The Millions of Me

by Daniel Masterson

  A while later we started playfighting, and after we were done we lay down in the sun and went to sleep. When I woke up, he was gone.

  You know the funny thing? After a while, so was I. I never lived this. Any of it. I’m a clone of a clone of a clone, but that doesn’t matter to me at all. I feel this history, these emotions like they were my own, and I’d have no way of proving they weren’t. Me and my copies, we’re like a trick of the light. We’re special and not at all special at the same time. When I discovered what I could do I started experimenting with it. You know, send my duplicate to school, see how long it took us to start becoming different people, and in the end I tried something else. I stood in my room, split myself in two…and then deleted the original copy. Do you want to imagine what that does for any delusions you had that you’re unique and special?

  The coffee table started vibrating beneath my feet. I set the plate to one side, leaned forward and hit the speaker on my cell. Cy’s voice came out, flattened over the line.

  ‘Milo? You there?’

  ‘Yeah, what’s up? I’ve got some breakfast going on over here.’

  ‘Well, hurry it up. I need you down at the office.’ His voice was irritated, like someone had been rattling his cage all morning. Hell, it was 7am, he must’ve been up for a few hours already.

  ‘Mr. Skellington has just woken up,’ he added.

  ‘I suppose I’d better get dressed,’ I replied.

  ‘You do that.’

  The line went dead, and I heaved a sigh. I’m not an overtime kind of guy, so rolling into the office at toast o’clock didn’t exactly appeal. Still, what can you do? I got dressed, finished my breakfast, and took the L into the Loop. By the time I arrived, Cy was pretty much hopping.

  ‘Some of us care, Milo,’ he said, as we headed down towards the holding cells. ‘Some of us care that the world we love is under threat from all sides. Some of us should care enough to not take goddamnn public transport when you’re needed at the office! I know you don’t care, Milo. You never have. But the least you could do is offer a little respect to the people who actually give a damn.’

  I walked a bit faster. Cy breathed heavily trying to catch up with me.

  ‘C’mon,’ I said. ‘We’re in a hurry here, what’re you waiting for?’

  Heh, y’know, I can almost hear Ash’s voice, telling me what a jerk I am. Telling you this story, I can kind of see what she means.

  I nodded at the guard as he led us into the cell block. It was a long hallway, cells on either side, separated from the hall by reinforced steel doors. The guard himself was a superhuman, some minor elemental, I think. I also knew that at the end of the hall, a human special ops unit was at standby. We’re not easy folks to jail, put it that way.

  We reached Boneman’s cell. Cy patted me on the shoulder and shoved me towards the door. I glanced at him.

  ‘This is your show,’ Cy said. ‘We’ll be out here, listening. Be friendly.’

  I rolled my eyes, and the guard wrenched open the cell door. It wasn’t a big room, nothing more in it than a toilet and bench. These kinds of arrangements are only supposed to be temporary. I’ve never really asked what they do with the guys they need to hold in the long term.

  ‘We meet again,’ the Boneman said. He sat cross-legged on the bench, his back against the wall. Looked a lot different than I imagined. The armor he’d worn for the fight had gone, dissolved or retracted or whatever, and now he looked pretty ordinary. Unlike Foolsfire, he actually looked like he was from somewhere in the middle east, though he didn’t have a mockery of the accent, just a local one.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, feeling awkward. Interrogation has never exactly been my strong suit. It’s easy to laugh about it, but can you picture how you’d go about interrogating someone? Yeah, exactly.

  Boneman raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Shall we start with introductions?’ he said, shrugging, as if he were trying to help me out.

  ‘Uh, yeah. Okay. Name’s Milo.’

  ‘Milo,’ Boneman echoed. ‘Cute. I’m Ossein.’

  ‘Real or show name?’ I asked.

  ‘Does it matter, Milo?’ He put weight on my name, turning my question around at me. He had a point.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t really want to play games with you. You know why I’m here. I just need some information, is all.’

  ‘You’ll have it.’ Ossein smiled. ‘I don’t care about the Ultramen. Foolsfire paid me, that’s all. I’m a mercenary, highest bidder and so on. Foolsfire thought I’d be useful, so he put a little aside to employ me. I wasn’t as useful as he thought, apparently.’

  ‘Well, don’t beat yourself up. I’m not easy to kill.’

  ‘Neither am I,’ Ossein replied, sweeping a hand through his hair. I got the hint. He obviously wasn’t a strong regenerator, but with that bone armor, he wouldn’t need to be. The armor stopped him getting hurt, and his regeneration could deal with the occasional mishap.

  ‘But I don’t usually close in unless I know I can win it,’ Ossein added. ‘And I don’t usually get shot in the head point-blank. You’ve got a vicious streak in you.’

  ‘Sorry? I guess? Not really sure what you want me to say. You stabbed me.’

  He waved it away. ‘You don’t have to say anything. But if you want to ask about Foolsfire, or the Ultramen, go ahead. Just one catch. After all, this is an interrogation, right? You get me out of here.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ I said. I heard Cy cough suddenly from beyond the door, but I didn’t care. Way I figured, if this guy caused trouble later on, I’d just beat him up again. It’s almost par for the course in our profession. I guess that’s where that strange buddy feeling comes from. Even if someone’s on the opposite side, they’re still like you, you know? For whatever reason, people like us aren’t great at bearing grudges. I think that’s why Cy got me to do the interrogation in the first place.

  ‘Ask away,’ Ossein said.

  ‘You know we’re going after Foolsfire. So what’s his next play? What was he planning with the COG?’

  ‘I don’t know what he intended with the COG. But I’ll hazard his next effort will be to replace the piece you recovered. But it’s also not the first he’s gone after. He already has another.’

  ‘Great. This is worse than I thought.’

  ‘I expect so. I wasn’t really privy to the details, but I knew enough to do my job. Headquarters was the old Barkley building, down on South Plymouth Court. You know the one?’

  ‘Yeah, I got it. Think I’ve been there before. Any idea what I’ll find there?’

  He shrugged again. ‘It was our safe house, the rendezvous. I never went there, was just told that it was the place to go if I ever needed help while in their employ. Just turn up and tell them my name, say I had an appointment.’

  ‘That building’s occupied, a few companies operate out of there.’

  ‘Maybe one of them’s a front. Or maybe it was just neutral ground. I really couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘Fine. It’s a start. I guess I’ll see you around.’

  I left the cell, and me and Cy retired to his office. There we sketched out a plan, which, as usual, mostly involved putting myself in some casual danger while Cy did nothing much of anything. When that was done, I headed out to the park, and waited for nightfall.

  Milo 2

  You know what I find surprisingly easy?

  …You know one of several things I find surprisingly easy?

  Breaking and entering, that’s what. Made still easier by skipping the breaking part and getting right to the entering.

  A fire escape on the building opposite gave me my vantage, and from there I could see into the darkened offices which Ossein claimed the Ultramen had taken as their base. I needed to get in there, extract information, and get out. Luckily, my little skill doesn’t care much for physical barriers. I could see where I was going, and that was what mattered.

  Milo 3

  From within the office, I broke off into several
other incarnations, and they all picked a direction and headed off through the building. I wandered around for a bit, trying to find something of interest. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Some file marked CONFIDENTIAL, maybe, or a computer sitting blinking on a password screen. This kind of espionage isn’t usually my bag. I’m not an industrial spy, and I can’t pretend I have the kind of skills to carry out this kind of work.

  Yet Cy gave me the job anyway. That used to happen a lot, back then. The way I figure it, Cy saw me as a self-replenishing army of pawns. Oh sure, the queen might win the game faster, but the pawns get there in the end, in their slow, plodding, weight-of-numbers way. Anything that might require skill or finesse could instead be brute-forced by sending me. After all, the facade would cover my tracks well enough. I was the infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters. Which is actually kind of insulting, now I think about it. For once, I can kinda see Eli’s point.

  I meandered through the office, before deciding to try one of the manager’s rooms off to the side. The door was unlocked, and the blinds were down. I closed the door behind me and flicked on the lights.

  Absurdly, I find myself staring at a stack of conspicuous files, and a computer sits waiting for a password. With the creeping expectation of a trap, I reach over to the computer and type in a password: ULTRAMEN.

  The computer gives a bing, and the desktop reveals itself. Files upon files, a desktop full of folders on a range of different superhumans, many I know went inactive decades ago. But out of all of them, one jumps out:

  The Many Million Man.

  I double-click it open. It’s all there, my life to this point. It even includes the stuff after the facade, so a blink must’ve had a hand in putting it all together. The files on the desk are of a similar kind. Amongst them are some half-baked plans for the sort of petty anarchy the Ultramen prefer. One of them catches my eye; it’s a treatise on darklight, the unseen force the makes superhumans go.

  I flick through it. A lot of it is too dense for my layman’s brain, but there are elements I recognize. Interestingly, it’s written from the perspective of a superhuman, going into depth about how we sense darklight and interact with it.

  I guess that’s kind of helpful to know, if you’ve never felt it yourself.

  If you want to know how it feels to be a superhuman, you really need to think about fish. Y’see, we’re not unlike electric eels in a way – they have organs designed to generate electricity, and can effectively ‘see’ the stuff. Likewise, part of the superhuman brain is different in some way, which allows us to tap into a spectrum that society at large is only aware of in the most distant way. Darklight is the name that’s been coined for it. We don’t see in it, as such, but we can feel it, and use it. Now, darklight has different effects on different superhumans, but it’s consistent in one aspect: it’s a source of energy. Additional energy effectively lying around the place unnoticed. We can process that into a practical effect, creating our various superpowers. We can train ourselves to use powers we don’t normally have, but it’s incredibly difficult. I’ve always sucked at art, and it’s kind of like that – maybe somehow I could learn to paint like Van Gogh, but I’d probably have to spend my whole life doing it, and even then it’d be hit or miss. So most of us just stick to whatever power comes naturally.

  That’s the prevailing theory, at any rate. Those kinds of theories are probably as numerous as me.

  I made a note of a few addresses on the paperwork and left everything as I found it. No point raising any suspicions by stealing anything, and I was a little weirded out that I’d found anything at all. It was too convenient, and there’s an understatement for you. So I flicked the light off, stole out of the office and back out to the main floor.

  As I rounded the corner, I bumped into myself.

  That’s what I thought at first. Half a second later, I realize it’s not me at all. It’s Eli. My brother, my twin, and my on-again-off-again friend. He’d spotted me at the same moment I’d spotted him. He gave me the biggest smile, and even though we look the same, it warmed my heart like nothing else. To me his appearance is nothing, like all of my selves, but it’s how he wears it that’s the thing. The way he looks at you, the way he speaks, the set of his jaw. I don’t think of him as anything like myself, and maybe that’s why I like him so much. We’ve had our differences, but he makes me think of so much more than myself.

  By that point it had been maybe three years since we’d last seen each other, but we parted on good enough terms last time we met. You see, Eli’s always played the sides. In the old days, he acted as information broker to superhumans great and small, selling data to whoever he felt had the moral highground in any given encounter – the problem being that Eli has a pretty specific set of morals, and they’ve not always lined up with what I or my friends consider to be right. Or what the law says, for that matter.

  It was him who spoke first.

  ‘Brother!’ he said, taking a step towards me and giving me the biggest hug. He pulled back, and looked me in the eye. ‘I’ve missed you.’

  ‘I missed you too.’ I glanced past him, at the desk he’d been searching. ‘You looking for something?’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ He let me go, entered the office I just left and took a seat there like it was his own. ‘I think our reasons for being here are much the same. The Ultramen get suddenly active, a piece of the COG wanders off, and Cy gives me a call to ask if I’ve heard of a few particular superhumans. Something big’s going down in the Windy City.’

  I pulled up a chair on the other side of the desk.

  ‘C’mon, then,’ I said. ‘Spill it.’

  He was silent for a moment. He’d grown his hair a little longer than I keep mine. I also realized around then that he was aging more noticeably than me. I guess it’s another bonus of being more than human. We’re more durable, stronger, more athletic, and that’s before we even get onto the more active darklight effects. Perhaps that reduced wear and tear on our bodies squeezes a few more years out of us. It was that moment, I think, I first considered the possibility that I might outlive my brother.

  Eli took a seat, and was quiet for a moment before he laid it out.

  ‘I think there’s something larger going than than the usual kicking and screaming against the Bureau, or the Nevermind – take your pick. No, that doesn’t usually involve theft of the COG, or a direct encounter with a Bureau agent. The Ultramen have always been subtle, guerrilla types. There’s no advantage in them standing toe-to-toe with the Bureau, they’ll get destroyed.’

  ‘So then what?’

  ‘A trap would seem to be the obvious reading. Some kind of trap, drawing the Bureau in. But for what? What’s to be achieved by stealing the COG and then letting the Bureau take it right back?’

  ‘They have another piece. Bonem-uh, this guy Ossein told me so. I brought him in on my raid. He was a merc, working for this other guy, Foolsfire, with the Ultramen.’

  ‘Hm, that makes slightly more sense. Misdirection, let the Bureau believe that it’s recovered the COG and it will forget all about them. But there’s still no reason for it unless they thought the Bureau was on to them in the first place.’

  ‘Which it wasn’t.’

  Eli idly pulled open the desk drawer.

  ‘Huh. Drink?’ he said. He pulled out two tumblers, along with some whiskey.

  ‘You don’t think they’ll miss it?’

  ‘From the looks of it, I’d say whoever uses this office is a heavy drinker, relies on a couple snifters to get him through the day. Guy like that won’t even keep track of how much he’s drinking. He’d live his life in a stupor.’

  Eli can always read people better than I can. I used to call him Sherlock, when we were kids. It was like he knew everything about you. He would walk in the door and tell you what you ate, when, and at what temperature you cooked it. I’m exaggerating a little. There’s nothing supernatural about it, he just has a keen eye, and he can read a cue. Guess t
hat’s how he got so far in his business as information broker in the first place.

  He finished pouring the drinks, and slid one across the desk to me. I swigged it down happily enough.

  ‘Just like old times, right?’ I said. ‘Cheers!’

  ‘Cheers,’ he said, and together we swigged it down. There was a comfortable silence between us, as we devoured the company, the flavor of the whiskey, completely relaxed in what should’ve been a pretty fraught situation.

  ‘What brought you to town, Eli?’ I asked.