Eli seemed to mull it over, perhaps wondering how much to tell me.
‘The COG,’ he said at last. ‘There’s been strange activity recently. Power surges, fluctuations, all of it coming back to the COG. Did you know the COG gives warning signs?’
‘Warning signs? Like what, low battery alarms?’
‘When it takes someone. When someone like you is torn to pieces for the good of the world.’
‘You know, when you put it like that, it sounds like we get a raw deal.’
‘The warning signs are pretty apparent, really. They’re not dissimilar to darklight strain. Tell me how that feels?’
‘You know – using your power too much, too quickly, it’s as stressful to the body as any other kind of exertion. Everybody gets different symptoms. The most common are headaches, blurry vision, basic migraine stuff. My left ear itches for like a day after.’
Eli raises an eyebrow.
‘I’m not even kidding,’ I offer.
He waves it off. ‘We think the COG is going to take someone, soon, in this city. We think for the first time ever, we’re a step ahead of it. We want to see if it can be stopped, but for that we need help. You’re with the Bureau, you’ve got friends in the community. You can tell us as soon as someone shows the signs.’
‘Who’s we?’
‘Just some old contacts of mine, people I ran with in the busier days. Not the same as working with you, of course.’ He paused, as if struggling to say what was on his mind.
‘I always missed you, you know,’ he said at last. That kinda blindsided me.
‘Hey, I never went anywhere,’ I offered.
‘I missed what we had. Before you discovered what you could do, we were inseparable. But then I lost out to your best friends, your real brothers. Your other selves. With that kind of company, why would you need me?’
It was a strange outburst coming from Eli. He’s an impassioned kind of guy, always fighting for a cause, but I always felt like he was preoccupied by bigger things, like he never really stopped to think about himself, only how he fitted into a much larger puzzle. It was unexpected, almost uncomfortable. If you’ve never really been a family person, like me, you know what I mean. Talking about feelings is weird. But I did my best to respond.
‘Eli, it’s not like you were ever irrelevant. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows in my head. Sometimes I need someone around who isn’t me. You’re like me enough that I wouldn’t call anyone else my best friend, but you’re different enough that you save me from myself. There’s no one else in the world who could mean as much to me as you do. I’ve really missed you, more than you know.’
He nodded slowly, as if digesting the point.
‘I’ve wondered, you know. I’ve often wondered. Am I even real?’
‘You’re sitting right there, aren’t you?’
‘But maybe I’m just a copy. Some copy you fluked up before we were even born.’
‘It doesn’t work like that. That’s…it’s just not how it works. And even if it was, so what?’
‘So what? I was made in imitation of you, my whole life based on your template, and you’re saying so what?’
‘Even if that was the case, and I’m not saying it is – you’ve become your own person, Eli. You haven’t been part of me for a long, long time, and we’ve become people since then. We’ve grown up together, but we’ve had different experiences, lived very different lives. You know, I have a rule, that no matter how many copies I create, eventually I need to reset back to square one. I can’t risk diverting from my own personality, becoming a society in myself. Luckily I think that way, so we all do. But left to our own devices long enough, I think we’d change. Just as people change throughout their lives. We become different people with every experience, every loss and every victory. That changes us. But me? I’m almost afraid to live.’
‘Well. I suppose it hardly matters either way.’
I blinked, and squinted, and frowned. Eli seemed to be receding. He was saying something, and his voice was dying away into gibberish, a thundering sort of echo. My vision was hazing, and I couldn’t pick Eli out in the fog.
I remember thinking of what Eli had said about the COG. Warning signs.
I don’t know how I knew at the time, but some instinct starting thundering inside of me. Get out, it said. Now.
I lurched up out of the seat, and sprinted for the door. Eli called after me, but I was already gone, bolting out of the office and into the maze of desks and office equipment. I felt like I was falling, falling forward each time I took a step, my legs catching me just in time before I hit the ground. I heard Eli burst out of the office behind me, running after me, but even in my state he couldn’t catch me.
My state? Like being drunk, drugged, poisoned, feverish. Every nightmare you’ve had crammed into the space of a few minutes.
Other shapes starting appearing in the office. Men in masks. They converged on me. The closest one was in the right place to cut off my escape, so I picked up the nearest chair and hurled it at him. He ducked, but that gave me back some precious seconds. Briefly the thought crossed my mind that maybe these guys weren’t real, maybe they were just a sign of my delirium.
Either way, I was too out of it to really know what to do. I made for the fire escape, burst through the door, shattered glass driving into my skin. I don’t think I even felt it. I looked down.
Three stories up. I knew I wouldn’t be able to duplicate, not in my current state. So I jumped.
The sensation of falling didn’t do my senses any good. I fell forever, slowly, time disappearing into infinity. I tumbled through the air, mind and body both spinning, unable to catch myself with my usual trick, unable to do much of anything. I slammed into a car three stories down, the screech of its alarm I heard as laughter from the demons pinching and pulling at my skin, tearing it free. I dragged myself from the hood of the car, falling to my hands and knees on the street. A couple of guys had emerged from the restaurant on the corner, one of them yelling about the damage.
‘How the hell did this happen?!’
‘Dude, just calm down.’ The second voice, Mr Rational, must have spotted me, because he said, ‘Hey, you see what happened?’
He was looking right at me, but he didn’t see a broken, damaged and disoriented man crawling off the car’s hood. That image reached his eyes, sure, but his mind never saw it. I knew that afterward he would just remember talking to someone he couldn’t quite describe, someone so ordinary that my image just sort of slipped from his head. That’s the gift of the Nevermind.
I don’t think I replied, just staggered away and into the nearest alleyway. The two guys probably thought I was some drunk, just dismissed me outright, caught up by the bigger problem of just what the hell crushed their car. I slumped against the wall, trying to convince myself to move, knowing that if the COG had started to take me, it wasn’t about to leave me alone.
Milo 4
As I lay on the couch, sweating out the pain inside my head, my other selves came back home one by one. We had our little debriefing session, they told me what they’d found out, what they’d manage to scare up. I started to come round from whatever spell had hit me. None of the others had felt it. That didn’t really fit with what Eli had been saying, about the COG taking us, but we couldn’t come up with any better explanation, except maybe that the COG simply affects us differently. Either way, we felt the experience was an important one, so we chose me as the prime. All the others gave themselves up, and that left me alone in the apartment, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. All I knew was that Ash had pulled me out of the fire, once again. That girl is my guardian angel.
She’d left me a note, and I picked it up and scanned it again for the sixth time, brooding on my next move:
When will you learn to be more careful? One day you’ll catch on that a two person op means two DIFFERENT people. Until then, I’ll keep interfering. See you around…
‘Not if I see yo
u first,’ I said out loud. It’s an old joke of ours. Y’know, because sometimes she sees me before she…okay, you get it.
PS. got your Boneman out of there. Cy is livid, and clueless as ever.
x
I slumped back on the couch. I knew that later I’d be reporting into Cy, and maybe he could make sense of what little I’d managed to pull from the Ultramen’s files, but that could wait.
Up to that point, that whole process, the debriefing, choosing a prime, returning to square one, was completely natural to me. Just what I do, part of the life of the millions of me. I’ve done it so often now that I don’t think about it. We don’t get individual names, little call-signs, anything like that.
Hell. Back then I didn’t even take a headcount.
Act III
I don’t really know how it happened. I can only speculate. But in my head, in my nightmares, it goes something like this…
I wake in the middle of the street. It’s night, and the acrid smell of burning is on the air. I’m flat on my back, the tarmac hard against my spine. I winch my head up. The moon is high, but even now the horizon glows red, and smoke billows into the sky, lit from beneath. Above the rise of buildings straight ahead I can see the tower they call The Pinnacle. I know this town. This is Silver Lake City, just across the lake from Chicago.
No, don’t bother to look it up. This place doesn’t exist any more.
A few years back, back before the facade, Mother Nature wiped this place from the face of the Earth. It was maybe the single most devastating act ever perpetrated by a superhuman against a human population.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen the town like this. The street is a wreck, strewn with debris. The burned-out husks of cars line the road, some of them overturned. Fumes hang thick on the air, collapsing visibility down to just a few feet at ground level.
From out of the smoke, he approaches.
I roll over, get up to my hands and knees, but when he reaches me he squats to my level.
‘Remember this place?’ the voice says. ‘Silver Lake. On the night before it was destroyed. Welcome to the battleground.’
He stands, and turns to walk away, but thinks twice. He turns back to me.
‘There’s just one rule,’ he says. ‘No copying. Create all you want. But no copying. Not here. Now go have fun.’
At first the distinction doesn’t make sense to me. Then slowly, it dawns.
Milo 1
But I guess I’m getting ahead of myself.
When we left off, things had started to get a little real. Sure, we’d recovered a vital piece of technology from the anarchistic Ultramen, and I even uncovered a little more info on their plans, but ultimately that episode ended with me in excruciating agony, fleeing from the scene, afraid the COG was going to take me.
The COG? That’s the machine I mentioned. More of a network, really. A hyper-advanced web of devices keeping the world running, long after the resources have run out.
Yeah, that’s right. You’re fresh out of them. Resources, I mean. Ignorance is bliss, right? But the COG does what it does by claiming superhumans, breaking them down into their component power, and using it to fuel the world.
I thought it had me. I thought I was done for. But I survived. I don’t know how yet, or why. I just know that now I’m safe. How long will that last? Well. How long do any of us have?
Even through the pain, I came out of my last mission with a lead. The plans I found pointed me to a specific place, and I told the Bureau as much. Cy assigned me to the case with Ash at my side. To tell the truth, after my last episode I kinda wanted her there this time. We were no closer to deciphering what had happened to me that night. Maybe Eli was right. Maybe the COG had tried to claim me.
Maybe it had failed.
Milo 2
It’s a run down district, full of empty factories and boarded-up warehouses. Weeds grow freely around old machinery, most of the windows are broken and graffiti tags cover the walls.
So I suppose if you wanted to hide somewhere in this city, this is the place to be.
The tip-off was reliable, I can tell that already. Some sort of power hums in my bones, like when someone leaves the TV on and you hear it singing from the next room. The tumbledown factory I arrive it as the source, but somehow I’m getting the weird feeling that I should walk away, just not even bother approaching it. I should go back to HQ and tell them there was nothing to see, just an empty shell. If they were ever here, they’ve long since packed up and moved out.
Heh. It’s a neat trick, but I’ve fought with enough mindbenders in my time to know it for what it is. A perception barrier surrounds the factory, slowly undermining the brain’s natural curiosity and sense of exploration in a subtle, insidious way. ‘It’s an empty factory, there won’t be anything of interest in there’ or ‘It’ll be dangerous, it’s probably falling apart’. That kind of thing. Not a hundred worlds away from the Nevermind’s most famous trick.
I shrug the thoughts away, strengthening my resolve, and speak into the earpiece I’m wearing.
‘Ash – you feel that?’
Her voice comes back to me through static.
‘Foolsfire must be in there.’
‘Or someone stronger. Okay, I’m heading in.’
‘Milo-‘
‘Yeah?’
‘I don’t know. I feel like I had something to tell you, but it’s gone now.’
‘It’ll come back to you. Let me know.’
Sounded pretty confident, but I find myself wondering more and more where this problem of hers will end, and why it’s happening to her. I can’t help but dwell on what Eli said about the COG, about warning signs.
I don’t go through the main door, but there’s a staff entrance just off to the side. It’s not locked, oddly, so I swing it open and enter. There’s a small office here, with a view of the sunken factory floor slightly below. The whole place is deserted. I listen for a moment and hear the building shifting and creaking around me. After a while I decide the place is empty, or if it isn’t, then I’ll need to draw some attention. I glance out towards the factory floor again, and scratch the itch.
Milo 3
Blue light. I’m standing on one end of the long factory floor, my back to the sunken ramp that leads up to the loading doors and out onto the street. Stretching away along the factory floor is a tangle of rusting machines and conveyor belts. Gantries and walkways stretch above me, disappearing into the gloom above. I don’t think this place has seen use in maybe twenty years. Piercing the darkness are a couple of skylights, but they don’t do much to clear the dinginess of the place.
I press my earpiece tighter into my ear.
‘It’s all clear, no one home. Come on in.’
I squint against the bright light as Ash burns into view beside me, jumping from her vantage on the roof.
‘What’re you thinking?’ she asks.
‘I really don’t know. Someone wanted us here, but I can’t see why. This place is empty, no signs of use.’ I start towards one of the gantries, toying with the idea of climbing up into the dark above.
‘A trap?’ Ash says, falling into step.
‘Or an arena.’
She stops suddenly. I turn, and see the look on her face. Ash knows, now, what it was that she forgot. Her expression is devastating – she looks at me with such despair, and I know that she’s thinking she’s betrayed me in some huge way.
‘What’s the matter?’ She doesn’t reply, still giving me that horrified look. I grab her by the arms, try to get her looking into my eyes. ‘Hey, it’s gonna be okay,’ I say to her. ‘We’ve been through worse, you and me.’
She can barely form words. This is bad, whatever it is. We’ve worked together for over a decade, and I haven’t seen her like this since Mother Nature took Silver Lake City apart brick by brick.
‘Milo, I remembered. That night, there’s only one thing-‘ She’s almost pleading.
‘What is it? What’s got you so-�
��
A loud clang cuts me off, and I look up towards the gantry I’d been planning to climb. A lone figure is walking down the steps towards us, casual, hands in his pockets. He’s half in shadow, but I recognize the walk.
‘Eli?’ I say into the dark. The word bounces back to me, echoing from the empty shell of the factory.
He moves into the light, and smiles. He’s still a good ten meters or so away when he reaches the bottom of the stairs.
‘Milo,’ he says, smiling. ‘Missed you. It’s been nearly a month.’
I’m not quite cool enough to pretend this makes sense to me. I frown. Something is telling me this is about to get very, very bad. I glance around for places to copy myself, knowing I need to be cautious here.
The Millions of Me Page 4