The Millions of Me

by Daniel Masterson

  He knows me better than I know myself. Eli’s eyebrow goes up as he sees my eyes flitting to and fro.

  ‘Feeling uneasy?’ he says. I’m not the best reader of people, but the way he’s acting is raising some serious alarm flags. It’s like he’s about to start something, but can’t quite bring himself to begin. A thought suddenly occurs to me. A sickening one, and I decide we’re getting to the point, here.

  ‘It was you,’ I say, and the words just seem so obvious now. As obvious as they should’ve been all along. ‘You did something to me that night. Attacked me.’

  He holds his arms wide as if betrayed.

  ‘Attack my talented brother? What sort of chance do you think I’d have?’

  My turn to raise an eyebrow.

  ‘You poisoned me?’

  He smiles, suddenly.

  ‘Okay, yeah. I did. I did that.’

  It’s easy to think I was being stupid, never realizing that Eli had poisoned me that night. But you know what? You’d have fallen for it too. It’s not like in the movies. I haven’t known Eli for the past thirty minutes, I’ve known him all my life, and I grew up with him, played together with him, trusted him. He didn’t twirl his mustache or practice his evil laugh. He’s not a villain, not my evil twin. He’s the same idealistic individual he’s always been. The part I didn’t see coming wasn’t the part where he betrayed me. It was the part where he betrayed himself.

  But here he stands, hands in his pockets, just looking at me. I know Eli. He’s my brother, and one way or another, he’s been involved in my lifelong career as an active superhuman. And you know what? He’s always been scariest when he’s at his most casual. That means he knows he’s won. He’s just waiting for the rest of the story to play out.

  ‘You’ll want to explain now,’ I say. ‘Quickly.’

  He thinks about it for a second, and glances at Ash, who’s still looking shell-shocked. All this time she’s been looking between the two of us like she’s watching a tennis match.

  A look of genuine sorrow crosses his face, her gaze drops, and she wipes a hand across her face.

  ‘I wanted you to be here for this,’ Eli says to me. ‘Because I want you to know the truth.’

  ‘What is it? What’ve you done?’

  ‘My brother, sooner or later they’d have come for you. The Bureau would’ve grown tired of you, or the COG would’ve chosen you, broken you down into raw material for their benefit. That night in the office, I wasn’t expecting to bump into you again. I’d already gotten what I went there for, so I improvised as best I could. Here we stand because of that night. But no word of what I said was a lie – the horrors of the COG? I couldn’t bear to see that happen, not to you. So I’m going to stop them. Make sure the Bureau knows its place. Make sure the COG never takes another of your kind.’

  He says it like he’s announced he’s going to tie his shoes.

  ‘How? You can’t fight them! I can’t fight them!’

  He shrugs. ‘You’re wrong. What did I say to you already? You’ve got potential. So much potential, and it’s gone unused. Neglected. Not any more. You know, powers like yours once went a long way towards making someone great. There used to be champions, in the old days. People who really stood for what they believed in. But now that power is just a tool, oil to the gears of the machine. People like you keep that machine ticking over.’

  ‘I’ve heard all of this before, and you know what I’m going to say, because I say it every damn time. Some of those people were monsters!’

  ‘And yet you’re only standing here, relatively free, because of them. They tried to register your kind as dangerous entities. Mother Nature took arms against them to ensure they failed. She even raised an island from the Earth as refuge for your kind. They tried to set up a facility to train an army to hunt superhumans, so the Ravager murdered hundreds to shut it down. So you call them monsters. Fine. But there were others. Many others who stood for what they believed in. The Nevermind may have brushed the problem under the carpet, but even he did what he did for a cause. Now they’re gone, and people like you have created a world where these champions can no longer exist. Now we’re all just people again. There are no more heroes left. Just men like you, doing their jobs, absolved of all responsibility, no matter who suffers for it. You’re snug and secure behind the Nevermind’s façade, one step removed from the real world, even as you count down the seconds until the COG claims you. And in all of it you know you’re just following orders. You’re not to blame.’

  I glance at Ash. She knows what I’m thinking as if she were one of the millions. With a final look towards Eli, she jumps away in a flash. He hardly seems to notice, or more likely doesn’t care. I don’t need her to tell me what it was she forgot. Ash is smarter than me, always has been. She’d sussed out what had happened that night.

  ‘That’s enough,’ I say to Eli. ‘You’ve gone off the rails this time. You’ve helped us in the past even when you were playing both sides, but this goes beyond selling information.’

  ‘Quite right. Less selling, more an investment.’

  The air ripples, and Foolsfire steps out of an illusion of concealment, grinning at me.

  Some tricks you come to recognize. Others you can’t fight until it’s too late. I’m not sure what Eli’s scheme is, but I get the feeling we walked right into it.

  Eli gestures to the psychic. ‘Foolsfire here has been hard at work for the last month or so. The COG has such an extraordinary effect on his abilities. Much stronger and I suspect he’d be able to tear down the façade itself. But that’s not the real point, here.’

  The air ripples again. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, and you’re probably Eli.

  The man who emerges looks like another twin, like maybe we were triplets after all, but it’s only the hairstyle – shaved nearly to the scalp – that throws me off, and I quickly realise who it is.

  It’s me.

  The realization tumbles like glass through my consciousness, each shard reflecting an image of what this means. The shards all come together to form one perfect pane, the mirror in which I see myself as a stranger.

  I don’t know him.

  I don’t even know what to say.

  My twin speaks first.

  ‘I’ve rehearsed this, but I’ve never been the best with words,’ he says, like I don’t already know. He gestures, not sure how to continue. ‘It’s been an interesting month. I spent it in Silver Lake.’

  ‘Silver Lake is gone,’ I reply. ‘Mother Nature-‘

  ‘Took it to pieces. Believe me, I know. But Foolsfire? The COG? Together, they’ve got some power to throw around. I spent the last month locked inside my mind. Sometimes it felt like exactly a month. Other times it felt…much, much longer.’ He’s get that same creepy coolness as Eli in his voice, like Eli’s voice has been ingrained on him.

  ‘Foolsfire kept me there,’ he adds. ‘Sometimes it was like dreaming. Other times he locked me in constant struggle. I don’t know how many times I relived Silver Lake, how many times I fought to see what I could change. Turns out, quite a lot. That is, once Eli started to guide me.’

  ‘Oh. Great.’

  Eli looks to him. ‘You don’t give yourself enough credit, Milo,’ he says to my doppelganger, and hearing my brother use that name for him twists my stomach. ‘You never did. All I did was teach you what you already knew.’

  ‘Yeah well,’ my copy replies. ‘Turns out I needed that. All those years of not listening, of not really getting what you were trying to say. I suppose in the end I learn by doing.’

  I feel like there’s something I can do to change this, to make it all go away. After all, he’s still me, right? What comes out of my mouth, on the other hand, really doesn’t help very much at all.

  ‘Look, I don’t know what you’ve been through, but you and I? We’re the same person, and you’re losing yourself. I know exactly what our limits are, okay? Now Eli has all these grand ideas, but we’ve got a few decades of h
istory to say he’s wrong. Okay? Dead wrong.’

  The twin shrugs.

  ‘Speak for yourself.’

  ‘I…’

  That’s my eloquent save. It’s the last good point I get to make.

  ‘It’s over,’ my doppelganger says. ‘You’re not the man I am. I can fight them and their COG, but you’ll be a slave to them forever. I can’t see myself used like that. I’m losing myself, you say? Sometimes losing yourself isn’t such a bad thing when you were a waste of space to begin with.’

  A lump rises in my throat, and adrenaline starts to bleed into my system, in a way I haven’t felt for a long time.

  ‘Are you going to kill me?’ I ask.

  ‘Eli was right all along, you know,’ my new twin says by way of reply. ‘We have so much potential.’

  He spreads his arms wide, like he’s embracing the room. The blue flares that detonate around us are all different sizes, which itself is odd. They pop around him like a firework display, and when they coalesce, when he incarnates, I see what it is he’s talking about.

  He hasn’t copied himself at all. The shapes that surround him are all different. There are creatures, twisted masses of bone and muscle shaped like the sorts of things lions and wolves have nightmares about. Other shapes become enormous golems eight foot tall or more, clad in bone, like Ossein seem in a fun-house mirror. Muscle ripples in the gaps between bone plates.

  I’d suspected. I’m not stupid. I always thought Eli was right, deep down. I first discovered my powers when my mom walked out into the garden and screamed, because instead of playing in the sand, I was playing with lumps of raw, bleeding flesh. As I got older I learned what it meant, but the first time I used my power consciously, I created myself. So the millions of me were born, and that’s how I came to view myself. Even went through an embarrassing phase of subbing I with we for a while. But I’ve always known it was possible to use my power in other ways. Being me was easier. I took the path of least resistance.

  My doppelgänger has learned how not to be lazy.

  How about that? Didn’t realise I had it in me. Any of me.

  But even now, you know what I hate? What really gets on my nerves? Having to clean up my own mess. I glance around the room again, and begin copying myself, blue light exploding all over the factory floor. As the twisted predators, beasts and homunculi charge, my copies engage them, and I find myself thinking that this is exactly why I don’t look for my own trouble anymore.

  They’re stronger than me, faster than me.

  Milo 4

  And I don’t know how I can win this.

  Milo 5

  Working for the Bureau gave me a way to hand over my responsibility, to put all of my mistakes on their head. I was a blunt instrument, a program to be activated. If they deployed me, they knew what they were getting.

  But here, now, I made things personal. I made a mistake, and I die for it. Over and over again.

  Milo 8

  I’m being killed just as fast as I copy. My guns are doing nothing, my knives are worthless. He’s slaughtered maybe a dozen of me already, and I haven’t taken down a single one of his creatures. Suddenly, I know how my enemies feel. How do you kill the unkillable? It’s like setting out to rid your house of bacteria, top to bottom.

  I back away up some steps, onto a walkway, and a golem kicks the whole damn thing out from under me. I go down in a tangle of steel. A jagged edge slashes my throat.

  Milo 16

  We just keep coming back. Ducking beneath a scything blade attached to a twelve-foot golem. A vault over the armored back of a skinless rhino. A shot to the face of a freakshow hound, just enough of a shock for it to not bite my leg off. All I can do is dodge, evade, try to keep up.

  If I don’t do something fast, I may actually die. A quick series of lucky shots and we’re all dead. Sure, there are some of me out in the rest of the city but I don’t know what this guy’s limits are. Who’s to say he can’t create a hundred copies? A thousand?

  A million?

  Another lucky shot. The world goes dark.

  Milo 25

  My vision starts swimming into darklight. The world goes fuzzy, colors flatten, strange textures resolve out of the gloom. I’m seeing into a world that humans don’t even know exists. It’s the spectrum we draw our power from, but the more we strain ourselves, the more that little bit of our brain which controls it begins to overload. Illusions of darklight take over my real sight, as if I’ve suddenly started seeing radio waves, sound waves, infra-red. It’s incompatible with human rainbow sight, but more than that, it’s a sign I just can’t keep up.

  Somewhere in the midst of being gored by a rhino with a bad self-image, I wonder where Foolsfire got to.

  Milo 32

  That gets me thinking. I flash back to a memory of my first encounter with him, his assumption that there was only one real copy of me. I put two and two together, and come up with the only plan that has even the remotest chance of working. Instead of looking for Foolsfire, I look for my brainwashed copy. He’s there, standing out of the melee, watching as it unfolds.

  I see the opening, the chance to copy right behind him and stick a knife in the back of his neck. I start – the flare appears, the muffled boom follows as the explosion reverses direction, and he turns on the spot. The blue fails to coalesce properly, because he’s just copied into the exact same location. The freak that appears is half me, half shapeless tumour of bone and flesh. The look on his face is a frozen second of blank horror, and then he collapses to the ground, in too much agony even to scream. His eyes fix on me, and he realises, much too slowly, that he should just disappear. He releases his form in a second flash of blue.

  I’m suddenly very, very glad that I don’t share feelings with them, even as I get stomped into dirt by a giant.

  Milo 38

  So, that’s my doppelganger accounted for. No sign of Foolsfire. But what about Ash? Out of long habit, I glance upwards, and a sense of relief floods me. She’s there, peering down through the skylight. Ash is watching over me, trying to work out how she can be of use to me now – just like she’s always done. Just like she did every damn time I thought I wouldn’t need her.

  Another of the golems charges towards me, boneblade swinging ponderously through the air. I tuck into a roll that takes me under the swing, but as I roll he gives me a punt that sends me flying. I skid across the floor, and as I come to a stop, my eyes popping open, I find Ash again. She’s no longer looking at me. She looks once at the golem that just batted me across the room, and then frowns, and looks towards my doppelgänger. Finally, she finds my eyes again.

  She’s just worked it out. We’re on the same page.

  She vanishes into a teleport, and I give myself a mental slap on the forehead. A moment later and I’d have copied myself up there and we could’ve synced plans.

  Instead I hear the roaring-inferno sound of her materialising behind my doppelganger, and she grabs him around the torso before he can react. She teleports again, taking him with her, and when she reappears it’s twenty feet above the factory floor. She lets him go, and ‘ports away. It’s a simple trick, one I could easily escape from. Create a copy on the floor to catch me, or just outright delete myself once the copy is made.

  My clone thinks along similar lines. As he falls he casts a blue light, and an answering light flickers on the factory floor. I watch with baited breath as a new golem is born, in the perfect position to catch him. He’s gone with Option 1, and I know exactly why.

  The golem doesn’t even see him. It dashes off to join the melee, roaring as it hacks two of me down in one wild swing. I incarnate myself below my falling doppelgänger, ready to make sure of the job.

  Milo 49

  Blue light. I glance up with the mere moment left to act, and draw one of my knives. He lands bodily on me and we both go hard to the floor. The wind is knocked from me, but that’s alright. I felt the way my hand jarred. My knife is buried in his heart. His eyes flicker blue
again, but I buffet him around the head, knocking his concentration just long enough.

  He expires, without a word.

  I push my own body off from me, and look around the room. It’s so clear to me now that I can’t believe he missed the obvious. My doppelgänger was different from me in the most fundamental way – he’d learned the hard way that he couldn’t trust himself. His golems continue to fight, but they’re not him. They’re just animals given a kill order. They don’t even know how to copy themselves. My strength comes from there being so many of me, from knowing myself so intricately, so intensely, that I might even have the most accurate self-image of anyone on this planet. I know my strengths, I know my limitations. I know I make mistakes, but I know, more than anything, that I can always trust myself to act just the way I do. No more, no less.