![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninety6tears[See Master Post]
I knew the music by now. The shower trade-off, the speed and rhythm of Gaila or Ken or Toni trotting down the stairs, Toni slapping food ingredients onto the counter as she arranged lunch and tipping her head heavenward to yell upstairs instead of asking where anybody's seen someone. Danek fiddled with the piano in the late afternoons, apparently having gotten experimental and putting the instrument to some use after all, and there was one delicate melody he played at least once every day. (As far as I can tell it was his own composition—after the house, I never heard it again.)
On the weekend things were the same but louder. Ken and Gaila saw Danek had left out one of his PADDs and got into a wrestling match over who would leave a prank message in his schedule, the living room floor split with the bark of her high giggling as he tried to yank her across the carpet and tickle her into surrendering the stylus.
I was inching in, beginning to feel less like an oblique oddity and becoming part of the revolving routine without having to think so much about it. I ran into the occasional kinks, having to find ways to divert attention away from things I didn't think I could carry convincingly. There were times I may have seemed off but not to any extent that anyone would worry rather than just chuckle it off.
There were parts of it that were difficult in completely different ways. I had watched for every detail I could get and I'd gotten fairly well-versed in the harmonies, the permutations of their relationships, but there were parts of it I had misunderstood. Even those hours of observations couldn't have really prepared me for how close they all were.
It wasn't evident in little soft assuring ways but in the harder and deeper things, the things they didn't think twice about: Toni and Gaila putting on old rock music after dinner and having the impulse to sing along to the same favorite lines, Ken offering barely a description of an artist whose name he can't remember before Danek knows just the one he's thinking of, no one going without a few cozying rubs up and down their arms if they're noticeably shivering outside. I wouldn't have mistaken them for people who'd known each other a whole lot longer than they had, or thought they had; there was still room to grow together, but it only added an excited glow to every moment that they were still learning each other. I had forgotten how people could be in each other's pockets like that. The ache arrived stealthily, like a slow-motion grip of a fist around my heart. I might as well have been newly divorced and forced to go to somebody's wedding every single day.
I gave a report to Chris over a walk in the park out back early on Saturday—mostly about the residents' subdued treatment of the seriousness of the attack, trying to think of anything that might have been more evident in a look or a wordless action that he would have missed. "For the most part, they're glazing over it. I did make the comment about how I didn't want to talk about it, but since that was to the waiter...Hey, did you check in on that guy?"
"Yeah. It was pretty easy to get him checked out; he takes care of his mom right up the street. Apparently he hangs with the group sometimes, but it's more of a friend-of-a-friend thing. But Jim, the thing about the chip. Have you got any ideas about that?"
"Not really. It sounds like maybe Will gave him something to look after but made him promise he wouldn't actually snoop...I might comb his room if I get the chance, but when everything's routine, he's usually home when I am."
"I know you don't like doing that stuff, but if you get the chance, take it. We could be overreacting, it could be something totally meaningless. But you know, it could also be something like a...no-pun-intended—"
"A will. I thought of that. It would be kind of morbid to suggest he'd look at it while the guy's just in a coma, though..."
"Yeah, they're a strange bunch, though. Really strange."
Are they? I wanted to ask. "I'll see if I can poke at it, but it's gonna be a tough one."
"The main thing I want you to do now is dig for histories, okay? Bring up Danek's daddy, bring up Toni's hometown, just see if there are any tells and make sure you don't explicitly come off like you believe it, you know what I mean?"
"Sure."
"See if you can harp on it when they're around other people and compare it to how it is at home, and never take for granted what Will may or may not have known. Try to get everyone's life story; ignore the fact that you know they don't have them."
It was becoming pretty easy to ignore. From the distance of only knowing about them and in my knowledge of them as these unexplainable creatures lurking at some corner of the city, as they'd seemed to me before the operation started, there had been something almost grotesque about the idea of their lives. The flawlessly tangible presence of them, when coupled with the knowledge that there was something there that was carefully fabricated, should have put my mind so far into an uncanny valley, but it didn't. The fact of their creation, when I wasn't practically forgetting about it completely, was something that held a fire through them.
I observed the way Danek fingered through his notes, his mind racing to tie one idea to another like some animal bolting from a cage. I heard Ken in the next room watching old B-movies, chuckling to himself at hokey lines. I learned Toni's consistent quirks, of itching the arch of her foot on the heel of the other, biting her thumbnail when she wanted to hide something in her expression. They were less and less like haunted, impossible machines and more like something that I thought of as soulfully composed, someone's masterpiece sent well adrift. I thought that they were perfect.
It may not have been the best way to go about my current assignment, but I was trying to get one-on-one time with people now that I was confident enough in how I was doing to be able to feel out the finer edges. It was one thing to see how close Gaila and Ken or Ken and Danek were by watching them; trying to understand Will's intimate particulars by the way others were to him was something else entirely. Things seemed uncomplicated enough with everyone, but I knew it could be risky to take very much of that for granted.
Just after sundown on Sunday the other three were out on a grocery run and Toni was sitting at the kitchen table. I'd deduced just the day before that Toni was the one with the stop-motion hobby; while the birthday greeting was the only one of her little films that had been put on Will's camera, she had loads of her own recordings somewhere. That evening she was putting together some little cathedral-looking thing with intricately woven pieces of wicker, cursing when I entered the kitchen because the lights had just flickered out. This happened pretty often due to a malfunctioning detector on the solar energy system; usually the lights booted back on within a minute or two, but I took the opportunity to ask if Toni wanted to get some fresh air, figuring this could be read as offering her a cigarette; she was the only other person in the house who smoked and had been complaining about being unable to find her electronic cigarette earlier that day. She tapped her nails against the table in a brief second of restless thought, then accepted with a "Sure."
A breeze licked up at Toni's bangs as we sat side-by-side on the small stoop. I lit my cigarette, tucked it next to the pinky and offered her one. She hesitated for a second—she very reasonably despises paper cigs—but then took one, wrinkling her mouth and quoting in a mock-barritone, "The thinker's true cigarette. Make it Slatroys," and yeah, there are definitely a couple things I like about Toni. I had finally gotten to the point where I wasn't constantly comparing her to Uhura; that had come even more naturally than I'd expected it to. In the pictures on the IDs the similarities had been rigid, and even when watching the recordings I'd had to train myself out of certain expectations with her. But when I got close to the real thing, there was someone else under there as obviously as a different sound; I couldn't decipher her psychology, but just the surface of it moving behind her eyes had its own locomotion to it, and I managed after a time to start feeling like she didn't even look so much like Uhura. Danek almost didn't look like Spock.
"Sorry," she muttered with a laughing smile, because I'd looked a little sheepish about the dig.
"It's alright. I hope you find yours," I said, knocking my elbow lightly into her arm.
"I can't figure out what I did with it, it's driving me crazy," she said, scoffing in agitation. After taking a first drag and relaxing down a bit, she asked, "How was the meeting? Danek's totally obsessing over that paper."
"It was fine. Nichols loves him."
"Danek loves Nichols," she said back with a rising eyebrow and I could tell this was often a point of humor.
"Danek would dutifully have babies for Nichols if he asked him."
She laughed, high and pleasantly raspy at the end. "He's sort of exceptionally invested, though. Do you know what I mean?"
"I guess."
"Like he's been pouring everything into this because he's too stressed to think about...well, fucking everything else. Fuck."
Toni—and I say this sort of affectionately—would make a terrible undercover. It hadn't taken me long to notice she's prone to outbursts of all types. Get her drunk and there's no filter of any kind (which I suppose I could have been thinking that I could eventually use, except that if she had anything to hide in the first place the personality trait could have all been a show anyway). I always remember her in different bursts of emotion showing in half a second flat, her heart always faster than her head. I had a hard time believing she would be any good at keeping secrets.
I let the moment rest as Toni looked away, scraping the sole of her shoe against the ground for no reason in particular. Then I said, "He doesn't have anything to worry about."
She made a sound that might have been a grumble of Will's name. For the next moment, that topic seemed to have passed without properly coming up in the first place. The trees had their own conversations, stirring in the wind. When I stopped staring out into the park and glanced at Toni, she looked like she might have been shaking her head at herself. Then her voice came, small and tight and darkly matter-of-fact.
"You scared the shit out of us."
I moved my cigarette to my other hand so I could put my hand on her knee, only briefly. "Hey..."
"I mean, what the fuck were you doing in that part of town in the first place?"
"Toni," I said all taken-aback. "I don't remember. You know that, right?"
"Yeah, I know that, and it's driving me up the wall. It's like I want to punch you in the face or something but I can't exactly get pissed at you for something you don't remember or don't know why you did."
I gave a weak shrug, mumbled, "It's not like we completely avoid that part of town."
"Like you wouldn't flip your shit if one of us went to a place like that alone?"
"...You're right." I shook my head, looked lost. "I know you're right, but I don't know what to say. I don't remember."
I was letting her break me in; the frustrations of any kind of amnesia can really wear on somebody, and none of them had seen it yet, but I was putting it on just enough then for her to believe I wasn't completely fine by any means. Sure enough, she looked a bit guilty, but it only seemed to worsen her frustration.
"I'm sorry," I offered.
"Don't, forget it, I'm just being—"
"I know it isn't my fault, but—"
"Look, you don't know what it was like," she interrupted heavily, loudly. "It happened to us too. You're back and you're fine and everything's fine, but it feels wrong to me how we're all just pretending nothing's happened. Most of us didn't sleep for that whole week, you know. Even after you were awake? It was like...we just couldn't calm down. It was awful."
"But it's okay now. I'm okay."
"I know, but the night it happened, the way everything went...If you'd been there you'd understand. We were all so freaked out, I can't even explain it..."
I furrowed my brow, putting out the last of my cigarette. "What do you mean?"
She let out a long sigh, hesitating.
"You don't have to tell me if you don't want."
"Of course I want to tell you, it's just..." She had her forehead rested in on her hands for a couple seconds, and took quite a while to speak again. "That night. Well, Ken and Gaila had gone upstairs already, and I was with Danek in the kitchen. He was feeling talkative...he was in a pretty good mood actually, and he just sat there with me and we must have been talking for one, maybe two hours, while I was working on a few of my pieces. Gaila came in from work and went straight up to bed, and only about twenty minutes after that...God, the weirdest thing happened. I was right in the middle of a sentence and I suddenly realized that you hadn't come home yet, and I stopped. And the crazy thing is, I didn't check the clock or anything like that, but Danek...he looked right at me and then we both looked up at the door, and I could just tell that we were both thinking it, that you would usually be home by then.
"And then...Jesus. The next minute I heard Ken and Gaila coming downstairs, and they came into the kitchen and we took one look at them and they were looking at us...and we all just knew. Ken was the first to actually say it. 'Something's happened to Will.'"
She looked at me and I hardly had to do much to react appropriately. Something in me had gone a little cold.
"So we started calling you and you weren't answering, and there could've been a hundred reasons you were late or that you weren't picking up, but we were all just panicked. And when we found out..." Toni's voice buckled out.
I was picturing the fact that it would have been Chris who came knocking at the door with the bad news, how it seemed now that the frantic mess he might have been met with was so far from what I could have possibly pictured, and I somehow couldn't stop the thought from entering my head: Why wasn't I told about this? He had met all of them that night in that way, barged in on them and surely seen the extent of the upset, but he hadn't mentioned it to me in nearly enough detail. But I didn't have to wonder why he hadn't; it simply hadn't been relevant. I'd had no reason to know.
It was too dark for me to tell whether Toni was doing anything like crying, but I could feel that she was hitting her hard deck. Out of everyone in the house she's surprisingly the most prone to being vaguely embarrassed by physical affection, the one exception being Gaila's ever-present little squeezes, but she seemed okay with it when I lightly rubbed up and down her back. "Hey," I mumbled into her shoulder. "It's okay."
"I know it's stupid to think of it this way, but I just can't stand it," she said, her voice wavering a bit, "the fact that somebody could want to hurt someone like you...It makes me so angry I don't even know what to do."
"Toni...You shouldn't talk like—"
"It probably wasn't personal, I know. Still."
My arm came back down to my own lap. "Well, you never know, it could have been a rage of envy. I'm a dashing fellow. Just ask Jek. We all know he'd love to—"
"You're so not funny. It's not funny," she interrupted by shoving hard into my shoulder and I started to snigger a little until she was joining in. "Fuck, stop. I don't want to hear about all the dirty sonnets you guys kept swapping at that party."
"I never," I protested lazily.
"William Abraham Kenley, you do not get to have amnesia about that."
The lights kicked back on in the kitchen and I jumped from not being used to it, but for some reason it just made her give in to laughing even more. When we heard the others coming home I helped her up off the stoop and Danek appeared holding a bag of vegetables and wearing a softening look at the sight of Toni clinging to me only briefly to avoid the second step that needed to be fixed, wobbling through the doorway and still laughing at something we'd already forgotten.
Over a week had passed. I still hadn't found the hole to dig in that Chris had wanted me to look for, but he hadn't expected it to be an easy task. I would have at least felt more accomplished if, after finally getting an early afternoon when Danek was away long enough for me to comb through his very sparse and uncomplicated belongings, I'd actually found anything even resembling the chip he'd referred to earlier. There weren't even data chips he used for everyday storage to throw me off; he didn't seem to like using them.
I was supposed to be watching Gaila somewhat more closely than the others, especially when I did manage to get any biographical discussion going. And I did watch her: I watched the way she got a member of the cafeteria staff intentionally flustered by cooling her neck off with an ice cube, watched her do a little dance around Toni cooing about how pretty she looked before she left for her date on Tuesday night, noted that she apparently disliked Kara West from all the looks she gave about the table when Ken wasn't looking during the couple times we had her over for dinner. Without any rational (or professional) way to place it, I was beginning to find it increasingly laughable that she was our biggest suspect. When it came to someone who might be capable of purchasing a batch of skinjobs, I had no idea what type of person we should have been looking for, but my observation of her felt more and more like excessive homework as the days went by.
So far there was one thing about her that was unusual: She had been having nightmares. With little else to tell me about the last time I'd checked in with him, Chris had mentioned this somewhat offhandedly, not knowing what to make of it yet. It must have taken a couple incidents of whispering in the middle of the night for anyone to pick up on it being a frequent thing, that Gaila would come down from her top bunk and ask if she could climb into bed with Ken. As far as Chris and I could tell she was keeping it to one person that she kept having these dreams; if it was anything unusual for her, she was being moderately secretive about it.
Aside from that bit there was nothing interesting: I could assume if there were any alarm bells of reminiscing conversations going on in the bedroom a trois that I would have already been told; as it was, Chris said that most of what went on upstairs was innocent gossip, hairstyling and snoring.
You would think that the conditions of their memories would be pretty apparent from the get-go, but at the start Chris and I had both been pretty unsure about whether this group might simply be pushing something very consciously to the edges. After all, if any of them didn't believe it to be a lie that they came from the cities and backgrounds their fake IDs had packaged them with, there would have to be a reason none of them mentioned a single thing about where they had been before New Dublin. They only ever vaguely did, but what took me completely by surprise was that when the topic did come peeking out, I wasn't the first to bring it up.
We were eating dinner in a casual sprawl around the coffee table and the couch. Toni was swapping her PADD around with Ken and Danek as they were half-heartedly competing at some logic game in-between some attempts to help Toni study her French.
At some point I was urging Ken to reiterate a story he'd told me earlier about how he saw the college mascot, in full big-headed costume, trip and faceplant onto a group of prospective students who were having a picnic on the quad. It was easily Toni who found this the funniest, and while she was too beside herself to concentrate on grammar, Gaila leaned and shook her head back so that her hair was tossed around my knee. I would've been in trouble if I hadn't picked up on this habit earlier: She loves it when people play with her hair, and sitting behind her when she's on the floor practically means you're volunteering.
I was sifting her hair around into something akin to a braid when I heard her say, "How awesome would it have been if that had happened to us our first day on campus?"
Danek looked up, one side of his mouth curling up. "I suppose if Will had volunteered to be the mascot that day instead of helping with that presentation, we would have been fated to meet in some fashion..." Toni giggled.
Get in there. "You know what's strange," I said, clearing my throat. The topic of the incident had come up a couple more times since my heart-to-heart with Toni, so I was fairly confident it wasn't still a mood-wrecker: "Out of all that stuff the cops were asking me about, one thing they actually asked about multiple times was how we all met."
"Oh yeah, us too," Gaila excitedly pulled back to look at me. "It was so weird...Why did they need to know?"
"I honestly don't wish to ponder it," Danek muttered, but it didn't feel entirely dismissive of the topic.
"The thing was, I had a hard time remembering a couple details, so," jokingly, "I hope my story wasn't...inconsistent. But it probably doesn't matter."
"What couldn't you remember?" Danek asked.
"Like..." I shrugged. "I wasn't sure which one of you I talked to first..."
"It was Ken—" Toni and Gaila were laughing at their own simultaneity, but then just Gaila said, "Remember, the guy called you up to the front by your last name, and he thought he heard 'Ken,' not 'Kenley'..."
Ken scoffed. "Right, and I go up to the desk and the professor's just kind of politely ignoring me, and you must have had no idea why I was standing up there but just struck up a conversation just for the hell of it while he got his stuff together..."
"Okay, yeah," I said with a distant grin. "Yeah, I kinda remember that."
"And then, I don't know, we had some really mundane chat but then you asked should we sit together at the ice cream thing, and everything else happened."
"I still remember the first time I saw Toni," Gaila said, and Toni threw the hair band she'd been messing with at her. "Carrying that huge bag because she got locked out of her dorm room when she'd left that thing in the lobby and didn't have time to do anything about it."
"It's not like I could have fucking left it there to get stolen, I had all the clothes I owned in that bag," Toni groaned. "Granted, I had like three outfits at the time, but I still looked ridiculous..."
Ken interjected, "She lugs that thing into the lunch room and Will and I are just looking at this poor girl and giving these looks to each other; I finally go, 'What did you bring me?'"
"Which annoyed the crap out of me. I was so embarrassed. And then Kara's with this big group at the other table and kind of takes pity on me and tries to wave me over...To this day, I don't really know why I didn't sit over there instead of with you guys, but I just..." She trailed off, shrugging, with an amused mock-rueful smile on her face. "Maybe I thought Gaila looked nice, I don't know."
"Danek only sat with us because there was nowhere else to sit when he came in," Gaila remembered. "I guess we're lucky it was one of the few times in your life you haven't been early."
"We're lucky he talked to us at all," Ken remarked.
"Well, he didn't really," Toni said. "Remember, he was sitting down when the announcer started talking, but...no, wait, didn't Will write him a note or something?"
My heart startled in my chest at the sudden memory: unsigned notes Spock and I were leaving on each other's computers for the couple weeks that our desks weren't yet pushed together. I told myself to knock it off.
Gaila was pointing at me: "Oh, that's right! That's why I assumed you guys already knew each other at first. You jotted something onto your PADD and then slid it over and I was like, '...Oh.'" She laughed, imitating some blinking dubious expression. "Those two, I guess, I don't know, he looks kind of like, uptight..."
"You didn't think Will seemed a little, uh, stuffy?" Toni said, putting a grin my way to make it harmless.
I was squinting like something was at the edge of my memory that I couldn't quite reach. "So what did the note say?"
Danek's face fell into a tiny shock, almost imperceptibly, and I thought, Oh, fuck, fuck fuck fuck...
Then Ken said, "Wait, you don't remember? I've asked you guys plenty of times, you won't tell me."
It was a joke, that they refused to tell anybody just to be teasing about it; I came out of my floundering and launched for that possibility, playing off like it had just been coyness. I shrugged and said, "I really have no idea at all," then a couple seconds later, gave Danek an oblique smirk.
I was innerly collapsing into relief when Danek's glance narrowed but then lightened into an easier expression. In a short moment I could tell he'd probably forgotten all about it.
"You know what I just thought of, when you said that about only owning a few pairs of clothes?" Ken was turning slightly into Toni's direction as he idly rattled the ice in his glass. "How it was so weird that none of us had like any stuff when we moved in."
Gaila pouted vaguely. "People get rid of stuff before they move, though."
"I mean, it's not that it's weird on any individual basis," Ken said. "It was just that we were all like that. A lot of students have a whole lot of stuff, and even more stuff at home, but with us..."
"I think it makes an amount of sense," Danek interrupted calmly. "Considering our situations."
The way he said that word, situations, it rang with a meaning that seemed to carry a warning: We don't talk about that. I was starting to feel like I could hardly keep up with all the strangeness in this conversation.
There was a brief slide of thick silence in the room. When Toni said something again, she was looking down at her PADD screen at the same time and the way she spoke seemed deliberately daring. "Sometimes I wonder what may have happened to all my old clothes. Like if anybody's holding onto them."
Something lit in Ken's features, his eyes showing something vulnerable I'd never seen in them before. "Me too."
"I had to give them away," Gaila said with a shrug, her voice the most hesitant but not unwilling, "but you all probably would have figured that."
"I just wonder about the clothes I had when I was little, because I think I'd been still hoarding some of them," Toni said. "I remember this dress with a cat on it—"
"Listen, about the questioning," Danek interjected, seeming to wield up my attention. "Will, have you heard anything—"
"—Wait, that's kind of funny." Ken didn't even seem to realize he had interrupted; they were absorbed. "Because I had this one embarrassing pair of mittens with cats on them—But I didn't even think they were embarrassing, I must have really loved them, because I got made fun of for wearing them a lot..."
I was blinking over at Danek; the look on his face that was only for me was strange. It was entirely clear that it was quietly imploring, like he was expecting me to say or do something, but I couldn't begin to catch up to what it was, except that he had most definitely been attempting to change the subject.
"Oh yeah, I wore the dorkiest shit," Toni waved her hand out in amusement, "like especially around holidays I'd be going all out..."
Gaila, giggling leisurely, said, "No one where I lived would have—"
"No pasts," Danek said.
A couple tick-ticks of a tree branch hitting one of the windows in the wind was the only utterance; everything was quiet.
The phrase hadn't been spoken loudly, but with an immediate weight, holding the magnetism of a maxim. Everyone's eyes went to their laps, back to reading almost as if no one had been talking at all, back to the screen on the wall even though the movie we'd been watching several minutes ago had been muted.
For a long stiff number of minutes, no one spoke again. Through the long stretch of time in which I imitated the rest, I was left to contemplate what in the hell had just happened.
I had no idea what to do with the stories of them first meeting. My antsy instinct halfway through the conversation was to get Chris to chase down Kara West and see if she was actually sure she had been there when the group met. But then, Toni had mentioned her. I didn't see how there could be such effective deception on both sides, which left me with the fact that this whole story was probably true.
I believed wholeheartedly that Chapel had been right: You couldn't program them to meet and like each other, not in such an immediate way. The one theory I'd been clinging to was that this was a big elaborate ruse, one that they were happy to play with themselves as some unhealthy coping mechanism and which also needed to be preserved if only for the sake of Gaila, the one unplanned friendship in the mix, the true humanoid who slotted right in. Then, maybe Will and Danek had known each other already when Will had passed that note. The message had been some last exchange of plans before the production slipped into something so permanent that it was almost believed by all of them.
This idea felt completely absurd, but it had been what I had, until I'd made that slip of not remembering what I'd written to Danek. His reaction had been too slight to be faked. I couldn't read anything other than the ache of genuine nostalgia in that fact: When he'd thought for a second that Will had forgotten the moment they met, he hadn't been confused, or suspicious, as if I'd made some misstep in the dialogue. He had only been hurt.
I knew the music by now. The shower trade-off, the speed and rhythm of Gaila or Ken or Toni trotting down the stairs, Toni slapping food ingredients onto the counter as she arranged lunch and tipping her head heavenward to yell upstairs instead of asking where anybody's seen someone. Danek fiddled with the piano in the late afternoons, apparently having gotten experimental and putting the instrument to some use after all, and there was one delicate melody he played at least once every day. (As far as I can tell it was his own composition—after the house, I never heard it again.)
On the weekend things were the same but louder. Ken and Gaila saw Danek had left out one of his PADDs and got into a wrestling match over who would leave a prank message in his schedule, the living room floor split with the bark of her high giggling as he tried to yank her across the carpet and tickle her into surrendering the stylus.
I was inching in, beginning to feel less like an oblique oddity and becoming part of the revolving routine without having to think so much about it. I ran into the occasional kinks, having to find ways to divert attention away from things I didn't think I could carry convincingly. There were times I may have seemed off but not to any extent that anyone would worry rather than just chuckle it off.
There were parts of it that were difficult in completely different ways. I had watched for every detail I could get and I'd gotten fairly well-versed in the harmonies, the permutations of their relationships, but there were parts of it I had misunderstood. Even those hours of observations couldn't have really prepared me for how close they all were.
It wasn't evident in little soft assuring ways but in the harder and deeper things, the things they didn't think twice about: Toni and Gaila putting on old rock music after dinner and having the impulse to sing along to the same favorite lines, Ken offering barely a description of an artist whose name he can't remember before Danek knows just the one he's thinking of, no one going without a few cozying rubs up and down their arms if they're noticeably shivering outside. I wouldn't have mistaken them for people who'd known each other a whole lot longer than they had, or thought they had; there was still room to grow together, but it only added an excited glow to every moment that they were still learning each other. I had forgotten how people could be in each other's pockets like that. The ache arrived stealthily, like a slow-motion grip of a fist around my heart. I might as well have been newly divorced and forced to go to somebody's wedding every single day.
I gave a report to Chris over a walk in the park out back early on Saturday—mostly about the residents' subdued treatment of the seriousness of the attack, trying to think of anything that might have been more evident in a look or a wordless action that he would have missed. "For the most part, they're glazing over it. I did make the comment about how I didn't want to talk about it, but since that was to the waiter...Hey, did you check in on that guy?"
"Yeah. It was pretty easy to get him checked out; he takes care of his mom right up the street. Apparently he hangs with the group sometimes, but it's more of a friend-of-a-friend thing. But Jim, the thing about the chip. Have you got any ideas about that?"
"Not really. It sounds like maybe Will gave him something to look after but made him promise he wouldn't actually snoop...I might comb his room if I get the chance, but when everything's routine, he's usually home when I am."
"I know you don't like doing that stuff, but if you get the chance, take it. We could be overreacting, it could be something totally meaningless. But you know, it could also be something like a...no-pun-intended—"
"A will. I thought of that. It would be kind of morbid to suggest he'd look at it while the guy's just in a coma, though..."
"Yeah, they're a strange bunch, though. Really strange."
Are they? I wanted to ask. "I'll see if I can poke at it, but it's gonna be a tough one."
"The main thing I want you to do now is dig for histories, okay? Bring up Danek's daddy, bring up Toni's hometown, just see if there are any tells and make sure you don't explicitly come off like you believe it, you know what I mean?"
"Sure."
"See if you can harp on it when they're around other people and compare it to how it is at home, and never take for granted what Will may or may not have known. Try to get everyone's life story; ignore the fact that you know they don't have them."
It was becoming pretty easy to ignore. From the distance of only knowing about them and in my knowledge of them as these unexplainable creatures lurking at some corner of the city, as they'd seemed to me before the operation started, there had been something almost grotesque about the idea of their lives. The flawlessly tangible presence of them, when coupled with the knowledge that there was something there that was carefully fabricated, should have put my mind so far into an uncanny valley, but it didn't. The fact of their creation, when I wasn't practically forgetting about it completely, was something that held a fire through them.
I observed the way Danek fingered through his notes, his mind racing to tie one idea to another like some animal bolting from a cage. I heard Ken in the next room watching old B-movies, chuckling to himself at hokey lines. I learned Toni's consistent quirks, of itching the arch of her foot on the heel of the other, biting her thumbnail when she wanted to hide something in her expression. They were less and less like haunted, impossible machines and more like something that I thought of as soulfully composed, someone's masterpiece sent well adrift. I thought that they were perfect.
It may not have been the best way to go about my current assignment, but I was trying to get one-on-one time with people now that I was confident enough in how I was doing to be able to feel out the finer edges. It was one thing to see how close Gaila and Ken or Ken and Danek were by watching them; trying to understand Will's intimate particulars by the way others were to him was something else entirely. Things seemed uncomplicated enough with everyone, but I knew it could be risky to take very much of that for granted.
Just after sundown on Sunday the other three were out on a grocery run and Toni was sitting at the kitchen table. I'd deduced just the day before that Toni was the one with the stop-motion hobby; while the birthday greeting was the only one of her little films that had been put on Will's camera, she had loads of her own recordings somewhere. That evening she was putting together some little cathedral-looking thing with intricately woven pieces of wicker, cursing when I entered the kitchen because the lights had just flickered out. This happened pretty often due to a malfunctioning detector on the solar energy system; usually the lights booted back on within a minute or two, but I took the opportunity to ask if Toni wanted to get some fresh air, figuring this could be read as offering her a cigarette; she was the only other person in the house who smoked and had been complaining about being unable to find her electronic cigarette earlier that day. She tapped her nails against the table in a brief second of restless thought, then accepted with a "Sure."
A breeze licked up at Toni's bangs as we sat side-by-side on the small stoop. I lit my cigarette, tucked it next to the pinky and offered her one. She hesitated for a second—she very reasonably despises paper cigs—but then took one, wrinkling her mouth and quoting in a mock-barritone, "The thinker's true cigarette. Make it Slatroys," and yeah, there are definitely a couple things I like about Toni. I had finally gotten to the point where I wasn't constantly comparing her to Uhura; that had come even more naturally than I'd expected it to. In the pictures on the IDs the similarities had been rigid, and even when watching the recordings I'd had to train myself out of certain expectations with her. But when I got close to the real thing, there was someone else under there as obviously as a different sound; I couldn't decipher her psychology, but just the surface of it moving behind her eyes had its own locomotion to it, and I managed after a time to start feeling like she didn't even look so much like Uhura. Danek almost didn't look like Spock.
"Sorry," she muttered with a laughing smile, because I'd looked a little sheepish about the dig.
"It's alright. I hope you find yours," I said, knocking my elbow lightly into her arm.
"I can't figure out what I did with it, it's driving me crazy," she said, scoffing in agitation. After taking a first drag and relaxing down a bit, she asked, "How was the meeting? Danek's totally obsessing over that paper."
"It was fine. Nichols loves him."
"Danek loves Nichols," she said back with a rising eyebrow and I could tell this was often a point of humor.
"Danek would dutifully have babies for Nichols if he asked him."
She laughed, high and pleasantly raspy at the end. "He's sort of exceptionally invested, though. Do you know what I mean?"
"I guess."
"Like he's been pouring everything into this because he's too stressed to think about...well, fucking everything else. Fuck."
Toni—and I say this sort of affectionately—would make a terrible undercover. It hadn't taken me long to notice she's prone to outbursts of all types. Get her drunk and there's no filter of any kind (which I suppose I could have been thinking that I could eventually use, except that if she had anything to hide in the first place the personality trait could have all been a show anyway). I always remember her in different bursts of emotion showing in half a second flat, her heart always faster than her head. I had a hard time believing she would be any good at keeping secrets.
I let the moment rest as Toni looked away, scraping the sole of her shoe against the ground for no reason in particular. Then I said, "He doesn't have anything to worry about."
She made a sound that might have been a grumble of Will's name. For the next moment, that topic seemed to have passed without properly coming up in the first place. The trees had their own conversations, stirring in the wind. When I stopped staring out into the park and glanced at Toni, she looked like she might have been shaking her head at herself. Then her voice came, small and tight and darkly matter-of-fact.
"You scared the shit out of us."
I moved my cigarette to my other hand so I could put my hand on her knee, only briefly. "Hey..."
"I mean, what the fuck were you doing in that part of town in the first place?"
"Toni," I said all taken-aback. "I don't remember. You know that, right?"
"Yeah, I know that, and it's driving me up the wall. It's like I want to punch you in the face or something but I can't exactly get pissed at you for something you don't remember or don't know why you did."
I gave a weak shrug, mumbled, "It's not like we completely avoid that part of town."
"Like you wouldn't flip your shit if one of us went to a place like that alone?"
"...You're right." I shook my head, looked lost. "I know you're right, but I don't know what to say. I don't remember."
I was letting her break me in; the frustrations of any kind of amnesia can really wear on somebody, and none of them had seen it yet, but I was putting it on just enough then for her to believe I wasn't completely fine by any means. Sure enough, she looked a bit guilty, but it only seemed to worsen her frustration.
"I'm sorry," I offered.
"Don't, forget it, I'm just being—"
"I know it isn't my fault, but—"
"Look, you don't know what it was like," she interrupted heavily, loudly. "It happened to us too. You're back and you're fine and everything's fine, but it feels wrong to me how we're all just pretending nothing's happened. Most of us didn't sleep for that whole week, you know. Even after you were awake? It was like...we just couldn't calm down. It was awful."
"But it's okay now. I'm okay."
"I know, but the night it happened, the way everything went...If you'd been there you'd understand. We were all so freaked out, I can't even explain it..."
I furrowed my brow, putting out the last of my cigarette. "What do you mean?"
She let out a long sigh, hesitating.
"You don't have to tell me if you don't want."
"Of course I want to tell you, it's just..." She had her forehead rested in on her hands for a couple seconds, and took quite a while to speak again. "That night. Well, Ken and Gaila had gone upstairs already, and I was with Danek in the kitchen. He was feeling talkative...he was in a pretty good mood actually, and he just sat there with me and we must have been talking for one, maybe two hours, while I was working on a few of my pieces. Gaila came in from work and went straight up to bed, and only about twenty minutes after that...God, the weirdest thing happened. I was right in the middle of a sentence and I suddenly realized that you hadn't come home yet, and I stopped. And the crazy thing is, I didn't check the clock or anything like that, but Danek...he looked right at me and then we both looked up at the door, and I could just tell that we were both thinking it, that you would usually be home by then.
"And then...Jesus. The next minute I heard Ken and Gaila coming downstairs, and they came into the kitchen and we took one look at them and they were looking at us...and we all just knew. Ken was the first to actually say it. 'Something's happened to Will.'"
She looked at me and I hardly had to do much to react appropriately. Something in me had gone a little cold.
"So we started calling you and you weren't answering, and there could've been a hundred reasons you were late or that you weren't picking up, but we were all just panicked. And when we found out..." Toni's voice buckled out.
I was picturing the fact that it would have been Chris who came knocking at the door with the bad news, how it seemed now that the frantic mess he might have been met with was so far from what I could have possibly pictured, and I somehow couldn't stop the thought from entering my head: Why wasn't I told about this? He had met all of them that night in that way, barged in on them and surely seen the extent of the upset, but he hadn't mentioned it to me in nearly enough detail. But I didn't have to wonder why he hadn't; it simply hadn't been relevant. I'd had no reason to know.
It was too dark for me to tell whether Toni was doing anything like crying, but I could feel that she was hitting her hard deck. Out of everyone in the house she's surprisingly the most prone to being vaguely embarrassed by physical affection, the one exception being Gaila's ever-present little squeezes, but she seemed okay with it when I lightly rubbed up and down her back. "Hey," I mumbled into her shoulder. "It's okay."
"I know it's stupid to think of it this way, but I just can't stand it," she said, her voice wavering a bit, "the fact that somebody could want to hurt someone like you...It makes me so angry I don't even know what to do."
"Toni...You shouldn't talk like—"
"It probably wasn't personal, I know. Still."
My arm came back down to my own lap. "Well, you never know, it could have been a rage of envy. I'm a dashing fellow. Just ask Jek. We all know he'd love to—"
"You're so not funny. It's not funny," she interrupted by shoving hard into my shoulder and I started to snigger a little until she was joining in. "Fuck, stop. I don't want to hear about all the dirty sonnets you guys kept swapping at that party."
"I never," I protested lazily.
"William Abraham Kenley, you do not get to have amnesia about that."
The lights kicked back on in the kitchen and I jumped from not being used to it, but for some reason it just made her give in to laughing even more. When we heard the others coming home I helped her up off the stoop and Danek appeared holding a bag of vegetables and wearing a softening look at the sight of Toni clinging to me only briefly to avoid the second step that needed to be fixed, wobbling through the doorway and still laughing at something we'd already forgotten.
Over a week had passed. I still hadn't found the hole to dig in that Chris had wanted me to look for, but he hadn't expected it to be an easy task. I would have at least felt more accomplished if, after finally getting an early afternoon when Danek was away long enough for me to comb through his very sparse and uncomplicated belongings, I'd actually found anything even resembling the chip he'd referred to earlier. There weren't even data chips he used for everyday storage to throw me off; he didn't seem to like using them.
I was supposed to be watching Gaila somewhat more closely than the others, especially when I did manage to get any biographical discussion going. And I did watch her: I watched the way she got a member of the cafeteria staff intentionally flustered by cooling her neck off with an ice cube, watched her do a little dance around Toni cooing about how pretty she looked before she left for her date on Tuesday night, noted that she apparently disliked Kara West from all the looks she gave about the table when Ken wasn't looking during the couple times we had her over for dinner. Without any rational (or professional) way to place it, I was beginning to find it increasingly laughable that she was our biggest suspect. When it came to someone who might be capable of purchasing a batch of skinjobs, I had no idea what type of person we should have been looking for, but my observation of her felt more and more like excessive homework as the days went by.
So far there was one thing about her that was unusual: She had been having nightmares. With little else to tell me about the last time I'd checked in with him, Chris had mentioned this somewhat offhandedly, not knowing what to make of it yet. It must have taken a couple incidents of whispering in the middle of the night for anyone to pick up on it being a frequent thing, that Gaila would come down from her top bunk and ask if she could climb into bed with Ken. As far as Chris and I could tell she was keeping it to one person that she kept having these dreams; if it was anything unusual for her, she was being moderately secretive about it.
Aside from that bit there was nothing interesting: I could assume if there were any alarm bells of reminiscing conversations going on in the bedroom a trois that I would have already been told; as it was, Chris said that most of what went on upstairs was innocent gossip, hairstyling and snoring.
You would think that the conditions of their memories would be pretty apparent from the get-go, but at the start Chris and I had both been pretty unsure about whether this group might simply be pushing something very consciously to the edges. After all, if any of them didn't believe it to be a lie that they came from the cities and backgrounds their fake IDs had packaged them with, there would have to be a reason none of them mentioned a single thing about where they had been before New Dublin. They only ever vaguely did, but what took me completely by surprise was that when the topic did come peeking out, I wasn't the first to bring it up.
We were eating dinner in a casual sprawl around the coffee table and the couch. Toni was swapping her PADD around with Ken and Danek as they were half-heartedly competing at some logic game in-between some attempts to help Toni study her French.
At some point I was urging Ken to reiterate a story he'd told me earlier about how he saw the college mascot, in full big-headed costume, trip and faceplant onto a group of prospective students who were having a picnic on the quad. It was easily Toni who found this the funniest, and while she was too beside herself to concentrate on grammar, Gaila leaned and shook her head back so that her hair was tossed around my knee. I would've been in trouble if I hadn't picked up on this habit earlier: She loves it when people play with her hair, and sitting behind her when she's on the floor practically means you're volunteering.
I was sifting her hair around into something akin to a braid when I heard her say, "How awesome would it have been if that had happened to us our first day on campus?"
Danek looked up, one side of his mouth curling up. "I suppose if Will had volunteered to be the mascot that day instead of helping with that presentation, we would have been fated to meet in some fashion..." Toni giggled.
Get in there. "You know what's strange," I said, clearing my throat. The topic of the incident had come up a couple more times since my heart-to-heart with Toni, so I was fairly confident it wasn't still a mood-wrecker: "Out of all that stuff the cops were asking me about, one thing they actually asked about multiple times was how we all met."
"Oh yeah, us too," Gaila excitedly pulled back to look at me. "It was so weird...Why did they need to know?"
"I honestly don't wish to ponder it," Danek muttered, but it didn't feel entirely dismissive of the topic.
"The thing was, I had a hard time remembering a couple details, so," jokingly, "I hope my story wasn't...inconsistent. But it probably doesn't matter."
"What couldn't you remember?" Danek asked.
"Like..." I shrugged. "I wasn't sure which one of you I talked to first..."
"It was Ken—" Toni and Gaila were laughing at their own simultaneity, but then just Gaila said, "Remember, the guy called you up to the front by your last name, and he thought he heard 'Ken,' not 'Kenley'..."
Ken scoffed. "Right, and I go up to the desk and the professor's just kind of politely ignoring me, and you must have had no idea why I was standing up there but just struck up a conversation just for the hell of it while he got his stuff together..."
"Okay, yeah," I said with a distant grin. "Yeah, I kinda remember that."
"And then, I don't know, we had some really mundane chat but then you asked should we sit together at the ice cream thing, and everything else happened."
"I still remember the first time I saw Toni," Gaila said, and Toni threw the hair band she'd been messing with at her. "Carrying that huge bag because she got locked out of her dorm room when she'd left that thing in the lobby and didn't have time to do anything about it."
"It's not like I could have fucking left it there to get stolen, I had all the clothes I owned in that bag," Toni groaned. "Granted, I had like three outfits at the time, but I still looked ridiculous..."
Ken interjected, "She lugs that thing into the lunch room and Will and I are just looking at this poor girl and giving these looks to each other; I finally go, 'What did you bring me?'"
"Which annoyed the crap out of me. I was so embarrassed. And then Kara's with this big group at the other table and kind of takes pity on me and tries to wave me over...To this day, I don't really know why I didn't sit over there instead of with you guys, but I just..." She trailed off, shrugging, with an amused mock-rueful smile on her face. "Maybe I thought Gaila looked nice, I don't know."
"Danek only sat with us because there was nowhere else to sit when he came in," Gaila remembered. "I guess we're lucky it was one of the few times in your life you haven't been early."
"We're lucky he talked to us at all," Ken remarked.
"Well, he didn't really," Toni said. "Remember, he was sitting down when the announcer started talking, but...no, wait, didn't Will write him a note or something?"
My heart startled in my chest at the sudden memory: unsigned notes Spock and I were leaving on each other's computers for the couple weeks that our desks weren't yet pushed together. I told myself to knock it off.
Gaila was pointing at me: "Oh, that's right! That's why I assumed you guys already knew each other at first. You jotted something onto your PADD and then slid it over and I was like, '...Oh.'" She laughed, imitating some blinking dubious expression. "Those two, I guess, I don't know, he looks kind of like, uptight..."
"You didn't think Will seemed a little, uh, stuffy?" Toni said, putting a grin my way to make it harmless.
I was squinting like something was at the edge of my memory that I couldn't quite reach. "So what did the note say?"
Danek's face fell into a tiny shock, almost imperceptibly, and I thought, Oh, fuck, fuck fuck fuck...
Then Ken said, "Wait, you don't remember? I've asked you guys plenty of times, you won't tell me."
It was a joke, that they refused to tell anybody just to be teasing about it; I came out of my floundering and launched for that possibility, playing off like it had just been coyness. I shrugged and said, "I really have no idea at all," then a couple seconds later, gave Danek an oblique smirk.
I was innerly collapsing into relief when Danek's glance narrowed but then lightened into an easier expression. In a short moment I could tell he'd probably forgotten all about it.
"You know what I just thought of, when you said that about only owning a few pairs of clothes?" Ken was turning slightly into Toni's direction as he idly rattled the ice in his glass. "How it was so weird that none of us had like any stuff when we moved in."
Gaila pouted vaguely. "People get rid of stuff before they move, though."
"I mean, it's not that it's weird on any individual basis," Ken said. "It was just that we were all like that. A lot of students have a whole lot of stuff, and even more stuff at home, but with us..."
"I think it makes an amount of sense," Danek interrupted calmly. "Considering our situations."
The way he said that word, situations, it rang with a meaning that seemed to carry a warning: We don't talk about that. I was starting to feel like I could hardly keep up with all the strangeness in this conversation.
There was a brief slide of thick silence in the room. When Toni said something again, she was looking down at her PADD screen at the same time and the way she spoke seemed deliberately daring. "Sometimes I wonder what may have happened to all my old clothes. Like if anybody's holding onto them."
Something lit in Ken's features, his eyes showing something vulnerable I'd never seen in them before. "Me too."
"I had to give them away," Gaila said with a shrug, her voice the most hesitant but not unwilling, "but you all probably would have figured that."
"I just wonder about the clothes I had when I was little, because I think I'd been still hoarding some of them," Toni said. "I remember this dress with a cat on it—"
"Listen, about the questioning," Danek interjected, seeming to wield up my attention. "Will, have you heard anything—"
"—Wait, that's kind of funny." Ken didn't even seem to realize he had interrupted; they were absorbed. "Because I had this one embarrassing pair of mittens with cats on them—But I didn't even think they were embarrassing, I must have really loved them, because I got made fun of for wearing them a lot..."
I was blinking over at Danek; the look on his face that was only for me was strange. It was entirely clear that it was quietly imploring, like he was expecting me to say or do something, but I couldn't begin to catch up to what it was, except that he had most definitely been attempting to change the subject.
"Oh yeah, I wore the dorkiest shit," Toni waved her hand out in amusement, "like especially around holidays I'd be going all out..."
Gaila, giggling leisurely, said, "No one where I lived would have—"
"No pasts," Danek said.
A couple tick-ticks of a tree branch hitting one of the windows in the wind was the only utterance; everything was quiet.
The phrase hadn't been spoken loudly, but with an immediate weight, holding the magnetism of a maxim. Everyone's eyes went to their laps, back to reading almost as if no one had been talking at all, back to the screen on the wall even though the movie we'd been watching several minutes ago had been muted.
For a long stiff number of minutes, no one spoke again. Through the long stretch of time in which I imitated the rest, I was left to contemplate what in the hell had just happened.
I had no idea what to do with the stories of them first meeting. My antsy instinct halfway through the conversation was to get Chris to chase down Kara West and see if she was actually sure she had been there when the group met. But then, Toni had mentioned her. I didn't see how there could be such effective deception on both sides, which left me with the fact that this whole story was probably true.
I believed wholeheartedly that Chapel had been right: You couldn't program them to meet and like each other, not in such an immediate way. The one theory I'd been clinging to was that this was a big elaborate ruse, one that they were happy to play with themselves as some unhealthy coping mechanism and which also needed to be preserved if only for the sake of Gaila, the one unplanned friendship in the mix, the true humanoid who slotted right in. Then, maybe Will and Danek had known each other already when Will had passed that note. The message had been some last exchange of plans before the production slipped into something so permanent that it was almost believed by all of them.
This idea felt completely absurd, but it had been what I had, until I'd made that slip of not remembering what I'd written to Danek. His reaction had been too slight to be faked. I couldn't read anything other than the ache of genuine nostalgia in that fact: When he'd thought for a second that Will had forgotten the moment they met, he hadn't been confused, or suspicious, as if I'd made some misstep in the dialogue. He had only been hurt.
