Chapter 4
Four
Ellie
In her dreams, she was a real person.
Ellie had been pulled out of her stasis so many times, it was hard to guess what was real and what wasn't. But here, in this dream world, she was always treated like a real, living being. Like she wasn't a clone of the person who had come before her.
That's how she always knew the difference. It was easy to guess when she was awake and when she wasn't by the programming around her.
The people here smiled when she walked through the halls. They laughed at her jokes, waved at her when she meandered past them. They wished her to have a good day every single time they saw her. Sometimes they even brought her little gifts. Today it was a fresh apple from the gardens of Tau.
She wasn't even sure if the real Tau had apples. Or gardens. But here, where everything was perfect and nothing ever went wrong, she knew that there were apples.
Biting into the crisp flesh, she headed toward the lab to continue her experiments. This simulation was so powerful, she was actually doing real work. It was recorded by the pod that she was in, or at least, so he said.
Malcolm Maximus Cornwall. He was the scientist who woke her every few months or so, and the one who had taught her everything she knew.
He'd even built the program she was currently living in.
Absolutely everything had been designed by his hand.
So she had him to thank when she got into her cozy bed, when she marveled at the beautiful wallpaper in the room she worked in, or when she had a crisp apple like the one she held in her hand.
As she turned the pale white corner that led to the labs, an unsettling thought bothered her.
She'd never eaten an apple. She had no idea if what she tasted now was actually what an apple was like, or if it was very different in the real world.
Thoughts like that bothered her sometimes.
Malcolm would tell her that was entirely natural, and she shouldn't let it bother her too much.
After all, it wasn't likely that she would ever bite into a real apple. She might as well enjoy this one.
She entered the lab, and a very handsome man spun around in his chair. He had always been her counterpart. In the simulation, his name was Romeo Steel. In the real world, his name was Steve, and he was not anywhere near as handsome as this.
He'd programmed himself to have a strong jaw and plush lips.
His eyes sparkled with mischief no matter what he was doing, and his shoulders were broad and square.
Muscles packed onto his form, almost ridiculous in their quantity.
He pointed them out to her often, but she didn't look at him that much.
Because Ellie knew what he really looked like. And it wasn't anything like this at all.
Steve was a very scrawny white man who was severely balding at a very young age. He'd always wanted to be tall and strong, and was absolutely incapable of convincing himself to work out in the real world. He lived in this simulation almost as much as she did.
"You're finally here! I was wondering when you'd show up." He grinned at her, trying to flirt like he always did.
He said the same thing every single morning.
No matter what time she arrived, Steve tried to make her feel like she was late.
It didn't make any sense whatsoever, considering time didn't matter here.
She wasn't alive. She wasn't dead. She was just here to learn and develop and grow all the things that Malcolm wanted her to grow.
Why? She had no idea. Whenever they woke her, she was tested.
Over and over again. They made her code things, write different scripts, see if she could compete with the droids as they spewed out binary code for her to decipher.
A hundred things they had her try to figure out, but none of it ever linked together.
She didn't know why he was trying to teach her these things.
Only that she had mastered Python when she was five years old in her reality.
Of course, her body was that of a grown woman.
It had been difficult for her the first few times she'd been woken up.
And then he'd built the simulation, and it was even stranger.
She wasn't a child anymore, but she’d never been a child to begin with. She'd had to learn that other people weren't the same as her, and that clones weren't really people, anyway.
She was a doll. Something for him to insert knowledge into and bring back to life whenever he wanted to play.
The room was cold and clean. Malcolm liked things to be just right, and he'd designed this room to have no distractions.
There was a panel in front of her, along with a keyboard to type whatever she needed, and then a wall of screens.
She could watch a great manner of things there.
All of her lessons took place in this room, as she learned theoretical knowledge that she only rarely put into practice.
The white walls, white floor, and stark fluorescent lights always grated on her, though.
"I'm not late, and you know it," she muttered before heading to her table. "What are we focusing on today?"
"Genetics. Today is all about learning how splicing genetics between humans and undine affects the average body."
Ellie frowned. Hadn't she already learned that? When Romeo leaned forward and pressed a button, she was certain that they had in fact gone over this lesson before. The screens were full of the same content that she'd gone through just last week.
"Romeo?" she asked. "We've already had this lesson."
"No, we haven't. Every day brings new knowledge, unless we're continuing a study that we did throughout the week. This week is a new week, you know that." He leaned back in his chair and pulled out a newspaper.
That was where the algorithm ended. He stayed frozen like that while she flicked through all the things she was supposed to learn. It was exactly the same routine every single day.
The only way she could wake him up was if she had a question. Then, he would turn back on again. Alive suddenly to answer whatever she wanted to know.
The real Romeo didn't know the answer to almost any of her questions. He just stared at her blankly when she was awake. His stare made her uncomfortable.
So she didn't ask him any questions. Instead, she just started staring at the same genetic code she had stared at last week.
The more she looked, the more certain she was that it was exactly the same.
There were no differences. She'd been doing this kind of testing day in and day out, and this was the same thing she'd already learned.
Come to think of it, she'd been doing a lot of similar things lately.
Her lessons seemed longer. She had told Romeo that she had already done lessons like this a few times, or that she was ready to move on but then couldn't for some reason.
He drew out the lessons, but his programming didn't allow him to lie, so she now realized maybe he had been repeating days because. .. he had to.
She leaned back in her chair, ignoring the squeaky wheel that was literally programmed to distract her.
The lunch had been the same every day as well. Usually, she had a variety of fake food, their simulation was meant to keep her spirits high, given the circumstances of her life. But the lunch had been exactly the same. Almost as though it couldn't change.
No, that wasn't possible. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her programming or the simulation that she lived in. Tau was doing fine in the real world, and she was just paranoid. After all, Ellie was locked up in here by herself day in and day out. A girl was bound to get uncomfortable.
Still, her gaze went to the ceiling as though she could see the real world somewhere way above herself.
What was going on up there, though? She hadn't heard from Malcolm in a while.
He was predictable. Like clockwork, every two months he would pull her out of sleep and test her again.
He was trying to create the perfect specimen, she assumed.
Or maybe he liked toying with her. Whatever his reasoning, she just liked being alive for a few moments.
Using real lungs.
Smelling real scents.
Experiencing the world as a real person would experience it was a rare and wondrous treat every time she got to do it. He didn't know the gift he bestowed upon her, or he was very aware of it and thought she should be more grateful than she was. It depended on the day.
Sighing, she continued memorizing the same gene sequence that she had last week until she was certain she could recite it in her sleep.
Memorization had always been easy for her.
Malcolm said that was because her Original was a woman of impressive knowledge.
Her brain worked differently from other people.
She'd tried to scan her own brain once. Malcolm had left her alone in the lab for a few hours when she'd actually been awake, and she wanted to see if there really was more brain activity in there than the average person.
He'd found her almost halfway through the test, and he'd been so furious.
"You are wasting resources for what?" he'd snapped at her, ripping electrodes off her head so quickly he tore hair out with them.
"You aren't capable of even reading these results!
You aren't here, Ellie. You’re just a copy of her. "
That was the day he'd sat her down and explained to her that she wasn't a real person.
He could dispose of her so easily, and no one would even care.
Her death wouldn't even make people angry, and she had to remember that.
There were hundreds of creations just like her.
Dolls to be woken whenever someone wanted to play.
Leaning back in her chair, she spun around to face Romeo. "I have a question."
He immediately came back to life, but this time there was a strange glitch in him. He flickered a bit, and then one of his eyes started looking in the wrong direction. "I have an answer. What's your question, Ellie?"
She was so put off by his eye that she completely forgot what she wanted to ask. "Romeo... What's wrong with your eye?"
"Nothing can be wrong with my eye. Please state your question, or I will go back to reading my newspaper."
Steve never read anything. She wasn't even sure he could actually read. "I wanted to know what's happening in Tau. I haven't heard from Malcolm in a while, and I'd like confirmation that everything is all right in the real world."
Then, something even stranger happened. The same side of his face with the wandering eye started to droop.
His mouth pulled down, like wax melting off a skeleton beneath.
Then his head started tipping to the left as well, but his voice never changed.
"Everything is fine in Tau. I would have been informed if there was anything wrong. "
"I think there's something wrong with you," she whispered as she slowly stood. "Maybe we should reboot the simulation. Can you do that?”
Her chair disappeared. The one she had been sitting in was suddenly gone. And then all the screens flickered on and off, each of them showing a city on fire. Tau flooding. Bodies floating in the water and blood turning the ocean red until it was all she could see. Death. Destruction. Danger.
"Nothing is wrong," he said again, his body limp and slowly sliding onto the floor. "There is no reason to be alarmed. I am certain the system would reboot on its own if there were something... wr... wrong..."
Everything went dark.
It only did this when she was waking up. There was no world for a little while. Just her, locked in her head and the body that wouldn't wake until her pod let her. It was a terrifying silence that she had never grown used to.
Was this what all the other clones lived in? Were they also aware, stuck in their own heads as they wasted away into madness because no one allowed them to even open their eyes?
Panic started to set in. She could feel her heart thundering in her chest, racing as though it might be able to flee out of her body and leave the rest of her behind. It didn't want to be here either. It didn't want to suffer in the darkness and silence and pray that someone might find them.
A sharp prick hit the side of her neck. The only time that happened was when she was indeed waking up.
Which meant all of that had been a nightmare.
She would request that Malcolm allow her to look at the pod, because something had clearly gone wrong with the programming.
Or perhaps this was all a test. Perhaps he wanted to see what she would do when she was afraid.
He was always testing her. That could definitely be the explanation.
Maybe clone bodies reacted differently under pressure, and he wanted to see how high her cortisol levels went. Or maybe there was an algorithm update that needed to happen, and he hadn't realized that doing it before she was awake would cause such nightmarish reactions within the programming.
So many explanations raced to the front of her mind because if she didn't explain it, then it was simply a cruel man wanting to hurt her.
She wouldn't even entertain the possibility that something might actually be wrong. She couldn't think that the images she had seen on those screens were real. That people were dead and that Tau... Tau was no more.
Where did that leave her? What did that mean for the girl stuck in a tube that would keep her alive no matter the cost?
Ellie opened her eyes, praying to a god she didn't believe in that everything would be the same. And it mostly was. There were bright white lights over her head, screens on all the walls surrounding her. It was all the same. Exactly as she had left it.
Except... Now there was a dark shadow looming over her. A shadow with long dark hair, eyes like the deepest depths of the sea, and a wide, split mouth that opened up to reveal long, sharp teeth.
"The princess finally wakes," he said, and his voice was the abyss coming to claim her.
She screamed before she could even think to draw breath.