11. Ilse
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Ilse


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When you've left your bunker far behind to taste the summer air,
There's a curious desire to reoccupy that lair
With its certainty and stasis, its unchanging quantum state
But there is no going home for you; the past will never wait.


Exposure response prevention. That's what this was.

She could go inside. Crawl back into the shell of her shell. Retreat into unchanging simplicity. It would be easy. The door was unlocked. Nobody would know; she was alone, between the breach bulkheads. Probably nobody was watching this specific camera right now, and when they reviewed the tapes after, they wouldn't be looking at AAF-A.

Nobody would know except her. So she stood there, exposed, exposed to the past, the wasted years, the loss, the warm blanket of fear and failure she had worn for generations, and refused refused refused to reach out and take it.

She stared at her reflection in the glass. It felt strange, the difference in the light. Outside versus in. She came here from time to time to contemplate, to get her thoughts in order. To remember how her mind had worked when her only responsibility had been to herself. To the project.

To escape from this incinerator.

There wasn't much to see, even if she did go inside. Everything had turned to dust when her plan went into motion. Everything but her.

She had a dust allergy now. No medical cause could be found. It was probably psychosomatic. She spent hours every day outside. She never wanted to go back in.

But she always did. And she always came back here, too. Where her old self was always waiting in the glass. Looking out at her, small and sad and still very much a caged animal. Something pathetic, like a baby koala. No, that was too silly. She smiled at the bathos.

Her reflection grinned.

She stepped back in shock, and her reflection didn't move. She really was standing in the incinerator. It was really her.

Then who am I?

And then she understood.

"Lys," she said.

The other woman laughed. It wasn't her laugh. It wasn't even her dead sister's laugh. She could still remember how that had sounded, over a century out. "You still believe that?"

She shook her head. "I assumed you were a hallucination. Or something from another…" She trailed off. There was no way of knowing whether this doppelganger was cleared to know about the Deadlines.

"Another reality? It's hard to get used to, isn't it? Seeing only one world at a time." Her double moved close to the glass, revealing the strangeness of her apparel and the wild look in her eyes. "Have you ever felt more alone?"

"Who are you?" she breathed. And then she added, "I've never felt less alone."

The double sneered. It looked profoundly wrong on those elfin features. "You know who I am. The question you ought to be asking is: why did I come to you?"

"Before?" She stared at the other woman — was she another woman? "I don't know."

"What did I tell you?"

"Other than lying about being my dead sister?" She couldn't bring herself to sneer back. "You told me no version of me had ever gotten out of that room. Well, guess what."

Her doppelganger clapped ironically. "Great job. Really. Kinda makes you wonder why I said that, huh?"

She frowned. "It wasn't true?"

A shrug. Like the truth hardly mattered. "No, it wasn't. I haven't seen many of us," and she paused, to let the pronoun sink in, "but I've seen a couple out in the wild. I lied to you. Why would I do that?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. Did you not want me out? Were you trying to discourage me?"

"I needed you out," the other snapped. "But I need you out as you. If I'd told you the truth, you'd have been inferior. The worst of all of us."

She spread her hands in surrender. "I give up. Tell me why it was so important that I think my situation was hopeless."

"No," her double said simply.

They locked eyes for a time, each searching the other for… what? Answers? Understanding? Weakness? A reflection of…

"Oh," she said, in a very small voice. "Oh."

"Go on."

"You wanted to make it harder." She could see immediately that this was the truth. "You didn't want me to have help. You wanted it to be all me. Vivian made it harder. Wynn made it harder. Even Dougall. Setbacks and disappointments. If you told me I'd make it out, I would have had hope."

"You would have had certainty. And just like that, you could never have earned your freedom. You'd still be standing there, on the other side of the glass, but you wouldn't deserve it, and you wouldn't really be you. You'd just be… a reflection. Transparently not the same."

She felt dizzy. "I could have gotten out years earlier, if you hadn't told me that. I lost so much time in fear and doubt."

"You got lucky." There was real rancor in the voice, her voice, familiar and yet so foreign. "There were harder roads than yours. We could only do you so many favours."

"Favours," she repeated. "We?"

Her reflection shook its head. "I didn't come here to answer questions. I came here to let you know who made you. Made your little bungalow and one-armed spouse and adorable little flash-frozen sprog possible."

She went cold. Even the breach alarm and distant booms hadn't been able to achieve that. Jay and James. You know about Jay and James?

The doppelganger sighed. "This is who we are, sister. We do these things ourselves. Nobody does them for us. Sui generis. Nothing less. Remember that, when the next act begins."

"The next act of what?"

It was a strange trick of the light, or the mind, that it took her a moment to realize she was looking not at the grinning lunatic with the infinity glasses but her own baffled reflection once again.

Ilse.png

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Geneviève

Indivisible

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Delfina

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