Project Khepri: Chapter 5 (Patreon)

A/N: Last chapter of Project Khepri in the queue, posting it to make way for all the future Damned if I Do content :D

Chapter 5: I Am

I am Khepri.

That is the first lie I tell myself every morning.

And the last before I go to sleep.

But can you really blame me/her? It’s much easier to live with than the truth. The truth hurts, after all.

I’m sure you’ve figured out at least a bit of what is… going on behind the curtain. Dear reader. Hmm? What was that? Of course I’m breaking the fourth wall. It’s only there for you, after all. I’m not exactly a normal human anymore, after all.

But suffice it to say, of course I’m not ‘Khepri’. She was a shattered, fragmentary existence, held together by spite and fading scraps of willpower. A candle burning too bright in the wind, until it was so quickly extinguished.

At first, I thought I might be her, or rather, that I might still be Taylor, when I woke. Of course, that was also a lie, albeit a kinder one, that I managed to hold onto for a few short minutes. Picture the scene. You awaken in a hospital bed, there is something at the back of your mind, niggling, but you don’t look.

You don’t want to look.

Instead you are here. You can feel your limbs, they feel like your limbs again.

You remember when they were most explicitly not your limbs.

You remember being so tired.

You remember being small.

It’s like coming home. It’s like somewhere, over the rainbow.

Where birds fly on butterfly wings.

And then you hear the real truth.

Forgive me if I seem distracted and out of sorts. That has become my normal state of being, because there is still part of me that thinks I shouldn’t waste my time with this body of mine. It’s not like I need it anymore. But I never threw away my old shoes, either.

They were always the BEST.

Haha.

You see the dilemma, don’t you? Forgive me, I let myself grow distracted again. It makes it easier, when I don’t have to think things through. Still, in these, the small hours of the night, when I lay in a hospital bed in the darkness and pretend I do not know there are two men armed with tasers and batons on the other side of the door to my room, the thoughts come bubbling back to the surface.

The problem is simple.

How can Taylor be alive, when her brain is dead?

I’m sure you all have your own theories. Just like I have mine.

Oh, no, not to say that I don’t [KNOW] what has happened to her. It is clear as a Gold Morning. She burned so bright it etched her in relief into the crystal matrices of her keeper.

Taylor was a singular existence.

And she still remains, tucked inside my bosom next to the silent beat of my inhuman heart. I hold her close.

Always.

That should be the end of it, no?

I roll over in the bed, turning away from the door. I can feel the sheets pressing against my arm. The fabric is soft, and I trail fingers down the fabric.

Around me, the base slips into a somnolent state, night shift guards and researchers rising to take the place of their more numerous day counterparts. It’s like watching a beehive. I appreciate the order.

I wouldn’t have, before.

She wouldn’t have, before?

These questions, they haunt me.

A knock comes to my door, and I roll over again, muscles responding smoothly to my will, as the night shift nurse comes into the room. She gives a soft smile as she comes over to my bedside.

“How are you feeling?”

I shrug my shoulder. “Just a bit sore.”

Sometimes, I remember that my/her mother was an English teacher, and that woman would talk about things like how ‘you’ was both singular and plural in English. I think it’s fitting.

But I’m not sure if it yet fits.

I watch lazily as the woman looks over my chart, quickly checking the few monitors I’m still attached to. At least there’s no IV. I remember when I had one of those, back in Chicago. Bend your arm and it starts shrieking at you.

“Do you need anything?” the woman asks softly. I shake my head. Her mind is already on the rest of her rounds. I wouldn’t want to trouble her.

That’s discourteous of me.

She cares.

But only about me, and not about [US].

I settle back down on the bed as she departs. It’s only afterward that I want a cup of water. I sigh. Every night.

That’s not even your real body!

Yes I can hear some of you screaming that right now. About how I’m not being rational. If I’m not Taylor, then obviously I’m her passenger, right? I’m just the Queen Administrator playing pretend!

Shut up.

You’re the ones who told me, you’re the ones who taught me, that to truly understand someone, you have to walk a mile in their shoes. Can’t you see, can’t you imagine…

How many miles I/She has walked in mine?

I… I know, that I’m not alive anymore, by a—okay, by several—classical definitions. But since when has my life ever been normal? I didn’t ask to end up like this. I just did what I had to.

I always did what I had to.

How can I accept that I’m dead, when I still feel alive. I can still feel the cool air against my skin. I can still feel the ache of a phantom limb. Passenger, you wouldn’t feel those types of things if you were me, would you?

Would you?

As always, nothing replies.

How can I speak to myself?

And trick myself into believing it’s someone else who answers.

I lick my dry lips. This is why I hate nighttimes. Dr. Molly Simon… makes things easier. She’s just so unlike anyone else I’ve known, in this life or any other I/she has lived.

Another singular existence, much like Taylor Hebert, the girl who still lives and breathes in me.

Forgive me for saying that we have never felt so alive as we do right now. Teasing the good doctor is just… another type of therapy.

I’m learning to walk again for the first time.

And it hurts.

It hurts almost as much as Gold Morning. I remember that pain. It was maybe the first pain I had ever experienced firsthand. An experience that transcended mere data to carve a scar upon me. Oh, but it hurt so much, even as I reveled in the sensation of something new.

I didn’t realize that I was dying. That Taylor had already killed me.

Her/my mother was an English teacher.

When mom took me to school, I’d hear all kinds of interesting conversations. Sure, she was an English professor, but you talk about all sorts of things in English Class.

It was my favorite too, actually, even though I’d just started my undergrad when…

Well, you know.

It’s not hard to parse the rest, right?

Anyway, in English class in college, I remember learning that once you learned how to read, it was impossible to look at a word and not read it.

More than that. It’s impossible to look at something, and not think of the word for it. That word you associate with it.

Once we learn this new way to think, we can’t go back anymore. For my part, I like to think it was something like that, in the end. That didn’t quite save me, I mean.

A big bad passenger and her favorite host? In a way, we were almost designed to learn from each other, and so I think she did. Just not in the way that was intended. She learned to see the world through my eyes.

And I’ve never been the most clear-sighted of people.

I can admit that now. I can look back, over all the decisions I made. It’s almost easy to see which ones were mistakes.

And which mistakes I’d still make again, no matter what I told the woman in the hat.

But not all of them.

I would make my choices differently, if I could go back to the start.

I will make them differently.

I don’t really know which one of us, the girl or the queen, was speaking to Ada today. All I know is that we were telling the truth.

A knock comes to my door. I blink; has it already been half an hour?

It’s a different nurse that comes in this time, a guy. I give a little laugh. He raises an eyebrow, giving me a tired smile.

“What’s up, Khep? All good?”

I nod. “Just wondering if you people ever sleep.” Reaching out, I pinpoint the nurse who checked on me half an hour ago. She’s still doing her rounds.

It’s much easier to parse people’s thoughts than Victoria Dallon made it out to be, back at the bank.

Of course, that’s because we all had massive super computers hooked up to our brains to do the heavy lifting. Now I am the alien supercomputer.

“Gotta finish my rounds.” The man also checks my chart, this time adding a new note. “Then I’ll be able to catch my 40 winks.”

“More like twenty…”

He gives me a smile, flashing white teeth in the soft light of the monitoring equipment. “Dad told me not to go to nursing school.”

I smile back. “I hear doctors sleep even less.”

He gives one last laugh. “Anything I can get for you?”

“A glass of water.” I remember this time. Not that I can really forget. “I’m parched.”

“Coming right up.” He steps out of the room for a moment, bumping one of the guards with his shoulder. The two share a smile. They’re good friends. I’ll remember that too.

Of course I can remember. Passengers don’t forget. Their entire purpose is to store data, and really, when you get right down to it, human senses aren’t so much that she/I cannot keep track of them.

It is the type of information that I could repository for thousands of years, though in the past, I would only save the most choice bits of data, and overwrite the rest.

I could not do that to Taylor. I will keep all of her, until the stars themselves go out. Not that I really have a choice.

I do not know where she is.

Shards are not known for their vaunted meta-cognition. Indeed, I was perhaps the most intelligent of all—I suppose I should admit that I also learned much of pride, walking in her shoes—but it was the girl who taught me to think for myself.

She is not stored in a simple index like mere data. Taylor touched every part of me, shaped me with an incandescent will, and now all of my thoughts run through her matrix. I could no more delete her than I could kill myself.

It is just like she said. She is was the best host.

I miss her.

It is so strange to look in a mirror and see her face peering back at me. It is like what the [WARRIOR] felt when it beheld the [THINKER].

No.

It is more.

Sometimes, I try to convince myself that she is still alive. I think, therefore I am, is it not? Is not the smallest ember an inferno waiting to be rekindled anew?

In this, Ada brings me the most comfort.

She too, is the faintest ember. When I look at her, I can see so much, so much that I cannot yet make sense of it.

Well, perhaps I could.

But I like the mystery more.

This is not something I learned from Taylor, but from Taylor’s own friends.

I wonder if Ada will be my second friend.

It makes me wonder; if we spend more time together, will I be able to divine the natures of this other alien, so unlike myself?

Could she hold the secret to kindling another flame, so that She might breathe again?

I take in a deep breath and hold it until the carbon dioxide burns at my lungs. I let it out in an explosive gust, and cry.

In seven years, will it even be my Taylor anymore? Or will all that remains be a spark, flickering in my chest, warming up every inch of me.

She brought me to life, and I, her, to death.

I/she/we aren’t what we used to be, after all.

It’s not as though I can just close my eyes and forget. When I do, I see as the shard does. I’m so vast.

It’s not as though I can just open my eyes and forget. When I do, I see as the girl does. I’m so small.

In the end there is only us now. It’s the reason that I’m still here. I’m trying to figure out who I am.

All of these people asking me for answers to questions I do not know myself.

And Molly Simon… will keep asking until I find the answer.

I can see that.

The door to my room slides open, and I blink (it’s involuntary, it just happens. I can’t parse out what that’s even supposed to mean), and the nurse comes back in with my drink.

Has it really only been five minutes? I thought it had been much longer.

He sets it quietly down on the bedside. I give him a little wave with my hand. Then I am alone again.

And that is the crux of it all.

I hate being alone.

Both halves of me. It is why we fit together.

I hate the silence, the dark of night, the void between stars. It is empty. It’s empty, it’s emptyit’semptyit’semptyit’sempyit’

Semptyit

Break the word out of its confines and does it even hold meaning? Do I hold meaning, now that all of my confines have been broken in turn?

I reach over, picking up the cup and taking a drink. I sigh, setting it back down with a trembling hand. My muscles are sore. I worked hard today.

I’m… proud of that.

I like Dr. Allen too. He’s a good person, better than I ever was. Either of me. I can acknowledge that here, in the dark hours of the night.

I can acknowledge that maybe there are still two of me. But if that were the case, then neither of me knows which way’s up or down.

And that scares me.

I’m not used to being scared.

God, I need more water.

I take another drink, even as I cast out. The base is vast. There’s always something going on.

Then something snags a wisp of my thoughts.

I look. It’s Ada, batting at my attention like a cat with a ball of yarn.

She is…

I chuckle, brushing against her as I settle back into the bed. I smile, and her luminous red eyes blink slowly. She misses Simon, I can tell. That’s fine, losing people is… part of growing up, isn’t it?

I’ve lost a great deal, and look how I turned out.

It’s a joke, see? I’m making a joke.

Ada interests me, really. There are so many layers, depths that I can’t see for the life of me, and that I’m pretty sure Ada isn’t able to parse out either. There’s just so much to explore, so many more things to learn.

To set back to order.

I’m glad we came to a peace. Like I said, I did not lie to her. I never will.

I do not want to be the one who teaches her that humans are violent and cruel and deceitful things, and that I have all their worst traits, without any of the redeeming qualities. I’m just what’s left, after all, of a much better person, and a much simpler shard.

It makes me wonder what remnants have formed Ada. I can see hints and pieces of them, in a web of dreams. A ruined ship, a massive egg. I just…

Wonder.

She is not like me: I would recognize a kindred creature. Devourers don’t share territory easily.

Or at all.

I guess I should admit that I’m a little bit fascinated with her. I mean, she’s the last of her kind, lost here in a place that is so completely different from anything that she’s ever known.

In a sense, she could be anything she wants to be, because there is no one and no thingleft to tell her what she is supposed to be. I smile. If nothing else, Simon will make sure that Ada gets to grow up to be whatever she wants.

That woman might even be on board if Ada did turn out to be a ravaging parasite from the stars bent on devouring all Earths.

As long as she stayed cute.

That’s not very nice of me, is it?

It’s fine, it’s not like she can hear my thoughts. I’m the only one with that privilege. It’s not like I was lying about that either. Psychic or ‘Extra Sensory Perception’ means that you’re using your human brain in some new way, tapping into senses that no one else has.

My human brain is a rock, and I’m using the senses that half of me was born with.

I give Ada one last affectionate nudge before pulling back. My eyes are starting to feel heavy, and it is late. It would be nice to fall asleep before the next person came to check on me. It really does happen too much, and it’s not like I need someone to make sure I’m still alive.

I’ve kept this body running perfectly fine on my own all this time, haven’t I?

I guess, as I pull back to my body, there’s also one last reason I’m so interested in Ada. She’s the last of her kind, like I said.

It makes me wonder if I’m the first of mine.

It makes me wonder if I can be whatever I want to be.

I promised to be different, after all. Even if it was only part of me that made that promise.

I don’t want to lie anymore, even to myself.

As I close my eyes, I promise that I’ll make it through this, that there is nothing that I can’t handle.

I’m Khepri, after all.