Repentence Saera Tyrathlion
91-09-16 - 111-08-11
There was no body under the stone plaque, of course. It was traditional to have the ashes scattered to the winds. Dust from the body of the girl would have spread over this little spot and been washed away long ago. Aside from her skull. Quite why Vara had taken that morbid trophy, she didn't know.
Last she'd heard, Vince still had it.
Repentence looked over the little memorial grove. There were dozens of little plaques here, stretching back centuries. It was private ground. Even a wanderer in the forest, itself private property, would hesitate to go beyond the old gate.
She'd never given it much thought. The idea that she was a copy of a copy. There were other people out there who'd been softcloned after some accident, capsuleers and those sufficiently wealthy baseliners to have the tech alike. They awoke, and for most it was probably no different to hardcloning, just with a touch of amnesia.
But she... she had a different problem. The problem of having existed in two places at once, even though only one or two people had known until the other was dead.
The problem that she was the copy.
When her mother, Vara, had shown up in Sinq and confronted her, demanding that she return home, she'd been too wrapped up in other matters, too clingy and willing to let others think for her, too... stupid to consider what it meant. Then she'd forgotten all about it with the year-long nightmare of split personality and the chaos that came with it.
Until she'd come here one day, after reclaiming her home, to pay her respects to her family and ancestors as was right, regardless of how she felt about some of them... and saw her own memorial. Presumably installed before they'd realised that there was another version of her out there.
She'd hunted down the old security footage, hacked through passwords and encryptions, and finally watched bits and pieces of her alternate self. It had been unsettling. So broken, so dull, so... lost.
And apparently, suicidal.
She couldn't imagine doing that now. She'd thought she'd hit rock bottom fighting off Nation's impulses, but apparently not. Did that mean that she was stronger? Stronger than the original?
She half-smiled. People would probably say that thinking like that, about originals and copies, was futile. That it would lead to madness. Hah. Been there, done that, got the psychosis.
She remembered what Scherezad had said, that she was a strong person. She'd just smiled, made some remark about having learned it. She'd needed strength. Without it, she'd have lost it completely, instead of pulling together the fragmented parts of her mind and forging them into the person she was now.
She'd actually gone through a hardclone. Bubbled and podded in w-space, no less. It had felt traumatic at the time, but now she knew what dying actually felt like, courtesy of fancy neural tech. Bad death, painful death. She knew what it was like to have life painfully ripped from you slice by slice, and what it was like to inflict the same.
There was an old folktale that she remembered in her youth, of a monster that rose from the ashes of the dead. A horror with total power over life and death, that understood it like no human could, for it had experienced both and the crossing point between. The revenant.
She was a copy. A shadow. A mirror image of the real girl whose ashes were scattered here.
But in the right light, a shadow could be far larger than its source.
Repentence pushed herself to her feet, turned away. Time to go check on Morwen.
Author
Topic: Revenant (Read 778 times)