You might say that my story began long ago. Then again, depending on your view and understanding of Time, my story began a short while ago. Or, if you hold Now to encompass all, my story has no beginning, middle, or end; it’s all the same thing. Similarly, depending on your understanding of Space, you could say my story either began far away or practically next door. Or no place at all, for that matter. But, regardless of where or when you choose as the beginning point for this story, the inescapable truth is that I may not be from around here.
Except, of course, that I may well be from around here. From what I can gather, based on the information available to me, it was in this place as much as any other that I was conceived and created. Perhaps even more than any other, for the situations arising from this place prompted my creation, as far as I have been able to tell. I am here because this is where I was created, and because my reason for being is here with me. Whether my age is reckoned in the few seasons through which I have worn this form, or in the millennia which my memories span, this is my story.
What if you woke up one morning, only to discover that you were not yourself? Or rather, you were yourself, but not the self you remember being? What if the person you love with every breath you take and every fiber of your being did not, upon learning the truth of your past that you yourself did not know, believe that your love was real, did not believe you could love for real, but only echo the love felt by the person you thought you were?
These are the sorts of questions and quandaries I face. Had you been a product of science and technology instead of the usual biological process, had you been created by an advanced cloning technique in a lab far removed from the safe policies and procedures advocated by governmental agencies and regulating bodies, these could well be the sorts of issues that shape your existence, much as they have shaped mine. In many ways, I wrestle with the age-old question of who I am, the same as any human might. And yet, in the case of beings such as myself, the question acquires an additional level of complexity in pondering my very humanity and that of my progenitor. At the root of it all, these questions remain. What is a clone? What is a man? What is the difference?
By what name do you call a man who has flaunted whatever passes for international law and ethical considerations to create living, breathing copies of himself? Criminal? Monster? For that matter, what would you call the copy of such a man... a crime? A monstrosity? By what title does the copy of a man call the man from whom he had been copied? Though such a creation might well consider himself or herself fully human, would humanity likewise consider such a copy human? Or would humanity judge such a being non-human: a scientific curiosity, a selfish indulgence, a medical mistake or misapplication, a freakish monstrosity be feared, reviled, and ultimately hunted down to destroy for the protection of society? I must confess that historical precedence does not offer me a lot of encouragement, should my origins become common knowledge.
Perhaps once I knew such things and have since forgotten, as I have forgotten so much of what I have come to think of as my previous life. Perhaps I never knew, that memory deleted by my progenitor, as so many details seem to have been. It may be just as well that passing of time clouds my memories of the past and endless possibilities for shaping the present, for the abilities that marked my remembered role in those times and places elude me these days.
In fact, with no clear date or when my existence began, the only reference point I have to attempt to determine the timeframe in which my life began is the onset of failure in those devices and abilities that I had taken for granted. In light of these failures, as I look at my life and the world around me, I wonder what else will fail, and when.
It seems curious to look at my memories and to realize that although they feel like my own, although I recall having been in distant places and done many things for good or ill, the body that I currently wear was never there. I could tell the details I recall of being an orphan, a soldier, a fugitive, and a medic. I could recount every wound, but the simple truth is that those stories are not my own; rather, they would be the story of my progenitor, my creator, a person whom in different circumstances I might have called father, or perhaps brother.
What I do know for certain is that I seem real. While most of my ability has diminished, I retain no small skill in the healing arts. What I know routinely surpasses the capabilities of what passes for medicine in this time and place. At my deepest levels, most of what passes for modern medicine strikes me as little more than state-sanctioned, corporate sponsored butchery.
Too, I know that my love for Vanessa seems as real to me as anything in the world around me. Other things that seemed important to me once seem to have slowly faded from my reality: the Medical Corps, the Army of Skye, my creator himself. Every day which passes with no contact and no way to get in contact makes them a little less relevant, a little less real in my life.
And the dwelling in which Vanessa and I spend out time together? Well, it and everything about it seems real and solid enough, except that I do not believe it to be located entirely within in the ordinary world. We live in what I would have once described as linked pocket-planes at the crossroads of existence: spaces existing in the areas between dimensions, touching on paths that traverse the edges of reality according to necessity and desire.
Or rather, it did. At one time I thought I had wrested control of this nexus from my maker, changing the access codes and instructing the internal security controls to disregard the previous codes. Perhaps I did at that, but denying control to another is not the same as having control myself. In lashing out with anger I may have been premature: I have since been unable to reenter the upper sanctum to use the controls, the inner matrix of connections remains stable though isolated from upper and lower levels, and I have lost the ability to redirect the entry points.
In short, I have no control over our abode. with no way to steer or move the connections from the nexus, Vanessa and I have become tied to two points of entry. We have been limited to entering or exiting on foot through what appears to be an archway in the ruins at the edge of town, or via a little-used maintenance tunnel with the VW Van that we can still get to. I suppose you might say we’ve been stranded, although comfortably, for as long as the systems feeding our abode function.
How long those systems will continue to function, and under what circumstances malfunction, I cannot say. I’m certain I had several books on the subject of dimensional manipulation and maintenance in the library. I remember, too, that I could read them. Yet I have been unable to decipher the markings and symbols in most of the books in my library for some time. Is my memory of reading the books accurate, or was something else happening, some ability that only seemed like reading at the time? Another unknown in an ever-growing list of what I do not know.
Not knowing might explain my reluctance to leave our dwelling without Vanessa and the children. Once I thought little of coming and going as I wanted. Now, I do not know whether or not I will be able to return once I step past the door. legends are full of stories about people who had strayed across a bridge between worlds and could not find the way back, and most legends are based on a grain of truth. It concerns me that legends are filled with people intending to leave for a short time returning decades or even centuries later. I do not know whether Vanessa and I can look forward to lives spanning centuries, apart or even together, for that matter.
At one time, determining our life-spans would have been as simple as a running a couple of quick scans. Stabilized Centurion physiology does not age at a mortal rate, but I can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that my biological profile no longer fits stabilized or runaway Centurion parameters. What might have been done to her, and what the result of my constant close interaction with Vanessa might be, I have been unable to accurately project.
In short, as far as I have been able to determine, I fit the same standard human biological profile as Vanessa. Which is to say that we are notable for our exceptional good health, and the rate at which our bodies mend. Life energy burns as brightly within me as it does within my beloved: if in good health, either of us may speed the healing rate of another by prolonged contact. Together, the combined effect of our healing auras on the breathing dramatically increases our abilities without conscious thought or effort; a full day of recovery may be made in as little as six hours, without expending any thought or effort.
Through concentration on repairing and optimizing the kirlian field, I may further accelerate healing or block pain impulses along neural pathways. Some superstitious souls might call it miraculous or magical; really, it seems a simple matter of advanced training in concentration, awareness, purposeful energy interaction, and will-power; I’d think that pretty much anyone can be trained to do as much, though some take to it more naturally than others. Then again, it could be some ability that my creator has awakened in my body, seemingly normal because it is, for me.
There are many things that I was never told about by my creation. My creator never told me that I had been cloned, or why he went to the trouble of creating me in the fashion he did. In fact, not only did he not tell me that I had been created, he seems to have gone out of the way to hide that truth and the very fact that he existed from me. Had it not been for a case of mistaken identity, and what may have been the jealousy of his significant other, there’s no telling how long it would have taken for me to learn the truth. Perhaps I might not have suspected anything amiss until Vanessa became pregnant, and I might then have been mystified at the differences between the biology that I remembered and the biological form in which I found my body. The only thing I know for certain concerning him is that he has never openly revealed his existence or his motivation to me.
Then again, would knowing why he created me, why he hid the nature of my origins, why he walked away from me and Vanessa change anything? If he were still here, if he played a continuing role as a father figure in my life, how would that change the dynamic of my relationship with Vanessa? Assuming that she loves me and not his memory, assuming we could withstand the strain of the questions his being present would impose, how would Vanessa and I explain a “Grampa Mikk” who looked and sounded just like daddy to our children? How would we explain that “Grampa Mikk” had attachments to a woman living somewhere deep in the woods who put in a rare appearance to assault someone, then vanished back into the woods.? Would an explanation matter?
I think I know what I know, I think I remember what I recall, but how much of what I recall can I call my own memories, and which are his? At what point can I say for certain that my memories are my own? I can be fairly certain my memories were unedited from at least the time that Vanessa became aware that I was not the person I believed myself to be; the recollection of hurt and anger, the loss and betrayal I felt when I thought Vanessa had left me, are my own darkest memories from what I suppose could be called my childhood. Or perhaps before that, when I recall rescuing Vanessa from the dungeon lab where sick individuals had been experimenting on her, torturing her.
I do recall, in those earliest days, that I had resented my creator for his actions. I hated him for simple walking away without any sort of acknowledgement that I existed, as if I had not mattered enough for an explanation of why he considered it necessary. I hated him for having deceived Vanessa, for not only abandoning her but planting the seeds of doubt in her mind. Did I hate him more for what he’d done to me, or for what he’d put Vanessa through? I’m not certain; does assigning blame and ranking the cause for disgruntlement diminish the degree of dissatisfaction?
If I could have, if it had been within my power, I would have gladly destroyed him. I might have settled for handing him over to the authorities, had I been able to contact them; from what I remember of our shared past, they would have been quite content to rob him of joy in the name of their justice, and perhaps they would have taken his life as well as his freedom and his happiness. In my pain at the time, I believed that he had done as much to me, and I wanted to cause him as much pain and as much anguish as he’d caused me over Vanessa.
Though I was angry, I did not find him. In retrospect, it may have been for the best that he was beyond my reach in those times. Rewarding his abdication with betrayal would probably have been inappropriate on my part, no matter how satisfying it might have been in the short term. As a long term solution, among other problems, betrayal would have denied me any chance to learn the answers to the questions surrounding my existence, to hearing those answers from the person who created me. On the off chance, of course, that I might contact him, or he me.
At times I wonder why he left without a word. Did he care so little about me, so little about Vanessa, that he could simply walk away? Then I remember that I had changed the access codes and alerted the automated defenses to the presence of a possible imposter in the nexus. The standing order for the defense system to incapacitate the imposter if he could not verify the access code, an order the system attempted to carry out on three separate occasions, might have discouraged him from stopping by. I suppose I did lock him out, and told what passes for guards to knock him senseless if he tried to get back in… but what sort of lame excuse is that? If he really were as omniscient and omnipotent as all of that, if he could so easily create life and this hideaway that Vanessa and I share, then something like bypassing the defensive systems should have been as trivial as it turned out to be ineffective against his shielding.
And yet, other than for the answers that only he could provide, other than to satisfy my own curiosity or to offer an explanation to Vanessa, can I honestly say that I need or even want him in this life I’ve found? Vanessa and I have been living happily together in the nexus realm without him. As long as the nexus remains stable it offers us shelter, the gardens sustain us and our children in perfect health, and there seems to be no threat to our continued safety or happiness. I have felt no particular need and more than a little reluctance to venture outside the nexus without Vanessa and the children. Nor do I feel any inclination to take my family out into the world, to expose the people I love to the violence and the mayhem that I associate with Bordestang and the surrounding area.
Am I living in a dream world? Are the areas I can no longer get to and the sounds that I hear echoing through the corridors the waking world, waiting just outside my grasp? Perhaps we are living in a dream, and I am no longer part of the so-called waking world; as long as I share this world with Vanessa and our family, I’m in no hurry to awaken, no hurry to depart, no hurry to return to the nightmare existence that may have once occupied my time and energy.