4:35am, Thursday the 9th October, 2132.
Nami sat cross-legged in an old armchair, listening to the sounds of her shower. A muted television washed the back walls of her apartment in flashing lights, but she ignored them, her focus instead on her tablet. She was staring at a message from her supposed boyfriend, a text she read over and over again but simply couldn’t process. It was as though she was half-asleep, as though all meaning and definition in its words had been stripped away by her struggle to stay attentive, and forgotten the moment she had finished.
She put the tablet down on her coffee table and looked up, eyes glancing towards her bathroom door. A stranger was in there, a stranger she had invited into her home. Why? She wasn’t usually so sentimental, and she certainly had more street smarts than to go out of her way for someone she had never met. And yet he was using her shower, cleaning himself with her water and her products, and she wasn’t sure why she let him.
Did she find him attractive? Had her decision been made by nothing more than a crude desire? No, it couldn’t be that. She preferred Japanese men, and there was something about this Aiden that made her unsure. For every part of him that seemed genuinely in distress, there was something else, hidden beneath, that she couldn’t put her finger on. He wasn’t acting, she was quite sure of that, but even so, something felt off about him.
And yet there she was, waiting for him to come out of the bathroom, waiting for him to tell her who he was. She was at a paradoxical impasse. Her intuition warned her against letting him stay, but her mind wouldn’t let her deny him.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said he could come here.
A few minutes later, Aiden climbed out of the shower and stood in front of the bathroom mirror. Everything was silent, even in the other room, and he found himself staring at a person he barely recognized. His hair was long, almost below his chin, and his eyes seemed lighter than they had been before, the deep sapphire of his father’s genes replaced by the ice-blue of an arctic wolf. He found them predatory in ways he hadn’t expected them to be, and they frightened him because they were so clearly not his own.
And yet they were his own, weren’t they? How could they not be? He opened his eyelids wide, rolling his pupil around to try and find the serial number of an implant in the white, to find any sign that they were artificial. There was none.
“You alright in there?” Nami asked through the closed door.
“Yes, thank you,” he replied. “I’ll just be a minute.”
All of a sudden, Aiden noticed something. It was difficult to spot, and he only saw it because of the peculiar way the light hit him, but there was a small, incredibly thin mark running down the center of his chest. He touched the top of it with his fingers, running them down to where it ended just below his ribs. A scar? Aiden was no doctor, but it was also no butcher’s mark. A surgeon had made it and he was worldly enough to know that few scars healed so cleanly. It screamed of expensive aftercare, the kind that only the most wealthy could afford, but who would spend that kind of money on someone like him? Why had he even needed it?
He held his finger to his chest and stared, became conscious of the muscle he didn’t remember having. He had been in a hospital at some point, and he was certain it was connected to his situation.
Suddenly, the bathroom light switched itself off and Aiden found himself standing in darkness. He had been still for so long that the movement sensor had flipped, but even in the dark, he could still see himself. He looked like a ghost; pale, half dead and haunting himself in the mirror, a stalking beast lost in an unfamiliar forest. He felt a thirst in him, a desire for something he couldn’t recognize, and it scared him almost as much as he scared himself.
He pulled away and dried himself, then dressed in the shorts and t-shirt Nami had provided. They had belonged to an old boyfriend, though he hadn’t cared to ask for specifics. He only cared that they were clean, and it felt refreshing to wear something dry after spending so long in the rain.
When he was finished, he stepped out into the main room of Nami’s apartment and offered her a small smile. Her apartment wasn’t the cleanest, but it was open – a unified space that contained both living room, bedroom and kitchen. He closed the bathroom door behind him, then took the liberty of moving to an old armchair and sitting in it.
“Are you alright?” Nami asked him, watching him with a gaze that seemed to know more than it revealed. Aiden nodded at her and she turned, sliding across the bed she sat on to take a still-steaming cup of coffee, her leg dangling over the side.
“Thank you for helping me, Nami,” Aiden told her. His eyes were drawn out of the apartment window to the tower on the opposite side of the street, but there was nothing to see, their windows tinted in the dark. “I owe you.”
Nami shrugged, sipping from her cup. “I like to keep a balanced karma, I guess.”
“You guess?”
She put the cup down on the table by her bed then leaned over, beginning to root through a pile of her belongings. “I have an old phone here, somewhere. You can use that to call someone.”
Aiden gave her a nod. “Thanks. I lost my earphone. I don’t even know when.”
She glanced up at him. “Yeah, I kinda guessed you weren’t wandering the streets like a lost puppy by choice.”
As Nami searched, Aiden looked around and examined her apartment. It had an underground techpunk vibe, with walls of soft, dark grey that were covered in posters of angry, politically charged bands that he had never heard of. There was something gothic about it, too, and his eyes were drawn to a decorative sculpture of a nude woman holding a skull like a talisman, and a painting of a dark bird that he suspected was by Nami’s own hand.
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Yet what struck him most was that there were very few of the conveniences he would have expected from a modern apartment. There was no home A.I system, no holographic entertainment suite, there weren’t even any netplugs. There was only a music system in the form of two tall speakers sitting in the corners, an old TV and video game console, and a shelf filled with digitized book-readers. There were barely even any lights, and the room was only partially illuminated because of the movie Nami had left on mute.
“Found it,” she eventually said, sitting back up and holding out an incredibly thin and transparent smartphone.
Aiden reached forward and took it. “Thanks,” he said, and swiped at it with with his finger until the clear screen was filled by a user interface. He wasted no time in dialing his sister’s number. If anyone could help him, it was Sarah.
There was no dial tone. After several painful seconds of waiting, a robotic voice told him that her number wasn’t recognized.
“Damn it…” Aiden mumbled, beginning to panic.
“Did you put it in wrong?” Nami asked, watching him.
“No,” he replied, though he dialed again just in case. He got the same result. “It’s fine,” he said, mostly to himself as he began to tap in yet another number. “I can try my mother.”
It didn’t work. “I apologize, that number is not recognized.”
Aiden’s heart seemed to freeze in his chest. Not recognized? What the hell was that supposed to mean? “Shit, shit!” He hissed. “I don’t know who else I can try.”
“No other family? Friends?” Nami asked him.
He paused a moment. “There’s my best friend from school, Jack, but I don’t know if…” He trailed off, realizing it might be the only choice he had. They had argued the last time they had spoken, Jack telling him in no uncertain terms that he disagreed with Aiden moving so far away. Aiden had ignored him, and he had no way of knowing if they had ever made up.
He dialed the number and prayed with held breath, silently begging an unseen power that it would work, that Jack hadn’t changed his number. It rang. Aiden let out a sigh of relief as the monotone tune played repeatedly, and he waited for almost ten unbearable seconds until someone finally answered.
“Heylo, who’s this?” A man’s voice said. A baby was heard crying in the background of the call.
“Jack?” Aiden asked, taking in a breath. “Thank god. It’s me.”
“Me? Who’s me?”
“Aiden. From England? Your friend?”
Jack went silent for several long seconds. When he spoke again, he did not sound happy. “Okay, I see. Fuck you.”
“What?” Aiden asked him, confused. “Jack, it’s me. I need he-”
Jack cut him off before he could finish. “You fuckin’ piece of shit. Whoever’s doing this, you’re a god damn psychopath,” Jack growled, his voice barely containing his anger.
“No, it really is m-“
“I’m contacting the police. You know his sister was a police officer, right? When she finds out who you are, you’ll think twice about doing these sick calls again, you slimy prick!”
“No, wait, Jack, listen!” Aiden begged, but the call was already dead.
He stared at the phone in shocked silence, his grip slowly loosening until it slipped from his fingers and clattered against the table besides him.
“What was that?” Nami asked. She had heard the entire thing, and she was sitting on the edge of her bed, clearly unsure how to react.
“I don’t know,” Aiden told her. He took in a deep breath. “I don’t know anymore.”
“Exactly what in the hell happened to you?”
He looked across at her, shrugging. “I woke up somewhere and I don’t know how I got there. There’s a massive chunk of my memory that… I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“Amnesia? You should have said something before. Look, maybe I should take you to a hospital.”
For a moment, the idea of a hospital put him at ease. There would be warm beds and doctors to help him, to tell him what was wrong, and a place for his family to find him. But then he remembered what he had done, that there was something terrible wrong with him and that he had no idea what it was. He was a murderer, a monster, and they would find out. They always did.
“I… Can’t, Naomi,” he said. “I know you have no reason to trust me, and I don’t know how to explain it, or even why, but I just can’t. I can’t go to a hospital, or the police.”
Nami looked at him. He couldn’t tell if she was empathizing with him or deciding to contact the police no matter what he said, but soon she put him at ease. “Alright,” she said, “no hospitals. No police. But you need to get help, and I can’t keep you here. I have enough trouble to worry about without adding yours.”
“I know,” Aiden said, standing up from the table and turning towards the apartment door. “Thank you for your help, Nami. I won’t forget it.”
All of a sudden, she stopped him. “Where are you going?” She called out, causing him to turn back towards her. “There’s no way you can go out there like you are. You’re confused, you have no idea what you’re doing. You can stay here for tonight, at least.”
He stared, overcome by a feeling of gratitude he knew he didn’t deserve. “I’ll pay you back, I promise.”
“I feel like you keep saying that,” she said, turning off her television with a press of a button on a remote. They were in darkness now, except the tiny amount of natural moonlight filtering through the apartment window. “It’s late, and I’m tired, and I have work again soon. I’m going to bed. You can sleep wherever you can get comfortable.”
“Thanks,” Aiden said, sitting back down in his chair as Nami undressed in the dark.
“You keep saying that, too,” she told him, pulling her bed covers up around herself.
Aiden let his head fall against the back of his chair. All of a sudden, with no light to pollute his eyes, he felt himself overcome by an exhaustion that was unlike anything else he had ever felt. Nami’s breathing settled into something approaching sleep, and as he listened, he felt himself being dragged into it with her. He slid down again, crossing his arms over himself for warmth, and slipped off into an empty dream. There was no pain there, no nightmarish fear – he was too tired for such things. But there was no comfort either, no satisfaction.
There was something wrong. Something missing from it, something missing from him. A thirst that he had not quenched, a desire his body would not let him forget. He squirmed, and groaned, and though not conscious, or having any recollection of what it was, he could feel it urging him closer. It wanted him to feast as much as he wanted to feast on it, and the very suggestion of its taste, of its intimacy, began to stir him.
There was a warmth now, and a softness. His foot slid down, and he felt it brush against something similar. Nami moaned softly, his body pressed down gently against hers with the heat and weight of bed sheets over them, and in the dark he bore down on her. She moved up to kiss him and their lips touched, but in that moment he became conscious again, aware of what was happening. He couldn’t remember going to her, he didn’t know what he was doing, and yet he could no longer stop himself.
Aiden’s lips left her own. She tried to take them again but he brushed her away, and moved down past her cheek to where some unseen force, some primal instinct, took him to her neck. Her breathing became heavy in his ear, but it was not her that he sought.
He could smell it, he could feel its phantom taste on his tongue, and it drove him wild beyond any semblance of his own character. His mind became shrouded in a foreign veil and it changed him, drove him into a frenzy that he didn’t know how to fight, and he sank his teeth into her flesh.
Nami cried out. Half in distress and half in desire, she tried to push him away, but he no longer had the awareness to let her. Her blood filled his mouth and he lost himself, and Nami grew limp beneath him.