I really didn't like the idea of leaving Bobby in that place, no matter how helpful they were. But we didn't have a choice. He was right, we had to get this machine back to Detroit and use it to find a cure. I had no idea if my parents’ conditions, or that of Irelyn, Trivial, or anyone else who had been affected, would get worse. But waiting too long seemed like a bad idea. We had to take care of this and let the doctors take care of Bobby.
So, we went back to the van. I changed its color once again, turning it into a dark orange with an intricate plumbing advertisement on either side. One bonus of the mercenary hospital being set up in a fake auto shop was that they were able to replace the side mirror, so that wouldn’t give us away either. Then Paige took the driver seat while I dropped into the spot beside her with Qwerty on my lap. We exchanged glances before the other girl pulled the van out of the lot and headed back to the freeway. “They'll take care of him,” she assured me. “They know what they're doing. They've seen a lot worse than that.”
Some part of me wanted to ask if she was convincing me or herself, but I fought down that instinct. Instead, I nodded. “You've got their number, right? So we can check in?”
She confirmed that she did and promised we would call and see how he was doing every few hours. And with that, there was nothing left to do but sit back and wish this van could go faster. Well, it could. Especially if I was driving. But given we were trying not to attract attention, that was probably a bad idea. Not that that stopped me from rocking back-and-forth in my seat a little, silently urging Detroit to get here faster.
Qwerty helped distract me, holding up the activity magazine he had drawn in to proudly show me what he'd done so far. I lost myself in that for a while, going over the book with him. He really was amazing. Maybe I took the fact that there were intelligent animals like Lucent and Lion out there for granted, but seriously, seeing the way Qwerty colored in shapes, connected dots, and even solved word puzzles was pretty damn incredible. Maybe it was just because he seemed so brand new to all this and more like a child or teenager that made the whole thing more real to me. I was seeing all this through his eyes in a way. It was obvious that he hadn't Touched very long ago. Which reminded me…
“Hey,” I spoke up after we tried the memory picture game in the back of the book, “Do you think you could tell us a little more about yourself? I mean, how you turned into what you are now. You were a parrot and a squirrel out in the wild and you just saw one of those orbs?” Hopefully this wasn't pushing too much and there wasn't some painful memory that he was trying to avoid. But I really did want to know more about our new little friend. And from the way Paige glanced over out of the corner of her eyes, it was obvious that she did too.
Thankfully, Qwerty didn't seem too bothered by the question. In fact, he was clearly excited to explain. Setting the book down, he turned on my lap and looked back and forth between both of us. “Well, there were two of me before. The parrot me and the squirrel me. The parrot-me lived with this old man for a long time. I'm not exactly sure how long, but there were a lot of different seasons, and he got old. The man, I mean. One day he didn't come back and there was this lady who fed the parrot-me. But she left the door open and I flew out. I was looking for food because the man or lady always brought it to me before. I didn't know how to find it myself, and I was really hungry.”
His head tilted to the other side as he continued. “The squirrel-me knew how to find food. I scavenged all the time and brought the nuts and berries back to my nest. I was hiding them in this little hollow in a tree. But then the parrot-me found it and started taking food from the squirrel-me. We fought about it. The squirrel-me had to protect my food and the parrot-me was really hungry. So we fought really hard about it. I think we would have killed each other. Or I would've killed myself? One self would have killed the other self?” He shook off that confusion and continued. “One of us would've died, but then the Orb showed up. I think it was watching us.” He said the last part in a whisper, as though it was a secret. “Maybe it didn't want us to fight anymore. It came right between us and we both thought it might be food. It was bright and shiny, like a great big berry. So we jumped on it. After that, we were both me. It was really scary at first, when I started thinking. I knew things, and that was weird. Especially when I had both of our memories. I remembered attacking myself, and fighting myself. I remembered being hungry and trying to take food out of the hole in the tree, and I remembered the big colorful bird taking the food I’d hidden in the tree. I remembered all of it, both sides at once. It was really confusing.”
Grimacing at the thought of how I would feel if I was only merged with a completely different person, let alone a different species, and had all their memories alongside my own, I nodded. “Yeah, that sounds like a lot to take in. Two different sets of memories and personalities, and you suddenly had human level intelligence? Sounds scary. But does all that happen at once? I mean, is it like someone snaps their fingers and you can suddenly do math and think in perfect English? Or does it come in a little slower?” There had been numerous studies about TONIs, of course. Dozens of them had been interviewed about the full process of becoming what they were. Several of those books have been written by the TONIs themselves. But I hadn't paid that much attention. And this was a chance to get information right from the source of one who seemed really new to all this, so it was fresh in his mind.
Qwerty bounced back and forth from one of my legs to the other excitedly as he explained. “Some of it came like the finger snapped and some of it took longer. I could think really quickly. I knew what humans were, what I was, how that happened to me, Basic stuff like that. The longer I thought, the more things I could think. It was like remembering things I never knew, you know? I remembered a bunch of stuff about history, and colors, and shapes, cars, airplanes, pencils, ATMs, restaurants, every time I thought about something, something else popped into my head. When I looked at things, I knew what they were. It was like all that knowledge was dumped in my head and it just needed a trigger to make it come out. I tried to tell the Orb thank you, but it was gone already.”
He went on to explain about how he had gone exploring with his newfound sapience and found his way into a dumpster where that old computer was lying. Seeing the keyboard with the letters printed on it had been what showed him that he understood the alphabet. One by one, he had read those first few letter keys out loud and decided that would be his name. Because seeing letters and recognizing them had told him he needed one. The parrot version of himself had had a name, one which he politely declined to reveal, referring to it as his not-now-name. He needed a new one for his new self. So he chose those first letters he managed to read. He was Qwerty. It was probably good he hadn't started reading from the bottom row, because I wasn't sure I'd even know how to pronounce Zxcvbn. And even if I did, it might end up summoning Cthulhu.
According to the little squirrel-parrot, all this had happened, as best as he could estimate, about two weeks earlier. He spent those days exploring and absorbing all the knowledge that had been dumped into his head. He didn't know who to trust or how to go about introducing himself exactly, so he had been planning out what to do about that, watching people and learning about them while hiding in the trees. Honestly, I was pretty sure a large part of that whole delay in actually showing himself to people was that he kept getting distracted by things too. After all, it was a lot more fun to fling himself off the tallest building in town and glide all the way down than it was to try to find someone he could trust to talk to.
Not that I knew anything about that sort of situation personally, of course. No sir, I never did anything like that, and I was positively offended by the insinuation. Harumph.
Our similarities aside, I really did like talking to our new little friend. He helped distract me from all the other serious thoughts and memories I had. Which was a tall order at this point. But even that couldn't last forever, and soon, I saw the poor guy yawning repeatedly. So, I tugged open the nearby jockey box in front of me, pushed a couple hand towels inside and arranged them like a bed, and he clambered in there to curl up and sleep for a while. Once he was out, I slumped back in my seat and exhaled. “I guess he's had a long day.”
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Paige gave me a look. “So have you. Maybe you should get some sleep too. It's not like you can make Detroit get here any faster by being awake.”
Oh, she really did know me. Pushing to spite myself, I offered a weak shrug. “Maybe not, but I'm not sure I could sleep right now anyway. My brain probably won't let me.”
Paige hesitated before shifting a bit in the driver seat to stare at me briefly. “You said you had all your memories back, right? Did you really mean all of them?”
I nodded quickly. “As far as I can tell, yeah. All that stuff that got erased came flooding back when I saw Bobby like that. I guess the whole similarity to what happened before, with him being shot in the back outside the vehicle, was enough to break through Kent’s power. Maybe all the stuff I already knew helped it along. I kept getting all those headaches every time I thought about that stuff too much, and seeing Bobby like that was the last straw. I remember everything.”
Swallowing hard, I reached out to touch her shoulder. “I'm really sorry. I'm sorry I forgot about you when you needed me. I know I said it before, but now that I remember all that, I guess it's kind of worse. I should've been there for you, with you.”
“It wasn't your fault,” she insisted firmly, moving her hand from the wheel to touch mine. "I already told you, I knew you wouldn't remember me. It was your parents, not you. Then my dad made it worse. And his thing wasn't an accident like your parents. They didn't know they were erasing me. They didn't know anything about me. But my dad, his vendetta is worse. He wanted me to kill you, he made me kill you.”
“Eh.” I did my best to sound lighthearted about it, but probably didn't do a very good job. “Only for a minute. Then you brought me back. His fault for not specifying.”
Visibly shuddering at what would've happened if her dad had thought to tell her not to revive me, Paige put her hand back on the wheel and squeezed it tightly. “Yeah well, he's about to get what's coming to him.”
Yeah, she was obviously eager to get back to Detroit too. Still, as she said, wishing wouldn't make the trip go any faster. Nor would worrying about Bobby help him get better. But I did know how to distract us so we wouldn't obsess over all that so much. Namely, I started talking to her about the things I suddenly remembered. We talked about how we'd met, some of the games we used to play, the silly things Anthony did, and more. It made me cry a little bit, but it was a good sort of cry. It was a sort of cry I should've gone through years earlier, the sort that would've helped me move on past Anthony's death instead of letting it fester in my subconscious for so long.
We talked about fun stuff, silly stuff, scary stuff, and even sad stuff. We talked about everything. We cried together, laughed together, and just remembered the friend we had lost. It was a very late, somewhat awkward memorial we had right there between the two of us in the van, but I was pretty sure Anthony would have approved. Not that that would stop us from doing something bigger for him as soon as we have a chance, of course. Now that I remember everything about my old friend, I was damn sure going to do something big in his memory.
Of course, there were other things we needed to talk about besides fond memories. Once it was obvious that was coming around, I looked down at the floor of the van for a few long, quiet minutes. The miles ticked by, but Paige didn’t rush me. She waited until I was ready to say something. Finally, I found my voice.
“I don’t know what I am, exactly. I don’t know what… what to label it or even--I don’t understand the… feelings or how much of it is just normal. I don’t know what normal is so I don’t know what I am. I know girls can like boy things and vice versa, but at what point is liking a boy thing and thinking like a boy and feeling like a boy actually being a boy? Where’s the--I don’t know what the line is. There isn’t a--there’s nothing that says, ‘here fill out this survey and we’ll tell you exactly what percentage of girl and what percentage of boy you are.’ There’s not--it just--” I sighed heavily and slumped back in my seat, hands against my face. “Gender is dumb and I wanna punch it in the face. Can I just be anti-gender? Is that a thing? I’ll be gender’s supervillain nemesis.”
“I don’t think you’d be the first one to feel that way,” Paige noted quietly. “But first of all, you don’t have to be in a rush to define yourself, Cassidy. There are people you can talk to, people who will keep everything anonymous. People outside the city. Chat rooms, phone calls, real support who can listen, or who you can listen to.”
“Thanks,” I managed before going for a joke as I looked at my own palms curiously. “I guess the fact that I like to have one side of my hair cut short and the other long probably should’ve given everybody a hint that I’m not exactly straight forward as far as that goes. Including me. And… and…” Again, I put my hands against my face. “And this is a lot.”
We talked for hours through all that, and had probably barely scratched the surface of things we needed to say. Not that it actually felt like that long. The next thing I knew, it was evening and my stomach was rumbling. Qwerty had woken up by then as well, and the three of us agreed that it was time to get some food. We checked in with the doctors back at that secret hospital place, and they assured us that Bobby was doing fine. Well, as close to fine as could be expected under the circumstances. He hadn't gotten worse, at least. He was still sleeping, so we didn't talk to him ourselves, but got the nurse we spoke with to promise to tell him we had called. Some part of me thought Bobby will probably find our concern a little strange. But then, he knew Paige, so maybe that would cover it. And, of course, he thought he knew about me too. He thought I was a Biolem made to look like me. Which was almost hilariously close to the truth. The man really was good at his job. Whatever that job actually was. I still wasn't sure if he still worked full-time for my parents, if he had just done this on his own, or what. At some point I was going to have to sit down and ask him about all that. Something told me it was going to be a very important conversation.
And speaking of important conversations, I had another one with Qwerty after we stopped for food and ate in the van. I had told him some about our whole situation before, of course. But now I told him everything. He was with us for the long-haul, so I had to trust the little guy. I told him the whole situation, all of it. which, obviously, was a lot to take in. He had a ton of questions, which I tried to answer as much as possible. About half of them were about the whole Ministry thing, and the other half was about all the different trips I had been on and things I’d seen.
He was especially interested in my trips to the race track. Something told me he wanted to drive one of those cars himself, which just made me picture some sort of car that had been put together in a way for him to control it. Maybe once Wren didn't have so many other huge things to do, she could work on that. I had a feeling she’d have a lot of fun with it. Actually, I was pretty sure she was going to love our new friend.
That thought made me realize we should probably call and check in with the others. Paige, of course, was way ahead of me. Apparently she had been updating Sierra on the whole situation the entire time. And yes, the others were apparently super-eager to meet Qwerty. Not to mention eager for us to get back so we could finally take care of this whole horrible situation.
Apparently Sierra was doing a decent job posing as me. That was what Izzy said when I called her, anyway. She assured me that my doppelgänger wasn't going around making everyone else think I was crazy. Well, not any more than I generally did that myself, anyway. Honestly, if I didn't do anything crazy over those few days, I was pretty sure people would immediately realize I had been replaced. Still, at least I wasn't going to go back to Detroit and suddenly find that my life had been upended any more than it already had been.
At the moment, Izzy was apparently getting ready to go on patrol. She sounded tired, but insisted she was okay. I was about to ask her how much sleep she had gotten the night before when she abruptly told me to hang on for a second and muted the call.
Paige, Qwerty, and I exchanged uncertain looks for a minute before the girl came back on the phone, sounding rushed. “Sorry, I've gotta go help the others.”
“Oh.” Paige abruptly sat up, cursing under her breath. It looked like she had just gotten a message from Sierra that she didn't like. Which, combined with what Izzy was saying, made me blanch.
“What's going on?” I asked both of them.
“It's Pencil and the Scions,” Izzy replied immediately. “They're making their next move.
“And your team is right in the middle of it.”