\ Nurture \

Marsia and Skyler trailed behind White, her coat fluttering in the low laboratory fog. Her imposing figure demanded attention—her attitude demanded obedience. So, begrudgingly, the two of them followed along.

They’d left Arufa and Locri behind with Ghiles, since their cells had been right beside them. Conversely, Marsia was less than excited to walk through the entire laboratory just to reach her own cell.

“I’m gonna come out and say it,” Skyler whispered. “I think Dr. White is insane.”

“What’s insane is, I can hear you. Dissing your captors is a bad idea, Skyler. So cut it out,” White said.

Marsia hmphed. “You just expect us to be silent the whole way there?”

“I was hoping for it. But you’re hopelessly talkative, so I guess I’ll bring myself to chat.”

The hallways stretched out forever, endlessly repetitive in design. Low purple floor lights only faintly illuminated the path forward—now looking at them more closely, they seemed a little on the red side.

“Why purple?” Marsia asked.

“I’m sorry?” said White.

“Why would you choose purple? Out of all the colors, and of all the brightness options. Why a dim, barely visible reddish violet?”

“Aesthetics won’t be a pleasing answer for you, will it?”

“Not remotely.”

“It’s for our computers,” she explained. “This hue has a very low frequency, bordering on infrared. And our cameras work on ultraviolet down here—management required—so we had to include a bit of that. The lowest ultraviolet frequency is right around our visible purple, so there you have it. Red and purple.”

“And what does that have to do with your computers?”

“They’re quantum computers. They need to be super-chilled, so nothing is disturbed. Even light can mess with them, so we’re stringent wherever possible with its use.”

Marsia and Skyler both walked in silence, thoroughly outdone. She’d just tried to be obnoxious and instead had her face shoved full of scientific knowledge she never meant to ask for.

Soon, they found themselves in a new room, larger and filled with beeping electronics. Fog poured out of a device on the back wall, running from the ground to the ceiling. Marsia could only assume it was a quantum computer.

Skyler walked a bit out of line, intrigued by a command prompt flashing in front of the machine. They reached out to touch it, and–

“Don’t touch that,” White snarled. “Unless you’re just aching to get shot in the neck.”

They stepped back. “Why? What does it do?”

“It’s called the Transversal. It’s how we search for and interact with entangled parallels.”

“…Boss, I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand half of those words.”

“I won’t be explaining it to you. We have a simulation to reboot.”

Disappointed, Skyler walked away and continued with Marsia out of the room. They still had a ways to go, and even though it wasn’t too far in the long run, the pain in her joints told her otherwise.

“Dr. White, I’d like to know you a little,” Marsia admitted. “You have been acting as my manager for quite some time. But I’d like to know who you are, even if I’ll forget.”

White looked down at her and rolled her eyes. “Fair question. But you really should have asked that to Arufa and Locri. You’ll never be seeing them again.”

“How do you know?” Skyler asked. “What if something happens again, like it did last time?”

“And why won’t I see Locri ever again?” Marsia added. “She’s my bodyguard, remember?”

The woman adjusted her goggles and fidgeted at her nails. She seemed uncomfortable answering that question—maybe uncomfortable wasn’t the word. Torn was more accurate.

“You won’t remember this, so I’ll give you a little preview of what X2’s going to be like from now on,” Dr. White said. “I’ve been pondering on what happened to break it all, and I think I figured it out. Do you two mind a little psychology?”

“Not at all,” said Skyler, twirling their curly blue-grey hair. “I love that stuff.”

“I know you do; you were literally a psychologist. Marsia, you?”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t mind. And—Skyler was a psychologist? I thought you said they were a murderer.”

“It’s very easy to be both,” White replied. She stopped walking and approached a wall, drawing a rough outline of a human brain in the condensation. “Now hush. I’m about to teach you a lesson.”

Marsia’s expression emitted confusion. “I–”

“Quiet!” the scientist snapped, reaching into her lab coat. “Don’t forget I’m doing this out of my own goodwill, understood?”

“Understood…”

“Wonderful.” She pulled her pistol out and tapped it against the outline. “This is X2. It simulates your consciousness as a pattern in different parts of the brain. We can store many souls inside one brain, though—it’s not just one-to-one.”

Skyler raised their hand. “Like DID?”

“That’s exactly right. And this isn’t a classroom. You may ask questions where necessary.” White drew several circles on the map of the brain. “But the difference here is, DID only pushes forward one consciousness at a time. X2, on the other hand, hosts several souls interacting at once.

“Two is perfectly fine, as you know. Three is alright, too. But the brainpower to host four interacting patterns of consciousness just isn’t there. The electric nodes lag, then they stop working entirely. That’s how you four shut it off—though it may have been less successful had Ghiles and I not tried to stop you.

Marsia nodded. “So you and Ghiles made it six and basically fried the bloody thing, is what you’re saying.”

“Yes. Moving on, let’s try an interactive example. If you were researchers trying to fit four souls in one brain, how would you do it?” White asked.

Skyler’s face lit up. They answered eagerly. “Split them up into groups of two!”

“And how would you stop the two groups from interacting?”

They blinked. “Um… okay, I’m not sure about that one.”

“Well,” Marsia said, “in the simulation, you did it by splitting the world up into two sides. It wasn’t impossible to pass between them, though. We had the Callosum Railway.”

“Wait, what?” Skyler replied, almost laughing. “There’s a railway connecting both sides called the Callosum?”

“Yes…?”

“You guys are fuckin’ jokesters,” they giggled. “It’s the corpus callosum. That’s the part of the brain that connects the hemispheres. You split us up between the sides of the brain.”

White nodded, drawing a line through the center of the brain. “That’s exactly what we did. And it’s also exactly why you ended up meeting.”

Marsia raised an eyebrow. “How’s that?”

“Marsia, we assigned you and Arufa to the wrong hemispheres; that mistake made you both desperately want to cross over. You’re a visual thinker, someone who values emotion over logic. You should have been in Underside—the right brain.

“Arufa, meanwhile, thinks in words and logical processes. She wishes for order over meaningless self-expression, and even though she valued you, Skyler, she always dreamt of living in Overside—the left brain.

“That mistake put us in the situation we’re in right now. But it’s a simple fix, really. We rewire your souls and swap your places. You’ll be perfectly content where you are, as content as you could be, anyways, and we won’t have to worry about a crossover ever again.”

Marsia sighed and looked down the hall, towards the cell she would likely spend the rest of her life in. “I have to know. Where’d you get the brain?”

“For X2? We covered up a murder and preserved it.”

“And everyone’s just… okay with that?”

“It happened almost thirty-five years ago. No one cares anymore,” she replied. “You two have wasted enough time. Come on, let’s keep moving.”

Dejected, the two subjects followed orders and continued along, taking a turn to the right and spotting the two adjacent doors of their cells. Before that, though, Marsia noticed something else—a hatch, laid into the ground at the end of the hall.

“What’s down there?”

“Down where?” the scientist grumbled.

“The hatch over there.”

“It’s highly confidential, is what it is. So you’d better not take a step in that direction.”

“Do you know what’s down there?” Skyler chimed in.

“Y-yes, I do. It’s my clearance level.”

Marsia noticed her face twitch. “Does Ghiles?”

“No. He’s lower clearance than I am. He’s my assistant.”

“Do you–”

“One more question and I’ll blow your fucking brains out!” She cocked the gun. “Five bullets left. They were supposed to be for warnings, but you two are getting on my last nerve!”

Bzzzt! Bzzzt! Suddenly, Marsia heard a soft vibration. She instantly identified its source—White’s coat pocket. White begrudgingly holstered the gun and plucked her phone out.

“Pick a worse fucking time, management. Jesus Christ.”

She brought the cell phone to her ear and turned around, arms crossed. Marsia instantly recognized this as a chance for escape; she grabbed one of Skyler’s many wires, covered their mouth, and pulled them with her.

“Heyo, what’s up?” she said into the phone, her tone and demeanor changing entirely on a dime. As she moved back further, Marsia noted her tone of voice was similar to Arufa’s.

She started searching for a place to hide. There was the obvious option of running back to the larger central room, but she would get found quickly there. She had to find somewhere less dangerous.

“Wait, what? They heard what?”

She spotted an exit. The hatch had been left unlocked, she realized, and with Skyler’s help, she propped it open. An orange glow flickered from inside, lighting up a set of iron rungs leading down to a small door.

“Okay, um… tell them we were testing hormonal reactions to calls of distress. And as for the idle chatter… okay, I really don’t know. Do you think there are going to be whistleblowers?”

Skyler slipped in first, Marsia second. She peered at an anxious Dr. White through the hatch cover, just barely cracked open now, and listened to the end of her conversation.

“No, you’re right, I should tell them myself. I’m sorry, we just had a little bit of a fiasco, and we’re trying to sort things out, so give me a couple hours, okay? Thanks.”

Before she could turn around, Marsia closed the hatch silently and stepped down a couple rungs. She was about to figure out exactly what White was up to down here—and in the meantime, figure out a way to escape.

She closed her eyes and imagined Arufa with her. Even now it felt as though they were worlds apart, what with her probably being back in her pod by now. Part of her regretted not having run that way to check.

She’d always wanted a way out from Overside, from her idol gigs, from the responsibility and weight of good fortune. She knew now Arufa had wanted just the same thing. It saddened her a little, but more so it determined her.

Alongside Skyler, she opened the door into the mysterious new enclave and set out to discover the truth—and a real way out.