\ Expendable \

FACILITY POWER CRITICAL. PLEASE EVACUATE.

FACILITY POWER CRITICAL. PLEASE EVACUATE.

FACILITY POWER CRITICAL. PLEASE EVACUATE.

Marsia took in a breath of dry air, the red emergency lights blazing through her eyelids. Sirens scorched her eardrums as she came to her senses.

As she sat up, she felt a coarse texture upon her fingertips. In the scarlet lighting, she could barely make it out—flecks of sand had fallen beside her.

“Marsia! Thank God, you’re okay!”

Marsia looked up at Ghiles, particulates shaking off his lab coat with every stride. He reached out his hand to help her up, which she gladly took, weakly pulling herself to her feet with him as her anchor.

Her first question: “Where are the others?”

“Look around. They’re knocked out,” he replied. “Our consciousnesses might have detached from our bodies as we breached the parallel. Further support for the idea that the soul lives in a separate field of existence.”

“Ghiles, you’re hurt…”

Her gaze drifted to his mouth—blood dripped from his lips, trickling down and staining his coat.

“I split my lip really badly when I was a kid. It must’ve busted open when I blacked out.”

The laboratory felt as if it were shifting; gravity tilted Marsia one way and another. Sand fell slowly from the ceiling like an hourglass—nauseous, she held on to Dr. Ghiles for balance.

“I hate to keep asking questions, I really do. But… why is there sand?”

“We’ve only interacted with four parallels recently. Chances are, this is one of them, and the sand tells me we’re buried deep in the desert.”

“Wait, you mean to tell me this is my world?”

“We can’t prove it until we climb out and see. But yes, I think so.”

FACILITY POWER CRITICAL. PLEASE EVACUATE.

FACILITY POwER CrITiCal. PleaSe eVacuate.

FAcility power critical. P l e a s e   e v a c u a t e . . .

Marsia heard footsteps from behind her, in the direction of the Transversal. She turned on a dime, still holding onto Ghiles’s shoulder, and spotted the other scientist.

“Who says we’ll be climbing out?” White said.

“Me,” Ghiles replied meekly. “Dr. White, this place isn’t safe. If it floods with sand, we’ll all suffocate.”

“I agree. So, then, Ghiles. Come with me, and we’ll escape. You can leave the girl here.”

“What?” Marsia hissed. “You already killed Skyler! What, did you get everything you needed out of us? Are we just expendable now?”

Ghiles held his ground against the building’s lurching. “If we’re leaving, she’s coming with us. And so are the other two.”

“What? Because you feel like you owe it to her?” White shot back. “Because you’re scared she’ll remember, before you’ve had time to make up for it?”

Suddenly, Ghiles was less keen to talk. He looked away when Marsia tried to make eye contact with him.

“What is she talking about?”

“…”

“Ghiles, what is she talking about?”

“It’s bullshit, is what it is!” he hollered, the fire in his eyes alight. “You can’t guilt trip me into letting her die again!”

White responded, but Marsia stopped focusing on their conversation. Hearing the words ‘die again’ made her heart skip a beat. Skyler had been right. She was a walking corpse.

But how had she died? She tried to remember the truth of the matter, the way she’d wound up here in the first place. But all she could remember last was a trek through the desert winds, sinking to her knees and letting the sands bury her.

It didn’t make any sense to the conversation, though, for that to be her demise. And so she concluded that had been her last memory in her own body, her own world—and instead, she needed to tap into her second set of memories.

The images in her mind were mostly lit by the humming fluorescent lights of a medical facility. She heard hushed mumbling from doctors, smelled necrosis with every breath. Her sight was dilated.

The fear lingering in that room let her know this was no usual doctor’s visit. She remembered focusing her eyes to see the details on her hands, hoping someday she would be able to note every detail.

By the next memory, she had no sight at all. Not even pitch-black—it was just aural. Marsia realized something then: the surgery must have involved her eyes somehow. If she really was blind afterward, it would explain her unnaturally strong hearing.

She snapped back to reality when Ghiles grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her back. “Jesus Christ, Ari! Put the gun down!”

White bared her teeth. “No! There’s a chance she knows about it. She was right there when Skyler–”

“Is this seriously about your confidentiality crap?” he shot back. “Is the New Dawn Experiment so bad that you can’t even let them glimpse it?”

“It’s not bad. It’s perfect. But no one will get that until it’s complete, so you’ll just have to trust me.”

Marsia spoke up, a bit rattled. “I never read the bloody paper, if that’s what this is about.”

“Watch it. She’s a good liar,” said White.

“So are you!” Ghiles snarled. “You’re so good at getting me to believe you, it makes me sick. You pry information out of my jaws and give me nothing in return.”

“I give you the opportunity to change the world. Because that’s what we do here, Ghiles.”

“No, what we do here is kill people and call their deaths an ‘untimely loss’! I bet that’s all Dr. Everly was to you, after you sent a thousand volts through their brain.”

“There’s a reason we move on from things like that,” she said lowly. “Because you just can’t let what happened to Dr. Lilia go, can you, Ghiles?”

Marsia pushed away from the angry man and threw her arms up. “Wait, wait, wait. Doctor Lilia?”

“That’s right,” White said, a smile spreading on her face. “I’d encourage you to remember Dr. Ghiles before the MWP.”

“No! She’s lying! That’s not– Ari!”

Marsia reserved all her mental energy for one push into her memory bank. Eventually, she began hearing names, associating voices, and retrieving conversations from her past. She found one in particular involving this situation:

“Dr. Lilia, we have a proposal for you,” said a male voice across the room. He had a British accent like her own.

She remembered feeling the cushion on the back of her wheelchair brush against her bald head. The sensation crushed her spirits all over again, despite her having never felt it before.

Another voice, this one female, continued. “I’m so, so sorry about your condition. You’re such a soldier.”

“Call me a soldier when I roll this chair into no-man’s-land,” she replied. “It doesn’t take bravery to fear death, Doctor…”

“Johnson,” the woman replied. Her dialect was American, with just a hint of foreign—perhaps a Spanish-speaker.

“I heard you decided to quit chemotherapy,” the British man said. “Have you given up on treatment?”

“Unless you two have something truly marvelous, yes. I’d rather spend my final days in surrender than in war.”

She felt a chill run down her spine admitting defeat. It just wasn’t like her to do something like that, even at her lowest. She had perhaps a bit too much pride.

Dr. Johnson went on to explain: “We’ve developed a way to store your consciousness on a computer. It’s currently working on another patient, and we want to observe whether the two of you can interact while inside it.”

“And what if it kills me?”

“It’s a risk,” the man said. “But this could be the answer to the digital afterlife so many have searched for! This could be everything and more! Isn’t it worth a shot?”

“…Fine. What was your name?”

“I’m Dr. Ghiles. And I believe you’ll make history with us today.”

She opened her eyes, almost relieved by the ability to see.

“I like the look on your face,” White said. “Do you remember?”

Marsia, knowing now a partial truth, backed away from Ghiles. She was disgusted with him. She could hear faint traces of his accent in his voice—he’d been covering it up all this time.

He felt bad because he had killed her.

“Who are you?” she asked him.

“I’m Dr. Ghiles, but I’m not the one she’s talking about! She’s tricking you! That’s– I’m– Dr. Ghiles is also–”

“Now look at him,” White said. “He can’t defend himself.”

Ghiles clenched his fists and screamed. “You lying scumbag! Why did I ever think we were friends?!”

“We were never friends. Is that what you thought? You’re my assistant. You’re here to seize the future, to create tomorrow. It’s your fault it’s gone like this.”

One of the walls cracked, sand pouring in with a loud roar. Marsia watched Arufa and Locri come to their senses in the background.

“You know what, no! I’m done!” Ghiles shouted. “I’m gonna tell it to you straight, Ari! I’m not letting this happen! All you’ve done is take advantage of me and lie to my face! I don’t care if we weren’t friends, that’s not okay!

“It’s this whole damn laboratory’s fault! They pay us to keep our mouths shut! They fund projects that endanger thousands of lives! ‘Carpe futurum’, my ass—Genghis Khan would be impressed with our body count!

“And you’re just like them! You’re trigger-happy. You think our test subjects are suddenly expendable, just because we always could find another consciousness in another parallel. You think I’m expendable the way you brush me aside!

“For all I knew, the New Dawn Experiment was made of sunshine and rainbows. But then you killed Skyler over it, and you were about to kill Marsia too. I don’t care how secretive it is, nothing should be that secret.

“You chose me because you thought I was like everyone else here—pathetic, weak-minded, and morally corrupt. And maybe I’m pathetic, or maybe I’m weak-minded, but I learned from what my parents did to Dr. Lilia. I’m going to do what’s right.”

Marsia turned on Dr. White. She had lied. Ghiles was trying to make up for the iniquities of his parents, and she set him up.

“The right thing to do now is to put the gun down and help us all get out. That’s what you’ll do if you know what’s good for you. Please, Ari. Don’t be difficult about this.”

Marsia noticed Arufa contemplating for a moment as she scrambled out of the sand. She figured hearing the name ‘Ari’ was new to her. When she and Locri finally arrived on scene, White had something to say in response.

“Oh, Ghiles. It’s too late to quit, don’t you know that? You’re in too deep. You know too much. Far too much. And you’re wrong about so much of your spiel it makes me sick,” she said, taking one step at a time towards him.

She counted each step down from twenty and stood directly in front of Dr. Ghiles, looking down on him. The man who’d brought Marsia back to life in spite of his father’s faults—the man who doubted her.

“But you are right about one thing, Ghiles. You know what that is?”

“What…?”

She pressed her pistol against the side of his head.

“You are expendable.”

“No, wait, Ari–!”

                                    RFIuIEdISUxFUyDigJMg                               
REVDRUFTRUR8fFJJR0hUCgrigKYKCmnig                                                                                                                                             JlsbCBiZSB3QWl0aW5nIG9uIHRoZSBvdGhlciBzaW RlLCB0byBmaW5kIHlvVQpUSGUgbW9tZW50IHdlIHVuY09uc2Npb3VzbHkgY29sbGlkZSwg4oCYY                                                                                         2F1c2UgSSBrbmV3ClJlYWxpdHkgaXMgYnJva2VuIGFuZCBpdOKAmVMgTmV2ZXIgYXMg                               aXQgc2VlbXMKc08gd2F0Y2gsIGFuZCB5b3XigJlsbCBmaW5kIFRoRSBzZWFtc+KAlHRoYXQgc3BsaXQgdXMga                                                                                                                                      W4gdHdvCgpTVV         BFUlBPU0lUSU9OQ09MTEFQU0VE                   

And Dr. Ghiles, the man obsessed with his memory of the world, was but a memory himself, smeared on the cold, hard tile.