෴Raz෴

෴Hex෴

Yesterday

Raz sat on the loveseat next to Sia watching the news as the rich orange sunset light fell over the city skyline. Aside from a brief mention of new discoveries and changes to the behavior of the anomalies at the center of the expansion zones, the bombing outside Barcelona dominated the news.

Sia was worried about the zones. “I’m serious. That’s big news. I don’t know why they aren’t looking at it more carefully. We, well, WD40, have been hired to help out at some zones several times. I’d have called them some of the most dangerous jobs we’ve ever had up until this last week.” She shuddered. “Even the regular Zones are bad, but the Expansion Zones.” she trailed off and looked into the middle distance. “Lets just say there’s a reason that only first world, military heavy nations have research facilities in those areas.”

Raz nodded and tried his best to look sympathetic as the import of her words rattled around in his mind.

Holy shit. There’s two kinds of zones? How did I not know this?

The ‘Barcelona Bombing’ story had only become more sensational when Doktor Midnight had arrived on the scene in a series of sonic booms and begun to dig through the wreckage with his abilities and by hand.

A few reporters had tried their luck, hoping to get a few words of commentary. After several terse dismissals, he stopped and glared at the reporters in silence for an uncomfortably long time. The staring eyes of his armor fixed on them even as the metal debris continued to flow out of the growing pit. He then shook his head and formed a jagged metal perimeter between himself and the news crews out of the rubble.

Shattered concrete attached to steel supports rose from the crater and touched down on the asphalt nearby. The steady stream of debris coming out of the crater didn’t look like much, but the pile grew much faster than an industrial backhoe could have made it.

Then came the bodies. Each totally unrecognizable, some barely looked as though they might have been people. Each time he brought up a body Midnight’s armor melted away from his hand, and he placed his bare hand on the remains. Each time, he lowered his head, and paused for a long moment before encasing the body in a slim metal tube formed from the wreckage.

As he worked, the media outlets had a field day. Wild guesses masquerading as reporting became the norm long before Midnight reached the bottom of the crater. The same reporter would flip-flop in the span of moments, from speculating that Doktor Midnight had come to lend a hand in the face of the disaster, to suggesting that perhaps he himself had perpetrated the destruction .

Raz had muted the audio long before Midnight took to the air with the bodies in tow. With nothing new on the news feed there, Raz used Sia’s laptop to check out local news feeds from around Barcelona.

He found nothing of any use. If anything, the local reporters seemed to have forgotten the original story in favor of talking about the up-close Doktor Midnight sighting. They had just switched to breaking news about an unpredicted daylight meteor shower being seen over India when Raz closed the browser.

With nothing left to occupy his mind Raz sat there, self-conscious of any body language he might be using, and extremely aware of the three female bodies in the room with him. The unresolved baggage there gave the room an uncomfortable tension. It felt as though she was waiting for him to break the ice.

He tried to avoid looking at the clock or thinking about the time, which was impossible, now that the time was part of his HUD. The awkward silence in the room felt palpable.

As soon as the question appeared in his mind he blurted it out without stopping to think. “Are we even real?”

Sia cocked her head to the side and looked at him with a puzzled expression. She made a show of pinching her own arms with each aspect. “I think so?”

He shook his head, a sharp jerking motion. “No. We, like you and me. I mean, are we only together because he wanted someone to keep an eye on me?”

She started to answer, and then stopped. She furrowed her brow for a moment and then looked him in the eye. “Do you want a simple but only mostly true answer, or the complicated but all the way true answer?”

“The whole truth.” he replied instantly.

She nodded with a somber expression. “Of course, you wouldn’t be you if you didn’t want the full answer, regardless of how complicated it is. I’ll tell you, if you’ll agree to let me say my piece, in peace, before you react or judge me.”

Raz idly rubbed his chin and then nodded. “That’s only fair.” He sat down on the couch next to her.

She sighed. “Would we be together if not for my boss setting me onto watching you? Well, if you think about it, the short and hard answer is ‘probably not’. But not because we’re not a great fit, and not because we’re not real. If we’d met because of a friend of a friend matchmaker, or random computer dating site, would that be less real because we didn’t just meet in a pool hall?”

“We did meet in a pool hall.” He pointed out.

“Yes, but I was just there playing pool with myself. You’re the one that came over and wanted to talk.”

He smiled at the memory, “Well, what can I say, I like a girl who—wait, those other girls were you?”

She giggled, “Makeup, it's a hell of a drug. But weren’t you going to let me say my piece without interrupting?”

Raz nodded and pantomimed zipping his lips.

“Anyway, it’s a big city. The odds of any two people meeting have got to be at least in the hundreds of thousands to one. We didn’t live in the same area, we certainly didn’t work in the same business. So the odds were against us meeting by chance. Even though several of my aspects are local, that only increases the odds to several hundred thou—” she cut herself off when she noticed him losing focus and raised herself up with her back straight on the couch.

“Ok, here’s the deal. I wouldn’t have dated someone for him. But by the time you noticed me and came over to talk, I’d already watched you long enough to like you, and be attracted. So when you approached me I already knew I liked you, that I liked who you are enough to color a little outside the lines of that job. I love you, and I hope you’ll accept that. If you need time to take that in, I get it, I’ll wait. But nothing I can say will truly convince you until you’re ready to believe.”

She sagged back into the couch as though she’d exhausted herself with that confession.

Getting anything useful?

[No signals of deception detected.]

Raz took a deep breath. “Alright, let’s move forward on the assumption that I believe you, and accept the situation and all that. Can you tell me that there are no more surprises?”

She thought about it for nearly a minute in silent stillness.

“No.” She said with a sort of sad certainty. “In fact, I’ve lived my multiple life long enough to know that more surprises is the one thing that will for sure happen. If you think about it, it’s inevitable that you’ll learn more things about me you didn’t know. It’s not even lying exactly, it’s just the sort of thing I’ve had to keep to myself long enough that it’s not only a habit to not talk about it, it’s just a deep well of things we’ve never discussed.”

“That’s what worries me. How real of a couple can we be if there’s so much I never knew to even ask?”

She thought about that. “Well, if your mom hadn’t mentioned it, would you have told me about how you all but abandoned school, grades, or person hygiene when you got really heavy into MMO’s in high school, or the weekend larping group you got involved with after that?”

Raz felt himself blushing. “No, I would not have made a point to bring that up.”

She shrugged with a helpless expression. “What if we just look at it like you’ve leveled up into the inner secret sanctum, and now you get to learn more. You got questions? Ask me. Besides, I’m sure there is plenty you haven’t told me.”

She’s not wrong about that.

At that moment her phone chimed with an incoming message. She looked at it, then showed it to him. The message began with a long string of random numbers and text, then the message ‘Have some things to deal with. Will be back soon. Keep an eye on him there!’

“This is the encrypted messaging tool we use. That code at the start means it’s from him.”

“Can you reply to him?”

She shrugged. “Well yes, but actually no.”

He tilted his head to one side, his expression unamused.

She pursed her lips. “Technically yes, but he’s never replied when I do. Sometimes I swear he just messages me to see if I have my phone and I’m responding. Then when I reply, he still never answers me.”

Raz sat there looking at the message and stewing in a growing anger.

She looked uncomfortable with his sullen silence. “I’ll send him a message if you’d like me to, I just wanted you to understand the situation.”

He shook his head.

That asshole doesn’t get to decide what I do!

Finally, he clenched his jaw and stood up. “I’m done waiting. So he won't reply if you message him, and he was helping with that disaster site, but do you have a reliable way to contact him or not?”

Raz glanced up as Tris and Nona came into the room and sat down on the loveseat. He looked back at Sia expectantly.

Sia shook her head. “It’s more of a ‘He calls me’ kind of relationship than the other way round,” she sighed. “I have a device that lets me send him short urgent audio messages, but it’s only for operational use, and before you ask, yes, I tried it and it’s not working.”

“How much do you trust him?”

Sia looked over at Tris and Nona and they all shared a brief look.

Raz made a slashing movement with his hand. “Hold that thought. I have a new question.” He looked at each aspect in turn. “That thing you just did. You said you’re all one person, but that looked like three people deciding how to answer me. Is it an act? Do you actually have to reach some kind of consensus or what?”

They snorted and laughed for a moment before Tris and Nona vanished. Sia took his hand and pulled him toward the spot on the loveseat next to her. Raz didn’t move.

Sia blinked a few times and her expression crumpled from a hesitant smile into misery. “It’s… Something in between I suppose? I am one person. But each of me... feels like me. There is no consensus or vote, it's all just me.” She let out a breath in an abrupt gust. “But that little move there, what you saw? It's an act. A habit I’ve had to build up over time to keep people from noticing. When we’re together I try to make sure to talk about ‘we’ not ‘me’ and ‘us’ instead of ‘I’. I lean pretty heavily on that sister silent communication angle, and mostly, I don’t show more than one aspect in the same time and place any more often than I have to.”

She furrowed her brow. “So, I guess to answer your question it's more of an act than not, but I don’t do it to trick you, it’s just something I’m in the habit of doing. If it bothers you, I’ll try to do better about it and drop the act around you.”

He let out a breath that seemed to hold more tension than even he’d realized. “Ok, that’s understandable I guess. It’s probably going to take me some time to truly see you all as one person. But back to the first question. How much do you trust him?”

“My gut response is that I trust him with my life. I do literally owe him my life after all.” She stood up next to him. “I can say for sure that he’s interested in your general safety and well being, but beyond that, his motives tend to be pretty opaque to me.” She slipped her hand into his and gently squeezed. “He doesn’t really tell me what’s on his mind, just what to do, and if I’m really lucky, a tiny glimpse of why I’m doing it. I know your mom trusts him, but I don’t even know how well she knows him, or how they met.”

Raz snapped his fingers in epiphany. “Of course. Where’s your phone?”

A few minutes later he stalked back into the room and handed her the phone back. “Just gives me a weird ‘cannot locate this subscriber’ message and sends me to voicemail.”

“Who did you try to call?” she asked.

He plopped down on the loveseat next to Sia. “Do you think he’s right about not being safe to get my phone replaced?”

She opened her mouth to reply, then paused. “Uhm… Well, I don’t disagree with what he said. As for being able to do it? You probably could, but I think it might be a bad idea. I think the best plan is probably to sit tight and wait ‘til he comes back.”

He watched the TV screen without really seeing it for several seconds. “No. Waiting for him is not a plan. I’ve done enough waiting lately.”

He looked back at her laptop. “So wait, you’re in this world of secrets. You must have some kind of VPN at the very least.”

She nodded.

“Can I use it?”

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