The feeds monitoring the zone of destruction were unapologetic in their depiction of the carnage. There were some Med-droids milling about, trying to locate surviving victims. They were, however, vastly outnumbered by the clean-up droids that zoomed back and forth, indifferently filtering through the debris for dead bodies and body parts. Leigh’s stomach rebelled when she saw one of these closely pass by the cam-droid with the upper half of a human being, a woman. Her bowels were trailing behind her until they caught on a protruding metal fragment. Leigh watched with morbid fascination, but the droid simply applied more force and the bowel was severed, leaving a piece behind, still attached to the metal.

Her overlay showed feeds of the massacre, even as officials came in to re-label the human bodies as non-urgent when compared to the energy-matter that was pooling all over the scene. All she wanted to do was turn them off, but she felt she owed it to the victims to watch. She hadn’t wished for a terrorist act, but it had resulted in her obtaining what she’d always wished for. Leigh couldn’t help but feel partially responsible. Parts of real people, alive, dead and dying, lay strewn around the site and the camera droids captured people’s agonized cries in clear definition. Leigh’s skin crawled, but she didn’t turn it off.

Her whole life she’d been sheltered from images like this. At first, the CHIP had completely blacked out anything ‘potentially traumatizing’, but over time it had slowly revealed more and more of the contents by pixelating the image less and less until it was almost revealed. Leigh thought she’d be ready for it when the veil was finally lifted. She’d worked through enough anatomy, autopsy and medical emergency problems to be comfortable seeing ‘dead’ people, but only now did she realize how totally wrong she’d been. No matter how realistic the SIMs and problems had been, none of them had been ‘real’. None of them had been real people, with real lives. Lives whose death she had profited from.

All her goals and aspirations, her need to surpass her brother, it all suddenly seemed so childish and pointless. In the grand scheme of things, her existence itself seemed pointless. She was a little girl with a big dream, but what did that matter when they were at war, even with themselves? Suddenly, the world seemed like a different place, but it hadn’t really changed, she had. She was finally seeing things for what they really were, and she couldn’t hide behind the rose-colored and filtered version her CHIP had shown her all her life anymore. It was time to step up and be the grown-up she’d always assumed to be.

Keeping an eye on the cleanup efforts, Leigh made herself bring up the Rank history displays so she could find the names of those whose death she felt most responsible for. Her mouth dried when she saw them: seven names. Leigh’s Rank had dropped to 1003 in the last seconds of Selection Day, and if it hadn’t been for these seven people dying, she would never have had the chance to follow in her brother’s footsteps. It all seemed so petty now. Did they really have to die for her to learn that lesson?

V’or Chocobo von Nielsheim (56)

Vox’en Dicit (2)

Flavio Antonio Genialus (899)

Jake Herbert Isaya (12)

Sassano Peti’dal Anadini (911)

Simone Raodin Calderari (371)

Leigh Anna Adams (238)

What were the chances? What were the chances that a girl named Leigh had been among the seven in the top 1000 to die? Leigh didn’t need her CHIP to tell her, not very high. Tears running down her face in a steady stream, Leigh opened the girl’s history. She’d been Ranked 238 and with her dirty blond hair and long face, she didn’t look too different from Leigh. The only difference was that Leigh Adams’ eyes were a shocking blue, while her own were a dark brown. The similarities between them were numerous, but none too surprising. They’d been born into the same Year and had spent the last sixteen Years following the same system, trying to get as highly Ranked as possible. Leigh mourned for the girl, overwhelmed by guilt.

The announcers reporting on the scene were calling it the greatest terrorist attack since 2888; that had been over a century ago and even her parents barely remembered it. Needless to say, the entire world was shocked by the event. The terrorist threat was supposed to have been under control, but that wasn’t what the feeds showed. Thousands upon thousands of destroyed working units lay scattered in pieces across great expanses of radioactive wasteland where thriving Centers, like Delphinia’s Center, used to be. Leigh dedicated one display for each of the twelve Centers that were attacked.

It was difficult to associate the complex, towering stacks that made up each Center with the devastation in the news. The CHIP-linked functions had all been either destroyed or severely damaged, leaving no traces of the virtual architecture the stacks had once displayed. At over three thousand meters in height, the Berlin Center had been one of the tallest stacks on Earth, it was also renowned for its complex architectural beauty. The announcer was mourning the loss of one of humanity’s most involved stack projects by showing the before and after of the Berlin Center side by side. Only hours before the Center’s working units had been stacked in the shape of a double helix.

“It took almost two decades to get the millions of people who worked here to agree on the details of the structure, but in the end they all managed to come to an agreement,” the camera angle flew around old footage of the glittering masterpiece, “Even down to the type of glass pane they would later use to create the glittering, DNA-shaped monument that had been one of humanity’s treasures for so long. And now…”

The image cut away to show the rubble that had replaced the tower after the attack. No words were needed to describe the gruesome scene of death and destruction, there wasn’t a single speck of the tower’s former glory left at the sight. All it inspired was horror and disgust.

For over an hour, Leigh stood mutely next to her parents, watching as the victims’ CHIPs automatically kept track of the rising death toll. At some point, her mother must have noticed Leigh’s frayed emotional state and pulled her closer, but Leigh didn’t register it. More tears streamed down her face with each new victim that appeared, but she felt unworthy of them. The CHIP allowed her, and everyone else in the world, to experience the disaster as if they were there on site. Leigh saw many people choose to publicize their profiles in order to pay their respects, but she chose to keep hers private. Instead, she paid close attention as the technicians first gathered up all of the unlinked energy-matter before it became concentrated enough to pose a problem. Only then did they transfer their attention to the bodies that lay scattered about.

“Leigh, honey,” her mother said. “You should get some sleep, tomorrow is a big day.”

“I— I can’t, Mom, I have to…”

Leigh turned to her mom and tried pleading with her eyes, hoping her mother would understand the feelings she couldn’t put into words. When she looked straight back at Leigh, there wasn’t a single blemish of age to be seen on her face, a face disturbingly similar to her own. At 352, her mother was still young. It would be another four to five decades, at least, before her mother’s mind broke down, taking her body along with it. The process was usually very fast, happening within the span of a year or two, and most people chose the end voluntarily instead of going through the uncomfortable aging process before dying. Leigh had never thought of her mother’s death before, but now she saw it everywhere she looked. It felt like humanity would come to an end at any minute.

“You have to what?” her mother asked.

“I have to watch until—”

“Until what?”

“Until they recover every last one.”

A sad look crossed her mother’s eye before she spoke again.

“Honey, they won’t recover every last one. It was a nuclear event, many people have been obliterated past the point of recognition, some even past the point of existence.”

“Still!” Leigh said, a little more forcefully than she’d intended.

Her mother narrowed her eyes at her.

“Leigh,” her father said, coming around her mother to put a hand on Leigh’s shoulder. “Get some sleep, you’re not doing anyone any good by fretting over this.”

“I’m not fretting!” Leigh practically yelled, not able to understand how her parents could be so stoic about the whole thing. “Millions died! Don’t you see!? I have to watch, I have to be here. It wasn’t supposed to— I shouldn’t have— I owe it to them. It should have been me!”

She could see her parents exchange a look under the overlays of the catastrophe, but she didn’t care. It didn’t matter if they thought she was losing it. Perhaps she was, but she deserved to. It was unforgivable, what she’d done was absolutely unforgivable. If she celebrated death, she wasn’t any better than the H-DNA terrorists they were blaming it on, she wasn’t any better than the Ardu. She was going to have to live with it on her conscience until the day she died, all because of a girlish desire to be recognized by the world. The only way she could even make a step toward redemption was to achieve something with her spot in the First Academy. Leigh Adams had been ranked 278th. If Leigh wasn’t able to at least match what the girl had done and what she could have done in her life, then she didn’t deserve to be where she was. It wasn’t for her brother anymore, it wasn’t for herself, either, it was for something much greater, for what it should have been for from the start: all the lives that had been and would be lost through this war. Leigh would never be able to wipe her conscience clean, but she would do as much as she could to make her life count in the war effort. The terrorists would pay for what they had done, and the Ardu would pay for setting humanity against itself in the first place. Only then would she—

“I’m sorry about this, honey,” her mother said, interrupting her determined introspection.

“Sorry about wh—” Leigh asked as the world went black around her.