“Show me,” he said. He walked over to the screens and typed in the commands, resetting the program of the Looking Glass V3.1. trying to load up the memories, or at least giving the-- the thing in the chair the ability to do so.
“Show you what?” she asked. She seemed genuinely confused. Perhaps she thought he wanted her to show him all the choices she’d made aboard Talos I?
“Show me,” he said between clenched teeth as he typed in command after command that was responded to with error after error. Why was this blasted console not obeying? “You say you’ve always been like…. Like this? Show me, then! Show me what little girl Morgan’s life looked like.” His breath was rasping, as if he had trouble breathing. “Show me what it was like.”
“Morgan, you’re smarter than this,” the Typhon said. “We’re smarter than this.” He whipped around. The sheer frustration, anxiety and panic of what was going on already had him on edge. His hair clung to his forehead and his eyes had trouble focusing. A creature was snarling in his hindbrain and he was doing what it could to get it to shut up, sit down, roll over and, most importantly, play dead. But the Typhon wasn’t done. “I remember only what you do. There is no more little girl Morgan.”
“What do you mean, ‘no more’?” he snarled. “There was nev--” he began and stopped and started pacing up and down the metal floor. “There was never--” he tried again, and again his voice caught in his throat. He didn’t remember his childhood. There were records, of course. And he’d managed to access some video files and even a diary or two from back then. But he was never… He didn’t remember… He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes to think. It was getting hard to think. He rubbed his face and looked at the creature again. “Why are you like this?” he asked. If she was really as smart as he was, she’d know what he meant. She looked up at him and she had the utter and complete audacity to give him a look of pity.
“I think you know that better than I do, Morgan,” she said softly. “This body... it’s been like this since the memories of Talos I settled. I…” she paused, looking for the right words. Morgan looked at her intensely. He didn’t know what he wanted from her, asking that question. It was hard to focus, his own brain was fighting him and he didn’t know whose side he was on. There was a war happening in his brain and the explosions were making him wince. “I just look like this,” she finally said carefully, “because that’s how your memories frame you. That’s what it felt like to be Morgan Yu.”
He shook his head and paced left and right again. He kept raising and lowering his hand to make one point or another, but didn’t actually manage to speak for several uncomfortable seconds. He was unraveling under his own scrutiny. His boots clanked heavily on the steel deck. Some words finally decided to cooperate and he turned to the creature in the chair. It seemed frustratingly calm and he knew that that calm was his, when he was confronting people. He’d driven some people incredibly angry by calmly looking at them while they ranted away at him. He felt like an idiot for being so unnerved by it now that the tables had been turned on him.
It didn’t help that she looked like his mother. Hell, she looked like him, only… pretty, instead of rugged. Typhon-Morgan was beautiful and he would have been completely taken by her if he’d met her before. He shook his head.
“You would have…” he paused, his words interrupted by a thought that he shook away. “You would have seen yourself in the mirror.” He felt almost triumphant at that. If she’d really had his memories, she wouldn’t have seen someone else in the mirror. She would have seen him, so this image she was basing herself on must not have come from him. But she wasn’t having it. She shook her head. He took a step back. He knew he could talk circles around people. It was what he was good at. Not to mention the fact that the Typhon material floating around in his brain had made him faster, smarter than he’d been before.
“No, Morgan,” she said calmly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, then looked him in the eye with those little pinpricks of light deep inside and he hated how calm and relaxed she looked. He knew that, when he’d looked in the mirror this morning, he’d looked cagey, cagey as always. “You never looked in the mirror much, Morgan,” she said. “By the time I saw my own reflection, your face is not the one I saw.”
Memories drifted at him, mornings on Talos I where he’d turned the corner before turning on the light, taking a shower before brushing his teeth with a foggy mirror as a shield between him and his reflection. He shoved them away. “What about the Looking Glass recordings?” he asked. He was afraid of the response. To a certain extent, he already knew what the answer would be. He didn’t want to know, of course.
“The Morgan Yu who made those recordings is dead,” she said. “They were dead before I woke up on Talos I and likely had been for months. You know that. And they weren’t… you.” She looked at him with those beautiful eyes and he could feel them boring into him as if she could see into his soul. “There’s a reason you didn’t do what they asked.”
He shook his head. “No, that person was still… me, a different version of me that I don’t remember but it was still me. A terrible person, yeah. And I never forgave them for their crimes on Talos I. But still... me.” He hoped she hadn’t noticed that fact that he’d almost validated her existence. It was very hard not to think of her as a person, someone with his memories, sure, but a person nonetheless. She was a Typhon, he reminded himself. She was as much Morgan Yu as a Mimic was a real cup.
“I disagree,” she said. “And I know you do too. It’s what kept us from falling apart when the hard decisions came. When the consequences of that person’s actions were ours to bear.” She looked past him at the operators stacked in the corner. “I like to think I’m a fairly faithful incarnation,” she said softly. “You told Mikhaila too, didn’t you?”
He finally, for the first time, took a deep breath. Morgan sat down on a stool and rubbed his face. “Yeah. I had to. Of course I did. Not telling her would have been…”
“Amoral,” Typhon-Morgan said. “Wrong.” He just nodded and looked at her. As he understood from Alex’s explanation, she’d been started off at his earliest point of memory. That meant she’d made a lot of the same choices he had. It meant she’d understood the hard choice of telling Mikhaila what past-him had done.
Typhon-Morgan looked at him again. She seemed a little more confident. He was angry at himself for finding her joy infectious. It was a completely new face but something about seeing it smile made something inside of him happy in a way he didn’t know how to put into words. “I hate them too, you know,” the Typhon said.
“Who?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“The person, the Morgan Yu who did all those unforgivable things on board Talos I.” He nodded again. She was right. They were very synchronised. She was a very faithful incarnation of him. But she kept talking. “I hate them for how callous they were with human lives. How casually they committed atrocities. Their gruff voice and rough face. The shaggy beard. Those big hands that looked like they could only commit violence.” Her tone had shifted completely. She’d started talking triumphantly, to show her understanding of his feelings, but now she spoke with venom.
He knew what she was talking about and really, truly, deeply wished he didn’t. He wished he didn’t know what she was talking about, that he never looked at his hands and balled them into fists until his knuckles went white and his nails had dug so deeply into the palms of his hands it made tears roll down his face, until he’d stopped shaking. He wished he didn’t avoid looking in the mirror because of how monstrous his reflection was to him. He wished he didn’t remember those Looking Glass recordings of himself, the person he wanted to reach across time to strangle. The Typhon sighed deeply. He realized that she’d felt about that recording the same way. He looked at her slender hands. He wondered if she had that problem, now.
“You don’t look at your hands the same way, do you?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No.” She moved her hand as freely as she could, considering the constraints, and looked at the back of it inquisitively. “I see a woman’s hands. Slender. Beautiful, even. My hands. Nobody else’s.” She looked at him, her eyes boring a hole through the back of his skull with how intense they were. “They never felt like someone else’s, Morgan. These are my hands, beautiful, feminine, and they’ve never pushed the button that condemned an innocent person to death.”
It felt almost like an indictment. She seemed to be able to read him like a book. Was she holding it against him that his hands did feel like that to him? That the thought of being that figure in the Looking Glass was him was still tearing him apart, even after so much time? “What…” he said. The rest of the question died unspoken in his throat.
“The person who did those things is not you, Morgan. It never was. The person who woke up that day on Talos I was a new Morgan Yu. It was you. And you were kind, empathetic, and you saved a lot of people. Alex told me. You were not and are not the monster you saw in that digital mirror.” The Typhon paused and then looked him in the eye with that unrelenting intensity.
“That’s not you, Morgan Yu. If the face in the image makes you sick to your stomach, maybe it’s not you. If the thought of that Morgan Yu makes you this angry and upset, what reason is there for you to look like them?”
She paused and looked at him, studying his face. He knew the tired lines she could see, the sunken eyes that were always tired, the carefully managed eyebrows above them-- they became a single horizontal line if he didn’t. He felt the urge to turn away but being able to return a stare was something he prided himself on. It was hard, especially considering what she was saying. Finally, his resolve broke and he looked down at his hands. At his hairy arms. He balled his fists again. He was crying. Why was he crying?
“You aren’t that person, Morgan.”
He looked up at her, almost pleading. He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how she was able to look into his head and arrest his thoughts before they came to him and he didn’t know how to stop her from doing it or if he wanted her to. She sounded insane and made so much sense it made his heart hurt. His head was throbbing with every heartbeat. He tried to think about what was being said but his internal monologue had been reduced to incoherent screaming, his superego a cradling itself in a corner of his mind.
She smiled so softly and so genuinely and with so much care it almost made him weep. If she really was Morgan, she was the best version of Morgan Yu he could have ever imagined. Finally she said the thing, the thing he wanted her to say and had almost begged her not to.
“You don’t have to look like them if you don’t want to.”
Oh wow the pain in this chapter is visceral
I dont understand but this looks interesting