Chapter 87: Book 2 Chapter 13.2: Twenty Questions

Close to a dozen questions had been bandied about, as all the loopers tried to squeeze information out of the others. However, the featured focus of the night had yet to answer more than a few cursory questions, so Vell shifted focus.

“How about Kim,” Vell said. “You haven’t been asked much yet.”

“Not a lot to ask,” Kim said. “I’m five months old and you’ve been there for three of them.”

“Well what about those other two months?” Vell asked. “Something interesting has to have happened.”

“I mostly got poked and prodded by scientists,” Kim said. “They wanted to know how I worked.”

“Did they try this special scientific technique we have called ‘asking’?”

“They did. But I wasn’t any good at explaining.”

“Do you think you’re any better at explaining now?”

“Explaining, maybe, but understanding, no,” Kim said. “Can’t really explain what you don’t understand.”

“You absolutely can, you just have to bullshit it confidently enough that people believe you,” Harley said. It elicited a smirk from Kim, at least.

“How would you describe yourself, though?” Hawke asked. “Maybe just saying it out loud will help you unravel something.”

“I don’t know…”

“The whole point of this is getting some stuff out of your system,” Harley said. “Come on. We won’t tell anyone, even if you say something dumb.”

“Which you won’t,” Lee said, elbowing Harley sharply.

“Okay, I’ll give it a try.”

Kim took a deep breath of the smoke-choked air -a sensation which did not bother her, as she had no lungs to irritate- and listened to the ambient sound. The waves were crashing, the fire crackled and snapped as wood collapsed, and she could hear the quiet yet expectant breaths of her friends. If they were her friends. She could also hear -no, not hear, feel Vell’s presence. She was acutely aware of him in some way, always. She knew that was only because of the rune they shared, but that connection remained, drawing her towards him not matter how hard she tried to pull away.

“I am...disparate. Different parts which never form a whole. I have more iron in my bones than in my blood, my pointless blood pumping through a heart that vibrates but does not beat, shaking a hollow sack that I breath to inflate with air for no purpose other than to mimic a necessary function that isn’t necessary for me,” Kim said. Her voice took on an almost trance-like cadence, drifting from word to word with direction but no purpose. “My flesh is unique but optional, my bones are integral but mass-produced. My flesh, my face- people tell me I’m beautiful but that beauty was sculpted to meet the standards of a man who wanted a hollow shell he could project his loneliness on to, and I don’t want to be what he wanted. I want to be what I want to be but I don’t know what that is.”

Kim’s hands were clutching her knees so tight she could feel the metal of her joints starting to poke into her synthetic flesh. It hurt -until she turned off her ability to hurt.

“They tell me I feel what everyone else feels but there’s no way to know if that’s true,” Kim said. “And even if it is, is pain still pain when it can be force stopped? Is happiness still happiness when it’s a digital sensation I can download and replay like a song? Is sadness real when I can close my tear ducts like a valve?”

As she was doing now, but Kim would never admit it.

“None of these questions ever have answers but I keep asking them because they’re the only thing I can be sure are real, are true, are mine. Everything else I’m made of is manufactured, sculpted, downloaded, taken. How can a hundred imitations of something else combine to form a genuine, complete me?”

Kim fell silent, eventually staying quiet long enough that everyone assumed she was done.

“That was...something,” Harley said. She’d been planning on some way to defuse the tension with a crude joke, but couldn’t even muster that.

“Have you ever considered poetry?” Hawke asked.

“Not really. I feel like people wouldn’t get it.”

“I didn’t get it, but in a good way,” Vell said. “It made me think. I liked it.”

Kim forced herself to give a stiff nod of acknowledgment, in appreciation of the compliments.

“Could you all quit looking at me like that?” Kim said. She had no idea how to process being the center of attention. The other four loopers dutifully looked in different directions. Harley stared directly at the fire, Vell became very preoccupied with his shoes, Lee watched the waves, and Hawke, panicking, stared directly upwards at nothing in particular.

“So, do you want me to derail us with another sexy question or do you mind if we ask followups?” Harley asked, after some of the tension had faded. “Oh, wait, no, somebody ask me a question, that’ll be better.”

“Okay. I don’t know, uh...alright, what’s your biggest fear?”

In hundreds of apocalypses, Harley had shown only the briefest glimmers of fear, always easily overcome. Even by the standards of a veteran looper, Harley was remarkably unflappable. Vell wanted to know if there were any cracks in the seemingly impenetrable armor of her positivity.

“Needles,” Harley said, without a moments hesitation. “Can’t do them. It’s why I don’t have any tattoos.”

“Oh. Don’t you have to get vaccinated against stuff to be here, though?”

The school had a virology lab in site, so all students were required to have a range of vaccinations against very obscure diseases, from yaws to smallpox, in case of a containment breach. Which had happened once already, but the vaccine had proved useless as the smallpox had evolved into smallerpox. Thankfully the loopers had been on hand to prevent the outbreak entirely.

“I mean, yeah, I got all that, but I had my mom holding my hand and I was squirming the whole time,” Harley said. “I don’t like needles, but I’m also not a selfish bitch. I get vaccinated.”

“Really though, needles, of all things? You’ve been dismembered before, dear.”

“Well dismemberment is quick, and clean, needles get under your skin and, guh,” Harley stammered. She started to shiver just thinking about it. “This conversation is giving me jibblies. Shit like this is why I’m never getting my ears pierced.”

“Alright, let’s move on,” Lee said. She could see Harley’s shivers and wanted them to stop. “Does anyone else have something?”

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“Okay, I have a question,” Vell said. He turned back to Kim. “Did you actually like my cooking, or was it just our weird rune connection?”

“I- I don’t know,” Kim said. “I feel like a lot of what I said and did back then was very ‘brainwashed by magic rune’ based. Does it matter?”

“I mean, I was trying to follow Renard’s cookbook, and I felt like I was doing a good job, but if it was just the weird rune connection talking,” Vell said. “I don’t know. It’d be nice to feel like I’m a good cook.”

“Didn’t you eat it?” Hawke said. “You weren’t in love with yourself. You’d know how it tasted.”

“Yeah, but, I mean, uh,” Vell said. He went a bit red in the face. “I suppose that makes sense. I just, my mom always tried to teach me to cook and I was never good at it, it’d be nice to feel like I was getting better. Sometimes I feel like I’m letting her down.”

Vell looked confused at himself and then looked down at the truth-token in his hand.

“Is that how I feel?” Vell said. “Shit. This thing makes me say things even I didn’t know were true.”

“I’m sure your mother is very proud of you. She wouldn’t be trying to teach you if she didn’t care about you,” Lee said.

“Your parents never taught you much, huh?” Harley said.

“Only how to exploit people for their benefit,” Lee scoffed. “They didn’t even teach me how to tie my shoes.”

The Burrows, being ‘busy people’ had offloaded educational duties for most of the important subjects -or at least what passed as important by their standards. Lee had been taught to commit tax evasion in thirty different countries by the age of fifteen, but hadn’t learned to ride a bike until she’d met Harley.

“Lee...Do you have a single happy memory with your family?” Hawke asked.

Lee paused, and let her mind drift from the beach to the past, to every year she’d spent under their thumb -and to the summer breaks and short visits where they could still apply their horrid pressure to her life.

“No.”

The loopers remained silent. Lee was actually the first one to crack open the quiet.

“God, you know, I’m actually glad I said that,” Lee said. “I was worried there was some pleasant Christmas morning I’d repressed. If they’re just genuinely shitty parents through and through I don’t need to feel guilty about wanting to hit them with a bus.”

“You should still feel a little guilty about that,” Vell said, unable to soften his words with a well-intentioned lie.

“See, stuff like this is why you can never learn pyromancy,” Harley said. “I don’t trust you not to set your parents on fire.”

“To be fair it’s actually harder to not set people on fire with pyromancy. Yourself especially,” Vell said. He held up the pinky and ring fingers on his left hand. “And I’ve got the missing fingerprints to prove it.”

Kim’s eyes snapped up at the speed of lightning.

“Vell, teach me pyromancy.”

“No.”

“What?”

“No!” Vell repeated again, louder this time.

“Come on! I thought you’re supposed to be the helpful one,” Kim whined.

“This is me being helpful,” Vell said. “Pyromancy is tough to learn with a good teacher, and I’m an incredibly bad teacher.”

“In the interest of continuing the truth game, how many times did you set yourself on fire, Vell?”

“Well, I tried thirteen times, so...thirteen times.”

“Nice!”

“Fine. Lee, teach me hydromancy, that’s less flammable.”

“I’m afraid I must also decline,” Lee said. “I’m not quite good enough to be an educator.”

“Why do you want to learn magic anyway?” Harley asked.

Kim clenched both fists and looked away from them all.

“Because machines can’t do magic. And if I could...that’d prove I’m not a machine.”

“Why do you need to be not a machine? Machine’s are cool.”

Botley nodded in agreement while Kim shook her head.

“It’s not that being a machine is bad, I just...need to be more than a machine,” Kim said. “It’s hard to explain.”

“You’re like five months old, Kim, give yourself time,” Harley said. “You’re already tackling mad philosophical concepts at a time when most humans haven’t figured out how to not shit themselves.”

“Does it take that long?”

“Kim, have you, uh, never seen a baby before?”

“I’ve been in a lab and then a college my whole life,” Kim said. “Are babies supposed to be in those places?”

“Kim, didn’t you say you could access the internet mentally?”

“I haven’t had a reason to look up babies, okay! I’ll do it now,” Kim grunted. Her eyes unfocused as she shifted her attention to a digital existence. “I- Who is this tiny man with the strange hair? Is he a baby?’

“Oh no, I think you’ve found an old music video,” Lee said. “Try ‘infant’ instead.”

“Okay, I’ll- what,” Kim said flatly. “What are these? Why are they so fat?”

“That is a baby. It’s what we look like when we were just born.”

“All of you?” Kim said, her voice a conflicted mess of confusion and horror. She examined Vell’s height and compared it to the average measurements of babies, and the comparison upset her on a primal level.

“Yes, all of us, that’s how people work. You got to-” Harley was mid-sentence when her eyes narrowed. “Oh my god do you know how babies are made?”

“I do now,” Kim said, after a brief pause. “And god, no. No, no, no no.”

Kim rapidly shook her head, as did Vell, once he realized what was being said.

“Yeah, we did not -there was none of that,” Vell said. “Even hopped up on weird rune magic I’m not that dumb.”

“Good. Because I’m not dealing with any half-robot babies,” Harley said. “Especially not ones that popped out of a chick who didn’t even know what a baby was until five minutes ago!”

“It wasn’t really relevant info!”

“Oh, speaking of relevant info, have you googled puberty yet?” Hawke asked.

Kim paused for a few seconds again as she parsed the new information. Then she screamed.

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“Okay, I think that was seventeen questions for me, fifteen for Vell, twelve each for Hawke and Lee, and seven for Kim,” Harley said. “Not exactly a full twenty, but also: I’m really fucking tired and we’ve got a loop tomorrow.”

“We can always revisit the activity later,” Lee said. She ended the truth spell on herself by returning her token to the bowl. “Just to see if I can lie again: Vell, I don’t like your haircut.”

“Oh. Uh, thanks, yeah, it was getting kind of long...that’s not the point,” Vell said. “I’m tired too. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

“Well, I don’t need to sleep, so I’ll take care of the fire and cleaning up,” Kim said.

“You don’t need a hand?”

“I don’t,” Kim said with a shrug. “Besides, it’s only fair. You guys already did the work to set this up just to make me feel good.”

Vell shared a glance with Lee and Harley, and they came to the mutual realization there was no point in trying to hide anything.

“Did it work?” Harley asked.

“Kind of,” Kim said. “At least now I know for sure I’m not the only weirdo here.”

“If that was ever in doubt, you haven’t been paying attention,” Vell said. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Kim.”

Goodbyes and goodnights were said en masse before the group broke up and went their separate ways. Kim stuck around long enough to kick some sand on the fire and start putting the burnt logs in the trash, humming to herself all the while.

“So that was a lot.”

Kim dropped one of the logs, and barely managed to turn her pain receptors off before it slammed on to her toe. She brushed the ash off her bashed foot and turned to the waves.

“Wish Fish? Were you listening to all that?”

The tiny mackerel poked his head out of the water and waved in Kim’s direction. She walked closer to the shoreline and knelt in front of the lapping waves.

“I tried not to stick around too long, you know, respecting privacy and all that,” Wish Fish said. “I circled back now and then just to make sure things were going alright. I never stuck around long enough to get ‘cod’ though, eh? Eh?”

Kim stared at him, unblinking.

“Because a cod. It’s a fish, and it sounds like caught? It...oh, nevermind,” Wish Fish sighed. “Do you feel okay?”

“I feel a lot better, actually,” Kim said. “It was fun.”

“Oh good. I was a bit worried once I caught on to what was happening, you know, I know your friends meant well, but that whole thing, sheesh,” Wish Fish said. “Bit of a misfire, right?”

“How so?”

The tide moved in a short distance, and Wish Fish followed, swimming conspiratorially towards Kim’s knees.

“Well, I know they meant well, obviously, but all that talk about their past, all their long histories, their childhoods and growing up,” Wish Fish said. “All that stuff you never got to do. Bit insensitive, don’t you think?”

“I...they were just trying their best,” Kim mumbled.

“Hey, no, I’m sure they were, I’m not trying to be hard on them, they did the best they could,” Wish Fish said. “But they still didn’t really get it, did they? They didn’t get you.”

Kim fell silent, and didn’t move even as the waves started to lap at her knees.

“Sorry. I put a damper on what should’ve been a fun night, I’m sorry,” Wish Fish said. “It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“It’s alright,” Kim mumbled. She stood and let her feet sink into the wet sand. “I’m just...going to go recharge.”

Kim wandered off, with her head hanging low. Wish Fish watched her wander away, and waved his tail happily with every miserable step.