#Mikhaila Iluyshin

[mittensmcedgelord]

The Truth Will Set You Free

The truth will set you free, but lieu of truth a different kind of lie can suffice.

Exhausted of vague plans and repetitious assurance, Mim seeks out Mikhaila in the hopes of getting answers no one else will give him. What he finds are more questions, ones with far sharper edges than he bargained for.

(This is so long. I am so sorry. This update has been sitting in my documents, waiting for @wandering-chronicler-blog to edit it for the 25th time before I posted. And somehow it kept getting longer. )

You’re a good human.

 You’re a good person.

 You’re as good as Morgan.

 You’re better than Morgan.

 It’s not that I’m not flattered, but I’m starting to think everyone is reading off of the same script. Igwe. Sho. Alex. Especially Alex. I’ve had that conversation with my brother so many times it’s starting to feel like part of the old sim. I used to think it was guilt over Morgan, but it isn’t just him. Almost everyone has the same thing to say to me. I haven’t spoken to Elazar yet, not privately, but the group emails and security memos were enough. It’s strange, to say the least. I haven’t been out of containment long enough to make that much of an impression, unless they’re all going by my responses in the sim. The Morgan I was in there probably deserved all the compliments I get. There are too many holes in that theory, though.

My sense of self-preservation is screaming at me. It picks threads out of the weave and tries to tie them together into something more solid. There was something in Alex’s office that hid his thoughts and brought me crashing down into myself. I can’t blame him. I’m a Typhon. I’m wearing Morgan’s skin, but I know what I am. He has every right to be afraid after what happened on Talos. It’s a reasonable, human response to a potential threat and I could ignore it if it didn’t feel like déjà vu. I’ve had that disassociated, claustrophobic feeling before. I didn’t tell Alex. If he’s going to keep things from me, I might as well return the favor. From now on, any new memories or feelings that surface are mine alone.

 I’m halfway down the shaft to the cafeteria when it finally hits me what that feeling was: The psychoscope. I put it on once. Only once. It was like having my thoughts wrung out of me until there was nothing left. I remember shaking, fumbling at the clasps to get it off. I blacked out at some point. That isn’t in any of my notes, though. All of the emails I found about psychoscopes are just Alex telling the people in the lab that I don’t need to wear one when I come down. I watch the lights, consider just hitting the button to take me back up to my room, and let it keep going.

 I’m walking out of the grav shaft mechanically. I’ve fallen into a routine again, even without the sim. At least it’s a routine of my own design. Every midnight I come down for udon and a can of coffee. I sit by myself near the vending machines. I listen to the other voices and absorb them. I know a lot of movies now. I know how to use chopsticks. I breathe in the collective consciousness of Talos 2 as if it could sustain me. Typhon feed on thought. In a way, I still do. I’m learning how to blend in. It’s a type of social mimesis, when you get down to it. I pick an employee at random, a young woman in a researcher’s uniform, and copy her affect. Before long I’m at ease, moving my fingers to a song I’ve never heard and humming. I look up from my noodles every few minutes, a second after she does, and stare expectantly at the nearly empty cafeteria. I’m not sure if I’m actually expecting someone, but I see Mikhaila out of the corner of my eye and something clicks.

 I need to talk to Mikhaila. She might not tell me everything, but she’ll tell me a different lie than the others. Maybe between them I can find the truth. I wish I could read her. I want to know why she tries so hard to look through me. Is it Morgan? Alex? Was she there when they put me together and did she see something they didn’t?

 “Doctor Yu,” she greets me as I sit down. One of the employees next to her, another researcher, looks away before leaving the table. His eyes never meet mine. I hear whispers. The people at the table are gone. Mikhaila continues to watch me. I’m shaking when I set the notebook down. My suit ripples along my hands like water and she’s polite enough not to say anything, though I see her clench her jaw. The weave is filled with her coworkers’ thoughts, hazy memories of a newscast about Talos 1 and the evacuation of earth to the martian colonies.

 “Still putting off your doctors’ appointments?” Her tone is accusatory. It’s a welcome change, though I wish it was from anyone but her. I don’t have to answer. I guess the look of shame is enough. Her lips tighten together and the corners of her mouth drop. Her eyes are soft. “You can’t keep doing that. You know there is a very good reason they schedule those.”

 She catches herself and bites her lip. Anger and embarrassment blossom across her face before fading. I wonder who she’s wearing. Whose skin got pulled on over Mikhaila Ilyushin’s? Her eyes move to my hand and I scramble to make the fingers divide into individual digits again.

 “And this is why you go to your appointments.” She drums her fingers on the table, spinning strands of gold thread where her emotions leave her. I touch one and pull it towards me, only for it to break. Mikhaila is staring at me, mouth open and a million silent words spilling out. I pick up my can of tea to make sure my reflection is still human. It is. When I look back up her jaw is set. “How many psi hypo do you use per day? On top of the water filters you have. Do you know?”

 “One or two. It depends on what I’m doing. More interaction with the crew means more hypo.”

 “You need them to be human.” It sounds like it’s a question, but her expression says she doesn’t want me to answer. She knows. I do. I run out, I stop being Morgan. I stop being Morgan, I become something else. Something that is going to have to actually feed instead of just drink a pitcher of tap water infused with psychotropic particles every few hours. I try to maintain eye contact, but her gaze is piercing. “You know what those hypo are, don’t you?”

 “I know. And I appreciate the irony of consuming typhon material in order to stay human.” I attempt a smile. It’s too wide. Too many teeth. I can feel how wrong my mouth is. Her fear moves beneath the surface of her face and I stop smiling. I come apart near her. I think Morgan did too, but in a different way. My hands move through the table. I don’t feel the bench under me anymore. Something whispers inside my head. I used to know the language it speaks, but now it’s nothing but a scratching noise and empty light. I nearly jump out of my seat when something slams against the table next to my hand. The can of green tea is crumpled in Mikhaila’s fist. The fear is gone. Anger. This one is anger.

 “You have no idea what you’re doing here, do you?”

 “Talking to you.” I run my tongue across my teeth, feel them smooth out and arrange themselves in order. My body is heavy, more solid than it’s been in days. I don’t like it. It has to stay this way until I leave, though.

 “On Talos,” she amends. “You have no idea what you’re doing on Talos.”

 “Alex said I was some kind of bridge between species. We’re working the details out.” I smile properly this time. It doesn't help.

 “When did you learn to write?” The question comes out of nowhere. She must have seen me taking notes on what she said. When I don’t answer the first time, she repeats herself. This time her words are bright, sharp. They burrow under my skin and give off sparks. I stare down at the notebook in front of me, the endless list of things that I think I know alternately underlined or crossed out. “You can’t use chopsticks, but you have Morgan’s handwriting. Do you know why?”

 “The cell lines?” Unsure. I sound unsure. She has a point and I don’t like it. I have to fight to keep myself as me. I imagine Morgan. I replay his voice in my head, telling Alex about growing a pair and committing. I replay his sense of self-assuredness and resignation. I take a deep breath as I straighten my posture. “Phantom memories aren’t the best studied side effect of Typhon modification, but they’re known to happen. It’s likely I only got a fraction of what Morgan knew from the experiment, the things that were important to him.”

 “You can’t fake his arrogance,” she snorts. “Morgan was arrogant because he was smart, because he worked hard to use that intelligence. And because he wouldn’t understand humility even if you installed it in him with a mod.”

 My thoughts are screaming. They warp everything in my vision, pulling away at the threads I try to carefully gather around me. My glove stops existing. She notices it, but her expression remains the same.

 “Ask Alex why you know how to write. And while you’re at it, ask him why he goes along with your insane desire to live in a simulation still.”

 “I don’t.” I hear the hum of the coral and, somewhere deep inside it, I hear my own voice echoed back to me. It sounds different than Morgan’s. Arrogance, but without the barbs. “I turned it off. Broke the clock. Reset my transcribe to sync with the station’s calendar. I spent too much of my life in a simulation already.”

 She smiles, but it isn’t kind. I’m getting the idea that Igwe’s Emotional Intelligence flashcards are full of lies. Every time I’ve seen someone smile, it hasn’t been happy. I don’t copy her. I feel my jaw tighten and my eyes lose focus. There’s empty space around her where the weave should be, those intangible threads that haven’t been made into solid coral yet. I can feel myself pulsing through them, my thoughts an invisible heartbeat for something much bigger than I am. And I can feel the threads tangle together. I exhale. She’s still smiling. I’ve decided I don’t like that expression. Humans have it all wrong. Animals bare their teeth to display a threat, but here they are thinking that it means friendship. The cards are lies.

 “What did I do to you?” There’s an echo in my voice, a crackle of static electricity. I shut my mouth and hope it was too quiet for the rest of the cafeteria to hear. It sounded like a phantom’s speech.

 “You? Nothing. Not this time. Not this you.” She regards me with the same rigid smile, the same bared teeth. Just once, the weave pulses around her and I hear the darkness move. “But maybe you should ask about the other ‘Mim’.”

 I want her to be lying. I want to tell her that she’s lying, that I know she’s saying this to hurt me because of some unfinished business with Morgan, but I remember the dreams.

 “You are so much like him, you know that? Maybe you can’t fake his mannerisms, but he’s still part of you.” She scoffs and glances at the table where Sho is. I should be over there with her, splitting a plate of eel rolls and talking about the latest batch of Fatal Fortress recordings I found. My feet won’t move, no matter how much I tell them to. Mikhaila turns back to me. “So quick to believe you’re a savior, that ends justify means. I’m sure they’ve told you otherwise. They always do. But how quickly did you believe them when they said you were the only one, the last great hope of humanity?”

 “Did anything I did in that simulation mean anything, anything at all to you?”

 There’s a pause. The world hums, gets desaturated. All I can hear is the first time I saw her outside of the sim and the way her voice sounded when she called me ‘Dr. Yu’. A thread breaks somewhere. My vision refocuses and, even though I know I haven’t shifted, I see the way I used to. There’s too many angles riding too close to each other. Starbursts of thought radiate around her, none of them hers. When she finally speaks, it’s deafening.

 “It meant that we tailored the testing variables right and adjusted your composition accordingly. You were a very receptive test subject.”

 “If you don’t like having a…” I stumble, my thoughts flicker away into the coral. I breathe in deep through my mouth and focus on Morgan. “If you’re so set against a Typhon based replica, why not just use an operator like April?”

 She doesn’t reply. Her eyes widen slightly and any emotion on her face disappears. As soon as I open my mouth again, she gets up and leaves. Her half finished dinner is left behind, along with her TranScribe. I shouldn’t have mentioned April. What did I think she’d do, sit back down and tell me a tragic story about a rogue operator? No. That wouldn’t be reasonable. I know she won’t tell me and that’s why I don’t follow her. I know enough to know that.

 I pick one of the blini from her tray as I wait for my body to forget Mikhaila’s presence. The threads are still moving, straining under the weight of my own scattered thoughts. I knew there were others. She told me nothing I didn’t know. So why does it bother me?

 I pick up the box of blini and stare at it for a while. I never learned Russian. I couldn’t have, not in the few weeks I’ve been awake. The Cyrillic letters come to me naturally. The names of the ingredients, the information, the slogan, and the Russian regalia are all familiar. I have never eaten blini. I never learned Russian.

 I don’t remember learning how to write either.