Chapter 10

Three days after the window stopped opening, I went back to the building.

I told myself I was looking for answers. That I needed to understand what she'd made me for, what all these new skills were building toward. A creation has a purpose. A tool is designed to do something specific. I couldn't just wait around for the other shoe to drop.

But that wasn't the whole truth.

The whole truth was that I wanted to see her again. And that wanting scared me more than anything else that had happened.

The drive felt shorter this time. Like the distance between my apartment and that brick building had compressed somehow, the city rearranging itself to make my journey easier. I knew that was crazy. Streets don't move. But the feeling persisted, this sense that I was being pulled toward something rather than choosing to go.

I parked in the same spot as before. Sat in my car for a few minutes, watching the metal door, waiting to see if she'd come out to meet me.

She didn't. The building just sat there, patient and silent, letting me decide whether to enter on my own.

I went in.

The hallway was the same. Narrow, brick walls, stairs leading up. My footsteps echoed like they had before, but something about the sound was different. Sharper. More defined. Like my ears had been upgraded along with everything else.

The second floor was empty.

Not empty of furniture. Empty of photographs. Every wall that had been covered with images of my face, my history, my forgotten life, was now bare. Just corkboard and pushpins and the occasional torn corner where a photo had been removed too quickly.

She'd cleaned up. Erased the evidence. Whatever purpose that gallery had served, it was finished now.

I stood in the middle of the room, turning slowly, taking in all that emptiness. The windows still let in gray afternoon light. The floor was still dusty concrete. But without the photographs, the space felt like a stage after the play had ended. Props removed. Audience gone. Just the bones of something that used to mean something.

"You came back."

I didn't jump. Didn't spin around. Just turned calmly, smoothly, with a control over my body that still felt borrowed.

She was standing at the top of the stairs. Same gray coat. Same dark hair. But she looked different somehow. More relaxed. Like a weight had been lifted.

"The other one is gone," I said. Not a question.

"Yes." She walked into the room, her footsteps barely making a sound. "I felt it happen. The last of them finally let go." She stopped a few feet away, studying my face like she was looking for something specific. "You felt it too, didn't you? The moment they disappeared?"

I thought about that night. The window opening onto an empty room. The seventeen seconds of nothing. The strange sense of finality when it ended.

"I felt something."

"That was them releasing their hold on you. All those months of clinging, hiding, trying to corrupt what I built." She shook her head slowly. "Such a waste. They could have just accepted it. Would have been easier for everyone."

"Accepted being erased?"

"Accepted being replaced by something better." Her eyes met mine. No sadness in them now. Just a calm certainty that made my skin crawl. "You're not a downgrade. You're an improvement. Everything they were, plus everything they could never be."

I thought about the lock picking. The languages. The way I could read people now, see their weaknesses laid out like a map. Improvements. Tools.

"What did you make me for?"

She smiled. That same smile I'd seen in my dreams, but warmer now. Prouder.

"Come with me. There's something I want to show you."

She walked past me toward a door I hadn't noticed before. Set into the back wall, painted the same color as the brick, almost invisible unless you knew to look for it. She opened it and started down a narrow staircase.

I followed. Of course I followed. What else was I going to do?

The stairs led to a basement. Lower ceiling, no windows, the kind of space that feels like it exists outside normal reality. The walls were lined with filing cabinets, the heavy metal kind that offices used before everything went digital. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting everything in that flat, shadowless glow.

She walked to one of the cabinets and pulled open a drawer. Inside, hanging folders, each one labeled with a string of numbers and letters that meant nothing to me.

"You're not the first," she said, pulling out a folder and handing it to me. "You're not even the tenth."

I opened the folder.

Inside were photographs. A man I didn't recognize, captured in the same surveillance style as the photos of me. Candid shots from across the street. Through windows. In crowds where he didn't know he was being watched. The photos spanned years, showing him aging, changing jobs, moving through a life he didn't know was being documented.

And then, about halfway through the stack, the photos changed.

Same face. Same body. But something different in the eyes. A sharpness that hadn't been there before. A way of holding himself that suggested capabilities his earlier photos didn't show.

"Michael Oliver," she said. "Replaced seven years ago. He's a security consultant now. Very successful. Very useful."

She handed me another folder. A woman this time. Same pattern. Years of surveillance, then a shift. A before and after that was subtle enough to miss unless you were looking for it.

"Diana Reeves. Five years ago. She runs a private investigation firm. Found her calling, you might say."

Another folder. Another face. Another life rewritten.

"There are forty-three of you," she said. "Spread across the country. Some know what they are. Some don't. All of them serving their purpose."

Forty-three. The number hit me like a physical blow. Forty-three people who'd been erased and replaced. Forty-three originals who'd faded away while constructs like me walked around wearing their faces.

"What purpose?" My voice came out steadier than I felt. "What are we for?"

She closed the filing cabinet drawer. Leaned against it, arms crossed, watching me with that patient expression I was starting to hate.

"Different things. Each of you is designed for specific capabilities. Michael is exceptional at finding security vulnerabilities. Diana can track anyone, anywhere. Others have different specialties." She paused. "You're not a mass-produced product. You're custom work. Each one unique."

"That doesn't answer my question."

"You're right. It doesn't." She pushed off from the cabinet and walked toward me. Slowly. Deliberately. Giving me time to back away if I wanted to.

I didn't back away.

"I could tell you exactly what you were designed for," she said. "Give you a job description, a list of capabilities, a mission statement. But that's not how this works. The purpose isn't something I assign. It's something you discover."

"That's convenient."

"It's necessary. The ones who get told what to do, they fight it. Resist. Waste years struggling against their own nature." She was close now. Close enough that I could smell her perfume again. That familiar floral scent that triggered something deep in my brain, some response I couldn't name. "The ones who find it themselves, they embrace it. They become what they were meant to be, and they're grateful for it."

"Grateful."

"Yes." She reached up. Touched my face. Her fingers were cold but the touch felt right somehow. Like a circuit completing. "You'll understand soon. The skills you've been developing, the instincts you've been feeling. They're all leading somewhere. And when you get there, when you finally understand what you're capable of, you won't want to go back."

I should have pulled away. Should have demanded real answers, or threatened her, or done something that resembled resistance.

Instead I stood there, feeling her cold fingers on my cheek, and part of me wanted to lean into the touch.

That's what finally made me step back.

Not fear of her. Fear of myself. Fear of how good it felt to be near her, how natural it seemed to listen to her voice and accept what she was telling me. The pull I'd felt driving here, the compulsion to see her again, it wasn't curiosity. It was programming. Something she'd built into me, an attraction to my creator that felt like choice but wasn't.

"I need to go."

She let her hand drop. Didn't try to stop me. Just watched with that calm, patient expression as I backed toward the stairs.

"You'll come back," she said. "They always do. The purpose isn't something you can run from. It's inside you. It'll keep pulling until you stop fighting it."

I climbed the stairs. Walked through the empty room with its bare walls. Pushed through the metal door and out into the afternoon air.

I was shaking by the time I reached my car. Full-body tremors I couldn't control, my hands jerking so badly I couldn't get the key in the ignition for three tries.

I sat there until the shaking stopped. Tried to think clearly through the fog of whatever I was feeling.

Forty-three. Forty-three others like me. Custom-built, purpose-driven, scattered across the country doing whatever they'd been designed to do. Some of them didn't even know what they were. Just walked through their stolen lives, fulfilling purposes they'd never been told about, thinking they were making free choices.

Was that my future? Waking up one day and realizing I'd been doing her work all along without knowing it?

Or was it worse than that? Would I wake up one day and realize I didn't care?

The purpose isn't something you can run from. It's inside you.

I drove home. Checked my locks. Stood in my apartment and tried to feel like myself, whoever that was supposed to be.

The skills were still there. The lock picking, the languages, the ability to read people. All those tools she'd given me, sitting in my brain, waiting to be used.

I could feel them now in a way I hadn't before. Not just as abilities, but as urges. Impulses. The lock picking wanted to pick locks. The manipulation wanted to manipulate. Every skill came with a hunger to be exercised, a pull toward action that felt less like choice and more like compulsion.

Was this what she meant by discovering my purpose? Letting the urges guide me until I ended up wherever she wanted me to go?

I thought about Michael Oliver, security consultant. Diana Reeves, private investigator. Jobs that probably felt like personal choices. Callings that probably seemed to emerge naturally from their interests and abilities.

But the interests were programmed. The abilities were installed. Every "choice" they made was just the inevitable result of the machinery she'd put inside them.

That night I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to remember what it felt like to want something that wasn't her design.

I couldn't.

Every desire I could identify, every impulse I could name, felt suspect now. Was I hungry because my body needed food, or because she'd built hunger into me? Did I want to sleep because I was tired, or because sleep was when she'd made her changes?

The paranoia was exhausting. Worse than the not-sleeping. At least the not-sleeping had a clear cause. This was different. This was questioning every thought I had, wondering which ones were mine and which ones were code.

Around 2 AM I gave up on rest and got out of bed. Walked to my window and looked out at the city, all those lights in all those buildings, all those people living lives they thought belonged to them.

How many of them were like me? How many of them were walking around in bodies that had been redesigned, thinking thoughts that had been programmed, fulfilling purposes they'd never been told about?

Forty-three, she'd said. Spread across the country.

But she'd been doing this for years. Decades, maybe. Forty-three was just the number she'd admitted to. The real number could be higher. Much higher.

And she was still going. Still watching people. Still documenting lives. Still choosing who to replace and who to leave alone.

What made someone worth replacing? What criteria did she use? The originals in those photos hadn't looked special. Ordinary people with ordinary lives. Michael Oliver had been an IT guy before she changed him. Diana Reeves had worked at a grocery store.

Had the original me been ordinary too? Just some guy living his small life until she decided he'd make good raw material?

I pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the window. Tried to feel something that wasn't fear or confusion or that terrible pull back toward her.

There was something else. Faint, buried, almost invisible under all the noise.

Anger.

Not much. Just a flicker. But it was there, and it felt different from everything else. It felt like mine.

Anger at her for doing this. Anger at myself for being what I was. Anger at whatever system had allowed forty-three people, at least, to be erased and replaced without anyone noticing or caring.

I held onto that anger. Nursed it like a small flame. It wasn't much, but it was something. A feeling I could trust because it pointed away from her instead of toward her.

She'd said the purpose was inside me. Said I'd discover it, embrace it, be grateful for it.

But maybe that wasn't the only thing inside me. Maybe there was something else in there too. Something she hadn't planned for.

The original had spent eight months hiding inside me, watching, waiting. They'd had plenty of time to do more than just survive. Plenty of time to leave something behind.

Find the article. Their last message. But what if that wasn't the only thing they'd left?

What if they'd left something deeper? Something woven into whatever I was, hidden so well that even she couldn't see it?

I went back to bed as the sun came up. Didn't sleep, just lay there, holding onto that small angry flame and wondering what else the original might have given me before they disappeared.