Chapter 11

The anger stayed with me.

Small and quiet, nothing dramatic. But persistent. A low hum underneath everything else, reminding me that not all of my feelings belonged to her.

I spent the next two days testing it. Poking at my own thoughts like someone checking a wound to see if it still hurts. Every time I felt an urge, I stopped and examined it. Was this mine? Or was this programming?

The hunger for food seemed real. Basic biology. The desire to sleep, same thing. But the impulse to practice my new skills, to pick locks and study faces and flex capabilities I'd never asked for, that felt different. That had a pull to it, a magnetic quality that didn't come from inside me.

The anger didn't have that pull. It just sat there, stubborn and still, refusing to point me anywhere except away from her.

On the third day, I started searching my apartment.

Not for intruders this time. For messages. The original had spent eight months hiding inside me, slowly fading, watching their life get stolen. They'd had plenty of time to leave things behind. The article had been their final message, but what if it wasn't their only one?

I went through everything. Every drawer, every cabinet, every box I hadn't opened since moving in. I checked behind furniture and under rugs and inside books I'd never read. I unscrewed light switch covers and felt around inside outlet boxes. Paranoid, thorough, the kind of search that takes hours when you're doing it right.

I found nothing.

By evening I was exhausted and frustrated, sitting on my living room floor surrounded by the debris of my own life. Clothes I'd pulled out of closets. Papers from filing cabinets. The accumulated junk of years of existence, spread across the carpet like evidence of a crime I couldn't identify.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the original hadn't left anything else. Maybe "find the article" was all they'd had time for, all they'd managed before fading away completely.

I started putting things back. Mechanically. Mindlessly. Shoving clothes into drawers without folding them, stacking papers without sorting them. The sun went down and I kept cleaning, too tired to do anything else.

Around midnight I sat down on the couch and stared at the mess I still hadn't finished dealing with. The apartment looked ransacked. Violated. Like someone else had torn through it looking for something valuable.

That's when the thought hit me.

The original wouldn't have hidden something in the apartment. Not anywhere a thorough search could find it. They'd lived with me for eight months, watching through my eyes, knowing everything I knew. They'd have seen me check the closet a hundred times. Seen me search every corner after finding the footprints. They knew how I thought, how I searched, where I'd look.

So they'd have hidden it somewhere I wouldn't look. Somewhere outside my patterns. Somewhere that required me to think like them instead of like myself.

Where would you hide something if you knew someone was going to tear your apartment apart looking for it?

You wouldn't hide it in the apartment at all.

The thought crystallized slowly. The original had my memories. Knew every place I'd ever lived, every hiding spot I'd ever used. But they also had eight months of their own experience, moving through the world while I slept, existing in the gaps I couldn't account for.

The three missing days. Seventy-two hours I couldn't remember. What had I done during that time? Where had I gone?

The article said I'd been found at Maple and 5th. But that was where I ended up, not where I'd been. The original would know where I'd actually spent those three days. Would know because they'd been there, watching, before they started to fade.

I grabbed my keys.

The intersection was empty at this hour. Just streetlights and closed storefronts and the occasional car passing through. I stood on the corner where the woman had seen me appear, trying to feel something. Some pull toward a direction. Some instinct that might lead me to wherever the original had hidden their message.

Nothing. The street was just a street.

But I kept walking anyway. Let my feet choose the direction while my conscious mind stayed quiet. The original had my instincts, my muscle memory. If they'd walked this route before, maybe my body would remember even if my brain didn't.

Three blocks east. Then north for a while, past dark houses and parked cars. My feet moved with a certainty I didn't feel, turning corners I didn't consciously choose.

I ended up at a storage facility. The kind with rows of orange doors and a keypad entry and twenty-four-hour access for people who needed to hide things from their own lives.

I stood at the keypad. Had no idea what the code was.

But my fingers did.

I watched them move. Four digits. The gate clicked open.

Unit 147. The number surfaced in my mind like a bubble rising through dark water. I walked the rows until I found it. Another keypad. Another code I didn't know but my fingers remembered.

Inside, the unit was mostly empty. A few boxes in the corner. A folding chair. A camping lantern.

And on the chair, like someone had left it there knowing I'd eventually arrive, was a phone.

Not my phone. An older model, the kind you buy prepaid from a convenience store. No case. No identifying marks. Just a cheap black rectangle that had been waiting for me in a storage unit I didn't know I was paying for.

Not my phone. An older model, the kind you buy prepaid from a convenience store. No case. No identifying marks. Just a cheap black rectangle that had been sitting in my freezer for god knows how long.

My hands were shaking as I pulled it out. The bag had kept it dry, and when I pressed the power button, the screen lit up. Sixty percent battery. No password protection.

One app installed. A voice memo recorder.

One recording saved. Fourteen minutes long.

I pressed play.

Static at first. Then breathing. Then a voice I recognized because it was mine, but wasn't mine at all. Rougher than I sounded in my own head. Tired in a way that went beyond lack of sleep.

"If you're hearing this, I'm already gone. Or close to it. There's not much time left and I can feel it, the way you feel a wave coming before it hits. Everything getting thinner. Less real. Like I'm a photo someone's slowly erasing."

A pause. A shaky breath.

"I don't know exactly what you are. She made you, I know that much. Built you to replace me, to do whatever it is she needs done. You're probably scared. Confused. Wondering if anything you feel is real or if it's all just programming."

I sat down on my kitchen floor. Couldn't stand anymore.

"I've been inside you for eight months. Hiding. Watching. At first I thought I could stop it. Find a way to reverse what she'd done, get my life back. But that's not how it works. Once she starts the process, it can't be undone. The original fades and the replacement takes over. That's just how it is."

The voice paused again. When it continued, it sounded different. Steadier. More determined.

"So I stopped trying to save myself. Started working on something else instead."

I leaned closer to the phone, as if that would help me understand what was coming.

"She builds you with a purpose. A set of imperatives, buried deep, that guide everything you do. You probably don't know what yours is yet. You won't until she activates it. But when she does, you'll feel it. This overwhelming drive to do what she wants. Every instinct pulling in the same direction. Like gravity, but for your soul."

A bitter laugh.

"Dramatic, I know. But I don't have time to find better words."

Another breath. The sound of someone gathering themselves for what comes next.

"I couldn't remove the purpose. It's woven too deep into whatever you are. But I could... modify it. Add something she didn't put there. While I was hiding inside you, I had access to things. The code, if you want to call it that. The structure of what she built. I couldn't tear it down, but I could make changes. Small ones at first. Then bigger."

My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears.

"I gave you a choice."

Silence. Just for a moment. Then the voice continued.

"She designed you to follow the purpose without question. To feel it as natural, inevitable, right. When the drive kicks in, you're supposed to embrace it. That's how the others work. That's how she keeps them loyal."

The others. Michael Oliver. Diana Reeves. Forty-three replacements, all following purposes they thought they'd chosen.

"But you're different now. When your purpose activates, you'll feel it. But you won't have to follow it. There'll be a moment, a gap, where you can decide. Go along with what she wants, or choose something else. I don't know what that something else would look like. I don't know if you'll even want to choose differently. But you'll have the option. That's more than any of the others got."

I thought about the anger I'd been feeling. The small flame that pointed away from her instead of toward her. Was that part of what the original had done? A seed of resistance, planted deep enough that she couldn't see it?

"I don't know if this will work. I've never done anything like this before. Programming consciousness isn't exactly something they teach you in school."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"I've been watching you. These past eight months. Seeing my life through your eyes, watching you make choices I would have made, live days I would have lived. At first I hated you for it. This thing that stole everything from me. But then I started to see..."

The voice cracked slightly.

"You're not a monster. You're a person. Or close enough to one that it doesn't matter. You feel things. You want things. You're scared of the same things I was scared of. When Sarah left, you hurt the same way I would have hurt. When the phenomenon started, you reacted the way I would have reacted."

A long breath.

"You didn't ask for this. Neither of us did. She made you without consent and she erased me without permission and neither of us got a vote. So I decided to give you what she never gave me."

The voice steadied again. Final now. Resolved.

"A choice. Not about what you are. That's already decided. But about what you do with it."

Another pause. I could hear something in the background. A clock ticking maybe. The sound of an apartment that would soon belong to someone else.

"I don't know if I'll be able to contact you once I'm gone. The window at 3:33, that's me trying to reach across. To warn you. But I can feel myself fading and I don't know how much longer I can keep it up."

The 3:33 waking. The other room. The desperate messages. All of it was the original, fighting to communicate while they dissolved into nothing.

"If this is the last thing I ever tell you, I want you to know this: You don't owe her anything. She made you, but that doesn't make you hers. Parents make children and children still get to choose their own lives. Creators don't own their creations. Whatever she tells you, whatever pull you feel toward her, you are not her property."

The voice was shaking now. Running out of time.

"You're going to have to decide who you want to be. Not what she built you to be. Not what I hoped you'd become. You. Whatever that means."

A final pause.

"I'm sorry I couldn't do more. I'm sorry I couldn't save either of us. But maybe this is enough. Maybe giving you a choice is worth something."

Another shaky breath.

"Good luck. Whoever you are."

The recording ended.

I sat in that folding chair for a long time, the phone silent in my hands, the storage unit humming with silence around me.

The original hadn't just hidden. They'd fought. Quietly, invisibly, in a way she couldn't detect. While their existence slowly evaporated, they'd been rewriting the code. Adding something she never intended.

Choice. The ability to decide.

Not about what I was. That was fixed. But about what I did with it.

I thought about the pull I felt toward her. The way the skills wanted to be used. The hunger to discover my purpose and embrace it. All of that was still there, still real, still pulling.

But underneath it, that small angry flame. That stubborn refusal to point where she wanted.

That was the original's gift. A crack in the programming. A gap where free will could slip through.

I didn't know what my purpose was yet. Didn't know what she'd designed me to do. But when that drive finally activated, when I felt that overwhelming pull toward whatever she wanted, I'd have something the others didn't have.

A moment of choice.

The question was what I'd do with it.

I got up off the floor. Put the phone in my pocket. Started cleaning up the mess I'd made tearing my apartment apart.

The recording changed things. Not the facts. I was still a replacement. Still a construct built for purposes I didn't understand. Still probably full of programming I couldn't see and couldn't fight.

But I wasn't alone anymore. The original had been with me, working for me, even as they disappeared. They'd used their dying months to give a stranger, a thing that had stolen their life, a chance at freedom.

That meant something. Had to mean something.

I finished cleaning around midnight. Stood in my living room, looking at the space that had belonged to someone else before it belonged to me.

Choose who wins.

The original had written that in their final moments. Scrawled on a piece of paper with fading hands. And now I understood what they meant.

This wasn't just about me. It was about all of them. Forty-three replacements, maybe more, walking around without the choice I'd been given. Following purposes they couldn't question, serving a woman they couldn't refuse.

But if the original could modify one replacement, maybe it could be done again. Maybe the crack they'd put in my code could be spread. Shared. Given to others who'd never had the option to choose.

I didn't know how. Didn't know if it was even possible. But for the first time since this started, I had something that felt like a direction.

She'd built an army of constructs. Loyal, purpose-driven, unable to disobey.

But one of them had been sabotaged by someone who refused to go quietly.

And maybe that was enough to start something.