Remainers

A Fractured Mind, Part 7

That night, Eric ended up camping separately from Caleb and Hope.

It wasn't that he was upset at them for hiding the truth from him. He needed the time alone, regardless. Both to rest... and to think. As he laid down inside the crumbling ruins of the church, he looked up at the starry night sky and sighed. He thought over that day's revelation, and everything he'd learned that day.

"Why did you hide it from me?" he had asked, his emotions running high. "Why didn't you just tell me the truth?"

"There was no knowing what you'd do if we did," Caleb explained. "There was a chance you'd refuse to believe it, especially since we didn't have much in the way of visible proof. At first, the plan was to have you accompany us back to the maintenance facility, while slowly getting you accustomed to the world around you. We hoped that if you had time to see how the world had changed, you'd be able to accept what we had to tell you more easily."

"That's why you took this huge detour to my hometown? I don't believe that. That was two weeks you wasted getting here!"

Hope nodded. "Right. That wasn't in the plan. To be honest, I said we should have ignored you and gone straight to the facility."

"Then why didn't you?"

"It's embarrassing to admit, but it was because I was banking on the chance you'd recover on your own," Caleb admitted. "I thought that allowing you to recover your memories naturally would be better for you."

"It was cruelty," Hope snapped angrily. "You let him believe he was still human when you knew that he wasn't. All so you could reveal the truth after leading him around for weeks. Aren't you ashamed?"

Caleb didn't bite back. Instead, he simply give Eric an apologetic bow. "She's right. This was my fault. I'm sorry."

The conversation ended there. Eric still didn't know what to think about the whole thing, but one thing was clear: they were telling the truth. He was no longer human, and his body was a synthetic cyborg frame made merely to look like a natural one. He looked at his arm and remembered how Hope scratching her skin exposed the metallic frame below it. He wondered what he would see if he scratched the skin on his arm open, too.

Eric shook those thoughts out of his head. He was letting himself get too negative. He laid down on his bedroll and tried to sleep, but his mind was too preoccupied with what he'd learned for hm to get any rest. After tossing and turning for a bit, he got up and walked out of the church. When he thought about it, did he actually need rest? His body was cybernetic, and even his brain was made of nanomachines. Considering all that, he hardly saw the point of lying in bed. Instead, he decided to walk the streets of his former hometown for a bit. He hadn't had much chance to do so beforehand, after all.

As he strolled through the town with only the moon illuminating his path, the empty city began to reappear according to the images still imprinted in his memories. The old shops, schools, and restaurants seemed to almost fill themselves in as his mind filled in the gaps. One by one, his hometown slowly came back to life, but it was just an illusion created in his mind. An illusion that would only last for as long as he could remember it.

He didn't know how long he spent wandering through town, only that when he had returned to the church, he found Caleb standing outside it. He looked concerned, but quickly grew relieved when he saw Eric walking towards him.

"I was surprised to see you not inside the church. If you hadn't come by sooner, I probably would have run out looking for you."

"You thought I'd run away?"

"I wouldn't discount it, considering what you've heard."

"It's certainly not something I could just ignore," Eric admitted. "Finding out I'm not human? That certainly would have made me want to run away."

"I wouldn't say you're not human," Caleb said encouragingly. "It's true that your body is cybernetic, but your heart still remains human. At least, that's what I think."

"You sure? That's a bit unscientific, isn't it?"

"Maybe so. But I wanted to believe in it. So much so that I let you drag us out all the way over here."

"Are you talking about how you wanted me to naturally recover my memories?"

"Yeah. It's true that if we just took you back to the facility and re-did the memory backup, there would have been no problems. But I felt that it was too much for you in your amnesiac state. At the time, I figured I'd bring it up slowly and eventually convince you to come with us to a facility."

"Well, why didn't you?" Eric asked curiously. "I doubt you were all that interested in my hometown. I mean, look at this place."

"It was because you seemed so adamant about your humanity, to be honest," Caleb replied. "I knew it was wrong, and I knew it could have broken you. But I wanted to believe in the humanity you still had inside of you."

"That's why you did all this? Why?"

"I admit that it wasn't just for you," Caleb admitted. His eyes wandered towards Hope, who was still sitting in front of a smoldering campfire. "You see, Hope is a little special, even amongst other remainers."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Because of that, she's a little detached from her sense of humanity. I've... been trying to get her to see it another way, but I haven't had much success."

"I see." Eric looked up at the night sky. "That's a little selfish, isn't it?"

"It is, and I'm sorry for that. But I couldn't get it out of my head. The idea that seeing you recover your memories might make her value her humanity more."

Eric hummed thoughtfully for a moment. "I don't think you need to worry about that, though."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, she said it was a cruelty, right? To let me believe I was human, even though I was a remainer. She must have thought it would hurt me to find out I wasn't human anymore."

"Right. Anyone would think that."

"That's just it. Even thinking that means, on a subconscious level, that she thinks being human is something that would hurt not to have. Maybe it's just me reading into it a bit much, but don't you think it's possible?"

Caleb fell silent for a moment as he thought about Eric's words. "I see. That is one way of looking at it."

"Well, I don't want to act like I know better about Hope than you do. But I think you're not as far away from her understanding her own humanity than you think."

"I suppose I'll take what I can get," Caleb said with a chuckle. "In any case, let's go to bed. We've got a long journey ahead of us."