Vicious Memories

Chapter 106

"What about them?"

"Who are they?" Finn asked. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and looked uneasily at the Strangers still sitting over in the central clearing. They hadn't moved.

"They're nothing more than unfortunate failures."

Bev didn't deign to look at them, but I did, and my heart twisted to see the beaten-down looks of dejection and shame in their postures and faces. Could they hear Bev's words carry?

"They're you," Bev continued. "Or, they were. The first trial we ran on the island devolved into savagery and a failed society. We gave them a choice: return to death row, or remain on the island and help with the second trial by adding stressors to your time here."

"This place is a hell-hole," Tana said. "What could make our trial different from theirs? Nothing would make this worse."

"You think so? How about an utter lack of identity? You think you lost everything, but you have no idea. You had a base to build on, a single memory that we isolated and reconditioned into your freshly wiped minds. Without it you would have become even more unmoored than you thought you were. You wouldn't have been lost at sea, you would have been lost in an infinite vacuum of nothingness. It's enough to drive anyone crazy."

"That's why you set Lukas free," I said, trying to pick him out of the crowd from afar. "He remembered me because I was in the first trial with you."

"Yes," Bev said, uninterested. "You two were friends."

I remembered the robotic warning delivered by the Stranger the day before the attack. A Stranger I had subsequently killed. At the time I couldn't understand how he could dispassionately pronounce what amounted to our deaths without batting an eyelash, but now I supposed it wasn't as impassive as I had thought - he was simply speaking from the script Bev had created for him. An actor playing a part that had gotten him killed.

"Don't pity them," Bev said, reading my mind. "They're about to get the same opportunity to start new lives that you did."

She reached up and swung her braid back over a shoulder so it could come to rest on her collarbone. Her gaze flicked over to the villagers and back to me. Perhaps she misread my expression, because a simmering anger appeared on her face.

"You all look at me like I'm the monster. Especially you, Ollie. But we were the good guys." She pointed over my shoulder, indignant. "They're the evil ones. They were sentenced to die and we gave them a chance at a new life. In the process we solved a global crisis. The world may have fixed its reproduction problems, but it's twenty years too late. We're dangerously short on labor and if we don't lay the infrastructure now the next generation of children will inherit an empty and broken world."

"And that gives you the right to control peoples' lives? To kill them in the name of science?"

"Yes! Jesus, Ollie, can't you see that?"

"Maybe I used to..." I chewed my tongue, searching for the words. My feet shuffled in the muck. "But maybe I saw something that you didn't. Or can't. If the experiment was a success... if we consider the people here different, innocent now... then what we've done is murder, Bev."

"Sometimes people need to get their hands dirty to change the world."

I saw it from both sides now, which scared me, but in the end I knew which side I had to choose. I hung my head in sorrow at the tragedy of it all. In my peripheral vision I could see the villagers edging closer, standing in a semi-circle behind us.

"So you get your big win," I said. "Things went according to plan."

"Well, not entirely, but the result is the same."