Chương 102: 7.04 No Return without Receipt or Label

2104: 03: 30: 01: 42: 30"You are sure there was no one there?" the elderly man asked, looking too pale even in my owl vision.

"No necromancer? I swear I saw a green light – a green! light! – from my window there!" With a shaky finger he pointed across the street from the graveyard's gate to the housing row across the street.

"No sir," Crowsong said.

"We checked the entire grounds, but there was nothing to be found. No lights, no people, not a single grave disturbed or mausoleum forced open. Right Jester?" I hooted from my perch on her shoulder. The man stared at me, his confused eyes lighting up with a small bit of wonder before turning back to my mentor.

"Are you sure?" The soft, confused-sounding plea in his voice made my heart ache. And it seemed like my mentor felt the same way.

"Well…" Crowsong hesitated for a moment, before grabbing something from her pouch. From it she grabbed a packet of cigarettes. Fake ones, supposedly, filled with a compound that burns up into a harmless vapor – props, in other words.

"We did find this. Now I can't tell how old it is, but there might've been some loiterers hanging around before we arrived." The man stared at the packet.

"Yes… yes, that must be it." He rubbed his eyes.

"I'm sorry for having you come out here for nothing. I simply… I could've sworn the light was green, and my pop used to tell me stories…" His eyes glazed over. It wasn't really his fault we were here if you'd asked me. The man hadn't called us or anything, simply sent out a message on an old, all-but-defunct neighborhood watch group that triggered an alarm on SentiNet.

As the app itself had marked it as a 'low priority, high likelihood of false alarm' due to its origin – said group was known to consist mostly of the eldest of elderlies and legacy accounts of those long since passed away – we'd nearly decided not to go. We only did because we were already close, and the night's patrol had been slow to say the least.

"It's no trouble sir," Crowsong said, her voice bringing the man back to the present.

"Better safe than sorry in cases like these, right?" The words took a second to register, but then the man nodded.

"Right, right. Damn loiterers!" The man's laugh was like a buzzing wasp.

"Back in my day we at least loitered around nightclubs and snack bars, or 24/7 convenience stores and such – not graveyards!" He laughed again as he vaguely waved away his own statement.

"But ahh, don't listen to me. Thank you for coming. It's nice to see the Sentinels in this part of town again."

"Glad to help," Crowsong said, and I added my hoot to it. The man left with a smile on his face back to his home. Once he was fully inside, and the light in his windows turned off, Crowsong turned around.

"Alright, coast is clear," she said.

"You can go now." A quintet of teenagers – two girls, three boys – emerged from behind a low brick wall next to the gate, climbing over the wrought iron fence with relative ease. They looked to be a year or two older than us. We'd first found them further back in the tree-filled graveyard, about a hundred or so meters away from the church at its heart. Supposedly, they'd come and snuck in here to film something for a school project by one of the gravestones.

Something which necessitated the use of – again, supposedly – prop cigarettes. Why they'd felt the urge to do it in the middle of the night, I had no clue. Nor did we get any clue what the old man had seen that could indicate a 'green light'. Either way, we'd decided they were ultimately harmless, if stupid, teens that didn't deserve to get the police called on them.

"Thanks," one boy grumbled reluctantly, sounding annoyed. As if it was our fault that they decided to do this! Did they have no pity for the man? I hooted and glared at him, causing him to flinch and scurry away. Our entrance to their party had been deliberately frightening, to teach them a lesson if nothing. Another boy nodded shyly, appropriately ashamed of his actions, while the third boy grinned and gave a more enthusiastic, "Thanks!" as he half skipped by us.

The first of the girls kicked casually at an imaginary rock on the pavement, but didn't say anything. The last teen paused in front of us.

"Thanks for not ratting us out," she said self-consciously.

"And sorry too, I guess." Then lastly, after some fidgeting, she asked, "Can I get a picture?" She took the phone out of her pocket and shook it a bit in askance.

"Of your crime?" Crowsong asked in disbelief, but aside from an uncomfortable squirming the other teen said nothing.

"No, you can't. Just… just go." I hooted in affirmation, spreading my wings a little to add to the command. She looked down and away, disappointed. With sagging shoulders, the last of the loiterers went, joining the rest of their pack as they marched off while jostling and laughing at each other further away they got from us.

"Stupid ass kids," Crowsong groused. I jumped from Crowsong's shoulder and shifted back.

"They're older than us."

"Then they should act like it." I rolled my eyes, then looked at the pack of cigarettes she was still holding.

"Were they really here to film something?"

"Might be, but who knows?" Crowsong said.

"All I know is these," she raised and rattled the half-empty carton, "are not just props." I knew it.

"So, what? They were just hanging out in the graveyard for no reason?" She shrugged.

"People are weird." I echoed her shrug. Fair enough.

"Glad we went though." Though I couldn't see it, I was fairly sure she was smiling underneath her mask. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. X An hour later, we arrived back at our base in The Hub.

"God, finally," Amber said tiredly, throwing off her mask and diving for the couch. I threw mine on the table and went to the fridge to grab her regular Seminnon Plus+ and myself a glass of cold water before joining her on the couch. As was her… style, Amber chugged the bottle down to the last drop in a single breathless gulping session. With a popping ahhhh, she said, "Thanks. Always feel good to pay back the debt." The debt being her stamina deficit. Not that she'd built much. Tonight was a slow night.

Aside from the 'necromancer' call, the alerts we'd gotten were either duds or too far away from us to do anything about it – and likely also duds. A kitchen fire that got resolved as quickly as the alert got out, a sighting of a potential robbery that turned out to be a false alarm, a car alarm that cascaded into a whole parking lot of cars doing the same; things like that.

Nevertheless, it was getting late, and Amber didn't have a semi-infinite – or at least, quickly-refilling – well of stamina to draw from like I did. Unfortunately for her, I'd decided to strike while the iron was hot – or in this case, while my courage was fueled by restlessness.

"Amber?"

"Hmm?"

"I think I'm an android." Near-complete silence for ten seconds. Only the sounds of a humming fridge and the rattle-buzz of the generator's motions ever so slightly rattling the walls from the other side"Sam," she said, sighing tiredly. She rose to sit and looked at me.

"What are you talking about?"

"Exactly what I said: I think I'm an android."

"What do you mean 'you think'? How can you 'think' you're an android?"

"Well, I know I'm an android." A bit of frustration crept in my voice.

"But others think I'm not."

"Others?"

"I told Millie and them-""Of course you did," she cut in. She didn't even say it sarcastically, or with that slight groan of 'how do I deal with you' that she so often carried whenever I did something she disagreed with. No, she just said it matter-of-factly, stated it in a way that told me even if I'd said nothing, she'd have already known. I frowned, but said nothing of it, continuing after a moment with, "-and I told my therapist, who urged me to take the RAT test." She looked at me questioningly.

"Shouldn't you already have taken one?"

"No, the GAC is a different-" I cut off.

"Wait, you've heard of it?" She snorted.

"You're asking me why I did my research on what my weirdo-""I'm not weird."

"-achronally displaced deskmate-slash-protégé went through?" She had me there.

"Fair," I said.

"But no, not the RAT. I did the General Authenticity Check, which is like a watered-down version of the Raadsburg Artificiality Test."

"Okay. So, why the RAT?"

"Because my therapist also doesn't believe I'm an android, and I need her to believe if I want to do something about this, ah…" I lost momentum for a second, feeling sheepish.

"About my Mad Android Syndrome."

"Mad Android Syndrome? That's what all that-" she gestured vaguely skyward, "-that stuff in winter break, with you feeling like you were 'going insane' and whatnot, was all about?" I nodded. Of course I didn't add that there was also the issue about the voices in my head trying to take over the body; that'd be one step too far. Amber leaned backwards, stretching her back over the couch's.

"Huh," Amber huh-ed, scratching her chin but saying nothing more. Not even after ten seconds of waiting.

"That's it?"

"Well, what else can I say?" She shrugged.

"You might be an android – which everyone with a lick of sense and less-than-a-lick of knowledge doubts-""It's not-""-and even if you were, you're still a hero and my friend, so who cares? It's not like you're trying to avoid your whole 'Mad Android' thing; you're literally confronting it with your therapist." I stood up and began pacing around.

"Not avoiding it anymore." I threw up my hands. How weird was it that I had to be the one to accuse myself?

"I waited months until I actually took action – even after I literally killed someone!" Amber rolled her eyes.

"Nth-Sight doesn't count. He was a Treaty-breaker responsible for dozens of deaths; he deserved to die." I stopped my pacing, twisting to stare her straight in the eyes.

"I killed him because he was trying to tell you I was an android." A spark of realization passed through her eyes and she opened her mouth briefly – but ultimately, she shook her head.

"Okay, so you panicked. And?""'And?'" I all but yelled, restraining myself right after.

"And what if I 'panicked' against someone else, huh? Someone innocent, someone that didn't break the Treaty." I took deep, shaky breaths, looking away from my mentor as bitter tone crept in.

"I nearly 'panicked' Maxxellerate into an early grave." It hadn't been me that did it, yet I was still responsible. Just like with Nth-Sight, it was another moment of panic where I'd given into my Heroic Impulse. And even if the line between me and it had been clearer with Maxxellerate than Nth-Sight, it was all, ultimately, still my doing.

"Except you didn't," Amber countered.

"I don't know exactly what happened – Darion hadn't been clear on that during my debrief with the Guardians – but whatever it was, you prevented it. And you think I don't know anything about doing something out of anger? About seeing your mentor get hurt?" I grimaced, tensing at the bite in her words. Amber continued.

"So basically: no, Sam, I don't think you're a risk, or going off the deep end any time soon." I let out a deep breath, unwinding and plopping back on the couch again. I ran my hands across my face as exhaustion hit.

"God, why do you all accept it so quickly."

"It helps that no one believes you're an android," she joked. I laughed self-deprecatingly, leaning back into the couch as well.

"Yeah. At least Millie and them did in the beginning thanks to her whole LieSpy thingy, but… Even when they did believe, they just accepted it straight away. Well, except for Millie."

"Millie didn't?"

"Not at first. Only after I shared what my therapist said did she stop… I don't know, feeling betrayed?"

"Why was she even angry in the first place?"

"She was thinking of my mom," I said.

"How I'm pretending to be her daughter, and how fucked up that actually is."

"Huh," she said with a huff of air escaping her.

"Weird." I frowned.

"How's that weird?"

"Whose mind goes straight to your mom when hearing that." Because Mom was basically her mentor, in as much as Acolytes had mentors anyway.

"Well, I did basically lead with how I still hadn't told her. Besides, she knows my mom, and Millie's and mine are good friends, so it's not that strange."

"Ah." She nodded.

"Still, it's not like that's for her to judge you on."

"Why not? I mean, it is kind of fucked up of me."

"You only believe that because you're thinking of it like you've been hiding a terrible secret or something." I rolled my eyes.

"Yeah, duh – because I am."

"Maybe now, but in the beginning?" She shook her head.

"You hid the truth from some stranger which the gov't and she herself claimed to be your mom, when you 'knew' she wasn't."

"But still-""You're a good person Sam," Amber interrupted.

"Stop trying to convince me you're not." I was stunned, finding nothing else to say. Was that what I was trying to do? No, I was merely stating the truth – or at the least what I thought to be the truth, anyhow – and claiming responsibility.

"Say, Sam," Amber began carefully after a moment.

"Do you really think you're an android?" I huffed, unamused.

"I said it, didn't I? I know I'm an android. It's everyone else that needs convincing."

"Yeah, but I mean…" She visibly mulled over her words for a second.

"Have you thought about that… that feeling being wrong?" I snorted.

"'Have I thought about it logically', I think is what you're asking."

"I didn't want to put it like that, but…" I sighed.

"I mean, yeah duh? Of course I thought about it; how could I not?" It'd had all but consumed me since the moment I heard.

"Why am I so different from other androids? Why is my maker's civil identity in the temporally displaced persons list? How could I pass the GAC if I wasn't at least somewhat related to Mom for it not to flag my genes? And if that's so, where did I even get them? Did my maker just like, create them from scratch, or had he somehow worked from a template? And if so: how? It wasn't like he was around for long.

Then there are questions like why the stories Mom told me sometimes clicked and sometimes didn't, why I accepted her so quickly as my mother and even accepted Michael as my brother. And so, so many more questions that it's- it's maddening." Amber looked uncomfortable at the deluge. And for good reason too; more than one of those things I said, if followed to the hypothetical end, had some disturbing implications.

"On the other hand: I woke up in an underground laboratory. The dates of the earthquake doesn't line up with me coming back from achronal displacement. Besides, I've seen the person that created me with my own eyes, watched him die right in front of me. I've got a thing in the back of my mind recording everything like a mental screen capture software. My powers are half-broken – you've seen it yourself with those stupid sub-powers from random inanimate objects, or with my half-functioning maker-tech forms.

Other powers I should have are completely missing, and while I don't behave like an android it's not like I behave like a normal achronally displaced either." I breathed in deeply.

"So tell me, Amber: what am I supposed to believe?"

"I… I don't know." Amber's discomfort had only grown with each word I'd said. I released the air slowly.

"Yeah. Me neither." After a brief pause, "Have you ever thought about going back?" Amber asked.

"Back?" I looked at her, confused.

"Yeah?" She blinked, returning the confusion.

"Like, to the place you were made? That laboratory you woke up in?" I blinked and opened my mouth to speak, but no retort came.

"No, I have not." And why was that? Because there was nothing for me there, clearly – but I'd also not thought of it since I'd started breaking down, started degrading as whatever 'juice' the maker had given me ran out and the Heroic Impulse likewise lost the plot. Yet if there was one place to fix the situation, it would be there. So why had I never considered it before?

"Well," I said after a moment, "maybe something for after the RAT test?" Amber looked at me searchingly, but ultimately shrugged.

"Sure. We could make a day of it."

"Yeah," I said, smiling.

"You, me, and like, a hundred policemen, researchers, heroes and whoever else the government deems necessary of visiting my birth place. A fun day for everyone!"

"Right," she groaned.

"Might as well invite your mom to come too." I laughed maybe a bit too loudly at that.