Chương 97: 6.18 How many Samanthas does it take to change a lightbulb?

2104: 03: 25: 15: 29: 59 The bell rang and Geography class ended, and with it the school day. In an instant, the class went from arguably quiet to pandemonium. Every student started talking, or began packing their bags, or, in the case of some, sprinting for the exit as if the bell ringing was the bang! of a starting pistol.

"And remember," Mister Korlitz shouted over the hubbub, "your essays need to be submitted before midnight the oncoming Sunday!" I'd nearly finished mine already, one on Cascadian plate tectonics. I'd wanted to do a piece on the environmental effects of temporally induced earthquakes, for obvious reasons. But Mister Korlitz, with a look of piteous understanding, had said it was too complicated a topic for me. So basic plate tectonics it was.

After a simple goodbye to Amber, I made my way to the front of the class where Millie, Saga and Jolie sat. Right as I was about to speak, Millie proved to be the quicker of us two.

"Sooooo," Millie began, "time for the mall?" She meant the Fairfield Acres shopping center in Northside, not the Bayside Beehive; that one was too far. It was our usual hangout for the four of us after school. And it was the exact thing I wanted to discuss.

"Sorry. Can't," I said, doing my best to keep level – didn't want to show the nerves.

"What? Why not?" she asked.

"C'mon, I know it's on-route to your therapy." Indeed. We'd hung out on Tuesday's after school plenty of times before.

"Take a guess," Jolie said.

"It's obviously the cast." I nodded.

"Mom's been all worries since, and now she wants to drive me to therapy. So I need to go back home, wait there, and then get to therapy." I put an annoyed huff to the words in order to sell it better, but the truth was that Mom wasn't worried about it – not anymore, at least. Not after being told my ribs and torn muscles were on the mend and the brain injury was explained away as a consequence of overusing of my powers. Truth was, Mom wasn't planning to drive me to therapy at all.

I had other reasons for not wanting to hang out. Millie's eyes narrowed at my words. While I knew she didn't use her powers off-duty, she had obtained a knack for whether someone was telling the truth or not. That, and I doubted I was that skilled a liar. Whether she was using her powers or not, I stared her directly in the eyes and beamed a plea of understanding straight into her head. It worked.

"Fine, fine," Millie said. And right as Amber walked past to head out, she struck, grabbing her by the arm.

"We'll just take Amber with us then. You know, as a replacement."

"The hell you are," Amber responded, tearing her limb free.

"I've got things planned for today anyway." The thing planned likely being hanging around at our base, doing a whole lot of nothing.

"Men plan and God laughs," Millie said, following which she let out a slow and hollow, "Ha. Ha."

"Ha. Ha," Jolie echoed. Saga stood and laid a hand on Amber's shoulder.

"Ha. Ha." Amber tsked, but there was no real heat in it.

"Fine," she snobbishly said, brushing Saga's hand off her shoulder.

"I'll just reschedule my whole itinerary for you then." She shot me a quick, inquisitive glance; had she caught onto the lie as well? The rest of the group let out a deadpan whoop. I said my goodbyes, left the school and made my way onto the bus.

As it drove, I idly watched the cityscape; the townhouses, the stores and businesses; the cars, trucks, trams, and motorcycles; the citizens, pedestrians of all stripes, marching up and down and side-by-side on the sidewalk; and the bicycles, both electric and analogue, racing and city-bikes; all doing their best to make their way through traffic, work and live their best lives.

Under normal circumstances, watching the city like this would've calmed me down, given me some peace of mind regardless of my internal struggles. Be it as a crow or a regular person, there was something about the hustle and bustle of people moving, working, buying, selling, eating, drinking, talking, simply being that often settled my nerves whenever they needed settling – at least for a time. It was a rare occasion where I needed it, but today was such a one, as had the previous three.

But where it worked then, it didn't now. I watched them all pass me, trying to keep their image in my head to distract me – nothing stuck. My affected relaxedness; my laid-back, sinking-in-the-seat and basking-in-the-soft-spring-sun hid an increasingly-heavy pounding heart, and an overactive mind. No, this Tuesday I couldn't escape my own thoughts, because today was important. I would be telling my therapist I was an android.

After reflecting on our close brush with death – a resurrectable one or not – I'd decided I needed to get it over with. That disaster of a fight was ultimately caused by my solo outing so long ago, which itself had been born from a lack of easy progress on finding a good way to combat Mad Android Syndrome – that is, a good way without admitting I was an android. But the time for stubborn refusal was over.

It'd been long ago that the Heroic Impulse had crept into my masked life, but still the depth of control the Heroic Impulse had shown had spooked me. While my mind had still been half-separate from it during the confrontation with Motorgang – and thank God for that or Maxxellerate would've been dead by my hands – control over my body had been lost completely. It was only after, when the window of opportunity had finally passed, that the Heroic Impulse felt it was done and returned control to me.

But how could I trust that it'd do the same in the future? Yet that wasn't all. Not only had Mad Android Syndrome infiltrated my masked life through affecting my decision making and degrading my Heroic Impulse, it was on the verge of creeping into my personal life too. If it hadn't been for the fact that it'd happened late at night, the switch to pseudo-Sam would've been more of a disaster than it already was. I didn't dare to imagine what would've happened if it'd occurred during the birthday itself.

I was losing control. The only 'bright spot' in my situation for these past few days was the method of self-termination I'd learned from the Heroic Impulse. But, you know, I'd rather not die if I could help it. Still, I needed to do something about my condition now, before it could do something about me, because if that happened the fallout wouldn't just be limited to me. It'd be my friends, my family, and, depending on how Mad I got, Charm in general.

So, yes, I couldn't afford to be stubborn and keep stalling anymore. And after my phone call with Michael, my decision was clear: I called myself a hero, now I should start acting like one. And whether she wanted to or not, talking to Marianne (and I was sorry about that) would be my first step. I didn't know what to expect from talking to Marianne, nor even what I was hoping to get out of it.

Mad Android Syndrome wasn't curable; how could it be, when it wasn't even a real disease but a consequence of maker-built intelligent machines losing their maker? Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. I tried finding out more about my situation, what would happen to me and how androids and their Madness functioned. And not just these past few days either, but the past weeks and months I'd tried to see if there'd been known cases similar to mine.

I found both a lot and not nearly enough. An android specialization – that is, humanoid machinery – was rare enough already for a maker to have. Rarer still was the maker capable of creating something intelligent enough to be able to function wholly by itself, and all but unheard of were those capable of creating superpowered androids with the kind of emotional and logical reasoning close to me.

Let alone one that both lasted long enough without their maker, and had the ethical framework necessary to turn themselves in once things began spiraling. In fact, I hadn't found a single android that matched my description. Most of the time the onset of Mad Android syndrome was measured in days. Definitely not months. If I put my situation as the average of a normal distribution, then I might very well be the first android of my kind to last long enough to convince themselves to surrender.

And that's without even counting for the fact that it was rare for an android of my type to be so heroically inclined at all. In fact, all three android types – the crude, mass-produced, legally-distinct robotic androids; the 'infiltrator', stand-alone-but-not-strictly-autonomous intelligent ones; and the fully intelligent (or sapient) ones like me, superpowered or not – were classically considered villainous.

It was annoying, but not too strange when one considered that all androids – or similar maker-made sapient machines, but those usually lacked the uncanny valley effect androids (especially fleshy ones) could have – were either thoroughly chained to their nearly-always-villainous maker's powers, or rapidly spiraling into unhinged, aggressive behavior. There was little people could use to convince themselves that the next android they heard of could be a hero. This in and of itself created a vicious cycle.

The bad reputation of such androids meant that heroes generally avoided making them if they could, resulting in villains being overrepresented and worsening the image of androids further. Add to that the long list of Dark Age villains using robotic armies to wage war, android clones to replace world leaders, and fleshy 'golems' to infiltrate enemy organizations, and it wasn't difficult to see why there was an oversaturation of the 'evil android' trope in the world's collective consciousness.

Even my own type fell in this trap. We were incredibly rare, and often used – or at least known to have been used – by villains to bolster their forces and fight against heroes. Not with them. Cases like mine were simply too rare to provide a strong enough counterforce to the 'bad android' narrative.

While I lacked an exhaustive list of all heroes and villains in the world, there were seven heroes in total I knew of that actively used androids in their heroics, and theirs were all clearly made of metal – not at all flesh-and-bone like I was. They were all part of either the Atmospheric Guard, the Arctic or Antarctic Authorates, or cycled between the naval watches. In short, kept as far away from people as possible.

Known villains were even less, numbering only two – one in the all-but-empty tundra's of north Central Eurasia, and the other alleged to be hiding underneath the Himalayas somewhere. Not because they were fewer, but because they hid very, very well, or didn't last. The complete lack of androids independent, intelligent and long-lasting enough to become a part of society likewise made the legal side of things opaque.

There were some provisions made for us due to being included in Malcator's Unification of the Rights of Citizens – whatever else might be said of him, Malcator had never been discriminatory against independently sapient creations – and as such, I was technically a wholly legal person with all the rights that entailed. But in practice?

Policy on how to deal with a new-to-this-world android could best be described as 'go there and see how it goes', with the 'how it goes' part often ending at best in the android's capture, and much more often their death. Killing an android – or 'destroying' one, rather – did not carry the same weight as killing another person despite our technical legal rights. Part of the problem was that, again, androids didn't last long without their makers, and were all but wholly obedient to them.

As such, we were firstly considered an extension of the maker – as any powered creation, like Hexkey's drones or Friend-of-Fiends' devils, was – and secondly as a potential Mad Android. It wasn't like I couldn't see why. I'd felt Mad Android Syndrome first hand, and what the Heroic Impulse was capable of doing as it degraded further and further. Still, to see not a single instance of someone, hero or otherwise, being charged, indicted or even scrutinized for the destruction of an android; it didn't bode well.

Again, part of the problem, or so I figured, was that androids degraded too rapidly. I myself had to take months and experience multiple crises to finally decide to speak to my therapist, and even that was still more than a few steps removed from actually turning myself in. It was a span of time most androids didn't have. I had no precedent, nothing by which I could attempt to figure out what was about to happen to me. Hence my fear for today's session.

The bus arrived at my stop and I walked the rest of the way home. Mom was at work, so I had the house to myself – for a whole twenty minutes until I had to leave again. I threw my bag into my room and went downstairs again, lying on the couch to continue worrying about the prospective outcome of my session with Marianne. For that was the unpredictable element: Marianne. Laws surrounding therapy was itself a legal minefield.

Add to that the laws surrounding masked, her knowing my and even my mother's identity, and it seemed highly unlikely for her to do something like call the Guardians. And even if she did, what then? An arrest? Again, there was nothing illegal about being an android. Yet simultaneously, the few things I'd found about what happened to androids after their maker died did not make me feel secure in my decision to tell her.

My legal rights, given seemingly incidentally fifty years ago by the great conqueror himself, did not stand well against years and years of history and precedent. And that's to say nothing about what comes after. What would happen if Mom found out, or my friends found out, or Michael- well, Michael was less of a concern now that he was being shipped overseas, but the point stood. What would they think of me lying for so long about who I was? That more than anything filled me with dread.

Even more than the Impulse deciding to pull the trigger and terminate me, or taking control over me completely. The only thing I feared more was becoming a Mad Android in full. X Time spent at home and waiting to go to therapy hadn't calmed my nerves any, and the time spent waiting in the room before Marianne's office had done the exact opposite.

I could practically feel it, the sweat pooling beneath my skin ready to manifest in either a cold outpour of sweat right as the executioner's axe fell, or a soothing burst after tension was released – albeit quite a disgusting release. Marianne peaked around the corner of her office door.

"Sam?" She looked at me with slightly raised eyebrows. Normally, I would've just knocked-and-entered the moment I arrived, and the fact I hadn't seemed like a cause for worry to her. Still, besides the raised eyebrows, all she did was smile and say, "Come in. Tea?" I shook my head – another break from the pattern – but I did stand and made to enter her office, heart beating quicker with every step. The office looked as clean and inviting as always, yet somehow smaller than I remembered.

On the table, in front of where I usually sat on the couch, a steaming cup of tea was already waiting for me. Marianne hadn't foreseen me breaking the pattern. As I sat down, I took a sip from it. Marianne, already cross-legged in her seat, didn't comment on it.

"How are you today, Sam?" I placed the cup back down, my shakiness causing it to rattle softly against the cork of the coaster.

"Not too great," I admitted. Marianne hummed affirmatively, nodded, but left the floor open. I inhaled once, deeply, then began with the opening I'd prepared.

"I got into a fight last Saturday – it went poorly. We- my mentor and I, that is, we wound up in the hospital after getting ambushed by a group of masked from Motorgang: Motor Spirit, Mangine of Destruction, Maxxellerate, Husk Carl and Kinetic Drive." I only found out the newest member's full name after the fight.

"That's a lot of masked for two junior vigilantes, isn't it?" I turned my head side to side.

"Depends. I think they were expecting more – you know about my mentor and I joining the Sentinels?" She nodded.

"Well, I think they were expecting at least one adult to be with us. And since it is an ambush, well, obviously they would seek to outnumber us." She hummed again.

"It didn't go well?" A mirthless chuckle escaped me.

"A few broken ribs, a couple of lost forms. My mentor got the worst of it, yet she was the one who was walking out of the hospital the day after – and quite happily too. Meanwhile, I had to stay for three whole days, run the whole gamut of tests all for them to say that it was nothing." Another hum. No words. I ran a hand through my hair, fixing it tighter while the silence grew strenuous. More serious, I added, "We nearly died." She didn't react visibly. It wouldn't surprise me if she'd read something about it.

Aside from the Sentinels, the Guardians had published a small bulletin about Darion and Darius' involvement, and word had spread from there.

"That would shake anyone," Marianne said.

"No. It's not that." A shiver ran through me, remembering the sight of Amber lying there, being beaten by Maxxellerate.

"Okay, it's not just that. It's what came with it- what happened during, I mean." A pause.

"And what led up to it too." Marianne didn't move.

"Remember what I told you about? About the boat on Crater Lake? How the-" I gestured at my head, "-the thoughts I had and how they – or how some, at least – didn't feel like mine?" She nodded.

"Well, I also told you about the argument with my brother, and how I got a headache similar to then." She'd recommended I see a doctor then, but I'd refused.

"But what I didn't tell you was I got similar thoughts back then. Similar in type, I mean – not content; that was different. And then I- I didn't tell you this one, but I had it another time more recently, about a week ago on the 17 th, right after Millie's birthday party. I haven't told you that one, right?" She nodded again, bearing an expression of intense concentration.

"That one was different too, but the one with my brother was a- the colder one, the exploitative one I think I called it last time? Then after Millie's party it was the- the emotional one, except neither I nor she were really emotional at the time, and during the fight it was the third one again and-" She held up a hand, interrupting my continuously worsening rambling.

"Deep breaths, Samantha." I closed my mouth and did as asked, the focus it required to control my breathing lowering my heartbeat. Slightly, very slightly, I felt myself relax a bit.

"Good, thank you. I'm sorry, I couldn't keep up. What were you…?" she trailed off for a moment.

"No, let's try this instead; can you, in as few words as possible, tell me what exactly you want to discuss? See it as… a framework for the conversation, one that would help me connect the dots." Yes. It was, unfortunately, extremely easy to sum it up in a few words. Just incredibly difficult to do. Nevertheless, I nodded.

"I'm-" My heartbeat spiked, pumping adrenaline and fear through my veins; the uttering of that single word stretching time; my muscles tensing; sweat pouring out preemptively, without yet knowing whether to be cold and sickly or cold and relieving; my mouth drying in an instant as my tongue felt like lead and my throat constricted painfully. Two sets of eyes, invisible yet omnipresent, judging and hovering and pressing down on my psyche, weighed my tongue. But I pushed through.

"-an android." At last, sweet release. And I wasn't dead yet, so that was a plus. But now came a whole different kind of tension. At my words, Marianne tensed slightly, followed by even slighter movement. A finger itching to rise and tap her chin, a foot twitching as if wanting to go up and down, a twitch running across her lips as it failed to open, and a short spasm of the eyebrows wishing to furrow. But she sat stock-still. Only her narrowing eyes betrayed something of the turmoil within.

As she had yet to scream, it was already better than the worst-case scenario I'd imagined. Then her body was in motion again. Her brows furrowed as her head tilted questioningly. She leaned forward slightly, uncrossing her legs and deepening her stare right into my eyes. She lowered her tablet, the stylus clicking in place on the magnetic strip attached to its cover. The whole weight of her attention on me, she opened her mouth.

"Sam." My whole body tensed like it never had before. I had said my final words, one way or another, as Samantha Pearsson, the achronally displaced missing daughter of Kati Pearsson, and these would be the first words I heard as Samantha Pearsson, the android occupying her place.

"You're not an android." Or perhaps not.