Chapter 44: Hollow
The next morning, it took longer for Zero to gather his shattered mind into a cohesive person. He spent a long time staring into nothingness before finally speaking:
'When I started showing symptoms, the Generations Program was already losing its battle to the Silent Genocide. There was a demand to solve the problem, and all we have achieved -- more than anyone in history had -- was to define the problem itself. A breathtaking breakthrough, and yet a failure in the eyes of the weak-minded majority. We negotiated, we pleaded, we begged, but no one listened. The paradigm was too old and too vast to shift. They refused to change to give us more time.'
He sighed heavily.
'I wasn't the first of the Second Generation to succumb to the disease. But when I did, it became apparent that we needed to act, while we still had time. And there wasn't much time left. Diplomacy had failed to produce results, and that left us with only one choice. Do you understand what that choice was?'
Mickey grinned and opened his mouth to say something, but I interrupted him.
'That's great, Zero. Everything you told us is mind-boggling, and grand, and incredible. But you still haven't told me what happened to my mother, and now it feels like you're dodging the question.'
He looked at me, shadows under his eyes.
'So before you continue your fascinating story, you're going to answer it. You're going to answer it now.'
Zero straightened in his chair, looked away, then back at me.
'Alright, Matthew. That's fair. I wanted you two to understand the... the why of what we did at the Farm, before telling you what really happened. First of all... first of all, you need to understand that everyone we used in our trials was a volunteer, your mother included. It might be hard to believe that we went out of our way to make sure that every subject was there of his own free will, but we did. Every wraith at the Farm knows that they're on their way to death, and you'd be surprised how many of them were eager to give that last journey meaning. And what greater meaning there could be than making sure that their children, possibly, won't need to walk that path themselves?'
I imagined my mother as she was the last time I've seen her. How could she give consent to these experiments, half-mad and disoriented? Was it true, or just a pretty fairy-tale Zero spun for my sake -- or his own?