Arc 9 | Chapter 407: Thoughts that Leak and Vanish
Mikhail tried not to glare at the notifications bouncing around the corner of his Censor, he really did. He just couldn’t not glare at them.
It was always just so frustrating, this reality that Halen had been able to program the intricate function that Coral used to translate all her emotional readings of people into words that could then be transmitted to everyone with its companion function, while nothing could be done to help him with, well, anything.
Dozens of readings shuddered through his mind as he, Coral, and Polianna descended the long trail of stairs into the Falmíer train station. They could have taken an elevator down, but Coral had wanted to get as many readings as she could before they actually got to the papers checkpoint—papers they’d fortunately had the sense to grab before they left the Penns. Without them, Polianna might have still be able to get a few of them through the diplomatic checkpoint. Even she wouldn’t have been able to get them all of them through. So, they were all carrying around the paper passports and various other physical documents most of their class had for their rare excursion into the Free Colonies. Such trips weren’t exactly common, and Seer’ik’tine had long been the sort of place where being asked for any documentation was rare unless you were causing problems.
Their entire class was known for causing problems. So, whenever they went to Seer’ik’tine, they brought their papers. That was good—it meant they’d all been able to find their paperwork quickly, although Mikhail didn’t really understand what the rush was. It was Emilia, and Emilia could take care of herself. If an extra five minutes ended up being the difference between her surviving or suffering some grievous injury in a fight they were too late to help in, he didn’t really think they would be much help.
Emilia was the best of them. Better than Halen or Andre, who were otherwise the best. More brutal than Samina or Levi or Baylor, even if she hid it all behind smiles and giggles.
If Emilia couldn’t do it, there was no way any of the rest of them could—not that he wouldn’t try! If any of his friends needed him, Mikhail would, of course, try to help them! Other people in their group… he wasn’t so sure…
Eyes flicking to Polianna as she huffed and gently complained about stairs, her overly plump body doing her no favours when it came to endurance, Mikhail wondered if she would try to help their friends, no matter what. They weren’t really Polianna’s friends, he supposed. While they had technically grown up together, he didn’t know Coral’s girlfriend well. Some people, like Leerin, he knew would take off the moment things got too rough—it was why he was surprised Halen had even let her come, although he had long ago learned that talking about how bad a friend Leerin was one on the list of things he shouldn’t talk about.
Other things on that list included saying sexual things about people—he didn’t really care what Codeth said, sex jokes were never okay—as were Polianna’s weight struggles and her ever-changing appetite—although he also knew he was supposed to tell someone like Coral or Halen or Taelor or Emilia if it seemed she was eating too much or too little. That was the thing with Polianna: she wasn’t part of their class, and she wasn’t friends with any of them. Really, he didn’t think she liked anyone except Coral. Still, if she was struggling, their class would help her because that’s just how they were.
They were people who would always help everyone else. Mikhail had learned that early, back when Emilia had stood up to Simeon’s parents and their teachers: they didn’t give up, they didn’t leave people to suffer, they were nice and caring. There were some times when it didn’t work out, like with Bryce. Mikhail knew a few people in their class had still thought about her, until the moment they graduated, probably still did now, months later. How could they not think of this girl who was caught in her parents’ machinations to gain more influence. If one day she turned around and wanted help getting away from her parents, Mikhail knew they would help, the same way he knew that, one day, they might be left stealing away Coral and Simeon. It wouldn’t matter that it would make them criminals—kidnappers. They would do it.
In a way, Mikhail knew he was lucky that he didn’t have a form of Dyadism. He would never be forced to comply with his parents’ demands that he be hidden away under archaic Dyad Containment Laws. Mikhail knew his parents didn’t love him. They were a lot like BJ’s: people who wished he would just be quiet and disappear. Unlike BJ, though, Mikhail knew he would have problems trying to go out into the world. If he left home today, trying to find a job, he knew it wouldn’t work. Censors were used too much in jobs, and his Censor didn’t like his brain. So, how was he supposed to get a job when he couldn’t use half the technology that would be needed for a job? Maybe it would get better as he got older—not because he would change, but because Emilia or Halen would figure out a way to connect his Censor and brain even a bit more.
Somehow, Mikhail didn’t think they would find anything—they had decades of searching and experimentation between them, after all. Still, despite knowing he would struggle out in the world, he was happy that he would never be like Coral or Simeon, with terrible parents threatening to lock them into their childhood bedrooms with no hope of escape. They would claim their Dyad children would be a burden on Baalphorian society—claim they needed to be treated like children in need of constant parenting for the rest of their life. The government wouldn’t bother checking if they were lying, so, their class would break them out—get them somewhere safe. Mikhail could do that—he didn’t really care about breaking stupid laws, another thing he shouldn’t talk about, but instead hold close in his heart.
Mikhail’s eyes continued boring into Polianna’s back, a message from Coral popping up, asking if he was okay. At least she hadn’t forwarded her reading of his own feelings to him. It was annoying enough when he couldn’t understand his own feelings, his thoughts slipping about and never quite completing themselves and leaving him with the perpetual feeling of confusion because there had been a conclusion, lingering within the corner of his mind, and he had been pulling it towards him with threads of connections. Then, a thread would snap, another voice or thought would interrupt him, and it would be gone.
Poof.
Nothing left but the feeling of confusion. Mikhail didn’t need to know he was confused, and he definitely didn’t need to know what sort of feeling he had been having before the confusion—before his thoughts popped and vanished into the aether.
Sending back a reply that he was fine, he instead focused on going over Coral’s readings of the people in the station. It was his job to read them, although he knew Halen and Taelor and probably Emilia—it depended on what she was doing and how much attention she could spare—were reading them as well. Mikhail was also supposed to read them. While no one would say they wanted him to read them because he was stupid, he knew that was the case, a least a little.
Where the others would be dragging each item that Coral read together to create a giant puzzle of connections, Mikhail couldn’t do that. He could try, his brain burning as he tried to hold on to each slip of information, but just like his thoughts shimmered away, so would those connections, no function on his side able to connect with his brain well enough to catalogue it all for him so he wouldn’t lose track. Instead, he was left with his brain alone to remember it all. No matter how hard he tried, eventually, every thought and feeling would vanish, leaving him only with that dim sense of confusion that had been his lifelong companion.
So, he would look at each feeling and take it for what it was: a single instance of humanity within a jumble of connections. Two people were talking, one was upset. It was easy to assume, without more information, that one person was saying something that was upsetting the other. It didn’t have to be that way, and when looked at individually, Mikhail could create his own stories—could take in the scope of human emotions and find the smallest sliver of something that didn’t belong. One person was upset, and without knowing they were talking to someone, what would he think they were upset about? Within isolation, what was happening inside them and why? What were all the options? All the important bits in this single instance of humanity, rather than the maze that was the interconnectedness of why humans thought and felt what they did?
It wasn’t the first time he’d done this, he and Coral teaming up when their class played at war to determine who had the secret weapon they needed to disable or steal. Everyone would be throwing out emotions to mess with her abilities, so he would dig through them for her. They were often quite successful, although it was always harder when the triplets were actively messing with her, primed as they were to be anything and anyone for a blink of time.
Aside from the clones, Mikhail thought their class might be the only group on the continent capable of purposefully messing with and EEC Dyad’s readings, thanks to all those silly games. Their prank wars had helped as well, while some of them had become excellent at purposefully riling up their emotions so she could feel them—learn to catalogue them. While he thought they all hoped they’d never need to avoid being read by an EEC Dyad—they were rather scary, with their ability to walk through a crowd and know so much about everyone their abilities touched—he knew they would do quite well… as long as the person relied on their Excess Empathy to give them an edge. Having seen how powerful Coral could be against people who didn’t know how to block her—or weren’t trying to, as they sometimes did in their games—Mikhail doubted anyone with Excess Empathy Levels wouldn’t use their abilities as much as possible.
That ability to read everyone was currently a lot, however. There were thousands of people within the station, and while Coral’s abilities couldn’t quite reach all of them, she was reaching a lot. Mikhail was doing his best to go through each reading, but they were quickly backlogging, especially since it wasn’t like she received only a single reading for each person.
Human emotions were always fluctuating, and while Mikhail knew they didn’t shift so much second to second—not unless something big happened—it was still a lot, and he didn’t want to miss anything.
It would not be good if he missed something and someone got hurt—especially not Coral because he liked Coral. That meant Polianna couldn’t be hurt either, as Coral liked Polianna—maybe even loved her. They’d been together a few years, and Mikhail wasn’t sure how long it took to love someone. Halen had once said it was painfully fast and horrifically slow all at once. He had claimed it was a slow building thing, but only when looked back on, when the glow of love had already surrounded you. Before that, he said, it was just existing and finding your eyes straying to the person aggravatingly often. Codeth had laughed at him so hard he had fallen off the wall they had been sitting on. It was at the beach, so he had been fine, just rolling over and laughing more while Halen threw balls of water pulled from the aether at him. It had been hot that day, so Mikhail didn’t think Halen’s attempt to punish Codeth for laughing had worked well.
Mikhail… wasn’t really sure why Codeth had laughed. Didn’t he see how much Halen loved Emilia?
Ah! That was another thing he wasn't supposed to talk about: when people loved each other. It was okay if the other person knew and accepted their love; it wasn’t okay if one person didn’t know, or had said they didn’t love the other person back. That one he had learned young. His mom didn’t like being reminded that he loved her because she didn’t love him back. Valor had once said it might be because he was a little different, and some parents didn’t know how to deal with their child not being what they had expected them to be. Valor had also added that people shouldn’t have expectations for their children and been very forceful about making sure Mikhail knew that, which he did. Mikhail also knew that any children he had—if he found someone to have them with—would be loved no matter what. The clones couldn’t have biological children, but Mikhail was sure that Valor would raise any children under his care—whether children Emilia had or young clones—well too.
Valor was smart and would make a good parent, but Mikhail didn’t think him being different was the reason his mom didn’t return his love. Even when he’d been really small, nothing really wrong with him yet, he didn’t think his mother had loved him. Instead, she was just sad and going through the motions, and until Emilia had found the smallest thing wrong in his DNA, he had assumed that maybe he was wrong because his mom hadn’t been a good mom. She’d tried and failed, and that was probably why she didn’t like that he loved her: she knew she didn’t deserve his love and understanding, just as much as she knew it was wrong that she couldn’t love him back—knew that some maternal part of her was broken. Coral had once told him that his mom was always frustrated when around him, but it wasn’t something aimed at him; instead, she was frustrated with herself and her inability to be a good mom.
So, he wouldn’t hold his mom’s trouble with being a good, loving mom against her—she hated herself enough for that. He’d just keep loving her, quietly from a distance because he knew she was trying to best. Her best just wasn’t working—wasn’t good enough for her or society or him.
He wouldn’t talk about how much Halen loved Emilia either, but he would reprimand Codeth for laughing about that love and making sex jokes about them—that was bad no matter what, but it was especially bad because Halen loved Emilia, and it was so much worse because Emilia was a silverstrain. Codeth wasn’t making sex jokes because of that, though! If he had been, Mikhail would have been actually upset, not just gently reprimanding!
Emilia was too nice. She didn’t deserve to be joked about for anything, especially not her genetics!
It was with that thought lingering in his mind that Mikhail caught it: a sliver of a reading that told him someone had been making sex jokes about a silverstrain, hidden within the mess of readings. From there, it wasn’t hard to pull up connected strands from the database Taelor and Halen—and to a lesser extent Emilia, as she had apparently needed to find a bathroom, resulting in accidentally starting an argument with her travel companions which had distracted her from Coral’s readings—had been dutifully cataloguing all of the readings into for them, organizing the function’s default cataloguing with the care only human minds could accomplish.
A single thread of emotion, tugged, until information lay piled through their mind and even Mikhail knew: this was bad.