2103:08:11:13:49:45

  I sat behind an oversized table in the meeting room set aside for my ‘family reunion’. To any person passing by the room, I would look to be the picture of calm, the essence of stoicism distilled in human form. Back straight, hands on my knees and staring at the door in what was not-at-all concern.

  But while my body was completely calm, my thoughts ran a mile a minute. I had a family. I had parents- or rather, a parent. My name was the same as that of the missing person, and so was my face, my registered height and apparent age; all of it identical to a T. It was all too much to be a coincidence.

  The file Anne had shown me had contained details on the event surrounding my counterpart’s disappearance. Over seven years ago, on the 5th of April 2096, a Villain by the name of Chronomaniak and a hero by the name of Peakstar had fought in the middle of the street in the Bayside district. The former had reportedly been driven insane and begun randomly freezing people in time with his alter powers. Peakstar, a light-based caster, had been the first one to arrive at the scene.

  Before the hero could arrive, a man – Pierce Pearsson – and his daughter Samantha got caught in one such time-stop. This normally wouldn’t have been a problem, since all other victims were able to be freed after the villain had been caught, if it weren’t for the fact that one of Peakstar’s beams had gone wide and hit the pair. A bad power interaction occurred and the two disappeared in a flash of light. They’d marked them as chronologically displaced rather than dead due to the combination of time and light powers in effect, but for all intents and purposes, no one had expected them to return.

  Until yesterday, when a Samantha Pearsson woke up in a forest less than a hundred kilometers away.

  It didn’t make sense, and yet, it also made perfect sense. While creating my body, my creator – in his infinite wisdom – must’ve discovered a way to cut the design phase short. Rather than make a face, body and identity from scratch, he breached the Charm city government’s files on chronologically displaced persons and picked Samantha from the pile, then created me in her image. Not only did it save him the effort of designing me, it also came with a backstory, a government-backed identity and a convenient excuse for any oddities I’d exhibit. That one of her parents was still alive must not have bothered him, or maybe even convinced him that it added another layer to my cover.

  It was this kind of shortsighted, genius-level stupidity that gave makers their reputation.

  And now, what do I do? Was I supposed to take the place of someone’s dead daughter? I found I didn’t like that idea very much – I added it to my rapidly developing personality matrix – and my Heroic Impulse agreed, demanding I come clean and confess everything. Even if it hindered my future in heroics. After all, what kind of hero would do such a thing?

  But I could not do that. It would cost too much and run counter to the very purpose I was made for. If it didn’t land me in prison or got me an execution order outright, revealing my secret would hinder my path to heroism too much in other ways for it to be acceptable. And personally, regardless of where my creator got his ‘inspiration’ from, this form was me. I had no classical android form for me to return into, and this exterior simply felt right in a way I doubted any other would.

  I was not going to mimic someone else and spend the rest of my life as them. I refused. Which meant arguing against my Heroic Impulse.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  It wanted me to be good, to use my powers for good, to stop villains and criminals, and improve the lives of people as best I could. It didn’t tell me I had to be a genuine, legally distinct, part-of-law-enforcement kind of hero, only to be a hero in the regular sense of the word. I could be an independent, a vigilante, even a professional or a rogue so long as I kept to the right moral code. And so long as that moral code contributed to being a force for good in the world, be it the regular world or the world of the masked, then I was being a hero regardless of other people’s definitions.

  Aside from it being morally dubious, there was nothing outright contradictory in pretending to be someone’s dead daughter while also being a hero. The good I could do as a free agent would be far greater than if my secret came out. I would always have to be on the run, always hiding, shifting shapes and wearing other people’s faces to hide from other heroes, while also ending up being labelled a villain. What good could I possibly do under those circumstances?

  And that’s saying nothing on how little good I could do if I was, you know, dead.

  Having properly gaslit myself into believing pretending being someone’s missing daughter was a good thing, the universe deemed now was a good time. Anne appeared in the doorway, turned toward the side and ushered someone else in.

  My mother-to-be: Kati Pearsson.

  The similarities between us were obvious. Sure, her hair was shorter than mine, not even long enough to reach her shoulders, but they were the same dark black. Though she lacked my abundance of freckles and my face was more rounded compared to her heart-shaped one, our eyes were the same in both shape and shade of green. Our skin tone was practically the same pale pink, and our nose and ears looked similar enough to be copies as well.

  The woman stared at me in silence, slack-jawed and wide-eyed for a moment. Stunned, the woman’s bag slipped from her shoulder and fell to the ground with a dull thud. Seeing her remain unresponsive, I decided to approach the woman. I stood up from my chair and walked from behind the table, approaching the woman slowly and carefully. But before I could so much as get close to her, the woman woke up from her dazed state and ran toward me like a cat toward a mouse.

  Startled by the sudden movement, I prepared myself for combat, fearing the worst. But the woman was too quick; before I could process that my combat routines were as incomplete as the rest of me, the woman had already caught and was busy crushing me between her arms.

  “Ohthankgod!” my mother-to-be sobbed, her grip growing increasingly tight as I felt her body start shaking. “My baby! I thought-! I thought-!” was all she could say before I felt her grip just as suddenly begin to lose its strength.

  Instinctively, I wrapped my arms around her waist in an effort to stop her from dropping. It was just in time for me to catch her, but my hold was awkward and she began to slowly slip. Thankfully, Anne seemed to have caught onto what was happening, since she was suddenly behind my mother with a chair. As gently as I could – which wasn’t very – I lowered Kati into the seat.

  She looked as if her face was drained of all blood, like she was about to pass out. Her eyes were bloodshot, watery and half-closed, with heavy tears streaming down her face. Then, her chest started heaving up and down rapidly and at random intervals. What was happening?

  Again, Anne knew just what to do. She knelt down and guided my namesake’s mother through a similar routine that Evelyn had done to me in the helicopter: head down, deep breaths, comforting pats on the back and a steady stream of vocal reassurance. In the meantime, I sat back down in my seat and waited.

  Color slowly started coming back to Kati’s face – perhaps even too much color; she’d gone from pale white to bright red. Still, her breath seemed to deepen and her previously slack body returned to her control. It took maybe half a minute before my counterpart’s mother looked at me again. They looked at me in stunned disbelief, which was better than the near-crazed panic they had before.

  “It’s real. You’re real,” she whispered under her breath. “I thought I’d…” She trailed off, though her eyes kept lingering on my own. It was somewhat uncomfortable, but I couldn’t understand as to why, so I couldn’t add it to the matrix. It wasn’t the eye contact itself; I’d found no such issues with other people. Was it guilt?

  Anne hovered worriedly, but as nothing continued to happen, she deemed Kati fit enough. “Are you going to be alright?” she asked.

  Kati shook herself out of her stupor. “Yes!” She said, a bit too loudly. She then scrapped her throat and turned to look at Anne. “Yes, I’m good now, thank you.” She seemed to hesitate on what to say next, looking at Anne awkwardly.

  Anne, though, seemed to pick up on what my would-be mother wanted to ask. “Want me to leave you two alone?” My mother responded with a nod and another thank you. Anne’s eyes then turned to me, asking the same without speaking the words.

  I shrugged in response, but when that didn’t feel right, reconsidered and nodded instead. I thought I wouldn’t care, but surprisingly, I found I did.

  Anne left the meeting room and closed the door on her way out, leaving the two of us by ourselves.