2103:11:12:05:47:49

  I decided to get up out of bed early.

  Normally, I would stay up and do whatever (review memcordings, take notes and mess around on the computer for the majority of it) until around 5:00. Then, I would go lie in bed in case Mom took an early peek at me when she woke up or got home late, generate a random time between 7:00 and 7:30 and rise then. Not that she ever peeked into my room while I was ‘asleep’, but I was led to believe that parents sometimes just did that, albeit mostly to much younger children.

  Today, I found myself too restless and annoyed to continue the routine. My nightly memcording integration was still incomplete because of this, but reviewing them was part of the problem. I’d made a mistake yesterday, a massive and nearly- No, not nearly, an actual life-ending one. If it weren’t for the fact of that undiscovered facet of my powers, I would’ve died.

  And all because I couldn’t let go of my desire to capture Darkstar. All because while I might know the Treaty, I hadn’t listened to what it meant for me.

  Reviewing that mistake over and over again to incorporate and learn from it didn’t help my mood. Though for better or worse, Crowsong’s many, many recriminations and lectures after the fact made sure I incorporated the lesson even without the usual thorough review.

  At least there was an obvious bright side to all this. The new aspect of my power was great, and had helped smooth out Crowsong’s irritation as we delved deeper and deeper into figuring out how to exploit it. Already I had gained multiple crow and rat forms to use as sacrifice and backup… although it also meant I had to go through the process of mastering each form over and over again. A resurrection of my previous woes of spending days mastering many forms, of days spend in dizzy misery and nausea, of-

  I was overexaggerating. Gaining extra forms of the same animal wasn’t nearly as bad as starting one from scratch.

  Didn’t mean it wasn’t a bother, though.

  I sighed as I went downstairs, planning to go watch a movie on my own. It was part of the homework given to me by my therapist, along with a variety of other stuff like watching shows, reading books, listening to music and just in general trying out new things.

  Technically it was all voluntary, but what would be the point of not doing them? It aligned with my goal of developing my personality further. Finding hobbies and stuff I liked doing, developing interests specific to me was supposed to be a part of that.

  Even if I didn’t quite get it yet.

  For today, I’d picked Doom Drums, an award-winning musical about a couple fleeing the Yucatan during Quetzalcoatl’s rampage in the early 2010s. Aside from having good music and a great story, it was supposed to be an impressively historically accurate view of the masked held responsible for starting the Dark Age.

  It was a part of history I was interested in further understanding, and since Miss Sims had yet to arrive at the part of history where superpowered and masked became a known fact, I decided I might as well get a head start.

  Also, it was a musical, so maybe Jolie had seen it? People who like music like musicals, right?

  I lay down on the couch, searched for the movie on FlickTsar and tapped-

  Rattling keys, a clicking lock, and the creaking of the front door slowly being pushed interrupted my process.

  Michael entered the house, carrying a large sports bag and an additional coat besides the one he was wearing over his arm. He looked tired and noticeably paler than the day before. Whatever he’d been doing, he must not have slept much.

  He sighed as he pulled the key from the lock, muttering something as he turned around… and froze in surprise upon seeing me lying on the couch and staring up at him.

  “You’re up early,” Michael said.

  I sat up. “And you’re back late.”

  Thinking about it, I hadn’t heard him enter the house from when I came home at around 2:00 AM till now, but I had just assumed he’d already been home when I came back.

  “My, ah, reunion dragged on a bit,” he said, running a hand across his face. He looked exhausted, slouching and half-stumbling forward red-eyed and a sheen of cold, clammy sweat over his face.

  He dropped the bag and coat on the floor, then removed the one he was wearing and hung it on the rack next to the door. “Might’ve also drunk a bit more than I intended. Had to take a nap on the couch there.” He looked unapologetic about the confession. “What about you?”

  “Do you care?” I asked, tone flat and neutral.

  He raised an eyebrow, a shallow smirk on his lips. “Can’t a brother be worried about his little sister?” He walked past the couch and to the kitchen, my eyes tracking him as he did.

  I didn’t like his tone. “Since when?”

  He’d grabbed a glass from the cupboard and was filling it with water as he said, “Since you time travelled and I’ve kept aging, you’re-”

  “Not that,” I cut off. “Since when do you care? You haven’t sent me a single message or tried contacting me since I came back.” I saw his hand tense around the glass. Seemed like I’d hit a nerve.

  He took a sip before answering. “And how was I supposed to do that?” His neutral voice sounded forced, with a slight bite to it. “I didn’t have your number, email or socials or whatever.” His hand went to another cupboard and grabbed a nutrient bar out of it.

  “Could’ve contacted Mom,” I countered.

  He grimaced and avoided the accusation. “Didn’t expect this to bother you so much.” He took a seat at the dinner table, unwrapping his snack.

  “It doesn’t,” I replied. “But what you’re doing to Mom does.”

  That did get an honest reaction – a scoff, to be precise. “After what she’s done? I’d rather not have contacted her at all.”

  Again with the reference towards a past I didn’t know. Same as Mom when she told me about him coming here. Apparently, whatever happened was a heavy burden to both of them. I doubted he would be the one to tell where Mom wouldn’t, so I kept the conversation on track.

  “Then why did you?” I asked.

  “As I said, my company is thinking of expanding to Charm.” He took a sip of his water. “They’ve found an old pharmaceutical factory in The Hub up for sale on the cheap. They want to see if they can turn it around, and Alfons- that is, my mentor is to be responsible for it.”

  I felt nothing at his admission he didn’t come for me, but still, I had to ask. “Mom said you came here to see me.”

  He narrowed his eyes and stared at me, then raised his eyebrows as he realized something. “You really don’t care I came here, do you?” he asked.

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  I shrugged. “Would’ve been better if you stayed in New York."

  He winced and looked away.

  He took a bite from the bar while he visibly thought over his response. “To be honest…” he started slowly. “I thought she was lying.”

  “Lying?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah. Obviously you weren’t there after you and dad got, ah, blipped out of existence, but…” His gaze darkened. “Mom was a mess. Well, we both were, but Mom was obsessive about it more than anything. Hoping you’d return, trying to find a way… Do you know how few return from stuff like that?”

  I nodded. “Two-point-two percent on average.”

  He blinked. “Really?”

  I nodded. “The Unified State keeps up a public database with cases of all disappearances, which get closed upon their return. Independent web archivists have kept track over the years and that’s the number they calculated.”

  I’d done my research – especially after the confrontation at school, the one that resulted in me getting therapy, revealed the gaps in my knowledge surrounding my false achronal displacement.

  “Ah,” he exhaled in realization. “Trust me, the number is even worse than that. Who knows when something’s temporal displacement or simple annihilation? Annihilation is much more common, so people just assume that’s what happened rather than time-stuff. Add to that the number of cases not known about, and that yours was achronal instead of temporal…”

  He shook his head. “Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, she got obsessed with it. Tried contacting powered professionals, scientists and even reached out to masked all over about helping her. And especially with-” He cut himself off.

  “With?” I asked.

  He looked me in the eyes with an inquisitive gaze. Then, he scowled. Irritation- no, anger writ plainly on his face.

  “She hasn’t told you,” he said.

  “Told me what?” I asked.

  He shook his head, sighed and finished his snack, drinking it down with some water from his glass. “You’ll have to ask her. If she hasn’t told you, I can’t either.”

  “Ask her what?” I insisted.

  Again, he just shook his head and returned to our conversation before the tangent. “Anyway, I thought she was lying when she said it. A way to get me to talk to her or come home. That, or she’d gone completely off the deep end, and there was no way I was going to subject myself to any of that.” He admitted it so shamelessly, so matter-of-factly that it looked like he was talking about a complete stranger.

  “Only after the company decided I had to go back to Charm did I check and found some proof that you actually returned… and even then, a part of me still doesn’t believe it.” His voice softened at the last part. “Still don’t know how to really feel. It’s been a long time.”

  That was… I didn’t know if I could call it reasonable without knowing the reason behind Mom and Michael’s issues, but it at least sounded more reasonable. It presented me with a conundrum. If Michael’s issues with Mom were actually legitimate – a thing I can’t find out without Mom telling me what it is, which she didn’t want to do – then my dislike of him wasn’t logical.

  Maybe Marianne was right and I should cut him some slack.

  Not too much though. “But do you have to treat Mom like that?” I asked. “She was really excited about you visiting. She even prepared an old family recipe she said you used to like.”

  Michael frowned. “Look, there’s a lot-” Now that I knew he actually did care, I manipulated him with Millie-style puppy dog eyes.

  He sighed deeply. “Fine. I’ll try. Maybe.”

  I smiled victoriously. He snorted at the sight.

  “Anyway, what were you doing before I barged in?” he asked.

  “I was going to watch Doom Drums.”

  “That old thing?” he said, raising his eyebrows.

  “It’s not old,” I said.

  “It’s from the sixties,” he countered. “It’s almost older than Mom.”

  “Human history spans hundreds of thousands of years,” I returned. “And movies over two hundred.”

  He snorted. “I just figured you wanted to watch something more… colorful.”

  “Colorful?” I asked.

  He nodded. “You used to mostly watch animated stuff. Especially sci-fi or masked fiction.”

  That explained some of Mom’s choices. A lot of the movies we’d watched in the beginning had involved just that, before suddenly stopping. Perhaps Mom had realized my tastes had shifted somewhat?

  I arrived at a dreadful possibility. “Frontier Blue?”

  He snorted. “God no. That’s Mom and Mom alone.”

  I sighed in relief.

  Michael chuckled. “I figured she ran you through the whole gamut. She did it practically every year, at least until… well, you know.” I could guess, yes. “Why Doom Drums though?” he asked, redirecting the conversation. “Not exactly an early-morning kind of a movie.

  I shrugged. “I liked the synopsis, and it was highly rated on Featureflight.”

  He snorted. “The only people who review there are idiots or worse: pretentious.”

  My mouth moved on its own. “Like you?”

  Michael smiled vaguely in reminiscence. “More like you. You liked to write them and get way too deep into arguments with people online about the specifics of fictional powers, or how the tech worked in this and that universe...”

  “Is the account still there?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Mom might know, but even if she did, I doubt she knew the password. Do you have access to your old email?”

  I shook my head.

  “Figures. Companies are required to delete that stuff after five years of inactivity – privacy laws and stuff like that – so both the account and your email are gone unless Mom managed to get a stay of execution. But those are hard to get, and considering she hasn’t shared it with you…”

  They were probably gone, then. Disappointing. It would’ve been fun to see what my predecessor had gotten up to – and useful too, considering how Mom’s stories about her had helped lay the basis of my personality. Who knew what I might gain from more intel on other-Sam?

  “You still like masked movies, then?” Michael asked, breaking the silence.

  “Sorry?” I asked, shaken out of my thoughts.

  “Still like masked movies?” He asked again.

  I hesitated, tilting my head from side to side. “Don’t really know. I like some of them, but I don’t know if I really like masked movies in general. I do like the subject, though. I think.”

  “You think?” he asked.

  I nodded. “It’s become clear to me that I’m still missing parts of my personality. Mom, my friends and my therapist have all encouraged me to try finding things I like doing to start with and work from there.”

  He looked uneasy about what I said for a second, before hiding it with a smirk. “She managed to drag you to therapy, then.”

  “She didn’t ‘drag me’ anywhere,” I retorted.

  “So you went voluntarily?” He asked, not quite rhetorically but in such a way that it was clear he already knew the answer.

  Unfortunately, he was kind of right. “It was… somewhat conditional,” I conceded. “Doesn’t mean I hate it.” Not that I’ve gone to enough to start hating it, but he didn’t know that.

  “That’s good. It was more the hypocrisy that bothered me.”

  “The hypocrisy?”

  “She wanted me to go to therapy but refused to go herself.” He snorted bitterly. “Said she was ‘too busy’. She could’ve just told me she didn’t want to deal with my shit.”

  I didn’t quite know how to respond to that, except, “She goes to therapy now.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Does she?” I nodded. “Well, good for her I guess.”

  His dismissiveness towards Mom still irritated me, but I let it go.

  “The therapist gives me assignments,” I said to restart the conversation. “Though it's mostly just trying stuff by myself to see if I like anything. Like drawing, or reading, or watching movies.”

  “That’s… I don’t know if that’s how you should handle achronally displaced, but she’s the expert, so go off I guess. ‘Sides, it’s nice to find something you want to do. Might even help you figure out your future.”

  “Future?”

  “Yeah, like what kind of work you want to do or what and where you’re going to study. Those kind of things, you know?”

  “Hm,” I hm-ed affirmatively.

  I hadn’t really given it much thought since my path was already set. The vigilante kind of heroics I did now paid well enough, though that might change if I had to spend the money not just on masked stuff, but life stuff as well – mostly rent since I didn’t really need to eat. But that was for far in the future.

  “You haven’t talked about this with your therapist?” Michael asked.

  “I haven’t gone to many sessions yet.” Two to be exact, and that’s counting the introductory one with my mother. “Maybe I’ll bring it up with her.” I won’t, but Marianne might.

  “It’s good to think about it early,” Michael continued. “I got lucky and knew what I wanted to do pretty quick and got an offer to do exactly that. But some of my friends still struggle with where they want to go and what they want to do and such.” He emptied his glass of water and walked towards the kitchen.

  Speaking of, “what do you do?”

  Michael was filling up his glass again. “Hm?”

  “I asked: what do you do.”

  “Ah. A work-study program supported by Miele & Van Dijk Electronics at New York University. A double bachelor in Applied Physics and Unification Studies, to be specific.”

  I understood which studies he was referring to and why an electronics company might support the first, but, “They sponsor you for Unification Studies?”

  He walked into the living room and settled in on the empty chair next to the couch.

  “Sounds weird, right?” He smiled. “Sounds like one subject for profit, the other for pleasure, but funnily enough there’s a synergy. Malcator’s Unification of Language reached far, much further than people and even most experts realize. For example, besides standardizing measurements, it unified all coding into a whole new language. Most agree he did this at the request of one of his powered advisors – Aissatou Ekane most likely, since it was his maker-tech coding language that became the new norm.”

  His enthusiasm on the subject was clear; his smile was the brightest and most sincere I’d yet seen on him.

  “Because of that,” he continued, “people began looking to see if they could now interpret maker-tech the way they could regular technology, and lo and behold: they could! A whole new world of physics, biology, chemistry – everything opened up! Even the softer sciences and humanities like history, sociology and especially archeology benefitted because of the translatory effect on old texts and terminologies. Not that it’s all easy, but God, the discoveries made because of him…”

  “You kinda sound like you admire him,” I asked carefully.

  Though my tone was neutral, Michael’s enthusiasm dimmed. “Don’t get me wrong, Malcator did horrible, horrible things, and it’s good he was stopped when he did. But in the end, I can’t deny that his unifications led to… well, basically everything we know and love about our current day.”

  “Huh,” I exhaled. It echoed what Crowsong had told me, except on the non-masked side of things. That, and Michael was more enthusiastic about him than Crowsong had been.

  There was an easy counterpoint though. “Except for the parts that didn’t make it.”

  Malcator had chosen English – American English, to be precise – as the basis for his Unified Language, his UniLang. There were a traces of other language in it – likely there to fill in the gaps or otherwise already on loan before – but the vast majority of languages didn’t make it. Truly dead languages without continuity to the modern era were the least of it, a lot of languages were just straight up ‘forgotten’ in Malcator’s wake.

  None could be forgiven, but some could be understood. Like the Assamese language, which had already been on its last legs after the Himalayan Slip of 2044 all but killed its native speakers. Others, like French, could not be understood without it being done on purpose or outright malice – though at least that one was lucky because of its many loan words with English.

  And as Michael had said, the Unifications had reached further than any had thought possible, Malcator included. Language was heavily linked to culture, and a lot of the cultural diversity of the planet was flattened by a single stroke of the Unifier’s power. Suddenly, people didn’t just sound like this weird, vague amalgamation of one part American, one part everything else; they acted like it as well.

  Something a lot of people to this day still struggled with and did their best to counteract. Millions of hours of research, billions of dollars spend on cultural preservation, and trillions spend on revitalization projects over the course of five decades. Even the Americans, who seemed to be the clear winner of this project, were doing their best to recover the pieces that hadn’t made the process.

  And all had, at best, mixed success.

  Michael grimaced and nodded. “Yes. A consequence of a plan not thought through enough. But the Dark Age had wrecked more, and would’ve wrecked everything if Malcator hadn’t put an end to it, and the Twelve to him in turn.”

  Hm. Fair enough.

  “Well, that was nice and all, but enough of all this bleak stuff,” he said, grinning at me. “Let’s watch the world’s bleakest musical instead.”

  I nodded and pressed play.