Alive, Child of Awake
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A/N:Alive, Child of Awake
PG
3118
Caroline, Echo
doll_ficathon - three_penny, Prompt 3: The mind of a person becoming an active.
No one really agrees on what makes a person.
P, peas_fics
Dollhouse does not belong to me.
Thanks to P for the beta. Constructive criticism is welcome.
Tabula Rasa
She only took the Intro to Epistemology course because she needed a philosophy credit and the Locke at the bookstore was cheaper than the Kant. The professor had a bent back and age-spots under his thinning hair, but he was pretty spry the day he swept his papers and the chalkboard duster off the desk and announced, "The slate is blank."
The front row tittered nervously. The professor preened, satisfied with his cheap theatrics. Caroline just wanted the class to be over.
"Locke is credited with the idea," droned Professor Kirby, "that the mind at birth is a blank slate, ready to bear any scribblings that life experience may impress upon it. But Locke himself was influenced by a fellow named Ebn Tophail, an old Andalusian philosopher who wrote a strange book about a young boy raised in the jungle by a gazelle."
She looked up and saw the professor's pale eyes fixed on her. It was creepy, like he knew the detail that would get her attention and wanted to catch her getting interested. But then he moved on to the blond kid in the next row and continued.
"The story is called "Alive, son of Awake". Our young protagonist is a feral child, raised without the benefit of any human interaction and thus entirely self-taught. Whatever he observes and experiences, he transforms into a learning experience and thus becomes wiser."
Caroline scribbled, "Feral kid, self-taught" on her notebook and went back to planning the animal shelter fundraiser.
"In one of his first acts of reasoned inquiry, the boy encountered a new kind of fruit and observed that all the other animals were avoiding it. He reasoned there must be something wrong with the fruit and decided not to eat it, probably saving himself some gastro-intestinal problems in the process..."
Caroline's neighbor's hand shot up. "I don't think that makes sense."
Professor Kirby took a moment to process the interruption. "What doesn't makes sense, Miss...Miss?"
It's the first day of class, Caroline thought. Why has she read the book?
"Later in the book he threw some dead fish in a fire and decided to eat them. Where did he get that idea?"
"According to the text, he observed his appetite increase because of the smell of burnt flesh..."
"But none of his herbivore friends would touch the meat. So how did he reason it was the right thing to do? And his desire to eat the fish had to come from somewhere..."
Kirby looked like it was Christmas morning, "Yes, do go on..."
"So this guy can't really say the boy was entirely self-taught. He already had criteria for saying that a smell was good or bad."
"So you're saying that the mind is not just..."
Ebn Topher
"...a clean slate," said Topher, "and then we can reprogram your brain to think and feel like a completely different person!"
The briefing had been a joke, thought Caroline. They already had her ass in a sling, so why go through all the trouble of pretending she was a volunteer? Did this hyperactive man-child really think that if he waved around enough Powerpoint slides, she'd suddenly become all gung-ho about this?
Chaining herself to a tree for forty days to protest logging in State parks counted as volunteering. Lying half-naked on a dentist chair with three dozen electrodes poking into her did not.
"You're going to feel some discomfort when when we prep your central nervous system to upload and download imprints. The plus side is, when we return you to your body after the end of your contract we'll leave out the memory of this prep stage, so you'll never even know it happened!"
She was getting tired of hearing the guy's voice. "Why can't you just put me under for the whole thing?"
"That would not be the best idea. We need you awake so we can make sure the neural replastification is only limited to your cortex and hippocampus. We wouldn't want to wipe out your fine motor control now, would we?"
Smarmy, patronizing jerk. She hoped he blew himself up.
"Now, first we inject you with a cocktail of neurotransmitters. You're going to feel some tingles in your extremities, and that's completely normal..."
Palimpsest
"...to feel out of place at times," she told Bennett. "Heck, I look in the mirror sometimes and wonder if I'm in the right life!"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, there's so many little things that lead up to me being where I am right now. Like, my parents only met because the chick my Dad was trying to meet had given him a made-up phone number and it turned out to be Mom's. If that hadn't happened, where would I be, you know? Or what if I had the tofu for lunch instead of the burrito? Would I still be me if I hadn't made the exact same decisions my whole life?"
Bennett said,"Why does that frighten you?" and laughed until her pupils faded and her irises began to swirl like a frothy supernova. Caroline could see stars spread into Bennett's empty skull like a silver carpet unfolding and the road was so long, so long...
Halfway through Nebraska she began to wonder why she hadn't flown to college like any sane freshman, and did she really need her car in the Bay Area? They had public transport and shit. Like those kangaroos she'd seen on the Travel Channel the other day, hitched to sleighs by sheet music woven into braids. There weren't any kangaroos in Nevada but there were jackalopes grazing by the roadside, so she changed the channel until she found jazz. And the ropey sinewy music that came out, she tied into a lasso and caught a fat jackalope. Soon her Honda was bouncing through the cornfields and...
She thought she was gonna die, or at least throw up, and she really hoped her puke landed on stupid Stacey Finnergan's stupid hair. She was just tall enough to get on the Tornado and Stacey triple-dog-dared her to do it so now she was at the back of the roller coaster, feeling every bump and yank that the ride threw at her. She knew the coaster was only supposed to go around twice but she was zooming through the station for the fifth time in a row, hurtling into a corkscrew and a loop and another corkscrew that wouldn't end oh god the track is gone and I'm still corkscrewing and she wanted curly hair...
So she stole Robin's round hair brush and wrapped her hair around it while hiding in the closet, but now the brush was stuck to her head and she cried for half and hour before her mother found her and pulled her head into her lap, and then snipped away each bristle on the brush until her hair was free. She made Caroline buy a new brush for Robin out of her own money, but she took all of Caroline's hair instead and made a fur coat out of it, long and swishy...
Her mother walked by sedately in a long red dress with a train that stretched behind her. Caroline recognized it as the dress she drew on her mother's birthday card. Red velvet, because that's what the cake was - moist and red-tasting. Her mother laughed at all the candles because Robin had insisted on thirty-two candles because that's how old her mother was that day. There was white cream cheese frosting, spread over the two-layer cake with a spatula that Robin held while spinning spinning the cake round and round. And the white was swirling everywhere and when it cleared she saw girders and scaffolds glittering like galaxies against a backdrop of nothing and thought, is that what my mind looks like when it's empty?
And then she wondered, who just thought that?
A tree falls in a forest
There are no thoughts. There is only observation.
There is a large room. It has quiet lights. There is a table with a pot with a tree in it. There is a hand holding a cutter. The cutter plucks at the tree and bits of not-tree fall onto the table, so the tree can be its best. There is a lady. The lady wears brown. She puts her cutter to the branchesof her tree and snips. On the left side is Sierra, who wears purple and smiles. Her tree is a beech. The lady has a tree that is maple. The tree that is snipped by the hand is juniper. The juniper is brown on the trunk and gray on the leaves. The not-trees on the table are gray. The hand keeps snipping and plucking and cutting, and there are more and more not-trees falling down.
The lady says, "Echo, if you keep pruning that hard, you won't have a tree to work on any more!"
The not-trees are cut from the tree so the tree can be its best. If you take away too much not-tree, then not-tree is left. Where does the tree go?
The lady is asked this question and her eyes are circles. She looks at the Upstairs. Then she looks back and says, "That is a good question, Echo. What do you think?"
An answer is considered and then spoken: "The tree is still there, but can't be seen."
The lady starts to smile, but there is another answer to be said -
"Maybe the tree was never there."
Cogito Ergo Sum
"No more trees," said Jenny to her new friend. "I'm officially a city girl now."
The EMTs gave her bottled water and first aid while they secured Jenny's buddy in the back of a van. They let her ride with him, which was nice because she could keep his mind off the arrow wound in his gut.
"It missed all the important stuff," he reassured her, but he winced every time they hit a bump in the road. Jenny squeezed his hand.
"They don't think Richard's gonna make it," she told him. "I hate him for what he tried to do, but I don't think I want him to die. At least, I don't want him to die because I shoved an arrow into his neck."
"It was self defense," he pointed out.
"I know! But I keep thinking of how his neck squished when...oh Christ!"
"Hey, deep breaths. It's all over now. You're safe"
"But I'm going to remember this for the rest of my life! How am I going to deal with Valentine's Day with those stupid cupids and their bows every year?"
"The mind is a very resilient thing. You're going to feel better after your treatment. I promise."
Jenny wasn't convinced, but she didn't want to whine about her trauma to the guy injured worse than she was.
The van must have reached the highway because the road was much smoother now.
Jenny still couldn't wrap her head around it. "What was he thinking? How does a man decide he gets to judge who lives or dies."
"My guess? He's insecure."
Jenny rolled her eyes, "Thank you, Dr. Phil."
"Hey, think about it after your treatment. Try to relax now."
But Jenny kept thinking all the way back to the city, and all the way through the treatment - and the thought is still there in the big room when the man called Dominic says, "There is no one in there."
And the thought arises, if there is no one inside, who deserves to live?
The hand hits the shoulder. No. She hits her shoulder.
And she hears an Echo.
The Bundle Theory of Self
Margaret Bashford did not like her new neighbors. At least Jenny had worked with horses, Rebecca Mynor was a decent conversationalist most of the time, and that holy roller Esther was occasionally something other than a bore. But the parade of scantily clad young things was giving her a headache. And how they all argued!
That twit Kiki was trying to flirt with Kerry-the-serial-killer while Eleanor Penn tried to stage an intervention. Jordan was recruiting Alice to be her back-up singer when she couldn't sing a note, and Taffy was begging Regan to teach her Krav Maga. Bringing about some semblance of order was like breaking in a dozen foals at the same time.
Yet when Echo called upon them they all slipped into position, moving their body in elegant tandem. Regan pivoted on their heel, slamming the attacker against a wall. Velvet pointed out the attacker's most vulnerable spots. Taffy looked for escape routes. Kerry funneled rage into every kick. It was beautiful to watch.
And if Margaret thought Echo was cold for strapping Boyd's body with bombs, she remained silent.
Echo kept them alive. Margaret appreciated that.
My words echo Thus, in your mind
Echo gave Caroline chills. This place was called Safe Haven, but Caroline avoided Echo the way she avoided mirrors the first time she went through puberty. Granted, the battle-worn aloofness was cooler than a faceful of acne, but the dead look in Echo's eyes made her want to scream. That Ballard was cute, though, and how often would she get to play matchmaker with herself?
After a couple of minutes of conversation, Ballard looked like he'd rather be mind-wiped than get sex advice from a preteen, so she decided to spare him. Echo was focused on cleaning her gun, so Caroline watched her from under a table. Despite the apocalypse and the collapse of the beauty industry, her body was doing pretty well - wrinkle-free skin and shampoo commercial hair, despite pushing forty. To bad she'd been evicted before she could enjoy the perks.
"Come out, come out, Harriet the Spy," Echo said while snapping the gun back together.
Caroline brushed the dust-bunnies from her knee as she got up. "I forgot how close the ground looks from this height. It's kind of nice."
Echo smirked. "I'll keep my five-foot-six, thanks."
Caroline watched Echo's precise hands on the weapon. "So...which of you is the fire-arms expert?"
"Regan. She's a gender-switch on a Special Op named Conrad. One of Topher's classics."
Caroline glanced at the man being spoon-fed by DeWitt.
"Don't stare at him," Echo warned.
"Sorry."
"That's Susan, by the way. Abuse survivor. Masters in Social Work."
"Um, pleased to meet you."
Echo rolled her eyes. "We don't switch in and out of the driver's seat."
"So what is it like, then?"
"Hard to describe," Echo stilled her hands and stared into space for a bit. "Remember that View-Master you got for Christmas? You tried to stuff two disks in it at once so you could make the pictures overlap? It's like that...a few dozen pictures overlap and make a new picture."
But Caroline was still stuck on something Echo said. "Why do you keep saying you? You had the same Christmas."
Echo looked annoyed, but then sighed. "Like I said, it's hard to describe. There's a Caroline in here. But she hasn't been you in over a decade. And you've picked up some memories she doesn't have. So who's to say we're the same person?"
Caroline looked more closely at the stranger wearing her body. Then she decided it wasn't really her place to play matchmaker for her.
After an uncomfortable silence, Echo spoke up.
"You know that crazy philosophy prof? Dwight or Dephen or something?"
"Kirby?"
"Kirby? Yeah, that sounds right," said Echo. "He said some crazy shit about personal continuity, how we're all a new person every moment and just think we're the same person we used to be because we share the same memories."
"I thought he was high."
Echo snorted. "He probably was. But he said a lot of crap that makes sense now."
"The continuity stuff, for instance?"
"Yeah. He says nobody's the same person they were a moment ago. So if you're feeling weird about not being me, you're not alone."
"What's that? The "Don't Worry, Everybody's Screwed" school of counseling? Don't you have a social worker in there who can do better than that?"
Echo merely grinned. Caroline thought, So that's what I look like when I smile.
It was a nice thought to have, right before the tech-heads arrived and it was the beginning of the end.
Left the Building
Much too soon after that, Caroline walked carefully over the debris littering the slope from the dollhouse to the LA streets. The sun glittered over the broken glass strewn across the asphalt. Like jewels, and she resisted the futile impulse to impress the scene in her memory.
A trace of her would linger within Echo - echoing, she thought giddily, after the sound dies.
And she was okay with that. Really. Why feel bad about not existing anymore when the world's gonna be saved?
And still there was a part of her that railed. That body downstairs was hers, damn it. She was born with it. That mopey pastiche had no right to it!
She was ready to turn and flee back to the sanctuary below, but that's when she saw the flash at the window...
...Before the sound of the explosion reached her, Caroline felt the girl-who-was-not-Iris flooding through her. And she thought, remember me.
Author's Notes, continued:
Liberties taken with the "Alive, Son of Awake" story- the poisoned fruit fable doesn't come from that book. The burnt fish does.
Rating:
Word Count:
Characters:
Recipient/Prompt:
Summary:
Beta:
Disclaimer:
A/N:Alive, Child of Awake
PG
3118
Caroline, Echo
doll_ficathon - three_penny, Prompt 3: The mind of a person becoming an active.
No one really agrees on what makes a person.
P, peas_fics
Dollhouse does not belong to me.
Thanks to P for the beta. Constructive criticism is welcome.
Tabula Rasa
She only took the Intro to Epistemology course because she needed a philosophy credit and the Locke at the bookstore was cheaper than the Kant. The professor had a bent back and age-spots under his thinning hair, but he was pretty spry the day he swept his papers and the chalkboard duster off the desk and announced, "The slate is blank."
The front row tittered nervously. The professor preened, satisfied with his cheap theatrics. Caroline just wanted the class to be over.
"Locke is credited with the idea," droned Professor Kirby, "that the mind at birth is a blank slate, ready to bear any scribblings that life experience may impress upon it. But Locke himself was influenced by a fellow named Ebn Tophail, an old Andalusian philosopher who wrote a strange book about a young boy raised in the jungle by a gazelle."
She looked up and saw the professor's pale eyes fixed on her. It was creepy, like he knew the detail that would get her attention and wanted to catch her getting interested. But then he moved on to the blond kid in the next row and continued.
"The story is called "Alive, son of Awake". Our young protagonist is a feral child, raised without the benefit of any human interaction and thus entirely self-taught. Whatever he observes and experiences, he transforms into a learning experience and thus becomes wiser."
Caroline scribbled, "Feral kid, self-taught" on her notebook and went back to planning the animal shelter fundraiser.
"In one of his first acts of reasoned inquiry, the boy encountered a new kind of fruit and observed that all the other animals were avoiding it. He reasoned there must be something wrong with the fruit and decided not to eat it, probably saving himself some gastro-intestinal problems in the process..."
Caroline's neighbor's hand shot up. "I don't think that makes sense."
Professor Kirby took a moment to process the interruption. "What doesn't makes sense, Miss...Miss?"
It's the first day of class, Caroline thought. Why has she read the book?
"Later in the book he threw some dead fish in a fire and decided to eat them. Where did he get that idea?"
"According to the text, he observed his appetite increase because of the smell of burnt flesh..."
"But none of his herbivore friends would touch the meat. So how did he reason it was the right thing to do? And his desire to eat the fish had to come from somewhere..."
Kirby looked like it was Christmas morning, "Yes, do go on..."
"So this guy can't really say the boy was entirely self-taught. He already had criteria for saying that a smell was good or bad."
"So you're saying that the mind is not just..."
Ebn Topher
"...a clean slate," said Topher, "and then we can reprogram your brain to think and feel like a completely different person!"
The briefing had been a joke, thought Caroline. They already had her ass in a sling, so why go through all the trouble of pretending she was a volunteer? Did this hyperactive man-child really think that if he waved around enough Powerpoint slides, she'd suddenly become all gung-ho about this?
Chaining herself to a tree for forty days to protest logging in State parks counted as volunteering. Lying half-naked on a dentist chair with three dozen electrodes poking into her did not.
"You're going to feel some discomfort when when we prep your central nervous system to upload and download imprints. The plus side is, when we return you to your body after the end of your contract we'll leave out the memory of this prep stage, so you'll never even know it happened!"
She was getting tired of hearing the guy's voice. "Why can't you just put me under for the whole thing?"
"That would not be the best idea. We need you awake so we can make sure the neural replastification is only limited to your cortex and hippocampus. We wouldn't want to wipe out your fine motor control now, would we?"
Smarmy, patronizing jerk. She hoped he blew himself up.
"Now, first we inject you with a cocktail of neurotransmitters. You're going to feel some tingles in your extremities, and that's completely normal..."
Palimpsest
"...to feel out of place at times," she told Bennett. "Heck, I look in the mirror sometimes and wonder if I'm in the right life!"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, there's so many little things that lead up to me being where I am right now. Like, my parents only met because the chick my Dad was trying to meet had given him a made-up phone number and it turned out to be Mom's. If that hadn't happened, where would I be, you know? Or what if I had the tofu for lunch instead of the burrito? Would I still be me if I hadn't made the exact same decisions my whole life?"
Bennett said,"Why does that frighten you?" and laughed until her pupils faded and her irises began to swirl like a frothy supernova. Caroline could see stars spread into Bennett's empty skull like a silver carpet unfolding and the road was so long, so long...
Halfway through Nebraska she began to wonder why she hadn't flown to college like any sane freshman, and did she really need her car in the Bay Area? They had public transport and shit. Like those kangaroos she'd seen on the Travel Channel the other day, hitched to sleighs by sheet music woven into braids. There weren't any kangaroos in Nevada but there were jackalopes grazing by the roadside, so she changed the channel until she found jazz. And the ropey sinewy music that came out, she tied into a lasso and caught a fat jackalope. Soon her Honda was bouncing through the cornfields and...
She thought she was gonna die, or at least throw up, and she really hoped her puke landed on stupid Stacey Finnergan's stupid hair. She was just tall enough to get on the Tornado and Stacey triple-dog-dared her to do it so now she was at the back of the roller coaster, feeling every bump and yank that the ride threw at her. She knew the coaster was only supposed to go around twice but she was zooming through the station for the fifth time in a row, hurtling into a corkscrew and a loop and another corkscrew that wouldn't end oh god the track is gone and I'm still corkscrewing and she wanted curly hair...
So she stole Robin's round hair brush and wrapped her hair around it while hiding in the closet, but now the brush was stuck to her head and she cried for half and hour before her mother found her and pulled her head into her lap, and then snipped away each bristle on the brush until her hair was free. She made Caroline buy a new brush for Robin out of her own money, but she took all of Caroline's hair instead and made a fur coat out of it, long and swishy...
Her mother walked by sedately in a long red dress with a train that stretched behind her. Caroline recognized it as the dress she drew on her mother's birthday card. Red velvet, because that's what the cake was - moist and red-tasting. Her mother laughed at all the candles because Robin had insisted on thirty-two candles because that's how old her mother was that day. There was white cream cheese frosting, spread over the two-layer cake with a spatula that Robin held while spinning spinning the cake round and round. And the white was swirling everywhere and when it cleared she saw girders and scaffolds glittering like galaxies against a backdrop of nothing and thought, is that what my mind looks like when it's empty?
And then she wondered, who just thought that?
A tree falls in a forest
There are no thoughts. There is only observation.
There is a large room. It has quiet lights. There is a table with a pot with a tree in it. There is a hand holding a cutter. The cutter plucks at the tree and bits of not-tree fall onto the table, so the tree can be its best. There is a lady. The lady wears brown. She puts her cutter to the branchesof her tree and snips. On the left side is Sierra, who wears purple and smiles. Her tree is a beech. The lady has a tree that is maple. The tree that is snipped by the hand is juniper. The juniper is brown on the trunk and gray on the leaves. The not-trees on the table are gray. The hand keeps snipping and plucking and cutting, and there are more and more not-trees falling down.
The lady says, "Echo, if you keep pruning that hard, you won't have a tree to work on any more!"
The not-trees are cut from the tree so the tree can be its best. If you take away too much not-tree, then not-tree is left. Where does the tree go?
The lady is asked this question and her eyes are circles. She looks at the Upstairs. Then she looks back and says, "That is a good question, Echo. What do you think?"
An answer is considered and then spoken: "The tree is still there, but can't be seen."
The lady starts to smile, but there is another answer to be said -
"Maybe the tree was never there."
Cogito Ergo Sum
"No more trees," said Jenny to her new friend. "I'm officially a city girl now."
The EMTs gave her bottled water and first aid while they secured Jenny's buddy in the back of a van. They let her ride with him, which was nice because she could keep his mind off the arrow wound in his gut.
"It missed all the important stuff," he reassured her, but he winced every time they hit a bump in the road. Jenny squeezed his hand.
"They don't think Richard's gonna make it," she told him. "I hate him for what he tried to do, but I don't think I want him to die. At least, I don't want him to die because I shoved an arrow into his neck."
"It was self defense," he pointed out.
"I know! But I keep thinking of how his neck squished when...oh Christ!"
"Hey, deep breaths. It's all over now. You're safe"
"But I'm going to remember this for the rest of my life! How am I going to deal with Valentine's Day with those stupid cupids and their bows every year?"
"The mind is a very resilient thing. You're going to feel better after your treatment. I promise."
Jenny wasn't convinced, but she didn't want to whine about her trauma to the guy injured worse than she was.
The van must have reached the highway because the road was much smoother now.
Jenny still couldn't wrap her head around it. "What was he thinking? How does a man decide he gets to judge who lives or dies."
"My guess? He's insecure."
Jenny rolled her eyes, "Thank you, Dr. Phil."
"Hey, think about it after your treatment. Try to relax now."
But Jenny kept thinking all the way back to the city, and all the way through the treatment - and the thought is still there in the big room when the man called Dominic says, "There is no one in there."
And the thought arises, if there is no one inside, who deserves to live?
The hand hits the shoulder. No. She hits her shoulder.
And she hears an Echo.
The Bundle Theory of Self
Margaret Bashford did not like her new neighbors. At least Jenny had worked with horses, Rebecca Mynor was a decent conversationalist most of the time, and that holy roller Esther was occasionally something other than a bore. But the parade of scantily clad young things was giving her a headache. And how they all argued!
That twit Kiki was trying to flirt with Kerry-the-serial-killer while Eleanor Penn tried to stage an intervention. Jordan was recruiting Alice to be her back-up singer when she couldn't sing a note, and Taffy was begging Regan to teach her Krav Maga. Bringing about some semblance of order was like breaking in a dozen foals at the same time.
Yet when Echo called upon them they all slipped into position, moving their body in elegant tandem. Regan pivoted on their heel, slamming the attacker against a wall. Velvet pointed out the attacker's most vulnerable spots. Taffy looked for escape routes. Kerry funneled rage into every kick. It was beautiful to watch.
And if Margaret thought Echo was cold for strapping Boyd's body with bombs, she remained silent.
Echo kept them alive. Margaret appreciated that.
My words echo Thus, in your mind
Echo gave Caroline chills. This place was called Safe Haven, but Caroline avoided Echo the way she avoided mirrors the first time she went through puberty. Granted, the battle-worn aloofness was cooler than a faceful of acne, but the dead look in Echo's eyes made her want to scream. That Ballard was cute, though, and how often would she get to play matchmaker with herself?
After a couple of minutes of conversation, Ballard looked like he'd rather be mind-wiped than get sex advice from a preteen, so she decided to spare him. Echo was focused on cleaning her gun, so Caroline watched her from under a table. Despite the apocalypse and the collapse of the beauty industry, her body was doing pretty well - wrinkle-free skin and shampoo commercial hair, despite pushing forty. To bad she'd been evicted before she could enjoy the perks.
"Come out, come out, Harriet the Spy," Echo said while snapping the gun back together.
Caroline brushed the dust-bunnies from her knee as she got up. "I forgot how close the ground looks from this height. It's kind of nice."
Echo smirked. "I'll keep my five-foot-six, thanks."
Caroline watched Echo's precise hands on the weapon. "So...which of you is the fire-arms expert?"
"Regan. She's a gender-switch on a Special Op named Conrad. One of Topher's classics."
Caroline glanced at the man being spoon-fed by DeWitt.
"Don't stare at him," Echo warned.
"Sorry."
"That's Susan, by the way. Abuse survivor. Masters in Social Work."
"Um, pleased to meet you."
Echo rolled her eyes. "We don't switch in and out of the driver's seat."
"So what is it like, then?"
"Hard to describe," Echo stilled her hands and stared into space for a bit. "Remember that View-Master you got for Christmas? You tried to stuff two disks in it at once so you could make the pictures overlap? It's like that...a few dozen pictures overlap and make a new picture."
But Caroline was still stuck on something Echo said. "Why do you keep saying you? You had the same Christmas."
Echo looked annoyed, but then sighed. "Like I said, it's hard to describe. There's a Caroline in here. But she hasn't been you in over a decade. And you've picked up some memories she doesn't have. So who's to say we're the same person?"
Caroline looked more closely at the stranger wearing her body. Then she decided it wasn't really her place to play matchmaker for her.
After an uncomfortable silence, Echo spoke up.
"You know that crazy philosophy prof? Dwight or Dephen or something?"
"Kirby?"
"Kirby? Yeah, that sounds right," said Echo. "He said some crazy shit about personal continuity, how we're all a new person every moment and just think we're the same person we used to be because we share the same memories."
"I thought he was high."
Echo snorted. "He probably was. But he said a lot of crap that makes sense now."
"The continuity stuff, for instance?"
"Yeah. He says nobody's the same person they were a moment ago. So if you're feeling weird about not being me, you're not alone."
"What's that? The "Don't Worry, Everybody's Screwed" school of counseling? Don't you have a social worker in there who can do better than that?"
Echo merely grinned. Caroline thought, So that's what I look like when I smile.
It was a nice thought to have, right before the tech-heads arrived and it was the beginning of the end.
Left the Building
Much too soon after that, Caroline walked carefully over the debris littering the slope from the dollhouse to the LA streets. The sun glittered over the broken glass strewn across the asphalt. Like jewels, and she resisted the futile impulse to impress the scene in her memory.
A trace of her would linger within Echo - echoing, she thought giddily, after the sound dies.
And she was okay with that. Really. Why feel bad about not existing anymore when the world's gonna be saved?
And still there was a part of her that railed. That body downstairs was hers, damn it. She was born with it. That mopey pastiche had no right to it!
She was ready to turn and flee back to the sanctuary below, but that's when she saw the flash at the window...
...Before the sound of the explosion reached her, Caroline felt the girl-who-was-not-Iris flooding through her. And she thought, remember me.
Author's Notes, continued:
Liberties taken with the "Alive, Son of Awake" story- the poisoned fruit fable doesn't come from that book. The burnt fish does.