The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories (draft) - Part 20
Another long chapter (though only 3000 words this week) for the first part of Fye's backstory. Aspects of this are so heavily based on Fye's official backstory that a lot of this chapter probably counts as spoilers unlike a few certain facts regaring Sakura from last week, which I only got right by accident. *cough*
Fun fact: though I'm sure no-one else but me would remember, we were just up to that arc of Tsubasa around when I first started seriously thinking about turning this AU into something bigger, with the result that a surprisingly large amount of the world built itself backwards out of a little idle speculation about how you could possibly retell a story like Fye's in a post-apocalyptic universe. Apparently world-building is easier when you have the story first.
Other parts: The original ficlets, Plot notes, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Side Story 1
Fye had always liked talking. He’d quite happily spin lengthy yarns on just about any subject anyone wanted to raise with him, and quite a few they didn’t. He’d told the others countless tales about the mysterious world of the Complex he was raised in over the years, some less exaggerated than others. But on the subject of his own life there - and particularly on the gritty issue of how he left - he’d always stayed silent.
He had his reasons - Kurogane’s somewhat ironic rule about pasts not mattering at their camp was not much more than a convenient excuse to avoid the subject. However, not least of all the reasons was that secrecy was a habit of his, and by this stage of his life it would be a very hard habit to break.
Fye had not been old enough on the April Fool’s Day when the world ended to remember it very well, but he did know he’d had a mother before it, and afterwards, he never saw her again. Nothing that passed in the long years afterwards could ever match the horror of the months immediately following the day the world came apart, when the millions upon millions of deaths that marked the first catastrophe were followed with thousands more by the day, as desperate survivors dropped like flies on a planet no longer fit to support them. The project behind the Complexes was the first beacon of hope any of them were given - but it was a weak hope at best. The land and resources that could be salvaged and protected fast enough would not support more than a few thousand people in total out of all there were who survived.
There were more than enough horrors that time would be remembered for, but many more that would be forgotten, and it is quite possible there may have been no more thankless task that fell to anyone than the job of selecting the names of the individuals who the Complexes would save from among the myriad more who there was no space for.
There was never any question of doing it by random ballot. To survive, the Complexes needed people who were healthy and fit, who had the skills to keep the operation running, and the emotional strength not to be driven crazy by their containment when only a thin bubble of glass and plastic protected them from the harsh alien landscape outside. By any standards, Ashura Flowright was exactly the kind of person they were looking for. He was young and relatively fit; more importantly, he was a technological genius of a rank few of his peers (living or dead) ever matched. The Complexes also needed children - a second generation that could eventually grow to replace the first, but in the early days there was a limit to how many unproductive young mouths they could afford to feed. It would have been tempting to take in as many innocent children as could be found, but it would have been ultimately self-defeating to try to support more than there would be food for. To prevent such sentimental mistakes, strict rules were enforced to govern how many would be taken in. Among those rules was the regulation of not more than one child for each adult parent, and here Fye’s perfect candidate father hit a snag, for Ashura’s son was one of twins.
It is worth noting that what Ashura did to overcome that snag was never his only option. He could have refused the Complex’s offer and opted to take his chances raising his boys in the deadlands as best he could. He could have accepted the rule and the hard choice of selecting only one son to save. There was even some slim chance an application to bring both boys to the Complex might have succeeded had an extra position for a child been found somewhere when the selection process reached its final stages. However, it was true that he had only one option that guaranteed he could bring both sons into the Complex with him, and that was for his two boys to become only one.
The impossible plan was really quite ridiculously simple in execution. If the boys hadn’t been twins it would never have worked, but since they were, all he needed to do was to ensure that not more than one of them would ever be seen at a time. The twins were thus reduced to have only one identity that had to be shared between them. Day by day, the brothers took it in turns to be Fye.
Needless to say, the Flowright boys had an unconventional sort of childhood.
Few men other than Ashura Flowright could ever have made the plan work at all. Official computer records predating April Fool’s Day which listed him as the father of twins had to be altered - and altered carefully - before his name came up in them as a candidate for the Complex project at all. Nor was that the only record that needed to be discretely changed - throughout his sons’ young lives, the amount of food delivered to his family was never recorded quite correctly, amongst any number of other apparently harmless pieces of statistical data. However, the Complex itself ran on computers, and Ashura had the ability with them no-one else in the building could ever match.
Computers are easily fooled compared to humans though. The most part of the task of hiding their secret fell to the twins themselves. Complex accommodation did not offer much in the way of privacy, but there was at least enough space in Ashura’s home to for one young boy - or later, one young man - to conceal himself through the day, while his brother was out using their name in the world. Each day, one or the other of them would go out into the small world of the Complex, attend his lessons, play with his friends - everything a normal young boy would do in an average day. In the evening, he’d return home, and for as many hours as he needed, he’d tell his brother everything that had passed during the day - every lesson learned, person met, conversation exchanged -everything the other might conceivably need to play the same role the next day. When tomorrow dawned, the other of the Fyes would take his turn to leave the house and play his role in the world, while his brother waited at home, passing the day out of sight, with their books and toys for company.
Never ending care had to be taken to keep them identical. If one had his hair cut, the other’s would have to be cut that same way. If one was bruised or cut, the other would have to wear a bandage in the same place. Both would spend days which stretched into years locked up out of sight. It was a strange way of life, but it never seemed as wrong to the boys as it probably should have. In their early years, they were far too young to understand exactly why it was necessary that they play this elaborate trick on the rest of the world. However, there was a hypnotic quality to their father’s voice and smile, and when he explained to his two young boys how their lives would work in this strange new setting, they’d both nodded solemnly. It hadn’t occurred to either of them to question the plan they’d been instructed with.
Nor did the task of sharing their lives so completely seem like any great chore. By the time evening came, whichever of them had left would arrive home bursting with things to share with his brother, and the other just as eager to listen. So intertwined were their lives - far above and beyond even the usual bond between twins - nothing that happened ever seemed fully real to them until both of them had heard the news. From the first, the boys trained themselves to take the most fantastic attention to detail in everything they did. Anything that left the slightest impression on them would need to be recalled in sequence and conveyed to the other. Visualisation too became an unusual specialisation for them. They’d listen so intently to the other’s stories, work so hard to picture it in their own minds, that by the end of the nightly conversation , both might just about believe they’d truly experienced all those events themselves.
A lifetime later, there’d still be memories the remaining Fye could not say for sure were his, or whether they were something his brother had told him.
Naturally, the system wasn’t perfect. Mistakes would be made, details excluded. Inevitably, there would be days when Fye would find one of his friends or colleagues calling on him with reference to some trivial conversation which his brother had honestly forgotten about the evening before, but just as surely would have remembered when prompted if it had been actually him there on the following day. Not for nothing did Fye master the art of bluffing his way around difficult questions, and weaving elaborate and surprisingly plausible stories at the drop of a hat. And if the Flowright boy went on to develop a reputation for having an unusually selective memory, well, surely his unquestionable talent and charming disposition made up for that quirk a dozen times over. If there was a mischievous element to that beaming smile of his, no-one ever noticed quite what it meant.
As the boys got older, Fye went on to develop the reputation as a technological genius who could do the work of two - with the simple explanation that in fact two were contributing to the workload assigned to one. The twins learned as they grew to make good use of those hours spent trapped in the house, and they’d spend a good portion in front of a computer doing homework - or later, reprogramming whole sectors of the Complex’s central system, while the other was out making an official appearance and doing his own share. By the age of twenty, Fye was a boon to the Complex’s technical department like no other of his age
***
It is difficult to say just when Ashura began going crazy. It may well have been before he came to the Complex at all - what he did with his sons is scarcely to be lauded as the act of a sane man, though it might be excused on the basis of desperation. Watching the end of the world drove better men than him stark raving mad. It was intended to be part of the screening process before anyone was selected for the Complex that they be checked by two psychiatrists for any sign of mental instability, though it is also quite possible that, when faced with a genius like Ashura’s, and such an obviously devoted father with such a sweet little son, the best doctors might have given him the all clear faster than they should have.
On the other hand, it’s just as possible that the task of hiding such a secret for so many years would have driven anyone mad eventually. Always remembering that the two boys he saw at him must be referred to as one for the benefit of everyone else, always watching for the slightest hint that anyone had caught on to their ruse - it was the sort of task that few sane people could have endured for half as long as he kept it up.
Whatever the specifics, it is clear that by the time his boys were on the verge of reaching adulthood he had devoted far too many years of effort to concealing their secret to think much of what else might need to be done.
***
Administration never did obtain full details of the incident that sparked the end for the Flowrights, but it proceeded roughly like this.
It was morning. Ashura had just concluded an unremarkable conversation with a colleague on the subject of an administrative issue relating to account management on their computer system, when she happened to glance back a window she’d been just about to close, frowned, and said, that’s odd, we’re recording Fye as being logged in at two different places at once.
An error? Ashura suggested, as if nothing was amiss.
I don’t see how, she’d said in reply, I only just finished checking this. There was an ominous series of keystrokes, followed by her declaring it couldn’t possibly be an error, the two ‘Fyes’ weren’t even logged in at the same place. One of them was in the office, the other in the Flowright’s home.
Ah, Ashura had replied, only inwardly put out by someone paying so much attention to a part of the system that usually went safely ignored for months at a time. He’s probably left an automated script running from home. He does that sort of thing now and then.
His colleague seemed satisfied enough by that to let the matter go. Conversations of that nature usually ended that way.
Two hours passed, bringing the day through the communal lunch hour without further incident. Barely fifteen minutes after that, however, Ashura found his colleague tapping him urgently on the shoulder. It was about that second Fye she’d seen logged into the network.
I had Plum keep an eye on it, she told him, breath short with urgency, and she just saw that other account access and recompile a whole block of the security system’s backup code. That can’t be an automated script - there must be someone in your house, hacking the system through your son’s account!
Are you sure? Ashura had asked, his face betraying no more than the mildest concern.
His colleague launched into a lengthy theory about the bad habit so many of them had of leaving log-in details saved in their personal computers - ripe for anyone who’d broken into the Flowrights’ house to access. It was a very good theory, leaving Ashura and any of his sons quite blameless, but investigating it would mean letting strangers into his house - probably that very hour of that very day. It would mean their living quarters would be examined in the minutest detail, and sooner or later, it would mean the discovery that the two persons supposedly living there had left three sets of fingerprints on all their belongings.
Ashura had some practice with decisions like this one he made during that conversation. Just like when he brought his sons into the Complex long ago, what he decided on was certainly not his only option by any half-hearted attempt at justification. However, this time he would be proven wrong in supposing that he’d made the only sure choice available to protect his sons, no matter how certain he must have been to take such an action that day.
Have you told anyone else about this yet? he asked his colleague, and smiled when she answered in the negative.
***
So how was your day? Fye asked him while they made their way home that evening, stretching his arms behind him casually in his long-limbed way.
Oh, Ashura had replied, nothing out of the ordinary.
The boys would be just as horrified as everyone else when they discovered what had really occurred.
***
Even a genius will occasionally slip up. Ashura did a careful and thorough job. The Complex administration never did find the woman’s body, but they soon discovered she was missing, and the investigation into how she could have disappeared so completely was a long and painstaking process.
The details of that part of the story were tedious and technical - inquiry after inquiry, search after fruitless search. They should have eventually declared the whole affair a hopeless, unresolvable mystery had Ashura succeeded in erasing all evidence as completely as he intended. However, in just a few subtle details, Ashura failed. By the time the investigation reached its end, the whole Complex had been informed of two terrible secrets: that Ashura Flowright was a murderer, and that Fye D. Flowright was made up of identical twins.
In the entire history of the Complex, there’d been no scandal like it.
The punishment dealt to the Flowrights might have had its controversies, but the laws were clear enough that it was a relatively straightforward matter. The punishment for murder was exile to the deadlands, that was the law, plain and simple. The rather unusual crime of the two Flowright boys was a more complicated matter. If the discovery had been made when they were a few years younger, they might even have gone blameless, but at the age of eighteen, they were no longer granted any excuse for not recognising the law, and all their lives they had benefited from a crime which dated to the foundation of their colony. Two years of exile was their sentence.
Altogether then, the three living Flowrights were pushed from the comfort of and safety of the Complex, out into the harsh, dying world outside.
Two years passed, then four, then six. Not one of them ever returned.
Fun fact: though I'm sure no-one else but me would remember, we were just up to that arc of Tsubasa around when I first started seriously thinking about turning this AU into something bigger, with the result that a surprisingly large amount of the world built itself backwards out of a little idle speculation about how you could possibly retell a story like Fye's in a post-apocalyptic universe. Apparently world-building is easier when you have the story first.
Other parts: The original ficlets, Plot notes, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Side Story 1
Fye had always liked talking. He’d quite happily spin lengthy yarns on just about any subject anyone wanted to raise with him, and quite a few they didn’t. He’d told the others countless tales about the mysterious world of the Complex he was raised in over the years, some less exaggerated than others. But on the subject of his own life there - and particularly on the gritty issue of how he left - he’d always stayed silent.
He had his reasons - Kurogane’s somewhat ironic rule about pasts not mattering at their camp was not much more than a convenient excuse to avoid the subject. However, not least of all the reasons was that secrecy was a habit of his, and by this stage of his life it would be a very hard habit to break.
Fye had not been old enough on the April Fool’s Day when the world ended to remember it very well, but he did know he’d had a mother before it, and afterwards, he never saw her again. Nothing that passed in the long years afterwards could ever match the horror of the months immediately following the day the world came apart, when the millions upon millions of deaths that marked the first catastrophe were followed with thousands more by the day, as desperate survivors dropped like flies on a planet no longer fit to support them. The project behind the Complexes was the first beacon of hope any of them were given - but it was a weak hope at best. The land and resources that could be salvaged and protected fast enough would not support more than a few thousand people in total out of all there were who survived.
There were more than enough horrors that time would be remembered for, but many more that would be forgotten, and it is quite possible there may have been no more thankless task that fell to anyone than the job of selecting the names of the individuals who the Complexes would save from among the myriad more who there was no space for.
There was never any question of doing it by random ballot. To survive, the Complexes needed people who were healthy and fit, who had the skills to keep the operation running, and the emotional strength not to be driven crazy by their containment when only a thin bubble of glass and plastic protected them from the harsh alien landscape outside. By any standards, Ashura Flowright was exactly the kind of person they were looking for. He was young and relatively fit; more importantly, he was a technological genius of a rank few of his peers (living or dead) ever matched. The Complexes also needed children - a second generation that could eventually grow to replace the first, but in the early days there was a limit to how many unproductive young mouths they could afford to feed. It would have been tempting to take in as many innocent children as could be found, but it would have been ultimately self-defeating to try to support more than there would be food for. To prevent such sentimental mistakes, strict rules were enforced to govern how many would be taken in. Among those rules was the regulation of not more than one child for each adult parent, and here Fye’s perfect candidate father hit a snag, for Ashura’s son was one of twins.
It is worth noting that what Ashura did to overcome that snag was never his only option. He could have refused the Complex’s offer and opted to take his chances raising his boys in the deadlands as best he could. He could have accepted the rule and the hard choice of selecting only one son to save. There was even some slim chance an application to bring both boys to the Complex might have succeeded had an extra position for a child been found somewhere when the selection process reached its final stages. However, it was true that he had only one option that guaranteed he could bring both sons into the Complex with him, and that was for his two boys to become only one.
The impossible plan was really quite ridiculously simple in execution. If the boys hadn’t been twins it would never have worked, but since they were, all he needed to do was to ensure that not more than one of them would ever be seen at a time. The twins were thus reduced to have only one identity that had to be shared between them. Day by day, the brothers took it in turns to be Fye.
Needless to say, the Flowright boys had an unconventional sort of childhood.
Few men other than Ashura Flowright could ever have made the plan work at all. Official computer records predating April Fool’s Day which listed him as the father of twins had to be altered - and altered carefully - before his name came up in them as a candidate for the Complex project at all. Nor was that the only record that needed to be discretely changed - throughout his sons’ young lives, the amount of food delivered to his family was never recorded quite correctly, amongst any number of other apparently harmless pieces of statistical data. However, the Complex itself ran on computers, and Ashura had the ability with them no-one else in the building could ever match.
Computers are easily fooled compared to humans though. The most part of the task of hiding their secret fell to the twins themselves. Complex accommodation did not offer much in the way of privacy, but there was at least enough space in Ashura’s home to for one young boy - or later, one young man - to conceal himself through the day, while his brother was out using their name in the world. Each day, one or the other of them would go out into the small world of the Complex, attend his lessons, play with his friends - everything a normal young boy would do in an average day. In the evening, he’d return home, and for as many hours as he needed, he’d tell his brother everything that had passed during the day - every lesson learned, person met, conversation exchanged -everything the other might conceivably need to play the same role the next day. When tomorrow dawned, the other of the Fyes would take his turn to leave the house and play his role in the world, while his brother waited at home, passing the day out of sight, with their books and toys for company.
Never ending care had to be taken to keep them identical. If one had his hair cut, the other’s would have to be cut that same way. If one was bruised or cut, the other would have to wear a bandage in the same place. Both would spend days which stretched into years locked up out of sight. It was a strange way of life, but it never seemed as wrong to the boys as it probably should have. In their early years, they were far too young to understand exactly why it was necessary that they play this elaborate trick on the rest of the world. However, there was a hypnotic quality to their father’s voice and smile, and when he explained to his two young boys how their lives would work in this strange new setting, they’d both nodded solemnly. It hadn’t occurred to either of them to question the plan they’d been instructed with.
Nor did the task of sharing their lives so completely seem like any great chore. By the time evening came, whichever of them had left would arrive home bursting with things to share with his brother, and the other just as eager to listen. So intertwined were their lives - far above and beyond even the usual bond between twins - nothing that happened ever seemed fully real to them until both of them had heard the news. From the first, the boys trained themselves to take the most fantastic attention to detail in everything they did. Anything that left the slightest impression on them would need to be recalled in sequence and conveyed to the other. Visualisation too became an unusual specialisation for them. They’d listen so intently to the other’s stories, work so hard to picture it in their own minds, that by the end of the nightly conversation , both might just about believe they’d truly experienced all those events themselves.
A lifetime later, there’d still be memories the remaining Fye could not say for sure were his, or whether they were something his brother had told him.
Naturally, the system wasn’t perfect. Mistakes would be made, details excluded. Inevitably, there would be days when Fye would find one of his friends or colleagues calling on him with reference to some trivial conversation which his brother had honestly forgotten about the evening before, but just as surely would have remembered when prompted if it had been actually him there on the following day. Not for nothing did Fye master the art of bluffing his way around difficult questions, and weaving elaborate and surprisingly plausible stories at the drop of a hat. And if the Flowright boy went on to develop a reputation for having an unusually selective memory, well, surely his unquestionable talent and charming disposition made up for that quirk a dozen times over. If there was a mischievous element to that beaming smile of his, no-one ever noticed quite what it meant.
As the boys got older, Fye went on to develop the reputation as a technological genius who could do the work of two - with the simple explanation that in fact two were contributing to the workload assigned to one. The twins learned as they grew to make good use of those hours spent trapped in the house, and they’d spend a good portion in front of a computer doing homework - or later, reprogramming whole sectors of the Complex’s central system, while the other was out making an official appearance and doing his own share. By the age of twenty, Fye was a boon to the Complex’s technical department like no other of his age
***
It is difficult to say just when Ashura began going crazy. It may well have been before he came to the Complex at all - what he did with his sons is scarcely to be lauded as the act of a sane man, though it might be excused on the basis of desperation. Watching the end of the world drove better men than him stark raving mad. It was intended to be part of the screening process before anyone was selected for the Complex that they be checked by two psychiatrists for any sign of mental instability, though it is also quite possible that, when faced with a genius like Ashura’s, and such an obviously devoted father with such a sweet little son, the best doctors might have given him the all clear faster than they should have.
On the other hand, it’s just as possible that the task of hiding such a secret for so many years would have driven anyone mad eventually. Always remembering that the two boys he saw at him must be referred to as one for the benefit of everyone else, always watching for the slightest hint that anyone had caught on to their ruse - it was the sort of task that few sane people could have endured for half as long as he kept it up.
Whatever the specifics, it is clear that by the time his boys were on the verge of reaching adulthood he had devoted far too many years of effort to concealing their secret to think much of what else might need to be done.
***
Administration never did obtain full details of the incident that sparked the end for the Flowrights, but it proceeded roughly like this.
It was morning. Ashura had just concluded an unremarkable conversation with a colleague on the subject of an administrative issue relating to account management on their computer system, when she happened to glance back a window she’d been just about to close, frowned, and said, that’s odd, we’re recording Fye as being logged in at two different places at once.
An error? Ashura suggested, as if nothing was amiss.
I don’t see how, she’d said in reply, I only just finished checking this. There was an ominous series of keystrokes, followed by her declaring it couldn’t possibly be an error, the two ‘Fyes’ weren’t even logged in at the same place. One of them was in the office, the other in the Flowright’s home.
Ah, Ashura had replied, only inwardly put out by someone paying so much attention to a part of the system that usually went safely ignored for months at a time. He’s probably left an automated script running from home. He does that sort of thing now and then.
His colleague seemed satisfied enough by that to let the matter go. Conversations of that nature usually ended that way.
Two hours passed, bringing the day through the communal lunch hour without further incident. Barely fifteen minutes after that, however, Ashura found his colleague tapping him urgently on the shoulder. It was about that second Fye she’d seen logged into the network.
I had Plum keep an eye on it, she told him, breath short with urgency, and she just saw that other account access and recompile a whole block of the security system’s backup code. That can’t be an automated script - there must be someone in your house, hacking the system through your son’s account!
Are you sure? Ashura had asked, his face betraying no more than the mildest concern.
His colleague launched into a lengthy theory about the bad habit so many of them had of leaving log-in details saved in their personal computers - ripe for anyone who’d broken into the Flowrights’ house to access. It was a very good theory, leaving Ashura and any of his sons quite blameless, but investigating it would mean letting strangers into his house - probably that very hour of that very day. It would mean their living quarters would be examined in the minutest detail, and sooner or later, it would mean the discovery that the two persons supposedly living there had left three sets of fingerprints on all their belongings.
Ashura had some practice with decisions like this one he made during that conversation. Just like when he brought his sons into the Complex long ago, what he decided on was certainly not his only option by any half-hearted attempt at justification. However, this time he would be proven wrong in supposing that he’d made the only sure choice available to protect his sons, no matter how certain he must have been to take such an action that day.
Have you told anyone else about this yet? he asked his colleague, and smiled when she answered in the negative.
***
So how was your day? Fye asked him while they made their way home that evening, stretching his arms behind him casually in his long-limbed way.
Oh, Ashura had replied, nothing out of the ordinary.
The boys would be just as horrified as everyone else when they discovered what had really occurred.
***
Even a genius will occasionally slip up. Ashura did a careful and thorough job. The Complex administration never did find the woman’s body, but they soon discovered she was missing, and the investigation into how she could have disappeared so completely was a long and painstaking process.
The details of that part of the story were tedious and technical - inquiry after inquiry, search after fruitless search. They should have eventually declared the whole affair a hopeless, unresolvable mystery had Ashura succeeded in erasing all evidence as completely as he intended. However, in just a few subtle details, Ashura failed. By the time the investigation reached its end, the whole Complex had been informed of two terrible secrets: that Ashura Flowright was a murderer, and that Fye D. Flowright was made up of identical twins.
In the entire history of the Complex, there’d been no scandal like it.
The punishment dealt to the Flowrights might have had its controversies, but the laws were clear enough that it was a relatively straightforward matter. The punishment for murder was exile to the deadlands, that was the law, plain and simple. The rather unusual crime of the two Flowright boys was a more complicated matter. If the discovery had been made when they were a few years younger, they might even have gone blameless, but at the age of eighteen, they were no longer granted any excuse for not recognising the law, and all their lives they had benefited from a crime which dated to the foundation of their colony. Two years of exile was their sentence.
Altogether then, the three living Flowrights were pushed from the comfort of and safety of the Complex, out into the harsh, dying world outside.
Two years passed, then four, then six. Not one of them ever returned.