Chapter 35
After a couple days the child realizes that letting the great Nathaniel Morgan stay was basically the same as inviting a wild animal into its home: now that he knows there’s food and shelter here, he’s never going to leave.
Food in particular is a problem. The great Nathaniel Morgan complains constantly when there isn’t any, but whenever the child goes out and buys some he eats it all within a few hours and starts complaining again. The only thing he won’t touch is stuff for the pokémon, but when the child tried buying some cookies and claiming they were for Raticate and Mightyena he went and ate them anyway. He’s so annoying.
Aside from eating or saying he wants to eat, all the great Nathaniel Morgan seems to do is sleep. The child keeps finding him passed out in front of the television, on the beach, in the kitchen, wherever it goes. The child doesn’t know whether to be grateful that he isn’t awake and causing trouble or annoyed by how boring he is. At least he stopped making a fuss about clothes once the child took to wearing its smiling-mantine swim trunks, the ones it uses when it’s pretending to be a deep-sea explorer.
Raticate enjoys crawling into the house’s nooks and crannies just as much as Rats, but fortunately he hasn’t bothered her actual nest. The child’s caught him nearby more than once, up on his hind legs and sniffing the air like he’s trying to suss the place out from a distance. The child hopes he stays away; Rats would be furious to know there’d been another raticate climbing around in there.
Meanwhile Graveler stays up on the mountainside, rolling down and climbing up over and over again. The great Nathaniel Morgan says that’s just how she is, sometimes pokémon do weird shit and at least she seems like she’s having fun, and also not to fucking wake him up if that was all it wanted to ask. And Mightyena–Mightyena shows up for meals, wolfs down her food, and leaves. She and the great Nathaniel Morgan ignore each other whenever they’re together, and the child thinks they’re both trying to make sure that’s rare.
“I can’t just not feed her,” the great Nathaniel Morgan says one dinnertime when he catches the child watching her. “She ain’t never been in the wild before. She don’t know how to get grub on her own.”
“We’ve been practicing on stuff in the jungle. It’s not hard. She’ll get it pretty quick,” Raticate says. He only realizes his mistake when the great Nathaniel Morgan stops chewing and stares. “I mean, that’s good, right? If she wants to live in the wild some day, she has to know, and if something happens now she can–”
“Yeah. Of course. It’s fucking great,” the great Nathaniel Morgan says. He throws down his fork and abandons nearly half his dinner, and Raticate’s too miserable to eat the rest for him.
Sometimes the child finds the great Nathaniel Morgan with the master ball, either yelling at it or sitting with it next to him, grim and silent and perhaps listening to soundless words inside his skull. He doesn’t sleep when the master ball’s around. The child thinks it might have been a bad idea to give it to him in the first place, and that he shouldn’t keep trying to argue with Mewtwo, but the great Nathaniel Morgan wouldn’t listen if it tried telling him that.
It’s not like the child’s own conversations with the clone go any better. At breakfast: “Why are you being so stubborn? I’ll let you out as soon as I get my pokémon back. Not telling me where they are just means you have to stay in your ball longer.”
And if you would just let me out, you would have your precious pokémon back in no time at all.
“That’s what you say, but what you do is leave me behind and go off and kill people. You know I’ll keep my end of the deal. I don’t know that about you.”
Very true, Mewtwo muses. After all, you’re so trustworthy you lied to the human and the sableye both to get what you wanted out of them.
The child grits its teeth. “You can read my mind. You know I’m not lying about this.”
From inside here? I’m lucky to catch a whisper of a thought. You could be plotting to throw this master ball into the ocean and I’d never have a clue.
The child tries again out on the beach, its feet buried in the sand and the master ball resting on a mound next to them. “You didn’t even ask my pokémon if they wanted to stay with me or not. Keeping them locked up in their pokéballs isn’t giving them their freedom at all.”
What would be the point of asking? They’ve been brainwashed into thinking that they want what you want.
“Brainwashed? Really?” the child snaps. “So if they disagree with you, it’s not what they really think, they must be brainwashed, is that it?”
No. They might disagree for their own reasons. Then they’d just be wrong.
And in the evening when the child’s bored by the news and waiting for a commercial break: “I’m a good trainer, Mewtwo. You know I am. You can see it! You can see how much I care about my pokémon. I miss them. There is no reason for you to keep them from me.”
A good trainer, Mewtwo muses. Caring is what makes you a good trainer? Caring is all you need?
“No, I mean, there’s more to it than that. But I’m nice to them, and I listen to them, and I don’t make them do anything they don’t want to do.”
So you would never, say, keep one of them confined to their pokéball if they didn’t do what you wanted?
The child hurls the master ball at a wall and doesn’t bother going back to pick it up. Absol brings it over after a few hours and leaves it humming smugly to itself by the child’s side. Reluctantly the child picks it up and stuffs it in the desk drawer where it normally resides, then wanders off to think about anything else.
So Mewtwo’s bad, and dealing with Leonard Kerrigan’s hardly better. He’s the one the child’s really waiting on; it can’t go anywhere until it can use the computer to find out where it actually needs to go. But Leonard Kerrigan’s never working when the child looks in on him.
“How is this even hacking?” it demands, glaring at books and printouts scattered across the carpet–things it brought, stuff it did, when Leonard Kerrigan’s the one who’s supposed to be working on this. The human’s typing away on the laptop the child got for him, which it figures is safe enough without his special hacker programs or an internet connection. The child looks at his screen. “What is with all of these dumb black boxes? There should be graphs and pictures and moving things!”
“How exactly would an animation be helpful?”
“I do not know, that is just how it works. How do you not know this? You should at least have something 3D by now.”
“I suppose this is what I get for not studying at the PokéStar School of Computer Espionage,” Leonard Kerrigan says blandly.
“I am starting to wonder whether you are a real hacker,” the child says warningly.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
And the problem is the child really doesn’t. It leaves Leonard Kerrigan to his supposed real, actual hacking, but every time it sits down to do something else it’s up again five minutes later, pacing, walking up and down the beach, feeling like it has to move but not knowing where to go. It can’t pay attention through a full episode of even Transformozords, and it can’t play with Absol, not really; she seems mad about something, but of course she won’t explain why or how to make it better.
So in a way the child’s glad to see the great Nathaniel Morgan awake and lurking in the kitchen when it comes in to check the fridge, which is empty again. An argument with him is at least something to do.
“You know, you could totally hold tours here, Freak. Like, show people all the crazy alien artifacts and shit,” the great Nathaniel Morgan says, gesturing at the crowded countertops, the stack of pots he had to move to take a seat at the table. “I mean, what the fuck is this, anyway?” He holds up a gleaming metal instrument, all toothy gears and flywheels.
The child shrugs. “I think it is for turnips.”
“The fuck is a turnip?”
“I do not know, some kind of egg, maybe?”
The great Nathaniel Morgan shakes his head and puts the thing down next to an unplugged countertop grill and a juicer with an intimidating number of buttons. “Point is, even if you did find you a fucking turnip, you couldn’t fling it or whatever the fuck because your entire goddamned kitchen is full of bullshit.”
“It is not bullshit! It is cool!”
“Freak, you don’t even know what half this shit does. Like this.” He waves a handheld thing with two paddles.
“That is a garlic press, obviously,” the child says, then does a double take. “Wait, no, that is a garlic press…”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
“But it was only $19.95!” the child says. “And the turnip thing was free!” It looks around, almost wistful. It really has forgotten half the cool stuff in here. “I would have better things, Absol says I am not allowed to buy anything else off TV. One time she came through here and a stack of stuff fell on her. She did not get hurt, but it made her fur go all poofy.”
Leonard Kerrigan appears in the doorway, silent as a wraith. “Looking for grub?” the great Nathaniel Morgan asks.
“I figured this would be my best chance to see one of you accidentally light yourselves on fire,” Leonard Kerrigan says, sounding bored as ever. “I am hungry, though. Were you planning dinner? Please tell me it’s not hot dogs again.”
“I made dinner,” the child says. “He just would not eat it.”
“It wasn’t dinner, it was a fucking dead seagull you dumped barbecue sauce on.”
You child narrows its eyes at him. “How can you not like barbecue sauce?”
“I will make dinner,” Leonard Kerrigan says with a sigh. “If you’re willing to bring me some real ingredients, anyway. I don’t have many recipes that call for coconuts and dead wildlife.”
“You ain’t gotta do that,” the great Nathaniel Morgan says. “I know how to work a fucking microwave.”
“That’s exactly what I was afraid of,” Leonard Kerrigan says, and the great Nathaniel Morgan flushes. The child’s curious despite itself. He does computers, and he can cook, too?
“Okay, do it,” it says. “What do you need?”
Leonard Kerrigan’s list takes the child to parts of the store it’s never visited before, where they sell the raw bits humans use for cooking like they do on TV. The child doesn’t recognize most of them and wanders around reading all the signs, trying to guess what everything is and amusing itself by taking bites out of things when nobody’s looking.
By its third trip back for clarification the child gets the sense Leonard Kerrigan regrets volunteering. “I couldn’t find a ‘basil.’ Is that some kind of fruit?”
“No, it’s a leaf. It should be with the other herbs”–he winces–“I mean the, the small… green… things,” he amends.
Once the child’s gathered everything Leonard Kerrigan needs it’s relegated to lurking at the kitchen table with the great Nathaniel Morgan. He’s put out some food for Mightyena and Raticate, and is now sitting backwards in one of the chairs, watching Leonard Kerrigan work with chin propped on hand.
Leonard Kerrigan clears a space on the counter and digs out plain pots and pans the child didn’t know it owned. He picks up some kind of mixing device, examines it closely, then sets it carefully aside like a thing unearthed from someone’s bottom dresser drawer.
He’s not as exciting to watch as someone on a cooking show, though the child tries to do its part by offering withering criticism of his efforts. There’s something fascinating about how the piles of chopped food bits transform into something recognizable, though, and then the child gets to eat the final result, which might be more fun than watching someone get angry and start throwing knives. “This is actually really good,” it confesses with mouth full. “What is it?”
Leonard Kerrigan smiles thinly. “Vegetarian lasagna. And thank you, I suppose. It’s not my favorite, but it can’t be worse than your idea of food.”
“There is nothing wrong with hot dogs. They are normal,” the child says. “And I still hate you.”
“The feeling is mutual.”
“And you had better finish hacking that computer soon. Everybody is waiting on you. If it turns out you are stalling…”
“Yes, yes, you’ll kill all my friends and family. You’ve been entirely clear,” Leonard Kerrigan says, sounding alarmingly casual about it. “There’s a vulnerability in the software that generated the hard drive’s encryption key. It’s easier to break than it should be, but it will still take time for the factorization to complete. A day or two, perhaps.”
The great Nathaniel Morgan snorts.”What kind of shitty hacker are you? You just gotta get a password, right? Can’t you guess a bunch of random numbers and letters until you find the right ones?”
Leonard Kerrigan gives him a withering look. “I suppose if I had a few thousand years to spare.”
“Or, like, can’t you get it off the fucking cloud?” The great Nathaniel Morgan waves his fork vaguely. “Like, break into some fucking government computer and have your fucking botnets hack all the passwords with their, with their RAM and stuff. And then it’s all, like, in the cloud, right?”
“You don’t have the faintest idea how computers work, do you?”
“’Course I do! They work by electricity! Duh!” the great Nathaniel Morgan says, smug. “I ain’t fucking stupid.”
“Clearly not.”
“Do you not want your dinner?” the child asks. Its own plate is nearly empty, but the great Nathaniel Morgan’s barely touched his lasagna.
“Nah,” the great Nathaniel Morgan grunts. “I fucking hate vegetables.”
“Excuse me?” Leonard Kerrigan raises his eyebrows.
The great Nathaniel Morgan turns a dark scowl on him. “I said I don’t like no fucking vegetables. Got a problem?”
“No, no, it’s just…” Leonard Kerrigan chuckles. “You won’t eat vegetables, really? What are you, five years old?”
“Fuck you, old man. I know you gotta eat like spinach and shit for your prostrate or some bullshit, but I can eat whatever the fuck I want.”
“I suppose there’s no reason to worry about your health when you’re probably going to get knifed in a dispute over a card game before you turn thirty anyway. Truly I envy your carefree, hedonistic lifestyle.”
“Yeah, well, envy my fucking dick, you shit-eating prick.”
“Oh, dear. It seems I’ve touched a nerve,” Leonard Kerrigan says, folding his hands on the table and looking at the great Nathaniel Morgan like he’s a mildly interesting insect. “Honestly, I can’t believe Team Rocket’s been giving us trouble with stolen pokédexes. When this is who they’re employing, really? Some thug who can’t even read? This is what’s getting past our security?”
The silence that follows is broken by the rasp of the child’s fork scraping the very last bit of cheese off its plate. This dinner turned out way more interesting than it expected.
“The fuck do you mean? Of course I can fucking read,” the great Nathaniel Morgan says.
“Is that so? I suppose that explains why you nearly jumped out of your skin when I asked you to pass me the book on cryptography. That would be hard, wouldn’t it, if you couldn’t read the titles? And you wouldn’t help with my list–because you couldn’t read it, am I right?”
“No, I’m just allergic to fucking chores. This is such bullshit! I can damn well read!”
“Well, that’s easy enough to verify.” Leonard Kerrigan picks up an empty Sugar Rowlets box that didn’t quite make it to the trash. “What does it say right here?”
“Fuck you! I don’t got to prove jack shit!” the great Nathaniel Morgan roars.
“Mmm. Yes. That certainly shows me,” Leonard Kerrigan says, and goes back to eating his lasagna as calmly as though he’d been discussing the weather. Meanwhile the great Nathaniel Morgan’s clutching his silverware in fists like he’s ready to plunge it into Leonard Kerrigan’s neck any second.
“You think you’re so fucking smart,” he snarls, “sitting over there all high and mighty and shit. Well, I was living on the streets while mommy and daddy were probably still driving you to your fucking flute lessons. I took care of myself–I always fucking took care of myself, and I am six fucking times the man your ballsless ass is. I mean, look at you.” He spreads his hands. “You probably do, like, yoga or some shit.”
“Perish the thought,” Leonard Kerrigan says blandly. “But oh, my, the streets. The streets. We all have our little sob stories, don’t we? We all have so many reasons why it wasn’t really our fault. Tell me, was it the streets that signed you up for Team Rocket? Was it the streets that made you throw in with this shapeshifting… character? Was it”–he makes air quotes–“‘the system?’”
“Fuck you!” the great Nathaniel Morgan screams. “What the fuck would you know? You fucking think you know the first fucking thing–”
“Do you really just put ‘fuck’ in front of some arbitrary number of words every sentence? Is that supposed to be intimidating?”
The great Nathaniel Morgan dives at Leonard Kerrigan, knocking plates and silverware in all directions. Leonard Kerrigan falls completely out of his chair, and he and the great Nathaniel Morgan roll around on the floor trading blows.
The child perches on the edge of the now-crooked table and settles in to watch the fun. The great Nathaniel Morgan would probably have the upper hand most days, but he’s still sick and already bleeding from reopened wounds. Leonard Kerrigan’s holding his own, but it occurs to the child that if he gets too hurt he might not be able to hack anymore. With some disappointment it jumps down and pries the great Nathaniel Morgan off him.
“Come on, come on, knock it off. I need him to do actual work,” it says. The great Nathaniel Morgan struggles against it, and it tosses him so he skids across the floor and almost hits the far wall.
He’s up in a moment, chest heaving and licking a split lip, but the child rises up, too, big as it can, and stands between him and Leonard Kerrigan.
“I said get out of here,” the child says. The great Nathaniel Morgan looks between it and Leonard Kerrigan, trembling, then wheels and storms off, slamming the door behind him with even more shattering force than usual. The child’s left alone with Leonard Kerrigan, who’s still on the floor, feeling around for his glasses.
“You made him mad,” the child says.
Leonard Kerrigan smiles tightly, but when he pokes at a bruise blossoming across one cheekbone it morphs into a grimace. “Yes, well,” he says, putting his glasses back on, squinting, and removing them again to clean them on his sweater vest, “it was hardly difficult. It’s not hard to handle someone like that if you aren’t intimidated by the bluster.”
“Well, whatever. It was cool.”
“Mmm. Well, I’ll leave the dishes to you, then, shall I? I have work to do.” Leonard Kerrigan pulls himself up by way of the table and hobbles stiffly for the exit.
“Yes, you do,” the child says, but he’s already gone.
It’s weird, the child thinks as it sits eating the great Nathaniel Morgan’s portion of lasagna off the floor. It turns out Leonard Kerrigan is actually kind of cool. It probably should have known–he’s a hacker, after all. But it would never have thought he could win a fight against the great Nathaniel Morgan.
Humans. They’re always surprising. The child hunts around for more food, but there’s nothing left but scattered crumbs. It should ask Leonard Kerrigan to make dinner again sometime.
The child sits back for a while, lost in thought. Then it gets up and pads out, onto the beach and into the jungle, up the incline to the top of the little mountain on the island’s western tip. It’s honestly more of a big hill, an ancient volcano ground down round and domestic. Tumbled chunks of volcanic stone, covered in lichen and netted by tree roots, are all that mark what it used to be.
Graveler stands out at the top of the mountain, a boulder conspicuously out of place. Her four hands feel across the hillside around her, searching for loose rocks, which she pops into her mouth with apparent relish. The great Nathaniel Morgan sits beside her, staring across the ocean towards One Island.
“What are you doing?” the child asks him.
“Watching the motherfucking sunset,” he says, muffled. Only his eyes and nose are visible above his arms, which are crossed atop his knees.
“The sunset is that way,” the child says, pointing west to where the horizon flushes pink. One Island is south. The great Nathaniel Morgan doesn’t even glance away from it.
The child sits down next to him. “You lost to an old guy!” it says cheerfully. “And you really cannot read? No wonder they kicked you out of school, you are even stupider than I thought.”
The great Nathaniel Morgan doesn’t laugh with it, though, and after a while the child begins to realize that the great Nathaniel Morgan might not find those things so funny. “Well, it does not matter anyway,” it says at last. “I guess you do not have to be good at those things to be a good trainer.”
“Yeah, sure,” the great Nathaniel Morgan mutters, “And I’m supposed to be a good trainer, am I?”
“Well, you have six badges. You cannot be completely terrible.”
“What fucking badges?”
“Yours,” the child says. Leonard Kerrigan didn’t hit him on the head, did he? “The ones on your pokédex.”
“The pokédex is stolen, you motherfucking idiot. Those ain’t my badges.”
“Oh.” The child doesn’t even have time to feel dumb, or angry, before the great Nathaniel Morgan goes on.
“Yeah, I thought I was gonna do the whole badge thing, once, be a master, all that shit.” The great Nathaniel Morgan addresses the ocean, though at least now he’s actually facing the sunset, skin glowing red in its light. “So I decided to challenge Sabrina, ’cause like, that’s the gym in Saffron and all.” He looks at the child out of the corner of his eye. “And I lost.”
“You lost to Sabrina? But your first pokémon is even a dark-type, how did you–?”
“I don’t want to fucking talk about it.” The great Nathaniel Morgan huddles down in his arms as if cold, but it’s sticky humid, even with the growing shadows and the ocean breeze. “So that’s who you decided you wanted to fight for you in the Pokémon League, Freak. Some fuckup who couldn’t even get one badge with a type advantage.” He leans his arms on his knees again. “And now his starter fucking hates him and his raticate’s got who knows what kind of issues and he fucking lost his steelix and Team Rocket’s after him and the League and everything is…” The great Nathaniel Morgan lets the unfinished thought hang there.
Graveler stops combing the hillside for rocks and turns to her trainer. There’s a long pause for what might be thinking, and then she reaches over and pats him on the back, or that’s what the child thinks she was going for. Most back-pats aren’t audible, though, and they don’t almost knock a person forward on their face. The great Nathaniel Morgan endures Graveler’s affection with clenched teeth. “Th-thanks, Graveler,” he says weakly, blinking tears from the corners of his eyes. She makes a satisfied grunt and returns to chewing a piece of old tephra with the air of someone who’s finally settled an important matter. The great Nathaniel Morgan watches her finish it, then picks up a rock from beside him and offers it to her. Graveler accepts it graciously, then sets it aside and selects another one within reach.
“Well, so what?” the child asks while the great Nathaniel Morgan tries to rub his back without being too obvious about it. “About the badges. You won the League tournament, didn’t you? You even nearly beat the Champion. Nobody who was a bad trainer could do that.”
The great Nathaniel Morgan snorts. “Freak, you know damn well it was only you cheating your ass off that got us anywhere in the tourney. I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
“Not true. You beat Aanya Singh all by yourself, didn’t you? Even her salamence! The point is, I was right. I told you we could win. And we did.”
The great Nathaniel Morgan makes a noise that might be the beginning of a laugh. “Sure, Freak. Whatever you say.”
“Of course it is whatever I say,” the child says smugly. The sunset’s in full force now, reflecting deep red and orange off the waves.
“Do you want food?” the child asks at last.
“What?”
“Since you did not want what Leonard Kerrigan made. And also I kind of ate your part already.” The child can tell the great Nathaniel Morgan’s trying not to smile, and is offended. But nonetheless: “So if you want me to get you some other kind of food I can.”
“You can keep your seagulls, Freak.”
“Or you can be a jerk about it and get nothing.”
It takes the great Nathaniel Morgan a while, but at last he says, “I mean, sure? I ain’t gonna turn down free grub. Especially not with this chick sitting here stuffing her face right in front of me.” He does smile then, and rubs the ridge above Graveler’s eyes. She rumbles something indistinct and dismissive.
“Okay. Come on, then. It is getting dark.” The child’s on its feet immediately and hops impatiently in place while the great Nathaniel Morgan cleans a stray bit of dirt from under Graveler’s brow-ridge. He gets up slow and stiff, and the child can tell he’s trying not to show how much it hurts. He starts openly massaging his back once Graveler’s out of sight.
“Oh Jesus, my ribs,” he squeaks.
“So are you and Leonard Kerrigan enemies now? Do you totally hate him?”
“Well, he’s a prick, that’s for damn sure,” the great Nathaniel Morgan says. “And listen, Freak… I know you’re all about this guy fixing that computer and finding stuff about Mew and whatever, but every time I see him he’s just got like all these words and numbers and shit on the screen, like there ain’t even no graphs or nothing. Are you sure he’s a real hacker?”
The child sighs and walks on ahead until the lights from the house show through the trees, bright yellow against the darkness.
But it turns out Leonard Kerrigan is a real hacker after all, and a couple of days later he comes to the child with good news at last.
“You did it?” it asks, hurrying in his wake. “You hacked it?”
“It’s cracked, yes,” Leonard Kerrigan says. “See for yourself.”
The computer screen shows empty blue, the log-in prompt gone. “As agreed,” Leonard Kerrigan says into the child’s electric silence. “Now, if you’d take me home, please.”
“Not now. I have to look.” It’s forgotten everything but the computer. It’s going to find out, finally, where to go next.
“Oh, I see,” Leonard Kerrigan says icily. “And just when might you be able to spare a moment?”
“When I am ready,” the child says firmly. “What if there are more passwords on the files? I might still need you.” It pushes past him to grab the mouse, squinting into the bright cathode screen. Leonard Kerrigan might say something else, standing there behind the child, but it ignores him. It has work to do.
There’s just one folder on the desktop, “mewtwo_incident_files,” and then folders in that folder, dozens of them, plus a big text file, “mewtwo_incident_report.rtf.” The child clicks around a bit, excitement curdling to dismay as it uncovers files on files, subfolders with more subfolders inside, hundreds of them. They’re clearly organized, but not in any way the child understands. Where’s the stuff about Mew? Where does it say where she is now? Is it really going to have to sit and sift through all of these and hope it doesn’t miss anything important?
It opens documents at random, anything with a promising filename. There are scanned notebooks from scientists, equipment lists, spreadsheets and images and kinds of files the child doesn’t recognize, which open into gibberish symbols packed tight on the screen. It opens a video at random, which turns out to be of a surgery done on Mew. The child closes it again immediately, swallowing rising nausea. This is going nowhere.
It starts over, opens the text file this time and sees with dismay that it’s over two hundred pages long. The table of contents is nearly three pages just on its own, but there at the bottom of the list: “Index of Files.” It only takes the child a couple seconds to confirm that the file names match the ones on the other folders. It’s still a lot, but at least it won’t have to actually open each file to know what’s inside. The child shifts in the cramped computer chair and tries not to think about how long this is going to take.
It reads bits of the big report on and off between trawling files. Somehow, even though it’s all about what happened in the Cinnabar lab, it’s nothing like what the child remembers actually going on. It’s weird, but kind of interesting, and makes a nice break from scanning through other files–sometimes, those are too much like the memories.
Final incident report on Project Mewtwo, presented to the executive council March 12th 1999
Prepared by Clarice Acheson, chief advisor, Eleanor Fairchild, acting head of Research and Development, and Xi Meidi, lead admin of Saffron District
Some of the files the child knows it can skip. There are expense reports, personnel listings, tax documents, all the bureaucratic cruft of running an evil empire. The child scrolls and scrolls, searching for a clue.
There are scientific documents, both raw data and written-up reports. The child tries to read some of these, but puzzling through all the unfamiliar words makes it horribly tired. It settles instead for marveling at pretty graphs and pictures, even diagrams for different kinds of psychic dampers that show how they go together. The child barely understands any of it, but it’s fascinating in the same way as the big report: here are people looking at Mewtwo and seeing numbers, behaviors, chemistry and psychology and big words, when in the child’s memory the clone is fear that knots its stomach up for weeks, nightmares and screaming and blood on cold white walls.
Technological advances in the late eighties, especially in the field of pokémon biology, led to a wave of investment in research and development. Team Rocket as a whole realigned towards new technologies rather than traditional enterprises such as real estate and construction. This flurry of spending produced fantastic returns, with the most impressive achievement being the master ball.
Although only a prototype, with the repossession of Silph Co. and push for mass production several years off, a pokéball that could contain any pokémon seemed to cry out for a pokémon no other pokéball could contain.
There are e-mails. The index itemizes them meticulously, down to the embarrassing and indiscreet, exchanged by people who perhaps forgot that anything sent from Institute addresses would be recorded.
Here are innocuous complaints about superiors, increasingly annoyed reminders to finish a report, fill out a form, send that recommendation letter, please. Here are excited e-mails about discoveries made, theories crafted.
Here’s a message to Rocket leadership in Saffron about “recent staff vacancies.” We have had several departures in the past month, despite frequent reminders about company expectations…
Here are e-mails from the child’s parents.
That Team Rocket would need to create such a pokémon, not merely find one, seemed clear. Even legends have been tamed, and while the master ball would make it substantially easier to capture such powerful pokémon, doing so would not be a truly revolutionary advance. Several Rocket projects were already developing bioengineering methods for creating enhanced pokémon, and the success of Porygon and Metagross showed just how far technology for manipulating infinity energy had come.
What Giovanni called for, then, was a new species, one more powerful than any known pokémon and tailored specifically for use as a weapon. It would be more than just a technological triumph or a devastating addition to the team’s arsenal; it would also be the ultimate proof of man’s dominion over pokémon: we would create a pokémon far superior to any nature could produce, and it would exist only to serve us.
They aren’t the child’s parents, not really. They were Sara’s parents, that other child, the one who died. Still, the child stares at the file names for a long time.
It doesn’t open them. They’re not important.
It was decided almost immediately that the weapon would be psychic-typed. Psychic-type pokémon are, with incredibly rare exception, predators. They require an energy-rich diet to fuel their large, complex brains. However, the abilities that allow psychic-types to find prey, to injure and even kill from a leisurely distance, at the same time expose the psychic to its prey’s thoughts and feelings. How can a psychic hunt when forced to feel its prey’s fear, experience the pain caused by its own attacks? How can a psychic kill if must die alongside every one of its victims?
Most pokémon have evolved ways to infer what others think, to mirror their actions and model their emotional states. Psychic-types, on the other hand, require an absolute sense of self in order to remain distinct individuals amidst the foreign minds that brush against their own. Despite experiencing others’ thoughts and feelings, they must recognize them as outside themselves. In a psychic’s mind, the separation between “self” and “other” is absolute. More than any other kind of pokémon, then, psychics are naturally inclined towards the task of killing without remorse.
Medical reports about Mew’s pregnancy, dietary experiments with the infant Mewtwo, new Institute policy that interactions with the clone be performed in shifts of no more than two hours… no, no, no.
Here’s a message from one researcher to the project head, a member of the Rocket occupying force, begging to be released from the project, offering money, offering knowledge. He never got a reply–no point sending mail to a dead man.
This folder has a series of videos.
Psychic Dexterity Exam 001: A tiny Mewtwo floats near the center of the room, and a scientist approaches cautiously to offer the clone a bucket of blocks. With halting, wobbling imprecision Mewtwo sorts and stacks them by color and size.
Psychic Dexterity Exam 055: the scientist, in heavy protective gear, presents a waist-high Mewtwo with a bin of puzzles, interlocking rings and blocks of wood and Rubik’s cubes scrambled to colorful messes. Mewtwo sweeps them into orbit without even a gesture. They spin and scrunch and untangle all at once, Mewtwo’s glowing eyes fixed on the experimenter the whole time.
Psychic Dexterity Exam 108: Mewtwo, full-sized, stands in front of delicate contraptions of glass and wire, intricately knotted and then tangled up with one another, a crazy mass of filaments that the child’s eyes can’t even take in. Mewtwo ignores them, and the instructions blaring over the speaker in the room, and stares into the camera, and stares, and stares, until the child closes the video.
No. This is not… what it wants. It needs to stop looking at these kinds of things.
The ability to share others’ experiences is matched by psychics’ ability to project their mental states onto those around them. Stimulating foreign neurons is what allows psychics to cause sleep, pain, or even the illusion of speech. However, without careful training a psychic’s passive thoughts and mood are also broadcast, causing similar emotions to arise in their “audience.” Over time, people and pokémon routinely exposed to a psychic’s mental field will “learn” to think more like the psychic, and this effect is more pronounced the more powerful the psychic in question is. The Mewtwo project sought to create a psychic of unprecedented power, but its executors failed to consider that they would also be creating a pokémon with unprecedented ability to influence its handlers.
The child shouldn’t be wasting time on all this useless information, the records of people who don’t matter, who are all dead anyway. But it keeps opening files, even ones it knows won’t be about Mew, and reading or watching in what might have begun as curiosity but is now something else. The child isn’t enjoying itself, but it can’t seem to stop. Sterile white walls encroach, and it’s trapped, doubly trapped in two sets of memories.
The only way out is to keep going. Maybe when it remembers everything, when it’s lived it all again, maybe then it can rest.
Perhaps if the scientists working with Mewtwo had projected confidence and reassurance, convinced the clone that it was a valuable asset with a place on Team Rocket, they could have earned its loyalty. As it was, fear of Mewtwo’s power, fear of displeasing Giovanni, fear for their lives and their families–most researchers were not members of Team Rocket, and we will later call into question the means used to control them–fear permeated the environment in which Mewtwo was raised. The clone absorbed it from foreign minds and learned to fear in turn. From this fear came hatred, a hatred the clone fed back into the people around it. And so their fear increased, and so too did Mewtwo’s’ hatred, negative emotions feeding on and amplifying one another. This led to impaired decision-making on the part of project staff, panic, madness, and would ultimately precipitate the project’s tragic end. It almost certainly damaged Mewtwo beyond the point of usefulness as well.
But there’s no end to the memories. The child could go down and down forever, but there will always be more. It lives the same scenes again and again, more vividly than ever now with all these stories to remind it of what was genuinely forgotten or what it had never actually known.
The intern who was always kind to it, who was a friend–she was a Rocket, one of the first to infiltrate the facility. And the scientist who fell first to Mewtwo, the first one killed–he had a name. It was Andre. The child (Sara, the other child) had never known. But now it does. It has no choice.
But there is an end. There is a bottom to the memories. Tucked in deep, far out of sight, is the child’s mother. It opens, reads, and then suddenly realizes it’s reading and not actually in the lab, returns to the present all at once, having found what it didn’t even remember it was looking for.
It reads the last sentence, the last word. And stops. And for some time, it does nothing at all.
“Hey, Freak.”
The child turns from the computer, and it can feel the turn, muscles cramping all down its neck and back. It’s hunched forward over the keyboard, eyes gritty and aching from staring at the screen. It doesn’t know how long it’s been looking at this file. It feels like even if it focused properly it wouldn’t be able to read the words anymore.
The great Nathaniel Morgan hovers in the doorway, shadowy and blue-tinted in the computer screen’s light. “Uh, what’s up?”
“What he means to ask is when dinner is,” Leonard Kerrigan says from behind the great Nathaniel Morgan. He pushes his way in, and the great Nathaniel Morgan shrinks away from him, becoming one with the doorframe. “Personally, I’d rather you just sent me home. That would be one fewer mouth to feed, wouldn’t it?”
“Later,” the child says with a dull flare of irritation. It’s hard to concentrate on them with its head still full of the past. Before it didn’t have words to talk about what happened in the lab, and now it has too many: they play over and over in its head, narrating dead horrors while it’s trying to haul itself back into the present.
The great Nathaniel Morgan asks, “You find what you’re looking for?”
“Mew is in Orre.” The child shudders, because somehow saying it makes it real, and all the hopelessness that’s been gnawing a hole through its middle threatens to escape.
It can’t even say Orre, not really. Team Rocket doesn’t know. There aren’t many files on where Mew went–“reclamation of the primary asset,” in their own dry words. There were sightings in Sevii, but they panned out to nothing, with remarks about how unfortunate it was that the searchers, given the opportunity to redeem themselves by finding one little pokémon, failed in even that much. So they’re dead, claimed by Cinnabar’s curse, and what good is that?
The only other useful file was a report from an information-gathering mission in Orre. Team Rocket was curious about Team Snagem’s pokéball-hijacking technology, and the rumor that Mew was spotted wandering the desert was a footnote. That’s all: the mere suggestion that Mew might have been in Orre a few years back, the best information the child could find on the entire computer. It even knows she isn’t “out wandering the desert” now–its dreams show that much, at least.
“Orre?” The great Nathaniel Morgan frowns. “Didn’t you say she was with Rocket? Ain’t no real Rocket ops in Orre, shit, we got standards.”
“She is not with Team Rocket.”
“I thought your bullshit dreams–”
“They show some place like the lab on Cinnabar. That is all I know.”
“What? And you got Team Rocket from that? Did you think they’re the only outfit with, like, tech? What, was Giovanni there, pointing to a huge ‘R’ on the wall or some shit? Oh my God.” The great Nathaniel Morgan shakes his head. “All this time we were–you fucking destroyed Viridian because–Jesus. Of fucking course. I should have known.”
“Shut up.” The child is not going to cry in front of these two. From shame and hopelessness it kindles anger, and it feels good to be angry. Being angry means it isn’t frightened and helpless like a human child, or a like a god impossibly trapped and alone. The child is neither of them. It’s strong. And the humans had better not forget it.
Leonard Kerrigan laughs. “Oh, this is too wonderful. I knew you two were completely incompetent, but are you actually saying you murdered over fifty people on a misunderstanding?”
“You shut up too!”
Somehow that only makes him laugh harder. “Truly, you’re a criminal master–a master, hah, a m-m-master–”
“You had better stop laughing,” the child says, taking a step forward.
Leonard Kerrigan doesn’t back up, and he doesn’t stop, either.
“This is your last warning.” The child’s voice comes out big, and it takes another step forward. It hopes he’ll keep going, that he’ll give it a reason to fight. He thinks the child is some kid he can push around? It’ll show him. No one is ever going to lock it up again. No one is ever going to ignore it, treat it like it’s stupid, ever again. The child’s heart beats loud in its ears, and power thrums in its chest, just waiting for release.
“Hey, maybe you oughta–” the great Nathaniel Morgan mutters to Leonard Kerrigan, who cuts right across him.
“Or what?” he says, tears standing out in his eyes from his laughing fit, mouth still trying to pull up into a smile. “I thought you might still need me for some menial task or other. I hope not, because at this rate I’m going to die of laughter.”
The child crosses the room in two steps, growing as it goes so it doesn’t even have to reach up to grab Leonard Kerrigan’s throat. “I said shut up! I said shut up!”
He gurgles a bit, but that’s better than talking, at least. The child squeezes tighter on his neck while he tries to thrash his way out of its grip. Now he remembers, doesn’t he? Now he remembers what happened the last time he met the child. And it wasn’t half as mad then, was it?
“Holy shit!” The great Nathaniel Morgan grabs the child’s shoulder, and it shrugs him off without taking its eyes from Leonard Kerrigan’s face. “Don’t kill him! Jesus Christ, don’t kill him, please don’t kill him!”
He tries again to pull the child away, but it takes one hand from Leonard Kerrigan’s throat and grabs the great Nathaniel Morgan’s arm. A sharp sideways twist, and the child hears the bone crack. The great Nathaniel Morgan’s eyes go wide, and he offers no resistance when the child shoves him away.
But he did distract it for a moment. The child tightens its hold on Leonard Kerrigan’s throat, annoyed. It could squeeze hard and crush his windpipe, but that would be easy, wouldn’t it? Let Leonard Kerrigan realize he has no chance, that the child’s much too strong. Let him realize he’s dying long before it happens. Let him know fear. Let him know dread. Let him know his own helplessness.
The child isn’t helpless anymore. It never will be again.
Leonard Kerrigan’s tries to say something. He makes noise, at least. He’s clawing at the child’s arm, but it doesn’t even feel his pathetic scratches. It doesn’t know if the pulse in its fingers is its own or his. It leans closer to him, smiling, smiling. How does it feel to be weak? How does it feel to be small?
“Look, just let him go, okay?” the great Nathaniel Morgan says. He stands off to one side, cradling his broken arm. “I mean, if you want to kill him later, then, then whatever, but for now just let him go. Let him go and let’s talk. It’ll be okay, let’s just–”
A clatter of claws outside and Raticate charges in, Mightyena close on his heels. They need a moment to take in the scene, and that moment is long enough for the child to prepare, so that when Raticate jumps it kicks him straight into his trainer. The two of them go down in a heap, the great Nathaniel Morgan making a high-pitched noise when he lands on top of his broken arm.
The child throws Leonard Kerrigan into the wall and lunges for the pokéballs on the great Nathaniel Morgan’s belt while Mightyena rushes to check that he’s okay. She rounds on the child, lips pulled all the way back from her teeth, then turns red and disappears. So does Raticate, still trying to disentangle himself from the great Nathaniel Morgan when his every cautious movement seems to make the human cry out in pain.
It’s just the great Nathaniel Morgan left. He cringes away from the child, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. “Don’t–” he starts, raising his good hand, and the child slams a confusion into his brain. His eyes roll back, and he collapses in a faint.
The child strides back to Leonard Kerrigan, who huddles at the base of the wall, coughing and coughing and holding his neck with both hands. He tries to run but can’t even get up to a crouch.
The child stands over him, looking down, and thinks it should feel triumphant. It should be enjoying this. But somehow the moment’s passed. Leonard Kerrigan’s lost his glasses, and his hair’s standing up in crazy mats, showing the place where he’s going bald. His stupid sweater vest is torn. The child can’t muster up any feeling but contempt. He thought he could control the child? It isn’t even worth the effort to finish strangling him.
But the child can’t have him telling anyone about its home. It grabs Leonard Kerrigan by the collar of his vest, and with a thought it’s away.
Autumn’s bite replaces the mugginess in the air. Trees crowd in around the child, mountains rise in the distance. This is the deepwilds near Viridian, where the great Nathaniel Morgan’s Rocket friends made their attack. The child thinks it’ll take Leonard Kerrigan a while to get back to civilization, but as he’s so smart, the child’s sure he’ll be fine. It drops him in the leaf litter and teleports home.
What to do with the great Nathaniel Morgan? The child looks sourly at his slumped form. Why did he have to get in its way? He didn’t need to get hurt.
A faint rumble distracts it from its thoughts. The floorboards tremble beneath its feet, and an ugly old farfetch’d planter shudders off a shelf and shatters. For a confused second the child thinks the volcano’s woken up, that an echo of Cinnabar’s eruption has come to claim it after so many years. But a look around finds no sign of Absol, and a second later Graveler comes smashing through the far wall. The child throws itself aside, and she barrels past, stopping neatly before she can blast into the next room. She uncurls and turns to face the child with all four hands clenched into fists.
The child spits a hydro pump at her, but she deflects the burst of water with one of the boards she sent flying with her entrance. That keeps her on the defensive long enough for the child to get to the great Nathaniel Morgan, grab her pokéball off his belt, and recall her.
Late to the party, the child thinks as it looks down at Graveler’s pokéball. Heard her trainer yelling from halfway across the island and got here as fast as she could, didn’t she? Of course she did. Of course she did.
Graveler flattened the computer when she came through the wall and smashed the desk to bits. The floor’s caved and cracked and soaked by hydro pump. Wood splinters and plastic shards litter the room. It’s quiet now, and quieter yet as the pulse of blood fades from the child’s ears. It can breathe again, and almost start to feel–
The great Nathaniel Morgan groans, and the child stiffens, caught between the desire to flee and the absurdity of running from a human, of all things. But the great Nathaniel Morgan’s going to wake up, and when he does he’s going to be angry again. And he should be, he should be, he got hurt, it wasn’t supposed to happen, but now it’s going to start all over again, and the child–
The child shudders, caught suddenly in the ebb of its anger, like it’s only now waking from a dream. What happened? It didn’t mean to do any of this. All it was doing was reading, and trying to find information, and then the humans came in here and it got… angry. So angry. It never meant for this to happen.
The child doesn’t have time to think through more than that. The great Nathaniel Morgan grimaces, and opens his eyes, and is starting to curl in around his broken arm when he catches sight of the child. It can see him recognize it is in the way his expression shifts, his pained look hardening to something hateful.
“You!” The great Nathaniel Morgan snaps. He starts to push himself up, like he’s forgotten all about his broken arm, only to stop with a wince and a curse. Oh, he is angry. “What the fuck happened? Where in the fuck is Kerrigan?”
“What?”
“Kerrigan! The nerd! Where the fuck is he?” The great Nathaniel Morgan asks. “You fucking killed him, didn’t you? What the hell did you do?”
“What? No, no, I–I never killed–”
“Bullshit! You were fucking strangling him right in front of my fucking face,” the great Nathaniel Morgan snarls. His hand goes to his belt, maybe unconsciously, and finds nothing there. He pats at his side, his empty pockets, and when he turns his gaze back to the child it fixes immediately on the pokéballs in its hand.
“Here,” the child says, stepping forward with the pokéballs held out in front of it, as far from its body as it can manage, like they’re hot.
The great Nathaniel Morgan lunges up from the floor but only manages to grab one, scattering the other two. He curses and pounces on them, which must jar his bad arm because he lets out what has to be an involuntary whimper.
“Your arm,” the child says, sour guilt welling in the pit of its stomach. But the instant the great Nathaniel Morgan sees it reaching for him he jerks away with a wince.
“Stay the fuck away from me!” he says, voice cracking on the last word when he jostles his arm again. “Don’t you get any fucking closer, I will fuck you the fuck up you murdering piece of shit.” He tries to get up, grabbing at the wall with fingers hooked into claws.
“I didn’t kill anybody!” The child’s shaking, opening and closing its hands, which are raised but useless in front of its chest. It doesn’t want to get angry again, it doesn’t, it can’t. “I don’t, I didn’t mean to, I…”
“I don’t give a shit, just stay the fuck out of my way!” The great Nathaniel Morgan manages to reach a standing position mostly by wedging his good shoulder into a corner and pushing up against it. He shuffles sideways towards the hole ripped through the wall, keeping the child in his sights the entire time. He sidles, sidles, nearly trips over a canted floorboard, and when he finally reaches the hole proper he turns and runs, clumsily, vanishing between the trees.
The child walks to the edge of the hole, where the floor ends in splintery jags, and sits down with its feet outside, resting on actual soil. It looks blankly into the trees, still shaking. Sadness rises in it so suddenly it nearly chokes. What happened? It didn’t mean to hurt anybody. It was just angry–those humans, they made it mad, they should have left it alone, it told them to leave it alone.
The room behind it is in ruins, the computer that the child worked so hard to get a tangle of busted metal and wiring. After all that, it’s gone, and for something so stupid as Graveler showing up and wrecking everything. Because she wanted to defend her trainer, who wouldn’t even need defending if not for his stupid mouth.
The child feels like it’s trying to get angry again but doesn’t have the energy, going hot and then cold as its emotions tumble over topsy-turvy. It’s tired but somehow brittly on edge, remembering again cold hallways, constant vicious psychic whispers. Maybe it doesn’t really care, actually, about the computer getting broken. It doesn’t want to remember any of that. What good can it do anymore?
Absol finds the child there, eventually. It might have been surprised, even relieved, to see her, if she’d come earlier. But it’s long since calmed its mind, turned off those sniveling parts of it that keep padding down the dark hallways of memory, into paranoia and slaughter and the unwelcome thoughts of the prisoner. Now it’s merely sitting where it is because there’s nowhere else it ought to be, neither hungry nor hot nor cold nor bored, listening to the sound of the wind in the trees and the waves against the shore.
“What happened?” Absol asks, eyes slightly narrowed as she takes in the room and the child sitting impassively in its new door. It neither knows nor cares what she might be thinking.
“I found what the computer said about Mew. The humans are gone. Graveler attacked me and broke the wall and the computer,” the child says. “We are going to Orre.” And after that, there’s nothing more to say, or to feel, about any of it, about anything at all.