momebie | The days are just like moments turned to hours.

Original fiction.
~1700 words.

Or crawled up onto the table and made herself comfortable. The pillow for her head always seemed to be a little too far away on its extendable metal arm, which kept her stretched and at attention even when she was lying down. The doctor joked that he would improve that in the next model. The Dolls that looked like her would be taller by just a couple centimeters. Not enough to be noticeable, but enough to make them more comfortable when they were being poked and prodded.

“And why should they have all the comfort when I'm the original?” Or leaned forward so that he could apply sensors to the base of her neck. “Shouldn't being real have some perks?”

“Ah, my dear, but that is a perk,” he said. “Being alive is incredibly discomforting. It's how we can tell ourselves apart from the Dolls.”

“About the only way if you get this to work.”

“Sit still,” he said. The doctor smoothed her hair back before applying the electrodes to her forehead. “Besides, they still won't have souls. We can't fabricate that. We don't even know if we'll be able to teach them to learn. They may just stumble around being the you from today. Be glad that's not a fate you have to endure.”

“Hm...” Or said, considering it.

“See, now close your eyes and count backwards from one hundred. I'm going to be pulling memory clusters today, so things may get a little muddled in the viewing.”

“One hundred,” Or said. “Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight. Um. Uh. Ninety-six...”

Or's looking at herself in the mirror, black hair piled up on the top of her head so that the back of her neck is bare. The furniture in the headmistress' room is made of dark wood that is carved into elaborate curls and creatures. It looks almost alive against the plain white walls. This room used to scare Or when she was a child, now it's a place that holds some of her dearest secrets. It's a place where she has become the woman she is by small degrees.

There's a mirror on the other side of the room as well, and when she turns her head she can see herself multiplied along a straight line, stretching off into infinity. Or has felt endless for as long as she can remember and this is only another step to that end. This is the final piece of the puzzle.

The headmistress comes out of the bathroom carrying a wooden stick with the needle attached to the end and a cup of ink. “This is the hardest one, child,” she says. “Are you sure you're ready to take this last step?”

Or nods and turns in the chair, straddling it backwards so that she can rest her hands on the high wooden back and drape her chin over them. She looks down at the floor, at the headmistress's black shoes and the way her nude colored pantyhose bunch around the ankles.

“May the True Diviner be blessed,” the headmistress says.

“And live on in our actions as well as in our thoughts,” Or replies, repeating the script she's been quoting since she was nine.

“This is for His death, may we feel pain so that we can Know it when we see it in others.” The headmistress places the ink down on the table next to them and Or hears the rustling of the cloth as she makes the symbol of the infinity loop over the ink, blessing it. “I'm going to start on the inside and work out, child,” she says. “Do not be afraid to cry out.”

Or remembers vividly the other tattoos she's received in her ascension through the order. The infinity loops on her wrists took upwards of an hour. They had hurt at first, but after a while she was merely fascinated by the action of the needle as it was beat against her skin in quick, short strokes. She doesn't imagine this final, short line at the back of her neck will be any worse than that. Until the needle comes down right on her spine and she feels the pain run through the tips of her fingers and back. There are stars exploding behind her eyelids when she closes them.

Or stands at the edge of the playground, her hands covering her face. “One,” she shouts. “Two. Three. Four. You'd better be hiding this time!” When she drops her hands the other girls are gone and she smiles, knowing it will take her mere minutes to find them. No one can hide from her for very long.

She walks around the edge of the playground, looking through the concrete tubes that they sometimes hide in or climb over. They're empty. She searches in the leaves of the trees that hang over her head, trying to see if any of the girls have climbed up inside of them, but there's no one there. She runs around the other side of the climbing wall to find the sand damp and undisturbed in the morning dew.

For the first time in her life Or feels truly alone. She's been abandoned. The others have left her. She sits down on one of the swings and rocks herself back and forth with her feet a few times, unevenly. When she looks up there's another girl standing in the middle of the playground. One who hadn't been there at the start of the game.

The girl has golden blond hair that hangs down her back in long, tangled curls. “Excuse me,” she says. “I'm Mattie. I'm new. Can you tell me where the year threes are supposed to be?” The words sound heavy in her mouth, as if she's talking around marbles. She deliberately enunciates each word.

Or can't answer. She can't do anything but stare, because over Mattie's head, reflecting off the sun off that light, light hair, is a small round halo. Her year hasn't gotten the talk yet, about boys and girls and how you find who's right, but she's heard the older kids discussing things. She knows not only should she not be seeing a halo this early, but that she should never see one for another girl. Or opens her mouth, but can't bring herself to say anything.

“Fine,” the girl says, turning on her heel and flouncing away. “You don't have to be mean.”

The halo retreats with the girl, the ring burnings itself into Or's mind so that the farther away it gets, the brighter she remembers it being.

Or is staring down the barrel of her revolver right into the dead center of the target. Its concentric circles guide her aim and calm her mind. Printed in blue ink, they closely resemble the ripples on the surface of a lake. Her bullets are merely rocks. They hit their mark directly in the center and leave the outside waves unbroken, perfect blips of infinity stapled on to the center of the ever changing world.

“Are you sure this is the first time you've ever held a gun?” Chet says. He's standing behind her, so close that she can feel his breath on the back of her neck. It sends a shiver down her spine and out through her fingers.

She pulls the trigger again, letting herself rock with the kick. “Yes,” she says, and the lie is so preposterous that he doesn't question it.

He reaches around her and places his hands on her elbows, pulling them down slightly and centering her stance. “If you keep this up they'll give you the fun toys in no time. I might have to hate you a little. It was six months before they let me handle a Class 5 Energy Gun.

“I don't want an energy gun,” she says, and pulls away from him. She doesn't want anything that Chet has to offer her, she just doesn't know how to turn him down before he asks. “I like the bullets. They're concrete and final.”

“They're clumsy and they can be traced.”

“Sometimes I want to be found.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you're stubborn?”

“Just get me more bullets,” she says.

When she finally shook off the anesthetic Or had the worst headache she'd ever experienced. “I think the pain is getting worse."

“You'll need to add that to the report,” the doctor said. “And I'll add the fact that you almost fried the machine to mine. I must have hit a hotbed of emotions. The friction from the information almost melted the circuits.”

Or thought about the memories she'd just relived. She had always thought of herself as part of a cycle. When Project Genesis started she'd jumped at the chance to be a part of it. They'd taken blood from her arms and scraped cells form her mouth and snipped off locks of her hair. They'd added up all of the bits of her and then combined them in a single genetic template to create the Dolls. She'd thought about how amazing it would be if they could make another person in her image without stopping to consider what it was that actually made her in the first place.

“Do you have to use everything?” she asked.

“One missed memory will make them different,” the doctor said. “Think of all of the small moments that have made you who you are. It's not my place to decide which one of those is safe to remove. We want them to be you. Or as close as we can come.”

“Except without the soul,” she said.

“Except without the soul,” he agreed.

Or wondered why that omission had been deemed okay. She wondered what the collected parts of her could amount to if there was nothing to hold them together. And most prominently, she wondered if anyone else would notice the difference.

This post was written for Topic 23: Pass the Ammunition at

therealljidol. This week's piece is an interlude in the universe I've been working with. It's set in Or's point of view instead of Mattie's, but it's information you'll need later, I promise. Man, I cannot wait until I can revamp this whole thing. This week at LJI we have three way intersections! I'm working with