Alone (1 of 2) [Dramatized Adaptation] by Sigler Scott

Author:Sigler, Scott [Sigler, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798200829095
Amazon: B09BY7XHR8
Goodreads: 90830553
Publisher: Graphic Audio
Published: 2020-06-03T07:00:00+00:00

He can’t be real. He can’t.

My father smiles.

“Hello, peanut.”

His words crush me, steal the strength from my limbs. I lean against the tunnel wall to stop myself from falling.

Peanut.

That’s what he used to call me. Call Matilda. Call us.

I know he’s not my dad. Matilda was born—I hatched. In the deep fiber of my being, though, she and I are the same person. Which means no matter what this thing is, I feel a connection to him so powerful and so real it doesn’t matter who came from where.

This is my father.

Am I imagining this?

“Huan,” I say, “what do you see?”

“A man.” Huan sounds almost as shocked as I am. “A black-haired man with a mustache.”

“You’ve done well, peanut,” my father says. “We know that many of you died on the journey here. That is to be expected. Only the strong survive, and only the strongest merge.”

This is madness.

“You’re dead,” I say, my voice cracking on the words. “You’ve been dead for a thousand years.”

That smile…so warm, so loving.

“Think of me as an echo. An echo of a concerned parent, if you will, perhaps no different than the memory in your thoughts that lets me take this form.”

This is a memory? I don’t understand.

“Can you read my mind?”

“Not in the way you mean,” he says. “I drew from your experiences to find a form that is important to you.”

He can’t read my mind, but he can read my memories? I don’t know how those things are different.

He is anguish and heartbreak dragged from my past and sculpted into reality. My father. So many times I’ve wished I could meet him. Now here he is, but he’s not real. Whatever this thing is, it is cruel.

A tiny part of me is glad I’m not looking at an “echo” of O’Malley. I don’t know if I could take that.

Maybe this thing would have chosen my mother, but I don’t remember what she looks like. I don’t know her face.

Am I going insane? This whirlwind of emotions

—love and hate and terror and killing rage—

whips at me, makes it hard to see, impossible to think.

“Em,” Huan whispers. “Em, say something.”

My fingers flex on the handle of my knife.

Have to focus…I’m here for answers.

“My people received a signal,” I say. “Very long ago.”

My father shrugs. “Long is a relative term, peanut.”

“Don’t call me that!” I draw my knife, shake it at him even though I’m not sure if there’s anything really there that I can cut. “Did you send that signal, or not?”

“I did. But not for myself. As I told you, I’m an echo. I’m not real. You know one like me….his name is…ah, now I have it—his name is Ometeotl.”

The Observatory computer.

“You’re a machine,” Huan says. “A godsdamned robot?”

My father glances to the tunnel ceiling, a painfully natural, human expression—he’s thinking over Huan’s words.

“No, not a machine, but perhaps robot is close. I am a small piece of a sentient, biological organism.”

He smooths his mustache. He does this because I remember my father doing the same thing.

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