The Bathrobe Knight: Volume 3 (35 page)

“Well, let’s just say that the creator gave us something special in our blood and leave it at that,” Stephanie said, pulling her rolly chair over to sit next to Kass. “Now, that said, how are you holding up? I put orange juice on the nightstand for you. I imagine you’re going to need a lot.” Stephanie grabbed the glass and gently put it in Kass’s hand.

Kass, not realizing how thirsty she was, found herself trying to down it all at once. Halfway through, however, she ended up choking and almost coughed it up and had to take a break for a moment. “Thanks,” she said as she came up for air and took a brief respite from gulping down the orange juice. “So . . .” Kass started, but the words were taking a while to get out.
So why were you there?
she wondered to herself, again failing to finish her thought aloud.

“There, there. Are you really sure you want to be talking right now?” Stephanie asked, leaning back in her chair as she watched Kass look around. “Do you need some more orange juice?”

Kass nodded.

“Alright, here you go,” Steph said, handing her another glass from the nightstand.

Kass looked over to see that there were still two more glasses waiting if she need them. She just hadn’t noticed them at first because they were behind a lamp. “Thanks,” she said, taking another sip.

“You know, you’re lucky to be alive. I almost wasn’t there,” Stephanie said. “And if it had been the other grunt, well, he might have shot you in the head, and that would have been that. Nothing I can do to heal a headshot,” Stephanie said with a shrug.

“Why?” Kass asked, still having trouble with full sentences. It wasn’t that she positively couldn’t say them: It was that everything felt heavy and difficult. The searing pain in her stomach occasionally flared up when she talked, or tried to talk, and acted as a sure deterrent against conversation. What she was hoping to convey was ‘Why were you actually there?’ But it was clear from Stephanie’s answer that she had misunderstood Kass’s single word inquiry to be ‘Why can’t you heal a head shot?’

“Oh, that’s ‘cause I can’t bring a person back to life if they’re already dead. Well, I technically might be able to . . . Maybe . . . I guess? That’s actually a good question. Even though the you in front of me might die, all of your data should still be loaded into the Tiqpa databases. I have a full mapping of your neurological networks, so, theoretically, I might be able create a new you . . .” Stephanie trailed off, “I mean . . .”

She paused again, only having advanced two words, but Kass could practically see the other woman’s synapses flickering back and forth through the look in her eyes. “I mean, if I were to create an organic robot with the exact same memories, or rather the same set of experiences and the same biological make up, would it be you? Could there be two yous? Or do we only consider it you if it occupies the same place in the space-time continuum?” Stephanie grinned. “For that matter, who is to say that I didn’t do that, and the person sitting right in front of me is just a copy of the girl who died in the restaurant?”

Kass’s gut managed to feel worse than it already did as the possibility struck her. “I’m . . . I’m not. Am I?”

Stephanie was already shaking her head before the first word even came out. “Relax. You can rest assured that, even if you don’t trust me to tell you the truth, you can trust logic to tell you that you’re not worth recreating. I’ve got a lot of bigger fish to fry than worrying about whether some fresh-off-the-boat kid dies in a barbecue joint; but, you have to admit, the question is still there. Like, even when you consider the video game world, for most single player games, we do multiple saves, and each save is considered part of the same ‘character,’ right? So if I rebooted you, so to speak, would it be the same as bringing you back from the dead? Would it be like a videogame where I’m simply loading a file where you’re still alive?” Stephanie scratched her head a bit. “Oh well, too much meta. But yeah, no matter what I did, I don’t think I could bring you back to life from a headshot no matter how good I am. Dead is dead.”

“I mean, why were you there?” Kass shook her head, brushing off Stephanie’s strange ramblings so that she could finally get out the question that had been bugging her for some time now. “Why am I lucky?” she asked, doing her best not to sound ungrateful. Being alive was probably better than the alternative, but she didn’t understand what Stephanie was doing hiding there in the first place or why she didn’t jump out earlier to stop her from being shot. Kass wanted to know why she let her get shot.
Why does it have to hurt so much?
Kass felt herself sniffling before she completely realized that tears were starting to pour out of her eyes and down her cheeks.
Why is it lucky that it hurts so much? Why is it lucky that this happened to me? Why lucky?
She found herself railing against Stephanie’s word choice, the tears turning into a steady stream as her nose struggled to pull the renegade snot back to its starting line.

Stephanie took Kass’s orange juice and put it aside before giving her a hug. “I’m sorry,” she said, patting Kass’s back as Kass cried onto her shoulder. “I’m so sorry this happened to you. You didn’t deserve it. You didn’t deserve any of it, and it’s okay to cry.” Her voice seemed to carry feathers as it soothingly swirled around and through Kass’s ears. “Just let it out,” she said, continuing to pat Kass’s back as she cried.

It took almost five minutes for Kass to recover. It might have taken less, but each sob pulled on her diaphragm and pushed against her stomach, causing the sharply burning spots to pulse with pain. Finally, realizing she had been tightly holding Stephanie as she cried onto her shoulder, she pushed the other woman away and tried to regain some of her dignity.

“Not to be a broken record, but there, there.” Stephanie patted the top of Kass’s arm. “Really. It’s okay to cry; it’s okay to let it out. Some awful things happened to you that shouldn’t happen to anyone. Coping with it in any way you can is okay. Don’t worry about feeling ashamed, there isn’t any such thing as shame for someone who has been through what you have. In two days, you’ve seen us demons enter the world and gotten yourself shot. You’ve gone through a lot, and you should know that I’m here for you. You just need to rest and get better.”

“Why?” This time, it was Kass who was the broken record. Even if the faucet had turned off, the emotions hadn’t. She was still mired in a crippling state of confusion as she struggled to deal with what was going on around her. Every ‘why’ had a thousand tails, each one seemingly as important as the next in terms of what needed to be answered. She still wanted to know what Stephanie was doing there. She still wanted to know why she had to be shot. Charles’s explanation just didn’t make sense to her. There wasn’t anything to be gained by killing her as she saw it.

“Kass, stop talking. Your body still needs to recover. Here, lean back a bit.” Stephanie pressed a button that caused the top half of her bed to fold upwards like it was straight out of a hospital, and Stephanie pushed Kass back onto it so that Kass was still upright enough to see without an issue, but she wasn’t supporting her own weight anymore. “If you really want to know what happened, I’ll tell you. You were lucky because I was busy watching Darwin, trying to find Eve and monitoring the changes that were going on with Valerie when I got a call from an associate of mine who works at the barbeque joint. He said Charles was ordering for two people, not just one. I called Charles’s driver and convinced him to stall arriving long enough for me to sneak in the back and get behind the counter before Charles entered the restaurant so I could listen to the conversation. I thought he’d be meeting with someone else, like your dad, so color me surprised when it turned out to be you.” Stephanie took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then sighed as she let it out. “It’s partly my fault: I gave him most of the technology he uses today. I gave him the device that forces me to crawl around like a monkey as I try to stay on top of his game.”

“On top of his game?” Kass repeated back to her.
You gave him the tech he uses to stop you?

“Yeah. He has been moving pieces to try to outmaneuver me since the day he met Eve and knew what I would offer.” Stephanie leaned further back into her chair, reaching to both of her pockets almost instinctually. “See, not that many people would believe me, but Charles isn’t the type to care about money. I mean, with how much he’s accumulated, it is hard to imagine he didn’t do it on purpose, that I pushed him through every bank account and checking book he had. He doesn’t have a greedy bone in his body . . . Although, I’m not sure he hasn’t grown into his role, titles or positions. He is a nationalist first: a cold, hard, calculating nationalist and humanist,” Stephanie stated with a frown. “He even tricked, lied to and married Eve, a perfectly innocent and naive girl--well, when he married her at least--just so he could study her and her child in hopes of helping ‘humanity’ advance a little more. He forced that poor daughter of his to go through tests every day of her life until Tiqpa. I have no doubt that, even now, he’s still running tests, drawing blood samples and running diagnostics, just to see if it can bring him a little closer to the truth.”

“That’s . . . That’s not possible. How could he . . .” Kass sat wide-eyed and open-mouthed as she stared at Stephanie in disbelief.
How can a man be with, marry and raise a child with someone just so they can study them? How does someone spend every waking hour pretending to love someone while at the same time treating them like just another rat in the laboratory? That’s monstrous. Experimenting on his own daughter? That’s insane.
The idea alone made Kass feel nauseous.

“Look, you don’t have to believe me. I’m the biased narrator as far as you should be concerned. Maintain your skepticism, but you should at least consider the possibility that, whether you want to be or not, you’re on my side. That’s how he sees it, and, as a result, he wants you dead and thinks you pose a threat,” Stephanie shrugged. “You don’t have to believe me, and you don’t have to even agree with that conclusion, but do consider it. He is that ruthless of a man. He is that dedicated to his beliefs.”

Kass, who hadn’t been trying to call Stephanie a liar, wanted to apologize that Stephanie took it that way, but the whole thing did sound dubious, like something she ought to be skeptical of.
What if Stephanie is on Charles’s side, and the reason she was there to save me was less of a coincidence and more of a planned event? What if my believing he wanted me dead is yet another piece in their grand plan to twist the board in their favor?
Doubt started to creep into her head as she mulled over what Stephanie had said. “So you were spying on him to stay ahead of his game . . . but, don’t you already know what he’s going to do?”

“That’s exactly it!” Stephanie’s face shifted from morose to happy in half a second as she smiled ear to ear. “That’s exactly what people are supposed to think! The smarter they think you are, the more reckless they play. They start looking over their shoulder thinking that you are always there, that you already know the moves they are going to make!” She looked like she was about to clap she was so excited. “They don’t realize for a moment that you’re not half as smart as they gave you credit for. You’re just sitting there with a dictionary when they ask you what a word means.”

“So . . . you pretend to be smarter than you are?” Kass didn’t comprehend what point Stephanie was trying to make at all.

“Or dumber! Both are useful. If you know a language, pretend that you don’t and let people feel comfortable enough to use it to voice their real opinion of you right in front of your face. If you don’t know a language, pretend that you do, that you know just enough of it to understand a few things, so that people are careful about what they say. It’s all about managing your enemies’ expectations. Never be who they think you’re going to be.” She suddenly started making the smacking, bubble-gum-chewing sound again. “Although, it, like, totes takes a lot of dedication to, like, pretend to be someone else. You have to, like, practice all the time.”

Kass’s jaw dropped for the second time in the conversation.
She fakes her accent, her character and everything about herself all the time just so that people won’t know who or what she really is? How paranoid is she?

“Right?” Stephanie’s response assumed incorrectly that Kass was impressed. “It’s such a good trick, but it takes a lot of patience and a lot of hard work. If you know something before people think you should, they’ll treat you differently. They’ll be so careful that they’ll be foolish, shutting perfectly good doors to very viable options just because they think you’re going to have a trap waiting for them. They’ll assume you’re going to be preparing countermeasures for options that you never even considered, and, as a result, they’ll be more easy to manage.”

“So . . . you pretend to be smarter than you are?” Kass repeated her question. She still didn’t follow, but she at least understood the gist of what Stephanie was doing even if she didn’t get the why.

“Yeah, because as long as Charles thinks that I know what I know from simply predicting what he’s going to do, from playing the chess game better than him, he’ll never expect that it’s something far more obvious than what he ever anticipated. I just watch, listen and study. It may be difficult, using just the right pieces at just the right time without ever letting him see the full hand in front of me, but it’s how it has to be. I have to spend minutes, hours, days and weeks researching, studying, working just to keep this front up, but it’s worth it so that I can win the long game.” Stephanie nodded her head over at the series of monitors and the old-fashioned mechanical keyboard she had been clicking away with.