I felt more excitement than I ever had, an eagerness that was tainted with a weight of cruelty that had long been quashed. It came at the reemergence of all the reasons why I hated her, and the feeling came fast and strong. All at once, I was reminded of these awful things, even as I was shocked to discover that reproduction was not only possible, but that it was also possible with human beings.
The small, rational part of me told me to stop. To wait. To hesitate, to take my leave by the look of such pain and agony behind her eyes. She’d told me briefly the story of how they’d all died to get this book.
It must have been very hard on her.
What if she didn’t want to know?
Why not? I argued to myself.
What she wanted didn’t matter all over again. She was a lesser species, a Third Race, a murderer and a manipulator. Everything I felt suddenly tasted cheap in my mouth, and I didn’t care that she was in pain. I just wanted to make the truth so evident to her that it would be impossible not to rub her disgustingly beautiful face in it.
“What’s Deviant mean?” Fisher asked distractedly, like she was deep in thought.
“It’s a little confusing…” I admitted half-heartedly.
It was a lie. I understood it perfectly.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s a program of clones, which are copies of actual people and things.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked with such frustration
I leaned away from the book, feeling so attached to my old world and my old ways that my anger began to channel outwards, like in a funnel, being forced into an opening that I would soon be incapable of stopping from spewing forth.
“A clone is science,” I said to her. “People in my land know how to make life without a woman and a man having sex.”
She blushed, but I didn’t care that I was too blunt.
“They’re not real. Fake and plain. And wrong. Wrong by nature.”
“Why wrong?”
“Because it is like these words on the page. I can tell them to you, but they can’t come out and touch you. Clones want that. They think that. They try to come out at you and trick you.”
“But why?”
“So they can kill you.”
Her eyes widened in shock.
“Why would they do that if people made them? Isn’t that bad?”
“See what I mean?” I asked, smirking at her stupid ignorance. “Wrong.”
“Then what is an Aio?” she asked next.
“It’s a better one than all the rest. They’re like…” I hated talking about it again. It had been gone from me for so long. I didn’t want to return to that bitterness. “They’re like gods, I guess.”
“Alpha and Omega?”
“The beginning and the end,” I replied, nodding. “They’re the offspring of artificial life. Before we…before this, people in my world thought that Aios were impossible. Artificial life should not capable of creating new life. That’s also wrong.”
She doubted this. I saw it in her eyes, but she made no comment on it.
“Then what’s Great Deviant?” she asked, nervously now.
“An Aio and a Great Deviant are the same.”
“Why are they important?”
I scowled.
“Because we need them to save us from extermination.”
“So my parents were carriers for some ancient ritual to keep these Aios alive? What – did they harbor these things in them or something? Is it a disease?”
“Let’s find out,” was all I could manage, and I read on, faster and harder than I had before.
“My husband and I tried for many years to have children with little success. Each time, I miscarried, and my heart began to ache in earnest at the task that my mother had given me.
Until a miracle happened. I felt it while I was cooking one night, suddenly. Nothing very specific happened, not really, but I stood tall and knew.
I was pregnant.
I had succeeded. My husband and I made an Aio, Myth. Your father and I made you.”
“Wait!” she shouted abruptly, but I plowed through the reading with an urgency neither of us understood.