Title: The Changeling Game (Formerly Identity Theft)
Author: Ardath Rekha
Chapter: 64/?
Fandom: Pitch Black (2000); The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)
Rating: M
Warnings: Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language, violence
Category: Gen
Pairing: None
Summary: As her return to her home world draws ever closer, Audrey prepares to adopt the role of an ordinary child who never left her world at all, and struggles to cut ties with a persona that still haunts her.
Disclaimer: The characters and events of Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios. I just wish I were in charge of their fates. No money is being made off of this. I’m writing strictly for love of the story.
Feedback: Absolutely, the more the better! Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post “rough,” so I can always use the help.
64.
The Camouflage of Ordinary Things
“How’s your arm?”
“Sore,” Audrey sighed. “Just a little, though. You’re sure nobody’s gonna detect it?”
“Nobody will have the opportunity to,” MilitAIre told her. “The moment your biometrics get collected to access your medical records, flags will go up and the medical staff will be informed, in no uncertain terms, that the only kind of care they’re allowed to provide is emergency triage care. No exams, no elective procedures… except the ones you and your handler have agreed to and your handler has pre-authorized. The penalty for medical staff disobeying a Federacy block is having their licenses to practice struck off, so they won’t feel inquisitive.”
“So… where will I get checkups? And shots, and things?”
“That’s being arranged.” MilitAIre sounded amused. “But it’d be very difficult to sell the idea that you’ve been on Deckard’s World the whole time if someone notices that you’ve received immunizations never offered there and have been baby-proofed until you’re nearly twenty-four.”
True. Those things weren’t generally available to girls on Deckard’s World, even if she personally thought they should be. It hadn’t taken all that much to convince him to let her get them done, either.
She’d begun reading the book that Izil had given her—one that, it turned out, had been co-authored by Takama herself—and it had been an epiphany. The Biology, Psychology, and Sociology of Human Sexuality had answered a lot of questions she hadn’t even known she had… and its evaluation of the sociopolitical norms of Deckard’s World were scathing enough that she was no longer surprised that the book would be impossible to find there. She found herself missing Takama more than ever and wishing they could discuss the text.
Izil had given it to her because it discussed issues of gender and biology that, thanks to her time masquerading as a boy, had confounded her. She wondered if he’d have given it to her at all if he’d known she was from Deckard’s world, given just how critical it was about the planet of her birth. Less than three chapters in, she’d discovered that, in addition to her home world imposing several centuries-out-of-date gender “norms” upon its populace, it had also cut people off from fundamental health resources. Such as immunizations that would protect against virtually every sexually transmitted disease a person might be exposed to… and regulators that could prevent pregnancies for years or even decades. The simple existence of such things had come as a shock; even her aunt, the nurse, hadn’t mentioned them.
Takama had argued, in one chapter, that the rationale behind blocking access to such treatments was tied to a disturbing philosophy that sexuality was sinful and should have negative consequences for anyone who enjoyed it. But it wasn’t the consequences of her own actions that Audrey had been worried about, which was what she’d told MilitAIre when she’d argued that she should receive all of the shots and an implant. If she and Kyra hadn’t managed to escape from Pritchard—assuming they’d survived what he and possibly Makarov would have done to them next—the consequences of his actions could have followed her through the rest of her life in any number of awful ways. And he might not be the last sexual predator whose path she crossed.
MilitAIre had let her plead her case, and then had spent a few minutes dissecting her arguments and suggesting how she could improve them, before informing her that he’d agreed with her from the beginning and that First-AId would have her implant configured for her in one day’s time. He’d then showed her the full schedule of vaccines—including several, for non-sexually-transmitted diseases, that she’d never heard of—that she would need to receive in the coming weeks. Deckard’s World, it turned out, had some perplexingly backwater ideas about disease and immunology that conflated getting sick at all with moral failings, and Audrey had been lucky that most of the people she’d encountered on her run hadn’t shared those views.
The funny thing was that MilitAIre didn’t particularly care about the philosophies behind any of the stances favoring or opposing vaccines; he simply considered it his job to ensure that Audrey was protected from all potential threats, including those on a microbial level.
His pragmatism about such things, she’d found, made him a very restful companion.
He didn’t judge; at least, not in any kind of moral sense. He did critique her constantly, but in a way that somehow made her feel better about whatever goals she’d missed as he analyzed just how she might reach them on her next attempt. There were still a whole lot of things she couldn’t bring herself to face—or discuss—yet, but it was growing easier and easier to talk about some of them. And he had insisted on knowing everything about her time on the run.
The rest of the AIs still had no idea who she really was, but they had accepted MilitAIre’s new position of authority over her. Even CaptAIn deferred to him where she was concerned, although he rarely had to.
“You have now succeeded twice in conforming your brain waves to baseline readings,” MilitAIre told her, rousing her from her musings. “Later this week, we’re going to run our first ‘surprise Quantification’ drill to see how close you can bring them without advance preparation. Advance warning is never given for such tests, after all.”
“Do you think I’m ready for that?” she asked, feeling doubtful.
“It’s unlikely at this stage, but we need to see just how far away from normative your readings will be in such a scenario.”
“So we’re doing a ‘fire drill.’”
“Essentially.”
Audrey nodded. She liked the way he tested her, in truth. She liked being able to make mistakes and learn from them instead of being scared that she wouldn’t get everything right the first time. She liked not having to figure out what she was doing wrong, or just wasn’t doing right, completely on her own. He had told her, when she asked, that her strongest learning style was “interactive,” which had both made perfect sense to her and come as a disturbing revelation, given how many of her teachers had stressed “independent learning.” But without MilitAIre, she might have still been in a tailspin about how to get her gamma-delta wave synch-up—apparently a telltale for espers—to un-synch.
The Apeiros disliked the exercises; they couldn’t “hear” her during them. She often felt like her senses were muffled, too; her awareness of the other ’verses became distant and tenuous. Once she relaxed, everything flowed back to her and she felt like herself again, but…
It worried her. She suspected it worried them both. She didn’t think she could live in a “baseline” for very long. It was further and further away from who she was.
“In the meantime,” MilitAIre said after a moment, “now that you have completed your mathematics, science, and social science modules, you aren’t going to be able to put off your literary assignments anymore.”
Audrey had to restrain the urge to huff. “Okay… I think I can manage them…”
The hardest one would probably be The Crystal Cave, she thought. She’d been reading it when she’d spotted Makarov on the train, and every time she’d tried to pick it up since, she started thinking about the standoff that had followed. For the first two months on the Nephrite Undine, though, every work of fiction she’d tried to get into had somehow become all about those terrible events. That had finally begun to recede.
“I’ll try reading The Crystal Cave again, last,” she told MilitAIre.
“Understandable. What other titles will you be reading?”
She knew he could look them up easily; he had access to everything she’d stored on the ship’s data mainframes, but he wanted her to talk to him about them. He’d explained his rationale for this to her a week earlier: aside from his observations about her preferred learning style, the way she interacted with and handled the texts, and discussed them with others, would be markedly different if she’d done all of it on her own, and that might raise suspicions. Her teachers and classmates needed to be under the impression that she had simply been enrolled somewhere else for two school-years; those who thought they were in the know had to believe that her handler had tutored her during her isolation. The truth, that she had spent nearly half a year separated by countless light-years from any other human being, was something that no one must ever suspect.
“Um… my eighth grade curriculum included The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Animal Farm by George Orwell, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.” And a bunch of short stories, but she wasn’t going to rattle all of them off.
“Interesting. Those are all twentieth century works, all mid-century, written in English by either British or American authors. That’s a narrow spectrum.”
Audrey shrugged. “Takama said in her book that Deckard’s World is mired in mid-twentieth century Anglo-America.”
“Do you know what characterizes that milieu?”
Oh. Now MilitAIre’s motive was coming clear. He’d added a few sociology readings of his own choosing to her list last week, after all.
“Yeah. Post-World War II America was attempting to assert a ‘traditional’ way of life that had never really existed before then, right? A ‘nuclear’ family in which only one parent worked outside of the home… people did act like my mom was nuts for going back to work when I started school. And an ‘American Way’ that was all about ‘equality’ and ‘freedom,’ but only if you met certain criteria. Women could vote but usually couldn’t have their own bank accounts or credit lines… birth control was rudimentary as shit… racial segregation was commonplace… and more than half of the rights in the Federacy Human Rights Charter were routinely withheld from people.”
“And?”
“And the Cold War kept people from fighting as hard for those rights and against those limitations as they might have, because a shadowy enemy on a whole ’nother continent could blow everybody up, and they were told that was a higher priority.”
“Well stated. Have you seen signs of anything similar on Deckard’s World?”
“The Cold War part doesn’t seem to apply, but everybody’s still jumpy about the New Taliban trying to invade and it’s been more than two centuries since that happened. So maybe they’re our ‘Soviet Union.’”
“A completely external common enemy to keep the populace’s watchfulness focused outward, yes. What else? What is attention being focused away from?”
Audrey grimaced. Her father had been right about Deckard’s World, and obviously MilitAIre wanted to make sure she was aware of it before she found herself surrounded by it again. “Class divisions are along racial lines. Xenophobia is high and includes almost all members of other ethnic and religious groups. There’s a big emphasis on ‘traditional’ gender roles and most of those are the ‘traditions’ of mid-twentieth-century America, so if you’re not heterosexual and monogamous, and want to do or have things that ‘belong’ to the other sex, like a ‘man’s job’ or ‘men’s clothing,’ you may have the right under Federacy law, but almost nobody’s going to support your choices.”
“You disguised yourself as a boy for a while,” MilitAIre said. “What was it like, being seen and treated as a boy rather than as a girl?”
“People didn’t talk down to me nearly as much,” she reflected. She’d been thinking about it a lot, because her experiences of passing as a boy had left her questioning many of the gender divides on Deckard’s World. “They acted like I might just have a brain in my head and they didn’t spend as much time trying to prove anything I said wrong. I still got a few creepy looks on Vasenji Station, but… nobody was trying to ‘accidentally’ grope me or rub up against me anymore. And all the ‘guy stuff’ I’d been told I probably wouldn’t be able to figure out—with maybe the exception of how to pee into a urinal standing up—wasn’t so hard as all that.”
“The study guides you’ll be working with don’t bring such issues up, but I want you to think about them as well, as you’re reading. You’ve now been exposed to a larger cross-section of humanity than you knew on Deckard’s World. Think about whose stories are being told, and who’s being left out of the narratives altogether. And why your school, or your world, might not want to include those who don’t appear, or even have people think about them. Also, think about why Arthurian legend would be important enough to your world’s culture that two of the novels on your reading list feature it.” A note of humor entered MilitAIre’s voice. “I can’t help you with the issue of using a urinal, but First-AId might have some ideas, if you wish.”
“Nah,” Audrey laughed. “That’s not necessary.”
“And your ninth grade reading list?”
“The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Should I be watching for the same things with them?”
“Yes. Your reading lists have been curated to match, and reinforce, prevailing ideologies of a time and place more than half a millennium in the past. While some of them are critical of that time and place, there are limits they don’t push past and attitudes they never challenge. I’ll be interested to see what conclusions you end up drawing about that.”
“Am I making a mistake?” Audrey blurted.
“By?”
“Going back to Deckard’s World.” She was going to be spending at least four years surrounded by many of those backsliding beliefs, a lot of them possibly coming out of the mouths of people she loved and admired.
“No,” MilitAIre told her in a calm tone. “All worlds have their flaws. But it would be much harder to establish a plausible and safe identity for you on any other world. When Audrey MacNamera ceases to be a missing person, especially when it becomes evident that she never left Deckard’s World at all, most of the potential loose threads from your run will be wiped away. Your name, image, and biometrics will be deleted from all of the Missing Persons databases throughout the Federacy, making it all the more unlikely that anyone will ever connect you to your appearances, under a variety of aliases, on three separate planets, one space station, and six Star Jumpers. Everything will seem to be back in its place. This wouldn’t be true for any other identity you took on, on any other world. Once you are legally eighteen, even if not yet biologically so, you can elect to leave Deckard’s World again—in the custody of your handler—and as far as the rest of the universe will know, it’ll be your first time going offworld.”
“Best and easiest way to break my trail. Got it.”
“And your family will know you’re alive and unharmed, and they won’t feel betrayed by your disappearance because they’ll believe you had no choice in the matter.”
Ouch. She’d very much had a choice, and she’d chosen to run out on them. She felt worst about running out on her cats, though, and they couldn’t be told a placatory lie about WitSec disappearing her for nearly two years.
“I’m sorry, Audrey. That wasn’t intended to upset you.”
“I know. I just… I was really thoughtless. About how they’d feel when I just disappeared. They’ve been worried about me for a year and a half now.” She wiped at her eyes. “They don’t know if I’m alive or dead—”
“They will soon. They’ll know that you have returned to them unharmed.”
“I don’t know about unharmed,” she disagreed. “Too much shit went down.”
“Comparatively speaking, then.”
She supposed that, on a missing-kid scale of Huckleberry Finn to Luljeta Kamberi, she was a lot closer to Huck than to Luljeta.
“Okay. They’ll be able to stop worrying, at least,” Audrey reluctantly agreed. “But… are they really not going to ask questions once they’re told I’ve been in WitSec?” She had her doubts. Her mother was a corporate lawyer, and Alvin the Asshole was an assistant D.A.
“That’s highly unlikely at first. Human curiosity shows little regard for what’s been declared off-limits. They’ll have a lot of questions, and they won’t be happy about not getting answers.”
“So what do we do?” Her mom was formidable, after all, and Alvin… well, she really didn’t know. He was an asshole, but she hadn’t stuck around to find out how much of an asshole he might be.
“You’ll stick to your story,” MilitAIre said, “which is simple enough. You saw something that you shouldn’t have witnessed and can’t talk about, you were taken into WitSec custody soon after, and you’ve finally been allowed to come home as long as you stay silent about everything that happened. And when they try to force the issue—which they undoubtedly will at first—your handler starts throwing their weight around.”
“That… sounds…” She winced. “…bad?”
“Only if they’re too persistent,” he told her. “They’ll stop once they understand that your handler truly does have the power to take you away from them again if they keep fighting.”
Shit. “Does that ever happen?”
“Very rarely. But even if it becomes necessary, your trail will already be broken at that stage. Federacy records will indicate that Audrey MacNamera never left Deckard’s World while she was a missing person, and that will still be true even if your return home ends up being brief. Your family will know you’re alive and well somewhere. But the odds of that becoming necessary are extremely slim.”
“So if Deckard’s World doesn’t work out…”
“You can be relocated. But it shouldn’t be necessary, and it’s important for you to focus on trying to have as normal an adolescence as you can. Aside from two comprehensive topics you can never discuss—your experiences during your missing time, and your unusual abilities—you’ll be able to live an ordinary life. Cultivating the ordinary is crucial to success in the WitSec program.”
“Yeah, ordinary…” Audrey tried to repress a frustrated sigh. “Because I’m such a normal person…”
“The important thing is for everyone else to believe you are, no matter what the truth is,” he told her in his most patient voice. “Which is why we’re adding another module to your curriculum between now and your return.”
Uh oh. “And what module is that?”
“Method acting.”
The main screen activated, the words Survey of Method Acting Techniques for “Natural” Performances emblazoned across its surface.
“You’ll be spending the next four years, minimum, portraying a role,” he told her. “We’ll explore and study the various techniques, particularly those used by film and vid actors for close-up performances, to find the approaches that allow you to play your part as naturally and convincingly as possible.”
“And what is that role exactly?” she asked. Obviously, it wouldn’t be “Jack B. Badd.” Jack was dead.
“A girl who, as a pre-teen, tried to run away from home after her mother suddenly announced she was marrying a man that the girl disliked and couldn’t manage to get along with. She got lost after making it into the nearby city, and found herself in the proverbial ‘wrong place at the wrong time,’ where she witnessed the murder of a Federacy agent. She panicked and hid, and was later found by other Federacy agents investigating their colleague’s death. When they realized just what she had seen, and whom she had witnessed committing the murder, they took her into protective custody.”
Audrey nodded. That was a whole lot more believable than what had actually happened, in truth…
…but not entirely dissimilar.
“Because the perpetrator of the crime, and his employers, were unaware that there was a witness,” MilitAIre continued, “the decision was made to conceal even the fact that she had been taken into custody from everyone until her testimony could be used. She was kept hidden for almost two years, with no human contact except her handlers, until the case abruptly fell apart when the perpetrator died in a firefight with Federacy agents, and any possibility of connecting his crimes to his employers came to an end. She was then told that she could return to her family as long as she never spoke of what she had seen or where she had been, because if his employers ever realized that she had witnessed the murder they had commissioned, they might have her preemptively killed just in case she knew enough to link them to the crime, herself.”
That made an absurd amount of sense, too. It was even, she realized, close to the truth. Pritchard and Makarov were both dead, and there had been nothing in the Merc Network files that she or General Toal could use to conclusively prove that the Quintessa Corporation had hired them to murder Colonel Tomlin. But she knew enough about that corporation’s ruthlessness to know that, proof or no proof, if they ever realized she possessed such knowledge—let alone that she had Threshold Syndrome—they would want to wipe her off the board.
“So, uh… most of the story is kinda true… just… happened a lot earlier into my run and… didn’t involve crash landings, battles on a merc ship, or Threshold Syndrome.” Or Riddick.
“Exactly. The most convincing lies are the ones built around enough verifiable truth that the false parts are unlikely to be scrutinized.”
“Like me witnessing a murder.” In point of fact, she’d witnessed several, and had even committed a few of her own.
No. Jack B. Badd had done that.
And Jack is dead.
“Exactly,” MilitAIre agreed. “Even if you never tell the story—and you never should—it should be something that you can treat as truthful. That makes all the difference. The current projected timeline for your return to your mother is mid-December. By then, we will have finalized all of the details of the story you can visualize, if not actually share, should someone start poking at your alibi.”
“Why December?” she asked, startled. “We’re scheduled to reach Deckard’s World near the end of October.”
“We’ll need time to configure the safe house you’ll use to check in with your handler each week and make sure everything is solid,” he told her. “But more importantly, the window in which you’re both biologically and legally fourteen years old opens on December 4, and being able to truthfully say you’re fourteen, if asked, will help sell the lie that you never spent any time in cryo. That said, I also have no intention of you suffering a second Christmas away from your family if it can be helped.”
It amazed her, sometimes, just how much he could see through her. And how much the things that mattered to her mattered to him. “So I’m going to be doing weekly check-ins with my handler? How come?”
“Largely for your sake,” he explained. “Your family’s probably going to be clingy and demanding at first once you return, and prone to not giving you space or privacy. So every week, for a few hours, you’ll be able to get away from the scrutiny.”
That hadn’t even occurred to her when she’d been trying to come up with her own back-story and plans… but she could see it now. Her mom might be afraid to let her back out of her sight.
“You can use the time,” MilitAIre continued, “to engage in any projects or inquiries that you can’t do where they’re watching… or just have a period of quiet. You’ll also be able to address any complications where your alibis are concerned, should those occur. Think of it as a pressure valve. Some weeks, you may not especially need it or even want it, but having it as a set part of your routine will ensure that you always have it when you do.”
“What kind of projects or inquiries?” she found herself asking.
“You have friends on other worlds that no one can know about. While you can’t contact those friends, especially one of them, until you’re eighteen, if you want to run searches related to any of them, you should only do so in the safe house. You’ll also have access to materials that are censored on Deckard’s World but considered customary and essential information throughout much of the rest of the Federacy. And, of course, it’ll be a space where you can continue to develop both your abilities and the skills you need to keep them hidden.”
“Yeah, I’ll need all of that stuff, won’t I?” It seemed so obvious once he said it.
“I think so,” he told her. Sometimes the hints of humor in his voice made him seem like an actual human being to her. “And knowing that you’ll be able to access it on a regular basis will help make playing your designated role, the rest of the time, more manageable.”
Once again, Audrey found herself feeling relieved that she hadn’t been stuck doing all of this on her own. Half of the things MilitAIre was describing hadn’t even occurred to her. I would have fucked this up, too, on my own.
She really didn’t do “alone” well at all. Not like Riddick. She realized that, the whole time she’d been with him… on the crash planet, in the skiff, on the Kublai Khan and the Xanadu III, and on the one and only day he’d spent on Helion—little more than a week, really, even less time than she’d spent with Ewan—she’d felt him wishing to be alone, to not have to feel the contact of other minds on his, shying away from both Imam’s judgments and her infatuation.
“You seem to be thinking about something sad,” MilitAIre observed.
“Yeah…” she sighed. “Riddick. I keep trying to just… let go of everything that happened with him, but… sometimes I just… miss him.”
His desire to leave no longer stung, the more she thought about it. He needed to be a lone wolf, unencumbered by problematic attachments. He’d probably have thrived in the isolation of the Nephrite Undine, whereas she, in spite of all of the companionable kindness the AIs were showing her, was counting down the days until she could immerse herself in the press of humanity again and feel other minds touching hers. The only part that still hurt, that she still had trouble understanding, was the way he’d left her without even a word, without a goodbye. That had made it hard for her to believe that he’d ever cared about her at all.
And yet he’d saved her life several times, risking his own in the process. Why, she wondered, had he been willing to throw himself into the path of bullets to keep her from falling to her death, but unwilling to tell her goodbye?
Why was it so damned hard to get over this? Every time she thought she had…
“There have been no sightings of him in a while,” MilitAIre said after a moment. “The last ‘confirmed’ sighting on record is the false video you commissioned. In the meantime, he’s dropped from first to second on the list of the Federacy’s Most Wanted, and is unlikely to move back up.”
“Why? Who’s in first place?”
“Do you really need to ask?” MilitAIre sounded amused again.
“Duke Pritchard?” It made sense. Aside from a very small group of people who were sworn to secrecy, nobody knew that Pritchard was dead. But everybody knew the kinds of crimes he’d been prone to… and might, as far as they knew, still be committing somewhere. He had become the bogeyman every parent with a missing daughter imagined… including, probably, both of hers.
“It’s likely that he will remain at the top of the Most Wanted list for years, or even decades,” he said. “No proof of his death will ever appear, given the location and probable condition of his remains at this point. And while the Federacy may dislike having an “Unleashed Esper” running loose, even it must admit that none of Riddick’s crimes have ever approached the monstrosity of Pritchard’s. Quite the opposite.”
“The opposite?”
“Yes,” MilitAIre told her. “Based on the part of his criminal record that remains classified, your Riddick might even be willing to break his cover to kill someone like Duke Pritchard.”
“He’s not ‘my’ anything,” Audrey grumbled before she could stop herself.
She wondered why, after everything, that could still hurt so much.
I need to let it go, she scolded herself. He isn’t part of my life and he never was. He was part of Jack B. Badd’s life.
And Jack. Is. Dead.