Eight Years Ago

We sat and stared at each other. The small room in the temple seemed more cramped than usual as I stared at an exact copy of myself and tried to process what the fuck had happened.

He cleared his throat.

“So, I suppose this it it huh.” He said. “I made a copy, I have become the man I have hated for the past three years.”

I was jolted out of my staring. “You made a copy? It was me!”

We stared at each other.

Exact same memories, exact same person. Who could say was the original?

Of course we came to the same realisation at the same time. We both struck our fists into our legs. Only one new copy was created, there were three of us sitting there.

The look of horror on the face of the now lonely Yuudai almost broke my heart. It was the same look of horror that I was so familiar with.

Almost broke my heart because it meant that I was not unleashing an army of Primes onto the world. Without thinking I touched the copy that had just been born sitting next to me. I felt a disgusting, soul sucking feeling, as I drew an entire human mind into my own.

We were back to the two. I was the Prime and the other a copy as I had been just moments before.

“You are going to have to kill me you know.” He finally said, breaking the silence.

“Kill you?” I asked. I was struggling to bring my thoughts to the present. The calm I had achieved just moments before was utterly shattered. In the span of less than 30 seconds I had created two new lives and already destroyed one. I couldn’t cope. After going through what happened with Valkyr and coming to peace with myself and then this? I felt lightheaded, hysterical.

Myself sitting across from me snarled “Yeah, what else would you call it? Absorbing me? What else is it but death for me. I exist now, I won’t once you touch me. You kill me. We have understood that since our creation but not really had to put into words.”

Levi Prime was so casual with it, he created and absorbed constantly. But my copy was right, I was right, it was death. He was a living, breathing man. Just like me. Like us. My copy. I had already thought of him as such. He had his own name now. We had not found it yet.

I had brought him into this world without his permission and if I touch him, he ceases to exist. What was that if not murder? I felt it deep in my bones. This was not something I would or could ever become numb too. I hope.

I was about to say that I was not going to do that to him but we both knew in that moment it was not true. I could not let him out into the world. Couldn’t I? This was too much. I had only just come to terms with being my own man and I had created someone else who was exactly the same as me. Their own man. What had driven me to drink and depression, to unknowing self-destruction was being a copy of someone else. My own nightmare existence I had now inflicted onto someone else.

This should have been a moment of celebration, of finding Valkyr and telling him that I was moving on. Taken his words to heart and that I was going to strive to be better. To become the man that he saw I could become. I was no longer a copy, I had accepted who I was.

Instead I had condemned another man to the same shit I had just gone through. Only worse. I had my moment of revelation, how would I have reacted if I then had immediately become another copy?

If there was a God I would like to punch him in the dick.

“Let’s not make the decision right now. We need to talk about this, I need to think, I need….” I trailed off as the look I got from me at the end of the futon should have melted me. I realised what the fuck I was saying: “oh I might kill you but lets talk about it first!” I was already sounding like Levi Prime. That thought disgusted me. I had to absorb him right now or promise to let him live, I couldn’t just leave him to live in fear….like I have been for so long now.

Like I don’t have to any more. Who knows what happens if two Primes touch? Levi Prime was not taking me back without a fight.

The part of me that had long waited for death took over, the part that had kept drinking even when everything already tasted like vomit. That kept lighting cigarettes through the bowel-shaking coughing fit. I didn’t even reach out towards him. I couldn’t. He started to shimmer, started to shake. He had time, as a pull like a black hole took over, to look me in the eye and say “Remember who we want to be. You owe me that.”

I silently promised him and myself that I would never make another copy.

Never make another person go through what we have.

He disappeared and felt him become a part of me.

I felt the tears begin.

I now knew how to cry.

They did not stop for a long time.