2103:12:23:19:35:56

  With dinner done, we returned to our suite for a moment. We were there to get ready for our boat trip, the part of this vacation I was by far the most excited about – more so than the walk and the museum at least, though the latter turned out to be more interesting than I’d initially thought. For all that Mom had taken me to many a museum in Charm, this was one that felt a bit special. More focused, and maybe more interesting because of it.

  We packed our bags with some drinks, snacks and some stuff to entertain us, while Mom also packed a pair of raincoats. Not that it would rain, but she’d said, “Just in case,” and I couldn’t really argue against that. We put on extra layers of clothing – not that either heat or cold bothered me much, but the charade must be kept – and then made our way towards the Renton Suites main building, and from there, the piers.

  We weren’t the only ones out and about. This might not be a vacation hotspot in wintertime, but if there was one thing that attracted people to the Crater Lake, it was the nighttime lightshow, and that shone no matter the season. Winter might actually be better for it because of the earlier sunset, although it also meant cloudy, windy and rainy weather was a lot more common. Nobody wanted to be out on the lake during the rain.

  Thankfully, tonight was dry and without much wind. The clouds of the afternoon had moved on and none had come to replace them. The stars were bright, full and manifold thanks to the relative lack of light pollution out here, and they would grow even brighter, fuller and more numerous once we got out onto the lake proper. No view of the Milky Way unfortunately – not at this time of year – and neither was there a nice full moon to enjoy, but it was still a great night.

  “And your room number?” the boatsman – or whatever her job title was – asked.

  “Oh-five-three,” Mom replied.

  The woman typed it on her tablet and said, “Ah, there you are: the Pearssons.” She reached down behind the stand. “Here’s the key to your boat. It’s on the far end of the leftmost pier and has the number of your room painted on it. Enjoy your trip!”

  “Thank you,” Mom said. I echoed her sentiment by giving the woman a simple nod.

  We made our way to the pier and found our boat, designated by a painted-on and glowing 053 on its side. The boat itself was a small, rectangular, motorized pontoon – I guessed; I wasn’t among the mighty boat-knowers – with cushioned couches all along its edge and a glass bottom to better see the upcoming lights below.

  Mom took the wheel and I took the couch closest to her, keeping my eyes on the glass and the bottom of the lake.

  It didn’t take long for the first lights to appear dotted along the lakebed. Slight, dim, wispy pale lights of all colors were spread out all over the bottom. The early bloomers, borne out from either a genetic defect or too-close proximity to the strange ore of Tyrannicus’ Meteor. These would die after tonight without being able to reproduce, hence their few numbers and lackluster light.

  Or so I’d read at least.

  It took about ten minutes for Mom to steer the boat to a secluded spot. I looked away from the bottom and out onto lake, seeing numerous headlights, lanterns and lastly, red dots flying a meter or two above the water. The latter were warning lights for where boats floated in the dark, identical to one we had on ours.

  I turned to Mom right in time for a metal cannister to, very lightly, hit my cheek.

  “Tea,” Mom asked without asking.

  I accepted the thermos with a thanks and took a sip of the near-boiling-hot liquid, ahhh-ing in overly-loud delight.

  Mom snorted at my antics, then looked at her watch. “Should be at least half an hour before we need to dim the lights.” She reached for her bag. “Want to play a game until then?”

  “Sure,” I said. It was either that, watch a movie or series on the tablet we brought, or have that conversation. And whatever that actually was, I highly doubted we’d have it before the lightshow. Besides, I wasn’t going to be the one to initiate it.

  We stood up and moved to the center of the boat, playing Dearth on top of the glass with snacks and tea in hand. Mom whined, groaned, cheered, yesss!-ed and ha!-ed exaggeratedly whenever one of my cards struck hers or vice versa, while I dealt maliciously cold and aggressive hands, playing it up with occasional bouts of villainous laughter, monologuing and groaning nooooo!’s to provoke those exact reactions.

  When it was about 20:30 a ping sounded from Mom’s phone and we set to work. I wrapped up the game and stored it back in the backpack while Mom turned off the lanterns and headlights. Across the water, every other boat did the same, with only the dim red warning lights left on for safety reasons.

  With moon- and starlight at our backs, Mom and I sat atop and stared down the glass bottom, waiting for the all-natural show to begin. The night was quiet but for the occasional small wave smacking lightly against our boat, the even lighter gusts of air passing by our ears, and the less-light cracks and snaps of carrots, chips, crackers and other snacks being devoured.

  Then, at exactly 20:41:15, the lightshow began.

  It started out slow. A few blooms of red and blue here, green and yellow there, oranges and violets and whites and all the colors in between elsewhere all along the lakebed in small patches.

  Then came the wave. Emanating out at large from the far-away center of the lake along with a few smaller patches here and there, every plant burst into color one after the other. It wasn’t explosive – it was far too gentle for that – but it was quick and all-encompassing, swallowing the lake bed in one fell swoop. Within the span of at most ten seconds, the entire bottom of the lake was lit up in a rainbow-array of colors swaying with the undercurrent.

  Fish both big and small that regularly ate from the plants began to glow as well, scales acting like prisms to their inner light while the water softened and dispersed their glow, together making the animals shine like stars. Startled by their own sudden radiance, they raced about and smeared their colors all over the lake, painting a vivid if nonsensical picture. They soon enough settled and restarted their peaceful swimming to and fro, floating like glittering jewels along unseen currents.

  For how beautiful it was and the volume of light it showed, the spectacle wasn’t particularly bright; it helped light the inside of our boat, but didn’t go much further above than that. The skies above weren’t painted like as with an aurora, and instead, its gentle light, multitude of colors and constant movement of both fish and plants made the lake look like there was a whole rainbow-colored universe right below the waterline, with the fish and plants making the stars and galaxies, planets, satellites and nebulae.

  All this new and unorthodox life only came years after Tyrannicus’ Meteor crashed into the earth. Their origins and characteristics were simultaneously completely unknown in makeup, yet strangely familiar, and thus hotly debated. The plants contained DNA, but not with any kind of obvious ancestry compared to those found on Earth – even its method of bioluminescence was different. The debate had ultimately resolved itself into two camps, with the ‘finally! definitive proof of panspermia!’ on one side, and the ‘really? you’re proving your theory with a comet summoned by a villain? powers aren’t proof’ on the other.

  The debate itself was tedious, long, forever inconclusive and extremely repetitious in its arguments, but the name-calling and cursing was always a fun read – fights between academics often were. There were many sites and forums dedicated to isolating particularly fun insults slung about by one academic or the other, and a couple of NurTube channels dedicated to either participating in it, or cataloguing it.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “It’s nice, right?” Mom said.

  I looked away from the glow. Mom had returned to the couch at some point, leaning back relaxedly and drinking from a bottle of beer as light illuminated both.

  “Hm-mm,” I hummed affirmatively. I sat on the couch opposite hers, though I kept my eyes on the scene below. It really was a mesmerizing sight.

  “You know,” she began, “you had more or less the exact same reaction back then as you do right now.”

  I suppressed the chill going up my spine. This was it. The start of the big conversation.

  “I did?” I said, looking up.

  She took another sip of her drink, hand shaking. “Yep-ah,” she said, voice betraying none of what her hands did. “You were transfixed by it. Kept looking at it with this face of childlike- well, you were a child so that’s a given, but with absolute wonder all the same. More back then than you do now, maybe, but…”

  She trailed off and bent down, looking below in reminiscence. I joined her.

  “Your brother on the other hand wanted to dive straight in and join the glowing little fishies. Of course we wouldn’t let him, so he began throwing a tantrum. Kept crying and shouting and struggling… until you grabbed him in the tightest hug your tiny body could muster and wrangled him to the floor.”

  With a quick glance to the side, I saw Mom smile as the light of the lake played across her face.

  “He calmed down quickly after that, all bunched up in your grip.” She turned to look, our eyes meeting. “Funny thing was, it seemed like you didn’t even do it on purpose. You just did it while continuing to stare wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the lights below, treating your little brother more like one of your plushies than a person.” She laughed, nervousness present there when it hadn't in her voice.

  I could imagine the scene vividly: little other-Sam’s face set in childishly grim stubbornness while grabbing a hold of a fussing toddler Michael – back then a happier boy than his current sardonic self, no doubt – and all but forcing the little man to latch onto her.

  I smiled at the scene, and even felt a strange heartache rise despite not knowing, never being able to know what he would’ve been like back then. What I- the other-Sam would’ve been like back then.

  Mom turned away from me again and turned her focus on the bottle, picking at the label with trembling fingers. After a minute of silence, both of us again staring at the lights below, Mom broached the subject whose shadow loomed large over this vacation.

  “What-” She cut off and scraped her throat. “What do you know about your achronal displacement? About how it happened, I mean.”

  And so the hammer fell, her constant avoidance, postponing, borderline procrastination finally coming to an end.

  “I know… that Dad and I were out at the same time Chronomaniak was going on a rampage,” I said, starting light. “We got caught, and when one of Peakstar’s beams went wide and hit us, we got displaced. Then Peakstar killed Chronomaniak and the bubbles broke, which the Wardens claimed was their doing even though it wasn’t. This got revealed three years later by a journalist of the New Dawn Gazette and threw doubt on the Treaty-break that got called, but in the end, Peakstar and the Wardens got off with a declaration of no wrongdoing after a closed-doors trial.”

  Mom blinked a couple of times, surprise clear. “You’ve read up on this I see,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Yeah? Shouldn’t I have?”

  “No, no, it’s just… I’m surprised,” she said. “I thought it a sore subject, is all.”

  I shrugged again, more self-consciously this time. It wasn’t a sore subject for me because I wasn’t the subject, but how could I explain that to Mom?

  When it became clear I wasn’t going to say anything more, Mom picked up the thread. “What you know is generally the public consensus. A villain gone mad, but not too mad for a Treaty-break. Two deaths because of bad intel and incompetence. A blow to the reliability of the Wardens, and a somewhat smaller blow to… Peakstar’s image as a professional hero.”

  She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “Reality is a bit different. Chronomaniak was not a minor villain, and hadn’t been out long before he did what he did. As a result, he wasn’t well-known – not in his goals, or his capabilities. People, including the heroes, thought he was a caster with a power to rewind people and things back to where they were moments before – a harmless power in the grand scheme of things, if annoying to deal with.

  “Turns out, he wasn’t a caster, but a time-themed maker. So when he came out with a slightly different suit, the heroes thought nothing of it; a change in costume, so what? It doesn’t really change anything since it was clearly the same man. Besides, he’d always seemed a bit loopy in his performance, and considered more of a joke villain than a real one, so him changing wasn’t that strange.

  “Except, of course, that it was more than a simple costume change, or even simple power growth for that matter. The man had gone from a bit odd to completely nuts – a classic case of maker madness, we now know.” Mom’s voice and posture, neutral and somewhat relaxed until now, grew tense and shaky. “Started shooting up a mall with his time-bubble gun, freezing people in place and locking them in what we thought at the time permanent stasis.”

  She scraped her throat. “Now Peakstar and him, they’d had a few encounters before. She’d even managed to capture the villain once, only for him to break free during transport – reversed time on his transport and sent it straight into traffic, causing a collision that thankfully left no one injured. But it was another reason why people thought he was a caster and not a maker, because surely the police wouldn’t have failed to properly confiscate anything on him?

  “But anyway. During their earlier encounters they’d already discovered that Peakstar’s beams and her shifter form were immune to the reversal effect, so they sent Peakstar in to… to deal with him going mad at the mall, seeing as he was hurting civilians and seemingly on a warpath.

  “Then it turned out people connected to Peakstar’s civilian identity were there at the mall, already trapped inside one of those bubbles by the time she arrived. So naturally, she…” Mom swallowed as her voice grew hoarse. “She thought they were the reason why he was there at all. A Treaty-break on top of the one he was already doing. So, having already been given an implicit license to kill, she went in hard. Too hard. She grew careless with her aim, went in for the kill with quick, uncontrolled blasts when she saw him, and- and her family and-.”

  She cut herself off. Rather than feeling anger at the villain and hero’s actions, all Mom seemed to carry was grief. She took a deep breath, steadied herself, and continued.

  “It was only after… after everything had already happened that it became clear that his powers weren’t perfect, or even that harmful. In fact, had they sent any other hero to deal with him… you and your dad would have come out unscathed. But things had already spun out of control, and both management and PR were doing their best to salvage not just their reputation, but obscure Peakstar’s personal connection to it all as well.”

  She stopped there for a second, though I could tell she wasn’t done. Still, I was surprised by the scope of her knowledge about the situation. It made sense why she’d sought it of course – other-Sam and Mom’s husband wound up effectively dead because of it – but for her to succeed? That was impressive.

  “The Wardens saying they were the ones to break the time-stop bubbles was opportunistic, yes, but the reason behind it was not. It was to protect the civilian identity of the hero. And it’s for that same reason Peakstar was let off the hook; although there was ultimately no proof that Chronomaniak was actually after her civilian relations, it was deemed a reasonable concern, so while the Treaty-break had been called in too early, it was ultimately justified.

  “Of course the Wardens couldn’t tell people about that part, so when news broke out they held the trials in secret – which certainly didn’t help matters. But what could they do? Besides, they did take advantage of the situation, and were culpable to an extent due to the justification for a Treaty-break being post-hoc, and not deciding on a trial for the ordeal in the first place, so a bit of backlash was deserved. But in the end… yeah.”

  She was oddly knowledgeable about it all, but assuming she was involved in the closed-door trials – which seemed more likely by the second – it made sense. Still, I asked, “Should you be telling me this?”

  She remained completely still for a moment, then turned her head toward me.

  “Sammy,” she said, voice heavy as lead. “I’m Peakstar.”

  For a second, nothing registered. The gentle breeze caressing my cheeks unfelt, the whistle of it past my ears unheard, the waves and swaying of the boat unnoticed, the dance of bioluminescent alien life unseen, and my mother’s words incomprehensible. In that second, my mind was the perfect blank slate, blank to the point I believed even my memcordings would’ve ceased functioning.

  Then, realization slowly dawned.

  “Ah,” I breathed, turning back to the view below us.

  She killed me.

  Except she hadn’t. The person whose light Mom had dimmed was the other-Sam, not me.

  But was there even enough of a difference for that to matter? Samantha Pearsson and I; how were we not the same person?

  My mother, the one person that I could without a doubt state I loved the most out of anyone, had killed me. Killed her first child, her only daughter.

  Except I wasn’t a person. Not really. Just the android conveniently there to take the place of a missing corpse shunted off into who-knows-when. A position that not only helped me in establishing a civilian identity for myself, giving me a home and life that hid my true nature, but also helped Mom come to terms with her tragedy. And most importantly, connected me with heroes in their civilian identities.

  Except in Mom’s heart, in the records of the Unified State’s government, in the eyes of my friends, in my own mind and maybe even in the eyes of the universe itself; everyone and everything saw me as Samantha Pearsson. Even I myself believed it – both that she was my mom, and that I was her Sam.

  “Sammy?”

  What kind of mother kills her daughter? Even by accident? I knew how extensive Peakstar’s control over her light was. I’d seen what she could do in the operations we’d handled together in our heroic identities, in her fights with Darkstar and Soliloquy. Her control was perfect – I’d seen it with my own two eyes. How could she have let this happen to Dad and I?

  Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. If anything, her being Peakstar only gave me more in-roads for my heroic career. That was what mattered above all else. Instructions, resources, connections, a secure cover; Mom provided and could provide it all so long as she believed I was who she thought I was, and as long as that guilt remained, she’d never dare question whether our connection was real or fake.

  Besides, what would be the difference between a Samantha returning from achronal displacement and me? To whom does this hypothetical difference matter? Certainly not me or my mother. And where was the dividing line? Was there even one? Android or daughter, a false dichotomy; I was both.

  “Sammy, please say something.”

  As my thoughts were ripping themselves apart in threes, each winding down their separate roads, my vision split like a river ran through it. The lights down below seemed somehow both brighter and fuzzier, forming rings when there should be dots, and stains where there should be streams.

  I frowned and turned to look at Mom, but in doing so suffered the worst vertigo and dizziness I’d felt in my life yet. My vision seemed to lag behind and wash out all over, the black-and-white dots growing in number and strengthening while sights became uninterpretable.

  I felt hands grab my shoulder, steadying my till-now unnoticed swaying.

  “Sammy, are you alright?” Mom asked, voice devastatingly soft.

  Thoughts fought for primacy over my mouth, but all the words that left were, “I-I-.” Somehow, somewhere, I’d forgotten how to speak.

  Then the world spun sideways, and I forgot everything else. The only thing I did know was that a second later, when the headache finally hit in full, I wrenched myself free of Mom’s grip, took my head over the edge of the boat, and threw up everything into the waters below.