I did not hit 50k today, but for good reason. I stood on a line at 6am, waited until 10am, and god something precious and kickass: The Nintendo Wii console. I played with it until I got a massive headache, and then I realized that I had homework as well. So I did the homework as fast as I could in order to at least get in my minimum 2000 words per day, even if it wouldn’t get me to 50,000.

But I forgive myself. The Wii is awesome enough for that.

Word Count: 45,046

 

He was still conscious at the end of that step. He was conscious for the next step, too. Every step he took, not a single one of the grotesque subhumans moved an inch from their initial positions. It was as though his presence had left them all frozen in time, or that they were scared stiff of him. He couldn’t imagine why, though, even if he did look a bit different than before.
 
He realized, though, why they were so scared. He had something they didn’t want. He had the lapel pin Genome. He looked at his pocket, touched it softly with his hand. Reaching in and pulling it out was his only option to find out what was going on, and why the group was so frozen with fright. He clutched the lapel and forcefully ripped it out of the pocket, thereafter displaying it to all in front of him.
 
They took a step back. It was their bane, perhaps. Walters knew, then and there, why they had dropped it. It was not an accident. It was an attempt to make such an item seem like junk. No, it was more than that – it was an attempt to hide the item, to not only make it seem like junk, but to make it disappear from the Earth entirely. It must have been the only one of its kind. If there were more, then this group had surely had success in their business.
 
One moved forward, showing their face, or its face. Walters could now get a clear picture of what one actually looked like. This one was man, without a doubt. He looked slightly familiar. Walters couldn’t pinpoint it, but after a moment it came back to him.
 
He was the owner of the store across the street from Katrina’s. More began to step out. They were all store owners, store clerks, store workers. Even the people who probably stocked the store, deliverymen and woman, were there. Walters did not know all of them, but he did not need to know exactly who they were. And he could see that they all knew what he’d gotten his dirty little (or large) hands on. And yet, not one of them would speak. They had all paused. Walters tried to make the first word of conversation, but he already knew how they would answer, and they knew how he would answer. The conversation was entirely void from this point forward, and Walters had the sudden urge to walk away. But no – he had come too far, waited too long for this one moment where he could confront them, strangle them with all of his might and, in a fit of glory, run of proclaiming he had found some of the most wanted men in the country of his mind.
 
He couldn’t bring himself to do it. He wanted to return the lapel pin to them; he felt that would be enough punishment. But what if they actually wanted it back? What if this was all a clever act to retrieve the Genome from him? He could, then, not let it out of his sight, for any reason – not that he hadn’t already been doing this, but now, surrounded by the very group that had left him with this cursed object, he must hold tight to it with extra caution.
 
The group continued to step forward. He saw now not just the store clerks and owners, but people he knew directly, as if the group of people were driving into his own personal life to frighten him. He was not so easily prone to cheap movie theatrics. He’d seen it all before; they wouldn’t psyche him out.
 
He felt his arm trembling. They couldn’t be succeeding – he wouldn’t let them succeed.
 
A man who resembled Reedy walked closer. He held out his hand and spoke with Reedy’s voice, but not fooling Walters. Reedy uncovered part of his shirt to reveal a pin similar to Walters’s lapel, and yet entirely different. “I told you they were wearing these,” he said, “and you believed me right fast there, old man.”
 
The quality of the impersonation shocked Walters. It wasn’t supposed to be this realistic. They weren’t supposed to act like him. There should have been something about him that was fake – some part of his appearance, his personality, his tone of voice. There was nothing. If he was a copy, then he was an exact copy. If he was a copy, then a man or woman had sacrificed their life and individuality to become Reedy, just for this one purpose of finding Walters and scaring him like this. It wasn’t impossible, but highly unlikely. He had never heard of a way to modify personality before.
 
He, however, didn’t want to know any more. Jenna was the next to walk out of the crowd, and he considered running. “Three weeks, dear – do you know how much I’ve missed you? It’s not alright that you abandoned me as soon as I came home. I know I’ve told you that it was, but the truth it, I’m not strong enough to admit that I need you more.”
 
That was all he needed. “Bullshit,” he said.
 
The replica looked puzzled. Walters spoke again. “You’re a nothing; a sorry excuse for a human life that can’t hold a candle to my real Jenna; you as well, Reedy. You must all be fakes.” He could not help from spilling the contents of his mind out onto the alley floor, every last thought, every apprehension he had about the pin, his wife, Reedy, Carpenter, the past weeks he had spent alone even though surrounded by thousands of potential conversationalists.
 
Not one of them seemed to want to listen; few actually bothered to notice he had said anything at all.
 
They were his only hope. “I concede,” he said, finally. “I need your help. This thing – this Genome, I believe it is – what is it, how does it work?” He asked that question expecting to get all the answers. It was far beyond what he could hope to achieve. He could hardly hope to ever discover who these strange people were, and how they had come to impersonate the store owners, clerks, and his friends. It was so terrible clichéd that he couldn’t help but wonder if begging would actually get him information. He thought that, out of pity, these poor creatures might do something for him, now equally as poor, in turn.
 
Yet they could not lest reveal who they truly were. They were nobody. They were the entity of all the people had come to hate about the shapeshifting system. They were an entire organization, or they were absolutely nothing at all. Their existence did not matter, and yet it mattered greatly to the success of the system. They knew exactly what Walters’s lapel Genomes was, and yet they knew absolutely nothing about it, nor had they ever seen such a device. There was no way to know which it was, because they certainly would not be the ones to tell it.
 
He was about to drop the lapel Genome, but clung to it. He knew that he could not deal with these people now, and certainly not later, and most likely they would elude him forever. Even though he had them right in his clutches – God forbid he could ever do such a thing – he couldn’t bring himself to get answers out of them. He wasn’t sure anymore what his original plan was to do when he actually confronted them. Part of him was sure that it would never happen, as though it were some novelty happening that was as likely to happen as winning the lottery. Now that the unthinkable had occurred, he couldn’t deal with it the way he’d hoped to.
 
In fact, he couldn’t deal with it at all.
 
After a slight pause, he shed two tears – one for his lost effort, the other for his lost appearance. “I’m sorry for disturbing you all,” he said, and walked away without another word to spare. A slight rain had begun to pour down, so various members of the group had dispersed, never to be seen again in the same form. He thought of seeing one of them again as some sort of monster, something so inhuman that it couldn’t possibly be real, and yet it was so easily thinkable.
 
As the rain began to pour down heavily and his body soaked with it, his larger shoes making puddle splashes on the cobblestone path, he felt overcome with failure. Returning to his apartment, to Jenna, to anyone, was unthinkable. He had brought shame upon himself. It only really went to his ego, but to Walters it seemed to go far beyond, to something he couldn’t comprehend. He kept a tight hold on the lapel Genome, praying that it wouldn’t be lost along with his spirits in the rain.
 
By the time he reached the apartment he was entirely drenched, and the rain had turned into a downpour. It was the most utterly disgusting thing that Walters had had to experience for a good while. It was not disgusting because he was soaking wet, but it was disgusting that his wetness was a direct reflection of his failure. He was still home incredibly early. There was no need to wake anyone up or to even mention that he’d gone out at all. He would sit there, act as though nothing had happened, and hope for the best. He would say, when people mentioned the idea of finding the thieves, that there was no point in doing so. He would lie and say that he knew what was going on, and everything about the lapel Genome, and make up some techno-babble that only his wife would be able to decode if she knew as much about genetics as he did.
 
That morning, everyone showed up at his door. Even Carpenter. They mingled over toast and tea, discussing nothing and everything, and the most important surprise topic of the day. This, of course, was Walters’s condition. Walters was frequently tiring of their talk about how he was not himself – he surely felt like himself. He didn’t notice whether or not he was not acting like himself. The only change he could see was in his appearance, and even that he had started getting used to after the many hours of seeing himself in his mirror-lined apartment. The situation as a whole might have felt direr to him if he had felt the presence of a shifting attitude, but as far as he was concerned it was all hoopla.
 
It was the most discussion about taboo that he had ever seen take place in his household, and it was the one time where they had all totally neglected to ask for his opinion on these matters, which especially concerned Walters because the issues in turn concerned him, and so did the people talking about them. There was certainly no reason for him to be left out of the conversation – not any that he could see, anyway.
 
Eventually the breakfast conversation turned to finding those odd thieves that Walters had told them all about. Wait – he had not told them all. He had only told Jenna.
 
“Jenna, how does everybody know about that group?” Walters asked harshly, knowing that she passed the word on to each and every one of them.
 
“I passed the word onto Katrina the other night while you were asleep. I’m sorry, dear, but I’m mostly afraid that if I don’t get you fixed up I’ll have to get myself fixed up soon after.” Walters was unsure of what she meant by this, but it didn’t sound pleasing.
 
“And Reedy?” Walters asked, even though he still knew that it was Jenna who had told him.
 
“This man’s actually a new customer to Jenna’s world of information. He showed up with Katrina, and we let him know just now. Apparently he’s seen them once a while back. Said that they were wearing a pin just like yours!” Her excitement far exceeded her intelligence on the matter after Walters’s morning experience.
 
“That’s absolutely wonderful, hon. I feel you’re ten steps closer already.” He had choked down those words, swallowed them only by increasing the size of his jugular tenfold. It was not a pleasant feeling.
 
They were forcing him to go back to the path. They were all going to look for the thieves. They were going to repeat what he had just done – what a waste of time for all of them! Walters knew more than any of them that there was nothing to gain from this that he had just performed. If he couldn’t convince them not to go, he would have to go, and because he could not convince them not to go, he did go.
 
They ended up going in late afternoon. What they did in between, while waiting for the rainstorm to pass, was nothing but a barrage of board games, card games, and online research of genetic alteration experiments of the past ten years. Nothing had any record of a pin-like Genome. Even the GSS’s new Genome products were shrouded in mystery as to their origin. Who had first suggested the idea was unknown. The designer of the pin-Genomes was also undisclosed. In fact, most everything related to the GSS was classified one way or another, but it was usually possible to get information that was a few days old. With that information they had hoped to find a solution to reversing Walters’s condition, but there was no information available. They called up the local library – a huge, towering structure that housed hundreds of thousands of books and periodicals, many of them medical records due to their efficient filing system. Various hospitals throughout the city kept their records in the library because it was, whether anyone believed it true or not, the safest place to keep them, and the files were always kept with ruthless efficiency and organization.
 
Therefore it was not uncommon for the establishment to keep a lengthy record of periodicals related to the Genome Surgical Society, the Genome Surgical System, the more recent ATC’s, and the more recent pin-sized Genomes. As plausible as it was, though, for them to be carrying these items, they curiously had no information. Instead, their answer was that “the GSS had specifically requested they do not disclose that information.” This really meant “We don’t have information, but we have damn good excuses why, and we hire writers to come up with them, too.”
 
Without this information, everybody but Walters felt that they needed to find this group of magical, extremely knowledgeable thieves (though Walters was unsure if the other three thought they were thieves or magical problem-solving fairies or elves or pixies and the like) in order to overcome this dilemma. What he knew was what they did not, and his efforts were not convincing. His plans to make something up completely failed and further convinced them that they needed to find, and find fast, this group of odd personas. Without them Walters was doomed to a life of an unknown persona, trapped inside a dead man’s body. His body had been rapidly changing since his visit to the Hospiten. It was without a doubt the effect of the pin.