XI.

 

March 5th, 2248
Edinburgh, Scotland

 

The cold from December still lingered in March,
And all of the people who stay in these houses are falling apart;
He sits in the corner
And sharpens his teeth,
Bartering all of his blood while the sirens sing out in the street.

-There Will Be Fireworks , Ash Wednesday [Alt. Version]

 

His body was unfamiliar.

It wasn't something that had filtered into his consciousness before; in the scramble of broken thoughts and screaming instincts and pain, in the need to drive himself to get out -- of where, even he wasn't sure -- and escape, Scotty hadn’t had any remaining space left to start to grasp that, let alone acknowledge it.

Somewhere at a bus stop on the A199, he'd finally gained enough running room mentally to realize it, bolstered by an inadvisable number of nonprescription pain pills he'd gotten at a small kiosk in the Port of Edinburgh.

(He knew it was an inadvisable number because said automated kiosk threatened to call emergency services on him if he ordered even one more packet.  Or, rather, to call emergency services on Cor, who wasn’t there, but who also had not yet had the ID deactivated or reported stolen.)

The medication didn't stop him hurting, but at least it sanded the worst of the jagged edges off of it.  Enough for him to start piecing more things together, even if his life and memory resembled a shattered stained-glass window right now.  Both past and present in fragments, and no real concept of a future beyond minutes or an hour.

It wasn’t the first time he’d had to force himself to function regardless of circumstance.  But his body felt like a lie at the moment; the shocking lack of strength he came aware of once he didn’t have the same level of desperation and fear to drive him onwards, the inability to walk without crutches to lean on, the-- the strangeness of it.  As if his very skin fit wrong.

It wasn’t the first time he’d felt like that, either.

Occasionally the realization crept in, some engineering common sense, that he was likely hurting himself worse; you don’t ask a damaged machine to keep working unless you have no other choice, because that compounds, and probably bodies weren’t so far different in that regard.  He only vaguely even remembered how he’d gotten damaged in the first place; the memory of the Sun was far more immediate than the date allowed, but even it was a mess.  Just impressions and desperation and the fire and smoke and sparks and--

And--

Stop.  He somehow managed to force his teeth apart, so he could try to look sane and normal and not at all like he was falling apart. It's still March 5th, still 2248.  Find the damned library.

If he stood any chance in hell of corroborating cracked memories half a lifetime old, Scotty would have to start there.

 

 

 

Edinburgh hadn’t taken nearly as much damage in World War III as a lot of other places; while parts of the city saw bombing, most often of the terrorist sort, whole sections hadn’t been leveled in the same way.  The Parliament building had to be rebuilt repeatedly, the castle took some localized damage, sometimes a street or shop or entertainment venue would be subject to an attack, but the city itself had come through mostly intact.

The worst threats back then to Edinburgh itself had been before the war, when the Scottish referendum on independence had passed by a significant margin; the European Union wouldn't step in until things were settled, and the English -- under a Tory government -- refused to acknowledge it, hemming and hawing about its legitimacy and that Holyrood hadn’t asked permission from Westminster before holding it.

It was the Scots who rose up then, starting with an angry working class, and the English Tories -- all smoke and little flame, and with very little stomach for real violence versus their usual brand of political or social violence -- eventually capitulated, though not before this whole area of the world held their collective breaths, remembering the Troubles and expecting much of the same. 

Scotty wasn’t the most willing history student, but he’d paid attention when they were studying those eras, and the transitional years before the war started; while he had spent most of his teens wanting to escape Scotland -- and felt no particularly deep attachment to his identity as a Scot -- the rage of it all had caught and kept his attention.

The whole world was angrier then.  Even though he’d learned how to swallow his own by then, something in him resonated with his countrymen from back in those days; their desire for self-determination, and their fury at having that threatened.  He wished more music had survived from that era, but it was after mass digitization had already taken hold; still, he could only imagine how good it would have been.

Music now only rarely got that manner of angry.  He had all of five good war protest songs from the modern era -- and in fairness, they really were good -- but that was it.  At least so far as human music went.

Still, not all things landed equally, in that incredibly short period between Scottish independence and the outbreak of the third world war.  Even two centuries later, Aberdeen wore scars, no thanks to having been a major port for oil and gas drilling and therefore a military target; Edinburgh, though, still had many streets paved in brick, still had great stone buildings reaching skyward, layers of flats above storefronts, the old and meticulously cared for chimneys that hadn’t been used even before the war pointing into the sky.

He hadn’t been back here since.

And now, he was trying to work on a memory half as old as he was, hazy for both time and circumstance and that half of a lifetime he’d spent trying to never, ever think about it again.

He could barely keep the current day straight in his head.  But he knew what he was looking for: evidence that what had happened did.

Walking for any length of time was out of the question; even with painkillers, traversing so much as a city block was more than Scotty had in him.  If not because of pain -- though that remained an entirely solid presence -- then because he just didn’t have the physical strength to.  Edinburgh was all uphill, it felt, regardless of approach.

He kept trying to piece together what Cor had told him, too, but he couldn’t.  Even now, in the present, his memory was unreliable.  He knew it was March 5th, and the year.  He knew they had been in Trenton, New Jersey.  He-- thought they’d been in Maryland, but he wasn’t entirely certain.

But the clearer his head was getting (even then, he wasn’t sure he could call himself rational, but maybe he was if he knew he might not be, aye?) the more he was coming aware of something deeper and older than the damage to his body and his fractured memory, something that was catching below his breastbone, a different kind of pain.

A different kind of fire.

(It was an old phrase.  To fight tooth and nail.)

When the bus stopped at the National Library of Scotland in the Old Town, he got himself out onto the pavement and looked up blinking through the rain at the stone edifice before pushing on inside.

 

 

 

The ability to access FedNet was available through every PADD ever made in the past century, never mind household computers and work terminals and public access points; accessing it without being traced, though, could only be done in a relatively small number of places.

There were very few people who still lived in the margins like that, eschewing a biometric ID and all of the included access to life’s necessities it provided, but they did still exist.  People who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to be recorded in any official sense of the word, even if that meant going hungry or cold.

For that matter, Scotty had spent his upper teens, until he shipped off for Basic, essentially living that exact kind of life.  He wasn’t homeless in any literal sense, but in the non-literal ways -- the ways that drove him to it -- he might as well have been.  He haunted cafes and the University, the salvage yard and the libraries, and he tried hard never to be in his parents' house.  He left his ID in a box he built specifically to keep it from being pinged by the FedNet unless he needed it -- to go to school, to buy anything -- and typically just made the best of it with his own wits and a deep, almost overpowering need to be untraceable.

By the time he was seventeen, he wasn’t too proud to sleep under bridges.  It didn’t happen often, but it did happen.  And he knew what it was like to go hungry, too.

He'd thought about that once, a few years removed from those times, safe in a dorm room where only his chosen company was allowed on his side of a locked door, and he'd wondered if his behavior then hadn't crossed the line to pathological, and that thought had led him down into an incredibly dark rabbit hole.

But then Corry came in bringing carry-out fish and chips, barging in like the sun burning through storm clouds.  And if Cor suspected anything was wrong, he didn't show it; he'd just chattered on about the latest gossip, not really waiting for Scotty to weigh in, and seemed unaware of being a lifeline until the past was only the past again, and left back where it belonged.

It was back now, though; it was back now because Scotty needed it to be, to remember old tricks he'd used to stay invisible back then, but it was also back despite the fact he didn't want it to be.

Not only the necessities of survival, but the yawning, unrelenting darkness beyond it.

He tightened his grip on the edge of the reference terminal, measuring every single breath, then went back to painstakingly typing.

Libraries were among the only places remaining where those who didn’t want to exist could still access the FedNet and other services, and since he was one of those people, that was his first, best hope of finding what he needed to.

He stood on his right foot; even holding his left up just enough to keep from putting any weight on it hurt like hell, but sitting down and getting back up again was absolutely worse. He had to type one-handed because he needed to cling to one of the crutches with the other, and even typing -- which he normally was quite good at -- was made slower yet for how hard it was to think.

Not that it mattered.  The search queries weren’t offering much.

Edinburgh hospitals in 2235

Edinburgh clinics in 2235

Medical facilities for children in Edinburgh in 2235

The lists often cross-populated to each other, but every promising entry he pulled up didn’t-- didn’t--

His memory of the building itself seemed vague at best; he hadn’t thought he had any particular reason to pay attention to it when his mother took him there, not before.  And after--

He wondered if searching would be easier if he could stop flinching away from it.

Medical facilities in Edinburgh in March 2235.

The same list, over and over.  Standalone clinics, hospitals, offices, but none of them the right one.

She'd taken any answer she might have given him to her grave; left him with the ghost of the child who had lost his thirteenth birthday to a facility that didn't appear to even have existed, now a ghost of a man who'd lost his twenty-sixth birthday and who was starting to believe he'd lost his mind, too.

Scotty always considered himself a-- a rational, pragmatic sort.  Even his moments of sentimentality tended to be grounded in common sense; for all Cor liked to whinge at him about his avoiding deep, heartfelt discussions, it wasn't so much because he was afraid to have those, or even genuinely unwilling, but because he often didn't quite know how to wring words out of his mental landscape, which was mostly a place where only what could be seen and understood could be trusted.

And even if he could have found the words, he wasn’t always sure how to trust himself to say the right ones.

The first time he could remember having faith in anything beyond his own determination to continue breathing and existing, it was when Cor dove after him into the North Atlantic and asked him to stop fighting long enough to be rescued.

And-- Scotty had.  And then he had extended it well past that moment, trusting that his best friend would protect him when he was too much at his rope's end to do it himself.

And Cor had done exactly that.

Charlie had carried him upstairs like he was still just a wee thing, at the end of that lost month in 2235.  And Edward had stayed a few days past that in the house.  But no one ever spoke of it again.  Not-- not to him, anyway, but he didn't think they said anything to each other, either.

He closed his eyes, eyebrows drawing together; unconsciously, his head went over to the side a little, as if listening and thinking were the same things.

This was all related.

Edward had taught him how to hang glide that summer; the adrenaline rush he got from leaping made up the high points of those years, little bright moments of memory, significant enough to record.  Of the highlands spread out below him, all greens and grays.  Something like freedom, and not only in the flight, but also--

He couldn’t remember anyone drying his hair for him before Cor had the day before.  Not even when he was small.  He knew that someone must have -- his parents?  His uncles?  Aunts?  Caretakers? -- at some point when he was a wee’un, but there was no living memory of it.

This was all related, he just-- just had to stop shying away from it.

There was one question -- one word alone -- that it came back down to.

Why?

He had only her answer given back then, which wasn’t actually a whole answer; still, any of his own were things to be stitched together, if that could even be done.

"They're just gonna take care o' ye, fix what's gone wrong, y’ken?"

He jerked his head to the side, a sudden tic in response to the invisible blade lancing through his chest; he managed to keep from showing his teeth by some willpower unknown, and then he typed, fingers trembling:

Psychiatric facilities in Edinburgh in March 2235

A number of the same entries came up, but then a handful more of those followed that he didn't recognize from prior queries.

He found it in the third of those, terror running through his skeleton like a lightning strike as he looked at the image of the building and read the words beside it:

The Institute for the Advancement of Neural Neutralization Technology
Experimental research facility studying the application of neural beam technology on neutralizing aberrant tendencies in the emotionally disturbed--