Beacon

It was the first thing he owned that was explicitly his, not to be shared with siblings or curious members of the New. Something secret that he had found in one of the many dilapidated homes that lined the border of the New and the Old. It had been covered by dust and the ghost of what had once been a support beam for the roof in a home that he or one of his thousands of siblings had cleared out so many lifetimes ago.

He had found it by accident. He had been looking for something else, entirely. The clouds had parted in just the right way, the sun had whispered her radioactive graces in just the right spot, and for a moment he had been left blind by the reflection of their dying star bouncing off of it’s metallic surface. Like a beacon from the rubble. ‘I am here,’ It said, ‘I am here, I am here, I am here.’

001313 (his siblings called him Lucky, he was aware of the irony) temporarily abandoned his patrol and went to investigate, expecting to find an outdated lifeform hiding in the bones of the home. Instead, all he had found was a scattered collection of valuables hidden by destruction. The piece that the sun had guided him to was only the size of his palm. It weighed practically nothing when he plucked it from it’s resting place, and was attached to a worn leather strap that had snapped. Lucky thought maybe it had been torn from the neck of it’s prior owner, or ripped off of some other inanimate object.

There was a clasp that indicated the heart-shaped medallion could be opened, but when he started to thumb it apart, one of his siblings called his name.

“C’mon, Lucks, we’re due back in half a rotation.” Lucky and his sibling still had half the Eastern border to patrol. They had to make sure there weren’t any lifeforms hiding in the Old.

002792, Sly, their siblings called him, smacked the back of Lucky’s cuisse with the butt of his rifle when he rejoined him on their designated path. “What is that?” He asked, jerking the chin of his helmet towards the scuffed locket in Lucky’s hands. Lucky shrugged in response, then finally worked it open and held it out for Sly to investigate.

“Found it.”

“That’s contraband.”

Despite his dismissal, Sly tipped his head to get a better look. There were two pictures inside; a grinning man on the left, a serious woman on the right.

The two siblings looked at each other through their visors.

“Kinda looks like you.”

“Reckon so.”

The man did resemble Lucky, but his was a face that had become concerningly common after the Distinguishing. A lot of men kind of looked like Lucky, a good number of women did, too. It was a fact of life in the New. There were people that looked just like one another and that was normal, that was the way it was supposed to be.

Lucky shrugged his shoulders and closed the locket, and not once broke eye-contact with Sly.

His sibling seemed to already know what was going to happen; let out a put-upon sigh and shrugged his shoulders right back at Lucky. “I never saw this.” He patted Lucky’s cuirass, then moved past him to continue on the trail. “You don’t even have that. It doesn’t even exist.”

Lucky watched Sly’s back, the gray of his armor almost disappearing against the backdrop of dusted homes and cloudy skies as the sun hid her face from them once again. He turned his attention back to the illegal possession in his hands and weighed the pros of keeping it against the cons. If their higher-ups in the New found out he had taken something from the Old and brought it home, he’d be decommissioned without question. On the other hand, if he kept this little treasure hidden then he’d have something that would make him different from his siblings.

Finding his individuality was something he wanted with raw desperation. He was tired of having the same face, he was tired of having the same possessions. All of his siblings were, despite what the Currents wanted to believe about them.

Lucky turned the locket over in his hands, looked for an engraving or a pattern that would tell him who he was spying on. There was nothing but the pictures inside. The woman looked so solemn, so devoid of life or love or happiness. Lucky wondered if she had known what was coming, when the picture had been taken. If she had had a feeling that everything was going to be different.

He couldn’t remember a lot from the times before the New and the Old. He couldn’t remember the kind of man he was or the life he lived, who he had loved, what he had held as important, before the world had been polarized. However, he remembered enough. He remembered having a different path before him. He remembered being someone else.

The Distinguishing, like many catalyzing events, had taken them all by surprise. It had found them sleeping in their cradles and had torn them apart without mercy. Lucky had a voice in his head that wasn’t his, his body did things he couldn’t control. He had woken up to find his face changed in small ways; a bigger nose, smaller ears, and others had woken up to find their faces changed in significant ways; different skin, different eyes.

Not everyone had woken up changed, though.

There had been several that had remained as they were, and it was Lucky and his siblings that were entrusted to see that the unchanged were tended to. In whatever form they deemed necessary. The Old was not to be lived in, the Outdated were not to be seen.

She looked so familiar, the woman in the locket. Her face made the back of his head itch, made his brain hum softly in his skull.

Lucky had to look away, lest his brain vibrate right out of his skull, so he closed the locket and tucked it in one of the many packs on his belt. When he looked down the path again, Sly was several yards ahead of him with only the faint glow of his life-support visible in all the gray.

001313 jogged after his sibling to catch up, and tried not to think about the grinning man full of life and the severe woman sitting opposite him in the locket.