animus_network

Wait - he?

[Asch. That is less important than the girl having a breakdown in front of you. Keep your replica issues to yourself. He tosses his head thoroughly because not important.]

It's your decision. Ultimately, if you ask me, that's what we're fighting for.

[The chance to make choices of their own, for themselves, unbound by any chains of prophecy or admin power.]

[She gets what he's trying to say.]

To be able to make our own choice...

[So... maybe she doesn't have to think about it now. Think about whether she wants to stay or go home and face - or perhaps fight - her destiny. There's a squirming in the back of her mind, as if it knows that the issue isn't really resolved, just postponed. She nods, still a little shaky, but some of the tension is easing out of her shoulders.

She glances over at Asch finally, a bit nonplussed]

Yeah... him.

[Why?]

[Yeah, okay, serious discussions are over, here. Admittedly Luke isn't perfectly identical to him, but...]

Fomicry doesn't work that way!

[You have officially broken his mind please hold.]

[You are getting the most awkward and half-embarassed look. He never used the term with her before. The name sounds a bit like a word she's heard, though she's not sure she can guess the meaning behind this particular word]

Fomi- what?

[World-specific terminology problems.]

The science of creating replicas. It creates perfect physical duplicates, or nearly perfect. Not...

[He gestures a little awkwardly. The point's pretty obvious.]

[It's the "phsycial duplicates" that drives it home. And now Xion's curling up again awkwardly, clearly a little self-concious now.]

I'm made of Sora's memories. That's... that's how replicas are made back home, I think.

[She looks forward]

Most of the memories I'm made of are Sora's memories of his best friend. A girl named Kairi.

...But that's...

[Congratulations, Xion, you have thoroughly flummoxed him. He certainly looks confused enough - just imagine the Asch version of this face instead of the one actually in the icon.]

Replicas on Auldrant don't have memories. They're born as blank slates.

[If they did, then proving himself to be the real Luke would have been six kinds of hassle.]

I... I didn't either. Not at first. At first... I didn't really understand anything. Only what they told me to do.

[A faint frown crosses her features. Her first couple weeks were a blur, of training and tests and black coats and voices that she can't remember the details of at all.]

It... it wasn't until later that I started to remember things, memories that weren't mine. I... I didn't know back then. I'd thought they were real. I thought I was remembering my life before I became a Nobody. But...

[Xion breaks off with a faint gasp. As if to back up this sentiment, there's a momentary break. A second where suddenly the walls and bookshelves are film and she and Asch are wireframes of purple with a glowing light in their center.

But then she blinks, and everything's back to normal. "Normal."]

[He's paying careful attention, although he glances around at the flicker - no, no changes. Once the glamour is back in place, it holds steady.]

No, our replicas are nothing like that at all. Even as my perfect isofon, Luke will never get any of my memories.

[And if Luke had had his memories, would Asch have lost them? Or would there simply have been no way to tell, which of them was real and which the replica?]

He wasn't in a state to take any kind of orders after he was born, either; some replicas are programmed with basic tasks, but most of them are helpless as infants.

[Xion hesitates.]

I think... I guess our world's replicas are really different, maybe. Though... I think, I was programmed, to do and know some things...

[She looks down at her hands]

We were trying to infiltrate the admin levels, a couple weeks ago. As a decoy. And so I had to hack the elevator and... It's like my hands knew what they were doing, but I didn't.

[It was really unnerving, to tell the truth]

It seems to be. Then again, I suppose the methods were created by different people.

[A physical copy formed of Seventh Fonons, compared to a creature seemingly literally made of memories... At least Xion containing the memories of a girl explains her form.]

On Auldrant, programmed replicas usually have some level of repressed personality and emotion - the more they're programmed, the less human they behave. The worst cases have no reasoning power of their own and are good for little but cannon fodder.

[Which is exactly what Van used them for, he's sure. After all, when you're sucking up all the Seventh Fonons by replicating the planet, a few human-sized replicas here and there won't make much difference.]

In that respect, I suppose you're lucky.

Just like puppets made to be thrown away when they're not useful anymore.

[Oh that's a suddenly very, very bitter edge to her voice. You may think she's lucky and in some respects she may be, but she doesn't feel like it. Certainly not right now.

In several ways she feels not very different from those bits of canon fodder]

I guess some things aren't that different.

[Puppets. And yet out of all people on Auldrant, it's replicas who do not dance to the Score's strings, replicas who drove them off that road of destruction.]

Some things aren't.

[And not every puppet was a replica, either.]

But you can still refuse to play along, just like anyone else.

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