“Does that have to do with why you hacked into the Department of Defense and disappeared? Were they the ones you lost to?” She’d heard the stories, but just like Google, those rumors only scratched the surface of everything that had really happened. My life had never been easy. Most kids were born and their parents told them that they could change the world if they tried hard enough. When I was born, it was obvious I would change the world and my parents were just waiting for the moment when. I was special, both Savina and I were, but that also made us more than just twins. It made us something more than children. We were a gift, treasured and cherished. We were never treated like typical kids and we only had each other. She was the only one who understood how hard it was when all eyes were on you before you’d even lost all your baby teeth. She was the only one who got it when I wanted to play baseball instead of work on Millennium Prize Problems.

I lifted a hand and rubbed it over my short hair. My fingers were shaking and I hoped she couldn’t see the tremor. I wanted her to trust me. I wanted her to believe in me. I wanted to pretend like I was invincible and unbreakable, just like she was.

“I hacked into the DoD because they killed my mother and I was looking for proof.” That was before I could control my impulses. That was before I’d learned to shut everything inside of me off. That was before I’d been honed into a hard, cold thing at the hands of the men who made me. I wanted to make them pay. I wanted to clear my father’s name. I wanted to save my family, but all I did was put everyone I loved right in the crosshairs of something so much bigger than any of us could have imagined. I heard my voice break and felt the way all of my muscles started to lock. It was fight or flight, and when I’d fallen into the wrong hands, the only choice I’d been given was fight. That conditioning was hard to shake even after all these years.

“That’s what your father said. He blames the government for her death and thinks they framed him and sent him to prison so they could get their hands on you.” It sounded outrageous, fictitious, and paranoid.

I believed with every fiber of my being that all of it was true.

I peeled my eyes open and blinked in surprise when I realized she was standing directly in front of me, close enough to touch. Without even trying, those knowing eyes of hers stripped away all the layers I’d spent years wrapping myself up in.

“When I wrote that predictive program that the military bought, I thought that would be the end of it. I thought they would use it to make the world a safer place, that they would utilize it to bring peace to places in the world that have been war-torn since before either of us were born. It was solid code that was adaptive. The program was designed to save lives, but our government used it to take them. They tweaked the code so that the algorithm predicted where it was most likely to find terrorist camps instead of possible targets. They called it preemptive measures. They wanted to stop the people behind the attacks rather than the attacks themselves. It was never about helping victims but about declaring war and waving their dicks around. My program made it possible for them to make sure they always had the most inches. They sent drones in and wiped out entire families, complete villages, without proper research. They didn’t have enough evidence to prove if the program was accurate or not, but they used it anyway. I have no idea how many innocent people died because of me, or how many more will. I know it’s a lot, but knowing the actual number might cripple me.” I wasn’t exaggerating.

“Last I heard, they were still using it. Hit or miss, if they take out the bad guys or not.” They wanted to take out the offenders, not save the innocent. Our goals had never been the same. From the beginning, what I had intended was bastardized and tainted. As a result, new terror groups got their legs under them and had moved to hiding in plain sight. More people have died for no reason, people simply trying to commute to work, or enjoying coffee with friends, people gathering in a crowd on a street minding their own business. It was possible my program would have pinpointed those exact locations, that it would have stopped those needless slaughters, but we would never know, because the powers that be instead used it to justify dropping bombs on undisclosed locations in the desert. All of it left a bitter, nasty taste in my mouth.

“They wanted you to write more software they could use against anyone they considered a threat to American soil, didn’t they?” She sounded so understanding. The reason I never talked about my past was because it hurt. The pain was always amplified when I realized whomever was hearing my story looked like they were struggling to believe it.

“That’s the problem with being smart. People think that intelligence is an unending commodity, that the well never runs dry. They wanted to pick my brain clean, but my mom insisted that Savina and I use our gifts to give back to society. She was convinced we were going to be part of a new Renaissance. She honestly thought my sister and I were going to change the world. She refused to let them tie me up in all their governmental red tape. She told them one program was enough, and if they wanted more, they could approach me when I was eighteen. She knew I was too scattered, too adventurous to tie myself to any one kind of programing. I wasn’t interested in warfare or military strategy.” I jolted when her hand landed on the center of my chest, her fingers smoothing over the cotton of my t-shirt like she was trying to soothe the erratic beat of my heart. I leaned into her like her small frame could keep me up when I was ready to collapse under memories and regret. “If I had given them what they wanted, something that would have taken no time and almost no effort on my part, maybe my mom would still be alive. She told the men who came for me no and her lab blew up the next week. My dad was arrested a month later, and they picked me up for the hack a month after that. My sister was left on her own, unprotected and vulnerable. The DoD told me if I did what they asked, if I let them completely own my body and mind, they wouldn’t lock me up next to my father. They promised they would train me and give me the tools I needed to excel physically and mentally, all while keeping Savina safe. They knew she was all that I had left. I was obsessed with her safety and they used it to gain my compliance. They knew I would do whatever they wanted as long as no one touched her.” My jaw clenched and there was a familiar burn at the back of my eyes. My hands curled into fists and my throat felt like it was going to close in on itself. It hurt. Talking about the past, remembering my sister. I never let that pain out. I kept it locked down with everything else, contained it and controlled it. She was the only person I’d ever shared it with, and that hurt in a different way, one that left me confused on top of everything else.

“What they wanted was for me to be a mass murderer. They wanted me to create weapons and strategy that would wipe out entire countries in the blink of an eye. They wanted me to change the world in an entirely different way than what my mother envisioned for her children, and they wanted me to do it while they pulled my strings and fiercely controlled my creativity and ingenuity. They swore up one side and down the other it was for the best. If I fell into the wrong hands, enemy hands, then I would be declared an enemy of the state, and the honey pot that was my mind would be considered a weapon of mass destruction. Then my own government, the men who were training me, molding me, challenging me, would have no choice but to end me.”

It burned like acid in my gut to admit that I’d been so easily manipulated. It made my teeth grind together and my jaw tighten when I thought about how malleable I’d been. I’d played right into their hands. I’d lost the game before I even knew we were playing. They set a trap and I walked right in like the naïve, unassuming child I was.

“They wanted you to be Captain America? A super soldier?” Noe sounded both horrified and amused.

If we were talking about anything else, I would have laughed. There was a moment when they had had me running drills and training with weapons that I wondered the same thing. I could do PT with the best of them and would probably make it through BUDs Seal training, if I had to. There wasn’t much I didn’t know how to do with my mind, and the government made it so the same was true with my body. The truth was, they only wanted me skilled enough to protect myself if someone else came after the unbelievable asset that was my mind. They wanted to keep their prized possession safe and out of enemy hands, and the first step in that was making sure I could kick ass and throw down if anyone they deemed a threat came after me. They wanted me to be able to take care of myself but rely on them . . . and I had. Much longer than I liked to think about.

“I’m no hero and I’m not interested in trying to save the world anymore. I just wanted to save my sister.” And I failed. Hard.

“They did a shit job of keeping her safe. She had more than one stalker according to the articles I read. She was constantly in the news and the public eye,” Noe sounded angry, and I remembered how hot and turbulent it felt when anger was the only thing keeping me going.

I wrapped my fingers around her tiny wrist and felt her pulse flutter rapidly against the touch. The frantic beat matched the one pounding between my ears, it was a fight song only she and I could hear. My frozen heart struggled to keep up with the powerful rhythm.