Well Practiced Miracles

Summary: You are a well-practiced miracle, and as such, you are perfect. Or so they keep telling you.

⋆ ꙳ ❅ ꙳ ⋆

By the time the eighteenth batch of Xeros is finished growing in their ORBs, the process has already been polished and practiced by many. It is clean, clinical work to create miracles, it turns out.

As such, when you are born, you are already perfect. Small, and helpless, but healthy, with a steady heartbeat that is a joy for the team to listen to. You look very cozy when you’re hidden away in the artificial pouch, like you might never want to leave.

When you’re grown enough to leave the pouch, a group of strangers welcomes you into the world, and none of them look like you. In fact, your batchmates barely even look like you, each of you so very different. This is, apparently, fine. You’re supposed to all look different. You are the newest palette in a long line of wonderful new colors that they’ve been discovering.

You take a liking to one of the scientists in particular. She always makes time to answer your questions, to reassure you, to make sure you’re not falling behind. You look at the world around us with such wonder, all “what is this?” and “what is that??” because it’s all new and wonderful to you, and she can’t help but share in the thrill.

You follow her around the lab wherever you’re allowed to go, and you make her and her colleagues laugh when you try to sneak into more places hidden under her white coat. Your genius disguise must work, because she does bring you to more strange rooms in this place, and so your world grows into a labyrinth of conference rooms, cleaning closets and other laboratories, and you watch her work, watch her treat hundreds of ORBs with the same care that she treats you with.

As you get older and your vocabulary grows past “what’s that for?” you begin to learn the ins and outs of the very process that made you, almost at the same time as you learn to read and count. You learn of the Exoplanet X-1118A, and of its tragic mass extinction. You learn that radiation destroyed the creatures who would’ve been your ancestors, and you learn of the mission of the ARC laboratories to essentially remake the species. The clue is in the name – you are a reconstruction done with the help of guesswork.

This is the reason for why you and your batchmates look nothing alike – each of you is based on an ever-so-slightly different recipe, and so you were born alongside creatures like the one-horned, fish-tailed X-542, or the dark as night X-554, whose patagia is a fluid shape of purple stars and whose tail glows green with a singular, massive eye.

It does not escape your notice that compared to some of the Xeros you share your home with, you look rather… ordinary.

Though, perhaps “ordinary” isn’t the correct term for it. None of you are ordinary – you are all a part of a Lazarus species, blindly leading the ARC scientists in walking backwards in pawprints of some long-gone reflection of yourselves.

And yet…

And yet?

And yet.

The form of a Xero, when it is first conceived in a laboratory setting, retains certain features every single time, unless actively adjusted. They have long limbs, big ears, two front facing eyes, a pouch, and that’s it. That, and their pitch black bones.

You point that out with no small measure of disappointment – the ornamental tails and long spikes and beautiful horns call to you, you can’t help but admire them, and you can’t help but be jealous. She laughs at your pout, and pets your head. “There is nothing wrong with being ordinary,” she tells you, as though it’s supposed to comfort you, but you don’t want to be ordinary. Why can’t you be special, like so many of your batchmates?

She tells you that you are a well-practiced miracle, a procedure turned automatic with only a few optional variables. You are special, as you are made based off of a unique recipe, just like all the others.

It doesn’t sit well in your gut. It doesn’t satiate.

You speak to some of your batchmates, as well as the Xeros from the generation before yours and the generation after yours – you all share the same quarters for the most part, you all learn in the same classes, you all eat at the same time. It’s easy to just talk, nobody’s stopping you from doing that, and so you talk.

Many of your batchmates barely have an opinion on the matter at all – you are immediately reminded that you’re the strange one, following the doctor around all the time and using a lot of big words that they haven’t learned yet, and that you know much more than most because you simply… happened to ask.

Of course, everyone here knows the basics, though – that your species couldn’t survive on its own, and so the kind people of this world banded together to help. And that’s so nice of them! That’s pretty easy to decide on, right? Objectively, that is a kind and incredibly honorable decision, especially given how much work it all takes and how many people pitch in to help. It’s almost like magical tricks that save the day in fairytales that the caretakers read to you before bedtime.

Still, you get lucky – there are outliers.

“U-um, I mean… I dunno if we should talk about it in the open…” The Xero you’ve decided to speak to is a shy creature, half hairless and with big round eyes constantly ticking from you to the room around you. X-549 startles at every passerby, and when you first approach him, he seems almost suspicious of you. “W-why do you ask?”

You’re not entirely sure how to answer. You’re asking because you feel… off. You feel like certainly, certainly, other Xeros around you must feel that they deserve more, the way you do. X-549 is, in a way, almost as ordinary as you, with only the hairless trait revealing subtle patterns in their pink skin and the four antennae around his snout, acting almost as whiskers, always twitching this way and that. “I’ve been thinking about the science of it all,” you explain, eventually, “and I don’t like it. It feels like there has to be more.”

His ears seem to perk up, but at the same time, X-549 looks away from you entirely in hesitation, paw over his mouth as if thinking very hard about something. After a moment, he turns to you, and whispers: “You should talk to my brother, I think.”

A “brother” is somewhat of a novel concept to you, although you of course understand in principle what it means – a sibling, a family. Everyone is supposed to get one of those once they’re old enough to leave the ARC labs.

(You wonder, sometimes, if she has any siblings, any family – the doctor you like following around. You’ve been a little scared to ask. You’re not sure why.)

There is a difference between a sibling and a batchmate. Despite being created at the same time as several other Xeros – in the same batch, and thus, your batchmates – given of your unique genetic makeup, none of you are technically genetically related, not any more than you are related to the long gone residents of the X-1118A. “Siblings” is a term made up by people with “biological” families, and co-opted by families not fitting neatly into that formulaic expectation. Plenty of your batchmates choose to be siblings as soon as they first learn the word.

This seems to be the case for X-549 and his younger brother, X-1274. When you come to talk to them later that day, X-549 practically curls around his brother, and X-1274, this little green critter about half your age, makes a conscious choice to always stand between you two. It seems very kind, at least from what you understand about familial bonds.

He warms up to you quickly once you start asking your questions.

“See, see??” he points at you, as though you are the surprise he’s waited for all day, “I knew we couldn’t be the only ones who could see it, I knew!”

“Could see what?” you ask, tilting your head in curiosity.

“That this whole thing is a sham,” he informs you, and the pair of spiral antennae on his head bounces when he leans closer to you, conspiratorially whispering: “They’re just keeping us here to experiment on us!!”

Your snout scrunches up as you try to parse out what that could mean. “...yeah. We’re an experimental species.”

“Nononono,” he waves his arms as he tries to explain, “I mean!! We don’t get to just! Leave! They teach us whatever they want and then they hand us over to just, whomever?? We’re just never ever free! And they’re tracking everything, they keep testing if we’re smart enough like I haven’t proven I’m a genius yet!! And they just, won’t let us leave on our own! That’s not how people live! That’s how animals live!! And we’re not animals!!!”

Slowly, you nod along. You’re not exactly sure you agree with all of that, but something sticks – you’re not animals. You get to decide your fate, or you should get to. It’s only fair, right? You didn’t have a chance in becoming this, but you could become… more.

“That’s why we’re planning to run,” X-1274 tells you, then.

You blink, once, twice, at a sudden loss of words. It has never before occurred to you that someone would… do that. “...run? As in, away from the labs?”

Both of them nod, one excited, the other hesitant, both determined.

“We want… we want to live somewhere where they don’t get to check on us all the time,” X-549 says. “And, m-maybe… if you want…”

“You could totally run with us!!” his brother offers, readily, like it’s truly that simple. “We’re planning to do it any day now!”

In some ways, it is tempting, shockingly so. A kind of strange hunger seizes your insides at the thought of running outside, across the yard you get to play in, at the thought of jumping the fence at the edge, at the thought of leaving it all behind for a vast, vast world.

The vision crumbles at the thought of running away from her, though. You couldn’t really do that, could you? You like her, you want to stay around her. You probably couldn’t talk to the ARC lab scientists anymore if you were trying to run away from them.

“I don’t think I can do that,” you shake your head.

The two exchange looks. “Are you going to tell on us?” X-1274 asks, boldly, narrowing his eyes at you.

Again, you shake your head. “No. I understand wanting… something else. I think you should do it if you really want to.”

Your questioning brings about no better results than that, and so you try to think in the other direction – if the majority of Xeros are simply satisfied, is there something fundamentally different about you? You’re not sure there is – you are, after all, so very close to what could constitute a “common” Xero that you are called a Standard one.

You ask her about it, when all your other sources fail you.

She laughs about it, softly, and crouches down to take your face into her hands. “My dear child,” she tells you with a smile, “I promise you, there is nothing different about you at all.”

The hunger within you growls in response.

You realize at that very moment that although she may be smart and she may be kind, the doctor does not understand what she is doing to the creatures she makes. She does not understand what she is doing to you, what she is denying you. There is more, there has to be more, yet every question only earns you the consolidation prize that this is enough, and it’s simply not true. You hang, precariously, between the echoes of something more authentic than yourself, and the foreshocks of something with more potential than yourself, and you were not created to be either.

Tension grows within you, and in the coming days it changes you – you eat less, you talk less, you don’t ask questions, you don’t pay attention. You don’t run off to other laboratories than the one you’re supposed to be in at any given time. You sleep a lot more, but your sleep becomes fitful. You dream of looking at a scientific model of the Standard Xero, and it’s just you, plastic and twisted into different poses, with red lines and circles describing the ways in which you are an example of the ordinary. Often, there is an irrational urge to fight this plastic reflection of you and the rage is enough to wake you up, baffled by your own emotions.

Late in the night, one time, you hear something break, and then there’s a whole lot of shouting and running in the laboratories. You remember that, don’t you? The sudden fear, and the overwhelming curiosity. It’s one of your most important memories.

You peek out of your quarters, and the science team is too frantic to pay you any mind. From their franticity, you decipher what has happened.

Two Xeros have broken a window and have escaped outside.

A giggle of utter surprise bubbles up from the hungry pit in your stomach, and turns into a grin. You’re happy for them. They deserve to make this life their own, they truly do.

And then, you watch a group of the scientists slam a door open, and then another, and – then you can feel the cold wind from the outside.

Only two open doorways away.

You are running before you can even think about it.

You can see the two small shapes of them, out in the dark, and you can see some of the white lab coats gaining on them. That won’t do.

The ground under your paws is cold and wet and slippery with fresh fallen snow that’s already becoming water, and you do your best to not lose balance as you dash past the group of Korsos on all fours, skidding to a halt in their path. They pause for a moment, startled by having let yet another of their wards escape, and you growl and yip to the best of your ability, baring your teeth like a feral thing surrounded by beasts. It doesn’t last long, somebody reaches for you and you take off again, but in the meanwhile you can see the duo scaling the fence in the distance, wires rattling under their weight – and it dawns on you only then that you’ll have to climb the fence, you’re not sure how good you are at climbing, you’ve never done that before, and then you’re there, panicking. What are you doing?!

“Hey!!”

You look up, wide-eyed and with lungs seizing painfully in response to the winter air.

X-1274 hangs upside down from the fence by his tail, which is firmly twisted around the metal pole at the top of it, reaching his paws out to you: “Grab on, quick!”

And so you do, and he hoists you up-up-up, faster than you could’ve ever done it on your own, and then you only have to swing your body over the metal, and–

You catch a glimpse of a familiar face.

She stands in the doorway you just ran out of.

You lock eyes with her.

She makes no move to try and catch you. In fact, from this far away, you’re not even sure if she looks sad at all. She just stands there, confused, like she has no idea why you would ever do this.

You jump down from the fence, landing in the snow, and the three of you dash off into the night.

You don’t stop running for a good couple of days.

You don’t stop running even after you split off from your fellow escapees. Ludo and Ygor go their own way, all you hear from them is something about making their own laboratory, their own science. You wish them luck.

You don’t know what you’re looking for, exactly, all you know is that people are not it. In fact, the more you encounter them, the less you want to talk to them. It feels as though every time someone lays their eyes on you, there is suddenly a limb missing from your body, an empty patch in your fur, a gaping wound in the center of your skull. 

Even when you steal enough food to survive, this other hunger sitting in your gut remains.

They catch you stealing, once, and they ask you if you need help. They talk about calling the ARC. You bite at their hands, and then you run.

When stealing stops working, you try your hand at selling things you find lying around. It has mixed results, but it’s how you learn about foraging, and you learn that, if you are lucky enough, you can survive off of this. You ask where people don’t forage too often, and you are pointed to the desert sprawling over much of the continent you find yourself on. There, you find solace.

At first you only venture out for small trips, running out into the hot sand for half a day and coming back with small pieces of metal and plastic that amount to nothing. You start going further and further, disregarding the burning sun that follows your every step, until at times you walk through the entire day and get to witness the desert at night.

You sleep in the sand, at first, until you happen upon a cave, and when you turn back, you can barely see the city on the horizon – and you decide that this is perfect. For now, this is your home.

This far out, the desert has many gifts to give. You bring back minerals, old lost packages, entire bags of broken toys. It’s not enough to make you rich, but it’s enough to get by.

And in the night, you dream, still, but now – you dream of your hunger.

You dream of a feast between only yourself and your self, and you dream of devouring all those things that can and will change you forever, of devouring all those magic tricks from fairy tales, of being your own savior and finally Becoming, becoming what you’re supposed to be, becoming the most Xero a Xero can be.

And the thing is – it’s not like it’s impossible.

Some of your batchmates, some of your species may be miracles, may be. But you, you’re painfully aware, you are not a miracle. You are a ghost of somebody who could not withstand the sun, you are a feeble attempt to grab ahold of the dormant potential in the real thing, and you are an attempt that has failed because the people responsible are not reaching anywhere far enough.

But you can fix it. You can fix yourself.

…but can you?

Yes, of course you can. Of course!

You just need time. Time, and a way to adjust the variables. You are a well-practiced miracle, after all! Surely, then, there are procedures for belated adjustments! There are special fruits and vegetables, and there are specific chemicals, and there are so many more scientists out there than just those at the ARC.

You only have to look for them.

And once you do?

You will finally become what you were always meant to be.