Francois Lemoyne, Narcissus watching his own reflection
He stepped inside, one hand hovering above his latch as he waited for the door to slam shut. Better safe than sorry, he thought to himself. It closed with a click and he pressed the button above his ribs, feeling the first layer of his suit come off – the maroon, scratched metal brace that served as his makeshift armor.
That was only the beginning. Disrobing would likely take Robin a full fifteen minutes, twenty if he was feeling tired. At this point he had a routine, and he brought his hands up to his neck as he stepped out of his covering, finding first one, then the other medical clasp that held his gauze mask up on his face. He unrolled the fabric layer by layer, feeling like one of those mummies you had to de-bandage in order to examine - except, once he was done with that, he still needed to take off his breathing mask and its oxygen bottles, his goggles and his hat. He left them on the floor for Maeve to clean up - the little robot would surely get here soon.
His face was out! And as he moved on to the bulletproof vest strapped to his chest, which itself covered a medieval-style chainmail, he stepped closer to the mirror that covered the entrance to his flat.
He looked tired, which I suppose was no surprise because, having spent the past eighteen hours outside, that was exactly how he felt.
The rims to his golden eyes were dark and bore the marks of his many coverings. His skin, which at some point had been a glowing brown, looked sickly, tinged with the mild green of someone who hadn't been in the sun for too long - nine years, to be precise, since he'd donned his suit and forgone any hopes of natural heat on skin.
His jaw was clenched, a default posture at this point, and it only helped to underline the singularity of his face, its almost rectangular quality. At 15 he'd been scouted to become a model. He’d spent a few years travelling the world, indulging in the most decadent luxuries it had to offer because everybody loved beauty and it seemed his brand of elfin, almost womanly features was exactly what fashion wanted to see between the years 2025 and 2028.
Thinking about that period always made him unbelievably angry – mainly at himself, that he'd been so close to all the things he was fighting today but too stupid, too blind, too arrogant to see what was really happening. How many times had runways been evacuated because of what the world out there called the Justice? How many times had he caught a glimpse of someone hiding under a car, behind truck doors, eyes glinting and body shivering with fear, and only thought to himself huh, would you look at that? How much precious time had he wasted on vanity instead of joining the fight?
Anyways. He snapped out of it as he took off his full-body ventilation unit - an improvement he'd thought of after a few months in his suit, realizing that the many layers suffocated him after just a few hours and that, if there was one problem he had always known how to fix, it was that of his own physical comfort. Then his pads, big, mousse-y things that prevented burns where his aeration unit ran too strongly, and finally the yellow hazmat suit he wore more out of habit than necessity now.
There. What was left standing in front of him was a thin, strong man, the kind of short that looked taller from afar, slender and sprightly.
Some of the indents left by the mask were starting to fade and you could see the two marks where his nose had been broken: the first he’d gotten as a kid, and it always gave him a sort of allure. The second was just a few years old, after his first encounter with the Emfanisi. He sometimes wondered if it meant machines would no longer recognise him, but he couldn't afford the risk to check. Besides, whether he still looked like his younger self didn't really matter anymore: the Emfanisi were worse than machines, and you were as good as dead if they caught so much as a glimpse of you.
They were ghastly creatures, the kinds of beasts only a monster could have thought to invent: they were made out of manufactured flesh by professor Fovos, and the fact that he invented a face-stealing, body-beating species could really only be understood once you knew what kind of a schmuck he had been. Before he became the mastermind behind the government’s oppression program, he fell for every trick in the book: phishing scams, catfishing, those emails from faraway princes promising you riches if only you'd give them your name and social security number. The Emf were the revenge of a man whose identity had been stolen so many times that when government officials got a hold of him he didn't have a home, because nobody would trust his name, a bank account, because he was on several money laundering blacklists, or even a car to sleep in, because his driver's license had been stolen and abused one too many times. He hated the world, they knew that, so they gave him a house, a car, a new name, even a new face and put him in front of some glug-glugging tubes with the promise that whatever he invented, they'd use it to avenge him.
Robin thought about Fovos often. He'd met him once at a Giorgio Armani after party in Milan and the man had reached out for his face from behind the glass cage he kept himself in at all times.
"You look beautiful", he had said, with something like hunger in his eyes. "You should watch out for your face – I might steal it."
A younger, (much) dumber Robin had laughed at the admonition – not that the threat of kidnapping was a particularly savory one, but when you were twenty-something and paraded in front of the world’s highest, richest members of society - the kinds of people who usually got their way - it wasn’t that rare an occurrence.
Fovos hadn't been phased. He'd just smiled enigmatically and offered Robin a trip to his laboratory, which, in Robin’s defense, certainly held a different subtext then. Thinking about how roughly he'd turned him down, Robin couldn't help but wonder if he might have been able to kill the entire thing in its egg that very night.
No matter. Here he was, years and years later, a vigilante tending to those whose faces were stolen by Fovos' creatures, a recluse living underground to avoid government forces, and at least he had a few years of fun to cling to whenever he wanted to remember a better time.
He walked up to the door, the security system activating with a soft beep. First the body scan: his modified camera was looking for his secret signals, hands crossed behind his back with every other finger touching (right hand: thumb to index finger, middle finger to ring finger, little finger sticking out; left hand: thumb sticking out and touching the right hand little finger, index to middle finger, and ring finger and little finger together).
He liked that signal. It was the one his father splayed out his hands to make whenever he blessed the community in Synagogue, and another Cohen had made it into a universal symbol of peace by bringing it to Star Trek. For him, the intricate but familiar computation was a good way of ensuring his own safety. If even one finger was out of place, the system would assume any other beings in the room were hostile and fully lock what was behind the door down, initiating a data-wiping sequence that would ensure the protection of all other resistants. As a last resort, he had another hand gesture, fists clutched and crossed behind his back: he was in mortal danger and the system should kill him immediately. He shuddered to think when he might have to use it.
The room beeped softly again, his body and heat scans complete, showing no signs of stress or abnormality. Biometrics next, fingerprints and irises, not that an Emf wouldn't fake an iris but, despite the professor's best efforts, it still couldn't replicate a fingerprint without having seen it, and besides, it was Robin’s mantra: better safe than sorry.
The checks were as much security as they were a way for Robin to get back to himself. His days were exhausting, and he often forgot about his individual self until he got back to that room and paid attention to his fingers, sore and emaciated from bandaging, soothing, feeding, sewing, holding - whatever it took to help the Disenfranchised Robin encountered on his errands.
That was his self-appointed job: to find, and care, for those whose identity the Emfanisi stole, hopefully before they had to realise for themselves the horror that the creatures wrought. You see, Professor Fovos hadn't just created identity stealers. His inventions acted more like voodoo dolls, inexplicably capable of inflicting pain on those they copied (‘imprinted’) by torturing themselves, except they had no nerves, no bones, no blood to speak of and what hurt the imprinted human had virtually no impact on them.
What happened after an imprint depended on three things: the human's resilience, the government's interest in them and Fovos' mood. The Emfanisi were inherently cruel creatures, and, about an hour after they saw you, they would kick off a first bout of torture without anybody asking them to. The details varied, but an Emf would typically let its pack (another 4 or 5 animals) beat it up while in human form, often leading to broken bones and bleeding faces. If you were lucky, that was where it stopped. If you weren't, they might step on your lung, or your throat, or your face for too long and you died right then and there.
After that, the stories turned into two groups: the first one told their tales with eyes wide open, shaking their heads in disbelief at the odds. They were in the small minority of people who had just been left to be in peace. One bad beating, maybe two, and the Emf seemed to forget about them, or maybe it was put on somebody else's trace, nobody really knew. It happened - he knew that. But for most, either the government wanted something from them, or the professor was in a bad mood, and that first beating marked the start of a relentless hunt punctuated with threats, extortionate requests and abuse to family and friends that left you with two dreadful options: disappear or give in, the latter being very much a function of the former, since nobody knew what happened to those who, shoulders slumped, beaten and bloodied, queued up in front of local "surrender" stalls at police stations.
There was a word for those who dropped off the face of the earth: the Disenfranchised. It wasn't even a word of the Justs - the police chief, in an attempt to invite surrenders, had portrayed them as people whose network had failed them by cautioning against the police. They were disenfranchised, he said, because of their nefarious connections - not the government, never the government, which was here to help.
His analogy was at best hypocritical, but it did fit - and the word was more widely adopted than, Robin wagered, the government might have ever hoped.
Since then of course, there had been other words: cockroaches; thieves; parasites - and for each President-in-chief allocution there were more riots, attended by more Emfanisi, creating more of the Dis.
At this point, no citizen could ignore the threat - everyone had secret signals with friends to confirm identities, and many no longer left their homes with uncovered faces. But there had been a time when the Emfanisi had been covert creatures, and while you did hear of people waking up next to beaten up spouses despite swearing they'd been there the entire night, it had been easy to dismiss the rumors as scaremongering.
Robin wondered how many times he'd been mimicked early on. He remembered the officials at shows, how they scrutinised the models, pointing to their projecTiles as they showed each other something you couldn't see from the runway. He could pinpoint the moment when he'd started realizing something was off, though: he learned to anticipate the blows when they leant forward, elbows on knees, apparently captivated by his walking clothhanger performance, the way they seemed to hold their breath just before it came, and how they jolted up, triumphant, before remembering where they were, fading into the background. For a few months the models all complained about unexplainable pains - tripping on the runways even though their only job was to walk straight, and they did it well; painful jolts to their sides, as if they were being pinched, just as they landed their pose; weird shoves they couldn’t explain backstage and that made the makeup artists have to start all over again.
One of them eventually confirmed their suspicions. He was dating a police commissioner and, while he hadn’t seen the creatures himself, his lover had explained how they worked amidst promises that he would keep him safe as experiments ramped up.
And ramp up they did, a fact that Robin had gotten to grips with intimately that dreadful day that he’d been pushed off the podium, a leg inexplicably broken by invisible forces, one ear permanently damaged by slashing.
The newspapers had called it a political stunt; they accused him of taking the side of a group he had never even heard of, let alone realised he had now joined, the Justice, and he lost any modelling clout he’d once had. When he looked around at others who had suffered the same, he knew it was no accident: they were all a little bit other-ized, and the Moroccan heritage that had made him so beautiful one day clearly marked him as a potential threat the other.
He spent a few weeks recovering in bed, hiding from public sight and waiting out the journalists who hounded his front door, hoping that the intermittent beatings that still happened, not really predictably, every once in a while, would finally stop.
Still full of an optimism he would shortly shed, he had reached out to his lawyer friends; his reporter friends; his politician friends - anyone, really, who might have been able to broadcast his story. He was met with utter silence.
Thinking about it now, he wondered if, had that been all, he would have just taken a bit of time off, gone on holiday, and started modelling again like nothing happened. But, just like every night, he walked towards his sister’s room and felt the throbbing of guilt as he made himself quiet, stealthy, utilizing some of his day-job skills to open her door and check on the most battered and bruised Disenfranchised he had yet to encounter.
She seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Her breath was less shallow than it had been for a few weeks, which was great, although that tended to mean they were biding their time for a new beating.
The police had created this narrative themselves. They had beaten Robin out of the runway and, as he took the time to recover, had incensed public opinion against him, painting him as an undercover agent for a resistance he hadn’t even known existed until he saw his own name associated with it.
Once he was designated as the enemy, everything was fair game: they harassed him continuously, his phone lit up with calls at a near-constant rate and black unmarked cars following his. He received endless threats, his every interface bombarded with messages from those who somehow found his profiles. He learned later what doxxing was, and that he'd been a victim of it.
To get to this self-created enemy, the police foisted Emfanisi upon those who were close to him - luckily, not that many. His parents had died a long time ago. Beyond the group of models who had been quick to cut off all ties he had few friends to speak of, and he had left his last boyfriend months before over an aesthetic disagreement on whether or not one could still avidly follow other attractive men on social media once in a relationship. He shook his head just thinking about how much of an ass he'd once been.
His sister had been the only person to be there for him - like she always was. Ella had never been like him, and though she carried the same beauty in her bones, she had chosen a different path, studying law and enrolling with one of the most prestigious firms in the world, quickly rising through its ranks. That was probably why she had been so optimistic about suing her way out of this predicament.
She'd been incredibly, dramatically wrong.
Nobody could prove the existence of the Emfanisi, not to a judicial system that connived with the police. And no judge would put their head on the line for the word of a model best known for his underwear ads and hallucinogenic drug habits, not least when it was against a potent organization who, it seemed, could now torture you from afar.
She got more and more vocal as her campaign hit one roadblock after another: if the courts wouldn't hear her then at least she could count on the newspapers. And though she'd been right at first, photos of her bruised brother shared time after time on the Consciousnesses, it took little for tabloids to twist the story, using Robin's tainted past to explain his current state.
One thing she was very successful at: angering, maybe even scaring, the powers that be. They retaliated by stealing her face, too, using it first to discredit her in the public eye, her Emf photographed in embarrassing, shocking, illegal situations before they beat her up within an inch of her life.
Nothing stopped her. She broadcast her suffering, going live on a Con every time the beatings started, which of course only fanned the flames of their ire. She filmed Robin, too, because throughout this ordeal he wasn't spared - and once the police caught on they started synchronizing the two siblings’ beatings.
One good thing did come out of that: they were found by the Justs. And one day, as he struggled to shut the camera off after a particularly severe bout of abuse that had left both of them writhing on the floor, they'd heard a knock on their door.
Robin's blood went cold. What now?
Another knock. A pause, then another. A voice behind the door:
"We know you're hurt. If you let us in, we can help you."
Robin felt like a trapped animal. After months of torture at the hands of the Metro Police, it was no wonder, but his brain had conditioned itself to trust nothing and no-one other than his sister, and as he attempted to drag himself to the door to check its camera, he was all too aware of the uncanny stillness of her body, the unnatural angle at which her spine was twisted, the short, shallow breaths that rattled out of her with effort.
One more soft knock:
“Look at this this way. If we aren’t really here to help you, you’re already dead.”
It took Robin a minute to process that, but as Ella got quieter and quieter, and as blood leaked from his nose to the carpet, he had to agree: either way, they were dead meat.
He crossed the last few meters to his front door, using the last of his strength to open it before falling back, unconscious. He woke up lying down on a makeshift gurney, nose throbbing intensely and mouth caked with blood.
His blood ran cold. Ella.
He sat up abruptly, groaning as every one of his broken ribs made itself known to him. He seemed to be in some sort of trailer, if the tranquil movement of the bed were anything to go by.
He tried getting up. He found that he couldn’t, his leg muscles seemingly unresponsive.
Desperate, he yelled out for his sister:
“Ella!”
A figure rushed in, shushed him, pushed him back down into the bed.
“Calm down”, they said, face covered in bandages, somewhat mummified. “She’s just in the next boat – we couldn’t fit the both of you on one.”
This explained the rocking. Heart thumping, Robin caught his breath to ask more questions.
The figure put its hand on his shoulder in a gesture of appeasement:
“I’m sorry. I know this is terrifying. I can’t answer your questions until we are in a safe place. You should rest some more – I’ll wake you up when we arrive.”
For a moment Robin considered objecting, but his lungs felt crushed and his mouth was too dry to speak without croaking. He relaxed back into the bed, giving the figure a sharp nod he hoped conveyed his thanks. The figure left and he fell back into a deep slumber.
The first thing Robin noticed when he came to was the peace. The world around him felt soft, welcoming, and although he noticed that he was on a stretcher, he felt almost like he was floating.
His eyes focused slowly; the light was almost blinding. He could feel the tautness of the makeshift bed bracing under him, and the small movements of his hands against the plastic-coated fabric chafed his overly sensitive skin. His mouth still held the taste of blood and he could smell it, too, wafting from his crusted upper lip to his nose. Still, he felt a sense of peace he couldn’t quite explain. He closed his eyes, then opened them again with a start. Quiet. That was what it was. The world was quiet - eerily so. He couldn’t hear his own breath.
Stomach dropping, pulse quickening, he cleared his throat. Nothing.
He opened his mouth, pushing air through his lungs in what he hoped was a breathy sound. Still nothing. He began to scream, his heart slamming into his chest as his stomach dropped, reaching for noise even as he felt the waves of his oncoming panic crash into his guts. A hand on his shoulder, in a gesture that was meant to be reassuring but which felt like yet another constraint to his terrified mind. He fumbled upwards, every single one of his broken ribs making itself known to him as he desperately tried to sit up, pushing against the hand that was now trying to keep him down. He fell back into the stretcher, clawing at his ears in a terrified motion. A pinch to his neck. A pop. The sounds came rushing in. He could hear a voice behind him, connected, he surmised, to the hand on his shoulder. It was dictating orders in a quick staccato, each command matched by the sound of feet coming to and fro. Then, a scream:
“We’re losing her!”
The hand left his shoulder and a figure in back rushed past him, thought it didn’t run far, and he could still hear its uninterrupted medical litany, somewhat reassuring in its assurance - until the last of his brains finally settled back in and Robin suddenly realised who they were losing. He jumped up, unrestrained this time, and an adrenaline rush stifling the pain he’d felt before. The stretcher veered to the right, nearly throwing him off as one of his carriers cried out in surprise, but he couldn’t care less: Ella. She was laid out on another stretcher just a few feet away from him, her face covered by a mask connected to a large metal tank by a multitude of tubes. Her hand, which he could almost touch, was turning blue. He called her name out, tentatively at first, then frantically. She wasn’t moving. Why wasn’t she moving? In the distance he could see a white bungalow towards which they seemed to be headed, and two more shrouded figures came running out of it, carrying some sort of contraption over to his sister, tearing her blouse in half and strapping her to it.
“3, 2, 1, GO”, someone yelled. An almost sonic sound, his sister’s chest jumped up. A moment as someone, he assumed, checked her pulse, then shook their head.
“3, 2, 1, GO”, again, and up her chest went, again, and the pulse check, the headshake.
His powerlessness seeped into him like a fever, his every muscle clenched as he realised he might be witnessing his sister’s last breath from his own stretcher, too weak to get up, not trained enough to help.
“3, 2, 1, GO”. She jumped up again, and this time all of the figures gave a little start as her pulse seemed to return.
He screamed her name again:
“ELLA! Ella! Ella please. Ella please don’t leave me, I’m begging you, please stay with me, I’ll take care of you, please Ella, please, please, please”
He couldn’t stop himself, sobbing as he begged her to hang onto the thread of life the defibrillator had given back, and as he implored her for something outside of her power he noticed her eyes on him, dark, grave, unblinking. She wasn’t moving. But she wasn’t dying, either.
Anyways. That had been then, before the doctors at the Justs’ health center had confirmed what her immobility on that stretcher had already hinted at, that the Emfanisi had broken something in her spine and she wouldn’t be able to move anything below her neck anymore.
And now, as he stood in front of her sleeping body, peaceful somehow after all those years spent caring for others less injured than her, he felt the same rush of guilt and despair he did every time he crossed the threshold of her room: his entire life now was owed to her, the sister had given her entire body up just to broadcast his fight, and still pushed him forward.
He had asked her, after the surgeries had gone as well as they could and she was convalescing at the Justs’ headquarters, how he could make this up to her, knowing full well that nothing could ever compensate everything she’d lost.
She had smiled at him, oddly serene for someone so severely injured, and made him promise to find all those who didn’t have her cameras to broadcast their pain, the people whom the Justs might not think of finding - the Disenfranchised.
If there had been any doubt in his mind that it was what he ought to do, her request had cinched it: and so he had begun his new, anonymous life as the Apon.
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