Origin, Chapter Three

The psychic energies that had brought The Four Heroes, Phoenix and Amy into communion with the mind of Phoenix Prime transported those observers back, all the way to the beginnings of memory. They became a part of Phoenix Prime’s very earliest experiences, events long forgotten but imprinted on her subconscious, now unfolding for the visitors inside her thoughts to see and feel...

The earliest of all. Birth. Phoenix Prime entered the world, her twin sister by her side. There was another sister waiting for her, and there were parents to watch over them all. And even these recollections from the first days of infancy, free of any ordered thought or mature consideration, carried something that remained today. The pride and happiness of James and Iskira Neetkins in the daughters they had created was there in the memory of Phoenix Prime, translated to her on some semiotic level of childlike comprehension, and shining joyfully from the scene even now. They were a family, and in their love they were united.

Then came the day it ended forever. Phoenix Prime would never forget the confusion and mounting fear that descended on her baby self as her parents lifted her away from her sisters, and placed her inside the black depths of their machine. And from there...horrors that followed one after the other, horrors that still could not be revisited without a fearful price to pay. The barrage of never-before-imagined forces, bombarding her tiny form, changing her. Heat flashing out across her very atoms, her pink flesh becoming incandescent red, wings of flame sprouting from her back. And the others, ten more of her, now a hundred, now a thousand, rushing into being all at once. It was her second birth, and it destroyed all she had loved, all the happiness her first birth had brought, leaving only nightmare in its place.

For there was to be no more love, no more sisters or parents. The next thing that happened was imprisonment. She and all the strange other hers that now existed were cast as one into a vast, dark cell from which there was no escape. Phoenix Prime would never again feel her parents’ touch, never again sleep beside her sisters. Solitude was her lot now, surrounded by this multitude of flitting, flaming creatures that resembled her but bore her no empathy. None of this, Phoenix Prime was yet old enough to rationalize or contemplate intellectually. But every emotional response to that time was inscribed eternally on her heart, and there was one more feeling too, worse than any of them. It was knowing that all this had befallen her, and not understanding why.

This much of the story was known to The Four Heroes and their companions, or at any rate, they knew the facts. Nothing could have prepared them for the experience of sharing in what Phoenix Prime had suffered, and while their telepathic selves were reeling under its aftershocks and struggling to recover, the recollections of their subject shot forward as if time itself were contracting. As our heroes plunged back into the life of Phoenix Prime, they saw that a whole year had already gone by…

She had changed. She was certain of it now, just as she was certain that the others were not changing.

An untutored but potentially brilliant scientific mind, inherited from brilliant parents, housed as it was in a body that needed neither food nor drink, just its own self-replicating heat, to nourish itself, had had no shortage of time this last year to observe and make sense of certain evident facts. The first of Phoenix Prime’s discoveries was that her intellect was indeed growing. She had, for example, already discovered a way to leave the prison that housed her and her myriad clones, simply by prising open a ventilation hatch and flying through it into the twisting passages and tunnels that ran the breadth and height of this sprawling castle. The others, her strange, synthetic siblings, had not learned to do this, and nor did they ever display any interest in joining her on her excursions. They seemed content to flap about the holding chamber like little aimless clumps of flame, questioning nothing, never investigating or exploring, their minds as simple and passionless as Phoenix Prime’s own had been on the day they were duplicated from her. Already, even though there was as yet so little to distinguish her from her many clones, Phoenix Prime felt contempt stir in her breast when she thought of them.

She was physically bigger too, and she never used to be. It wasn’t easy to detect – together they still looked like nothing so much as a flock of winged babies of fire, neither one any different from the rest – but Phoenix Prime had noticed it. Her hands and feet, once the same size as the clones’, were now larger, and her arms and legs were sturdier and stronger than theirs too. She had even started to display a level of control over her body, especially in the skill with which she used her wings to fly, that the others in their uncoordinated lurching and wheeling couldn’t match. Phoenix Prime mulled all this evidence over for hour after hour each day, applying her fast-developing intelligence to the question of what it might mean.

When she wasn’t engaged in puzzling over the mysteries of her existence, there was one other thing that Phoenix Prime would occasionally do. Lifting up her ventilation hatch, she’d fly along the shaft until she came to a small grille that looked out upon the hall that served as her parents’ laboratory. Her sisters were both gone by now, but her mother and father remained, and Phoenix Prime would crouch unseen in the top corner of that room and gaze down on them from behind the bars. These days they were always working on a new machine, one that closely resembled their last, especially in the gigantic cube-shaped dimensions of its body.

Phoenix Prime didn’t dare reveal herself to her parents. They had already changed her and locked her away with the others – who knew what else they’d do, if they ever laid hands on her again? But although she was afraid, still she came to her secret hiding-place to watch them, sometimes for hours at a time. They only ever looked sad now, even as they worked away on the great cube, and Phoenix Prime knew about sadness too. Something glimmered in her as she studied them, something that was trying its best to glow through all the loneliness and confusion and hurt. It was something she could dimly call back from those earliest of days, when she and her parents and sisters had been together.

One day the new machine was finished, and Phoenix Prime remembered that day well. This time she had had to find a new vantage point because her mother and father had gone outdoors, so she’d flown beyond the ventilation shaft and eventually ensconced herself in a narrow arched window high up on one of the towers. For here, a world Phoenix Prime had barely even guessed at stretched ahead of her, so vast and new and free that she could only stare. Her mother and father stood on the craggy shore of the island, clinging to each other as if in need of warmth and comfort, as they looked out upon a sea of such size that Phoenix Prime thought it must roll on to the end of the world. The sun was beating a golden path across its surface as it slowly sank in the sky, and the second machine was flying away across the waves on a course to the blazing horizon. Phoenix Prime’s parents watched as its shape dwindled to a tiny black square and finally vanished into that glorious long-gone afternoon.

The sight filled Phoenix Prime with dread. Something had been in the air for some time now, and though she did not know what exactly it was, she knew the departure of the second machine had something to do with it – that and the stacks of cases, trunks and chests that had been steadily piling up around the castle. It all awakened in Phoenix Prime a fear worse than any she had yet known, one she could not even bring herself to face, but one which seemed to be drawing ever closer to coming true…

And sure enough, soon after that the day arrived when her mother and father stood in the castle gates, long traveling coats wrapped around them, and took their last look at their laboratory and home. A boat loaded with their possessions sat waiting at the quay, and a grey stormy sky teemed overhead. Phoenix Prime gazed from her concealed nook at her silent, tearful and unknowing parents, and though she had not yet the power of speech, her sentiments in that moment echoed through the ages to the listening Four Heroes and their friends, ringing as clear and true as any words:

Don’t leave me! Don’t go!

But go they did. They were the last link to the one fleeting time of happiness Phoenix Prime had ever known, and now they were no more. Nothing remained in the barren shell of the castle but her, save for her memories, her clones, and her pain.

Years passed in a heartbeat. The pain never went away, but Phoenix Prime continued to grow. The fiery red hue of her skin faded in time and reverted to the pink flesh she had had as a baby, and the hair that grew on her head was as brown as her father’s had been. Her wings of flame remained, growing in span and length just as her body enlarged, and Phoenix Prime’s mastery of that body, both in terms of its physical potential and the things she could do with her superhuman powers, advanced swiftly. So too did her mind. Using her parents’ diaries she taught herself to read, then studied every book, every manual and every item of equipment they had left behind. The copies of her, meanwhile, were still just incandescent babies bouncing mindlessly around their prison. Phoenix Prime concluded they would always stay that way.

Soon, Phoenix Prime had learned all that the castle had to teach her. She knew about her family, the failed experiment, her missing sisters, the Martian race and Dimension Borg. It was time to see what else the world held for her. So, on a day when she was not much older than her sister Carmilla had been when she bade farewell to her ancestral home, Phoenix Prime left the clones, the diaries and the Anti-Matter Transporter just as she had found them, and did the same. Like Carmilla, she simply stepped out of the laboratory window and swept away across the ocean, letting the wind carry her to whatever adventures lay in store.

What followed was an array of experiences so far-reaching and numerous that The Four Heroes could barely decipher one from the staggering assortment, as Phoenix Prime roamed the world for the remainder of her childhood and expanded her prodigious intellect to true genius proportions. As this happened the world changed around her too, in ways her observers well remembered playing a direct part – the creation of Nottingham, the birth of a new era for mankind. And yet, through it all, no knowledge or enlightenment came to Phoenix Prime that could ever quite dispel that which burned away at the very core of her. Her anger, her hatred and her pain had been there too long. Everything she learned, every new discovery she made, was claimed by them, the feelings and memories of the girl who had been changed and deprived and forsaken. So it was that when Phoenix Prime had achieved a level of knowledge sufficient for their needs, they directed how it would be turned to use. They shaped the course Phoenix Prime resolved to follow, the mission to which she would dedicate her life.

She would destroy the clones, each and every one of them. She would undo the wrong her parents’ disastrous experiment had caused. When she was once more the one and only Phoenix Neetkins in the world, all would be as it had been before, and the dark time would at last be over.

Thus Phoenix Prime’s journey led her back to its starting-point, the tiny islands dotted over the stormy seas off Scotland. Here, however, she ran against an obstacle even she could not have anticipated. The castle was gone. It, and the island on which it had stood, had been reduced to a few rocky ruins jutting from the thrashing brine.

The clones had not perished with it. Phoenix Prime was linked on certain telepathic and physical levels to the beings that had been replicated from her, and she knew from this that most of them had escaped the catastrophe and were now scattered to every corner of the globe. Another long, lonely voyage thereby began, as Phoenix Prime set off in pursuit of her prey. The next years were spent hunting far and wide for the scattered others, and exterminating each one she ran to ground. She wiped out many of the burning babies during that time, feeling the pain and terror of every victim as she struck the death-blow and enduring it, letting it strengthen her resolve. For Phoenix Prime was grimly aware that until her roaming was over, until the entire horde of those tiny abominations was no more, her pain would never end.

And soon…soon there was something else too.

One of the clones had discovered a partial cure. It was no longer an infant of fire, but had somehow regained its proper aging process and shed some of its anti-matter powers. The very thought of it sickened Phoenix Prime and she yearned to slaughter it at once, but it had fallen in with her sister Neetra and The Four Heroes, powerful friends who Phoenix Prime could not easily challenge. She had no choice but to bide her time, but while she was doing so, the clone went even further and managed to achieve what she had not: an absolute cure. It changed itself into a healthy, ordinary girl without any paranormal abilities at all, a copy of what Phoenix Prime herself would be if the cursed experiment had never taken place at all. And by the end of the second Martian invasion, that clone was living with Neetra, and Carmilla, now cured too, and their parents, who had returned. They had rebuilt their family. They were together again, just as they had been in that beginning whose distant echoes still resonated somewhere deep within Phoenix Prime…except the clone had taken her place. It was living the life that was rightfully hers, while she was still shut out as she had been all her days, peering in from hiding, watching them alone and from afar.

All this, Phoenix Prime saw. And her hatred grew.

The creature must die, she was determined on it now. So she concealed herself and waited patiently until the opportunity presented itself, taking care not to reveal her existence too soon. She was aware that her parents’ Feeder Ray had rebuilt Castle Neetkins and given life to a whole new generation of clones, copies of the original copies of her, but she resisted the urge to go there and obliterate them wholesale. This would have tipped her hand to The Four Heroes, and destroying the monstrosity they harboured was all that mattered now. When the subterranean war broke out Phoenix Prime saw immediately that an alliance with The One Below was her route to power enough to take on Nottingham’s defenders, and from there everything fell into place, leading Phoenix Prime to the course of action that had ended her long travels in the Military Control Centre, kneeling exhausted on the floor, as Neetra’s psychic interface drew to a close and returned the seven participants to their own minds, and the present moment…

END OF CHAPTER THREE