(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 33

"I never got your name."
It was still daylight, but the sun did hang low in the sky. The guy had barely stepped out of the supermarket's back door before I started talking to him, and while he made no comment on it, his shifty eyes and slightly frowning brow told everything I needed to know on that specific topic. Then again, that was the only thing I could read on him.
"No," he said, dragging it out in a low voice, never making eye contact, "maybe there's a reason for that."
The low sun and the nearly empty parking lot by the supermarket conspired to make the air feel cold. It had yet to reach freezing, but with what little clothing options were open to me, I was already dreading that point in time.
"What should I call you?"
"How about you don't," he replied almost instantly. "Look, I'm not doing this as some bleeding heart favor. Whatever is going down, it has everybody on edge. Everyone's leaving because they're terrified of something nobody even seems to really know what's about, and I just put down a deposit on a nice three bedroom out on the east of town with my girlfriend." He finally turned to look me in the eyes, but the experience was not all that pleasant. "I want to throw as many wrenches in as many wheels as possible before I tug tail myself, capiche?"
"What does that mean?"
"It means I'm not your friend. I just hope that something will stick."
"No, uhm, that last word, what did that mean?" I asked, feeling like a bit of a moron. And he looked at me as if I was.
"It's Italian," he grumbled. "I think it means whether you understand or not."
I nodded. "I get it, totally. I just want my life back, too."
Like he had before, he looked me over, but there was something different about it this time, as if he was measuring me up for something.
"Right, I guess," he mumbled, sounding a little less than impressed. He then walked away, heading towards one of the last cars in the lot. It was an old one, but compared to what the time travelers had been using, it looked pretty good. The dark burgundy paint had its scrapes and it had no hubcaps, but it was in one piece, which was an upgrade.
"Get in," he said, not wasting much time waiting for a response.
"What, in that? I don't know who you are, I don't even know your name."
Looking less thanpleased, he stopped halfway into the driver's seat and stood back up.
"Yeah, and I look like a #*@!ing pedo trying to get you into my car. We don't have much luxury of choice, and you came to me, remember?"
With a weird feeling of preemptive regret, I got into the passenger seat, keeping my eye on him. To my frustration, he was right. That didn't make any of it feel any more right.
"So, you some rebel, taking down robot copies for the innocent or something?"
"Most people that got copied also get dead," he said casually as the engine began to groan. He was quiet after that, but it only took him a few seconds to realize that it wouldn't be the end of questions just because he went silent.
"My dad found out that a friend of ours had been replaced, and he pulled some strings. We caught the #*@!er and took it apart, thinking it would help us find our friend."
"So, did it?"
"Sort of," he sighed, and I quickly put together the rest. "The thing is, they don't just replace people, they also replace the robots that disappear under weird circumstances. So if we're doing this, we need a workaround to that, too."
I looked at him as he leaned back, one hand on the wheel and one hand in the window, making him look like some movie teen, cruising through town. It was a far cry from Vera's frantic driving or Patrick's tense caution. Peter sometimes did the same, in the summer when the car was hot. He claimed it had a cooling effect, that it was for health reason. The rest of us knew about his love of 60s youth movies.
"How long you been here?" I asked, instantly noticing how I sounded like some nervous child wanting to strike up conversation. He didn't seem to mind, though.
"Got here when I was five with my parents. Don't remember much about the time I'm from, except the air was much more dry. I still sweat like a pig in summer and freeze like, well, something else in winter."
His face changed as he spoke, the tension easing and his left hand becoming more active, tapping the window frame or fiddling with his hair a bit.
"Humidity," he added, actually looking over. "It carries heat and stuff."
"Yeah, I know, I know."
And like that, all of a sudden, we were just two teens in a car, talking about random things. It quickly began slipping away into unimportant chatter, but something inside me wanted it to be like that. No drama, no danger, no mindboggling mysteries. Nothing insane. It lasted a whole few minutes, and it actually felt good.
It ended when, after a few minutes of driving, we stopped at a small grove of trees just beyond the last real houses in town, down south-east. Fields began to stretch out beyond that point, but they were still separated by patches of other plantlife. Small rows of old stone stuck up from the ground here and there, so overgrown that they looked like natural rock formations until you inspected them close up. The nearest house was far enough away that I couldn't have clearly seen someone in its windows, so it felt safe to assume that nobody would see precisely what we were up to, either. Had I been there with someone I knew, that would have been reassuring. With this nameless boy, I did feel a little less sure about it all.
"What is this place?" I asked, perhaps more to make conversation than to actually know.
"Secluded," he simply replied. He showed no real interest in me, which in many ways was comforting, but was instead looking around on the ground for something. In a sudden lurch, he reached towards the ground, gripping an old metal thing. It looked like a pipe that had been forcefully bent out of shape, and then left to rust.
"What is that?"
"A piece of metal pipe," he answered, right before he gave it a tug. It was stuck in the ground, but he seemed like he wasn't surprised by that, at all. In fact, he seemed like he was checking that it was! Leaning back, feet planted hard into the dirt, he pulled on it, and slowly tore a chain from the ground! Once the chain was long enough to reach his knees, he seemed to struggle for a moment. Taking a few breaths, he gave it a slow, hard tug, and a small box emerged from the dirt.
"And that," he added, "is what we need to catch ourselves a robot."
The box wasn't very large. It looked like an old style of toolbox, wood with metal fittings around edges and corners. Judging from his strained sounds, though, it did weigh a bit. When it was finally out of the ground, he knelt down beside it. He then pulled out a small key on a chain.While the key in question looked old and heavy, the other keys on the chain were fairly new, giving the impression that it was his normal keychain, and the old key was simply something he always had on him, something nobody ever took much notice of. The box resisted slightly, but with a grating sound, the lock popped open, and the guy looked around a bit before he opened the box.
"What you need to know about their robot copies," he said, all the while he rummaged about inside the box for something, "is that they are mainly for show." He stopped talking as he struggled with something in the box, and finally pulled out what looked like a fishing net. "They are not made to be smart. So outsmarting them really isn't a big issue."
As he plonked the net on the ground in front of me, he made a few grumbled sound, his tone suggesting that he was cursing under his breath. Kneeling down to look at the net as he walked to the car, I couldn't help but throw the wooden box a few hidden glances while I had the chance. He had shut it again, locking it with the old key, and my mind started wandering, thinking about what other things might be in there. He showed up with a shovel before I could think of anything plausible, though, and started digging the hole free of dirt, from which he had pulled the box in the first place. It didn't take him long, but I was still watching the sky to estimate if we had much time before it grew too dark.
"This is a  conductive net," he said in a dry, terse tone, lifting up the net. "Hook it to a battery and let it charge for a minute or two, and it becomes a big taser. You know what those are, right?"
I nodded. I had never seen one in real life, but TV and Youtube videos had filled in the void.
"So I just... tase her? That's it? That's the big mystery to taking down one of these things?"
"No," he sighed, "that's how you capture it. The tough part comes after that."

The old cinema felt colder than expected. I had hoped to make my way back to the time travelers' house, but after he sat me off by the town square with the net in a bag and spare a car battery, getting out to the outskirts of town seemed a bit too daunting. I had rushed down to the nearest supermarket that was not his workplace and bought a cheap blanket with most of my remaining cash, and it helped. But with my clothes still slightly damp and the night air difficult to keep out, even in the room farthest from the entrance that I could safely navigate my way into, I did feel a slight shiver run through me.
Things blurred, and I found myself at home, standing in the doorway amongst shoes and jackets. The lighting was odd, as if lightbulbs were dying but not quiet dead. All of them at once, it seemed. Noises could be heard from the living room, the droning mumble of television, an old crime movie, from the sound of it. Voices, shifting in and out of focus behind half open doors, from speakers that seemed to be as poorly functioning as the lightbulbs. Static interfered and volume shifted in clearly unintended ways. I looked through the crack in the door and saw my mom and Peter sit absolutely still, staring at the screen as the channel changed every few seconds.
My sister was either quiet or not there. At the top of the stairs, not a sound could be heard, other than the hushed noises of the television downstairs. There was no music from her room, no sound of anyone moving about. The door was closed, and something compelled me to keep it that way. I instead fixed my sight on my own door, the next door down the hall. It, too, was closed. As I moved towards it, the lightbulbs became worse, dimming and flickering as if begging for me to just let them die. But my eyes were on the door. And as it slowly opened, a dim blue light flooded out, spreading slowly like a mist.
I saw myself step out of the door, poorly dyed hair whipping through the air like vipers. My skin was pale, my eyes dark, pupils almost gone, while the whites of the eyes seemed to slither about. I was laughing, flashing razor teeth.
I woke up after only a few hours, still feeling uncomfortably cold. The sights from the dream were still edged in my brain, like images that wanted to be remembered, regardless of what I wanted myself. I could feel my heart in my chest, cramped and sore, like a pulled muscle, and some part of me felt like crying was an appropriate response to all of it. I was breathing rapidly, throat dry and raw.
The old cinema smelled odd. Moist night air was slowly warming from the early morning sun, concentrating the smells of moldy walls and wet insulation. It wasn't quite as repugnant as it could have been, but the strange mix was a little unsettling.
I stepped out of the broken door and into the yellow sunlight, breathing in deep to clear my mind. But all I managed to do was swap one set of worries for another, the bag with the net weighing heavy in my hand. The battery, clutched against my ribs, under an arm quickly getting sore, felt like it was digging deeper into my skin for each second that passed.
Shallow puddles lined the streets, the last evidence of the rain the day before. The first few trucks were bringing their wares to stores, squeezing around corners and into narrow streets. Anyone slipping down one of the alleyways would quickly find the loading areas behind the public facades of the shops by the square and along the promenade, but it was a coin toss whether drivers used those or simply delivered through the front. It was a more relaxed attitude to commercial deliveries than in bigger cities, but it seemed to work.
My own delivery was another matter entirely. I had thought hard about it, about the right place to strike, and dauntingly few options had presented themselves. I knew the inner town fairly well, but it had always been with shortcuts in mind, never hiding. I had tried to imagine what places were truly hidden from prying eyes, but it was a new way to think about my world. A way that really felt uncomfortable and weird.
The street by the school was quiet. It sat down on a bench, resting my arms and looking at the net and battery with a million thoughts going through my head. A lone car passed by now and then as I sat there, just taking in the place. The sounds of school ran through my head, glimpses of memories that were still fresh. It felt like watching a poorly edited movie of a life I had once had. And as I took another look at the gear I was dragging with me, I felt more than saw myself taking that life back. And more than anything, that thought gave me the strength to pick up these things and push onward.
Ten minutes or so later, I emerged from behind the old building by the railroad tracks. Like so many other places around town, it had a handful of trees to make it more appealing when seen from the street, even if nobody ever went that way around. The fallen leaves that had yet to be removed turned out to also be excellent at hiding my clumsy trap. All that remained was the wait.
As dawn turned into morning, I found a proper hiding place in the green near the library. I had passed the spot where the woman had dissolved into colored dots just days ago, feeling my stomach clench unnaturally as I looked at the patch of still blackened growth. It was hard to spot, browning autumn plantlife mixing in with the charred color a bit too well, but I knew where to look. I still remembered, even if not from my own free will.
I had no sense of time as I walked aimlessly about by the small amphitheater that had been sculpted into the landscape there. I had passed by one of the local kiosks before going to sleep the night before, picking up a few items with a bit of cash that my new and still nameless friend had handed me, and among those things was a simple bottle of water. Like some cigarette junkie, I calmed and distracted myself by sipping on it, having gone well past half its contents by the time I even got to the amphitheater. I was a little thirsty, sure, but it was more a habit to keep my hands and mouth, and through them, my brain, occupied.
When he finally passed, my heart sank. There was, in theory, nothing wrong with it, I had taken that route along the bike lane with Mischa on a near daily basis for as long as I could remember. But lurking like some creep in the bushes and seeing him roll by side by side with her triggered something deep inside me. I felt a burning rage, an urge to storm out and knock her from her bike, my bike! And the more I saw how she looked and acted like me, the more the rage boiled within me.
It took mere minutes for the early wave of students to pass by. I knew several, even thought of some of them as friends. But I stayed, stayed in my hiding spot. There were too many questions they might think of, had they seen me standing there in my unwashed and still somewhat damp clothes. They would see my copy at school and wonder why the clothes were different, how the hair had been cleaned. They would wonder, and they might ask. She was me, now. She lived my life, she talked to my friends. She rode to school with Mischa. I had hoped for a lucky break, for finding him on his own, but this was not my time, and I stayed.
Writing him as I walked back to the hidden spot amongst the trees behind the building, I actually marvelled slightly that I remembered his number, just in my head. There were few that I could say that about. Maybe my mom and Peter. But I sent a short message and waited, and he messaged back. He was in History, adding some garbled name as unnecessary evidence, claiming they were told it was important. He clearly paid very little attention, writing too much back to be able to listen much. I didn't care. All I needed was to tell him what to do.

It was nearly four hours later. Mischa sent me a very short message, but it told me enough. He was concocting some reason for her to follow him, and as I found my place in the plan, I heard, at first. As they passed me by, I snuck up behind them. It only took one bad step, and I thought all was lost! Something crunched beneath my feet, and she turned. I caught a strange glimpse in her eyes as something in her shifted around, and even noted how her shoulders rose and her fingers stretched, like a cat about to pounce. It was too little, too late. I threw the net over her and jumped back as the stones around its edge weighed her down, causing her to stumble. All it took then was the flick of a switch on the battery, and a crackling hum filled the air. She made an inhuman sound, like ripping curtains, twitching in ways that should break her. I rushed in with a long stick I had scrounged up, on the recommendation of my nameless friend, and knocked her over, turning her back up and her face down.
"Stay away," I snapped at poor Mischa, who stood like some glitched video game character, not sure what motion to make and unable to find a sound at all. Throwinga coin at the net, I watched for sparks, but there were none. It had burned through its charge. Every second now counted.
Everything had a strange feel to it, like I was watching myself on a movie screen. I pulled out the handful af thin metal needles, each the length of a knitting needle, and dug them deep into the robot body, following my new friend's instructions to the letter. But it was a different me. Something took over, something... else. I felt the anger at her, the resentment at what she was meant to take from me, rush through every vein. I felt every pinch of helpless confusion crystalize into a charging beast inside me as I put all my weight into jabbing the last needle into her. And I let it all take over. I couldn't do this. I sat back and let the other part of me do the work, watching my hands rush to pull a small ball out of my pocket and jam it in her mouth, then grab a blanket from the same bag that the net had been in.
"This has metal foil in it, and something to muffle any sound she might make even without using her mouth," I told Mischa. He hadn't asked. And then, I laid myself out on top of her. There was a soft twitch beneath the blanket, some limb that the needles had failed to completely paralyze. But beyond that, it was over. I pulled out the old flip phone that my nameless friend had given me and sent a single letter to the one number that was in the phone's memory.
And then, it faded. All the anger, all the fear and frustration. On top of the copy's gently twitching body, I felt my own start to tremble, ever so slightly. I looked up, and Mischa just stood there, an empty stare on his face. For the first few seconds, he didn't even speak.
"She was bleeding," he finally said. I fought hard to give the body beneath the blanket my full attention, but I had to send him a confused look.
"When... When you... stabbed her..."
"It," I corrected him. "When I stabbed it."
He nodded, in what seemed more like obedience than agreement.
"When you stabbed... it. It bled. It has blood in it." His eyes shifted from staring at the blanket to meeting mine. "Ida, is it alive? Is it real?"
I broke our mutual gaze, feeling some of my own worries start to surface again. It took only a deep breath to push them back down. This time.
"No. It was built to trick everyone. If it got hurt, it had to bleed, or people would figure it out."
I made every bit of that up, on the spot. Mischa was clearly trying to phrase something, but the exact words kept failing him. He raised his finger and opened his mouth to speak more than once, but nothing came out. And before any of that had time to change, the nameless guy showed up.
"Is that it?" he asked so casually he might be asking for someone's forgotten suitcase. I groaned a "yes" while struggling to stay firmly on top of the now a bit more writhing bundle. Without a word, he stepped over and jammed another long, thin needle into it, straight through the blanket, and the copy just slumped down like a sack of hammers.
"Who's he?" Mischa asked, sounding more than a little bewildered. "Who are you?"
"Hi," the nameless guy simply replied, then turned back to me. "We gotta go."
"Wait, Ida, who is this guy?" Mischa insisted, sounded more than a bit upset by the lack of answers. This, I could follow him in!
"It's hard to explain," I sighed, feeling the anxieties lost when paralyzing my evil clone suddenly begin to slip back in. "He helped me capture her. It. Helped me capture it."
The guy's car was parked all the way up to near the trees, making it effortless to load the now eerily motionless bundle into it. As he slammed the trunk shut, I stopped in my tracks, seeing Mischa standing by the car.
"No, Mischa, this is just me and him."
"Yeah," he said, dragging it out as he made a pretty mocking face, "because I'm gonna go back to school and just hope nobody asks why I ran behind an old building with you and suddenly you're gone. I've seen crime shows, you know."
"With or without him, we leave, now," the nameless guy said, looking at the both of us, and I groaned angrily as Mischa got into the back seat.