She wondered if they ever looked for her.

Her family, that was.

Ever since that dream, the memories hadn't quite left her alone. The memories the dream, that was, what little of it she could recall of it from the brain fog that often obscured the dreams that came into her mind. The image of a shorter man remained clear in her head, though she couldn't recall his hair, his face, his nose, his skin tone. She could barely recall anything about her mother but the deep voice she carried, one that was deeper than her own. She was fairly sure she had the highest voice in her family. She was fairly sure she couldn't tell why.

Delilah wasn't sure why she was sure of any of this.

Did she have any siblings? Any pets? Any cousins? Any friends? Sedna had mentioned having friends on the other side who cared about her and were trying to bring her back. Nembus was certain that if she had anyone on the other side, they would have come looking for now. She was fairly obvious, she was fairly sure. She had always thought her face was rather distinctive.

Always had thought for maybe the last few months, anyway.

What was always when always was defined by forever, and forever to her felt like the beginning of the summer of last year? Did that mean always was a year? Was it something that extended?

Had she always been so alone?

The question dogged her until she found herself in front of a computer in the library. She had stayed logged in to someone else's account, the computer abandoned when her fellow student realized they were late for class. It was to her advantage.

But she stared simply at the search bar, uncertain where to approach.

How did one attempt to look for signs that their old identity was missed when one didn't even know their own old identity?

She supposed she could try to find missing person articles from circa that time last year.

And so the search term went. 'Missing Persons, June 2018'. That was probably about right, right? What was time?

It turned out that the search was too ... well, it was too broad. The number of results that came back made some color drain from her face. Thousands. Millions, even. Were these all missing people, or were these just continued reports of the same thing? Were these just remarks on the trends of missing people? She went into one article, another. A third. A fourth. All the faces were different, and each different face she saw made her heart hurt. Were these all force corruptions? Not possible, she doubted. Some were likely just abductions.

Just, she thought, like abduction was minor.

Some were probably murders where the body was never found, realistically. Perhaps some were starseed grabs, bodies left to rot wherever they had been. Some of these faces looked so old, but others looked so young, so innocent, so...

Delilah swallowed hard, exiting out those articles.

Perhaps there was something she could do for a more specific search. Did any of the Destiny City newspapers keep any missing persons reports, perhaps?

The sites for three of the major area news stations were pulled up, along with a couple of sites for the local newspapers. She wished she had a name to search. Then she could see if anything came up. Who was Delilah, before? What was her last name? Her first name? Her middle name? Her face? Did her face change? No, that didn't make sense, Sedna looked the same, but she also hadn't recognized Sedna upon the first look. Could her face have changed? Was there any way to find out what her civilian name once was? Would Marcasite know, or had Marcasite just pulled Nembus over to the side of Chaos without knowing who she was as a civilian?

The idea of that was perhaps a little more alarming than she would have liked to confront, and so, once again, she simply went to punching in her search terms, looking through the articles.

s**t.

Delilah sucked in a breath when she realized the hundreds of results she was still receiving when she tried to make her search a little more specific. Reports of parents wondering where their children went. Reports of children wondering where their parents went. Reports of a friend remarking that their roommate had never come home from a midnight run. Reports of a roommate remarking that their roommate had just up and vanished one day, never to return, never to respond to their phone calls, eventually instantly going to voice mail. Reports of bodies that were found, eventually, unrevivable. Reports of bodies that made it into Destiny General, but remained hooked up to the machines until things were hopeless, and then there was more mourning to follow.

Delilah lost herself to the stories for a half-hour.

She traced some of those with multiple articles, hoping to find a picture that was familiar, a name that struck a chord, a phrase that sounded like someone she would have known way back when would have said. But besides that, she hoped to perhaps find some links to people she knew now, perhaps people she could talk to, perhaps people who could explain if anyone was out there looking for her, perhaps people who might understand what it was like to live with no memories of anything beyond what was almost the last year but not quite...

But she found nothing of that.

No faces looked familiar, either. Just a string of faces that were unfamiliar. A string of many, many faces, many of them unfamiliar.

It struck her to the core that she was finding so much, truly. How many of these people had ever been found? How many people had gone towards feeding the mission of saving the earth from the alien invaders she had once considered herself part of before she had been saved? How many people had gone towards the mission she may have possibly been brainwashed into, the mission that was taking away the energy and lives of people to feed a bug that was washing into her brain, and giving her all the power and things she could ever need--

Delilah shook her head out of her confused thoughts.


She glanced at the clock for a moment. Did she have any more time before she needed to report to Argent Industries for her secretarial position?

Perhaps another twenty minutes.

Delilah looked at the screen once more time, cracking her knuckles. Was there anything she could do to refine her search?

Perhaps...

Delilah looked down at her phone for a moment, before lifting it up and turning it towards her face. She put on her best-practiced school photo smile that she had definitely never practiced before and snapped it, before leaning down to plug her phone into the library computer. The picture was dragged out of her phone folder, dropped onto the library desktop, and then pulled into the image search she had become so familiar with.

There had to be a similar photograph somewhere on the internet, right?

The first thing the photograph managed to pull up was one of her social media accounts, and Delilah noted grimly that she made the same face a lot, didn't she. But moving beyond that, Delilah went looking. It appeared to be pulling up mostly women of a similar age. A lot of college students in a library, of course. Mostly frontal facing pictures of women with small, practiced smiles. A lot of women who appeared to have fine lives, some who appeared to have excellent lives as actors and actresses. Nothing about a missing persons report, at least not on the first page. At least not on the second page. At least not on the third, not on the fourth, not on the fifth--

There was nothing to find here. There wouldn't be anything to find there. If she was able to be found through a similar search, the image search did not see her as being similar enough to pull up. Perhaps her face did change. Perhaps there was something to that theory.

Or perhaps there was just nothing there, and no one had ever cared, and she had always been alone. Perhaps that had been why she was corrupted, after all. There was no one to back her up. She had no one who came to her aid. It had been her, by herself, perhaps with her only friend, who opted to bring her over to her side so she was not alone. Or perhaps it had been her, by herself, and she was forced because she had no one to stop it.

Delilah sighed, grabbing the link and sending it back to herself.

Maybe deeper research was required.

But then, perhaps, maybe deeper research was nothing but a rabbit hole into the tragedies that other people suffered and considering her own potential hand in that, she wasn't sure she could continue to hold that in her heart.

She glanced at the clock.

Even if she wanted to, she couldn't try to dive down that rabbit hole right now.

1537