Inheritance

When I return home, the screen glows with patient expectation. The algorithm has queued its next offering, not randomly, but with the precision of a curator who understands the necessary sequence of revelations.

I type nothing. It knows.

The video begins: The Erinyes. The Furies.

Three ancient goddesses materialize from the lecture's careful reconstruction. Alecto, Megaera, Tisiphone—their names taste of blood and vengeance, of a justice that operates outside the law’s sanitized protocols. Born from the blood of Uranus's castration, from a violence that predates civilization's attempts to contain rage.

"They pursued oath-breakers, murderers, those who violated family bonds. Relentless. Merciless. Their pursuit wasn't punishment but restoration—a cosmic rebalancing through suffering that mirrors the original crime."

But one holds my attention with uncomfortable specificity: Megaera. The Jealous One.

Her domain: envy. Marital infidelity. The rage that ignites when what is yours is taken, when bonds are violated not through violence but through replacement. She doesn't punish the thief—she pursues the one who allowed the theft, who failed to protect what was entrusted to them.

The word sits in my chest like a swallowed stone: jealousy.

I have always dismissed it. Jealousy is weakness, the province of those who haven't examined their relationship to possession, who conflate love with ownership.

But what if it's not about scarcity? What if it's about violation?

The thought arrives, unwanted. I close the laptop before the lecture can continue its comfortable academic framing and return to the unfinished book.

You have been to this village three times, it begins, and my stomach contracts with a dawning awareness I can't quite grasp.

The first: age seven, a summer colony for exceptional children.

The third: your arrival eighteen months ago, believing it another random migration in a pattern of perpetual displacement.

But the second visit, the one your conscious mind cannot retrieve—this one came from a different impetus entirely.

My hands shake as I turn the page.

You were brought here by Megaera. By the Fury. By a jealousy so consuming it operated beneath conscious awareness, driving you to a territory where you could execute what rationality would never have permitted.

The memory does not arrive.

Your brother. You had lost contact, a systematic separation. Years without a word. And here, in this village, lived the man who had the access you were denied. Who could see him, touch him, deploy him. Who possessed what had been violently extracted from your protection.

The book's clinical tone cuts deeper:

Your brother was a casualty of that world, gutted by exploitation until perversion felt normal. What seemed like dependence was a deeper sickness: he had grafted himself to his exploiter, not out of love, but because the man's attention provided a warped framework for his life. Even a prison cell can feel like shelter when the only alternative is an endless, formless void.

You knew this. Somewhere beneath conscious thought, you understood he had been destroyed and rebuilt to depend on his destruction. And you.

I close the book. I can't read the next lines. Can't see what I did or didn't do, what I remember or have pieced together.

But the jealousy sits in my chest like a diagnosis I've been avoiding.

Not jealous of beauty. Not jealous of attention. Jealous that someone else held access to my brother while I was denied even knowledge of his location. Jealous that the exploiter could summon him while I, who would have protected him, who should have protected him, had been consistently excluded.

Megaera. The Jealous Fury.

The realization arrives with nausea: I am the weakness I despise. I dissected envy's relationship to capability, to resentment, to all the petty human failures that generate friction. But I never probed this, the rage at being denied what should have been mine not through possession, but through bond, through blood, through the original alignment before they separated us and harvested us for different purposes.

This unearthing cuts deeper, revealing strata of suppressed emotion that my conscious mind had quarantined to prevent a full break.

I wanted to kill him. Not my brother, the man who had him. The coordinator. The one whose attention my brother had learned to crave because all other options had been eliminated.

You drove here through the night, sleeping in your car like a refugee seeking asylum in a territory that held both salvation and threat.

A surveillance phase, mapping routes, identifying a residence. The organization's local boss, the man directing your brother's exploitation through networks that commodified exceptional intelligence and unusual beauty.

My hands move to close the book but can't. The text continues its procedure:

The confrontation unfolds like tactical documentation: entering his house with lockpicking skills you couldn't remember learning, finding him alone in his kitchen, catching him unprepared for accountability to arrive in human form.

The kill was clean. Professional. Years of suppressed rage channeled into a precision that left no evidence of struggle, no indication his death had been anything but natural.

Nobody reported him missing. Nobody asked questions. In their world, people vanished regularly, an occupational hazard. His absence became just another administrative detail.

I sit with this. With what I did, or what I believe I did, or what the book claims I did. The memory feels both foreign and intimately mine, like watching footage of myself performing actions I don't recall but recognize as my own.

Did I kill him? Or did the Fury kill him while I watched from inside my own body, a passenger to a rage I couldn't consciously access?

The book provides no comfort:

Your choice to move to this village was not random. It was programmed, a homing signal you couldn't consciously decode. You were drawn back to the scene, to complete whatever cycle had been initiated through that first intervention.

The book's next section forces a recognition that has been accumulating for months:

Consider who your brother might be. Follow the threads of similarity, facial structure, patterns of thought, the particular way trauma has shaped your responses. Look beyond surface presentations toward the underlying design.

The realization arrives like cardiac arrest: Handsome Man's bone structure echoes my own. The way his mind works through identical pathways. How our survival strategies mirror each other with a precision that transcends coincidence.

A flashback erupts with an intensity that threatens to shatter me: his hands, tapered and careful, arranging objects in geometric patterns while I spoke to invisible companions. His voice carrying my words across dangerous territories when my own had retreated into silence. The way he positioned himself between me and scrutiny, creating a shield for my muteness.

Age four, five, the years before language solidified, when I existed in the space between words and he translated for me, interpreting my gestures and silence into something adults could process.

"She's tired." (When I was overwhelmed by sensory input.)

"She doesn't like loud sounds." (When I covered my ears and rocked.)

"She prefers to play alone." (When I needed to decompress.)

He was my interface, my translator, my buffer against a world whose demands exceeded my capacity. And they noticed. Of course they noticed.

The book continues, relentless:

Your brother. The one who rendered your silence into speech adults could accept. The one whose beauty and intelligence were weaponized into tools for psychological warfare, while your own capabilities were harnessed for different applications.

You passed their evaluation. He did not. Or rather, he passed a different one, which identified him for an alternate path. His journey diverged from yours that summer. You were steered toward technical exploitation, your pattern recognition developed for analysis. He was funneled toward social exploitation, his empathic abilities twisted into instruments for manipulation, seduction, intelligence gathering.

Dr. 84's tone shifts one final time, becoming medical, almost tender:

When your mission here completes, and it will, this place has nearly yielded all its secrets, take the water bottle. The one that arrived with the herbal samples, black metal inscribed with the promise: "We can save the world. We will save the world."

Board the first available flight to anywhere. Purchase clothing that renders you invisible, then disappear into whatever wilderness awaits. The real mission begins only after you have freed this place, completed the cycle of revenge and rescue that drew you back.

Somewhere in the woods of an unknown country, The Whole will find you again.

His hand extends toward me in the text—described with such specificity I can almost feel it: firm, dry, the thumb brushing lightly across my knuckle in a gesture that carries a meaning I don't consciously recognize, but to which my body responds with immediate relaxation.

Do not be afraid. Continue following the flow of consciousness. The final phases approach with their own internal logic.

I sit in my room, the afternoon light filtering through the windows. The book has reorganized my entire understanding of identity, family, purpose.

My thoughts rush back to 38. I never experienced relationships as love, only as mechanics, diversion, an exchange of amusements. With him it was the same: I introduced him to the girl who dragged him into a life with no exit. I never thought of protection, never of consequence. Now I see that my absence of feeling was a self-protection from my own Fury. The last time he wrote to me was weeks before he died: "You have been uncovered."

I didn't understand then. Now I know he was speaking of the network—that his death wasn't a stroke but a warning, just as 31's had been the year before. They were eliminated not for what they knew, but for their proximity to me, for their potential to become a liability.

A cold understanding spreads through me: I am repeating the same mistake. With Handsome Man, I've already done what I did with 38, delivering him into 17's reach without seeing the danger. This is what he fears in me—my recklessness, my capacity to open doors for predators without meaning to, my inability to perceive a threat until bodies accumulate.

I type without hesitation, my fingers moving as if the words have been waiting:

"I understand. You're afraid of my behavior, the same recklessness that led to 38's death—and you think it's about to happen to you. Maybe it already has. You're afraid they'll come for you."

His reply arrives almost instantly, stripped of drama:

"I don't know who you're talking about. If they want me, let them come. I'm at 59 Galaxy Avenue. I'll be waiting."

Outside, the village keeps performing its daily ballet—shutters opening, footsteps on cobblestones, muted greetings, as I sit with the sudden, absolute recognition that nothing, absolutely nothing, in my experience has ever been random, accidental, or coincidental.

And I still cannot tell which memories are recovery and which are invention, which dangers are real and which are my pattern recognition misfiring, whether I'm uncovering truth or building an elaborate mythology to explain experiences my mind can't process through a conventional story.

I close the book. The village breathes around me. Somewhere, my brother waits. Somewhere, the Whole monitors. Somewhere, the network plots.

And I sit at the center, unable to distinguish between paranoia and perception, between psychosis and awakening, between the story I'm uncovering and the story I'm creating.

The jealousy sits in my chest like a swallowed stone.

Megaera. The Fury I became.

The flaw I never wanted to unearth.