Editors, Keepers
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Difference between revisions of "Summary:The Original"
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;Summary
Holly wakes up in a hospital bed, disoriented and confused. A doctor asks her questions, wanting to know the last thing Holly remembers. Holly asks where her husband, Jonathan, is, but the doctor doesn’t answer any of Holly’s questions, which frustrates Holly. The doctor asks more questions about Holly’s past, and then signals to one of the men in the room. The man pulls a knife out and moves to attack Holly. She responds quickly, stopping his attack and wrapping her IV line around the man’s neck. She
=== Chapter 2 ===
;Summary
Holly sits on the edge of the bed, holding a gun in her hand. The gun feels disturbingly comfortable in her hand, due to the muscle memory edited into her. Holly is assigned to hunt down kill her original,
=== Chapter 3 ===
Holly arrives at the hotel, which is blank and generic without theming. Holly’s room has an in-room fabricator, and she tries multiple times to print weapons. Holly tries to figure out what ICON wants, and decides that they want some sort of memories stored in her head. She wants to figure out who really killed Jonathan, so that she can prove that her original didn’t do it. She decides that she needs to meet with her original, but on her own terms. She picks the Jolly Racer nightclub, a place that she and Jonathan have strong connections to.
=== Chapter 12 ===
;Characters
{{columns|
*[[Holly Winseed (Provisional Replica)]]
*[[Carl Newton]]]
*[[Zoba Moss]]
*[[Frederique Gorski]]
*[[Holly Winseed (Original)]]
}}
;Summary
Holly enters the Jolly Racer nightclub, hoping to isolate one of the ICON members and get some answers. She wears a physical disguise that she printed at the hotel. She brushes against dancers to hear the music, allowing her to dance to the rhythm and blend in. She uses her dancing to disguise her search for ICON members. She spots Carl Newton and Zoba Moss, then accidentally bumps into another ICON member. Holly keeps dancing, and spots Frederique Gorski on the balcony. Holly goes to the bar and orders a drink, but Carl Newton sneaks up on her and puts a gun to her head. She attacks him, stealing his gun and shooting him with a paralyzing shot. Holly uses the crowd of dancers for cover, and both her and the fire team have trouble shooting accurately with all the dancers. She shoots an ICON member in the knee, then is attacked by Zoba. Both of them roll across the dancefloor as they fight, and Holly emerges victorious, pointing a gun at them and demanding answers. Zoba tells Holly that they have a voice recorder with a message from her original. A security guard comes over and pulls them apart, then zaps Holly with an energy gun when she tries to resist.
Holly wakes up in a room with a security guard, only having been asleep for a short time. The guard tells her that fighting is not allowed in the Jolly Racer. He tells her that her friends are already gone, and that they left a voice recorder for her. She takes it, and the man leaves. The voice recording is from her original. She tells Holly that she is going to save Holly a lot of pain by telling her that she was not framed, and that she killed Jonathan.
=== Chapter
;Characters
{{columns|
*[[Holly Winseed (Provisional Replica)]]
}}
;Summary
Numb and in shock, Holly processes the news. She goes up to the roof of the nightclub, angry. She crosses from rooftop to rooftop, then stops atop a building to think. She wonders again why she would've killed Jonathan, and what he could've possibly done that would've made her so angry. She reasserts to herself that the only way she would get answers would be to talk to her original. She decides to hunt her original down carefully, then make her tell her what happened before killing her.
=== Chapter
;Characters
{{columns|
*[[Holly Winseed (Provisional Replica)]]
}}
;Summary
Holly goes to a bar late at night and orders two drinks on the rocks. She gets some physical pencil and paper, and wonders what information her original put under a biolock. She realizes that her original mightve used dice to randomize where she went. Holly makes a list of eleven places her original might go, then puts them in an order that feels natural. Since seven is the most commonly rolled number, she looked at six and seven, which said to get a hotel room and to change her name. She writes down a list of possible fake names she might use, then sees that her nanites are depleting again. She heads to the renewal station, deciding that Skyler could look up some of the fake name ideas.
=== Chapter
;Characters
{{columns|
*[[Holly Winseed (Provisional Replica)]]
*[[Skyler]]
*[[Jonathan]]
*[[Jill Preston|Jane Doe]]
}}
;Summary
The system places a call to Skyler when Holly enters the renewal station, and he is slow to reply due to the late hour. She gives him the list of fake names, and asks him to check hotel registries. He tells her that PR's that shift to working things out on paper statistically have a higher success rate. She realizes that her original could've looked up her name in the hotel registries too, and Skyler books her a room in a hotel with a fake name. The hotel is pubic property, so Skyler can keep an eye on her. After he hangs up, Holly looks up another one of Jonathan's speeches on the psychology of checkouts. He talks about rising suicide rates, saying that many people stop finding meaning and purpose in life. He shows an interview with an old woman named Jane Doe, and Holly recognizes her from the checkout slums. Jane says that she took up smoking because she liked the danger and risk of it. Holly wants to know how she knew Jonathan, and decides she needs to go to the checkout slums to meet with her.
=== Chapter
;Characters
{{columns|
*[[Holly Winseed (Provisional Replica)]]
}}
;Summary
Holly goes to an old fashioned hotel, where almost everything is real. She gets a good night of sleep, then tries to figure out where her original could've gone. She rolled dice again to pick from a list of places, and comes up with camping as the result. She decides to go to the forest and try and find her original there.
=== Chapter
;Characters
{{columns|
*[[Holly Winseed (Provisional Replica)]]
*[[Jennie-May Barker]]
*[[Pardeep Bryant]]
}}
;Summary
Holly arrives at the forest, and is shocked to find it packed with people. She had thought it to be nearly empty when she had been there, but the theming there shows people being by themselves. She is horrified at how much her and Jonathan been deceived, and she vomits. Holly sees two of her friends talking to each other, but they can’t see her. She realizes that even if she succeeds and takes her original’s place, she can never go back to normal. She wonders if her original turned off her theming and saw all the deception, then somehow snapped. Realizing that her original isn’t here, Holly leaves the forest.
=== Chapter
;Characters
{{columns|
*[[Holly Winseed (Provisional Replica)]]
*[[Skyler]]
}}
;Summary
Holly sits on a maglev, riding back to town. Skyler calls her, telling her that he found a hotel where her original had registered using a fake name. He tells her that she wasn’t there, but that she left a voice recorder with a biolock on it, as well as a pair of dice that matches Holly’s. Skyler tells her that she needs to come in to unlock the recorder.
=== Chapter 19 ===
;Characters
{{columns|
*[[Holly Winseed (Provisional Replica)]]
*[[Skyler]]
*[[Holly Winseed (Original)
}}
;Summary
Holly enters the government building where Skyler works, which is made to look like an old noir film. Skyler greets her, wearing a real suit. He tells her that he doesn’t use theming, since a lot of criminals use theming to hide. He leads her into an interrogation room, and they sit down at the table. He hands her an evidence bag with the recorder in it. She unlocks it, and reluctantly plays it.
Her original apologizes for putting her in this situation. Her original tells her not to trust the government, and that she badly wants to meet with her. Her original tells her that Jonathan’s death must be hurting, and Holly furiously turns off the recorder and doesn’t want to hear the rest of it. She asks if originals usually leave clues, and he says that they do it when they feel guilty about what they’ve done. Skyler tells Holly that he is a PR, along with many other government agents. She asks about her violent tendencies, and he tells her that they didn’t edit her personality at all. Holly resumes the recording, and her original tells her to leave a message at the marketplace. She decides that she needs to go into the checkout slums to confront ICON.
=== Chapter 20 ===
;Characters
{{columns|
*[[Holly Winseed (Provisional Replica)]]
*[[Skyler]]
*[[Zoba Moss]]
*[[Jill Preston]]
}}
;Summary
Holly enters the checkout slums, in disguise and posing as a new checkout. She carries two bags with her, one with a tent and some toys, and one with groceries. She knows that the ICON headquarters are in the top floor of one of the buildings. She is greeted by three ICON members, one of them from the nightclub. She pretends she is moving to the slums, and her disguise fools the ICON members. She enters a room with Zoba waits, who gives her some paperwork to fill out. Zoba pulls out a gun, and Holly attacks her using an expandable tent as a distraction. Holly defeats Zoba, knocking her out after a brief fight. She leaves Zoba and her ICON escort bound and gagged, and she climbs up the building. She uses a grappling hook to climb up, managing the climb with difficulty. Holly calls Skyler, and he uses cleaning bots to knock out the lights in the slums.
Holly goes up to the roof, then enters into a room where Jane Doe sits at a desk. Holly asks how she knew Jonathan, and she says that they met when Jonathan was researching checkouts. Holly soon comes to the revolution that Jane Doe is actually Jill Preston, leader of ICON. Jill Preston tells Holly that ICON isn’t a terrorist group, and that the videos that the government showed her are false. Holly demands answers, and threatens to carve her head when she doesn’t cooperate. Preston became afraid, and Holly says that she has nothing left to lose.
Jill says that when Jonathan died, Holly’s original received all of his pass phrases and secret info. Preston tells her that Jonathan discovered a back door in people’s minds that the government could exploit, allowing them to hack into people’s memories without their knowledge. He encrypted the pass phrases so that only he could access them, and that ICON had tried to recruit him. He had been murdered by Holly’s original before he could be recruited. Holly calls Skyler, and informs him that she’s found Jill Preston.
=== Chapter 21 ===
;Characters
{{columns|
*[[Holly Winseed (Provisional Replica)]]
*[[Holly Winseed (Original)]]
}}
;Summary
Holly uses herself as bait on her last day, sitting in the art gallery where her last memory took place. She listens to the recording that her original had left in Jill Preston’s desk. The recording says to think about the first time they had met Jonathan. Her original asks how she didn’t notice how unhappy Jonathan was towards the end. Her original asks her again to meet her, and Holly hears the click of a gun. She turns to find her original standing behind her, an old-fashioned revolver pointed at her. Holly pulls out her own energy gun, pointing it at her original.
They stare down each other, and Holly’s original tells her story. Jonathan had gone on a business trip and checked out, which the government didn’t like because of the valuable secrets and information he knew. They illegally made a PR of Jonathan who killed and replaced him. Holly’s original had discovered the truth and murdered Jonathan’s provisional replica. Holly and her original stare at each other, guns leveled at each other and wondering who would pull the trigger.
=== Chapter 22 ===
;Summary
A voice recording plays, left by either the original Holly or the PR of Holly. The recording says that of them shot the other, and the violence was edited away. The message says that she in the end, she wanted to live. She says that they were both broken, and that her life will never be the same. She recounts their relationship, and says that she’ll roll the dice and see where she goes from there.
{{summaries|Partial}}
{{The Original}}
[[Category: The Original|+1]]
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