Jeanne d’Orleans sat upright in her hospital bed. The sight of the white washed walls had become like a second home to her. The trips to the hospital visiting Lina, in her final years, and visiting Maria, in her loss of memory, had cemented the familiar room in her mind. She was hard pressed to remember anything in between and this was despite being still quite perceptive in her old age.

So it was no surprise to Jeanne when Maria appeared before her bed, standing. Against the backdrop of the never-changing scenery, Jeanne had picked up that something had changed within Maria. It was the excitement and longing that appeared and disappeared in Maria’s eyes as quick as a lightning flash whenever Jeanne hobbled over to her room. It was how Maria had, on more than one occasion, recounted a detail or two from Captain Jeanne Adventures without the book in hand to a child from the reading circle that approached her.

Now it was Maria approaching Jeanne, for the first time in years, looking as beautiful and youthful as ever. It would have been a compliment if it weren’t for the fact that age had not touched her since the day she was checked into the clinical study. Instead, it felt like a cruel joke.

“Jeanne,”Maria smiled gently.

“You remember?”

“For a while now.”

In Maria’s hands was a thin vase filled with trimmed Narcissus flowers. She walked over to Jeanne’s bedside table and placed them upon the surface. Jeanne looked over at them and frowned.

“What?”

“I remember everything,” Maria looked down at the flowers and rubbed one of the frail white petals in between her finger and thumb.The way her head hung mimicked how the flowers also dropped over.“Including further back than I’d have liked to imagine.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” Jeanne asked,her voice rising a little. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

Maria shook her head and looked up to meet Jeanne’s eyes.Her voice was firm but gentle.“No questions. We’re out of time. You will understand soon enough.”

As Maria reached over to press her finger and thumb on Jeanne’s forehead, Jeanne could smell the faint earthly scent of the grave flower.

∰

The smell lingered when Jeanne opened her eyes again. She did not remember closing them in the first place.

“You know, I was hoping you would have realized it by now. But I guess I gave you too much credit.”

That voice. It was Lina’s voice. The voice of a much younger Lina.

“Lina?!” Jeanne spun around.

They were back on the roof of St. Catherine’s. Lina’s back was against the railing that bordered the roof. Lina had her face turned to the side, towards the half crescent moon that hung in the sky.

Jeanne held her breath. This is not what she remembered. It was a full moon the day that Lina called her out to the roof and accused Jeanne of not recognizing her. It was a moment that Jeanne replayed in her mind often, out of guilt, even after being forgiven a thousand times. There was no mistaking the discrepancies.

Startled, Lina snapped her head towards Jeanne. A flicker of recognition wavered on Lina’s face before it finally settled. Stumbling forward away from the railing, Lina held a hand to her forehead.

“Wh-wha? We’re back here? Didn’t I–? Aren’t I–?”

Jeanne sprinted towards Lina and cradled her in her arms. “It is you.”

“This time you remembered,” Lina looked up and smiled through tears.

“I’ll never forget you as long as I live.”

The two stayed that way for a moment or two, basking in the warmth of each other. Even if this was a dream, Jeanne didn’t want it to end. The heat of Lina felt so real. The feeling of the school uniform underneath her fingertips. Lina’s hair tickling her cheek. It was better than anything she could have imagined.

“Hey Jeanne…”

“Yeah?” “At this time… Isn’t Maria…?”

“Mari—? Ah!!” Jeanne gasped. The two of them tore apart and vaulted over the railing towards Maria’s dorm.

Instead of being greeted by Aziz Al-Hazard like they expected, they found Maria sitting on her bed in the dorm, reading a book. Her eyes drifted up from her book, half-annoyed, half-amused. “Haven’t you heard of knocking?” She looked back and forth between Lina and Jeanne. “Took you two long enough. And you call yourself Templar trained, Jeanne.”

“I am so confused!” Lina wailed, clinging to her head.

“It’s better that way. But it won’t be that way for long, I’m sorry.” Maria put down her book and stood up. She strode purposefully up to Jeanne. Before Jeanne could protest, Maria raised her arm and put her fingertip and thumb on Jeanne’s forehead. Jeanne’s world went black once more.

∰

When she came to again, Lina was nowhere to be seen. Jeanne was in a white room. This time it was not the familiar, somewhat comforting, white rooms of the hospital. No, this time it was the impossibly large, empty common room that she and Lina had spent painful endless days all those years ago. Panic began to set. This had to be a dream.

“You’re not dreaming,” a voice said quietly.

“Why are you doing this, Maria?” Jeanne closed her eyes, trying to shut out the tears. “I… I hate this place.”

“I’m sorry,” a hand softly stroked her head. “I just wanted to show you what this is.”

“And you think I don’t know what this is?” Jeanne whirled around to confront Maria. Maria simply put her fingers onto Jeanne’s forehead.

∰

This time Jeanne was holding Lina’s hand in hers when she opened her eyes. They were both back at St. Catherine’s in Lina’s dorm room, lying on her bed. The two of them were laying on their sides, staring into each other’s eyes. Jeanne remembered this. It was a rather uneventful Saturday morning. That day it was pouring rain and they decided to stay in while Maria was busy with council activities. It was nothing extraordinary but the moment somehow stuck in Jeanne’s head throughout the years.

“I keep drifting in and out of consciousness,” Lina whispered. “I thought I was dead. That I died of old age. What’s happening?”

“Maria’s doing something,” Jeanne said. The emotions from the previous transfer were still welling up inside her and let her tears fall freely. “She brought me back to that place. It felt so real. ”

“But you’re not there now,” Lina reassured her. “You’re… Here. Whatever this place really is.” Lina’s eyes roamed around the room.

Jeanne followed her gaze. No, this wasn’t a dream. Every detail stood out to her with razor sharp precision. She could see the threads in the blankets. She could feel a slight draft waft in through the room. She could smell the faint fragrance of freshly cut grass drifting through the open window.

She sat up abruptly. The window was wide open, letting in the sun. Not a single rain cloud was in sight. In fact, Jeanne could see the ground was dry as a bone.

“It was supposed to be raining today, wasn’t it?” Lina said, also sitting up.

“Yes,” Jeanne frowned. “Something is up. I just don’t know what.”

“We should go snooping!” Lina suggested excitedly. The two looked at each other and grinned.

“To Maria’s room!” the both of them exclaimed.

∰

There was some doubt in Jeanne’s mind of whether they would find anything in Maria’s room. She was largely an open book, especially when it came to Lina and Jeanne. This seemed to be the only time where Maria was trying to keep something from them. When they opened Maria’s room to see nothing obviously out of place, Jeanne tried to keep her expectations low.

She scoured Maria’s Brazilian Rosewood desk while Lina strolled over to the closet. Jeanne thumbed through papers—mostly school notes or student council paperwork. She began to open drawers and only saw more papers. One drawer in particular would not open. Jeanne jiggled the drawer a little. At the sound of the stuck drawer the two girls automatically looked at each other. Jeanne raised an eyebrow.

“Sounds like something that doesn’t want to be found,” Lina joined Jeanne to peer around her shoulder.

There was no obvious key hole or lock mechanism on the drawer. Jeanne inspected the sides of the desk but there was nothing obvious there either. She ran her hand across every inch of the expensive wood. No buttons, holes, or anything.

“I’m stumped,” Jeanne sighed.

“Let me give it a try,” Lina jumped in and began inspecting the desk.

Jeanne scanned the room. Clothes from the closet were now strewn about haphazardly on the floor and the bed. Lina had evidently gone through all of that already. Jeanne lifted the bed’s mattress and felt the seams. She pushed down on the pillows. She looked under the bed for good measure. Nothing.

The only thing left was the bookshelf. Jeanne walked over and scanned the titles. A lot of textbooks. As expected from Maria. Her eyes glided over the spines. She hesitated over one thick volume whose spine was almost disintegrated from use. Jeanne pulled it out. In Maria’s neat handwriting, the title read, “Captain Jeanne’s Adventures.”

She opened it. It was not a published book, like Lina had said years ago. Instead, it was a notebook, full of notes about various events of Jeanne’s life. In fact, it documented every event in Jeanne’s life. Some that she never told Maria even once. Others where she wasn’t sure if they were true because they occurred so early in her life. Jeanne flipped to the very end.

Soon, Jeanne will learn the truth.

The smell of burning wood interrupted Jeanne’s feeling of dread.

“I got it!” Lina yelled. She looked back at Jeanne. “Laser beam, meet wood. Wood, meet laser beam.”

Lina had cut a hole directly into the desk. Jeanne winced at the thought of the rosewood being brutally massacred like this.

“You’re lucky you didn’t burn any of the contents inside,” Jeanne mused. The two of them began to pull out the objects from the drawer.

There was nothing that was of use to them. Jeanne felt guilty as they looked at the items they pulled. The first was a broken arrowhead. The very one that Jeanne sunk into the poor stag during archery class. The second was a fragment of the chocolate box that exploded in Maria’s first dorm room. The rest of the many trinkets were like the first two: little things that Maria collected over the course of knowing Jeanne. Jeanne wondered how many of these things had lost their meaning to Maria over the years the more she used her healing powers. And how none of them retained their meaning after Maria’s admission to the hospital.

“Wow, do I feel like a third wheel right now,” Lina sighed. “How sweet. Too sweet. But, ultimately, nothing that helps us.”

“Well,” Jeanne looked back at the bed where she put down the book. “I did find Captain Jeanne’s Adventures.”

“Huh?” Lina blinked. “That doesn’t exist, though.”

“But it does,” Jeanne plopped the book in front of Lina. “It’s notes on my life. My entire life. I almost can’t read it, it’s way too embarrassing.What bothers me, though,is how she knows all of it. I sure as hell didn’t tell her that at the age of 4 months I threw up on my birth mother. I don’t even remember my birth mother.”

Lina picked up the book and began leafing through it. “This is scarily detailed.” She did what Jeanne did earlier and went straight to the back. Lina began reading aloud the entries in reverse chronological order.

It was around the time that Lina died, before whatever this was, that Maria inserted a personal note.

“I remember,” Lina read slowly. “I remember everything, including further back than I’d have liked to imagine. I do not know what to do with this information or whether I should tell Jeanne. It is a blessing in disguise that Lina is no longer here with us. Or, rather, that she was never with us to begin with.” Lina put the book down. “Excuse me, what the fuck?”

“Don’t look at me!”

Lina started again. “I am unsure if there is any way to avoid our fate. For now, I can only gather information on the parameters of this simulation.” Lina sighed. “And now it goes back to your life.”

“Simulation?”Jeanne stroked her chin. “Is this all simulated? That could explain some of the inconsistencies we’ve been experiencing.”

“All the things, you’ve been experiencing,” Lina reiterated. “Apparently I don’t even exist. Even though I definitely feel like I’m existing right now.”

“We should look for the source of this simulation,” Jeanne said, ignoring Lina’s comment. “If we’re IN the simulation, there must be something that links us to the outside world.”

“You keep using the words us and we,” Lina grumbled. “But I can do a scan of the area and see if there’s anything that could indicate any outgoing connections.”

“You could just say port scan, you know.”

“Shut up. Let’s put everything back first and go back to my room.”

∰

Lina laid her head down onto Jeanne’s lap and closed her eyes. The machinery within her whirred quietly as she initiated a scan of the campus. “You know,” Lina said, eyes still closed. “It is all making sense now. All the places we’ve been to, we’ve been to before. Like, we’ve never made a random impromptu trip to the beach, just because.”

“A trip to the beach sounds nice,” Jeanne mused, looking out the window. “We’ve never really had a nice break, have we? Just the three of us, together.”

“I always found days like these, or what we remembered this day to be, w(ere)as a nice little break(s). But no breaks right now, I think I found something.”

“Mm?”

“There’s a lot of noise coming from the sub-basement.”

The pair stood up and walked quietly down the halls towards the sub-basement. As they passed by their fellow students and the nuns, Jeanne eyed each of them suspiciously. A part of her could not believe that all of this was a simulation. Just how intelligent could a simulation be? She knew many of her classmates extremely unique quirks and habits. Their different ways of talking. How their uniforms fell differently on each of their bodies. Could a simulation really embody a different personality for each of these non-human characters?

Jeanne tried to avoid thinking about Lina. Just how far did the simulation go? Did the simulation create Lina to get help her mentally get through Al-Hazard’s experimentation? Were the experiments themselves simulated? Jeanne clenched her fists as they walked down the stairs. It hurt her brain to think of all of this.

“The scan revealed activity coming from the basement, specifically,” Lina said, interrupting Jeanne’s train of thought. “Hopefully it’s enough for me to grab a signal and piggyback on a connection.”

Jeanne watched Lina wander around the basement, testing out the signal strength. She smiled to herself. Lina had hacked consoles remotely when Jeanne’s missions called for it. If anyone could do it, it would be Lina.

“I’m in!” Lina exclaimed. “It’s just leading me to a NAS, though. Pretty locked down, I can’t hop over to anything else. I can definitely snoop, though. Here, let me show you what I see.”

Lina opened her hand and a beam of light hit the wall, projecting the console onto the surface. Jeanne watched silently as Lina traversed through folders and folders of data.

“Can you do a search of our names?”

“Huh. I should have done that to begin with.” Lina entered Jeanne’s name as a search term. A few files popped up. Lina opened one of them. It was filled with symbols that seemed not to be from Earth. “Okay, cool. Are we dealing with aliens, here?” Lina opened the next file. This time it was a video.

The video showed CCTV footage of Jeanne in a sterile white room, stripped of all her clothes, lying in a futuristic looking pod. There was another pod next to her which contained another person. Lina zoomed in. The person was impossibly pale and thin. They were also bald, their skin was smooth, lacking any wisp of hair. But the face of the person was undeniably Maria.

“Whaaat the–” Lina’s jaw dropped open.

“You’ve found it.”

Both Jeanne and Lina snapped their heads towards the top of the stairs. Maria stood there, her long blonde hair softly swaying from the draft of the door closing behind her.

She smiled. It was hard to register what kind of emotion was on her face, if there was one at all. “Just what I expected from Templar trained assassins.”

“Maria,” Jeanne’s voice hardened. “What does this mean?”

“It’s exactly what you found out,” Maria said as she slowly descended the stairs. “You and I are in a simulation. Right now. As I speak.”

“And what about me?” Lina demanded as Maria stood in front of them.

The smile faded from Maria’s face and she frowned. “You are a part of this simulation.”

“Then…I’m not real?” Lina’s voice faltered.

“No, Lina!” Maria clasped hands with Lina. Her eyes were fiery with emotion. “You are real. Just as real as I am. Just as real as the rest of the students here.” She looked away. “Well maybe that’s not entirely the truth… I synthesized you from my memories. But you’re exactly how you were. How I imagined you would continue to be.”

Before the question bombardment could begin, Maria released Lina’s hands to gesture at the wall. “Watch the video again. That other being in the pod is me.”

Lina projected the video back onto the wall. They all watched the lithe body lay in the pod next to Jeanne’s. “Are you even human?” she murmured.

“I am,” Maria said simply.

“I don’t know how much I can trust your track record of discerning what’s real or not,” Jeanne said.

“Well. I’m as human as a Neanderthal is. It’s true that I’m not of your species. But I am still part of the homo genus,” Maria explained, her eyes never leaving the video. “I’m of an alien race. We’re mostly like you humans but we have found the fountain of immortality. That fountain we drink from is memories.”

“That explains how you didn’t age one second while Lina and I did,” Jeanne gasped.

Maria shook her head and laughed softly. “No, that was the simulation. I think it was a bug of some sort.”

“Wait, back up,” Lina stopped the video. “You synthesized me from your memories? You feed on memories?”

“Right. Maybe let’s get back to my room.”

∰

“So your alien brethren invaded Earth, harvested people’s memories through simulations, and devoured those who wouldn’t convert your weird alienism?”

“We’re inherently genderless so I’d prefer it if you didn’t refer to the rest of my species as my brethren,” Maria scrunched her face as she took a sip of her tea. “I do enjoy being a girl, though. Either way, you are correct.”

The trio fell silent.

“So…Why exactly are you in a simulation with me, then?” Jeanne asked.

“It’s a little embarrassing to say,” Maria looked down at her cup. “I did experience the human world, just a bit, while we were negotiating with the leaders of your race. And I met the two of you.” Maria glanced back up at the two girls. “Lina died. An unfortunate accident, nothing related to our invasion. I just couldn’t leave Jeanne alone in the incoming apocalypse.”

Maria locked teary eyes with Jeanne and smiled weakly. “I guess you could say it was because of love.” Maria sniffed. “But… I’m not sure if it is the best decision I could have made. Because of me… We will be devoured, too. Because Jeanne—” Maria laughed a little. “I couldn’t convince her. Jeanne didn’t want to convert.”

“That does sound like her,” Lina said solemnly. Jeanne assented with a nod.

“So, that is the situation we’re in,” Maria concluded.

“Is there anything we can do?” Jeanne asked.

Maria shook her head. “Even if we were to escape the simulation, I don’t know what we would do next. We could steal an investigator ship and leave the space hub. But without faster-than-light travel, we’d just buy ourselves a few more weeks of time.”

“Can’t we just go back to Earth?”

“We are too far from Earth to get there with just an investigator ship. Earth is barren anyhow. Anyone who wasn’t devoured is on this ship, converted.”

The trio fell silent once more.

Jeanne looked down at her left hand and silently gave it the command. In an instant, it had become a lustrous, jet black. If what Maria said was correct,then the experimentation she and Lina underwent was real. She was built to brute force her way through any problem that was set out before her. Over the years she learned that if brute force was not the answer, then she just had to finesse her way around it.

She looked up from her hand.

“A few weeks is more than enough,” Jeanne stood up. “I’m not going to lie down and waste away until I get eaten.”

“I was afraid you would say that,” Maria smiled in defeat.

Memories Rewritten

End.

Author’s Note:

Fanfiction AKA getting your characters wrong one word at a time. A lot of retconning, characters changing personalities and physicality, glossing over details you’ve probably forgotten but probably should be reminded of,straight up plagiarism from the original source, etc.,etc.

Actual Author’s Notes:

I wrote this for my writing group that I have with friends. The prompt was, “rewrite the ending to one of my stories.” This was really hard for me. I ended up reading all of their pieces and this one resonated with me the most. I basically rewrote the story while trying to keep it faithful to the original style. It was interesting. I started out not really connecting to the characters but by the end I was really fond of them, especially Lina.