Danny waited for the young HSF aide to circle around and open his door, as per protocol. He stared at his hands and gathered his courage. He was about to perform again, like a puppet, saying the things he was supposed to say, and playing the part of the wounded hero to an audience that encompassed the entire world.
Dr. Ganand had warned him. "Americans love a hero, Danny. And like it or not, you're a hero."
He spread his fingers and looked at the tiny scars crisscrossing his palms. Daniel T. White, hero. It didn't work. If everything he'd learned since the accident was true, the word didn't go with the name. Nor did the name go with the man. He pulled on his dress gloves.
A band of pain tightened around his temples. Now he was returning to the waiting arms of a family he didn't remember. They'd been told everything, finally, once the government decided he was no longer a security risk and could be allowed to go home. It was pathetic how badly he wanted to remember them, and how afraid he was that they wouldn't remember him.
Fumbling in his breast pocket, he pulled out a miniature holovid pic. An eager, open face smiled at him, green eyes looking trustingly into his. Surely she would remember him. They had been married. He pressed a small button on the back of the metal box.
"I love you." That was all she said in her laughing, melodic voice. He turned it back over, craving another look at the open eager smile. Her face was filled with love and laughter, and maybe just a trace of sadness. Danny held the picture a bit closer. What gave him the idea she was sad? The eyes? They were green and bright and filled with something he'd like to think was love.
A voice echoed in his head from Daniel White's micro-disk logs. Conniving bitch. He couldn't reconcile the cold fury in those words with the lovely face captured in the snapshot. The face looked like a face he could love. Kee looked like someone he could trust.
If only he could remember. If only he could feel a connection with the angry voice on the micro-disk, or dredge up the resentment Daniel White obviously harbored for his wife.
But there was nothing inside him except the hollow dread. The dread and one other thing, the thing that made him able to get through all this.
Hope.
Hope that, when Kee looked at him, her face would light up like the face in the photograph, and she would open her arms and welcome him home. Hope that when he stood in front of his family, something would click in his battered brain and he would be able to believe his own lies. That he was Daniel White.
Because right now he wasn't so sure.
)
