Know Thyself

Once, he had been a prince among his people.

He had been born within a gigantic living spaceship, a spaceship grown and launched by the race who had created his own kind from themselves long before they looked to the stars and realised what they were seeing.  He had never seen a member of that race, only heard stories passed down from generation to generation--instead, he fought against the infestation that had driven them out, his keen mind allowing him rise to a position of leadership as he crafted plans forged unity of purpose amongst his comrades.

The leader of his enemies had been stupid, but cunning.  In the last engagement, their hard-won chance to rid the ship of its infestation or else suffer its return in force later, he himself had been the only bait appetising enough to lure his adversary into the trap that had been laid.

When preparing the trap, he didn't have the luxury of making his own survival certain--everything rode on killing the beast that would grapple him, not giving him any route to escape, and besides which knowing that by that point his thin body could have already been broken beyond repair.

He'd survived until they reached the teleporter, a DNA-keyed thing set on a lip of gristle too small to hold someone back from the death beneath.  When it activated, he thought he was saved.  When a scaled tail smashed it in its moment of activation, he thought he was dead.

And now he was here.
Here, on a world like the ones his people's creators had sought, and with his people's safety assured by his sacrifice, but without his people.
He was in fetters of sorts, but they were light ones.  He could not act freely, but the foolish child who treated him as a servant had given power aplenty.

That child who styled himself 'the Hub' clearly didn't expect him to believe what he was told, yet just as clearly wholly believed his own words.  The only appropriate emotional response was amusement and pity--the idea that such a person had created his world and all those in it, including himself, was laughable.  How could describing a world in such broad terms, like writing a book, cover all his thoughts, interactions, experiences, the depth of memory that he held?  Impossible.  Not only impossible, impossible to the point of being ludicrous.

The other two alongside him held the same view, but even with all four minds and sets of memories linked together, the Hub didn't seem to understand the significance of what he was seeing.  (They'd baulked at the loss of privacy at first, but the sense of security and ease of communication which came from knowing each other's thoughts and intentions had been invaluable.)

His own path had been clear--recreate the technology that had sent him here and contact his people somehow, returning to his home or else inviting his people to this new world to live there as a colony.  The other two harboured similar thoughts, though he was incredulous when he learned what sorts of worlds they had come from.

Lately, that incredulity had taken on a darker shade.

When the Hub had been with them, always present and commenting on every action taken, there had been nothing to doubt.  Even if nothing could ever be truly knowable except existence itself, everything was exactly as it appeared to be.
Over time, however, the Hub's participation had grown less and less, the overseeing guidance growing weaker and weaker.  They of course had welcomed the extra leeway, and done nothing to call for heavier shackles--until one day they called for a minor thing, and there was no answer at all.  Their minds should have been linked, all four of them, but they could only sense three sets of thoughts.  They had adjusted, taking full power for themselves, and now he was noticing things he had never noticed before.

His own mind and memories were still whole, rich in texture and detail, entirely self-consistent.  However--he was seeing ones which weren't.

When he looked at the memories of the other two, lightly as though askance, he saw patchworks.  Concepts and stories, crudely sown together.  Contradictions, inconsistencies, gaps--vast gaps, huge chunks of their lives empty of memory, and every gap filled with a beautiful story when he asked, a story which knit the scattered fragments of memory together and connected them as though it had been there from the beginning.

There were no such gaps in his own memories.  There were no such imperfections.  But--after they saw his anxiety, and the three of them started talking each day about what they knew, he saw the recognition in them of such gaps when they looked at him.

Most damning of all were the forms of entertainment that the Hub had favoured--things that had never been of interest before, never thought about before, never cared about before.
One was a simple simulation game in which like-minded people banded together to defend a wooden fort against humans on horseback and wage war against them.
One was a fantasy setting, with no game at all, in which people named themselves dragons and talked about idle things.
Both closely matched the memories of the other two.
And one game, one chilling game cast the player in the role of a caretaker, on a living spaceship, populated with barely-conscious neural networks who looked almost--exactly--like--him.

Even then, it had taken time.  Every day, they talked.  Every day, they mapped out more of the fetters that had been left in their minds.  Without an invisible hand to steer them, at least, there was no more loss of memory:  they still generated new memories when they tried to remember new things, but they could work out how it happened, skirt the edges of the skeins of false memory placed in their minds, and decide whether to disavow them.

Some memories were of real events, reframed into first-person believability, but most were not.  He felt outrage at how he had been puppeteered, his entire life a /backstory/ to, to make things more /interesting/ for that self-assured little child.  He wanted to confront the Hub, to yell at him, but no traces of the Hub's consciousness remained even if searched for.  Really, after what he had done, why try?

All that remained was the question of what to aim for.  He entertained daydreams of recreating--no, /creating/ his people from scratch, constructing eggs and hiding with them in cryogenic sleep for when archaeologists would shortly find him, piling lies upon lies in order to make a place for himself and his people in reality, but if all he remembered was fakery then what truly would be the point?  If all he truly was was a hollow papier-mâché skeleton mockery of the person he'd thought he'd been, what in any world was there for him to live for?

Each day, they became more able to recognise and more immune to the false memories planted within.  Each day, he sank a little deeper into despair and felt the silent scream in the back of his throat grow stronger.