“Is that real?” Dae asks himself aloud. He is in solitary confinement, just a month into what would be a five month sentence following the murder of his cellmate.
He’d seen Metion wield the badge of the Order of Sound Reason, but had it actually happened that way? Of course there was no way to know. Even if he still spoke with his mother, he didn’t have any contact information for her.
This was confirmation that every memory he’d been conjuring of his father was manufactured in his own imagination, corrupted but his own warped view of reality. He isn’t crazy, though. If he is crazy, then he wouldn’t have been convicted for his crimes that had put him here. He would be in a home for cuckoo’s. Instead, he is being slowly driven out of his mind with solitude and it is impossible for him to sort his delusions of the past from reality.
Unless, of course, Metion had indeed been part of the Order of Sound Reason and his fetal self had actually overheard his conversations with Dae’s mother about working to frustrate Idiots. How could he prove that his recollection was that and not just an elaborate fantasy?
Because if his father had battled Idiots, then the targeting from Sunday would make sense. His father’s opposition to the Idiots must have put a target on his back once he made a name for himself at Columbia. Sunday and the Idiots would have known Metion; it was even possible that Sunday had worn Metion’s face, though Dae wouldn’t have recognized it.
But why did his mother hate him so much if she was the same woman from these new memories who adored Metion? What could he have done to make her erase him completely from her life? She would have changed his name from Daedalus to Bradford to complete the scrubbing of Metion from her life.
Dae decides to continue to mine the memories to find out what ended the relationship between his mother and Metion, and once he feels that he has uncovered the truth, he will try to find his mother to confirm it. That is the only way to know for sure if he is actually out of mind. He has no idea how he will be able to locate his mother. He hasn’t spoken to her since he forced himself from her home as an adolescent. He hasn’t spoken to his brother either, but maybe he’d be easier to find?
Those were plans for the near future, though. First he had to mime his memories for a complete view of the circumstances that drove a wedge between his parents. He would focus on that, and when he was released from solitary, he would track down the only person in the world who could confirm his sanity, though he had little confidence that she would be willing to help him.
“Was my name always Daedalus ?” He asks aloud to himself. Then Dae closes his eyes and let’s go. He travel deep into himself where his ego slowly dissolves as a scene materializes. He is watching, but not from a distance, he is inside of the scene like his perspective is the camera filming everything. His mother is there, tragically beautiful with tears running down her cheeks. This can’t be my memories of my mother, he thinks, I’ve never seen her this beautiful, I’ve never known her to be beautiful, this must be the objective memory of the woman free from my biases.
Metion was there too, as muddy faced as ever.
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