As Miranda’s eyes fixated on the blinking red lights of the Level 5 Vernacular Lock, a surge of adrenaline coursed through her veins. The cold, unyielding metal of a gun pressed against the back of her scalp.
Glancing at the reflection of the man behind her, she drew upon her training and harnessed her mimicry skills. With a calculated tone, she spoke, her voice echoing confidence she hoped to emulate. “This gift has always been a part of me, long before these implants. I’m certain there’s a way I can be of value to you.” As the words left her lips, she imagined herself as the embodiment of resilience, mirroring the tough-as-nails persona she perceived in her captor. She could feel the tattoo on her arm, intricately linked to her neural implants, shifting beneath her skin, etching out the image of barbed wire and roses.
The man with the gun was clad head to toe in black and was having none of her blabber. He only coughed and glanced impatiently at his watch.
She opted for a different tactic; humour. She needed to test his defences.
“But what about you?”, she said with a wry smile, perhaps she could mimic the kind of girl he’d go for. “You gonna throw a ninja star at me?” Pursing her lips in a way that her implants suggested he might find appealing, she hoped to disarm him, even just for a moment.
“You’re not the first Mimic I’ve killed trying to crack this lock”, he coldly stated and pressed the muzzle of the gun even more deeply into her scalp. Thoughts of her own demise flashed through Miranda’s mind as she imagined the grisly aftermath. However, she refused to let fear consume her.
With a grimace, she mustered her courage and responded, “I don’t doubt that”. Her voice carried a touch of defiance, mingled with a hint of sarcasm. “But perhaps you’re going about this the wrong way. I highly doubt your superiors will be pleased when you’ve splattered all the fancy implants I’ve got in my brain on this lock.” She levelled a pointed gaze at him, her expression daring and challenging. The persona she had adopted, that of a Catholic nun, seemed to be having an effect on him.
As she noticed the subtle change in his expression, Miranda’s mind flashed back to her training days.
She had been told that the implant only worked on the “gifted”. The ones they chose as agents had exceptionally large temporal and parietal lobes. Her and her classmates had tried to guess which agent in their training unit had the “thickest lobes”.
“I hate these accents and expressions you’re doing, by the way”, he sighed and sat down cross legged in front of the door, his arm held out in front of him, although shaking slightly. “Try harder!”, he shouted at her.
She shivered and her mind reached back to all the ways her “talent” had felt like a strange power before she’d become a Mimic. The first time was in her teens when she’d spent a week in the deep south with some distant cousins and came back with a thick Southern accent. The nickname, “Kentucky Fried Chicken”, echoed through the school hallways. Yet, instead of stinging, it only fuelled a strange craving for buckets of savoury fried chicken.
In those days she hadn’t wanted to fall into different accents, but when the accent, dialect or slang was just comfortable enough she fell deep and couldn’t get out again. It was a bit like being sucked into a strong current. She could drown in the tongues of others if she wasn’t too careful.
And that was part of what had got her recruited, and ultimately why she was staring at a Level 5 lock when she should be in a café drinking a mimosa and sizing up her next target.
“Taken Away Hemlock Heights”, she said for the ten thousandth time in a flat American accent. She then decided to try a slightly chill and rather friendly Jamaican accent. It was influenced by an interview of a poet she’d once heard, “Taykeen aweey Hemlyck…”
The gunman interrupted her, “Why don’t they just crack this with a computer? It seems like it could make all the same sounds as you and wouldn’t eventually try to kill me”. He spat his words out through a twisted smile. She knew he’d killed the rest of her training unit. She was the last one he’d hunted down.
Grief mingled with anger surged within her, but she swiftly composed herself. Meeting his gaze with unwavering resolve, she mustered her strength for what lay ahead.
“Accents aren’t just about sounds. They’re about emotions. The feeling behind the words and beyond the words is what really gives an accent it’s depth. That’s why you’ll never crack this lock, if we don’t know anything about who set it, even if you had a room full of mimics”, she said thinking that he might see sense, since he was finally starting to ask smart questions.
The door opened and an older gentleman with a long-twisted moustache stepped in. The Mimic guessed how he would sound before he opened his mouth. As usual, she was spot on.
“We knew you wouldn’t be enough”, he said in an American West Coast accent. He was a techpreneur meets the dark web type, and he gave her the shivers. The man with the gun seemed to be shocked to be seeing whoever this was in the flesh.
“A mimic needs to want to crack a lock and that’s why we’re bringing your daughter here”, he stated with a self-satisfied grin like he had her in checkmate.
“What?”, she roared at him. “You’re bluffing!”
“Oh really?”, he said and held up his phone to show her an image of her daughter, in real-time, playing with her father.
“I’m sure you know that children, especially young ones, make the best mimics. If implants go in when they’re 2 or 3 and you set them at a task like this lock, they can crack it 100 times faster than you, but it might take their entire childhood to do it.” The words slipped from his mouth like a knife and he seemed to pleasure in the cuts it made to her psyche.
“You son of a….”, she started to say, before he cut her off.
“But if you work a bit harder, I’ll give you another month before we see how your little mimic fairs with this lock”, he turned abruptly and walked out the door.
“Miranda”, a voice quietly whispered in what she thought was her ear, but suddenly realised was inside her head. She sat down and put her head in her hands, not sure how to respond.
“You heard the man. You better get going!”, the gunman shouted at her.
“I need a minute to think!”, she snapped back.
“I guess it doesn’t matter anyhow, your daughter will crack it faster than you. So, sure, take all the time you need”, the gunman replied, casually picking something from his teeth with his free hand.
“We’ve hacked your implants, Miranda. It’s me, Major Jones”, the disembodied voice continued.
“We’ve just learned that the man who made this lock was French. He spent his child in Bordeaux and attended Oxford. His mother was from Gujrati. He was a rather glum fellow who liked to spend all his time in the lab.”
A smile spread across her face as she realised she could crack this lock. The voice seemed to sense her confidence.
“When you open the door, enter the safe and close the door behind you. We’ll be there to extract you in 30 minutes. The images of your daughter are bogus. We’ve already moved her to a safe location. It was a distraction, something to buy us time”.
Miranda spent the next few hours trying on all the accents and languages she knew. She spoke them with varying degrees of emotional pitch, but the lock never once responded and neither did the gunman. When she noticed him starting to nod off, she took her chance.
Allowing her implants to take control, she whispered the password with a subtle Gujarati lilt, French intonation, and twing of “stiff upper lip”. The door responded with a faint hiss as it obediently swung open.
The gunman jerked up and lunged for the door, but not before Miranda could slip inside and slam the door behind her.
It was dimly lit and she felt her way around the room. A chair was in the centre and some kind of console was on the other side of it. She tried pushing buttons to create more light. She needed to get a better look at her surroundings.
“Hello, can you hear me?”, she asked, wondering if Major Jones could contact her from inside the room. “Is extraction imminent?”, she asked the space. As if in response, the door cracked open.
The moustached techprenuer entered and clapped slowly. “You’ve done exceptionally well. We knew you wouldn’t submit to our test willingly, but this way we really got to see what you could do. You… are…. remarkable. It’s a pity your friends didn’t fair so well.”
Four men with guns rushed in and strapped her down in the chair.
She felt like a small child overpowered by any adult and forced to sit in a high-chair. She snarled at the men as they grabbed her.
“You don’t know, do you?”, the moustached man said, his face uncomfortably close to hers.
She yearned for the freedom to defend herself. His scrutinising gaze made her squirm, an invasion that sent shivers down her spine.
“The capabilities of a properly trained and implanted mimic are truly astounding”, he continued, a twisted sense of admiration in his voice. “They hold the power to make peace, start wars, derail governments, and even crack locks. There are only a handful of individuals like you in the world, and while I lack the ability to create implants myself, I possess the skill to hack into existing ones. Together, we can accomplish incredible feats. You can become anyone we desire.”
His condescending words were accompanied by an unsettling gesture as he petted her forehead, treating her like a prized, rare breed of cat. Revulsion surged within her at her own chameleon-like nature that so many had called a gift.
“Over my dead body”, she spat at him, defiance dripping from her words. She would not allow herself to be moulded into a puppet for his sinister agenda, even if it meant facing the gravest of consequences.
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