“Why me?” Jon asks, when they’re somewhere else.
“Why you what?” Annabelle asks back, grinning.
Jon grits his teeth a bit at the evasiveness. Still, it’s something he’s come to expect from her. He wonders if there is any point to asking this at all, if it will make him feel better or help him fight the powers better or if it’s just another indulgence–pointless, masochistic curiosity, of the sort that got him into this situation in the first place.
He decides to ask anyway, threading the compulsion into his words.
“Why did you choose me?” he elaborates, grumpily. “Why was I ‘the one most likely to bring about your manifestation’ as you put it.”
“Hmmm,” Annabelle says. She’s not resisting the compulsion, but her grin gets a bit stiff. “Okay so, it’s–”
Jon stares, waiting. Annabelle tilts her head a bit.
“So that was a lie,” Annabelle says. “Ish? I mean, it was true enough.”
“What.”
“It was actually Doug.”
Jon blinks. “Doug.”
“Doug Shufflebottom,” Annabelle tells him, a bit wistfully. “He got an early start. Tried to dissect mice at age 7 and record the results. Ran straight to any place that people told him was haunted because he wanted to see the ghosts. Avid journaler.”
“Wh–” Jon tries to process this. “Then why not him?”
“Wellll,” Annabelle says. “So, the thing is–strands get broken all of the time. Real manipulation is about adapting, not setting up a foolproof plan that plays out exactly as you expect it. There are things, plenty of things, that the Web does not foresee and that break a strand here and there. In fact, most of our plans–I would say about 99.9%?–get disrupted by some unforeseen circumstance.”
“But–I thought–”
“Again, it’s about adapting, not flawlessly predicting every single outcome!” Annabelle says, throwing up her hands. “Anyway Doug got eaten by a bear when he was 23, three days before the interview with the Institute we’d set up. You’re actually the fourth most likely to start an apocalypse. Out of 188 potential candidates we groomed from a young age.”
Jon takes a moment. Opens his mouth, and closes it. “Then why did you tell me that I was–some sort of chosen one?”
“Because you were!” Annabelle says, clapping her hands. “You were the most likely by the time the job opened up. The top three were unfortunately a bit too gung-ho about throwing themselves into dangerous research to survive to that point. So I didn’t lie, you see.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“We wanted you to feel special.”
Jon buries his face in his hands a moment. “You thought telling me that I was a,a singularly likely apocalypse bringer from childhood would make me feel better about myself?!”
Annabelle grins so, so wide. “I didn’t say better, Jon,” she says. “I said we wanted you to feel special.”