Face-Slapping15 min read
My Number Eleven: The Little Girl Who Owned a World
ButterPicks13 views
I am Evelyn Browning. I was called "Number Eleven" before I learned my name. I remember a cold bed, wires taped to my small arms, lights that smelled like batteries, and a man who called himself Professor Denis.
"Number Eleven," he said into a recorder, "age five years, six months, nine days."
"Mind control test: SSS," another voice read out.
"Physical: SSS," a woman added.
"Memory: SS," someone else murmured.
"Pain threshold: zero…" Professor Denis trailed off as he watched me sit up.
I didn't notice the names on the papers. I only saw the light blink, the wires pull, and the little beds around me. My short legs swung. I had a sheet wrapped around me like a cape. My eyes were big and dark, and they watched Professor Denis like a clock watches a second hand.
"Eleven," Professor Denis said with a tired smile, "you did very well this time."
I reached out. I always reached if someone smiled. He handed me his tablet when he thought no one was watching.
"Play half an hour," he whispered. "Only half an hour."
I nodded. He left. I watched the lab door close.
A man in a black suit waited at the doorway. He understood the machines, the electrodes, the value of things. He walked closer.
"Is her mind power higher?" Jason Ahmad asked in Chinese, but with an accent that made his vowels smooth.
Denis pushed his glasses up. "Not higher. Our instruments top out at SSS."
Jason tried to step into the room. Denis stopped him with a polite, hard shake of his shoulder.
"Mr. Jason, you cannot enter. Mr. Caspian isn't here. Without Caspian's permission, only authorized staff approach Eleven."
Jason's face fell. "Caspian went to the capital? When will he be back—"
"Then wait." Denis's voice was calm, but there was fear in his eyes. He pointed at his own throat to finish the sentence without saying it: If you make Eleven angry, you'll lose more than an argument.
There was a rumble of thunder, then a horrible cracking.
"What's that—" Jason started, and the lights popped.
Glass fell. Wires snapped. A ceiling panel slammed down and crushed a technician where he stood. Jason's look turned to panic.
"Get her out!" he shouted. "Get Eleven out now!"
Denis slammed his palm on the glass behind which I sat and called my code name.
"Eleven, I order you—open the door!"
I looked at him and tilted my head. The tablet in his hand glittered. I could see his fear like heat on a mirror.
He pressed his thumb to his phone. The fingerprint lock flashed green. The door would open if I would press it.
"Eleven, open the door," he tried again, louder. I could hear his heartbeat through the glass.
I reached to the latch.
The table beside my bed crashed into me as the floor shuddered. A switch flipped. Light lanced through my body like cold knives. My hands jerked. I was thrown into the air and I kept twitching until I could not feel anything at all.
I shut down.
When I woke, my stomach ached with hunger. My head hummed. Something else sat in my mind like a small beetle.
System: Hello, host. I am Ant Customer Service of the Ant World game… ah!
The voice squealed like a broken toy and then begged.
"Don't kill me!" it said. "Please! I am—"
I blinked. The voice scrambled. It said it was a game system. It said I used to play "Ant World" on a phone. It stammered that the lightning—ten thousand volts—had somehow linked the game and me.
"Ant World," I echoed. The world flickered. A tree appeared. Mangoes hung like fat suns. A piece of dry dirt looked like the wood they called "lan grass" in the lab.
"Do you remember the chicken?" the system squeaked. "You had a chicken. You—"
"My chicken?" I turned, as if the chicken could be under my small feet in that soft green.
"You can't open the farm yet," the system warned. "Your authority isn't enough. I need— ah, don't hurt me!"
I shouted, "I want the chicken!"
The system yelped. It spent its little bank of coins to open my farm. I put my hand on the chicken's wing and the world folded like paper.
I blinked back into the lab. The sheet slid off my shoulders. My phone—what was left of it—crumbled to black powder in my hand.
Light began to fall through the broken roof like pale knives. Rocks tumbled. A sound like a wild animal clawing at the stone rose.
A dog fell through the hole and crashed beside me. It whined, shook, and pushed its head to my knees.
"Axel," I said. Dad once gave me that name. The dog wagged. He was all fur. He was large enough to block a door.
Denis lay on the floor half-under rubble. Blood painted his sleeve. I pushed him. He didn't move.
"Is he dead?" I asked. I wrapped the sheet around myself and climbed onto Axel's back.
"A dead man can't take me home," I thought. "We find Dad."
We ran until the sun turned the trees long. We reached a road and I saw a woman being held by three men. She screamed when she saw Axel and me.
"Get your hands off her!" I didn't know how else to say it.
"Who are you?" one of the men spat. He and his friends were thick as logs and smelled like oil.
"Get away or the dog will—"
They laughed. One threw a water bottle. The bottle froze in midair like a fruit and I reached out.
"Stop!" I said. The bottle hung. The men were frozen too. Axel leapt and roared.
One fell off a cliff. Two could not move. The woman slid free and hugged me like I was a warm roof above her head.
She had a name the woman cried. "Emersyn Brandt," she said, stumbling. "You— you're Eleven…"
"You are safe," Emersyn said, and I could tell she believed it with all her small bones. She held me like a secret.
"Call me Emersyn," she whispered. "Please. Come home with me."
I thought of Dad. He had told me the world outside was a place of fire. Professor Denis told me the same. There were rules: follow orders, never trust strangers, keep clean, keep quiet. But Emersyn had given me a mango and a stick of candy and she smelled like soap and things that tasted like summer.
"Will you give me candy?" I asked. She laughed softly and nodded.
We left Axel behind carefully; I put him into my Ant World when we stepped into town so he would not be trapped on the narrow roads.
Emersyn had a house with walls and stairs and a strange thing called "a rooftop." She offered me clothes. "Try this," she said, pushing a small blue hat onto my bald head.
I liked being called "Eleven" but I liked being Evelyn more, so I kept both names in my small pocket.
Emersyn did small, fast moves. She was not gentle. She was bright as a coin. She told me that she was reborn, too. She had come back to fix the wrongs of a life that had been stolen from her. Her mouth made lists of things: sugar, salt, rice, big machines, solar panels. She said words like "preparation" and "plan" and her voice sounded like someone lighting a match for the first time.
She said one sentence and meant it without breath. "You stay with me. You belong to me."
The system in my head blinked and said, "A new sale, new staff."
"Staff?" Emersyn asked.
When I put my hand on her head, the green bar above her avatar fell a little, and she staggered as if pins had been pushed into her chest. She nearly fainted. I had discovered the game could touch people.
"She is willing to be my employee," the system whispered into my mind. "Do you accept management?"
Emersyn picked herself up, looked at me, and said, "I will serve you. I will be your employee."
"It is a black-hearted company," the system explained. "You will be the boss. You can mark her, and then her life will be—partly—under your hand."
Emersyn's eyes lit like two coins in a jar. "Sign me," she said.
She signed with more than her words. She stamped her life on my little world and smiled like she had found shelter. She became my person.
We fought over small things. I had the authority to lower her life bar. I thought of it like a game piece. When I did, Emersyn would topple like a puppet. But she laughed while she bowed. She liked being near me. She wanted to be inside my small world and when I gave her a chicken egg, she called me her god.
"You will keep me?" she asked one night as we ate a bowl of Emersyn's tomato-and-egg noodles. I had said that food after five had made me angry in the lab, and she had promised not to tell Denis.
"Stay and I will guard you," I said. The promise tasted good.
Emersyn sold houses. She called men who would give her the money, and when they came, she said goodbye like a girl closing a door. Her voice was quick. Money slid into accounts she owned.
Vaughn Curtis came one afternoon like a shadow who smelled of suits. He looked at my tiny hands and at Emersyn's quick smile. He said the price of the company's shares into Emersyn's phone and the numbers were big enough to make Emersyn's mouth stretch wider than a surprised cat.
"Five thousand— no, six million and a hundred thousand," Vaughn said.
"Deal," Emersyn said. She did not blink.
We used the money to turn a house into a fort. We bought food and seeds and machines. Emersyn told me the world outside would burn, and I believed her because she always smelled of sugar and because she fed me boiled eggs we kept in my world. The eggs were small miracles. They filled a person with a rush of light, a feeling like heavy water turning into warmth.
The system told me, "Only the host gains full benefit. Guests feel some effect."
Emersyn ate my eggs and said, "You saved me." She put a hand on my small hairless head and did not ask for anything else.
We spent days buying, packing, and shipping boxes to the old factory she owned. She called it "the backup." It would be quiet there, she said. She would hide trucks there, and men would come and leave and load things in the night. We moved carefully, like the sort of people who keep a pile of matches out of a child's reach.
People saw us. People knew Emersyn had money. A friend of hers, the woman who once betrayed Emersyn—Rodrigo Brewer—and a woman named Jess Harrison, who had agreed to be part of a plan to hurt Emersyn, walked into the shopping center like hungry wolves.
They used to be proud. They thought they owned other people's stories. Rodrigo had charm. Jess had a laugh like glass. They had betrayed Emersyn before; they had tricked her into signing away things she did not understand. The memory of what they had done made Emersyn's jaw go hard.
"Rodrigo," she said softly to me, "they called us weak and told us to be grateful for crumbs."
"I remember," I said. I had been on the other side of the glass for so long. Now I had a way to reach out and crush the glass.
They met us at the mall. Rodrigo swaggered, Jess laughing at his jokes. They had other men behind them, men who had been part of a plan to ruin Emersyn's life in the old story.
When they saw us, Rodrigo's face stretched into a smile.
"Oh, is this the little sister you always keep hidden?" he mocked the way people who lack shame do.
Emersyn's lips did not twitch. She pulled her coat closer.
"Don't," she said, "don't speak."
I don't like weapons except the ones my hands make: a slice of truth, a sudden stop, an idea turned into a fact. But I had a tool.
"Show them," I told the system.
On the mall's big screen, an ad blinked and then froze. It opened the way a stage opens. Rodrigo's phone messages appeared in huge letters. Jess's laughter filled the speakers.
"She is a cash machine," one message read.
"Wait until he gets the money, then dump her," another said.
Rodrigo's smile faltered.
"What is that?" he blurted out.
People around turned their heads. A security camera's tiny red light flashed like an eye. Someone raised a phone.
"Stop it!" Rodrigo yelled, and his voice sounded small.
The screen showed more. Photos. Signed papers. How they had planned to lure Emersyn out to a place on the mountain and ruin her. There were recorded calls: promises made and broken. Then, like a stage trapdoor opening, the recording played the moment when they left Emersyn alone on the cliff.
Crowds began to gather. A thousand small voices pressed into being. Phones rose like a forest. Fingers recorded. A woman behind us started to speak into the camera.
"They stole from her," she said, "they tried to kill her."
Rodrigo's eyes jumped light to dark like a frightened animal's. His face which had been brazen grew pale.
"It isn't true," he began to stammer. "You can't—this is—"
The little lies tumbled like stones when a heavy hand lifts the rock that held them. He reached for the screen, then found his hands empty. Jess's laughter died; she pressed her palms to her mouth.
"No!" she said. "You can't show that. That's private—"
The crowd pressed in. People pointed. Someone shouted, "Copy the recording! Post it!"
Rodrigo's arrogance broke like glass. He spat and tried to claw back at the cameras and the evidence, but the footage kept rolling and the comments on the live stream moved like a wave: "Scum," "Exposed," "She should be locked up."
Jess dropped her eyes. She looked smaller than a folded napkin. "This is defamation," she cried. "You're liars. We will sue you. We will—"
A man from the store tried to separate Emersyn. "Ma'am, calm down—"
Emersyn didn't move. She stepped forward like a tide that had learned a name. Her voice was quiet at first, and then it pushed into the people.
"Everything you see is true," she said. "This is how they made me into nothing. They thought they'd sell me to the world for parts."
Rodrigo stormed forward. He shoved a bystander aside and pointed. "You— you will regret this. I'll—I'll—"
He ran to the center court and tried to turn the camera back to himself, to make a new story where he was the victim. But people had seen. Their phones sang with betrayal.
The crowd's mood changed into a chorus. Someone screamed for a good beating. Another voice, deeper, said "Call the police!" A dozen phones uploaded the video in seconds. In the minutes that followed, no one would forget the faces. People took selfies. People clapped and hissed. Men who used to look away found their hands wanting to hold them accountable.
Rodrigo's face went from a flush of anger to something like fear. "No—no, listen," he barked. "You're full of lies. This is staged. I never—"
Jess tried to speak, too. "This woman... she must hate me. I—I didn't—"
It was the part I had to watch with a small, stupid human's hungry joy. The system in my head hummed like a distant radio.
I stepped onto the polished floor. My voice was a child's voice but it did a thing adults forget: it told the truth.
"You sold her," I said.
"You threw her off a mountain to make a story for yourselves," I told Rodrigo. "You used her because she had no one left to protect her."
Rodrigo's lips formed the shape of denial, then the shape of panic. He looked at the crowd as if they were a storm he had not expected to flood into him. The men behind him shifted and took a step back.
"You're lying," Rodrigo kept saying. "I would never—"
A woman directly behind us pulled out a recording and played a voice that matched Rodrigo's. It was a call where Rodrigo had planned how to get Emersyn to sign away her house and leave town. The audio blossomed across the mall.
Rodrigo's face changed. The color drained. Denial died. Shock settled like a heavy cloth.
"I—no—this is—fabricated," he begged. "You can't prove—"
"Rodrigo Brewer," Emersyn said, "you owe me the life you tried to sell."
He lunged. He tried to pull his phone from the hands of the person streaming. A young man in a red cap shoved him. Rodrigo slipped and fell to his knees. It was a small, pitiful thing. The men who had laughed with him were now shoals of empty promises.
People around circled like fish. They took pictures of his knees. The cameras recorded him on his knees while the public, who had not spoken out before, began to speak all at once.
"You coward," someone said.
"Look at him," another cried. "He begged us to buy his lies. Don't let him buy yours."
Rodrigo's voice became small, then cracked. He pressed his hands together like a child who has learned the wrong prayer.
"Please," he said to everyone. "Please, I was— I was under pressure. I didn't think—please—"
A hundred phones swallowed his pleas. Someone uploaded the footage and added a line: "Here is Rodrigo Brewer begging a mall full of strangers not to send him to the shame he made others feel."
"You're pathetic," Jess sobbed. She had been loud and cruel once. Now she was a shadow who thought words could be erased. She tried to laugh at herself to hide, but the laugh broke.
Security arrived, not to take Rodrigo away. Instead they asked for his ID and called the building's manager. Someone from the crowd demanded that Rodrigo and Jess give back what they had stolen. Others threw up their hands and recorded the spectacle for hours.
Rodrigo tried to stand. His knees were shaking. He could not find the arrogance he once wore like a coat. He looked at Emersyn like a hunted thing.
"No," he said, voice raw. "No, I'm sorry—I'll do anything."
People shouted for restitution. A woman stood up and loaded files onto a laptop. She called out the dates and the bank transfers, and Rodrigo's face collapsed like a tower lashed by wind. He fell all the way through the stages the crowd needed to see: from smug to shocked to denial to collapse to begging.
"Please," he whispered. "Don't—please don't—"
Jess started to beg, too. Her hands shook like dry leaves. "Forgive me!" she cried. "Forgive me, please—I'll do anything."
Phones kept filming. Strangers who once let their silence be a fence around the bad did not look away. Some clapped. Some hissed. Some just held up their cameras to the truth.
The building manager came out onto the balcony, his mouth open. "We will not assist criminals," he boomed into a microphone. Someone handed the footage to a journalist who had been at the mall for a product launch. The reporter's voice went live.
"They face public accusation," she said. "We have their messages. We have witnesses. The police will decide what to do, but the court of the public is already here."
Rodrigo dropped his head and started to cry. He had never done that in front of other people. The sound was raw, and it made the mockery that had once been his life look small and useless. He begged like a child to a sky that would not answer.
When the police finally came, they did not take him away for punishment alone. They guided him to sit on a bench and told him the process would be slow. They also took statements from the witnesses. The crowd's phones had saved the story. Rodrigo and Jess were left in a place that was their worst fear: seen by everyone.
Later, the footage of this event trended for days. Rodrigo's fall from a smug throne was the kind of public lesson people shared like bread. The videos showed his face go white and crumble. They showed Jess press her hands to her mouth and beg. They showed people walking close enough to take pictures with them, their thumbs flicking to upload.
Emersyn walked away with me. We did not need to shout. Her hair moved like a flag in calm wind. She put a small hand in mine and said, "Thank you."
"I did what needed to be done," I said.
"No," she corrected me. "You did what the tracks of time could not do alone. You held a mirror for everyone. They saw themselves reflected and chose what to be."
In the days that followed, Rodrigo and Jess lost the breath to say anything. They tried to deny, but the proof only grew. People watched the tapes again and again. The shame swelled until it was too large to hide.
That day at the mall was not the only punishment they would receive. The law moved slowly. But the biggest part of the punishment was in the public: comments, faces, recordings, jobs refused, doors closed. Rodrigo's family would gather his pride in handfuls and bury it.
Emersyn sold more properties. Vaughn's money bought more seeds and more chickens. We put everything into my Ant World: food, animals, water, a place where time stopped and things did not rot. I learned how to plant. I learned how to hatch eggs. I learned how to count and to keep secrets.
Emersyn never left me alone. Sometimes she said she loved me, and I allowed it. She kissed my head, and I felt the world in a new shape. She said, "You are mine," and she meant the shelter of a person who would do terrible and tender things.
We had many nights where we counted the eggs in my Ant farm. "Four," I would say. "Keep two for nights and give one to Emersyn when she is tired."
"You're my god," she would say, and then she would eat and get up and go back to making lists.
We read the wind and the news. The world grew hotter. The electricity failed in stuttering fits. Emersyn bought solar panels and a diesel generator. She had men put up steel doors, new glass, and an electric fence. She turned our little house into a rounded fortress.
"Everything will change," she said, and then she bought trucks and a small yacht—because who knows what the sea will bring—and she paid a man called Dwight Mayer to watch the empty factory.
I learned to measure storms. I learned to listen for footsteps that meant trouble. I learned that the game gave me small things—chicken eggs that made the tired bright—and that real people needed more than bright to survive.
When Rodrigo and Jess tried one more time—this time in a quiet place where they thought no one would record—they learned the last rule, the one that had always been the rule in my life: if you hurt my people, your names will be remembered in the worst way.
They paid a price with the kind of ruin the public understands best: exposure, loss, a map of their mistakes on every phone. People took pictures, called friends, wrote letters. The world narrowed for them until all they could do was hold out their hands and beg.
I kept counting eggs.
I kept tending Axel Murphy. I kept feeding Emersyn. I kept the Ant World's doors open for chickens, for seeds, for people who chose to stay.
"Will your father come?" Emersyn asked one night, staring at the small pool of light where I stored my eggs.
"He will," I said.
She smiled like she had swallowed something sweet. "Then bring him home. Bring him and keep him here."
I wondered for a moment about Caspian Barrett—tall, powerful, the man who had taken me and taught me order. He had many hands in the world that now needed money and answers. I did not know if he would come or what he would do. I only knew that when he came, his face would be measured by what I had become.
The Ant World hummed in the dark: chickens clucked like soft clocks, seeds lay in small beds that waited for rain, and Axel slept with one ear always half open.
Later, in the middle of a clean, hot day when the city trembled with heat warnings, we sat on the roof and counted the last two eggs that the chicken had given. Emersyn rolled one between her palms.
"If you ever want to leave," she said, distance in her voice, "I will go with you, but I will never leave you alone in the world I cannot protect."
I turned the small egg over and felt its weight. The system hummed in my head, a small insect that had learned to sing in my voice.
"Keep the eggs," I said. "They are proof."
The day the world grew hotter, friends came with pies and shared stories. Neighbors knocked on the steel door and asked if we had room for a little more hope. We opened the gate just enough. People brought seeds and more seeds and a jar of pickled peaches.
My world became a pantry of small miracles: a wooden house where time stopped, a dog that guarded the gate, a woman who called me a god, and a person named Emersyn who had chosen to be my hand in the dark. The proof of our life lived in the eggs stacked in my wooden box. The videos of Rodrigo and Jess's pleading were still online.
I learned to hold both things: tenderness and the hard punishments necessary to keep it safe. I learned to feed and to control. I learned that a black-hearted boss could be a fierce mother in a child's body.
And in the quiet night, when the generator scared the dark and the stars listened like sleeping things, I would wind the small game watch in my head and whisper to the system, "Keep us safe."
"Yes, host," it would say, always eager, always small.
We kept the eggs, and they kept us. We kept Axel, and he kept watch. And when my father finally came—if he came at all—he would know the sound of the little chicken, the sound of the plate when it was passed, and the face of a woman who had once been called Number Eleven but had chosen a different name.
On the last page of the day, as rain finally came to wash the dust off the streets and the public videos faded into a quiet background hum, I put the last egg under the small lamp and counted the seconds until it cooled down.
"Tick," I whispered.
The system in my head replied with a small, very human laugh.
"Tick," it echoed.
We were small, and we were strong, and the Ant World kept giving. That was our secret and our ending.
The End
— Thank you for reading —