The suburban street had become an open-air interrogation room. Rick C-137 paced in circles around Kaelen, his analytical mind working at lightning speed, disassembling Kaelen piece by piece with sharp questions.
"Your portal gun. It's a decent design for an amateur. You managed to stabilize the quantum fluid without a micro-battery from a seed universe, which is... ingenious, in a stupid, dangerous way. Where did you get the stabilization algorithm?" Rick asked, his tone that of a professor scrutinizing a troubled child's homework.
"I didn't get it from anywhere," Kaelen replied, trying to maintain his composure. "I... I deduced it. After analyzing your weapons."
"You deduced it?" Rick scoffed. "No, you didn't! You don't have the neural infrastructure to deduce jack shit! You're hooked into my signature, you're downloading my knowledge like an interdimensional parasite! Admit it!"
"It's not like that!" Kaelen exclaimed, frustration overriding his fear. "I'm not a copy. I... I died. In my original universe, on a planet called Earth. And I woke up in another body, in another galaxy. This knowledge... it just appeared. Like a template in my head that's been filling up."
Rick stopped and let out a loud, bitter laugh. "Oh, please! Reincarnation? Are we really going down that road? Next you'll tell me to talk to crystals and align my chakras! Consciousness is a chemical phenomenon, not a ghost looking for a new body to possess! You're a software bug, an echo with a messiah complex!"
Rick's family watched in silence. Beth, arms crossed, seemed torn between embarrassment at her father's outburst and intense curiosity. Morty simply looked terrified.
"You're a nobody," Rick snarled, stepping closer to Kaelen until their faces were almost touching. "You have no real past. You have no parents. You're a reflection. A ghost in my machine."
That was the last straw. Everything Kaelen had fought to maintain—his identity, his love for Padmé, his humanity—was reduced to nothing by the man from whom, ironically, his power originated. In an act of pure, desperate self-affirmation, Kaelen looked him directly in the eyes.
"You're wrong," he said, his voice trembling but filled with unshakeable conviction. "I had a life. I had a past. I had a mother."
Rick rolled his eyes with exaggerated drama. "Oh, sure! Wonderful! And what was her name? Aphrodite? Frigg? Sarah Connor?"
Kaelen didn't look away. The memory of his previous life, the face of his true mother, came to him with painful clarity. The woman who had raised him, who had bought him his first chemistry set, whose love was the only pure memory left of his original existence.
"Her name was Diane," Kaelen said softly.
The effect was instant and absolute.
Rick Sanchez froze.
It wasn't a dramatic movement. It was the complete and sudden cessation of everything. The cynicism vanished from his eyes. The mocking smirk disappeared from his lips. The hand holding his flask stopped mid-air. The slight sway of his body, a product of alcohol and arrogance, ceased. He became utterly still, like a statue.
For an instant, the loudest, most chaotic man in the multiverse was utterly silent.
His family noticed instantly. Beth straightened, her wine glass forgotten. She knew every twitch, every nuance of her father. And never, in her entire life, had she seen him like this. It was as if someone had hit an off switch in his soul.
"Dad?" Beth whispered, her own voice filled with fearful confusion.
Padmé, who had been bracing herself to defend Kaelen, saw the change. In that terrible man's eyes, she saw a flicker of something she didn't expect: a pain so deep and ancient it seemed capable of swallowing entire galaxies.
Rick finally moved. He slowly lowered his flask. When his eyes met Kaelen's again, all the mockery, all the anger, all the arrogance were gone. In their place was a cold, dangerous intensity that was a thousand times more terrifying.
His voice, when he spoke, was no longer a drunken shout. It was a whisper, sharp as obsidian.
"Say that again."
"My mother... her name was Diane," Kaelen said again, not fully understanding the power of the words he had just uttered.
Rick took a step back, his mind—the mind that could calculate the end of universes—struggling to process an impossible coincidence. This echo, this anomaly from another galaxy, this ghost bearing his genetic signature, somehow knew the name of his dead wife. The anchor of his own grief, the origin of his nihilism. The name he never, ever, spoke.
The power on the street had shifted irreversibly. Kaelen, unknowingly, had gone from being a mere technical problem to becoming the most personal and painful mystery in Rick Sanchez's life.
"Explain it to me," Rick demanded, his voice a low, deadly growl. "Slowly. Why... why do you know that name?"