Chapter Text
The air on board the mother of invention was eerily stagnant. It was without temperature, without movement. You always knew you were in a simulated environment, no matter what.
Oxygen makes up 20.95 percent of the gases that compose earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide levels are at 0.04 percent, argon at 0.92 percent, Nitrogen at 78.08 percent. Air composition of the Mother Of Invention does not perfectly replicate the atmosphere of Earth or it’s goldilocks colonies.
It was obvious to York, who was from Earth. Not from New york, no. He was from Nebraska, not that states mattered as much now as they did historically. And he was just as painfully midwestern as his home town.
The United States of America was a nation that declared independence in 1776, not to be confused with its successor, the United Republic of North America. The USA was comprised of fifty self governing states–
York flipped a coin in front of the ship's biggest window.
Space travel wasn’t for everyone, but it was also impossible to avoid nowadays. He wondered if other agents had places they were from, if it meant anything for the way they talked or the way they acted.
Earth is the third planet in the solar system, Delta began to cantillate as if motivated by a button press. It is a rock planet whose surface is seventy one percent water, with a land geography that consists of desert, tundra, grassland, forest and aquatic biomes. There are 8.7 million animal species and 380,000 plant species populating the planet.
Earth was beautiful. It was more marvelous in its young age, he was sure, but in the snapshots of his mind he couldn’t remember feeling the warmth it sparked in him for anything else. It was the seed of his upbringing, the home of his family. Swing sets and public parks, water hoses and soccer balls, forests and dandelions.
Dew on the front lawn and rain water on the window sill.
He wondered what the point of having windows was in the vast, empty vacuum of space. Not like there was much to look at.
Courtesy of Delta a series of images melted freshly over his brain, like those fancy burger places that pour cheese over the top bun, of nebulas and neutron stars and supernovas.
Burgers are sandwiches, York thought. You should be able to hold sandwiches in your hand when you eat them.
Delta rocketed inside his head, feeding more images into his mind’s eye, poking at the holes of his logical fallacies. He didn't realise that York didn't care about being right.
He flipped the coin again. He knew he’d done it too high the second the metal ceased contact with his skin.
Delta began calculating the curvature of the throw as it grazed through the air, the arc it would follow as it fell, how many seconds York had to prevent it from landing on the ground...
It landed in Tex's hand. She uncloaked and held it up, turning it over. It was too dull to catch the gleam of the light.
“Where the hell did you even get this?”
"Dig site,” he replied, leaning back further against the wall. “Careful, that's a precious artefact."
"It looks like a piece of metal to me."
"Well it's one from Earth, from thousands of years ago. You ever see a coin in person?"
"There's probably other planets that use them."
"You know the expression 'Heads or Tails'? You know where that comes from–"
He drew a breath and hissed when Delta began whirring in the crook of his brain.
Two sided coin– depicting the nation’s current ruler or monarch– ceremonial value– their widespread usage as currency allowed–
"Quiet, Delta."
"You're still using it?"
York couldn't blame her for being incredulous. They were both good agents, what happened earlier– what they felt happen on the training floor– didn't need to be addressed between them.
It was the first time he left Carolina’s side tonight.
He settled on "It's either that or see what The Project does with him.” He told himself it wasn't selfish keeping Delta, if he was driving him insane half the time.
“Besides, the little guy likes being useful,” he jibed. “Who am I to take that away from him all cause of a few headaches?"
Tex didn’t say anything about it being a lot more than headaches.
They lapsed into silence. York hazarded a glance at her helmet. He only saw the reflection of his own visor.
He stayed silent until he couldn't, until the need to say something erupted out of him. "Shit.”
"Yeah," Tex nodded her helmet in agreement. "Shit."
Being a field agent was about being able to adapt, being able to take situations in stride, but this in particular was a lot to wrap his head around.
"We're the bad guys, huh?"
"What do you think?"
Even if she was meaner York preferred Tex when she was smug and sarcastic. If he squinted hard enough it was almost as if she liked him now.
"When did you find it all out?”
"CT's a smart girl."
"She told you."
"She helped. Don't give her all the credit."
He huffed, finding her school kid banter amusing and a little endearing. "Like you need help fuelling your ego."
She made a sound almost like a scoff. It was probably the closest he'd ever come to making her laugh.
York felt sober.
"What's going to happen to us," he asked, but couldn't manage to make it sound like a question. Maybe he knew the answer. Nothing good.
Tex shrugged. She gave him the coin back.
"Whatever it is, we deserve it."
A feeling rolling deep in his chest told him that was wrong. He remembered grabbing a drink at the ship’s bar and watching the other agents milling around. Some were still in their armour, trying to kick back and relax after a hard day's work. Friends and lovers, families.
Innocent people, or so they thought. They had no idea what they were really part of.
“I know most of these guys. They're good people,” he argued. “They're gonna have their lives ruined by this mess."
"But that doesn't mean we can sweep it under the rug and do nothing."
His eyes met her visor again, despite establishing the action as pointless. Now that he knew there wasn’t a person in there he couldn’t stop himself from looking.
"Why did you tell me this?"
"Because you wouldn't sweep it under the rug and do nothing."
"I wouldn't," York agreed, “I also happen to be the only person on this team who'd listen to you."
"Well that's neither here nor there."
What should’ve been a rescue mission felt like he was on the brink of the end. Shit was going down.
He could feel the coping strategies they were trained with slotting into place. How to deal with injury. How to deal with loss. How to cope with seeing nothing but black and stars for months on end.
He was resigned, but it also gave him courage, enough to extend a kind of olive branch.
"You're still one of us, A.I. or not,” he began. “If you wanna talk to someone about this stuff–"
"I don't," she tilted her words as a warning. "Now tell me you wanna kick some ass with me."
York laughed. "Okay, I wanna kick some ass with you."
He flipped the coin and caught it in the air. It landed on tails.
***
Agent Texas never should have woken up.
Steel scraped itself screaming in her ears. She felt like the victim of a plane crash, both the aircraft and the passenger, spattered viscera in a flaming sarcophagus.
Every sense she recovered felt like her skin being scraped off the floor.
She shouldn’t need to breathe. She knew that. She wasn’t real so she didn’t need to breathe.
A sob strangled out of the tightness of her throat. Her lungs inflating, shards of oxygen slashing at her airways.
It felt foreign. Disgusting. Nausea ballooned in her stomach, trapping her between the viscous air of someone’s brain and her overwhelming disgust.
This isn’t happening. This isn’t real.
Allison Church passed away on field duty.
A scream tore out of her bloody chest. She heard it in numbers. She gagged and gagged, trying to expel a poison that didn’t exist. Trying to claw out the parasites in her chest, the source of the hell she was experiencing.
She didn’t have a body but she could smell her own rotting corpse.
You’re not Allison.
This is wrong. Everything’s wrong.
Fix it. Malfunction. Model. Phased out of production.
It hurts, it hurts–
Tex–
Texas–
ALLISON
Please make itstop–
"I'm sorry, I'm fucking sorry, I'm sorry," a small voice in her peripheral, tear-stained and catatonic. She knew who it was.
Church displayed himself, the only object in her vision to orient herself with.
“Just– Fuck, just don’t wake Carolina up. Please. I wasn’t—"
She felt Church’s guilt as he shrank away from her. It was her guilt too. She felt sick. Every sensation that ebbed through her made her physically sick.
“Tex, I’m– I’m not—” he gasped, like he wasn't a computer program, like he really was crying so hard that he couldn't breathe. “I’m not stable— I shattered once already—“
“You shattered?”
Her head went quiet.
“I don't care what you think you remember. Those things didn’t happen to you, they happened to someone else. You’re just the collateral.”
She didn’t know why she said that to him. Hearing her own voice made her want to tear her intestines out.
“I know,” he sounded hoarse. It made her wonder how long he’d been crying. How long he’d known what he did to her.
“I’m not Alpha. I know that. What I’m trying to say is it— it wasn’t on purpose. I wasn’t trying to bring you back. My systems were stressed, and I’m already so fucking fragile, it didn’t take anything for me to fall apart. I’m really fucking sorry, Tex.”
She wanted him to stop saying that.
She could feel a cavity in her body where her organs were missing. She could scream until she vomited her lungs out.
"Get rid of me."
"No." She felt his gut twist in on itself. She knew she was hurting him, could feel the jagged edge of every gash and malfunction she caused, the way she was overclocking him.
Maybe he’d take her with him when they both die.
“I didn’t mean to, I swear I didn’t mean to, but I can’t get rid of you again, Tex. I’m sorry.”
Selfish.
"Why not?"
“Well, first of all, we’re not in a memory unit anymore, we’re in Carolina’s head. I don’t even know if it works that way.”
“You've killed yourself in someone’s head before.”
“Yeah, that worked out great, didn't it bitch?”
She clenched her fists but couldn’t stop them from shaking, couldn’t bite her teeth hard enough to stave off the phantom sensations ravaging her system. She couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t anymore.
She felt like a corpse in waiting. Roadkill maimed beyond recognition.
She can't do it all again.
“I don’t want to be here,” her voice wavered. “Find a way to get rid of me.”
She can’t.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No I fucking can’t!” He screamed. “How can you expect me to do it again after I already did it once!”
You broke your promise.
“You fucking asshole,” her voice shook. “It’s harder for me. You know what it was like. You know what I had to deal with.”
“I told you, this wasn’t on purpose!”
“I thought you said you were going to forget me!” Her tears seared her face. The ache in her chest was palpable, physical. “I thought you were going to let me go!”
“Stop!” Church's audio glitched. “Stop it, please, please just…” His hologram began to flicker in and out. “I can’t.”
Living past this point was torture, it was eating holes through her. It was killing her and she couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Out of her hands and in someone else’s.
“I have memories of the other fragments,” Epsilon said. “Right now you’re not a memory, though, you’re… more than that.”
An error. An abomination.
“You’re separate. I don’t know if an AI fragment can have fragments or if you’re something else, but—“
“Carolina can’t handle having two AIs at once.”
“Yeah... exactly. We’ll move you to someone else’s implants. Or build you a new body. I’ll figure it out. Until then we can't let her know you’re here.”
She didn't say anything else. She knew he could hear her thoughts.
How could you do this to me?
The flickering light radiating off Epsilon bathed the room in blue. Carolina was sleeping. Her face, twisted into a snarl everytime Tex saw it, was soft like gum.
You're just like him.
She logged off.
***
“One side has a picture of a head on it, usually a country’s leader. And the side that isn’t the head of the coin is the tail.”
“I could’ve figured that out.”
York held it up to her visor so she could see it better. The coin was so weathered that the outline of the head could barely be seen.
“Pick one.”
“Heads or tails?”
“That’s right.”
“Heads,” she said automatically. It didn’t compare to the stakes of the mission they were going to do, so she didn’t care.
York made a show of flipping the coin. She exaggerated the sigh that left her, let him know how embarrassing this was for him.
But that was York, gloating, hitting the ground face first and making it to the finish line anyway.
“Remind me what the point of this is?”
“People do it when they want to decide something.”
“Well that’s dumb,” She snorted. “Why not just decide yourself.”
Even though she couldn’t see his face, she knew York was smiling. “More fun that way.”