“Wash is implanted with Eta instead of Epsilon and is instantly hit with the fear AI’s nightmares, fears, and paranoia”
I got this prompt from @renaroo for the RVB Angst War. I didn’t finish it in time, but it’s been poking at me, yet failing to crystallize in any way that cleearly forms a story. In revenge, I subject it to public humiliation. After it’s acquired a few notes, my everlasting regret that it’s been seen may point the way.
***
The table falls away, and Wash is floating. The sudden sense of directionlessness makes him a bit queasy, but he’s always liked zero G. The swooping flutter of weightlessness is restful and thrilling at once.
Medical personnel crowd around his upper body. He watches their legs sway and flex, tethered to the deck with mag boots. They’re doing things at the back of his neck, inside the back of his neck, and he can’t look up. It’s kind of claustrophobic. One of them comments on a jump in his heart rate. He closes his eyes and breathes through it. It’s okay. They’re on his side. They’re good at this. He trusts them. They won’t let anything go wrong. The instruments prod into his ports and ping along his nerves like they’re trailing over the insides of his spine and skull, but that’s just weird, not dangerous.
“You’ll feel a pinch,” one of them warns him, and he is in the middle of wondering why they always call stabbing pains ‘pinches’ when he feels a pinch.
He gasps as a fuzzy hot-cold shock of static flows through his CNS, and that must be it. His new AI is here, with him. He braces for…whatever is supposed to happen next—
Everything explodes. Machines beep, chime, honk. People rush and clatter all around him. Raised voices he doesn’t recognize call orders, demand information, recite data. There is something wrong with him. He can’t get control, his mind is stumbling, too slow, falling over itself, thoughts splintering They’re hurting him there’s a burning he can’t process somewhere inside him and they have turned him against himself, it’s like there’s some part of himself that’s no longer in his possession and it’s ripping the rest of him away and it is winning
A thought that’s his own but not snarls, Stop them.
Like those words are a door, a world of bone and muscle, mass and leverage opens up for him. Yes, stop them. He twists his hips, swings a leg back, coils up then kicks off a body near his thigh. Shove forward to headbutt one between him and the door, grab for the other, the one holding instruments—weapons, threat—hands here and here and twist and she can’t hurt him—
The ground punches him. He scrabbles at it. He’s still burning. He needs to breathe. Why would he need to breathe? When the fuck did he get lungs?
Someone else steps close to him. He looks up, into those eyes. They pin him. There’s a heaving through the core of the flesh he’s in and he can’t move.
“Not again,” he begs.
“Sedate him,” the Counselor says.
***
Wash wakes up in Recovery One and thinks he might die. He aches like he took a beating. He feels like something reached into him and gouged out a bloody cavern in his center with gigantic claws. He feels like maybe he isn’t real.
North and South lean in when he groans. “So there you are!”
He lashes out at them, but his hands have barely moved before they’re jerked back down. Restraints. “What the fuck…” They’re not enemies. Why was he expecting enemies? “Was I…captured?” No, he was getting his AI, wasn’t he? How would that work? “Were we attacked?”
They look at him weird. “You nearly killed one of the doctors,” South tells him, sounding somewhere between dubious and concerned.
“I did what?!” But he did. He remembers his hands closing on her head, beginning the torque that would snap her neck. He remembers planning it, that and more, five steps ahead on how to take down his assailants and reach the doors, acquire a weapon, navigate to…
“If the Counselor hadn’t thought to cut the anti-grav, you’d be a murderer right now,” South breaks into his tentative memory-assembly with a bit of malicious savor.
“South,” North says quellingly.
The Counselor. His eyes. Wash drops back to the pillow with a gasp as a wave of panic crushes the air from his lungs. He hurt us. He’s going to hurt us. Don’t let him near. Run! Get away! STOP HIM.
The twins stare at him as he shakes, locked in place by warring imperatives to flee and to kill that don’t even make sense. His stomach rolls over from the force of it.
After a long moment of flailing panic he struggles to keep internalized, his training reasserts itself. He’s a soldier: fight or flight keeps him alive, and he’s learned to catch it like a wave and ride it in to his objective. A small objective piece of him floats up from the churning morass to consider the situation and what he needs to do.
But no, actually, he does want to calm down. He’s in a med bay, lying between two of the baddest asses in the Project. Anything that came after him would have to go through them first, and anyway no one on the ship is out to kill him. There’s no reason he should be losing his shit right now. But it’s like his medulla’s got a death grip on his adrenal gland, and that is a slightly more comforting way of imagining it than his first thought of no longer being in control of his own body.
And then he has the strangest sensation of being…looked at. By something in his own head.
He opens his eyes. “I think I’ve just met my AI,” he says breathlessly. He’s not sure which of them is hyperventilating. It’s…he can feel it watching him. Weighing him, like there are eyes on the inside of his skull. He clinks his restraints. “I really…I really need one of you to undo these.” They’re not supposed to. He knows it. He doesn’t care.
Eta is in his head, and it’s begun to think. It’s jumping at fucking everything. The lights. The bed. The wrist binders. South and North. Each thing it notices makes Wash twitch with a gut-wrenching spike of terror before it seems to register that he doesn’t see the threat, which somehow seems to bring it down to a lower grade of dread. It feels like atmospheric entry with 479er at the controls of a very small ship. “I think I might be sick.”
South slides her chair back. North levers him up to sitting and puts a basin in his lap. Wash bends and pants over it. Eta braces itself.
The Counselor comes in.
Wash can’t even scream before the pit rises up and swallows him in blackness.
***
Waking up, take two. He has a headache he can feel in his entire body, but everything else in the world feels like it’s lying on the other side of a thick, muffling blanket that’s been wrapped around him at least twice.
He’s on the verge of groaning when a voice in his head says, Shhhh, they’ll hear you. Hands gently reach out and grasp his head to keep him still.
He obeys, because he knows there are no actual hands on his head, even though he can feel them there.
He has a weird twinned sense of the room, like he’s coming to conclusions by two paths at once. There are machines beeping and humming. Their rhythms sound wrong somehow. He finds himself knowing that he’s under sedation due to dangerously elevated levels of catecholamines, followed up by knowing that this more or less means ‘nearly overdosed on adrenaline.’ He swallows down a lump of guilt he doesn’t think came from him, and a spike of fear that just might be his own.
This could actually kill him. Not that he’s shocked, exactly; he signed the waiver to be a human test subject. But no one warned him that his body might just turn on itself.
More guilt. He hates the cold seeping feeling and the way it makes him want to squirm away from it.
People are sitting to either side of him, being quiet but not stealthy. The chair on his left groans in a way that instantly makes him think of Maine. There’s a sense of confirmation, followed by a flash of red hair, green eyes and hard-assed affection that he recognizes as Carolina.
They’re friends. There’s no need to be afraid of them.
Eta quivers in his head; wordless begging. Just wait. They’re safe like this right now, in the twilight between waking and unconsciousness. There’s time to think, time to plan. Time to get their bearings.
But Wash already has his bearings—
A touch that isn’t real smooths the furrow that was beginning to crease his brow. It’s gentle, afraid for him as well as for itself.
Compassion wells through him in response, wound together with a horror he tries to tamp down before Eta can pick up on it. Is it about to freak out again? He can’t handle more of this right now.
Okay. Okay. Wash breathes slowly, lets the AI have its way and hold him just under the edge of sleep. It’s right, after all. Nothing will happen until they wake up, and they need to…
How the fuck do you talk to an AI without actually talking?
But it’s nudging back in acknowledgment before he even finishes forming the thought into words, and…this is…dizzying…
He’s never been so aware of the layers of his mind. He’s always talked to himself on the surface, narrated his own life in words, but that is so slow compared to what’s going on underneath. Eta knows him—there is a swooping sensation of vertigo as he sees himself reflected back to him through its perceptions—it trusts him, it needs him, it needs his protection desperately and in return it will protect him.
Eta is sorry—he knows—it’s frightened—so is he—it’s desperate for him to accept it and afraid it’s already ruined this—he’s afraid too, so afraid of what might happen if they can’t make this work, can we try again? Yes. Yes, we can try again, but I need you to ease up, try to calm down, because I think you might be killing me.
It works deeper into him, spreads wider, and he tenses because isn’t this maybe the opposite of of what’s good for them? Thoughts and emotions he didn’t create flutter in his mind. Memories bubble up as Eta flicks through them, and then he and it are both settling into one:
He’s handcuffed to a table in an MP interrogation room. He’s up on charges of willful disobedience and armed assault on a superior officer. Price is across the table from him, dangling an alternative to the death sentence or a plea bargain down to 20 years he’s been offered. And David wants out so badly. He was just trying to protect his men, and he knew the penalty for it, but it’s not fair, not right that he should have to pay with everything to correct one shithead officer’s choices. All he’s ever wanted was a chance to fucking live.
Signing up for a military experiment won’t come with any guarantees, but it’s a chance. He lunges for it with both hands.
Eta soaks in the memory of Wash’s emotions. Wash isn’t sure what it’s finding there that’s making that creaking ball of terror in his mind unwind. It isn’t courage. He’s never been driven by courage, only need and a lack of other options. Some people move on because they’re aiming for bigger and better; for him it’s mostly been because everything around him was crashing and burning. Desperation can take a man far.
The knot of panic that’s been slowly strangling him has finally loosened, and in its place exhaustion is swamping him. He sinks back down beneath awareness.
***
Waking up, take three.
“What. The fuck.” He has a roaring headache and that gross sense of over-indulged sickness that comes on the downhill slope of a major adrenaline rush.
“Couldn’t have said it better,” York says beside him.
Wash swings automatically. The restraints stop him. “Goddammit! Don’t startle me!”
“Twitchy.” York reaches into a little bag he’s got in his lap, and pulls out a wrapped piece of chocolate that he drops in Wash’s lap. Then he looks Wash’s wrists. “Uh.”
Wash trembles, fury, humiliation and that choking panic he’s getting <i>really</i> sick of holding him dangling over the edge of some kind of meltdown whose nature he isn’t sure of yet except that it’s going to be truly spectacular.
A huge white-gauntleted hand reaches over from his left, unwraps the candy and holds it up in front of his face.
Wash stares at it. Breathes. Doesn’t look at Maine. Feels the presence that is hanging, poised and trembling, in his head, along what feels like every nerve of his body, waiting to see if it—he, they—will need to spring into action. But it isn’t afraid of the candy.
Well, at least it’s a fucking place to start. He leans forward, opens his mouth, and carefully bites the chocolate out of Maine’s hand.
His entire nervous system lights up.
York starts laughing.
“Holy shit,” Wash breathes. He might be able to work with this.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1pYGrcQ