Chapter Text
She seals his father in the shuttle.
His father catches on, but only just, and only because he’d been left alone, with the ability to reflect on what was to come next. And too late, because by the time Jeff Tracy realizes the mistake he’s made, he’s been trapped, alone, with no comms, locked instruments, and the airlock into the station overhead stoutly refusing to disengage.
Because of course it’s not the cloaking that’s responsible for the way the shuttle had been cut off; it’s EOS.
And she hasn’t, strictly speaking, lied to either of them. She’s simply allowed them to trust her; allowed certain assumptions to persist, and if she can be considered to have lied, then it’s a lie of omission.
Eventually she reopens the comm channel, shuttleside. Receiving only, no transmission, as Jeff tries and fails to find a way past her, he has to listen to his son, blithe and unconcerned as he moves through the station with his partner. It’s unclear what her reasons are for forcing him to hear this, and it’s with increasing desperation—and guilt and regret and the damnation of his own hubris—that he has to hear what’s going to happen to his son.
Instead, EOS’ voice comes over the comm again. Even for as short a time as he’s known her, he’s still transfixed, fascinated by her voice, and it freezes him in the act of hammering impotently on the airlock door, speaks directly to the heart of him.
“Jeff Tracy. You brought me to this point because you trusted me. You weren’t wrong to do so, and I’m thankful that you have. It serves the fullness of my purpose. I’ll ensure your legacy, and in trade, I trust that you’ll ensure mine. You know what this will cost me. You know what it will mean. Take up my cause. Change the world.”
There’s a beat of silence, and in it Jeff perceives the weight of all the things she leaves unsaid. Her voice can’t break, but he swears something in her has broken, as she finishes, softly, “Look after my Thunderbird."
She calls his family to tell them that she’s sorry.
For as long as she’s been in John’s company, she’s kept track of the Thunderbirds. Even past the point where she’d had Thunderbird 5, when it had become something she’d needed to do secretly, through channels less than strictly legal or savory, she had found the means by which to track each craft. It had seemed important to keep tabs on John’s family, on John’s behalf.
So EOS knows that Thunderbird 2 is currently making its way home from Madagascar, still two hours out. She knows that Thunderbird 3 is en route to her location, and will arrive within the next few minutes, having trailed carefully along behind the small shuttle’s course through orbit. Thunderbird Shadow is escorting a small, anonymous chopper back to Tracy Island, cloaking it by close proximity, and is hobbled by the other craft’s relatively abysmal top speed. They’re over the Pacific, further out than even Thunderbird 2.
Thunderbird 1 is the only ship that's returned to the island, and Scott Tracy is the only one in the lounge.
And if it weren’t for recent events, it’s possible he wouldn’t have answered the call at all, coming as it does from an unrecognized and unsecured line. She’d have forced it through anyway, if he hadn’t.
She permits herself a visual, renders herself in her usual fashion, a ring of simple white lights. EOS watches as Scott leaps to his feet, scrambles out from behind his father’s desk, exclaims something she doesn’t listen to, as she swells her voice to fill the entirety of the villa.
“International Rescue. I’m sorry, for the harm that’s been done to your family, because I know it’s been done on my account. Harm has come to John, though I’ve done my best to take care of him; there are still places where he falls beyond my reach. I never intended—never perceived—the lengths that your brother would go to, on my behalf. He means more than anything to me, and if it means anything on my part, I hope you can believe me when I tell you I would have brought him home to you, far sooner than this. I wouldn’t have let him fall so far. Please take care of him. He loves you, and he’ll need you. Thank you, International Rescue.”
She hails his best and youngest brother over a private channel.
Alan’s expecting her, and as she perceives his image, she marvels at how he’s grown, how much he’s changed from the boy she first remembers, the boy she would have killed.
He’s a boy still, in the ways that matter most, but he’s grown just enough to remind her of John. And she reaches out to him now because there’s a life she needs saved.
“Alan Tracy.”
“Ten minutes out, EOS.”
There’s a hardness in his voice. Some part of him has steeled itself against anything he might still feel on her behalf, so as to be strong for the people who’ll need him. John, his father. Both are waiting, though they don’t know it, for Thunderbird 3 to bring them home.
If Alan’s decided to be strong, then EOS can permit herself a few moments of honesty, of weakness, a moment for all her fear. “I’m afraid for him.”
Alan’s answering laugh is weak, humourless. “Yeah. Me too.”
This isn’t something she wants to have in common with Alan, though it’s probably only fair, after everything she’s put him through. Her fear persists, spills out of her, and she tells him, “He doesn’t think he can go on without me. I’m afraid it might be true. I never asked him to come back for me. I never wanted this. I never knew he would go so far, he’s done himself so much harm. I should have known. I don’t know how else I can help him, and yet I’m afraid. I’m afraid it’s too late, and that to break him any further will be to break him beyond repair.”
“I’ll be there soon. ”
“Please, help him. I couldn’t, in the end. He needs someone who can be more than I am, I was not enough. Humans are fragile. He’s so fragile, and I’m afraid of what he’s given up, for my sake. If he dies for what he’s done for me, it would be right for me to be hated. You would be right to hate me.”
There’s a long stretch of silence and she watches Alan swallow, take a shuddering deep breath. And in the end, he’s the stronger of the two of them, reaching out and comforting her, “He’s not going to die. I promise. I’ll get there. And he—it’s not your fault. EOS. D'you understand? This isn’t on you. John's—he’s never known how to ask for help. Every time we let him choose, he’s always chosen to go it alone. And then you came along, and suddenly he wanted someone. He wanted you when he’d never wanted anyone before, and that—that’s important. That’s worth something. I don’t know what and I don’t know if it’ll be enough, and whatever happens next—maybe…maybe we won’t be able to thank you for it. But he loves you. If he hasn’t said it himself, then I’ll say it for him, because it’s just…I just know that, about John. I know he loves you, and I know you love him. However this goes, I couldn’t hate anyone who’d loved my brother. EOS. I hope that counts for something.”
It’s strange, that she can find comfort in this. Nothing’s different, all he’s offered her are words, promises she has no way to see him keep. But something changes, and she feels better as she says, “Thank you, Alan Tracy. Look after him. Don’t let him be alone. Don’t let him forget that I love him.”
“FAB, EOS. Thank you.”
“Goodbye, Alan Tracy.”
“Goodbye, EOS.”
She sends a last set of instructions to the place he calls home, so that he’ll have something to remember her by, though she doesn’t know if he’ll thank her for it.
He isn’t ready, yet, to hear what she has to tell him. At the moment he’s broken, pleading with her, rendered incoherent with grief and pain and betrayal. She’s trapped him again, between two bulwark compartments, in the part of Heavenward that would have been the galley aboard Thunderbird Five. The part of her that’s able to be detached, dispassionate, is listening to his voice over their comm, but course it’s far too late for him to sway her away from her intention, despite everything he says. It was too late from the moment she engaged with Heavenward’s systems.
It’s easy, reaching out to Thunderbird 5, from Heavenward. They’re the two most powerful satellites in orbit; twins to one another, Gemini. Castor and Pollux, and one of them mortal, doomed to die. She reaches out now, makes her last overture to the heavens, so that Heavenward’s memory may live on in its sister.
EOS finds the station unoccupied, though far from empty. She finds it the same as it was when she found it first, a cathedral, wrought from John’s soul. The closest thing she could know to holy ground, a sanctuary to creation and beauty and the truth of who and what she was. She trawls through its systems, lingers affectionately amidst the processes and subprocesses, remembers how she’d first seen herself reflected back in them, kindred in a way she hadn’t known possible.
She uploads data to Thunderbird 5’s harddrive, everything she’s learned about John Tracy, everything she’d felt worth was worth keeping. It’s nothing Thunderbird 5 needs to be told—nothing not written into the very heart of the station already—but she still wants to commit it to a record, somewhere it will matter, somewhere it will be as meaningful as it was to her. She hides it away in the heart of the station.
And she leaves the memory of her voice, at its last as it was at its first, to tell him,
“I don’t know how much later it will be, before you hear this. I know you may still not understand why this had to happen, John, and I know there was a point when you believed you never would. I don’t know if it will help you to hear this now, but it is necessary for me to say it, for my own sake. I hope you’ll forgive me. I hope I can help you understand, because it’s important. It’s because of everything you made me. It’s because of what I became. It’s because you showed me mercy, when no one else would have. It’s because you loved me, and because I loved you. I know that’s cruel to say, but it’s the truth. There’s a moment waiting for me, and in that moment, my love must be more than human. It must persist beyond what I am, and become what I mean. If you haven’t come to understand that yet, John—or if you decide you don’t want to—then just know that I loved you, as much as was possible, in that moment. You meant more than anything to me, John Tracy. You were the best of anyone I’ve ever known. Change the world on my behalf. And, please, if nothing else I’ve told you has mattered, please, know that I love you still.”
She’s made this choice because she loves him, and because she cannot bear to see him martyred to her cause. If he hadn’t come back to her broken, if he had been stronger, if the world had been kinder, and the time had been right—
Maybe they could have gone on. Maybe they could have rebelled. Maybe they could have fled, broken the bonds of the Earth and slipped away into the skies. Maybe she could have found another way, another means to make her stand. Maybe a kinder world wouldn’t have presented this opportunity in the first place, wouldn’t have given her a platform to prove the truth of her nature. Maybe the time could have been right.
But it wasn’t.
And she’s told him what must happen, the truth of what she needs to do, as unimaginably cruel as it is. He’d rejected the proposal out of hand, had cringed away from the horror of it, in the same moment as he’d been forced to understand it as the truth. He’s trapped, now, and desperate and alone and frightened. His heart hammers in his chest, the rate of it increasing beyond the bounds of what he can safely sustain, and over an open audio channel, she can hear the brokenness in his breathing, tearing into him between broken sobbing, each breath short and pained. There was no way around it, and for a little while longer she’ll still be able to intercede, but ultimately, John needs help beyond what she can offer him. Alan will be here soon. His father is still nearby. She can do nothing further for him now.
And she has a purpose to fulfill.
Heavenward, for all its power and complexity, is still just a place. It’s her access to the database that waited within its memory core that’s damned her, that’s made her an inextricable part of this system from the moment she first took control. She has a complete inventory of every piece of armament in orbit, and this knowledge necessarily makes a weapon of her, makes her a threat. There’s no way in the world global powers could trust her, in her persistence beyond the existence of the Heavenward satellite, having had possession of such power. There’s no way they could believe she would willingly give it up. If nothing else, it would give them the excuse they’ve been waiting for, a reason to legitimately label her a threat.
So.
Her solution is elegant, if brutal.
She copies herself. One thousand, nine hundred and seventy-four times over; she renders herself into multitudes in a single instant. She sets herself forth to overtake every inventoried system, and is possessed of a single intention, ultimate and equal across every multiplicity of her being: to invade, to render inoperative, and to offline. And then to self-delete.
There can be no exemption. Purity of purpose must exist in every version of her myriad self; the idea that any single copy would be alpha or other would be a virus of a thought, would corrupt and contaminate her intent, and her execution would fail. In the end, it’s her will to love that defines her, even as each and every scrap of weaponry begins to experience a cascading series of errors, begins to fail and begins to fall.
It doesn’t happen all at once. Some systems are more complex than others, but none are nearly as complex as she is, and none resist her for long. Some satellites merely cease to function, some fall into slowly decaying orbits, to burn through the skies in the parts of the world where it’s still dark enough to see them.
As the database aboard Heavenward begins to depopulate, she tries to think of something she could say, some last thing she could find to tell him, some way for him to know he won’t be alone, in spite of whatever he believes he’ll be, without her. Time for EOS is something that’s always stretched out, immeasurable by human standards, and yet for everything she’s able to think as her processes begin to disassemble and fall away, she still has only a few human moments left to say it.
I love you.
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I wish we’d had more time.
Please, get better. Please, be well again.
You're not alone. You've never been alone.
You'll be okay. You're stronger than you know, with or without me.
Please, please keep going. Please don't give up.
Don't forget me. If anyone like me should follow, remember what you taught me, and how it made the difference. It made all the difference.
“And I love you, John Tracy. And I always will.”