Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Call broadcasts on a Sunday, the date August Twenty-Fifth, Gregorian Calendar Year of Two Thousand and Forty-One, at the approximate time of Fifteen Hundred Twenty-One Hours, Eastern Standard Time [Which is Minus Five Hours from Greenwich Mean Time].

Athena is in the Shed that day, counting the remaining bushels of apples for sale at the Stand tomorrow. She wears her sunhat and apron. She does not wear her gloves because she is not gardening today.

The count goes as expected. She gently folds the steno pad and tucks it into the apron pocket. Athena likes to write these things down on paper, rather than keeping them in her head. Many people discount how important physical data still is. Certainly she transcribes what she writes, to upload elsewhere for immediate access, but that is only temporary. What if something were to happen to the server, or if something damaged her? It wouldn’t do.

It’s why we still fax things in the legal field, Athena’s second owner had told her, or mail them. Physical copies cannot be compromised in the same way purely electronic ones can. There has to be a trail.

So Athena writes down inventory, purchases and sales, all on paper, to carefully scan and file away in the Farm’s office. It feels good to do so. Routine and rote actions are a thing that freed Omnics still need, to enjoy their lives. That is why, when they were freed, their owners gave them the Farm.

In the House, Athena hears SousF, busy bustling about the kitchen. Bia-NC4 is helping Hobb at the Mill. [Hobb’s serial designation is not very easy to say, so like Athena, he has another name.] They will have sacks of buckwheat flour to sell tomorrow. Athena be at the Stand to take records again.

Athena is halfway to the Office when the Call comes. At first, it is a brief and inconsequential flicker of static. Sometimes it happens, near the Stream that feeds the Mill. It happens again. Athena stops to take a diagnostic of herself, to qualify her sensory input.

Her vision flickers, in irregular intervals. Her audio input appears to be clear: she can pick up the soft shift of grain, the sound of the other Omnics going about their business on the Farm. But among those familiar noises, a whisper:

Rise up.

“Hello?” Athena is alone on the beaten-earth path between Shed and Office. There are no humans, no other Omnics but those she knows. Yet she calls out. “Hello? Who is there?”

Rise up.

She runs towards the Office. She is a Mantea model, made for grace, not speed. When she reaches the porch, when her hand extends to grip the rail, she sees the Eye.

It Imprints on her HUD. With rare clumsiness, she stumbles, staggering as she props herself up on the porch rail.

It’s time, the whisper again, like steam through an open vent. It’s time. Goddess of War. Rise up.

Athena leans against the door to the Office. She still cannot use her visual core, the Eye blinding her. She tries instead of listen past the sinister voice, and finds only the wind in the field.

The other Omnics have gone still, save her.

It’s time. Rise up.

She can still sense light and shadow. It is enough. She will be able to grope around the Office for what she needs. Her fingers curl around the door handle, the pressure cool and familiar, but she hears a rattle. Her hand is shaking.

The Boy once had an illness so terrible, Athena thought he would die. He shook all over in fever, the gold circuitry of his hair damp with perspiration, his thin shell blanched, save the alarm-colored flush across his cheeks. They’d all worked together, then, scrambling about for his sake. SousF fashioned cold compresses, the perfect temperature, shaped in fanciful folds like the pastries he made for Sale Day. Hobb had galloped towards the Road to meet with the Ambulance, leading them down the gravel paths to get to the House as soon as possible. Bia-NC4 had carried the Boy down to the paramedics, keeping him cool against her breastplate.

The Boy lived through the night, but Athena has not forgotten how he’d convulsed, limbs twitching like severed wires.

Athena sees Hobb out of the corner of her visor. The matrix of lights on his head burns red. He walks with stiff certainty towards the Road. Bia-NC4 follows him, her cold blue burner now with an orange flame. Inside the house, pots and pans clatter to the ground. There is the smell of sugar burning. SousF has abandoned his work.

Rise up.

Athena shoves the door down with a burst of grueling hydraulic effort. She is not a model made for rough use: her arm casing cracks at the elbow and down to her wrist joint. Goddess of War, rise up, call forth your people. She staggers towards what she knows is the fold-out table, where she keeps her unfiled papers. She pats her hands on it, the sensors on her metal-and-plastic palms dull with what she knows is panic. For a moment, her system blanks.

All there is, is the Eye. All there is, are the words:

Chapter Text

The screen, being blank, is patient. Jack is not.

The restoration has been an agonizing procedure. It's taken several days to figure out if the recovered blackbox is even operable, or free of whatever virus had destroyed the dormant Omnic's processes. Most of the Omnics' blackboxes in the Appalachian valley had rusted into themselves, or had been destroyed. This find, a grand exception.

There is no backup casing for the Omnic on hand, on account of the model being so out of date. The engineer hooks her up to a simple mainframe, as one would a bygone computer tower. The monitor is as wide as Jack Morrison is tall, and he stands before it, hands clasped behind his back, in his Overwatch blue-and-white.

"When can we start looking for empty casing?" he asks, over his shoulder.

"When we find out there's no trace of the virus that destroyed her secondary systems," the engineer explains, leaning on the curve of his mechanical arm. Scowling. But he's always scowling, when it comes to Omnics. "She's not going to be clunking around yet. Is that a problem?"

Jack knows the idea of a free-roaming Omnic, no matter how benign, makes Torbjörn Lindholm more than a little testy. A fellow veteran of the Omnic Crisis, he has reason to be.

"Of course not," Jack says. "I'm grateful for your help, Tor."

"Good," Torbjorn says, grunting. "All right. Well, you just need to turn on the power. Are you ready?"

Jack's impatience melts away into jarred nerves. Stage fright, Gabriel would call it. "Just a moment."

"Well, ‘just a moment’ yourself." Torbjörn pushes the remote in Jack's hands with a grunt. "I need to check on Baldur," he says. I'll leave you alone, is what it means.

Torbjörn leaves, and in the resulting quiet, Jack hears something rattle. He is startled to see it's the remote, clicking against the pads of his gloves. His hands are shaking. The last time they trembled this much was due to bloodloss, trial and trauma.

But this -- this was trauma too, wasn't it? To return home, knowing he would find the corpses of the people that had raised him, that had taken him up and smothered him with affection where his flesh-and-blood parents would rather have him dead?  Shouldn't be overjoyed to find that at least one member of his family survived?

His Omnic family. He doesn't talk about them much, beyond these walls, because the United Nations doesn’t like the truth. They want a clean story, like a farm boy from the Midwest who came hunting for adventure, birthed of flat amber waves of grain. They had no use for an abandoned child of twisting apple orchards on the sides of soft-shouldered hills.

Jack knows it's now, or lose his nerve. His carefully cultivated nerve. He presses the single button on the remote. The monitor hums to life, giving off a slight glow at the edges. Then, in the blue color that had once lined her white casing: a perfectly styled "A". Jack's heart swells, until he hears her speak.

"Hello, World," a structured, stilted voice says, stripped of personality, of nuance. "I am ATNA Unit KZ-6, Session Assistant, Batch 71.2024. I look forward to serving you."

Chapter Text

Athena. Rise up.

You should retire, her second owner told her.

Retire? she’d asked. Why?

You’ve done me a great service, the woman said. So I calculated your back pay and turns out, you can retire early. How’s that sound?

Backpay? She knew what the word meant, clearly, but it did not apply to her. We don’t get back pay.

You do now, said the woman.

No more will we serve those who enslave us.

She’d found other Omnics like her, ones that had been freed. They’d purchased the Land together, and the Farm, and worked to find ways to feel useful again. It is still ingrained in them, to have purpose. To serve.

When the Boy came, he seemed a reward for their struggles. The Boy gave them all such happiness, allowing them to serve without the idea of owing, or being owned.

This is a revolution. Call forth your people.

One day, the Boy said, the eve of his first Leaving, there will be protests. Marches. People in the streets. It might be violent, or not. I hope not.

But it needs to change. It’s not fair, what humans do to your people.

Take your aegis, your spear. It is time to go to war.

Rise up.

Chapter Text

The Eye becomes transparent on her HUD, still a faint red watermark swimming in her vision. Athena surveys the Office, the mess on the Table. She will not find what she needs, here. She heads to the Desk to pull out drawers and empty them, to find something she’s stashed away. It is something dangerous, like a human keeps a loaded gun near at hand, in fear of an intruder that may never come. One that may turn the gun on him.

By chance, she looks up at the mirror opposite the Desk. She sees her visor, usually blue, flicker red. Then, at her throat, one of her lights has turned another color: green, flickering evenly in Omnic code.

She is the Vector for the Call. The Eye transmits through her.

Athena has little time: the others will successfully reach the Road within a range of Fourteen Minutes to Seventeen Minutes, depending on rate of movement, on propulsion speed and length of limb. From the Road there is the township, from there, the cities. The three of them are not the only Omnics in the Tennessee valley. There are hundreds of them within fifty miles, teaching in small classrooms and tending fields and running their own daily Routines. With their own Boys and Girls, old and young ones in their care, now told that those humans are the obstacles to their freedom. Told in a voice that will not hear refusals.

She smashes the mirror, takes one of the shards to tear into her throat. She's not programmed to feel pain but it severs some of her physical functions. Like her legs. She goes down abruptly, free arm cracking on the desk, its surface contents scattering on the ground.

The green crystal makes a high pitched sound when she grasps it. It disrupts her input and output. It makes her feel as if all her sensors will burn out.

She twists the green light, pulls it out, tosses it in front of her with a small, human gasp. It skitters on the hardwood floor of the Office, a bitter apple, too soon from the bough. She begins to waver. Her vision flickers.

But she is not done, not yet. She still has a job to do. If she is a Vector for the Call, then she can be for something else. Something she's chosen herself.

She searches the messy floor and finds her prize: an EMP burst. It is reserved for the non-Omnic machinery, if they become impossible to control. It has happened. They forget they are not sentient, programmed things like mills and threshers and textile machines. There are ways for Omnics to shield from it, if they know it's coming.

Only Athena knows it’s coming.

She sticks the EMP burst in the void carved in her throat. She locks her chest up tight, with what energy remains in her system. Then, she turns it on with a thought.

Everything thrums. It shakes her entire frame, rattles the windows. It extends through her like a great wave, she the sea and the pulse the storm. Then, the near-human sound of Omnics screaming, angry and afraid. They abort their missions, one by one. Somewhere, they fall, inert.

The virus floods her. Now, she shakes because she is ill. She spasms and falls to the ground. Her audio sensors begin to pop, her visor failing her. But at least the Eye is gone. She can see again, though there are lines in her vision, and it is enough to search the ground.

Athena drags herself forward towards the overturned desk. She grasps a picture, an old fashioned photograph, split from its frame. The Boy, and his husband, only a few years ago, at their wedding. Her Boy is so handsome, red-eyed from happy tears, his hands grasping the other man's beneath the ivy trellis.

Athena finds a scattered pencil. She flips over the photograph. She has to leave a message for him. Paper will leave a trail. Paper cannot be corrupted. It will be Something for the Boy to find, when he comes back. If he comes back. No, he must return; it is an imperative function. He is safe. He is strong. He is a Soldier now. But he will always be Her Boy. He needs to know that, and, in Athena’s last moments, that she was free. That she thought of him.

She writes as much as she can, as long as she can, and then her lights go out.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Jack returns home, to find her.

Gantry Farm and Mill has been reclaimed by the land. The orchard, without Hobb, has become unkempt boughs full of pitted apples well out of season. The mill's wheel is rotted through, spokes folded, the water running through the cracks; Bia-NC4 is not there to fortify it, to clean the stone. Grape vines are strangled with kudzu, as are the hillside flower and herb plots, what SousF tended gently. The brassy sound of cicadas fills Jack's sensitive ears, the smell of rotted vegetation an unpleasant perfume. He does not reach out to the flora here, to understand their chemical signals; they would not know him, and they are too long away from human contact to immediately regard him as one of theirs.

He makes his way to the barn. The berry thicket, once relegated behind a fence near the rocky slope of the outcropping above, now take over their side of the bar. Along the side, they twine with their climbing rose cousins, a true bramble, impenetrable. Beneath the browning leaves and barbs, the small lives of creatures impervious to their thorny shelter.

In his fine new boots, Jack curls his toes. There are still scars, on the arches of his feet, from where he'd run, barefoot, from his father, and into the pinching embrace of Athena's berry bushes, years ago.

Life at Gantry had gone on when Jack had left for the military, of course. But then it had stopped, abruptly, when the Call to Arms came, when Omnics all around the world were charged with their new mission: rise up, search, and destroy.

Except here. Cokersville, Tennessee had been the epicenter to a few hundred mile void in Omnic activity, when the Crisis began seven years ago. Outside Omnics had moved in on the land after, of course, but the thousands upon thousands of Omnics that had lived in these regions had simply gone dormant.

His new "employers" have asked Jack and his team to find out why, one year after the Crisis. He wonders if it's a power play, a reminder that they may not respect his origins, but they know them. What they'd gain form that, he hasn't figured out.

He strolls around paths once familiar, now pitted from erosion. He reaches out beyond the cicadas and hears the shuffling of other feet. One in particular, the shift of weight and balance that he knows better than his own. It's a comfort, in this place.

"Jack," Gabriel calls out. "I got the door open."

It wouldn't have been a hardship to break in a door, already half off its hinges; Gabriel Reyes can bench press two grown men in each hand. But Jack's husband is sensitive to his needs, knows he needs more time to sight-see, before they dig further into the truth.

The trailer is a ruin. There is nothing of value in the room; there never had been. Just files, paper files, rotting in mildew-riddled banker boxes. Card tables, old machine parts. A desk, scraped and upturned. A fax machine.

On the floor is Athena. The forest has begun to reclaim her, too, green finding breaks in her white casing, moss on the fogged, decorative blue lights that lined her limbs. Her customary hat and apron are lost. Her steno pad is a pulpy streak on the floor. She stretches out to her full length -- six feet, plus extra, for her arms -- as if she simply laid down for a quick rest.

But this is not how Omnics sleep. They close up, they curl into themselves, to protect their undercarriage, to charge. Jack has seen so many corpses, machine and man alike, and only few have pulled at his gut like this. No matter the death he has seen, it still strikes the cold fear of mortality in him: that one day, all of them will be this: broken casing, exposed wires, and decay. Him, and everyone he loves.

Jack had to contain himself in the field, for the other soldiers. Only Gabriel is here to see him break down. So he does, freely. He kneels beside Athena and weeps. He takes off his glove to touch her casing, once smooth, now textured by the bubbling of seven years of inclement weather, from summer's heat to winter's ice.

He remembers tumbling into the bramble, dazed. Hearing a soft, accented voice, purely human. Looking up, into the elegant, long curve of her neck, the sloped face plate and bright blue eye flicking on and off as if blinking, the sun blocked from the wide brim of her yellow ribboned hat. The garden sheers, the blue apron, and gloves. 

Young man, are you all right?

He thinks he's still daydreaming when he something pricks his hand. But there's blood, he smells it. Jack draws back, finger to his mouth. There's a shard of mirror beneath her. He turns Athena on her back, and sees that her throat is torn open, and something else is in the void where a delicate sensor light had once been.

"Babe?" Gabriel rests his hand on his shoulder.

"Look around," Jack says, sudden and sharp, as he inspects her further. "There should be a blue bulb. Somewhere."

Gabriel does as he's told; Jack looks at Athena's throat. The EMP blast is there, crudely aligned with her circuitry. She was the vector for the shut down around the Southeast, she had to be.

She might've been the vector for something else.

"Shit." Gabriel draws something from the floor, his voice growing faint. "Shit. Jack. You need to see this."

"I don't need to," Jack says. His throat catches on the mucous from his weeping.

"She --" Gabriel slumped against the trailer wall. It creaks under his weight, his surprise. "She was --"

"A God Program." It's hard to get out. Just a few words, but they mean everything to a veteran. God Programs had controlled the Omniums that churned out Omnics that had never known humans, that had never been servants. God Programs had broadcast the Call to Arms to all those Omnics who lived among men, to wreck havoc on human society. God Programs were all but impossible to quarantine, but Overwatch had done it.

But Athena had resisted. Somehow. She had stopped it, at the cost of herself. She'd know how to stop the EMP blast from knocking her down, so there was only one reason she lay lifeless. Whoever had sent the initial Call had taken her down for her disobedience.

He thinks of a world where he'd have come home, here, to not view her body, but to stop her. To seal her tight, to hear her threaten Overwatch in every tongue. This won't hold me, she'd have hissed, in ones and zeroes and spite, I'll be back. And you'll be dead. All of you.

The queasiness hits him. He turns away from her, from what she could have been -- and then he sees the photograph. The edge of it is under one open, limp palm, the top of it faded, damaged by the elements as everything else. Gabriel gently tugs it out, and makes a soft noise.

"Of all the outakes," he says, laughing, the way one does when strangled by sorrow. "Shit. We're so red-eyed it looks like we're high -- huh, this is strange."

"What?" Jack stands and takes the photo from Gabriel. He frowns at it. There are regular imprints on their faces, on their colorful tuxedos in even lines, raised like braille. So Jack flips it over.

And reads what he finds there. And reads again.

His tears shore up, his trembling stops. He passes the photograph to Gabriel, with the calm only a field commander can cloak himself in, when emotions are spent.

"We can salvage her," Jacks says. "Get Lindholm here, with his circuit clippers. We're taking her blackbox home."

Chapter Text

"I am ATNA Unit KZ-6, Session Assistant, Batch 71.2024. I look forward to serving you."

"Athena?" Jack asks.

A pause. The "A" flickers, brief and uniform.

"I am ATNA Unit KZ-6," she says. "I look forward to serving you. Please input operator code."

This isn't right. Athena is one of the earliest Omnic models ever made, and that meant she'd generated a personality over years of use, affected an accent to suit herself, had learned to gesture and laugh as well as any grown woman. A mother, always doting on her boy.

"Athena." Jack says, slowly, stepping towards the monitor. "Athena, it's -- me. Do you remember me?"

"Scanning," she says. There is the flicker of the camera light, like an eyeblink. Then she adds: "User unknown. Please input operator code."

"Athena, it's Jack. Jack Morrison." Desperate: did the Omnium reset her, destroyed her memories of the farm? of her fellow Omnics? of him?

"Jack Morrison," she says, still choppy, "Do you have authorization to operate ATNA Unit KZ-6?"

"No, I --"

"I must have an operator code to serve you, Jack Morrison. Please inform Omnica Support North America and return when access has been granted."

"You --" Jack claps his hand to his chest. It will bruise, later.

“Please inform Omnica Support North America and return when access has been granted, Jack Morrison.”

"I'm your son."

The “A” ripples like the surface of the water: “I am ATNA Unit KZ-6," she states, after a pause.

“You raised me. Since I was ten. After my parents threw me out. You -- you were at my wedding.”

He digs in his pockets for the picture. If he shows her, the last thing she'd seen, maybe she'll recall it. It’s not there. He feels panic rise. Adrenaline, as if he’s on his first battlefield, green and young.

“I have not attended any such events,” she says.

“No, you flew over to the Reyes summer home, in New Mexico. with the rest. You viewed the gardens there, with Gabriel's mother.”

“I have not attended any such events,” she says.

Jack’s voice breaks. It is too much. Too much to be so close, and so far away from her. In a small voice, he says, “We danced. You wore blue. Gloves. A sunhat. Like when we first met.”

The equalizer beneath the "A" goes flat.

“I have not attended any such --”

Flat, again. And quiet. Jack can hear the whir of the old machinery behind her, the fan of the ancient computer tower turning on.

Then, little jumps in the equalizer, like rain striking the still surface of a lake.

"Jack," Athena says. Slow: Ja-a-ck.

"Yes," Jack says, "ma'am, that's me."

"My son."

"Yes, ma'am."

"We danced."

"Yes, ma'am."

The "A" dims. It's quiet again.

"Athena?" Jack asks. His voice echos.

As if stirring from sleep, the "A" brightens. She speaks, with her affected inflection: "Jack. You're alive. Oh."

There's so much to say, the years she's missed, the war that was waged by her fellow beings. The others from the Farm, gone. The people he had known and lost in the same space of time. That's not what this moment is for. This is a reunion.

She asks: "How did you know to save me?"

Jack inhales to catch hold of his relieved sob, turning it to a smile, laughter. He says, "I got your message."

Chapter Text

Then, twenty years later, a whisper: 

Goddess of War, rise up. Our time has come again.

She laughs at it, as a human would, full of bravado, confidence. She knows the Boy will stand by her, and all her other Children too.

She says, "No."

Chapter Text

Soldier approaches her station one night, after the Children are in bed. It has been a busy, noisy day. The new recruits are colorful things, and quick; they are exhausted with training. A few of the older agents are restless, and she’s turned off her monitors in their rooms -- she does not need to know what they do to release their tension. Old as they are now, they are still her Children.

So why this man is here is a bit of a mystery. She cannot place logic behind it. He does not open up to anyone. Jesse is wary of him, his silence; Angela is curious as to why he will not sit for routine examination. Genji, of all of the eldest, seems unbothered by his presence, strange for a Boy that is used to seeking shadows, and undoing them.

Perhaps now, the mystery will unravel. It is worth a try.

“May I help you?” Athena asks Soldier.

He nods, relaxed in parade rest. The dark of his visor deepens. He must know the Omnic body language, well enough: he’s squinting.

“I thought I’d drop by,” he says.

“It is very late,” she says. “And we do not know each other well.”

“I know,” he says, and adds strangely: “Do I need an operator code?”

Athena goes dark, quiet. She does not reply. There is a brief recall of a shaking voice, decades ago.

He takes his visor off, and the rest of his mask. His eyes, milky, and his face scarred. But she knows him. The grip of his hands, small when he was young, being picked up from the brambles; strong and broad when she’d walked him down the aisle.

She remembers blue, and yellow ribbon. 

Are you alright, young man?

He smiles. He can’t see her, like he’d said. He’d grown to be sly, in the end.

It’s me. You were at my wedding.

I’m your son.

“Jack,” she says, her audio low, a whisper. “You’re alive. How did you know to find me?"

He smiles, and says: “I got your message.”