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[I found myself in Armonia, on the planet Chorus, at the arranged meeting place to talk to Peridot Facet-25FL, Cut-5XG, a defector from the alien race known as Gems, a dying species ruled by all accounts by a stifling autocracy and plagued by a perennial resource crisis. My name is Dylan Andrews, for the Interstellar Daily. The date is March 20th, 2560. Across from me at the other end of the bar table is a green alien with a form sculpted to look like a jumpsuit, a grey blob where pictures of other Peridots indicate there should be a yellow diamond emblem.] Hello, Peridot. Can I call you that? Do you prefer "Agent New Jersey", or "Jersey"?
I don't know.
I'll go with Peridot. Well, then, Peridot...Would you mind outlining the journey you took to go from being a mass-produced technician in Yellow Diamond's Court's Navy to one of the more...unique agents of the human secret military project, Project Freelancer, and then from there to ending up as a hermit with a fittingly green artificial intelligence fragment with you?
I met Lapis. Then she....Well, I can't meet her anymore.
You mean Agent Oregon?
I mean Lapis.
Right. Well, would you mind elaborating, firstly?
Fine. I was created in a Kindergarten (That being the production facilities used by Gems to produce their own kind) on Homeworld, and I served in Yellow Diamond's Navy as a technician for about seven hundred years, running on Earth time. There were...funny stories. Once, I almost got put on a ship with the war hero Jasper, out to do some trivial little thing on Earth. I can't really remember. All I do remember is that I was kicking the walls of my living quarters that I was passed over for that prestigious assignment...until I found out maybe two hundred and fifty years later that that assignment had led to the...death of Jasper. I thanked the stars and my Diamond after that, obviously.
I was on an Emerald Hand-class ship with two Pearls, another Peridot, an Agate, and a Sapphire, mainly as an on-board engineer, in order to you know, fix any issues that might come up-
What issues?
Technical things. Gravity engine mishaps, robonoids leaking adhesive fluid, nothing major.
Right, continue.
Okay, so I was on this ship, and the pilot, the Peridot, some stupid clod, she ended up accidentally firing the gravity engine, and soon enough we found ourselves in UNSC space, and, well, if you're familiar with the UNSC, you know that being an alien anywhere near them is a bad idea, especially when there was a Charon-class light frigate in the area, and... Pelican dropships immediately started chasing after us, and we were quickly boarded. The Sapphire knew it was hopeless and just waited to be shot and tossed out into deep space in Gem form. The rest weren't so smart. The Agate had too much pride to beg for mercy, and the Pearls knew not to annoy an Agate by doing something they're too prideful for in front of them. I was the only one who, after they'd been...sent to drift endlessly in the void of space, I started to beg, describing first my engineering skills and how that could help, and when that didn't do much, I got onto explaining how hard it is to destroy a Gem with human weapons. I apparently at the time preferred to serve the enemy than end up drifting forever. You could go insane that way.
What happened when you tried to surrender?
Well, they let me on. At first, I was a hostage, and used to gather information on the Homeworld, but the thing was that a Peridot really couldn't tell you much. We're not that important, especially these days, when the whole society's about to collapse in on itself and they're cracking down on everything. Eventually, though, they thought I could be trusted, reasoned that they'd never get another soldier with advanced engineering skills and the same near-immortality as Agent Oregon, a defector who occupied #14 on their internal ranking system, the "Leaderboard", and so, I was inducted into the project. This was my first sign that this wasn't a normal institution in any way.
What was your second sign?
Well, the fact that I, despite sitting at #28, well below any of the more qualified Agents, and doing work as an engineer as much as actual combat work, as the training, while useful, didn't improve my abysmal skills much, and due to my limb enhancers I was unable to wear traditional armor... I was offered an artificial intelligence fragment. The phrase "Should we make her a simulation trooper" I heard thrown about once or twice. The Sim Troopers, of course, being idiots and incompetents used unknowingly to test out weapons and armor upgrades for Project Freelancer.
Anyway, "offered" is a bit of a misnomer. I was forced into re-forming my body after being poofed so that I had a second cognitive system with which to get computer hardware containing the Delta artificial intelligence into my body. I still hear him talking in my head, calculating probabilities...I suspect that they assigned him to me for three reasons, but this is just my guessing. One, that I have a green color palette, so that must have been aesthetically preferred. Two, that I tend to think extremely literally and logically, so an AI embodiment of the Alpha AI's Logic that thought similarly might mesh well, avoiding the worst of possible implantation hazards...and that I was a Gem who was expendable, and I'm sure the Director of Project Freelancer saw this as a sort of experiment. He liked his experiments.
What kinds of experiments?
Lots of them. I couldn't name them all, that was how it was. You could only suspect, but whether it was the fact that the system seemed set up to encourage infighting, or that the Director had given some agents AIs and not others in a way that seemed to be deliberately intended to encourage conflict and self-destructive tendencies among both those who did get AI and those who didn't, or...Well, what he did to Carolina, his daughter, which was something nothing short of brainwashing. He turned her through manipulation and force into a Jasper, that's how I'd put it.
The one that mattered to me was what he did to Lapis, though. You see...I'd kind of grown to care about Lapis. She was the only other Gem in the Project. She'd left Homeworld deliberately, I was forced into this, but we had that to bond over. Sure, she was...cold, but she started to warm up, and we liked to talk about our lives, each other...sometimes ourselves (but that was mostly me)...She was beautiful. I don't know what she was, but she definitely did, and she was prized by the Project. While, you know, back on Homeworld Lapis Lazulis were just meant for terraforming, the humans saw them as living superweapons, and so she was just dropped by drop pod on any aqua-worlds that needed to be leveled back to the stone age. The only things keeping her from reaching #1 were the relative lack of aquaworlds...and the Director's blatant favoritism towards Agents Texas, Carolina, North, and New York. I swear! He was totally biased!
Right.
Anyway...She was beautiful, and perfect, and she had this kind of...I don't know what she was, nobody knew what she was, nobody but her...Her hair used to move a little bit under the ship's area fans, and you could kind of watch it shift, and she used to ask me why I kept staring at the side of her head, but that was why! At first, she never gave me the time of day, to use a human expression, but...Well, eventually she was teaching me a lot about how many humans showed affection to one another, I'll say that.
You had sexual relations with her?
.........[She blushes.] I'm not answering that.
Right. So...What did they do to her?
Well...She...She'd gotten tired, emotionally, just being expected to level cities and fly around shooting by command and being treated as little more than a gun or sword, "Agent Oregon" title be damned, so...She stopped. She just refused to fight. Said she was done taking orders from shadowy assholes ruling with cults of personality, no matter who they were. Her words. The Director sighed and spoke in his deep Louisiana accent (so I'm told that that was what that accent's called), [She mimicks the accent] saying "I see. Well, then, Oregon, I suppose we'll have to discuss your role in the Project another time. I understand your concerns." Then, he walked off, and I looked at Lapis, and she seemed depressed, so I said, "Hey, Lapis! This is good news! It's going to work out, I promise!" She looked away.
Then what?
Do I have to answer that?
You don't have to do anything, but if you want to see Former Director Leonard Church's full crimes displayed to the world, you should say what you want everyone to hear. In the end, though, it's your choice, Peridot.
Fine. He...He...Ugh. Stupid, lumpy, clumpy, clod! He put Phi, Zeta, and Iota into her head, claiming that since the newer fragments were getting weaker with each new AI, they had to triple up for such a...scarred mind as hers, and they...They said it was going to help her, and I was happy, but the voices never stopped and she just kept screaming over and over again. "ALLISON! ALLISON!" These long, agonizing wails, and she kept screaming it, stopping only to yell about "seeing her" over and over and over...They ruined her, and the only explanation I can find was that they just wanted to see what would happen, and she became expendable as soon as she insisted that she be treated as a Gem and not a tool. Or maybe that's what Gems are. Tools. That's what Yellow Diamond...or Dr. Church would say. Lapis had to be kicked out from orbit onto the ground and shot with the Mother of Invention's Magnetic Accelerator Cannon.
Magnetic Accelerator Cannon?
Mass driver. They made me fire it. They said that it was the only thing to do, but I pictured her face, crying seawater and screaming "ALLISON!" over and over like it was the only thing in the world, and I was going to refuse, but then that same face kind of told me I had to, so, from the comfort of the bridge of the Mother of Invention, I ordered the ship's AI to fire on one specific point...I never went down to see if any of her still remained, but any buildings around her would have been vaporized. We dropped her in an occupied city. So...I don't think even a gem could survive that kind of power. I still see her face, and I wish I could see her as that cool, mystical badass who didn't take anyone's crap and who...who loved me, and I loved her....But all I see is a screaming face and the sound of "ALLISON!" over and over, and the kicker was that in the end, they tried it with two AIs with Agent Carolina, and until recently I thought that she was dead.
The Director's put to justice, though.
Tell that to Lapis.