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She doesn’t have much to go by, but she thinks, if she were standing next to him, the man on the screen would seem sort of small. He has soft-looking dark hair that curls just so, and long eyelashes.
She’s never seen him before, not really, she saw the body on the ship but it was a dark and cold room and she was ushered out very quickly. How could this man be dead? There’s so much life in him, even when he’s sitting still. He smiles so brightly. There’s music playing in the background, starting out as a soft trumpet melody and a woman singing too softly for Miranda to make out the words. She catches something about a sycamore tree before he starts to talk over it.
“Hello, Miranda. If you’re seeing this, you know what that means!”
She knows him, she knows that face and that nose and those lips and those cheeks, given clay she could map it out with her hands–
Miranda covers her mouth with her hand, her breath shaky and loud and hot, and she doesn’t understand what’s happening to her, but it’s as familiar as the man on the screen. It’s a knowledge that seems to come from the ache in her chest, the way that the paths she take in a dream may not match up to real life but she’s comfortable walking them anyway: she knows she’s crying and that the man on the screen is someone whose face she knows better than her own.
“Now, I don’t expect you cried at the funeral–you did put on a funeral, I hope–you never did cry before, but that’s okay. Rachel should be taking care of the business stuff, I hope Rachel’s still around–”
She’s not, Miranda can’t bring herself to care.
“–but don’t let her and Warren eat each other alive, I know you’ll think it’s funny but it really, really would not be good for you. They’re your best bet! Promise me you won’t let them get in each other’s way.”
His voice is soft, a little bit high-pitched. There’s something saccharine about it. It would be grating, she thinks, except that he feels like home, like the creak of one’s own front door.
“Now, for you. I’m assuming you haven’t got some backup copies of me somewhere?”
He raises his eyebrows, and tilts his head to the side.
If I did–
“If you did, I wouldn’t be here,” he finishes, for her. The song ends, and another one starts up, something jazzy. The singer, it seems, won’t dance, she finds out, in the pauses between Marcus’s words. “So, there you go. You can look up all the other videos, maybe they’ll be helpful, maybe not, but if this is the last one that I make for you then that’s all, folks. Miranda, I… you know it’s all taken care of, right?”
She nods, even though she doesn’t know what this man is talking about.
“You can still keep doing your work. If this is the end of the line for me, I did my best to make sure it won’t be the end of the line for you. I’m sure you know that by now, but I never wanted you to doubt that. Everything that’s mine is yours, partner. Good-bye, Miranda, and good luck.”
He gives her a small smile, and a wave, and then the picture jumps, and then it turns off.
No.
No, that’s not it. He was whole, and human, an infinity of thoughts and impressions and opinions–she cannot be left with just this. She rewinds it, and listens to it again, she plays it a third time, and then by that point she can almost speak the words along with him when she rewinds it to queue up a fourth watch.
…This is silly, she decides, and proceeds to look into the data storing device, from her little laptop, which, as Jacobi says, has been… tricked out. The device nothing quite like anything she’s seen before, the encryption had been very difficult to break. And, yes, there’s something else in there–
No, two somethings. Possibly three. She cautiously pieces them together, like broken picture frames after an earthquake, too many pieces to tell how many things broke. By the end of it, she ends up with two separate videos that are fuzzy, and glitching, but feature a recognizable man with a visible smile, and a few pieces that she can’t quite make heads or tails of. The audio quality is terrible–the music isn’t there and she realizes that he must’ve added it all later on (she’s beginning to find that this Marcus Cutter is something of a showman), but she can tell what he’s saying.
“–And as for you and me, Miranda, I was glad to be your partner. You can’t do this, yourself, and I would never ask you to, but when I’m not there you have to find someone who will help you with people. I’m not gonna tell you how to do that, yourself. I don’t ever want you to stop being yourself. I don’t want you to stop searching for answers. You’re the smartest woman in the world, but just… find someone who can help you get what you need. I worry about that, you know? No, you know all of that, cut the tape.”
God, she thinks, she wishes that the person that he was describing wasn’t so recognizable. All these months of am I a good person and will they ever trust me feel like a waste, looking at this. Was she Miranda Pryce? Of course she was, no matter whether or not she had her memories.
…And yet.
And yet, he would recognize her, and there’s something in that, too. Searching for answers, she thinks, and she holds onto that. He made this video for that person, he worried for her, he didn’t want her to change, and, Miranda thinks, I was understood. For all this monstrousness, everything that she’s afraid of, every perfectly natural thing that she says that garners a reaction of fear and mistrust from the people who rescued her and seem to think she needs rehabilitation, like a wild animal, the man in this video–
He knows her. The others act like her questions are hard to answer–who was I, how can I fix our toaster, our finances, our friends–who were you, what did I do to you–why are my eyes different from yours?
She wants to ask him all of these questions.
She turns on the other video. It’s much the same as the end of the first, she thinks, but he re-recorded something and must have started over.
“Everything that’s mine is yours, partner, I’d give you my whole self if I could. I guess I just wanted you to have a little something to remember me by, a last missive, just in case I never told you any of this straight out. Good-bye, Miranda, and good luck. No, no, let’s cut that one–”
She takes another look at the final stray pieces, and after a few minutes toying with some predictive algorithms, she has a few more seconds of video, with recognizable phrases. None of it matches up, all of it seeming to have been poorly deleted.
“–’ll fix the world–”
“–love ya, never change–”
“–so lucky, Miranda, so lucky–”
She turns it off, finally, when it gets too hard to hear him say her name, when she can’t tell if it’s the poor audio quality that’s making him sound hoarse or if his throat is as tight when he’s speaking as hers is now.