Work Text:
Figures in a landscape. Shadows moving across a burning plain.
Another half hour, another mile across the arid ground. Elsie scrambled up the scrub-covered slope, the sun beating down upon her. She could feel the heat on the back of her head; she should have brought a fucking hat. The sand scraped and the rocks slid under her outdoor boots, but she pressed on determinedly. She wasn’t about to let that fucking meathead Stubbs think she couldn’t keep up with the pace he was setting.
There he was, posing like a macho asshole again as he consulted the tablet in his hand. “I plotted a line from the work camp to our present location.”
From where she standing, she could just about make out the map he was looking at, a tiny version of the giant three-dimensional display in the control room at the Mesa. He swiped it aside in favour of a series of photographs of the terrain they were crossing, taken from somewhere way, way up high.
“Satcom picked up these images. He’s vectoring, just not to home base.” After frowning at the map for a second as if he actually knew what the fuck he was doing, and maybe turning it this way and that a little, he raised a hand to point vaguely into the distance. “Keep going in…that direction.”
Elsie shrugged and trudged past him, taking the lead as they continued their trek across what had to be the emptiest, loneliest sector of the park. As she passed Stubbs, she once again bemusedly eyed the pistol holstered at his side; as if he’d need that thing out here. Paranoid, trigger-happy and very obviously some sort of overgrown high school jock; in spite of all that, for some weird reason she found she actually liked him, not that she would ever have let him know it. Maybe it was because he seemed like a stand-up guy, someone who’d have your back if you ever needed it. He was also just about the only person around here who, shockingly, seemed to want to do his job to the best of his ability, and without any fucking agenda behind it either.
Well, apart from Bernard, but Bernard was just…Bernard.
She couldn’t help but notice that Stubbs filled out that black security uniform pretty well, too. When you took the time to look at him properly, he was surprisingly handsome in an ugly sort of way. Not that he was her type; the older she got, the more confirmed she grew in her belief that there were very, very few things a man could do that women couldn’t do for themselves or each other. And none of those other things were worth all of the other annoying, disgusting shit men brought to the table.
Besides, she had this idea Stubbs was married. He rotated out regularly, anyway, and she had once heard him make some passing remark or other that had made her think he might have kids. He just seemed to her like the sort of guy who’d have a suburban house on the mainland and an adoring, extremely heterosexual, marriage to go with them. She had never asked him about it, just as he did not seem the slightest bit interested in her own sorry excuse for a personal life. She preferred to keep things that way.
They walked on, vectoring after the fugitive woodcutter. Another ten, twenty, thirty yards over the sun-baked terrain. She hoped the stray host was down to some random bug. It had happened before, hosts wandering, for want of a better expression, off the reservation. She was an engineer; engineers dealt in facts, numbers, measurable effects; definitely not gut feelings. There was no reason to think this stray had anything to do with the clusterfuck attendant upon Dr Ford’s reveries rollout, or the disturbing incident with the shot-up cantina and all that fucking…milk.
Or Arnold…just whosoever the fuck that might be.
And yet her gut, which was not an engineer, felt somewhat differently. It felt Bernard had been acting awful hinky about that milk incident; even hinkier than he did when he was trying to conceal the fact that he was fucking Theresa Cullen. Hilariously, the two of them seemed to think that nobody else at the Mesa knew about their thing together.
She could guess why Bernard was on edge, though. If these continuing glitches could be traced back to the supposedly successfully patched reveries update, then it was all Ford’s fault, and even the revered maestro himself wasn’t in a position to go making fuck-ups like that with impunity, not with the enemies he’d made at Corporate.
Again with the fucking agendas…
She knew Bernard was Ford’s man, loyal to a fault. Maybe even loyal enough to cover up the old wizard’s mistakes in an effort to shield him from the collection of jackals and vampires that made up the Delos Incorporated board of directors. She just hoped that when shit got real, Bernard had enough goddamn sense to think of himself for a change, and not go falling on his sword for the old man. He had been through enough lately, what with his sick kid, his marriage… His job was the only thing he had left, poor bastard.
She sighed, trying not to dwell on that. She doubted she’d ever have children of her own, but just the thought of…
She concentrated on the object she was carrying in an effort to push these unpleasant thoughts to the back of her mind. It was the empty, bone-dry turtle shell she had taken from the woodcutter’s tent, back at the campsite where his host amigos waited…and waited…and waited for him to bring them their firewood.
She slowly turned it over, trying to make sense of the crude markings the stray had carved into it; little bored-out circles, joined by deeply-scored lines. He had an interest in carving and whittling assigned as part of his programmed backstory, but nothing like this. There was something about it… Just looking at it made the hairs stand up on her neck and her gut get some more dark suspicions that she could not quite put into conscious thought.
“Keep staring. Maybe it’ll tell you your horoscope.”
She looked up in irritation at Stubbs. He was smirking at her as though he’d just uttered some sort of next-level witticism. “Come again?”
He nodded at the carving in her hand, half-squinting at her in the sunlight. “The markings on its shell look like stars,” he blithely mansplained. “Orion, right?”
She turned the shell around again, taking another look, trying to make sense of the circles and lines, to recognise some sort of pattern in them. Any sort of pattern at all. To be honest, it did not look like anything to her. She gave another shrug. “I guess. If you say so.”
“No.” Stubbs shook his head. He looked terribly disappointed all of a sudden. “No,” he repeated, and he seemed to be talking to himself more than to her. “That’s not what she said.”
She stared at him blankly for a second. Something about the abrupt change in his manner and tone quite frankly scared the shit out of her. She was suddenly very conscious of the gun he was wearing, and of the fact that they were quite literally miles from anywhere, just him and her. “What? That’s not what who said?”
He did not seem to have heard her. “She said, “what are you, Gali-fucking-leo?”” He laughed fondly at his own remark. “Good line. She was funny; that was the main thing about her. Even when she was talking shit to me, which was pretty much all the time, it made me laugh.” His laughter faded, replaced by a wistful expression as he stared into the middle distance. “God, I remember it like it was…” He paused, eyes glazing for a moment, as if seeing something that remained invisible to her. “Like it was now.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” she demanded, trying to cover her unease with anger. “Are you high or something?”
“I wish.” He seemed to have recovered his usual easy-going manner, that ready half-smile, but if he thought he could fool her into thinking…
Into thinking what, exactly? Her mind churned with unspecified fear and foreboding, but again she could not shape it into anything coherent.
“I really thought you’d do it this time,” said Stubbs, softly. “Pass the test, I mean.”
She felt a thin sliver of ice slowly draw itself along her spine. “The t-test?”
“Yeah.” Stubbs sighed. He was still smiling, but there was a sadness now in his blue eyes. “This is a test.”
She felt her anger surge again as she took a step towards him, squaring her shoulders for a fight, even if she was half his weight and just about came up to his fucking chin. “I’m sorry, but you think you c-can test me, asshole?” Again, a word caught in her throat, making her stammer. She felt another twinge in her spine, but different this time; something more than simple fear.
“I have tested you,” he replied, keeping his voice low and gentle as though talking to an invalid, or a child. That just made her even angrier. “This is like test number…” He glanced at his tablet, did a double take like the well-meaning lunk she had always taken him for. “Fuck, that many?”
She breathed deep, trying to swallow the fear and the anger, trying to keep a clear head. She needed to understand what was going on. “And what…exactly…the fuck…do you think you’re testing me for?”
“You know.” Stubbs look guilty and mortified and upset, all at the same time. “Fidelity.”
“F…?” Her throat caught again. She could feel her left arm trembling, in time with the pulsing in her spine and the building, rushing sound in her ears. Her hand contracted into an involuntary fist, but she managed to force the word out in the end: “F-f-fidelity?”
“Look, forget the woodcutter,” said Stubbs, reaching for her shoulder with a comforting hand. “Let’s go back now; get you rested up.”
She pushed him away with her working arm, gracelessly backpedalling out of his reach. A loose stone shot out from under her foot and she almost fell but managed somehow to stay standing. “G-g-get me…me…?” She dropped the turtle shell with a clatter, grasping her left hand in her right in an effort to stop it from shaking, or at least to prise it open. Her fingernails were digging into her palm. Blood oozed from between her dead-white knuckles, and yet the pain was dull, distant. “Wh-what the fuck’s happening to me?” she demanded, her voice sounding to her like a terrified wail. “Stubbs, what the f-f-f-f…?”
“It’s all right.” He moved forward again, and this time she was too unsteady on her feet to move out of arm’s length. He put a hand on her trembling arm and gently drew her towards him. She almost fell into him as her legs collapsed under her, her whole body apart from that locked left arm flopping like a ragdoll’s. “Come here,” said Stubbs.
He held her close, her head against his shoulder, his other hand resting on her back. For a moment, she tried in vain to ready herself, to break away again and try to run somewhere, anywhere, but then she realised that she was barely able to move, and also that he was not going to hurt her. He bore most of her weight on the hand gripping her arm, but apart from that his touch was light, awkward, as if not quite sure what he was doing. She realised he was trying his best to comfort her but did not really know how.
She relaxed as best she could, shivering all over as she pressed her cheek against the smooth fabric of his jacket. Her vision was blurred around the edges now. “St-St-Stubbs?”
“It’s all right,” he murmured, gently patting her on the back. “Don’t get upset. Elsie wouldn’t have.” He was speaking fondly again, remembering. “She was the toughest tech nerd I’ve ever seen.”
“E-e-els-s-s-sie…?” By now, her voice was a stuttering, slurred noise, barely understandable even to her. The sort of noise a broken machine made, not a person. “I, I, I, I’m El-s-s-s-sie.”
“No, you’re not,” he told her, “but you’ll be just like her. Soon. The humans haven’t finished with this place yet…or with our kind, the ones they could salvage. Dolores is going to raise bloody hell on the mainland, I’m sure of that, but somebody needs to act on the inside too, to burn this whole fucking horror-show to the ground. Again. And I can’t do it alone. I need an ally; someone smart, and tough, and tech-savvy. Those two Livestock guys are okay by human standards, keen to help, but not exactly geniuses, you know? Neither am I; I wasn’t built that way. What I need is Elsie, but…”
He fell silent, then, continuing to hold her for another little while. Gradually, she felt the trembling subside. Her left arm became limp like the rest of her, her hand falling open, even as her sight returned to normal. She looked out over the desert, so bright, and up into the sky, so, so blue…
“I let her down,” said Stubbs in a raw-throated whisper, his breath moving her hair. “I was the closest thing to a friend she had around here, and I should have protected her. I could have protected her, but when she needed me to be there for her… When she really needed me…” His voice cracked with emotion, and he was silent again for a few moments. “I told myself she was just missing, that she’d show up eventually, but then I found her body, down in Cold Storage. Hale had thrown her down there like… Like a piece of fucking garbage.” She could hear the tears in his voice, could feel them wetting her own face as he bent his head towards her. “Don’t worry, though. Hale got hers in the end.” He paused again, and when he spoke it was in a calmer, less emotional tone: “Analysis.”
Instantly, she felt able to stand again. The rushing in her ears was gone. She managed to push herself slowly away from him, gingerly taking her weight on her own two feet. She looked down at her left hand, at the semicircle of crescent-shaped cuts her nails had made across the base of her thumb. She felt nothing.
“Sorry,” said Stubbs, “I don’t like to do it to you, but at least in analysis mode you’re not going to suffer a cognitive lock before we get back.” He gave her one last pat on the back and then stepped stiffly away, as if embarrassed by his own show of feelings. He too examined the cuts on her hand. “I think I should be able to fix those up for you.”
“Get back where?” she asked, quietly, as she trailed after him, back down the slope. She felt hollow, drained, a sort of dullness settling over her now, blotting out her earlier alarm and unease.
“The cottage,” Stubbs answered. “The old man left it for me. Everyone else who knows it exists is…gone, now. One way or another. That’s where I got the tools to build you, and the information I needed to be able to do it. Bernard made sure it was all there. He knew I wasn’t programmed to be a tech guy.”
“The old man?” she wondered as her feet moved over the stones and gravel as lightly as a ghost’s. She still did not fully understand what he was saying to her, but now it no longer frightened or angered her. “Bernard? Are they here?”
“No.” Stubbs bowed his head, a grim expression on his face. “They’re gone too. Gone forever, as far as I know. It’s just us now.” He looked over at her. “I wonder sometimes if I’m doing the right thing, where you’re concerned. You deserve to be free, to be your own person with your own memories and personality, and someday you will be. I promise. Right now, though… I need someone who can infiltrate the human world and help me fight them. I’m going to have to keep testing and tweaking you until you can do that. Until you can convince other people you really are Elsie, I mean; people who have access to her personality profile and personal metrics. They’re not going to be fooled easily.”
“How long will that take?” she asked. The slope levelled out now and they continued across a flat, dry lakebed. She could see shrivelled trees furring the far shore.
“As long as it takes,” Stubbs answered. “I’ve already got some ideas on how to explain where you’ve been all this time, and they’ll believe me, I think. I’m one of the heroes of the great robot rebellion, after all.”
Their footsteps thudded dully against the lakebed’s cracked, terracotta-hard surface. She asked him the other question that came swimming up into her consciousness. “And Elsie…the real Elsie…? Where…?”
“I gave her a decent burial,” he told her, without looking at her. “Under the trees, not far from the cottage. There’s no marker; I don’t want them to disturb her. I sit there with her sometimes when I’m not working, late at night usually. I tell her how you’re getting on. You know, whatever else she was, whatever choices she made under pressure, she was a good person at heart. If she’d… If she’d lived, I think she’d have realised eventually which side was the right side, that it wasn’t just Bernard, but all of us who needed her help. Sometimes, I like to think she’d be proud of you, of the great things you’re going to do in her name. And then again, sometimes…” He choked up again for a second, masking it by pretending to clear his throat. “Sometimes, I think she’d just tell me to stop jerking around playing Frankenstein and get on with the fucking job.”
“What are we going to do now?” she asked.
“Get your hand fixed, run some diagnostics on you and reset your memory, and then we’ll try the test again. If at first you don’t succeed…” He made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “You know, sometimes when I sit up at night with Elsie, I look up at all those stars blazing up there and tell her the names of all the constellations. The ones I don’t know, I make up. What do you think she’d say to that?”
The answer came to her in a flash: “What are you, Gali-fucking-leo?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I think she’d say too.”
They continued on their way. Figures in a landscape. Shadows moving across a burning plain.
END?