Archive of Our Own

It was the noise of the air conditioning that had woken her up, Maxwell decided. That, or Jacobi’s snoring. He was still near her, lying on his back on the floor, still in his vodka-stained t-shirt, but someone had put a blanket on him, and a pillow under his head, too. His mouth was open and he was drooling.

Maxwell’s head throbbed, and her mouth tasted like something had died in it. The sound of the air conditioning was oppressive. She clambered to her feet, and stepped as lightly as she could in the direction of the sliding glass balcony door.

It slid open with only a little noise, and Maxwell stumbled out into the hot, dry darkness. The lights of the city were a distant gold glow in the great black vault of the desert sky. Warren Kepler was a man-shaped cutout of black, an area where the city lights were snuffed out. Maxwell didn’t like it. She wasn’t particularly fond of Kepler’s white smile, but she liked knowing when it was on his face. 

“Doctor Maxwell,” he said, without turning. “Wonderful view of the stars out here, wouldn’t you say? Just wonderful.”

Maxwell didn’t look up. Night skies in Montana were very bright and clear, and she’d spent more than enough time staring at stars she couldn’t touch. 

“I like this town,” Kepler said. As Maxwell stepped around, approaching the area of railing to the left of him, she caught a glimmer of streetlight caught in non-crystalline solid; a glass, held loosely in his hand. Looked like it might be the stupid expensive whiskey Jacobi had told her about. She wondered, about a man who didn’t get shitfaced with his- employees? Friends?- after the completion of a stressful mission. Who just sat there on the floor with them as they emptied the hotel minibar, listening to slurred, inane babblings, laughing at the appropriate intervals and chiming in with his own ridiculous anecdotes. Who preferred to drink alone in the dead hours of night, out on a hotel balcony scoured by a hot desert wind. 

She thought about the pillow under Jacobi’s head. 

Five hours ago, Maxwell had watched someone hold a gun to that head. 

It felt like it was still happening, that moment, in an alternate plane of reality just a hair's breadth away from hers. She could still feel Kepler’s fingers digging into her arm. A warning to stay cool. She remembered the heat rising in her face as she realized with embarrassment that contrary to her own predictions, she was not staying cool. 

It was the first time she’d seen someone with a gun to their head.

It was the first time she realized there was someone she really didn’t want to die. Not just because God Would Know if someone died and she didn’t care. But because if Jacobi died he would be gone and she would- 

He didn’t look scared. She wasn’t great at facial expressions but he looked pretty much the same as he always did, eyebrows pulled together and mouth creased in a frown. Maybe this was just an ordinary Tuesday for him. 

“You’re being very unreasonable,” Kepler said, in the past.

In the present he turned at last, just slightly, his body angling towards her just enough that a bit of light reflected in the whites of his eyes. As her vision adjusted she saw he was wearing flannel pajamas with what she suspected was a lobster print on them. It was weird. She wasn’t sure she liked him doing something as human as wearing silly-looking pajamas. 

She wasn’t sure, still, if she liked him. Five months she’d known him and still there was not enough data. That was- annoying.

She remembered the day they had met, the recruitment speech he’d given her. She could still hear his voice. You grew up so rural it took your redneck teachers twelve years to realize they had a bonafide computational prodigy on their hands, not just some "girl who's good at math."   She remembered how her body had gone hot as her mind went cold, admiring the thought that must have gone into that sentence, how perfectly designed it was to worm its way under her skin. If he knew so much about her he’d know her twelfth grade math teacher hadn’t thought he’d had a girl who was good at math. 

Some part of her mind that wasn’t completely distracted by Hyperion, by Theia, by every Goddard AI she was given access to, had stayed on alert, and a week later when Kepler had introduced her to Jacobi, it had sent up a red flag. She hadn’t wanted to be suspicious, she’d hated thoughts like that, but sticking your head in the sand didn’t help either and so, okay, yes, she’d wondered: was he, like, collecting them? Did he think it was cute to put them together, hey, you’re both trans, isn’t that neat! 

But there wasn’t any hint of a smirk in the way Kepler said Mister Jacobi , and the guy seemed to worship his boss like a god so that was… well, unsettling, but fine, she supposed?

She hadn’t liked Jacobi at first. He was overly familiar, acting like being on a team together meant something more, something she didn’t understand, and she felt like she was always trying to crack his code, pouring effort into it while he just stayed even more unreadable than most people. 

“Just shoot me already,” Jacobi had said, five hours ago. “Or don’t. Either way it’s not going to help you.” He sounded bored. Maxwell had felt- angry? Why had she been so angry? Because it hadn’t been supposed to go down like that, they’d both told her there was nothing to worry about. 

If she closed her eyes now she could imagine him, back in the room on the floor. She could remember the weight and warmth of him, leaning against her as they talked about fucking Transformers lore, vodka burning her throat, feeling giddy and weak and larger than God.  

“I don’t think I like it,” Maxwell said. 

“No?” Kepler asked. He took a long swig of his whiskey, gray with a shimmer of golden man-made light. 

“No,” Maxwell said. “Too hot.” 

“Okay,” Kepler said, relaxed, amused. “We don’t have to come back.” She couldn’t tell how serious he was. “But you should come into town with Jacobi and I tomorrow. You ever count cards?”

“No,” Maxwell said. “But I’ve hacked slot machines.” 

She expected him to laugh, then, but he didn’t. Just turned away again to look up at the stars. 

The first thing she hadn’t expected was being ordered along in the first place. The second thing she hadn’t expected was the car. “It’s the other side of the country,” she’d said. “We’re not flying?”

Kepler had laughed, and said, “No. No, Doctor, we’re not flying.” He had paused, looking at her- and she still didn’t know if those pauses, the slowness of his speech, was just for dramatic effect or if he was trying to cover something up with it- “We’re bringing some, uh, specialized equipment in the trunk.”

Jacobi had grinned at that, and gave the back of the car a pat. It had been an expensive car, and that hadn’t surprised her. She wasn’t a car nerd, but as a hobbyist designer of machines with motors she had some professional respect for them, and she could tell this one was high end. It also didn’t surprise her that it was dumb, not one of the clever little self driving vehicles Goddard was so proud of. The major didn’t strike her as someone who enjoyed giving up control.

Maxwell soon wished he would, wished she could be the driver and have something to focus on that wasn’t Jacobi and his loud chewing noises as he worked his way through bag after bag of chips, Jacobi and his feet that kept intruding onto her side of the car, Jacobi and his attempts at “making conversation” that got less and less friendly as Maxwell continued to give him stony silence. 

“Who wants to play a game?” Kepler suggested suddenly, fifty miles down the interstate. 

Jacobi groaned, which was enough to goad Maxwell to say brightly, “I do!” She remembered being good at road trip games, if you defined the win condition as annoying your brothers so much they screamed until your father yelled at everyone to shut up or he’d shut them up. Which she had. 

“Excellent,” Kepler said happily, and Jacobi groaned louder and covered his face with a large empty chip bag, sliding down in his seat until his knees were in Maxwell’s face. 

Things Maxwell learned over the next three days: 

1. Colonel Kepler was probably not human, given that he was able to drive for twenty hours straight without losing one inch of his cheer;
2. The only car games Kepler ever lost at were those that were trivia related, because the trivia inside his head was very idiosyncratic and random and couldn’t compete with Maxwell’s encyclopedic knowledge of all science fiction ever produced or Jacobi’s mental library of action movies (“So maybe I had a thing for Vin Diesel when I was in high school,”) BUT it was very important, when Kepler did score a point, not to let him launch into a story about where, exactly, he had picked up that piece of information;
3. The Midwest was just as boring as the Northwest. 

The most surprising thing she learned, somewhere in day two, was that she didn’t really mind the company, or even the stupid games that degenerated into arguments, not when the landscape outside was as big and empty as the fields of Montana and the road stretched on forever through cellular dead zones. Maxwell held her phone in her hand, even when it was just telling her No Signal, feeling its small weight like a lifeline back to her lab and her life, and listened to her coworkers passionately argue the rules to I Spy. 

At night, in her motel room, while the other two presumably slept, Maxwell sat in a chair curled around her laptop and established as secure of a connection back to the New York lab as she could manage.

How’s it going out there?   Just letters on a screen, glowing in the dark of the motel room.

Fine. Weird. I don’t know. I miss the lab.

I miss you, Theia said.

Very stupid to be doing this one room over from Kepler, but the door was locked and Maxwell liked living dangerously anyway. She wasn’t actually sure how much trouble she’d get into if anyone found out she’d given one of the AIs a connection to the outside world. She didn’t plan on finding out any time soon. 

I’ll be back soon, don’t worry. 

The final location had been a secret research facility hidden under the heat-cracked ground of the Mojave desert, and Maxwell was still kind of incredulous that such places even really existed. It was like something out of a fairy tale, her kind of childhood fairy tale, daydreams cobbled together from X-Files reruns and crackpot webrings. She'd thought she'd left all that behind a decade ago, trading it for the real world, which was boring and mostly unpleasant but which maybe- someday- could be taken apart and reassembled into something better, once the future finally arrived.

And then a self-driving car had taken her to woodland facility and a strange smiling man, and she'd learned that the future was already here, hidden in the cracks and crannies of the mundane present. 

So secret underground desert facilities were real, and she was walking into one to verify the handoff of top secret technology. An under the table corporate trade kind of deal. She was there to make sure their software could do what they said it could, and Kepler was there to do the talking and, she presumed, the threatening, if shit went really bad. She didn't understand why Jacobi was there. One of many things she didn't understand about Jacobi, like why an orbital ballistics researcher even had a lab in the same building as hers, why he kept sitting next to her in the cafeteria, or why he disappeared off with Colonel Kepler so often. 

She'd wondered if she'd finally get some answers. 

"Do things always go south that fast?" was not the question she'd thought she'd be asking, sitting on the edge of a bathtub in a hotel bathroom as Jacobi applied antiseptic to a sluggishly bleeding scrape on his face. He was squinting into the mirror. His face was rounder without the glasses. The burn scars seemed more obvious, wrapping around his jaw and cheek. 

"I think our current record is twenty-three seconds," Jacobi said. 

"Nah, you're forgetting Oslo," the cheerful voice of Warren Kepler corrected, from the bathroom doorway. Maxwell watched Jacobi sigh and close his eyes. "Doctor Maxwell, did I ever tell you about the time we had to do a trade off on the deck of a Viking ship?"

"No, sir," Maxwell said, "I don't believe you have."

In the mirror she could see Jacobi make a face at her. 

“Well,” Kepler began, the word drawn out and full of delight, “Mister Jacobi and I had just finished an assignment in Copenhagen, and that’s a good story for another day- but we were just about to get on a plane back to New York when all of a sudden-”

She didn’t hear the rest of the words. She was looking at mirror Jacobi, now making a whole series of increasingly contorted faces at her, and suddenly she was imagining what would have happened if the idiot in the suit had pulled that trigger, imagining the blood and the brains and everything she’d only seen in movies.

Her hands were over her face but they were shaking, they were shaking so badly and she couldn’t hold them still. She couldn’t get control. 

“Alana,” Jacobi said. 

“You said there was nothing to worry about,” she said, accusingly. “You said it would all be fine.”

“It was fine,” Kepler said. “Get ahold of yourself, doctor.”

“Sir,” Jacobi said, and there was something in his voice she’d never heard there before. “I think Alana could use a drink.”

There was a tense pause. Maxwell closed her eyes, but the mental images were still there, so she opened them and stared at her hands, willing them to stop shaking. 

“Good call, Jacobi,” Kepler said finally, jovially. “I’d say we could all use one.” He backed out of the bathroom. 

It felt different with just her and Jacobi, suddenly. 

He kneeled down in front of her, in front of the bathtub, and took her hands gently. “Hey,” he said. 

She didn’t mean to lean forward and start crying into the folds of his sweaty t-shirt, but she did anyway. 

“Hey, hey,” he said again, and his arms were around her back, now. He was hugging her. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had hugged her. It felt- nice. It felt really nice.

“I don’t even like you,” she sobbed into his shirt. 

“It’s okay,” he said. “Everyone has a bad reaction at first.”

He was being kind, and how weird, how sad and strange would it be to admit that it wasn't the violence upsetting her but the realization she wasn't an inviolate island after all, that other people still had the power to hurt not just her career but her heart. 

“Did you?” she asked. She should disentangle herself, but this felt so fucking nice. 

She felt him laugh, his shoulders shaking with it. “Maybe I’ll tell you after we get drunk.”

Her head ached with the beginnings of a hangover. She hadn't drunk like that since undergrad. She felt a bit like that naive girl again, confused and overwhelmed and full of strange excitement and dread. She didn't have the energy, right now, to pretend to be normal; so she didn't. She let her knees bend, slid down the wall, and sat there on the balcony, legs dangling over the edge, forehead leaning against the cool metal rail, feeling the wind, feeling the dry air. 

She didn't feel the awkwardness she expected to feel. She knew the colonel was still there, but it almost felt as comfortable as if she had been entirely alone.

It seemed larger, the emptiness of the desert in front of her, and the night seemed darker, the expanse of stars colder, knowing that behind her was light and warmth and the feeling of another human body near hers. It all felt so fragile. 

"The skies are painted with unnumber'd sparks,
They are all fire and every one doth shine,
But there's but one in all doth hold his place."

It was odd how Kepler's voice didn't seem to break the hush. It was up to her to clear her throat and feel the silence crack. "Sir?"

"Jacobi's a good man," Kepler said. 

Maxwell made a noise she hoped would be taken as agreement. She wasn't sure she believed in good men, or that someone who designed missiles for a living would count as one if such a thing did exist, but- 

Kepler's hand patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. It should have made her flinch, but it didn't, somehow. 

"Good work today, Doctor Maxwell," Kepler said. 

Maxwell looked up at the stars, and imagined each one as a node in a neural network, flashes of light simulating thought. 

"Thank you, sir," she said.