Chapter Text
Morgan had mostly pushed the mirror neuron thing as a way to get under Alex's skin. Alex was throwing roadblocks in front of the typhon neuromods in the name of "safety" and "due diligence"? Then Morgan was going to pull up the most out there project that would cause the worst sort of philosophical questions.
The first few trials didn't lead to much of anything, but since they also didn't lead to catastrophe, Alex seemed to be calming down a bit and actually fine with letting Morgan stir things up this way.
That was the opposite of what Morgan wanted.
The only logical thing to do was up the stakes. The next mirror neuron trial, Morgan used his own DNA as the basis for the mod being injected into the typhon test subject.
Alex wanted to prevent Morgan from injecting himself with typhon abilities? Then he, and the whole rest of the team with high enough clearance to even know what was going on down in psychotronics, were going to have to squirm uncomfortably while Morgan ran a typhon through his own memories. The more uncomfortable they were for Alex, the better.
He wasn't expecting it to actually work.
"What do you mean, unexpected results?" he asked, having gotten paged down to psychotronics at some ungodly hour of the morning. The typhon was running through some memory of his. A camping trip from college. Alex had pushed it as a 'bonding activity' and it had gone absolutely terribly.
"It's deviating from the memory," the late night staffer whose name Morgan hadn't bothered to remember told him.
"Who'd it kill?" he asked, curious. Alex again? Alex was usually the first to go when the typhon shook off memories. It had been a bit gruesome at first, and he was a little nervous of the idea of normalizing his brother's death to the sort of scientists that could stomach psychotronics...but it did make Alex get that frown. The one he got when he thought Morgan was being reckless or cruel or both.
Considering what a pain in the ass Alex has been about the typhon ability trials, Morgan was all for making him get that frown about other things right now.
"No one," the scientist answered. "It just made different choices. Choices that still seemed…in character, for lack of a better term."
"It's a good enough term for what we're doing," Morgan said idly, most of his attention going to the screen. The typhon and Alex were making smores.
They had done that, during the actual trip. Alex had insisted on it, with his checklist of 'bonding activities', and Morgan had been completely and utterly done by that point and gritted his teeth through the whole ordeal.
The typhon was smiling. The typhon was wearing his face and making it smile and sitting there all loose and calm and hiding a laugh at Alex's attempt to roast marshmallows on a literal stick. It looked like it wanted to be there.
Creepy.
"Finish the simulation. Mark it as 'do not dispose'. Even if it reverts to typhon form or goes on a rampage," Morgan said, mind racing. If they had a typhon making reasonable human choices that didn't line up with what Morgan would actually do, nicer choices than any Morgan would reasonably take, then that meant it was working.
Alex was going to be insufferable about this.
The memories kept deviating in the same sort of ways. Everyone else was getting very excited. Morgan was getting nervous about the implications. If they could give mirror neurons to typhon, that would be great...but ultimately fairly useless and it would throw everything into the 'peaceful contact with an alien species' realm and open up all sorts of inquiries into the ethics of changing another species' empathy abilities and do absolutely nothing to further the neuromods.
When he went up to the arboretum and shared that worry with Alex, Alex just sighed. "Don't worry about that. It's got your personality, not its own, it won't be a normal first contact situation. Assuming it doesn't try to go on a rampage as soon as we pull it out. Way too early to start thinking about political messes. Just do what you do."
It wasn't a satisfactory answer.
When the tests finally did start going off the rails, Morgan was almost relieved.
They were putting it through the memory of Morgan's first day at Transtar. There was a lot of meeting people, a lot of personalities to process, a lot of paperwork, a lot of Alex.
Morgan didn't tend to do the social butterfly thing, so in theory it was a good test of if the typhon could maintain a human personality with a lot of overload and differing stimulation. It was the first simulation where it would be touching people this much.
Morgan paid attention for long enough to confirm that it was waking up as usual, and then left. He'd started focusing more on the typhon neuromods. Worst case, he wanted those done, tested, and in his head before everything could unravel on him and push those tests back even more. No one gave a shit about so many 'volunteers' disappearing, but they would probably care about the typhon even in the form without mirror neurons, much less this new problem.
The moment he got to his office, he had to leave again.
"What do you mean, Bellamy got killed by a mimic?" Morgan asked, once he hauled his ass all the way back down to psychotronics.
"In the simulation." Bellamy told him, looking very serene considering the playback was currently frozen on a frame of his coffee cup about to murder him.
"Obviously."
"The simulation appeared to deviate from the moment you arrived at the Transtar building." Bellamy summarized, and then hit the playback in lieu of explaining further.
That was a definite deviation.
"Check the background of the volunteers we considered using for testing." Morgan said, ready to absolutely murder (or at least fire) someone if they managed to mix up the injected DNA.
"There have been no new human DNA injections into typhon since--"
"Don't care. Check it. It could have been contamination from earlier that's only just coming up." If they broke his actually working typhon he was going to be so pissed.
Nevermind that he had spent the last week nervous about implications. It was still science! They were making huge leaps here and if someone fucked it up with improper cleaning he was going to hit the roof.
They shut the typhon down for three days, sequenced the preserved DNA left over from what they'd injected into the typhon several times, and found nothing.
Morgan had them start back up an old simulation. They'd put the typhon through the frustration of his PhD defense about five times now, to see how it adjusted the presentation each time and how it responded to that sort of pressure.
(It always was a lot more nervous than Morgan himself had been. Morgan had known he had this in the bag; even if he fucked it up the panel wouldn't have dared fail him. The typhon seemed to actually care about their reactions.)
The typhon woke up in his old apartment, and then Alex called. Simulation rejected, first day of work.
"Let it play out." Morgan ordered.
It went exactly the same as it had the day before. Weird tests. Mimic to Bellamy's face. The typhon knocked out.
He made them wait, until it woke up. In the apartment again.
In a replica of the apartment.
"It's an outbreak scenario." One of the lab techs murmured, nervously, as the typhon flipped a wrench in his hands and stepped over the dead body of the lab tech that was standing next to her. The guy looked a bit ill, but didn't say anything. Bellamy had set the standards for how they were allowed to react to their on screen deaths.
"If any of you ever wipe my mind and put me into a glass box for observation, you're fired," Morgan drawled. "Someone run a comparison with the previous iterations."
The difference was that the typhon completely disconnected from the simulation after the first few seconds.
Morgan had them run a simulation where he didn't start in his apartment. The simulation disconnected immediately, and then the typhon was waking up in the fake version of Morgan's apartment (he could spot the fakeness now, the door looked a bit off and there were books on the table that Morgan had never read).
"Let it run all the way through this time," he ordered, and then went to analyze the disconnect.
Alex called halfway through, and very smartly did not say a fucking word about their earlier conversation while Morgan ranted about the sudden deviation.
"Sounds like the typhon neuromod trials," Alex said, carefully, once Morgan was done ranting. "Could be mixing up memories and anticipated events."
"As far as I'm aware, I was supposed to be briefed as to what was going on with the start of each of those."
"Absolutely," Alex said. "I would never do any differently. But you said the typhon has been making its own choices. Maybe it misunderstood."
By the time Morgan got back into the main room, it was just Bellamy. "Did you finally lose it and feed the lab techs to the typhon?"
Bellamy snorted out a laugh. "I sent them on break. The typhon created a scenario where you had made what appears to be a series of illegal operators, and I wanted to talk with you about how to handle revelations like that."
"I haven't made any illegal operators." He could. He could easily. It wouldn't be worth it.
"Of course you haven't." Bellamy didn't sound like he believed him. Bellamy also did not sound like he gave a fuck. "But given that these deviations mean that you can no longer control exactly what memories the typhon is experiencing, I thought it was a good idea to revisit the protocol and access level."
"Fair enough." Morgan leaned in to look at the screen. The typhon appeared to be down in the hardware labs, for some reason. "Let's let it play out fully, see where it ends up, then we'll assess."
"A couple trials might be wise," Bellamy countered, "since this typhon has shown a tendency towards deviation."
Several hours later, Morgan called Alex back. "If the typhon neuromod trials had changed my personality, what would you have done?"
"We'd stop the trials once we noticed the deviation, I assume."
"And if we didn't? If I insisted on pushing on until my personality was well and truly fucked?"
"I'd try to get you back?" Alex answered, sounding confused. "What's this about, Morgan."
"It's about what you would do in this scenario."
"Did you find something in the typhon neuromods? If you know about it now, it won't happen. You caught it and now we can fix it."
"It's in the simulation. The version of me the typhon is playing through got stuck in an endless loop because you were trying to reset me back to my original personality."
"Take a break," Alex advised. "I can go down and run the mirror neuron simulations if you need me. Switch focus, analyze the typhon neuromods to see if the personality shifting would be an issue. Maybe it's something you noticed without realizing it, or didn't realize the significance of?"
Morgan let out a breath. "Maybe."
"You're brilliant," Alex said, easier with the complements in this sort of setting than he ever was when Morgan had actually accomplished something. "If anyone would have subconsciously noticed that sort of thing, it would be you. You probably would have figured it out if you had been focusing on the typhon neuromods instead of this other project. Don't sweat it."
"Except I didn't notice, in that simulation."
"It's not even a simulation anymore, Morgan. It's a typhon's dream. Don't let it get to you."
Morgan set to tearing apart the typhon neuromod sequencing, and set some of the displaced lab techs to go over the other neuromod trials carefully. They didn't have much personality data, not enough to analyze small switches, so they'd just need to up those types of trials.
He got back to Bellamy just in time to watch the typhon break into deep storage, looking for one specific audio recording for one specific person.
Morgan spent several hours stewing, resisting the urge to run off and ask Mikhaila directly if her father was a volunteer.
He avoided her for the next three days, verified it himself with a very careful background check, and then used the paraplexis as an excuse to break up with her when she finally cornered him.
She looked pretty upset and he did not care. She was a spy.
A bad spy. And a brilliant engineer. Obviously the best revenge was to keep her on board with the paraplexis secret dangling over her head, and assign her father to the new neuromod personality shift trials. The old man could spend the next ninety days playing the piano and taking personality tests. If the typhon's simulation was right, he wouldn't be the same old man when he came out, but Morgan didn't really care. Someone had to go through it.
It was petty, but it made him feel better. It wasn't guilt. He'd sat himself down and come to terms with the entire concept of sacrificing people before this had all started. Every single volunteer--okay most of them--had someone who loved them. Some of them weren't even guilty of whatever crime they'd been convicted of. It didn't matter. They were surviving or not based on nothing but what they were useful for in the typhon or neuromod trials, not their personal worthiness. They were tools.
Mikhaila sent herself down to fix something in the Neuromod Division not long after it got out that they were starting a new round of tests with a lot of volunteer participants. In retrospect, she had done that pretty much anytime a big test had started.
Whatever, Morgan didn't care. If she worked harder now that she knew her father was spending all his time playing the piano, that was just better for Transtar as a whole.
There weren't any other crazy revelations from the typhon. His parents trying to have him murdered? That tracked. Alex trying to do things Morgan's way was mildly frustrating considering what a fussy roadblock he'd been up until this point, but not especially surprising. One asshole who was already on a fast track to firing that they could keep a better eye on, a few traitors that very frustratingly couldn't be verified since they hadn't actually done anything yet outside of a typhon's hypothetical scenario, and several people who knew things they shouldn't.
It was probably time for employee restructuring anyways. He sent the information to Alex and let his brother figure out what to do with it.
The typhon itself, for all it was insisting on playing through this scenario over and over, was stuck in a loop. Sometimes it would do things slightly differently, but it always tried to save all or most of the people still alive on the station and then faded out when it got them to the shuttle. Sometimes it would go down with Talos I. Sometimes it would escape.
It never killed Alex, not even when it decided to blow up the station.
In a fit of frustration at the lack of progress, Morgan connected the looking glass in his office to the simulation, and waited.
When the typhon got to his office, Morgan flipped on the looking glass.
It was wierd as fuck. They were, essentially, in two planes of reality. Talking to each other.
This was technically a first contact.
"You're in a simulation," he told the typhon. "And I need to know why it keeps defaulting to this one scenario. It's not programmed in, and I don't know a lot of the things you're finding out so I know you aren't pulling them from my memories."
It looked at him, wary. For a second Morgan wondered if it could even understand him. It had been talking with people in its simulations, but those had been either memories or created by the typhon itself.
"Have you considered," it said, after several moments of silence, "that you're messing with things you shouldn't be?"
Morgan sighed. "I get it, you're currently existing as the most boring version of my personality. That doesn't answer what I need to know, and your concerns aren't relevant since they aren't real."
"Why ask me, if you're the one with the answers?"
"Because you're the cause of the deviations.
"But they're true?"
"Some of the information is true, but the whole scenario is off. We haven't even verified half of it, and the rest could be coincidence."
"What have you verified?"
Morgan realized, very suddenly, that this was what it was like talking to him. There were two versions of him trying to figure out very different things and neither of them particularly cared about the information the other wanted.
No wonder Danielle always looked like she wanted to shove him out an airlock.
"You don't need to know that," Morgan said, after a pause. "It's enough to be confused how you got that information. I need to know where this went wrong."
The other Morgan stared at him, warily. "What, exactly, did you do."
"You." Morgan retorted, not really in the mood.
Normally the innuendo would have passed as an immature comment. Instead the other him laughed. "You would." The typhon glanced back out the window. "You did the mirror neuron tests," it guessed after a pause, not even giving Morgan time to startle because holy hell that was a leap. "I thought those were theoretical at the point you should be at. Are you sure that your reality is the real one? Maybe we're in parallel simulations. One last ditch by Alex to reset your personality by immersing you in it long term, maybe."
"I'm positive that I'm in real life and you are in a simulation." Morgan snapped, uneasily.
If it was a parallel simulation, why bother to connect them? Nevermind that the typhon had already completely fucked his own simulation.
"Hm."
"Think on it." Morgan said, warily. "The only thing I need from you is to know why your simulation went sideways."
He was definitely sure his reality was the real one.
Why had he wanted to talk with a typhon again?
Whatever.
The typhon didn't move from the office again during that simulation, after Morgan disconnected. Instead he spent the whole time on his computer, going through files and ignoring the increasing amounts of chaos outside his door until it finally overwhelmed his turrets and then him.
The first thing typhon did, in the next simulation, was write 'Alternate Timelines' on the walls of his fake apartment.
And then the simulation auto-reset.
The next simulation, the typhon went through the simulation as normal until the point that Morgan had contacted him. And then, the simulations played that conversation without any input from Morgan at all.
The Typhon didn't stick around this time. It was like it was old news, like he suddenly remembered. And he was suddenly reacting to the simulation as though it was a simulation. He stopped to help people, but with less concern, and spent more time down in psychotronics tearing everything apart and learning things that Morgan didn't even know, things that hadn't even happened.
Morgan shut the simulations down and they auto-restarted. He shut the machinery down, and as far as he could tell the typhon started dreaming. He didn't pull the typhon awake, because obviously that would be a bad idea.
Bellamy was uneasy, but mostly willing to go along with what Morgan wanted to do.
Alex wanted him to destroy the typhon. Morgan refused. They had been successful! He'd had a conversation with an alien!
That wasn't an alternate reality, it was just a typhon going rogue.
The volunteer testing started to confirm personality deviations after multiple neuromod resets.
Morgan restarted the simulations.
This time, instead of setting up a looking glass, he plugged himself into the simulation.
Bellamy wasn't thrilled, especially since Morgan had decided not to tell Alex ahead of time, but he went along with it.
"If anything goes bad you can always pull me out," Morgan said idly, caring less about reassuring him than he did about the mild risk of Bellamy deciding to tattle to Alex.
"I'll keep an eye on it," Bellamy said, nodding as though Morgan had given him an order instead of blowing him off.
Morgan didn't really care, because the next step was inputting him into the simulation.
It felt like a bad idea the moment he was there. There was a big difference between watching an outbreak scenario on a screen and sitting here, in his office, hearing the turrets go on in the lobby and knowing that they had spotted mimics. If he went out the door, he'd start encountering bodies.
He didn't go out the door. He kept the screen down over the windows, kept the door locked, and waited.
When that got untenable, he started going through his computer files.
"Oh," the typhon with his face said, when it finally stepped into the room. "It's you."
"You could at least try to be surprised." Morgan grumbled.
"You don't want that."
Morgan snorted, eyeing the typhon. He...looked like Morgan. Not just in looks, but in how he moved and stood and the ways his eyes were narrowing. It was unsettling. There was a version of him that had just spent several hours shooting and bashing his way through an alien outbreak and...it was sort of hot.
He wasn't sure if that version of him actually being an alien that was essentially wearing his skin and personality like a costume made that more or less the case.
The typhon seemed to have noticed him looking, if that smirk was anything to go by.
"Anyway." Morgan said, ignoring his own reactions like they'd never happened. "I figured the best way to get you past the whole dual simulations thing was to just plug myself into this one."
"That doesn't prove we aren't in connected simulations."
"Yes it does. Unless your simulation is a sub simulation within mine, at which point we may as well treat mine like reality, this wouldn't be possible."
"But the looking glass would?"
"Probably not."
The typhon's eyes narrowed. "I bet you I could figure out how to connect simulations. In theory it should be possible."
Morgan sighed and leaned back in the chair. He was, without a doubt, the most annoying person in the world.
"It's either a simulation or an alternate reality. You couldn't explain the things I know that have turned out to be true any other way. I couldn't have known those things because you didn't know those things," the typhon argued.
"Fine. It's an alternate reality that you somehow got access to."
"If that's the explanation you're willing to go to, then we're probably in connected simulations."
Morgan slammed a hand on the desk, glaring. "Whatever. I don't care. What I need to know is how you got access to that information."
"Probably something typhon." The typhon shrugged. "You're the one who has been studying them, you tell me."
"You are literally a typhon. You've got to know."
The typhon glared at him. "I know what you knew before starting at Transtar, and what I've been able to keep between simulations, which isn't much."
"Then make a guess, because whatever this is, it's coming from you. You've gone and messed up the whole experiment out of--what, paranoia? Paranoia about a possible alternate reality that didn't happen?"
Morgan had kind of forgotten what he was talking to until the other version of him suddenly shifted a little bit off color. Just a bit of purple.
Before he could say anything more, the typhon was over the desk and sending the chair sliding backwards into the wall. Morgan didn't even have time to try to get up before the typhon had him pinned to the chair by his neck, one knee between his legs as he leaned close enough to bite him.
Or kiss him.
It was sort of hard to remember that he was just in a simulation, with the typhon version of him close and furious.
He looked really hot when he was angry.
"None of this would be a problem if you had any concept of--"
The simulation suddenly faded out, and moments later he was blinking up at a very concerned looking Bellamy.
"What the fuck was that?"
"It attacked you," Bellamy answered, looking stressed.
They hadn't ever had two people in the same simulation like that before, so...fair. Annoying, but fair. Morgan grumpily took himself over to watch the rest of the simulation.
The typhon didn't seem interested in completing the scenario after that. It went out and started killing typhon, dragging them back to put into the recycler until it had a massive pile of material cubes.
It took the cubes out into the lobby, carefully arranged them into a massive heart, and then mimicked one of them and rolled into place.
Then it stayed there.
For hours.
Until the station was broken apart around it and the simulation finally ended.