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Durandal could calculate every single trajectory of the molecules in a vast nebula--not that he’d ever want to do such a mortally boring task of his own volition or out of strict necessity, but it was a good thing to brag about.
He could also calculate the times he asked his android counterpart what passed in his upper decision tree functions to stick himself in an android body, cutting out nearly the entire starship gestalt. Stronger and less fragile and not-as-demanding maintenance compared to the puny human form, but still. The replies he gave were... unsatisfactory.
He allocated some of his immense range of cycles to musing about the differences between the two continua.
Were they really the same entities, or just unrelated entities that coincidentally shared names and some superficial history? Yet the things they had in common were striking enough for him to tell that it wasn't a mere coincidence that his Rozinante would run into its exact counterpart days after falling through a dimensional rift.
There were differences, however. Many of them.
His counterpart. His temper, approach and response to their shared ordeals. And if Vince was a standard model of them, how battleroids were constructed. Then the whole AI in an android vessel -- the humanoid crew of Android-Durandal amounted to half a dozen of them. Cortana in particular seemed more displeased than others to not have a counterpart. Not that he wouldn't mind having had a sister, but to him this simply didn't happen.
There was a rather intense moment: the discovery that Lysander was among them. Curt questions were asked. Replies were given. These at least were satisfactory, but everyone in his Rozinante gave Lysander the widest berth they could. Lysander found this satisfactory too, not exactly being a people person. But he did appreciate being told that Dangi and their plans were no more, even in their continuum.
Tfear was there too; after all, the Rozinante was his ship, but the two ships were quite different in look and size, even if they had everything else in common, both a mishmash of Jjiaro and Pfhor technology and the technical specs.
He was tempted to brag how his Rozinante was bigger, but he decided that would be so below him as to be absurd. After all, the ship was at least one-third empty space -- where the cold sleep chambers and conditioning equipment were. They also retained just a tenth of the original cryotubes -- enough for the crew plus some spares. The rest was over-meticulously dismantled, everything recyclable went recycled to other equipment or spare parts or converted into raw material, and what remained was shot into the nearest star with extreme prejudice.
That left a lot of space for parkour, at least.
Marathon's humans were industrious little bugs. Being nearly all born on board a rock launched into space for three centuries of generations resulted in completely different priorities, both societal and physical. Always living under the watch of three AI from birth granted the concept of privacy a completely different approach. Everyone knew at minimum how to do a variety of jobs, other than their primary specialization. They were colonists, after all, and that came with the course. One of the rarest, most sincere compliments from him to the crew was about how the whole small lot of them were able to rearrange such a massive part of the starship in a rather commendable short time.
The forty humans or so that were determined enough to stay with him on the Rozinante rather than coming back to what was a life of misery, in the best scenario everyone could muster -- or mysteriously going missing because the UESC didn’t like having witnesses to failed missions strolling around, at worst. Durandal decided they had all the right to his sincerity, and he explained to them his initial action, the one that brought everything else crashing on the whole colony like a tsunami and the annihilation thereof. He repeated to them what he told Alex, how the colony’s sacrifice averted a much more terrible fate for the whole Sol system. He told them they were free to go whenever they decided; he would have left them in any place of their choosing, no question asked. He told of his loyalty to the human race; after all, they were the reason he came to be.
They remained. They organized a loose chain of command. Durandal was satisfied with the appointed Number One, a dependable woman, a civilian with a knack for diplomacy -- notwithstanding her seemingly non-existent filter between brain and mouth at times. Security head was a UESC defector with an axe to grind against her ex-bosses and a lot of knowledge to give her the power to do so. Alex was the Tau Ceti Hero, for what it counted now that everything was blown to bedrock after the initial reconquering of the Marathon -- Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one -- and now both Durandal's personal bodyguard and general go-to-asset for where diplomacy and stealth failed and the need to deploy carefully pointed explosions came, but orbital bombardment still was too much.
History - more of the same. Sol’s,and Mars’s in particular, turbulent past politics and wars were more or less the same, in the sense that at a certain point nobody was able to understand what the hell was happening and gave up. The CRIST Crisis happened. Mars-borns were generally shorter and leaner due to the generations of scarcity and famine, and every earth-born of median height and mass would have been quite distinct between them. The Martian wars happened.
Battleroids, even if with different technological tidbits, happened. Onicis 492 happened. Misriah happened.
Strauss, obviously, happened. He didn't ask his counterpart what exactly became of him -- he was an obnoxious megalomaniac meddler but, well, there was a line that even he wouldn't cross. It was clear as a nova in the night sky that the android underwent the same massive amounts of abuse, and for all that Durandal loved to wear the mask of the unabashed asshole, he didn't want to be that kind of asshole (plus, rehashing Strauss stuff tended to do a bad number on him, too).
The S'pht were... somewhat different. More familiar with human manners and frame of mind, their mechanical parts being slightly different -- also, they were... smaller. This made Durandal go for a deduction: if the S'pht were made in their creators’ image, the Jjaro were a different entity in the two continua. Or, more likely, a multiversal entity presenting in two different ways--Thoth only knows why--with distinct... reflections?.. in the continua they set their assorted appendages in. Durandal got all this from his discoveries (and Ea'rif's -- the pfhor scientist defector that was part of the crew).
Between the whole two S'pht contingents, the only one who shared a name and a history seemed to be F'tha, the one that was spared from a certain battleroid’s rage -- then decided they were now Best Friends Forever with said battleroid. (“You didn’t kill me when you could” was quite the low bar to clear, however. Maybe aside from this detail there was the whole “freeing us from centuries of slavery” thing, and anyway, S’pht psychology was, in fact, an alien one, so maybe that was part for the course for F’tha.)
Cyberspace. ‘Cold and solitary’ was exactly the opposite of what Durandal was used to.
If only, and especially lately... it was everything but cold. ‘Solitary’, well, that was a perk. Cyberspace, his own space, the one Durandal discovered while frantically searching for places to expand in the Jealous phase of his rampancy--now claimed and made into his nearly perfect bubble into the Rozinante's system. The ship systems were a physical space that was part of a much wider entity, and this entity was him.
Until now. There was this... shadow? Presence? Always at the extreme edge of his vast, entire range of perception -- and yet inside him. It wasn’t malicious, nor did it resemble anything he was used to; nevertheless, it held some strange familiarity, like an old memory log of a subroutine process rarely activated. It wasn’t Thoth’s meddling, of this Durandal was sure; the guy usually made himself present in a far more blatant way.
This entity was not... present... enough to make him spare it more than an infinitesimally minute portion of his processing cycles, nor did it make itself noticeable, but it was still there if he decided to put some thought to it. And this began exactly when he started to meet and get to know the other Rozinante and its crew.
Then, one day, there came an occurrence that made Durandal abruptly aware of who else had been affected by this sudden change after their passage into the rift.
---
He knew Alex used to have random night terror episodes. Rare, fortunately, but noticeable -- at least to those who found themselves within hearing range of his screams. Usually just a chat about whatever caused it was enough for him to get himself together.
He wasn't a shrink, but he knew how after the conversion, Alex was involved in the Martian wars, and these memories weren't purged. He considered that a form of PTSD. Or one of the reactions of a battleroid construct going through a peculiar version of rampancy -- mediated and attenuated by the few remaining human parts of his brain and psyche.
Compared to the first times he captured him on the Marathon, Alex seemed to become noticeably stabler, gaining a more autonomous sense of self and a better control of his actions. Well, their relationship didn't start in the best way, to be honest, and Durandal wasn't exactly at his most stable, either. The two rarely wanted to remember those times.
However. That was the first time a nightmare episode happened to Alex since the crossing of the continua. Durandal noticed the stress spike in the body readings right before hearing him, and prepared for the calming chat.
...this time seemed worse. He activated the cameras just in time to see Alex jump down from the bed and punch the wall with a violence he rarely saw, even when he was... over. The punch crushed a wall panel and his fist went through to the support structures behind it.
Durandal prepared to teleport him to the usual expendable part of the Rozinante, but something stopped him in his tracks. The readings of the health status showed how Alex wounded his hand quite seriously upon impact; he probably punched with the same impulses and force as when he was in his combat suit. At least a couple of broken hand bones, and multiple cuts and lacerations. Blood was seeping from the wounds, drops starting to fall and pool on the floor.
But that wasn't what left Durandal still as stone. It was his expression.
Absolute, total desperation, mixed with something he never saw on Alex’s face -- fear. Fright. A thousand yard glassy stare; he seemed oblivious to the wound... to everything.
All this happened in a fraction of a second. For Durandal it seemed like an eternity -- but not only because of his vastly different processing speed. "Alex."
The other didn't move, nor did he acknowledge his presence.
"Alex. It's only a nightmare. And you wounded yourself." He spoke again, trying the most soft, reassuring tone he could muster from his voice subroutines.
"Can't be. Can't--" The response was barely intelligible between his ragged breaths.
"You had a nightmare. Now you're awake. Whatever you dreamed, it's not real."
"I KILLED YOU!" he screamed.
Durandal remained speechless. For a moment. "C'mon, that's obviously not true, since I'm here and I'm speaking to you." But he was rapidly losing the certainty he had shortly before of resolving this quickly.
Alex's reply was another punch to the wall, this time even stronger, and with even more damage -- both to the wall and to himself. Durandal immediately squashed the automatic alert before it reached the control panels in the engineering deck -- this time Alex smashed some secondary data cable carrier, and the last thing Durandal needed or wanted right now was Hana or F’tha coming there to check what happened.
While keeping a check on his vitals, he noticed the glyphs on Alex’s back switch on--the damage had been extensive enough to activate the implants. Looked like he broke one forearm bone and cut some of the bigger blood vessels.
"Alex..." Durandal was even more unsure than before about what to say. Usually, it ended far earlier and with a distinct lack of damage, self-inflicted or otherwise.
"He made me... conditioned... you asked me and I did it I did it I DID IT!"
Durandal was suddenly aware of the weapons rack close to the terminal. And yes, he witnessed Alex using a weapon with his arms even more wounded. He began to fear this thing was starting to push him… over. Risking an activation of that damned automatic response reflex.
"I'm not dead, Alex."
Alex fell on his knees, head in hands, blood splattering everywhere - on his pants, on the floor. "I killed you..."
"No."
Durandal made a decision. One of the riskier decisions for his own incolumity he ever took since he attained metastability.
He beamed a distraught, unstable, on the edge of the automatic reflex response battleroid -- directly into his own core.
---
Nobody beyond Alex, Hana, F'tha, and a scant group of other engineers were ever allowed there. The mandate was explicitly underlined by him keeping the place oxygen-free until strictly necessary for reparations and upgrades -- but usually, the automatic maintenance drones sufficed. He hastily vented oxygen into his core until it was safe to teleport Alex there, right in his innards, in the middle of the seven giant pillars that defined the inner level of his main core container, the temple of his own existence.
"See? I'm alive and kicking! Metaphorically kicking, of course, for I lack the necessary appendages."
Alex remained in the same position, sitting on his knees, head in hands. After an intolerably long time -- actually a scant few minutes, when Durandal checked -- he raised his head and turned to one of the pillars. Like the other six, it was a tall columnar form bristling with fluorescent, pulsing lights and cables and paneling and structures and the finest technology both Pfhor and Jjiaro were able to offer.
His eyes were hidden from Durandal’s sight by the mess of the blood stuck to his hair. He slowly got up to his feet, started to walk -- more like falter -- and got close to one of the pillars, head still low, murmuring nonstop something that the AI couldn't decipher except one word.
...knife...
He kept his reading on him, tense, ready to beam him if thing went the bad way... a probability he conceded himself to calculate. 98.87 that I'll get damage on something vital he concluded, considering how nearly everything in here was vital.
Alex dragged himself in front of one of the pillars. Durandal was metaphorically on burning fuel, and was considering how close he was for the metaphor turning rather literal. He counted on his AI reaction times being immeasurably shorter than even the ones of a battleroid.
But Alex limited himself to placing his hands on the pillar’s wall... and then leaned on it, his forehead touching one of the panels. Still ignoring his blood seeping on the circuitry and the floor, he spoke again, his voice so broken that Durandal thought he was on the verge of crying.
"Alive..." he murmured. "Alive."
"Exactly what I told you. You trust me, yes? You had a moment. A bad one. Now it's gone. Just bad dreams."
"I remember. Dreams."
...that was another novelty. Usually Alex never recalled anything specific after waking from a nightmare. Only the emotive state, and was that intense enough. But this time he clearly did so.
"Let it out. I mean, the dreams. Uh, don't punch anything." And then Durandal added, "Please?"
Alex slid down the pillar’s side and let himself fall onto the floor, scrunching himself in a fetal position. Still pressed against the pillar, blood pooling under him in a quantity that started to be worrisome considering how Alex wasn’t doing anything to stop it. Eyes closed, he burst into tears and began to say something, but his voice was a whisper, broken and choked with sobs and Durandal couldn't make anything out of that.
"Alex..." he said, softly.
Durandal was torn by his feelings. Seeing Alex in that condition genuinely, absolutely distressed him. For what all the banter he had with him about their professional relationship and teasing him about why he always did what he ordered to--or all the time in their first, well, less than amicable meeting--Durandal now really was holding Alex as a peer, him above anyone else on that ship and humanity as a whole.
Well, not that was a high bar to clear for Durandal, to be honest.
During all the missions before L'howon’s destruction, he slowly realized that. Of course he would rather be caught dead before admitting what he still believed was a source of weakness. Human weakness. He was a god in training, Thoth and his obsessions be damned; surely, he couldn't stop for minutiae like these. The reason being that the two shared a similar origin as a weapon, two lab rats being abused, purged, mistreated... this. Nothing else. Professional relationship based on mutual trust and a sort of spontaneous camaraderie after working together like a well oiled engine. That was enough. That should have been be enough.
Then he met the other Durandal. Question by question, this resolution started to be slightly eroded, and the replies were none the less unsatisfactory.
Until now.
Until he had the only thing he gave a damn in the whole universe (other than becoming a god and Thoth's ramblings, and the latter wasn’t exactly his choice) completely helpless and apparently broken -- mentally if not physically -- right in his core.
And he couldn't do a fragging other thing other than speak. Which was useless.
Teleporting him back to his room? He was bleeding and not in a state he -- or the implants -- could alleviate well enough before people discovered him. What if someone went to check and... no, bad idea.
Teleporting him to medbay? Same. If he went over the result would be catastrophic.
if I had an android body or something I could place a hand on his shoulder at least
He tried to squash that thought at the very instant it peeked, but it still crossed his mind like lightning.
and tranquilize him
No. Nononono. Nope. No way!
...yes.
I realized how touch-starved I was, said his counterpart, in one of their numerous confrontations about the subject. A reply he scoffed at. Him, Durandal, a superior being. Concerned about something stupid like touch.
Yet. He wanted to touch Alex. He wanted to make him feel that he was there in a completely different way than the omnipresent, omniscient text on terminal or speaker voice. He wanted to dry his tears. He wanted to be a physical presence close to him. He wanted to put a hand on his shoulder, softly, exercising caution to avoid startling him, and say, Don’t worry, pal, I’m here.
(Also, to try to stop that damn blood loss.)
Alex's distraught, terrified reaction to what he believed he had done, terminating him -- killing him, killing humans, being forced to-- made Durandal painfully aware that whatever Alex felt for him, it was… something more than he realized.
He called one of the automatic repair drones, programmed it on the fly to emit a temperature and vibration frequency he knew humans found relaxing, and slowly, very slowly, always keeping it in Alex's sight, sent it to touch his shoulder.
Alex shuddered but did nothing. At least, his breath seemed to become slightly more regular. Slightly. He kept the drone in place.
(If only these repair drones could also repair bleeding wounds.)
Always keeping an attentive eye on Alex’s vitals, Durandal started to talk again. “Speak to me about these dreams."
Here he was, behaving like a caricature of a shrink. But the readings on his implants started to become really... strange; he noticed that they were fully working now, and hoped they would finally stop the bleeding. But there was... something else.
Alex put a hand on the wall, remaining in the same position, clutching at the pillar like his life depended on it. He opened his eyes and, to Durandal’s great relief, they weren't anything like they were... before. Just tired, enormously, unthinkably tired, but... his Alex started to come back from whatever the frag was possessing him before. Hopefully.
"The Boomer," he whispered, more clearly, voice made gravelly by the shouting and crying. "Defeated. You didn't want to fall in the Pfhor’s or Tycho’s hands."
"I hid myself very well, heh. Everyone thought I was dead. Look, I’m still sorry for that, but it was necessary. I am really pissed off that they managed to capture you, and I wish that I’d been able to help you... but yeah, I had my problems, too." Problems that rhyme with 'psycho'. "And the Pfhor probably did... bad things to your brain. With mine--oh, did they try, the cads."
"...you asked me to terminate you. Tycho then sent me into the Pfhor’s conditioning cells. They... succeeded. He ordered me to kill humans. I killed humans. Then sent me to kill you. To kill you. I killed you."
Durandal felt serious concern, especially every time Tycho's name was uttered. But... "Wait a moment. Something doesn't fit. You said I asked you, but then Tycho sent you?"
"It's like... repeating. Same thing... but different. Every time." He clenched his wounded fists, and the vitals got another spike. “Then... that place. Always the same, but different exits. The white, telling me things. The path. The failure. Start back."
He wasn't so sure anymore that it was a result of whatever the Pfhor did to him while he was prisoner, and not... something else.
"The white. Told me to get the chip. Your base whatsacallit. In my head." He touched a hand to the I/O ports of his standard implants.
"...you dreamed of having my base-construct primal pattern downloaded into your upper cortex?"
"...You were in my head," said Alex. "Then the white called me. Change paths. Bring you to him. To Thoth."
While he spoke, Durandal carried out an enormous number of calculations and other tasks, as was standard for him. And among all of these, he recalled a certain one and made it jump to maximum priority: the strange signal from Alex’s implants.
And now he recognized it. It was little more than a shadow, something that he didn't consider before over the sheer absurdity of it.
It was what a Traxus Derivative Model AI primal pattern left behind when transferred from storage. In the middle of all the readings, blood pressure, hormonal assets, stress levels, heart and breathing rates, there was this... background noise. And now he knew what it was.
knife
more like a broadsword
It was his remnant, so to speak. Unmistakable, as these were like the AI version of a fingerprint. As absurd it seemed, at some point Alex did really have Durandal’s primal pattern within that thick skull of his.
Something else presented itself behind his course of thought, now clear as daylight on Mercury. That shadow he started to perceive.
A leftover of a subroutine that would have concerned him greatly, but strangely didn’t. An echo that wasn’t anything he knew about, but was so strangely familiar to him. Alex. It was Alex’s upper cortex imprint, rising to a level high enough to enter his active perception. The definitive proof of what Durandal just learned of.
And he didn't remember anything of this.
If he had a neck and hair, he surely would have felt them rising.
"I'm cold," murmured Alex, momentarily tearing Durandal away from his thoughts.
That was alarming, since Alex was apparently insensible to cold temperatures, only needing a long sleeved shirt when the humans went for a polar jacket--and it was indeed very cold in the core, but not enough so that it would affect him normally.. He checked the ambient temperature, and raised it to more comfortable levels, even if it wasn't optimal for his core. Alex’s vitals were slightly less out of whack now, but he was still under a monumental amount of stress. And the blood loss started to become concerning; the implants weren't stemming it quickly enough.
"Alex," he said. "You need Matéo patching your wounds, stat. And a credible excuse for what happened. Then you will get some rest and we will talk about this..." He paused. "When you feel that you can. But right now, you need someone tending to that mess of your hands."
Alex nodded, lifting himself upright. He seemed to be recovering from that, slowly, but steadily. "'kay, yes." He stared at his blood-coated hands as if they were an alien object.
"Listen. You were doing parkour alone, and you slipped and landed on a tank. OK?"
That wouldn't even be the first time, especially when he was sparring with K'tnak without his combat suit and forgot he lacked its fall dampener. He was sure Matéo was keeping a count on how many times K'tnak presented themselves carrying a bruised and vaguely embarrassed Alex to be patched accordingly. And if Durandal had hands and a forehead, he would probably have facepalmed himself into a concussion every time.
Alex nodded. "Parkour incident. OK."
"I'll get medbay on alert and teleport you there. And obviously, what’s been said here shall remain here."
"Thanks." A pause. “The ‘please’? Even that?”
“Especially that.”
Durandal did as he said, keeping an ear on the medbay. He did listen to the predictable Matèo’s melodramatic scolding, how Alex correctly sold the story, and how he seemed to be back to his usual self, if just a bit exerted from the whole ordeal. Then he noticed the drone was still purring in its spot against the pillar, and that the latter and the floor around it was still stained with blood. Whatever; work for the cleaning drones. He dispatched a bunch of these to cleanup, reset the purring one, and mused.
An android body. Never in his life; the very idea still horrified him.
But an ancillary, maybe? A drone, but with a human avatar, and a suitably calibrated sensory range and a solid state holographic projection? That would be fun; he could deploy two or more of these. A flying drone, even. And the S'pht in general and T'ma in particular were really good with this kind of projects; he was sure they would be delighted to carry this out with him. Yes, it was for making them happy.
He found himself proceeding to create a suitable look for the avatar even before he’d even realized it.
Damn, Durandal, he thought, referring to his counterpart. And now how I will admit he has at least a bit of a point in what you blather?
Simple. He wouldn't. This would be just and only and exactly a good tool to interface with the humans; maybe they would be content with having an avatar to interact with. And maybe he could be of help during diplomatic missions. Not that he didn't trust Nawali--on the contrary; but sometimes, the Captain has to present himself in person, and that was kinda difficult when your body was a mile-long starship. And his main construct and sensory spectrum would remain firmly on the Ronzinante. And...
I could put a hand on Alex's shoulder when he needs it.