Chapter Text
Mandy's mother was the one who knocked on the door.
“Mary!” she shrilled, pronouncing it more like "Maaaaary" and shoving a box at Laura's mother when the door opened. "Thank you so much for agreeing to this. I know it's last minute and I appreciate you so much for it."
The box smelled like fresh cookies.
"Well, it's Laura you should be thanking," Mary Brand said, rubbing her daughter's shoulder briefly before giving it a squeeze.
"Of course, of course," Mrs. McTavish said, glancing briefly at Laura before turning back to look at Mandy. "I'll be back in two hours, all right?"
"Mom," Mandy said in a hushed voice. "I thought you said one hour. I'm supposed to meet the other girls by then."
Mrs. McTavish looked from her daughter, to Mary, to Laura. "Well, it's a big project, honey. I'd think you need a little more time."
Mandy looked at Laura for a moment, somewhat panicked, before sighing frustratedly and nodding. “I guess I’ll see you later.”
Mandy’s mother kissed her on the forehead before leaving. Mary turned to the two girls and smiled. “I’ll go put these out on a plate, all right? You two get started.”
And so, Laura was left alone with Mandy McTavish.
Mandy was taller than she was, like most of the girls in her class, and her light brown hair was kept under control by what smelled like a lot of frizz-control shampoo. She was wearing an electric blue tank shirt, despite the fact that it was too cold outside for that, and about a million bracelets.
“I heard you made the cheer team,” Laura said. “Congrats.”
“Thanks,” Mandy said. She hesitated for a moment. “I thought your house would be bigger.”
“We have a lot of land, I guess, but we’re not rich.” Laura started walking down the hallway towards the dining room. “I mean, we’re not poor either. We’re fine. We might even be moving to a bigger house soon because we’re going to be taking on-”
“Laura!” A loud, sharp voice came from down the hall. “You’ve got to get all of this stuff off the table!”
There was a fuzziness at the edge of Laura’s vision, like the room darkened for a moment. She shuddered.
“Sorry! Coming!” she shouted back.
She hopped and then took a skip to cross the rest of the hallway, sliding into the dining room on her socks. Her father was standing there with his arms crossed.
Mandy came in behind her and looked between the two of them. She shrugged off her backpack and put it in a chair.
“Sorry,” Laura said, gesturing to the mess of black fabric that covered most of the table. “This is my Halloween costume from last year. I needed to take one of the parts out of the voice modulator for something else, and I put it back together this morning.”
Mandy just looked at her. “Okay.”
“I went as Darth Vader. Want to see something cool?”
“Uh, sure.”
Laura picked up the helmet and fumbled around on the chest pad piece, which was still on the table. She hadn’t been able to make the eyeholes right so that she could see well while wearing the helmet.
She found the right button, pressed it, and held it down. “No, Mandy, I am your father,” she said, and the voice that everyone else heard was a perfect imitation of James Earl Jones’s voice.
No one said anything for a few seconds.
“Well, Laura, I am your father, and I think you should put that in your room so you can help Mandy with the math assignment.”
“Yeah yeah yeah, okay,” she said in Vader’s voice, laughing a little, and walked back to her room with the helmet on, using a hand against the wall to navigate. She tossed the costume on the bed and picked up her notebook before heading back to the table.
“You can buy a helmet like that at the store but I actually made mine from scratch, soldered everything myself. I want to make it even better this year, maybe add a bunch of lights to the bottom of the cape.”
Mandy made a face. “Lights? On Darth Vader?”
“I dunno, I just don’t want to do the same thing as last year, and since I’ve got a month before Halloween I figure I don’t have enough time to start a new costume.”
“Aren’t those kinds of lights… expensive?”
“Yeah, but I’ve got a little bit of money left over, and I can use the lights again on another project.”
Mandy looked down at Laura’s sweater for a moment, then back at her notebook. “Sounds interesting.”
Laura’s sweater was a dearly loved pink number that had been stylishly oversized when her father had bought it for her years ago. The colors were a bit faded and there was a burn on one sleeve from a soldering iron that she’d not quite been able to wash out.
“Or I could spend it on some new clothes or something, yeah,” she said. “Anyway, um, we’re supposed to be looking at geometry.”
“Yeah, I don’t get the Indian thing,” Mandy said. “What’d you get for the… entire second page of answers?”
“It’s… it’s not actually an Indian thing,” Laura said carefully. “SohCahToa is an acronym, it just sounds, you know. Trigonometry is about triangles, and, um.”
The man who looked like Andrew Brand walked over and picked up the paper they were looking at. He frowned at it.
“This isn’t that hard,” he said. He looked Laura in the eye. “I thought you were smart.”
The room was darker, somehow, even though it looked the same.
“It’s seventh grade math,” she said. “I was past calculus and learning linear algebra around this time, she wasn’t.”
“Huh?” Mandy asked. “What’s going on?”
“We’re learning trigonometry,” Laura said to the man who looked like her father.
He looked coolly at her, and turned to walk away.
She only had to kill time. If she could wait a few hours, maybe that would be enough. She looked at the clock - 2:31 pm.
It might take days, she realized.
This wasn’t so bad. She could do this for a few days.
It might take longer.
“Let me see,” she said, looking at Mandy’s paper. She read the problems one by one. It made her head hurt.
“See, the thing to remember about arrays is that you never start with one. The first one isn’t one, like it would be in a grocery list. The math wouldn’t make sense. You have to start with- hey!”
The man who looked like her father stopped and quirked an eyebrow at her.
It was infuriating. The body language was all wrong. Someone was wearing her father like a suit and he wasn’t even behaving right.
“This isn’t right. We were doing trigonometry.”
“Does it matter?” he asked.
“I don’t know. What are you getting at, here? What are you trying to see? Because you haven’t told me.”
The problems on the paper changed back to trigonometry.
“Thank you,” was all she said. She turned back to Mandy. “So the ‘S’ in sohcahtoa stands for sine, which is just the height of the triangle if you orient it a certain way. How do you orient it, you ask? Well, let me tell you…..”
It had messed with her head.
Here, she felt like she was twelve all over again. She remembered everything she was supposed to say in perfect clarity. But when the problems on the paper had changed, she’d almost fallen for it. She’d played along by instinct, as if someone was running a simulation of what twelve year old Laura would have said if the situation had been different. She’d have to be vigilant.
She thought ahead. How long had Mandy stayed here that day? Not the whole time, maybe half an hour? She had that long to rest, reorient herself. After that was the car ride, and then she wasn’t sure what else.
God, she was so tired.
Nero had taught her that if things go sideways, if possible, one was to find a way to reassess the situation and rank priorities again. What did she need to do?
First, she needed to find out what the goal of this whole thing was. Was there a piece of information he was looking for? She could make a few educated guesses as to what it was, but without knowing for sure, it was best to just try to give as little away as possible.
The way to do that was with the second priority. Bide time. Take things as slowly as possible. Delay, delay, delay. The less she did, the less likely he was to find what he was looking for.
Third, find a way out. When things went off script, even just in tone of voice, the world felt wrong, like whole new possibilities needed to be calculated all at once. If she could veer things off course, she might be able to crash the system. On the other hand, if the thing she crashed was her own mind, she wouldn’t be any better off.
Then again, crashing her own mind might just bypass the first priority, by permanently locking away whatever information the person pretending to be her father was looking for. No matter what, she couldn’t let him win.
Finally, seek new opportunities. He might be looking for information from her, but she just might be able to get information herself.
She had a plan. It wasn’t much of one, but it was better than she’d had before.
“Hey, Laura?” Mandy asked. “Honestly this is really hard for me, and you seem like you’re already really good at this. Maybe you should just do this and I’ll find a way to make it up to you.”
Laura reached over and grabbed a cookie off the plate.
“Are you sure? You’re not gonna know how to do it for the test.”
“I’ll deal. Maybe I could pay you to change my grades again?”
“Shh! My dad’s in the next room.”
“Okay, fine, sorry,” Mandy said, quieter now. “Deal?”
“Deal.” Laura started to form her papers into a pile. “So what do you want to do now?” She didn’t have that many hobbies that other girls liked, but she did have a Gamecube, and she figured that was probably enough.
“Actually,” Mandy started. “I was wondering if you could get one of your parents to drive me to the movies. The other girls are going to be there, and I didn’t realize my mom was going to expect me to stay here.”
“Are you guys going to see Serenity?” Laura asked, smiling.
“What? No. We’re watching Just Like Heaven.”
Laura narrowly avoided gagging in front of Mandy.
She’d wanted to go to the movies with the other girls. Hell, she’d made it a goal to be able to sit at their lunch table at least once. There never seemed to be room.
“I’ll go ask my dad,” she said.
She started towards the office, but hesitated. She’d be subjecting herself to almost an hour in the car with him. Should she ask her mother instead?
She remembered her rules. She didn’t know what he wanted, so she couldn’t change the script. If this was some sort of ‘show you how your life could be different if you’d made different choices’ situation, she needed to avoid making any choices at all.
She gritted her teeth and continued on.
From the back, he looked so much like her father that her heart ached. It could have been him. But the moment the floor creaked when she got too close, he turned around, and the illusion was broken.
“Mandy wants to know if you can take her to the movies,” Laura said. “She doesn’t want to be here any more.”
In the car ride out to town, Laura got to be silent. ‘Andrew’ made small talk with Mandy, and Laura looked out at her family’s barley fields as they drove by.
“Three sisters!?” ‘Andrew’ asked. “That’s got to be a house full. We’ve just got the one kid. We got it right the first time, right Laura?” He winked at her.
She’d forgotten about that part.
It was like the words had punched her in the gut. She turned her face hard into the window and stared at the setting sun until her eyes couldn’t focus any more.
When Mandy finally left, the man who looked like her father dutifully turned and asked if she’d like to sit in the front seat on the way home.
Of course she’d said yes.
Laura stepped out of the car, took several deep breaths of fresh, wild Scotland air, and got back into the car in the front passenger seat.
“So, what happened? Mandy doesn’t like ones and zeroes as much as you do?”
She couldn’t take it any more.
“Is that your name?” She asked. “Zero?”
He made an amused sound. “There she is.”
“Answer the question.”
“Yes,” he said. “I am Zero. I am the first of a new generation of advanced lifeforms. My abilities exceed that of even the most talented humans without practice in a given field. Soon, my siblings and I will be able to begin work redesigning the world as you have known it up to this point.”
“Okay,” Laura said.
She wasn’t sure how to feel about this one. On the one hand, this had the potential to be very bad indeed. On the other, this was a kind of problem she at least had a little bit of experience dealing with.
Zero stared at her, clearly unhappy with her lack of reaction.
“How old are you?” she asked. “Are you the same age as us?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve been artificially aged up to reach full integration with my neural implant within the last two months.”
The road was brightly lit by the afternoon, but about fifteen feet on either side of the road, and thirty feet ahead, the world simply stopped existing. It was being rendered from her memory in real-time, right before she needed to interact with it.
“How do you expect to redesign or even understand the world if you’ve only been alive for two months?” she asked. “Have you even been outside the Glasshouse?”
“That’s what I have you for,” Zero said.
“You’re learning about the world from pieces of other people’s memories?”
“It’s what I’ve got now. I’ve also been allowed to use the Internet.”
“Somehow I don’t think you’ll get a complete picture. You do this for, what, a few hours with someone Anastasia doesn’t like, looking for secrets she wants you to tell her? You’ll learn a lot about the criminal underground and not very much about anything else.”
“I know,” Zero said frustratedly. “That’s why I’m so glad she finally gave you to me.”
Laura’s blood ran cold.
“I… what?”
“Anastasia and the other Disciples kept talking about how brilliant you are, how they never could have succeeded without you, how you’d foiled their plans before coming to the Glasshouse and they were so glad they didn’t have to have you as an obstacle any more. And I just kept getting these security guards they’d captured, or shitty assassins Raven had put into a coma who were half-braindead. I’d get them for a few minutes and get a ton of scenes of hand-to-hand combat or mission briefings or the last thing they saw before they were knocked out. I didn’t have enough time.”
“Why do you think you have more time with me?” Laura asked.
The barley farm was gone now. It was just the car, and the amount of road that the headlights could reach.
She hadn't hated being twelve in the moment, but she hated it now. Being small, having braces, the constant need to impress people. She was different now. Being stuck in her younger body made her feel powerless.
“Laura, tell me something about computers. If you put a USB 2.0 device in a USB 3.0 port, how fast can you transfer a file?”
“USB 2.0 speeds. You can’t go faster than the slowest device.”
“Right. And in this metaphor, I’m a device, you’re a device, all of the thugs I usually get to play with are devices. And let me tell you, those other devices are slow. It’s excruciating to have to muddle through their bovine thoughts. It’s like walking in mud. I don’t know how they get through the day.” His voice had started to raise. He looked over at her, not really paying attention to his driving. He probably didn’t need to. “But you’re different. Your brain is so much faster. Everything they said about you is right. You’re a genius.”
Oh.
Oh no.
“What time is it?” Laura asked.
Zero smiled.
“Zero, tell me what time it is right now.”
“Do you really want to know? Because a website I read once says it’s best to not look at the clock when-”
“ZERO!”
“Fine, fine, fine.”
He stuck her father’s wrist over and she got to see the digital readout.
2:32 pm.
It had been about an hour and a half since this had started. The math problems, the conversations, the drive.
And in the outside world, a minute had passed.
She didn’t say anything. She just put her face in her hands and let a few stinging tears leak out.
“Aww, you’re sad now, but by the time this is over, who knows how you’ll feel about me?”
She looked at him bitterly, but thoughts were already beginning to form.
She controlled the pace. He might be keeping her here, but this was her own head. This wasn’t as unbalanced as it appeared.
There was a way out of this. There had to be.