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“How does that work,” she asks, and Epsilon can hear her eyes narrow.
“It’s not like you’re a chatterbox, Carolina. A man’s got needs. Like conversation.” He shrugs his small shoulders.
“But you are just talking to yourself.”
“Everyone talks to themselves,” he says, defensive. “I answer. It doesn’t have to be a thing.”
She thought long and silently. “And you have everyone in there?”
“Yes.”
“Even Delta? I know you played the journal logs.” Something is in her voice, an air of detachment she’s working too hard to maintain. Hard to hide from things inside your head.
Epsilon was suddenly wishing he could backtrack. “Yeah, even Delta. But, like, they exist to hear myself talk, it’s…they’re memories. It’s not really Delta.”
“Echoes.”
“Exactly,” he says, relieved.
“Like the journals.” He tenses up again, but there was no way out of this one. “You still have them stored somewhere, don’t you?”
“I mean, yeah, I do-” He’s trying to work his way out of this corner that she built while he wasn’t looking. Of course, it was a matter of time, but much more time. Years and years of time, if he was lucky. But when is he ever lucky…
“Show me.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit-”
“That’s an order.”
“Yeah, but, I’m just saying-”
“Order, Epsilon. Don’t make me repeat it a third time.”
“Which one?” he says, defeated.
“All of them. No, wait. All but the last one.”
“For the record, I think this is a bad idea,” Epsilon says, his voice slipping into the tones of Delta in the process.
“That makes two of us. Play it, Delta.”
“So, all of them are in there?” She yawns in the middle of the sentence. Sleep. She must be getting old.
“Memories, just memories! Besides, it’s not like I just let them roam around. I got it under control.” Epsilon stands a little taller as he says this, the projected image preening for her benefit. Her eyes are already closed.
“That’ll be a first,” she says into her pillow, an oversized gold sweatshirt on top of a criminally thin and beat up mattress. It’s the small comforts, like the heavy blanket she found during a recon mission recently. She should have built a fire, it’s cold even with it and her body suit on. Maybe she should have slept in her armor again…
She’s got the warmth of the sun bearing down on her cheek almost aggressively, but when she opens her eyes she’s in complete darkness. She blinks, twice, and she’s in a desert, the sand rolling around her in some imagined wind. She hears a fire and looks for signs of someone, but it was coming from right behind her. In the space it takes her to turn around she’s standing on grass in a small park in the middle of a dense city, a patch of green in front of a coffee shop. She smells the beans before the smoke. The shop explodes and she’s blown back into a brick wall on the other side of the park, and the fire roars up into the street like it’s forming a shape, a bird or a dragon, maybe, she’s not sure.
She hears a growling and gets on her feet, slow, looking for the animal she landed on. The fire singes her hair. It’s long, too long, and down, and waving in the wind. It’s matching the colors behind her and in front of her and she’s in the middle of the flames. She grips at her throat but isn’t gasping at all, and then she remembers, of course, and jumps so high that she sees the shape in the flames:
Hello Agent Carolina
The sound of wood burning is in her ears now and she’s falling, turning in the air and trying to see the culprit. Just behind her left ear and out of sight she hears the growling again.
“Maine?” she calls out just before her world becomes full of water. She’s landed in an ocean, sinking into the dark depths below and she hears something slither like a snake, just out of reach. She looks up and there’s fire on the surface and she turns, her movement lagging in the water, her hair streaking after her, bright, so long, much longer than it ever was. She doesn’t remember how to swim, and whatever is beneath her is getting closer.
“Epsilon!” she yells and her voice carries through the water. There are no bubbles and she wonders if she just yelled it in her mind, and if he’ll hear it anyway.
She blinks and a mountain of a man is in front of her, on fire, burning the image into her mind. He leans in and grins in a way she hasn’t seen in decades and his flames trail behind him as his scarred throat growls…
“CAROLINA!”
She jolts awake, throwing the blanket off of her in the process and sitting up through the projection of Epsilon. He had been yelling right in her ear.
“Bad dream,” she mutters, but her breath is still catching like she’s gasping for it.
“Sure sounded like it,” the AI says, turning away so she can compose herself. “I was trying to wake you.”
“Yeah.”
“It took a while.”
“…Yeah.”
“Was it, um. Was it York?” She heard the hesitation.
“No,” she says, curling up again and dragging the blanket over her. “Can you get Delta to play it again? It’s…it’s been a while.”
“Sure.” She hears the tone of voice change as the other AI takes over, “if you think it will help.”
They’ve been waiting at this spot so long she is beginning to doubt her intel. It will be dark soon, and the window will close. She hears Epsilon mutter to himself. “Who are you talking to?”
The AI splits and shows another projection, Delta. The green man turns and looks at her expectantly. “It’s usually Delta.”
“Arguing with yourself,” she asks with a smile.
“Re-running tests. It’s been a while, and as Delta is so good at telling me, recalibration is very important.” The two projections said the last part together, and Carolina had to suppress a small muscle shiver at the echo.
“Are you sifting through the intel again? I don’t think they’re going to show. They should have been here by now.”
“I’ve got the twins on it,” he says, following it with an immediate “oh shit-”
“Twins?” She knows he slipped up somehow. Part of her reminds her that self-preservation would have her ignore it, but that’s never been a particularly loud part of her mind anyway. “Show me.”
She sees Eta and Iota on the ground in front of her, looking so small she could step on them at any moment. Delta has vanished and Epsilon is watching her reaction closely.
“They’re talking,” she observes, watching them interact while they don’t pay her any attention.
“Not usually,” Epsilon says. “Sometimes, I guess they talk, but mostly they just stay silent.”
She leans down closer to them. “Let me hear.”
“Carolina-”
“I said let me hear them, Epsilon.”
She hears the AI sigh next to her ear. Amazing, what Epsilon could convey with a sigh.
She listens to the familiar voices, both of them, talk in hushed tones. Their cadence and rhythm was so natural in her mind, the way letters rose and fell. The ends of sentences, the upturned questions. The excitement of a hypothesis being correct.
She stands up again. The AIs are dismissed, going back to a background process somewhere in Epsilon’s mind. “Well?” he asks, cautiously.
“Allison,” she says, dully, like the blade of an overused knife.
“What?”
“That’s all they said. Allison allison allison. Whole conversations, just one word.” She turns back to her post, still empty of activity. “Didn’t you hear them?”
“They don’t talk much, remember? Not to me.” He hovers for a moment. “I’m going to go back to recalibrating.”
“Yeah. Good idea.”
They’ve found their rhythm.
Or, rather, he has found her rhythm, and then fallen into step. Things have gotten pretty interesting and in all the excitement he thinks they’ve almost moved past the journal-logs-until-she-goes-to-sleep stage.
“You know, I think we’re really in a good place right now,” he says, quietly. “Oh, if you roll left, there’s a pillar around the corner.”
“Right now, in the middle of an enemy base with that Locus fanatic looming around, you think we’re in a good place?” She rolls and waits for the patrol to pass her. The longer she goes without anyone seeing her, the more files she’ll be able to lift off of their hands.
“I mean, mentally. With each other. Like, I get you, you know?”
“How about you get what we came here for, and we have this little heartwarming pep talk later?” She sticks the little flash drive in the port and looks behind her. Two minutes until another patrol comes by.
“Sure thing, boss.” He floats over to the computer, hovering above it before blinking back to her side. “But I can multitask, you know.”
“Why, is Theta helping you?” she says with a small smile at the current smoothness of this mission. It’s been a while since they’ve had one like this. The purple AI is now standing behind Epsilon, looking at the ground and trying to make himself smaller.
“No, Gamma,” Theta answers, shyly. “I’m on defensive maneuvers.”
“Gamma,” Carolina echoes, taking her eye off the hallway. Gamma, but he’d always called him Gary, when he thought no one else could hear.
“Knock knock, Carolina,” the processed voice behind her says and at the same time Wash’s voice rings out in her ear so clearly she looks around for him.
“It was Wyoming,” Wash had admitted, reluctantly.
“I hope he didn’t make York listen to one of those awful knock knock jokes,” she had said, forced.
“Carolina! I think they heard that!” Epsilon’s voice is rushed, bordering on panicked.
Alarms. Alarms are blaring in her ear and lights are flashing red, and the door behind her is trying to close for the lockdown. The space above the flash drive where Gamma had hovered has two bullet holes cleanly lodged into the monitor. The flash drive was still in the computer. Her gun is in her hands.
“Some defensive maneuvers would be nice right about now,” she says, darting forward and ripping the memory stick out of the machine. “Wasn’t that Theta’s gig?”
“It’s me now,” Epsilon says as the sound of armored footsteps fills the hall from the left. “Ready?”
“Always.”
“You know, you did try to shoot at another AI right in front of him,” Epsilon reminds her, in what he clearly thinks is a gentle way.
“I was confused. Besides, I didn’t shoot at Theta. I wouldn’t.” She was pacing, back and forth in the small room and waiting for the files to be decrypted.
“He’s not your AI,” Epsilon mutters. She stops in front of him.
“Are you jealous? He’s part of you, you know.”
“So is Gamma.”
“And I said I was sorry about that, I won’t do it again.” She rubs her arm where the bandage probably needs to be replaced again. “I was just…it was sprung on me.”
“Right, which is why he’s scared.”
“But I’m not even holding a gun. And it can’t hurt him anyway.” She sits on the old battered chair, sighing into her hands. She pulls her fingers apart and pulls at the corner of her eyes in thought. “How did North do it?”
“He was nurturing,” Epsilon says pointedly, his arms crossed and his helmet facing away from her.
She gets up with a click of her tongue, her voice cold. “Well, we’re just going to have to deal with what we have.”
“Right.”
“I don’t have to see him. Just. If it comes up, tell him I’m sorry.” She pauses for a moment, listening to the computer hum in the corner of the room. “And Gamma, too.”
“Sure,” Epsilon says, a little softer.
“And can you…can you get Delta to play it again? Last time.”
“You’ve said that before,” the AI says, already opening the logs.
“And I’ll probably say it again.” She closes her eyes and leans her head back against the wall behind her. “Good evening, beautiful people,” she says along with the projection. “It’s a lovely Monday night…”