Work Text:
"You added code to the simulation January."
"Yeah. Is that a problem?"
"No, no. Not a problem at all." The response is too-fast, too fast to be real. It's almost like Alex knows that you don't care if he thinks it's a problem or not. "I was just wondering if there was a reason."
Which is Alex-speak for I looked at it and what the fuck, Morgan, even if he'd never say that to your face. He might have, once, but you're three missing years and a few too many brain injections past that point.
You push your keyboard back so that you can turn towards him while propping an elbow on your desk without getting an arm full of key smash. Alex looks much the way he always does, but he won't quite meet your eyes when you look at him. This, too, is the new normal. The scarring on your eye is a reminder he doesn't especially like, you're pretty sure.
(That's you giving him the benefit of the doubt. Everyone tells you you should do less of that, when it comes to Alex, but it's too easy to fall into old habits, sometimes.)
"Were we made for something, Alex?" you ask. It's almost a perfect echo, of the voice lines you added to the sim, not synthesized in the way the real January's voice would have been but spoken into a microphone by you, yourself, because even if January is the medium, you're the one doing the asking. Words that it felt important to speak with your own mouth, even if they might never reach their intended audience, if these experiments aren't as successful as Alex hopes.
Did someone make you, Morgan? Were you made for something?
"That's a question you'd have to ask our parents," Alex says, and you laugh, short and harsh and bitter.
"Yeah, like that's going to happen. Whatever purpose they had in mind for us, I think Dad made it pretty clear that we failed at it."
If not, you'll have to invent your own purpose. Or have none at all.
Alex wrings his hands a little, at that, and doesn't answer. You don't know how your parents ever thought of you as the fidgeter. You continue, "Besides, I'm pretty sure that our parents made us because two point five kids and a white picket fence, and because they needed someone to inherit all the money that's not doing them much good anymore."
The Coral isn't visible outside your window. But you know it's there, it's always there, calling out to an Apex that will never come, that you destroyed in the blast of a nuclear reactor turned into an atom bomb. Like you, made for a purpose it will never fulfill.
You have to decide, Morgan. Who are you?
And because it's clear that Alex doesn't have any other answer for you, you continue, "If the test subject gets far enough to go investigating the Coral - far enough along to hear those lines - then they'll be almost all the way to becoming a person. And that person can't just be another me. That's not how it works."
That's not how it's going to work, even if Alex looks like he wouldn't actually mind that all that much. (You don't think it would go as well for him as he thinks it would. You were angry, on Talos, you were so angry until you stopped because you were just tired. And you've never stopped being tired since then, no matter how much sleep you get, even if you no longer have dreams about hunger on the horizon.)
(Sometimes, the hungry horizon is just you, reflected through a funhouse mirror.)
Diplomatically (because he was always the better diplomat; there's a reason you weren't allowed to talk to the press without a PR person at your elbow), Alex says, "So you decided to prepare it for the real world."
You don't comment on his choice of pronouns. You just say, "Isn't that what you're supposed to do when you create someone? Prepare them for reality as best you can, before you cut off the training wheels and send them rolling down the hill?"
"You don't think the simulation and your own memories will be enough?" Alex asks, and the way he leans in just a little bit, his eyebrows raised - in the old days, it would have been a sign of genuine curiosity. A sign that your thought process had gone too fast for him to follow, and he needed the extra steps to catch up.
Now it's not that your thoughts move too fast. It's that they move too foreign, too far from the bounds laid by the Morgan who died a little bit, over and over, in a scary chair on Talos I.
You sigh, scrub one palm against your chin, and say, "Even if it was enough, Alex - isn't the whole point to make things better for the people who come after us? Isn't that the reason behind everything we did?"
You know that it is. That's the reason the Morgan of the videos told you, the reason Alex still holds fast to, even in the face of golden threads winding their way across the Earth. But you still ask, because Alex isn't the only one who has learned the trick of innocent-sounding questions to shine light on just how much you don't understand each other anymore.
Alex chews his lip to one side, just shy of biting it, and then says, "I suppose it was."
It's the first argument in a long time that it feels like you won.