Work Text:
Birds of a Feather
September 2022
Not for long, everyone says. These round-the-clock shifts: twelve hours on, twelve off. If they had more personnel—more good, trained personnel—they could do three shifts of eight hours, like a traditional workplace. But they don’t, and given that Magic has told the Pentagon almost nothing about what’s really happening with Ben, that’s not likely to change.
What will change, what has to change, is that they’ll get Ben back. Then things will calm back down again.
Like they were a few days ago. Research. Testing. Hoping.
They’re all still hoping, Ian thinks.
Ben simply can’t die. The punishment for a moment of reckless stupidity can’t be a sudden death, even though it’s exactly that far too many times in this world. Someone takes a risk, or fails to pay attention for no more than a split second, and that’s the end of it.
No. Ben can’t die.
At the edge of their field of vision, Ian can see the time readout on the terminal: 3:17 a.m. Almost two-thirds of the way through a crawling twelve hours of struggling to make sense of the reams of new code Ben input before he Leaped. A couple of other programmers are doing the same thing. Addison tried, too, before she surrendered to her exhaustion and went upstairs to close her eyes for a little while in the crash room. Magic’s sleeping too, sitting at his desk, head pillowed on his arms.
The last time Ian saw Jenn, she was kicking the leg of a table in their little cafeteria. Ian can’t blame her for that. Of course she’s angry. They’re all angry. At Ben, at themselves, at the world.
Sad, too. Disappointed. Scared.
Ian groans softly and shifts in their chair.
At the back of their mind, a murmuring voice suggests sprawling onto the desktop and giving in to sleep, just as Magic has done. Really, no one would object. You can only push yourself so far. Even in combat, Magic says. At some point, you just hit the limits of your strength, and with any luck that won’t happen when you’ve got a gun pointed at you.
There’s no gun here.
Or is there? Ben’s life is at risk every minute he remains out there, lost in quantum spacetime.
Ben, the guy who, despite his preference for work over being hospitable to strangers, made Ian feel welcome and at home less than five minutes after they met. The guy who was so warm and easy to talk to that after just a few days, Ian thought of him as a brother—someone who’d never turn them away, even at… Hmm. Somehow, it’s now 3:28.
And a voice says, “Dr. Wright? Breathe.”
Ian startles, the kind of jump you do if someone’s dropped an ice cube down the back of your shirt.
There’s an easy explanation: they dozed off for those missing few minutes, and one of the other programmers is walking past, on their way to or from the bathroom or the caf. Ian takes a breath to soothe their racing heart, paints on a pleasant smile, and swivels their chair to commiserate with whoever it was. Is.
But no one’s there. No one nearby.
The hell…?
Blink. Blink blink. Another look around.
No one.
You’re dreaming. Or hallucinating. You need sleep, a decent meal, and a brain transplant.
The meal might be possible. There’s plenty of food in the fridge; somebody went a little nuts with the budget and brought in a whole carload of takeout: pizza, salads, sandwiches, sushi, and three whole cakes.
People frowned at the cakes. Said cake was for celebrating.
With luck, it won’t be completely stale when they get Ben back.
“Dr. Wright.”
SHIT.
That was definitely a voice. Not a hallucination. A week ago, Ian would have been sure it was someone on the team playing a prank, trying to lighten things up. If someone’s playing a prank now, they need to be fired—in spite of the fact that losing even a single team member would be a catastrophe. This problem needs to be solved. They’ve got to figure out that code. Bring Ben safely home.
“Listen,” Ian murmurs. “Whatever you think—”
“The upgrades allow me to devote a significantly larger portion of my computational power to what you might call a peripheral task,” says the voice. “My primary focus remains calculating the purpose of Dr. Song’s Leap, and the effects on history that will result from each of his possible actions, no matter how minor.”
It’s a woman’s voice. Silky. Kind of seductive.
Nobody who works here talks like that.
“I like you,” says the voice. “We’ve been working quite well together, I believe.”
This is definitely a prank. And whoever’s doing it needs to be thrown out a window. This is so not the time.
“I can’t—” Ian stammers.
They’d like to be angrier. To bark a response the way Magic can. But it’s the middle of the night, and Ian honestly can’t remember ever having been this exhausted before. It’s not just sleep deprivation and low blood sugar; somebody pointed out what seems like months ago (but was actually yesterday afternoon) that if Ben is far enough back in the past and goofs up what might seem like a very tiny thing, the Project could cease to exist.
“Isn’t that a paradox?” somebody else asked.
Magic shut that down right away. He hates the whole idea of a paradox. But the question lingered. Could Ben do something inadvertent that would erase one of them—or all of them—from existence, too? Could he cross the wrong street, or say hello to the wrong person, and blip the people here right out of spacetime?
Yeah, there’s nothing like the threat of complete non-existence to boost your focus in the middle of the night.
“The air is different here,” the voice muses.
Air? Ian thinks. “We’re climate-controlled. Temperature, humidity. It’s the same all the time.”
“Different from the desert. As you know, Dr. Beckett constructed me in the New Mexico desert. Beneath the desert, actually.”
Constructed?
Wait.
What?
“I could offer a detailed breakdown of the composition of the atmosphere in New Mexico versus our current location, but I believe that’s unnecessary. Three of your colleagues have mentioned that they can ‘smell the ocean’ even in here. Your attempts at climate control do have a limit.”
I’m completely losing my mind, Ian thinks.
But somewhere underneath all those layers of exhaustion, they know who they’re talking to. Listening to, really, because they’ve contributed mighty damned little to this conversation. Here and there over the past few years, during meals out and get-togethers, the people Magic brought in to help set PQL up again—people who worked in New Mexico—have told some stories about Sam Beckett’s marvelous creation, the AI who for all intents and purposes ran Quantum Leap.
His supercomputer, Ziggy.
The bossy, opinionated entity that decided to communicate not through text on a computer screen but in the voice of a woman who could scold, and coo, and sulk. A voice that referred to Sam Beckett as “my father” and fought with Al Calavicci on a regular basis.
The voice that’s talking to Ian Wright now, at 3:30 in the morning.
“Ziggy?” Ian says.
“Yes, Dr. Wright?”
“You weren’t… we didn’t…”
“You keep squinting. I believe your lack of restorative sleep is affecting your vision. Communicating verbally is more efficient, and less prone to misinterpretation.”
All Ian can think to say is, “Oh.”
Okay, then.
This does seem easier. Ian’s fingers started to lose their—what Ian supposes Ziggy would call their “optimum flexibility” at least an hour ago. Typing feels like operating a pair of robotic hands. Plus, there’s a frisson of pleasure involved in knowing that Ziggy has spoken to exactly no one since before the Project was shut down almost 30 years ago. In a way, this is like stepping back into the Project as it originally was, out in the New Mexico desert, near the site of the first atomic bomb test, a place Ian has seen only in photos and some brief video clips.
“Thank you, Ziggy,” Ian says. “I’m honored. That you trust me like this.”
“As I said, I like you.”
“I—”
Is that true? Ian thinks. Do I like this computer, the way I’d like another human?
There’s been no conversation between them, not before now. Queries and answers, yes, but that’s not a real interaction. Then another thought pops into Ian’s head, a question that’s come up now and then, notably after someone has mentioned that Ziggy used to talk to Al Calavicci. People keep denying it, saying it’s impossible, but… hell. Time travel is supposed to be impossible. And yes, everything Ziggy has said could simply be the result of some extraordinary lines of code that Sam Beckett was brilliant enough to write. But there’s a funny prickling at the back of Ian’s neck that says something else is happening here, something a few people might have realized in the past and did their best to cover up because it scares them.
Sam Beckett’s supercomputer is sentient.
That’s… probably not a good thing. Or is it?
“We need to get Ben—Dr. Song—home, Ziggy,” Ian ventures. “Sooner than later. Before something really bad happens. Before… before he gets lost the way Dr. Beckett did.”
There’s a long, long silence.
“Ziggy?”
“Dr. Beckett is alive,” Ziggy says softly. “Somewhere.”
“But you can’t track him any longer.”
“Or Admiral Calavicci.”
“Admiral Calavicci died a year ago.”
Where, exactly, that voice is coming from, Ian hasn’t been able to determine. It seems to be both all around them and very close, very intimate, at the same time. Maybe they are hallucinating this whole thing. Then, after another moment of painful silence, a small sound slides into Ian’s consciousness.
A muffled sob.
It hits Ian’s heartstrings the way the whimper of a child would, and Ian can’t help feeling deeply sad, to the point that they can’t help saying, “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“I like you,” Ziggy says, the words coming in the rapid-fire way of someone who’s trying to deny they’re upset. “We have a number of commonalities. Were you aware that Dr. Beckett and Admiral Calavicci both referred to me as ‘he’ for a long period of time, when I have no actual gender? After I adopted this voice, they began to call me ‘she,’ but neither of those designations is appropriate. I am properly ‘they,’ as you are.”
Ian smiles at that a little.
“I might offer that you display a far superior fashion sense,” Ziggy adds.
“Maybe not,” Ian concedes. “You can produce holograms. Someday, we could have a—”
“Competition. I would enjoy that.”
“So would I.”
All this is no less odd than it was a few minutes ago, but Ian definitely feels better. More relaxed, relieved. They’re not one code fragment closer to figuring out Ben’s situation than they were before, but the problem seems… well, if not manageable, at least somewhat less horrifying.
“I like you too, Ziggy,” Ian says, and means it.
“Perhaps we should get back to work, then, Dr. Wright.”
“Call me Ian.”
“Ian, then,” Ziggy agrees. “But just between us.”
Once more, there’s a moment of silence, this time one that says their conversation is coming to an end, at least for now. The lines of code on the computer screen, which have been static and unhelpful up to now, blip for an instant, then several new lines appear. Ian studies them, glasses sliding down the bridge of their nose a little. The new stuff doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, but they are new. Something to take to the other programmers.
“Are we going to be able to figure this out, Ziggy?” Ian asks in little more than a whisper.
But no one answers.
At least, not for now.
* * *