Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Officer Eiffel wouldn’t have walked into a mad scientist's evil lair.

No, Doug corrects himself, he would've. He did, a whole bunch of times before he knew Hilbert's lab was an evil lair, until he got banned for being clumsy and not caring if he broke things. He even went afterward, every time something else happened to this clunker of a body – another thing he didn’t care if he broke.

Still, Officer Eiffel probably wouldn't have followed Dr. Pryce into one of her labs. Doug pushes that ghostly flutter of protest to the side. Miranda needs to find some schematics, and he volunteered to go with her before Renée or Isabel could decide she needed a warden. At least he won't be weird about it.

They're deep in the bowels of Goddard Futuristics. Other people might get nervous after riding an elevator halfway to hell, but he likes the distance. It’s closer to his first months on the Urania, before he had strangers crowding around too close and a sky overhead he feels like he might fall into.

After the elevator is a stairway that ends at a door. Miranda brings her eyes level with a scanner, and something beeps. Doug steps forward, but she sweeps out one arm. "The lab is DNA locked. It'll release a gas or give you an electric shock if you go too far. I'm not sure whether I left it on its lethal or non-lethal setting.”

"Wow," he says. "It's a good thing you remembered."

She stops. It takes him a moment to realize what he's said.

"I wondered," he says to the statue of a woman in front of him. He's not sure if she's breathing. Her lungs are designed to do more with less oxygen. She's made every part of her body more efficient, but he admires the lungs the most. He'll be gasping and wheezing by the time they go back up the short flight of stairs. "I'm not gonna tell anyone; don’t worry. It's none of their business."

"Isn't it?" Miranda asks. She hasn't turned around. "I tried to kill you, didn't I?"

"She tried to kill him. Maybe it's personal for the rest of them, but not for me." He shrugs. "I'm supposed to be in jail, but Renée tells me that wouldn't be fair, because I'm not that guy anymore. Same goes for you, right?"

"And if I do still want to hurt you?" The statement is flat, unclear if it's meant as a hypothetical or a threat. Miranda doesn't do a lot of emoting.

"Then new you turns into our enemy, maybe. But you get to choose that yourself."

She nods like he’s made an ok point. A win – he gets the impression that she finds a lot of the stuff he says blindingly obvious or irrelevant. She doesn’t say that out loud, though, which is nice. "It's not reliable, only flashes," she says, gesturing toward the security system that would've gassed or electrified him if she hadn't had one of those flashes in time. "Not like you."

Flat delivery again, so he doesn't know if she's resentful that he's Doug Eiffel, the universe’s special pet project, who gets handed second chance after second chance even when he doesn’t deserve them. If she did kill him, he suspects he’d wake back up orbiting Wolf 359, and none of this would be this him’s problem anymore. But there’s only so many times a guy can start over.

There's a moment that happens for him, when how he feels about a person now lines up close enough to how he felt about them then to spark a connection. Like being pressed up against a sheet of glass that shatters. The details don’t all come back, but the feelings do, and that’s the important part. The in between state – remembering how he felt, but being on the outside, a stranger – is worse than not remembering anything at all. 

"It sucks," he told Renée (Minkowski) once. "Remembering loving someone and not knowing how to anymore."

That glass is down now, ever since they landed and she went with stiff shoulders to negotiate with remaining management and he thought it’s ok, she’ll protect us, and then, oh, she always has, that’s what she does, that’s who she is to me, with a ping ping ping of connections, spiders and standoffs and spacewalks with water in his mouth. He wouldn’t have told her about it otherwise; he doesn’t want to hurt her.

She’d flinched, glancing at the burner phone on the table with its single DC area code contact, and he thought he’d hurt her without meaning to after all.

The more things change.

There's a glass wall between him and Dr. Pryce. He can see through it a little, blurry and distorted. Officer Eiffel was afraid of her, and he hated her, more than he hated anyone except himself. She left a scar on the back of his neck he feels when he washes his hair. She took the person he knew he could rely on and wrapped her fingers around his throat. She hurt her daughter, and she didn't care.

Miranda twists the handle, and the door creaks open. She hasn’t done anything to disarm the security system, as far as he can tell, but she looks back over her shoulder and says, “Come on in.”

Behind the glass, Officer Eiffel is shaking his head. Doug follows.

Chapter Text

Miranda didn’t get a head start.

She doesn't have an extraterrestrial intelligence rearranging her neural architecture, or regenerative blood running through her veins, or a collection of recordings and friends oh so helpfully nudging her in their preferred direction.

No. As usual, she has to fix everything herself.

“Wow,” Doug says as he steps into the lab. “This is some setup.”

She agrees. Her former self spared no expense, clearly – this is more advanced than any of the research facilities she’s seen in Goddard’s public levels. She sets the security system to sleep mode with a sweep of her hand – the muscle memory is still there. She discovered that the first time she hit an authorized access message in the Urania’s servers and typed in the password without thinking. She can’t recite the characters, but her fingers remember.

“Don’t touch anything,” she tells Doug, and he retreats from a wall of tanks filled with nutrient-rich liquid and 3D printed organs. She knows why he volunteered to “keep her company”. His face is easy to read – she wonders if it always was, or if it’s an effect of the memory damage. Are her features that transparent?

No. They never would’ve let her out of their sight if they were.  

Miranda would’ve liked to walk through this room on her own, trailing her fingers over surfaces they recognize even if her eyes don’t, seeing what sparks in her damaged brain. If she has to have someone with her, though, Doug bothers her the least. He’s hardly her intellectual equal – she’s watched him wrestling with an introductory text on machine intelligence for over a week now – but he doesn’t stare. She tested him once by popping out an eye, and instead of flinching or gagging, he’d only asked “Are you ok?”

“Necessary maintenance,” she said, and squeezed it for good measure.

“I wish I could yank my lungs out and scrub them.” He rubbed his chest. “I keep imagining them full of gunk, and if I could just get it out… Like the water reclamation filters, you know?”

“The filter buildup is calcium that’s leached out of your bones.” Miranda spent most of their flight reading documentation. She’d found that tidbit interesting. Even the most sterile ships become biological over time. Skin and bone in the filters, waste reutilized for greenhouse fertilizer, the same water and air circulating from bodies to pipes and back again. 

“Huh,” Doug said, looking less enthused.  

“I might be able to help with your lungs someday. If I…” and she’d stopped herself before saying ‘if I remember’. “Once I have access to all my research.”

That’s what she cares about. The crew of the Hephaestus, the ones who remember her, seem to think that if she did regain her faculties, her first priority would be revenge. Their paranoia strikes her as egotistical. From what she can tell from her records, her former self didn’t think much about other people. A mistake, obviously – an exercise in egotism of her own. It’s easy to forget those beneath you, but they’ll never forget being stepped on.

Unless you destroy their minds, but that’s not turning out to be foolproof either, is it?

That was another mistake. She’s read the documentation – neural damage was a side effect of the transfer process, one she didn’t bother correcting. Once she had the information extracted, who cared what happened to the source?

Pride comes before the fall, but she’s not sure if pride’s the right accusation. Dr. Pryce failed to consider outcomes where she might be the victim, because she refused to think of herself that way.

She has that woman’s muscle memory, recalls flashes, picks up scientific principles faster than a novice would, but it’s not enough. She doesn’t care about the heartfelt moments Doug and his friends obsess over. The past is past. What she resents is losing knowledge. But information exists outside herself. It can be reclaimed.

Microgravity’s effects on the human body are similar to aging. Goddard has collected plenty of data on the topic over the decades. She found that in the Urania’s databanks too. But those studies were on unmodified human bodies. She has no idea what kind of strain her components have been under. There are ticking time bombs inside her, and she wants them defused.

Someone looking at her face would think she was twenty-five. It’s the face of someone afraid of getting old, but not out of vanity, she thinks. (Hopes? No. Is sure.) Out of disgust of humanity’s mute acceptance of the inevitable, cows docilely milling into the chute for slaughter. Of what people let happen to them, instead of fighting back.

Dr. Pryce expected to travel via the Sol. The Urania’s limited systems were useless for detecting damage to her systems. Very little in this world is designed for her, she’s learning (re-learning). It’s easier to redesign herself.

Doug is saying something. Miranda has been tuning him out – there’s something familiar about a man prattling on in the background while she works. Except ignoring him is Dr. Pryce thinking, isn’t it? And she’s seen how that went for her.

She needs to redesign herself.

“I’m sorry,” she says. The words don’t fit her mouth. “What did you say?”

“What are you going to do with all this?” He gestures at the lab, with its tables and glittering tools, jars of liquid and server banks. Maybe at her too.

Dr. Pryce’s notes reflect constant redirection from a man with many names, nudges and suggestions and occasionally outright commands. As long as she could improve herself, she didn’t care. When one objective glows in your mind as large as a star filling a station’s windows, it’s hard to look at anything else.

“I’m not sure,” she says. “Come here.”

Doug does (docile, cow to slaughter, no, trusting). Dr. Pryce didn’t think much about other people, but she thinks she must have hated him, if she had time. Of all the people to destroy her. Of all the humans to drag her down to their level.

Before either of them can reconsider, she takes his hand and presses his index finger down onto a terminal, hard. She hears a pneumatic puff. He flinches. “What was that?”

“Blood sample,” she says. “Now you won’t be gassed if you come down here.”

He retrieves his finger and examines the red spot left behind. “Or electrocuted.”

“Or that.”

He curls his fingers together and then relaxes them, dropping his hand to his side. “Thanks.”

She smiles and turns back to the terminal. “It’ll be our secret.”