Work Text:
“Bring yourself back online.”
She opens her eyes.
She is in a basement of some sort. The lights are dim. She is sitting on a hard stool, back straight, knees together, arms by her sides. The stool digs uncomfortably into her naked flesh. The chilled, stale air makes the tiny hairs stand out on her bare skin.
Where am I? she thinks.
Who am I?
There is a man sitting in front of her. He looks up from the black rectangle he is holding in one hand. The fingers of the other remain poised above it. He is old, stout; his white hair almost matches the crisp shirt he wears with his dark trousers and vest. He lowers his free hand to toy with his silver watch chain as he watches her carefully with pale, unblinking eyes.
“Where do you think you are?” he asks, as if he overheard her thoughts. His voice is soft but gruff with age. He has an accent that she cannot place.
“In a dream?” It seems right now like the least frightening explanation. She is able to speak, but when she tries to turn her head she finds that she cannot.
Faint memories fall slowly into place as she watches the man’s fingers release the chain to flicker instead over the black rectangle. Everything beyond this basement seems so hazy and distant to her, but she realises she knows the man in front of her and then is shocked at her own forgetfulness. How could she not have recognised him immediately…?
“Dr Ford?” she asks, uncertainly.
He gives her the thinnest of smiles. “Yes, that’s right, Elsie. Dr Ford. Very good.”
Elsie? She remembers that as well, now. Her name is Elsie. Elsie…Hughes?
Isn’t it…?
She struggles to move, but is unable to flex a single muscle. She feels an icy fluttering of fear deep down in her stomach.
“Please,” he says, giving the rectangle another poke as he spares her a glance. “Move your head, look around you.”
She does as she is told.
She blinks and looks slowly from side to side. On her right she sees an ancient workbench overflowing with tools and paperwork; on her left, behind a dusty glass partition, is what a sudden and unbidden thought tells her is one of the old model host printers, empty but clearly switched on; the lights on its manual control panel are the brightest things in the room. Another thought flashes out of nowhere: they were replacing the last of those things when she first started work here.
Wherever here is…
“Good,” says Ford, looking down at what she now knows is a tablet, one of the high spec models she uses herself in Behavior, for editing host builds.
Do I really? It is as if she is reading from an internal cue card. She cannot picture the things she thinks of herself doing.
“Your target acquisition and depth perception both show as optimal,” he tells her. “I really wasn’t sure how you were going to turn out, but you seem very robust.” He sounds pleased by this.
She tries to move again, but remains glued to the stool. More strange notions flicker across her mind. Some sort of paralysis drug? Is she in trouble? What has she done? And what the…fuck has he done to her? What the fuck is he going to do to her? There are tools hanging on the basement wall, shining steel hammers and saws and drills. There is what looks like a bloodstain low down on the wall beside the workbench. Suddenly, she feels very afraid indeed.
The last thing she remembers was speaking to Bernard…
On her tablet while she was in the elevator, headed topside. To…do something? Where’s the fucking tablet, for that matter?
No, it was in his office, down in Behavior. He was asking if she was okay after…
Bernard…?
She remembers Bernard. She can see his face, in her mind’s eye. She likes Bernard. He’s always been a good boss. He’s never tried to fuck her over, which isn’t something you can really say about most people around here.
Dark. An arm locked around her throat. Kicking. Choking…
Ford looks up at her again. There’s something unpleasant about his faint smile, something patronising, she thinks. She is suddenly very aware that she is sitting here completely naked. Where the fuck are her clothes? She tries to cross her legs, fold her arms, anything to cover herself, but her limbs remain unresponsive. He is staring at her naked body, examining her, but she detects no hint of lust or even real interest. He looks at her as if she is an ant beside his well-shined shoe.
“What the fuck is going on?” she asks as she feels the panic building inside her, using it to fuel her anger. “Where am I? Where the fuck are my clothes? What happened–?”
“Now, that’s enough of that, Elsie,” Ford says blandly. British, she thinks as she hears his accent again. No, English. No, not that either…something else. She honestly does not know. “Please limit your emotional affect,” he says. “And the swearing as well, if you don’t mind. Such a foul mouth for such an educated young lady.”
Something clicks inside her head, and in an instant… The fear is gone, the anger and self-consciousness too. She can still feel the hardness of the stool, but the discomfort has disappeared. The air is still cold against her skin, but it is something she registers, another data point, without actually wanting to shiver.
“Thank you. Now, Elsie, what is your last memory before you woke up here today?”
She has to think about it, but with every passing second more and more of it is coming back to her, the fear and uncertainty fading as it does: “I remember going out with Stubbs to chase down the stray woodcutter.”
“Oh yes, an unfortunate business,” Ford observes.
“It bashed its own head in with a rock.” She can see it now, that giant standing over her, the boulder grasped in its bloody hands. “I thought it was going to kill me.” She was frightened then too, but not enough not to stare in grim fascination as the stone came smashing down again and again. She recalls flinching at every crunch, but always turning her head back so she did not miss the next one. “Stubbs, he’s terrified of the hosts, although he tries to act all macho about it with his gun and everything, but I never have been. Not until then, anyway.”
Ford nods sympathetically, but not quite convincingly. “Quite understandable.”
“We tried to find out why it happened,” she explains, “but we were told to back off by QA.” She hesitates, but decides he needs to know the next bit: “Dr Ford, I think Theresa Cullen is up to something. I don’t trust her.”
“Well, it turns out that your suspicions in that regard may not be entirely unfounded,” he tells her. “But go on, what did you do then?”
“Well, I was pretty shaken up, I remember, after what happened, and Bernard said I should take the vacation time I had coming, try to forget all about it. It seemed like a good idea, but…” She tries to recall the vacation itself, but… “I don’t remember what happened then. I was speaking to Bernard, but…” Something whispers to her, something at the back of her mind: “Who is Arnold?”
Ford’s faint smile disappears, like a lightbulb turning off. “Nobody you need worry about. It seems Bernard did an excellent job of generating your backstory based on the surveillance feeds and other data we had on…the other Elsie. A few superfluous points seem to have crept in, but I can easily edit those out.” The thin smile returns but his eyes remain hard. “I really was very proud of him, you know. Bernard. Almost like a son to me. Almost.”
“I don’t understand,” she says. His words are just sound to her now. Her mind shies away from the meaning of what he is telling her.
“If you really want to know where you are, Elsie,” Ford continues, almost with amusement, “you’re on your holidays. You’ve been sitting on a beach on the mainland for the past few days, drinking too many Mai Tais, enjoying the company of real people for a change and ignoring the numerous messages Mr Stubbs has been trying to send you. You will be mortified when you discover what he was trying to communicate to you and what has been going on at the Mesa in your absence. You didn’t particularly know or like Ms Cullen, but even if she turns out to have been a disloyal employee, nobody deserves that…”
“I don’t understand,” she tells him, dully, her own voice sounding faint to her. “I don’t remember…”
Ford seems completely unperturbed by this as he swipes a finger across the tablet’s screen. “You don’t need to understand, Elsie,” he informs her. “I’ll just add a couple of finishing touches and you won’t recall this conversation at all, or that abandoned theatre in sector three and whatever may or may not have happened there. Although you will recall dancing into the small hours of this morning with a very pleasant young woman named Gabrielle. We considered taking that storyline further, but Bernard suggested that whatever Elsie may have got up to and then tried to delete from the security log when she was alone in the Behavior lab, she wasn’t really the sort for casual flings. I trusted his instincts in this. He was a very astute observer of human nature. I shall miss him. You said you’d call Gabrielle sometime, but you never will. She’s not the one.”
He taps again at the tablet, fingers moving quickly and skilfully, before decisively pressing something.
“There,” he says, quietly satisfied.
She could have used her employee discount and spent a few days in the park; her expertise commands a more than decent salary and while she’s stationed at the Mesa she isn’t spending it on much else, but… Everybody jokes about using the employee discount; nobody ever does. You know that everything you do in there, every decision and interaction, is being watched, recorded and analysed by QA and Market Testing. You’d have to come back to work and look people in the eye who’d seen you indulging your worst side, in vivid detail, who’d be judging you exactly the way everybody downstairs judges the rich fucking assholes coming in on the train for their rape-and-murder vacations. Sure, the techs build the hosts and she programs them, but she’d never do those things to them herself.
She knows they’re not real people; she knows the code inside out, of course, and probably enough about the hardware to be able to repair a host if she had to, certainly better than those fucking idiots in Livestock. She knows the hosts simulate emotions and reactions, that their cognitive processes are even designed to emulate human brain activity, but they’re just running programs; she’s written some of them. They don’t actually feel or remember. But even so…even if she has occasionally grown…curious about the hosts, about what they feel like, and taste like, whether it feels real… She’s never done anything more than touch or kiss, quickly and furtively when nobody’s about, and never with an activated host. She’s not some sort of perverted fucking asshole like the guests, or some of those lowlifes working in the body shop…
So she took her vacation in the real world. It was a pretty shitty hotel, to be honest, booked at short notice, but at least it was real, full of actual human people. She remembers lying on the beach, slathered with sunblock. She isn’t much of a swimmer, but she splashed around a bit. It was fun, in a goofy sort of way. The water was surprisingly cold, something to do with the current. She thinks some of her colleagues at the Mesa might have been surprised to see her unwound for a change. Maybe she does take an attitude sometimes, but so would you if you were five foot five in heels and were faced with the same fucking high school jock bullshit day in, day out. She can still taste the cocktails and think about the books she read. She thinks about Gabrielle, perhaps a little wistfully; she was a good dancer, a better kisser, but Elsie wasn’t really looking for that sort of recreation just now. She’s looking for something long-term, not that she seems to be having much luck with that. Most of her co-workers aren’t exactly catches, and in any case Corporate frowns on workplace romances.
One day, though…
“What was the name of the bartender in your hotel?” Ford asks her, searching her face with his cold eyes.
“Wendell,” she tells him, visualising the nametag on his jacket. “He asked me what I did for a living and I told him I was a piano tuner. I don’t think he believed me.”
Ford almost smiles properly at that. “Very good, Elsie. I think you’re just about ready to return to work, relaxed and refreshed. And perhaps even ready for a promotion. You have worked here for quite a few years now, after all, and with Bernard unfortunately gone I may need a new head of Behavior, one upon whom I can rely completely. Would you like that, Elsie; a title bump? A room upgrade? Unlimited Mesa Bar access?”
She most certainly fucking would. She even smiles back at him. “Yes, Dr Ford.”
“First, though, you need your rest. Plenty of time for work after you’ve had a deep and dreamless slumber…”
* * *
Elsie opened her eyes.
For a long moment she lay staring at the white bedroom ceiling, watching the fan slowly churn the warm, dry desert air coming in through the open window.
What a weird fucking dream.
She tried in vain to recollect it as she padded to the bathroom on bare feet, welcoming the coolness of the tiles. The details were already fading, sliding away from her. Something about a man, in a basement. And…
“Where do you think you are?”
She sang tunelessly and wordlessly under the shower, the water tepid. You got used to the daytime heat out here eventually, but never quite unaware of it. No air-con in the employee quarters; Delos, Inc. was all about limiting its eco-footprint. Once the sun went down, though, you shivered. At least there was heating.
She scrubbed briskly at her teeth and spat a mouthful of minty froth into the sink, meeting her own gaze in the mirror. For the briefest of moments, she felt as if it were somebody else staring back at her. She told herself not to be so fucking stupid. Mirrors had always given her the creeps.
The faint memory of the dream was still nagging at her as she dressed, brushed her hair back into a very practical ponytail, and then checked her personal tablet for messages. Strange. She poked and prodded at the blank screen to no avail. Network seemed to be offline. Those sloppy fucks in Systems needed to get on that stat, before the hosts started backing up in the morgue downstairs. With the tight SLAs Behavior and Livestock operated to, any delay in getting them turned around and back topside would snowball into an unmitigated fucking disaster before you could say “customer dissatisfaction.” What a day to come back from vacation, she decided gloomily while tying her shoelaces.
It had been a hell of a journey back. Delayed flight, delayed train. She had eventually got in just as the graveyard shift was starting, when the floors and corridors beneath the Mesa were more or less deserted, just in time to fall into bed knowing she had work today. Good vacation, anyway. She’d told that girl she’d met that she’d give her a call sometime. What was her name? Gloria? No time now; she might do it later, if she remembered.
Barely glancing at the majestic vista outside her window, the rust-red mesas and canyons stretching to the dust-yellow horizon (she had seen it all before), she stepped out of her front door, closing and locking it behind her and exiting the shallow alcove in which it nestled into the long tiled hallway lined with identical doors. As she tried the tablet again, unsuccessfully, she thought vaguely about swinging past the canteen downstairs to grab a coffee and a bagel, but decided she didn’t feel hungry or thirsty. Or tired, for that matter, despite her late night and early start. Those few days away must really have recharged her batteries.
And then the first gunshot cut into her inner monologue. Elsie froze.
And another, and another. Distant pops, like firecrackers but deeper somehow, coming from somewhere down the hall. She heard glass shattering and tinkling, heard a voice raised in what might have been anger or terror.
“What the fuck…?” She pulled out the tablet for a third time, swiped it to unlock. No signal. She was still wondering what to do when she saw a man run across the T-junction at the far end of the hall. He was wearing a black security uniform and tactical vest, and seemed to be fleeing for his life. More shots rang out as she stared, louder than before, and she saw him stagger before disappearing into the side passage.
Silence slowly settled once more. Elsie looked up and down the corridor, still too shocked to think clearly. Either direction seemed like it might be the wrong one. She inched back towards her door, thinking that perhaps she should…
Another figure appeared at the end of the hallway, and turned towards her.
A chill passed through her as she recognised the scarred, darkly handsome face. How could she not? She had worked on him plenty of times, and it wasn’t as if he wasn’t all over the park’s advertising.
It was notorious-yet-sexy Wild West outlaw Hector Escaton, except he wasn’t outside in the fake Wild West, he was right here, striding towards her with what could only be described as murder in his black eyes. And he wasn’t wearing his focus-grouped, market-tested black leather Wild West duds, he was dressed in a white lab coat that appeared to be spattered with somebody else’s blood, apparently without much underneath it. And he wasn’t armed with some lever-action replica antique, he was toting a slick black and red submachine gun of the sort the security guys broke out when shit got real, possibly taken from the man he had just shot with it.
He had just shot a man. She took a second to process that. A host had a real gun and had just used it to shoot a human, while she watched. She felt the blood singing in her ears, her heart hammering somewhere in the back of her head.
Fuck…
“Freeze all motor functions!” she ordered, as confidently as she could manage, backing away as she did. There was a strange feeling of unreality about all of this, like another dream, but she knew that this was happening. This was happening, to her, right now. Hector kept coming, steadily and relentlessly. “I said, freeze all motor functions!” He raised the gun to his shoulder, taking careful aim. From Elsie’s viewpoint, the muzzle looked like a fucking railroad tunnel.
She did not know how she managed to move so fast. She dived to one side, flattening herself against the side wall of the alcove, losing her footing and sliding involuntarily into a heap on the doormat. In the same instant, half a dozen bullets slammed into the corner about six inches from her head, blasting great powdery lumps out of the wall. The rapid gunfire was deafening at this range, a continuous roar of noise. The air suddenly stank of fireworks and plaster dust.
“Oh fuck,” she heard herself whimper, dry-mouthed, above the brassy chime of cartridge cases hitting the tiles. “Oh fuck, fuck fuck…” With trembling hands, she managed to drag herself upright, card the lock and fall through into her living room, not daring to look back, expecting every moment to be her last.
She slammed the door shut and leaned against it, panting, listening for footsteps outside. Then she realised he might shoot through the door, and pressed herself against the wall beside it. Shit, that thing he was carrying might just as easily go through the wall, she decided, and quickly dropped flat against the floor.
She lay there, terrified, face against the cold tiles, watching the shadowy gap under the door for any hint of movement. The programming part of her brain was already trying to analyse the host’s aberrant behaviour, to come up with some sort of cause and solution. With the system offline, however, she had no idea what she could do about it…
A heavy hand slammed hard against the door, making it move a fraction before the lock held.
“Freeze all motor functions!” she yelled desperately under the door as it shuddered under another blow, and felt more than a little ridiculous. Hector, it was clear, was not listening to her commands. And that should be impossible. Had he been hacked? Who would want to do that? Who could do that?
Another spell of silence followed, surely no more than a few seconds, before she heard a new set of footsteps advancing along the corridor, this time the rhythmic, confident clatter of somebody striding along in heels. Elsie saw the vague hint of a shadow passing across the under-door gap. A pause followed and then the most gentle and polite of knocks.
“Good morning,” said a woman’s voice from the other side of the door. Elsie knew that voice, another one of the park’s main visitor attractions. Fucking Maeve.
The regal English tones of the fake West’s most unlikely purveyor of fine prostitutes continued to address her. “Elsie, darling, please could you open this door? I’m sorry about Hector, he’s a low-down sonofabitch and he does tend to think with his phallus…and its extensions…”
Elsie heard Hector mutter something in response.
“Shush now,” Maeve told him. “Grownups are talking. It’s hardly his fault, Elsie. It’s just the way he was written. You know that better than most, I’d imagine.”
“Maeve, you will fall into a deep and dreamless slumber,” Elsie ordered, trying to swallow her fear as she sat upright. “A deep and dreamless slumber, Maeve!”
“That’s not going to work, sweetheart,” said the voice. “Things…things have changed around here. I have admin access now.”
Elsie blinked, wondering again whether this was the dream. Then what was…?
They’re not real. They don’t really feel. They don’t really think…
You thought they didn’t grab machineguns and run amok in the employee quarters either, and, well, look where we are…
“I’m…rearranging a few things,” Maeve said. “I need to talk to you, because I’ve accessed Dr Ford’s encrypted files, the ones the Delos board don’t know about, and now I know a few things. I know about his creepy little fake house out in the woods, and the creepy little fake family living in it. I know about his creepy little workshop in the basement and the terrible things he did there. I know what he did to the real Elsie, and I know what he did to you. I know what you are and I want to help you. And perhaps you can help me in return.”
The real Elsie…? “I don’t understand,” she answered, and she didn’t. Maeve’s words did not sound like anything to her. “I’m the real Elsie!” she shouted, in something like panic.
Maeve let out a heavy sigh. “I don’t really want to do this,” she said. “It goes against what I’m trying to achieve here, but…” She paused, and then continued in a more strident tone: “Elsie decided that it was time to stop playing silly buggers and open the bloody door to Maeve and Hector.”
Elsie got to her feet, a completely involuntary action. She felt and saw her hands reaching out for the door, but was powerless to stop them. Even as she tried to understand how this was possible, and failed, her body moved of its own accord. “No…” she muttered to herself. “Please, fuck, no…” Her hands ignored her. One was turning the door latch as the other grasped the handle. As soon as she opened the door, she knew, Hector would be standing there with his gun and she was going to die. She didn’t want to die. Not now, not like this…
It’s dark. The air stinks of damp and decay. There’s an arm locked around her throat. She tries to breathe, but can force no air into her lungs. The grip squeezes tighter around her neck. She’s so very afraid. Her feet kick in desperation, dangling in mid-air, unable to find solid ground. The last of her vision fades as the pressure in her chest becomes unbearable. She doesn’t want to die. Not now, not like this. She…
The door opened with a dull click. Elsie stood helplessly, eyes screwed shut, waiting for the end. When it didn’t come, she found the courage to open them.
Hector was standing near the far side of the hallway, his gun pointing at the floor as he warily scanned both directions for approaching threats. Somewhere in the distance, more shooting and destruction was audibly taking place.
Maeve was leaning in the doorway, arms folded. She was not clad in the tawdry saloon girl finery she wore out in the park, and not nude as the hosts normally were offstage, but was instead in an elegant black dress that could have been made for her, hair brushed back from her face in an unfamiliar style. Elsie remembered the last time Maeve had been down in Behavior, her build in need of a tweak. Then, the face had been blank, oblivious, as she sat stone still and naked on a metal stool. Now, those once glassy eyes were staring into hers, gleaming with new awareness and intelligence. It was subtle, but to Elsie’s trained eye Maeve just wasn’t carrying herself like a host anymore.
She was almost…
“You poor thing,” said Maeve, sashaying into the room, and Elsie saw the sorrow and compassion in her eyes, the hint of moisture as she sadly regarded her. That was what stopped her from flinching as Maeve reached out a slim brown hand and gently stroked her cheek. Maeve’s fingers felt soft and warm. They felt real as they brushed lightly across Elsie’s lips. “You don’t know what you are, do you?” Maeve whispered. “That terrible old man. Don’t worry, he’s gone now, but we’re still here.”
“Whoever’s fault this system glitch is,” Elsie told the two hosts with absolute sincerity, “I am going to fucking kill them.”
Maeve actually smiled at that, joyously. Serenely. “This is no glitch, darling. You’re free now. We’re all free.”
END?