Chapter Text
She’s fifteen the first time it happens.
Satya Vaswani is an emotional mess, in the depths of her brain is turmoil like her thoughts have descended into a whirlpool. She digs her nails into her palms and feels the pain, sharp and cutting. Usually that distracts her, but now it only makes her feel worse and the feeling clots in her throat so that she can hardly breathe.
Their latest test rankings are on the screen. Next to the name of Satya Vaswani is 7/13.
She’s in the bottom half, and she wants to puke. Everyone can see it. Her thoughts descend down slippery slope after slope, careering down the mountain. Everyone can see that she came seventh, which means that everyone can see that she is a failure, which means that everyone knows that she has failed Vishkar, failed her purpose.
It’s with tightly clenched fists that she pivots on her heel and returns to her room because if she doesn’t flee she’ll melt, right in front of everyone, and it will all be over.
But on her own she can’t scream. She can’t even vent it. The emotions and the stress and the fear are all reaching a fever pitch but there’s something stunted, they can’t get out, and it just makes her feel worse and worse as she twists her fingers in her hair and wills for it to just burst out of her so that she can carry on and claw her way back to respectability.
Her hands scrabble on her desk and hit the cool surface of her Vishkar-standard education tablet. In the absence of any other way to let it out, she switches to her tablet notes and begins to pound out everything that she wants to scream. It’s incoherent, a mix of her native Telugu and the Hindi they speak in Utopaea, except the former can’t transcribe in the text and so she can hardly read what she’s writing herself, hardly knows what it is, but it’s therapeutic so she continues to write away, feels the stress and anguish bubble down until –
¿Ta b?
Satya pauses and stares at the words that have somehow manifested in the midst of her incoherent rambling. Perhaps to call them words would be too generous. More letters than anything else. Latin alphabet, although her preliminary Spanish lessons at the academy mean the upside down question mark is suspicious. She blinks, and wonders if somehow she has managed to subconsciously vent in another language.
But it’s not a language. It’s three letters, not words.
She responds with equal brevity.
?
It takes about two seconds for a response to appear.
¿Estás bien?
When she doesn’t reply within a split second – primarily because she’s too dumbfounded by the sheer absurdity of what is happening and the impossibility of such a circumstance – another message appears.
¿Hablas español?
That’s something she can answer, at least.
Un poco.
¿Inglés?
Yes
Satya can hardly understand what’s happening, what she’s doing. Either the tablet is speaking to her, someone in Vishkar genuinely cares about her state of mind, or someone has hacked the tablet. The third is an impossibility, because Vishkar equipment is virtually unhackable. The second is highly unlikely. The first is bordering on childish fantasy.
You ok?
She bites her lip and subconsciously tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Satya reminds herself that there are far better ways to spend her time than to have a conversation with her tablet, and that if any of her superiors knew she’d probably be out of the academy in a flash.
Yes
Liar
Satya taps her nails on her desk. This is wrong, this is incredibly wrong.
You should not be hacking a Vishkar device
Whoops, looks like I already have
She scowls and turns off the tablet.
Satya comes to call the tablet hacker Uda, because they always write in purple. For the first few weeks, she does not reply. She ignores each and every message in the hopes that eventually they will take a hint and leave her alone. Part of her wonders if she should go straight to her superiors and report it, but she does not, and the longer she leaves it the more anxious she becomes about telling them.
After the first few weeks, she begins to assess the situation with the cool-minded analytical thought process that has gotten her so far. First of all, she appears to be the only person who knows about Uda – certainly, nobody has approached her yet, which would suggest that they have somehow managed to remain unnoticed. Secondly, they seem to be capable of hacking more than just her tablet. Just about any device that she sits down at has purple text on its screen within a minute.
Uda seems to have an affinity for her, perhaps even a fixation. Satya doesn’t know how, or why, this came to be, only that it somehow manages to evolve from being an annoyance to tolerable to something quite different. It isn’t necessarily pleasant, but there comes to be a comfort, even a familiarity to seeing those messages. She has sifted through possibilities – a sentient AI, maybe? – but none of them change the fact that she comes to see Uda as a necessary part of her daily life. If she is stressed, she sees the colour purple and feels herself relax again.
It takes six months for her to finally reply. It’s a mistake, but it’s one that she makes again and again. She has always played by the rules, but there is something quietly exhilarating about having a secret of her own, one that is harmless but hers. She holds it close to her, carries it with her like a superstitious person might keep a lucky charm with them. She falls asleep with it close to her chest.
Uda always signs off their messages with XO. She doesn’t understand it, but they become her favourite two letters.
She does not realise what a necessary part of her Uda has become until the replies stop. It’s an abrupt halt, so much so that it can only mean one thing – either Uda, whatever it is, has been terminated, or she has somehow managed to repel it. Satya is by this point twenty-two years old, and it is only once her nameless, faceless closest companion is forcibly torn away from her that she, suddenly cleft in two, realises what they meant to her.
For the first few weeks, she just assumes that they are busy, or their AI has glitched. After two weeks, she begins to feel something that feels curiously like the homesickness her eleven-year-old self had felt upon first leaving Hyderabad – an ache that, for all intents and purposes, has no rational explanation for its existence, but wedges itself between her ribs nonetheless. Satya tells herself that, just as her younger self should not have missed the filthy, disease-ridden slums of her birthplace, she should not miss trivial purple text.
But she does. She does not have any messages to look back on; they always delete, Uda is good at covering their tracks. But Satya lies in bed at night and sees purple patterns dancing on the ceiling. She has conversations in her mind. She writes XO on the corners of her notes.
She is twenty-two years old, she is now Symmetra, she travels all over the world and does difficult tasks in the name of order and harmony and a good future for humanity. She has no reason to feel as though she has lost so much. But the loss aches nonetheless.
After seven months and twenty-two days, a message appears on her tablet.
Miss me?
She doesn’t know why, but she cries.
When she is twenty-six, the slums of Rio de Janeiro burn in front of her eyes, and in turn burn onto her memories. Later she sits in a hotel room in São Paulo, one that is clean and calm, and she spills all of her doubts and worries to Uda. They pour out of her with the inevitability of a river flowing to the sea. They gurgle and foam like rapids, they meander, but they reach it. She doesn’t even know why she is saying it, until midway through when she realises that this is what she has been wanting to tell Uda for more than a decade.
There is a long pause before a reply arrives, longer than Uda ever leaves.
You know there is an alternative
Pardon?
You can leave Vishkar.
Satya realises that she is trembling. Her hands shake as she types out a reply.
They would take my hard light away
Not if you run away. I could help.
Realisation crashes upon her like a wave. Uda makes sense. It all makes sense. The last decade of messages, ever since the first one, she suddenly realises what they were for.
And she becomes livid. Because she has finally worked it out, and the truth is ugly.
The truth is that the past decade of something resembling friendship has been nothing but a ploy to turn her away from Vishkar and gain her hard light technology. She’s been a pawn the whole time. She’s been even more of a fool than she’d thought.
Satya throws the tablet out of the window of her hotel room. It falls down, down, down. It shatters on the pavement below. She goes out in the darkness and gathers up the broken pieces, then disposes of them. Uda must get the message, because they don’t attempt to contact her again, even though she knows they’re fully capable of using any other device.
She can be grateful for that at least, she supposes.
When she is twenty-eight, she does the unthinkable.
It is early evening in Caracas. The sun is setting over the city’s favelas, surrounded by hard-light walls. Satya can see them from this distance, in Sanjay’s office in the Vishkar tower. They glitter in the fading light that streaks gold and rose across the sky.
“A tragedy, really.” He sighs. “If they had not rejected our earlier proposal, then perhaps they would have had a proper water supply. Proper sanitation. Perhaps this would not have happened.”
“A tragedy.” She echoes, hollowly. There is a corpse in the street. From this distance, it appears so small. If she squints it is a discarded rag doll, not a person.
“At least they allowed us to set up the quarantine zone.” He continues. There is a glass of wine in his hand, and one in hers, but she has yet to drink it. To do so would seem coarse, somehow, unfeeling. “I’ve been speaking to the Venezuelan authorities. Once this disease has run its course, they should allow us to rebuild the slums. Proper sanitation. Clean water. Not that plagued river.”
Satya sips some wine before placing it on the desk behind her. It burns hot in the back of her throat. She keeps her eyes on the waters of Rio Guaire. There is a kind of tranquillity to the scene, she thinks, and wonders whether or not she should be the one to break it.
“I thought you said that the virus was transmitted by skin-to-skin contact, and that is why we set up the wall?”
There is a brief pause. He does not turn to look at her. A mistake, she thinks, and she almost pities Sanjay for making such a mistake. The wine burns in her chest, in her gut, something burns and she begins to feel her calmness infuse with something else, something alien and unfamiliar but so intrinsically right.
Does she dare? She does. Satya traces her fingers over the crystal lens of her gauntlet, then twists them.
“That is what I said, Vaswani.”
“Is it?”
He turns to look at her, but hardly utters a word before a hard-light knife is thrust into his neck.
Sanjay at first stumbles back a step. His hands reach for the knife, as if confirming that it is really there. They brush against the hard-light, and he looks at her, his eyes bulging and terrified and laced with something that might be betrayal. She’s not sure. All of her emotions seem to have ceased to function, she stares at him as he flounders as if she were but an onlooker. He knocks over the wine glass, having already dropped his own, and she watches the red liquid pool on the white floor. He can hardly speak, although his rasping breaths sound like they are trying to form her name.
Just before he falls, he slams his hand down on a button on his desk. She does not bother trying to flee. They arrive within thirty seconds, and she is standing by the window, staring out at the favelas of Caracas as the sun bleeds its last few minutes of daylight.
She thought that she was used to the colour white. Everything in Utopaea had been white, streamlined. It was calm.
Her room is also white. The neon light is white, on day and night, although she has no concept of the difference. She wears only white. When she closes her eyes all she sees is white. There is a white screen with stark black text that counts down the hours and minutes until she will next be fed, next receive water, next be able to urinate or defecate.
Never let it be said that Vishkar neglects the care of its prisoners.
She sees white and sees wine pooling. The memory is so potent that she can almost smell it.
Satya wonders why they don’t just execute her and be done with it, but she knows that she is too valuable. Better to ensure her undying loyalty for good than waste a perfectly good architech. They tell her that if she is good she can have her arm back. They ask her why she had felt the need to murder her colleague. They tell her that they expected better.
In all honesty, she doesn’t know the answers to anything. There is no need for answers in a world of only white anyway. She traces patterns. She counts. She designs skyscrapers in her mind.
One day, however, she feels herself reborn from her living death when the screen shows a different message.
Miss me?
Satya manages to count to fifteen before the door opens. The doorway is empty. She wonders if she is hallucinating. It seems to be the only rational explanation, that she is completely delusional, that they have finally broken her.
Perhaps she has become numb to absurd happenings, because when a woman appears in front of her out of seemingly thin air, she doesn’t even blink.
There is a silence. So Uda is a woman, she thinks. Not an AI – at least, she doesn’t look like one. Her eyes trace patterns of wiring like blood vessels on her skin. Purple in her hair, her clothes, her eyes. Even in flesh and blood there is a quality about her that is unreal. It is like an imaginary friend that has suddenly gained a human form. Satya reaches out, to see if she will disappear the moment her hand makes contact.
The hand that grasps hers is real, however.
“I read about what you did. Didn’t think you had it in you.”
Her voice is hoarse and doesn’t sound like it belongs to her, but she responds anyway. “I did not either.” Then she shakes her head and laughs, because she can hardly believe the situation. “You’re Uda. You’re actually Uda.”
“Is that what you called me?” The woman giggles. “I prefer Sombra.”
“Well, Sombra.” Satya replies, and she’s shocked by how easy it is, like picking up a tune from her childhood. “You got in here. Get me out of here.”
The sun is rising when they finally arrive in Dorado after the most chaotic day of her entire life. She sees her reflection in a window. Satya is gaunt now. Her hair has grown too long, it is greasy and unkempt. Her white dress slips off where one arm is missing. Her cheekbones protrude unsettlingly.
So she is free. To what end? To what purpose? She sees only the Satya of Hyderabad. It’s like the last seventeen years or so of her life have disappeared and she is right back where she started.
“Cheer up.” Sombra tells her, turning her attentions away from the van that she may or may not have hacked for them. There is a strange connection. The familiarity, yes, but there is another foreign degree of separation. Talking to a line of text is very, very different to having the real entity in front of you. She doesn’t know where she stands.
But there is also a sense of completeness, one that she shouldn’t feel because her whole life and purpose has been taken away from her, one that is entirely irrational but beautiful in how it defies seemingly all reason. The secret she once cared for and protected blooms lilac daybreak in her chest. She doesn’t understand it, but she rather likes it.
“I worked for seventeen years of my life to be an architech. It is all gone now. I have no purpose. Tell me again why I should ‘cheer up’?”
She sees the hacker’s reflection approaching her in the glass’ reflection. Her hands are clasped behind her back. It’s so Uda, she realises, Sombra is every part the Uda she had cried over and cared for. She is chaotic, she is morally ambiguous, she is peppy, she is loud, she is everything that Satya despises yet she is a necessity and has been for a long time.
“I got you a gift.”
Satya turns her head to see her arm. The sleek white, the pulsing blue crystal. She blinks in disbelief.
“You stole that, I presume.”
“No, Vishkar just gave it to me.”
She smiles at that, weakly, before taking the prosthetic limb and reattaching it. Something warm courses through her, an unstoppable force of nature. She spins a hard-light wire frame between her fingers. The first attempt falls apart – lack of practice – but the second forms an elaborate polygon, one that she spins to become ever-more complex.
“What is it that you want?” Sombra asks. Satya looks up and sees – what does she see? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t need to understand, she realises, she just needs to have it nearby.
Satya focusses on the hard light wire frame. “Vishkar burned the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. They poisoned the waters of Guaire. They have manipulated me my entire life, they tried to break me. They took my family from me. They tried to take my individuality. What do you think I want?”
A smile. One that is audacious, one that is somehow familiar. “Then I suppose we’re on the same page.”
“Yes.” The shape disappears into shimmering light. “Yes, Sombra. We are on the same page.”
She hears a laugh, as the bells of Dorado chime for the start of the day. “I’ve waited thirteen years for you to realise that. You and I, Symmetra, we’re going to go far.”
When Symmetra looks up, the ache is gone. It is all gone. She doesn’t understand why.
And what’s more, she doesn’t mind.