Plurk paste

A couple of seconds feels like minutes. A couple of minutes feels like hours. It takes a while - a comparatively long while, in AI time - for Church to make sense of this concept. That he's actually blazing through at a thousand figurative miles an hour to Wash's ten. It takes all he has to not go slamming around into even more figurative walls, to not...settle into the ley lines ghostly etched across Washington's brain, footprints of someone else here before. Church has jumped into heads before, taken over, but he's never just jumped along for the ride, really taken time to *not* be someone. He's never thought of himself as a computer. But now he feels more like a ghost than ever, wandering the wastes, haunting jagged and jumbled edges where dust has started to settle, where nobody else has been, should ever go.

Wash - and he knows it's Wash, hearing the voice without really 'hearing' - tells him to calm down already. And stay quiet. There's still a ways to go, and Church banging around all of the pots and pans is going to get *really* distracting *really* quickly.

It's all Church can do to not just take over and pretend to waltz around like Agent fucking Washington just to make a mockery. But he has to trust that Wash is telling the truth, or at least that he's got an idea of the truth. The (former) Freelancer's words had dug under synthetic skin and wire and plating and settled in as a nagging, unsettling thought. So he might as well settle in Wash's head like a likewise nagging, unsettling thought.

The landscape of Wash's mind is full of abandoned destruction. A wall smashed down, ceiling caved in, dust and dirt and sand whipping inside. Lonely. No effort made to reconstruct. He catches bare glimpses of memory, ghosts paler than he is, brief and fleeting but full of violence, betrayal, anger. Like fading tv screens. He touches one, a clean dark floor, a dead body, *his* armor-

(feels the whisper of the name Epsilon, tastes the quiet horror that pauses before the tidal wave of emotion and desperation and psychosis crashes into shore, hears the wire pulling taut that is an urge Wash has to raise his weapon to his head, although the impulse dies immediately)

-and Wash snaps to stop touching things. He's a guest in this house. Body. Church mumbles something about wiping his feet beforehand.

There's a lot of information to sort through here. He has time. When he realizes he has time, he stops touching at all. It's not his place. Is this what he was supposed to be doing? Was he supposed to dart around the mental dunes and valleys of a Freelancer's mind, figure them out from the inside and be the companion (the weapon) that AI were developed to be?

He lets out a synthetic breath at the casual falling apart of Wash's psyche. "What the fuck did you do?"

It's not an accusation. It's awed curiosity. He doesn't want to poke - well, that's a like. He wants to sift the sand for clues, really dig his digital fingers in, and feel. Absorb the memories and become. Become what? Who? Wash? There's a lot of damage, and he can only guess in the seconds-minutes-hours he has how far down it goes.

Wash lets no shame filter into his voice. It's almost mechanical, despite the abundance of biology at Church's feet. "Everything I had to."

Church believes that he believes it, so he doesn't ask again. Doesn't call bullshit. Doesn't interrogate. Not his place. It strikes him, very hard, enough to make him almost lose balance, that Wash does enough self-interrogation for the both of them.

It's not hard to dust off the anger and disappointment burning like a bright beacon. The Alpha. Private Church. How many people had to die for this nobody in a nowhere canyon who doesn't remember anything and can't shoot for shit? Everyone fell apart because the AI wanted to meet the Alpha. Everyone fell apart because they were fighting for pieces of the Alpha. Everyone fell apart because they were hunting for the Alpha to make it all better. Is this what Church did, fell into insolence and ignorance and uselessness? Without even knowing? Or is this what he simply was, something that he is, because of things that happened? How much of this is his fault without ever having understood that something much bigger was going on around him, something he was at the center of, and all he could think about was Tex and his team and nothing else mattered all that much?

Another voice rings clearly as day, thickly southern, and the image of Former Director of Project Freelancer Doctor Leonard Church stares at him from Wash's mind. None of it is familiar, but Church is determined to commit every stark line of that face to memory (the face he should have the face that once was his he is church church is him they are the same but the alpha is l e s s t h a n)-

He has time, but he also needs to get ready. There's an urgency thrumming through them both that an ending is coming, but in what form, who can really say. An ending is coming, maybe for the both of them, but the beginning that comes from that? Maybe it'll be peaceful. Maybe when all parties involved have been wiped away, the rest will know peace away from the war they never understood they were embroiled in, not with aliens but with other people, with hubris and machines that could think and feel too sharply.

They both feel too sharply. Get ready, says Wash's mind. Get ready. Get ready. The curtain is rising, the first cue coming. Church has never been more ready than he's been in this very moment.