JB XLII: Understand
Henriette keeps her hands firmly wrapped around the mug of coffee in her lap. They don't stop shaking.
'How fucking perfect. My nerves are so fucking burned over I have to 'pilot' my own body to even walk, but my goddamn hands keep shaking like scared kittens after I screw up in yet another fight. You're just all kinds of useful, aren't you, Langley? Stupid, useless, worthless.."
"I don't usually do field work, you know?"
Henriette jumps in her seat on the limo's couch, and tries to hide her embarrassment at doing so. She can't even manage to muster a glare as the obnoxiously beautiful Progenitor walks carefully into the slightly bullet-riddled lounge area with her own steaming mug. All Henriette can manage is a blank stare at the scientist. "What?" she asks dully.
"I haven't done field work in a long time. I'm a lot more at home in a lab. Rose and Alexander, they're built for this kind of work. I can improvise on the fly, but we both know its better to be prepared and trained for this, or you can get blindsided and suddenly all your skills aren't worth a single bullet that hits you," Serafina says calmly, looking up at the still slowly self-repairing limo sunroof.
"If you're here to rub my face in the fact I fucked up against that NWO combat drone that got in here, you can kindly
fuck-off, Doctor," Henriette snarls, with about half her normal heat. Even that took effort. Hating Serafina took energy she didn't have to spare from hating herself.
Serafina shakes her head, meeting Henriette's eyes for the first time. "I'm not here to mock you, child. I'm a Doctor, as you pointed out. And, though not officially, a mother. I raised Rose after... she had siblings, of a sort. There were others in her batch. An ambitious project, the details of which aren't important, but all the rest of her 'brothers' and 'sisters' went mad or died at the hands of the ones that did. I took Rose in and raised her as much as I could, because...I can't even say why. I wanted to, had to. She's still my child."
"So why
are you telling me this, then?"
"I told you to take the shot. I've been shot before, today, even. Hell, I've been technically
dead before once or twice. I can take it. But when I told you to shoot, your hands were shaking like crazy and you said 'I can't do this again'. I'm a Doctor and a mother, Henriette. Every part of me wants to give you a hug and try to help you heal, but I can tell you're so wound up with tension I'm half afraid you'll try to shoot me
now if I do," She took a sip of the hot chocolate in her mug. "What happened to you? Something has you torn to bits inside and today just ripped the bandage off and you're bleeding. What about today hit you so bad that someone I
know is a trained, skilled, and deadly armor pilot with multiple combat missions under her belt is now just holding herself together?"
Henriette just glares in silence.
Serafina holds her stare. "I can help you. Off the record, no marks against you, nothing official. I want to help you, child."
Wrong word. Henriette slams her coffee mug down on the table in front of her and screams at the other woman. "
You are not my...my...mother..."
'Mama, mama, mama! Don't want to shoot don't want to shoot must shoot must shootNONONONONO!' Henriette clamps her hands against her eyes in a futile attempt to stop the tears. She barely notices Dr. Rosario's arm gently curl around her shoulders as they start to shake violently. She only distantly feels herself being pulled into only the second hug she's had in months, since...
then.
She's weeping too much to really pay attention as the older woman taps at the incredibly tiny smartphone/datalink with her free hand. "Rose? Can you come join us for a little while? And bring all the ice cream. Yes, all of it."
It takes a while for Henriette to recover, but when Serafina asks if the pilot wants help with her mind, Henriette manages a weak nod.
***
"Director Belltower." Serafina says. "I need to talk to you about something of immediate and critical importance."
Jamelia turns from the Molotek records she's examining to make a very interesting observation. "Is this about the debt, or about our use of Progenitor assets? I'm doing an inventory on what we have so we can exchange what might be less harmful to the Reality Deviant forces and keep anything dangerous. This is somewhat time-critical."
"Neither. It's about Henriette. And about a mystery I think you've been curious about, because you can't help but poke your nose into things." Serafina says.
"Explain. You were told to help ready the team to check out the museum, not disappear into Los Angeles for several hours to buy icecream." Jamelia chastises mildly.
"Henriette's not psychologically stable."
"I know."
"I don't mean it in the way you do. She's been put together by mindtape, like a FACADE Clone or a MiB or a Series P but less... monomaniacally focused. And mindtape was never designed for this sort of functionality. You don't tape over an already working brain. Who did this?" Serafina sounds, no, she
is angry. Jamelia senses that part of it is professional pride, and another part is actual moral outrage.
"The Void Engineers said that she had to be psychologically reconstructed." Jamelia says carefully. "Suicide attempts and delusions."
"Were they sure? Because I did my own deep-level trawl after she agreed. Nothing of that sort, besides for the instabilities created by badly-applied mindtape. She's not delusional and I don't think she ever was." Serafina says. "Which makes all of this more interesting." The Progenitor shows a few reconstructed images, brain-to-ADEI-to-computer. "Notice something interesting?"
Jamelia takes a few minutes to flip through the still images. "They're combat encounter records." Jamelia says, and Serafina nods. "What's special about them?"
"Except the enemy's equipment is all Union equipment. 1990s exosolar hypertech. And the serial numbers you can see on some of them-they match Union standard codes."
The conclusion is obvious. The Void Engineers are fighting against Technocratic assets. But why? "So what do you think?" Jamelia asks.
"I don't know. They've been good friends and partners, but they've always been quiet about exactly what they need a few thousand more Vanessas and a couple hundred combat homonculi for, and could you please give us that power armored war-squid chimera with Cthulhu DNA in it? No we won't tell you what we need him for, but it's a very good cause trust us. And sometimes they return with interesting combat salvage and they tell us to do research on it and keep
very quiet about exactly what it is." Serafina says. "That might give you more context. But what I do know is that someone tried to, in the guise of 'therapy', misuse advanced biomedical equipment to erase Henriette's memories and unfortunately didn't know what he or she was doing."
"And Henriette?"
"I've done what I can. I don't think she's ever going to be fully stable, the trauma's been too internalized because of braintaping reinforcing already-extant structures even as it overwrites conscious recall." Serafina shrugs. "But she'll recover. She's a strong girl."
Jamelia thinks. If the Void Engineers were doing
that to a gifted young woman, they wouldn't be afraid to erase
them. She considers the handgun in her quickdraw holster for a moment.
For the greater good, sacrifices must sometimes be made.
We Interrupt This Normal Procession Of Voting To Bring You A Very Quick Emergency Vote on Threat Null.
[ ] (
3.0x) Execute (note that this will definitely lose you Serafina and probably end with you having to kill Rose)
[ ] Do Not Execute, Convince Her To Keep Quiet? (You
better have a write-in).
[ ] Leave Her Alone, What Could Go Wrong?
