Counterpoint 3.2
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Darkness.
Her eyes flashed open, but there was no light.
She was weightless, no, suspended somehow, and there was something, something in her mouth, her throat,
moving,
twisting-flexing in ways that something natural never would.
She screamed, but she could barely hear it and nothing happened.
Her hands frantically went to her throat, as if she could claw whatever it was inside out herself, but they found nothing to hold or grasp.
Without thinking she lashed out with her hand, reaching and hitting something. Something keeping her inside,
trapped and
nonono this wasn't right she couldn't.
Outoutoutout. She needed to get
out.
She stuck forward, as hard as she could, feeling something hard yield but not give way. She
needed needed needed out.
She struck out again, the barrier disappearing suddenly with a crash and whatever darkness was around her rushing out, throwing her onto the floor as she gasped, heaving, surrounded by viscous silvery liquid.
She coughed, and the fluid inside her just
kept pouring out, spilling onto the floor and joining what was there as she retched.
Her vision wavered, each eye seeming to focus independently for a moment before solidifying, bringing her sight into sharp clarity.
She stared, looking at the black skeletal hands and arms in front of her, holding her up from the ground, lifting her left one up before flexing it. She twisted it around, spreading her fingers, watching it move and shift hypnotically, silvery-black bands and fibers twining and flexing around dark metal. Metal plates sat on the underside, contoured and fitted to it.
Steel/carbon/unknown actuator contractile strands. Steel internal structure. Intelligent design.
Where was she? What…? What was going on?
She looked around, at the bright silver-metal walls, riveted and welded in place.
Interior structure restored and/or modified.
What was happening?
Where was she?
She couldn't… couldn't– a dull throbbing took up inside her head and she winced, halting that train of thought.
Brain damage. Amnesia. Minor visual agnosia. Bilateral hippocampi and temporal lobe damage likely. M̧a͢jor ̛më̸ntal ҉ṱr͠aǘ͘ma̧.͟ ̸Self̸-próţȩ̌cti͝vẽ p̴s͡y͡c̕hŏ̡logical ͞d͝is͟sŏ͜cịa̸tiọ̶ń.̸ ̢Psych̕ogenȉc ҉a͝mnȅ͢sia̸,̷ é͝x͘acẻr͠b̨ąt̴e̛d b͠y ̸phy̶sic̵a͝l tra̴u̢m̢ã̸.̕
Brain damage.
Deep breaths, deep breaths. Check everything else.
She knew where her hands were, knew where
all of her body was, how it was positioned and that she was kneeling, but now that she focused on it, she realized she couldn't
feel anything. Pressing each of her fingers against her thumb elicited some sense of touch, but pressing the fibers on her arm only gave her sensation from the fingers, not the arm.
Plates on underside of hands convey pressure.
So it was supposed to be like that, okay.
She staggered up, knees and hands dripping that silver fluid as she moved towards the heavy-looking door on the other side of the room, taking slow steps before finding her balance. Her steps became more confident as she crossed to the door, lifting up the lever that was the door handle and pushing out, stepping over the lip on the floor as she moved past the door. A short hallway extended left and right, with light at the end on the right illuminating steps that ascended upwards.
She turned, moving towards the stairs, reaching them and then slowly stepping up them, grasping the rail to emerge… in another small room. Windows sat at the front, streaming light and showing bright blue-green water with sunlight glancing off it, with the sound of waves lapping gently and seagulls cawing drifting in from the open doorways to either side of her.
Pilothouse. Fishing vessel, abandoned.
At her left was a soft sound, quiet breaths going in and out.
Somebody was next to her.
She turned towards the sound, staring at what she saw: a not-even-two-foot figure with pale skin and dark curly hair facing towards the door. It was almost like a caricature of a person, or rather a simplification of them, everything matching up, but… childish, dressed in a t-shirt and a pair of jeans complete with tiny shoes.
And that still wasn't even mentioning the large number '2' on the figure's forehead.
It (she?) sat in a swivel chair bolted to the floor, eyes closed, cheek on her fist, elbow on her leg, a bubble of saliva expanding and contracting from her mouth.
She stepped towards it, but her foot caught on something and she stumbled, reaching out for the wall with her left hand, impacting it with a
clang.
The bubble popped, the figure's head snapping up to look at her with wide eyes.
"Aaaaahhhh!!"
She automatically reached up to cradle her head with her right hand. …Why had she done that?
"AAAAAAHHHHH!! SHE'S AWAKE!"
Instinctive reaction. Expected pain.
"AWAKE!!"
The figure turned to her suddenly, hand up, palm facing forwards. "Stay. I am on the way."
It sounded like a child repeating a phrase they'd been told to say (
how did she know that?). After a moment, it nodded in satisfaction, its message delivered.
Sincere. Does not mean you harm.
With that bit of information imparted it became impassive, staring forward out the window towards the sea and swinging its legs, just leaving her standing there with nothing else.
After a moment's debate, she moved over to the chair next to the figure, sitting quietly and listening to the soothing sounds of the waves and birds, a calmness settling into her as she waited for whoever was coming. About a half a minute passed, and then the short person next to her began idly… humming? It wasn't any tune she recognized.
After seven minutes there was a quiet
thump that reverberated through the ship and she turned towards the door it had come from. The figure of a tall girl appeared, a mirror of the tiny figure to her left, scaled up and given proper proportions, dark hair and jeans and all.
"Tattletale?"
Her head throbbed.
"What?" What was that supposed to mean? How did that even begin to fit the context of what was going on here? "What are you talking about?"
The figure blinked.
Expected a stronger reaction. "…Isn't that your name?"
There was a momentary flicker of something, an impression of
worry, trapped, perseverance but that
didn't feel right.
She shook her head, and the figure gave her an odd look. "What's your name then?"
Without prompting her mouth opened. "Lis—," she started saying, but it died halfway out her throat.
Wait. No. Yes? It felt right, but wrong?
Fragments, snippets, feelings, all muddled together and impossible to separate. She swallowed and tried again. "Li—"
A sudden flash, an actual memory, faded and barely even there. A woman,
"—ah don't you dare walk out that door! This conversation is not over young lady!"
She frowned. "—ah?"
"L-e-a-h, Leah?" the girl asked, echoing her in pronouncing it like 'Lee-ah'.
She blinked and looked up at the figure. "Leah," she repeated.
Nothing rose in her mind in response, but it
felt right in her mouth. Or at least not as wrong as the bits themselves.
She nodded. She had her name, now, at least.
Leah. That was one step forward.
"Where… are we?" she asked. Somewhere on the coast? Boston?
The girl stared at her. "The Ship Graveyard? Brockton Bay?" Brockton Bay? Why would she be there? Why did she think she
shouldn't be there? "D-Don't you remember what happened?"
Flashes. Red. Fear. Burning.
Pain. Leah winced at the sudden headache, her hand going to her head as she shook it.
"O-oh. Um," the girl was clearly set off-balance by that. "I… Well, I found you. You were dying. Really, really dying. And I tried to save you. But um."
"What?"
"I couldn't. Not… not everything. Just…" she trailed off to a whisper, "just your brain."
…Oh.
She looked down at her hands again—
artificial construct. not organic—and swallowed, before looking back up. "You… you made me a body?" she asked quietly.
She couldn't even imagine something like that. The girl hadn't been able to save her so she'd
built her a replacement.
The girl gave a small nod. "I've never done anything like this before and I know there's probably problems but I promise I'll do better and I'll make it u—"
"Are we friends?" Leah asked, cutting off her rambling.
The girl shook her head. "Not… yet? We only met one time before, about a week ago."
Oh. So she hadn't even really known her. This girl had done all this for a virtual
stranger. And she doubted anybody else could have saved her. She couldn't remember much, but the idea of something like this felt impossible. If it had been anybody else…
"Thank you," she said, looking into the other girl's eyes.
Because of her, she was still alive. Even if she couldn't really remember anything and her body was different now, she was
alive, when she could have just died.
"My name's Taylor," the now-named Taylor said awkwardly. "I figure it's only fair since you gave me yours." She hesitated. "Can… Can you stand up for me?"
Leah took a breath, and stood up from the chair.
Taylor let out a breath. "Good. Okay. Good." She walked forward and around Leah's mechanical body, examining it. "How does it feel?"
"…Fine?" She looked herself over. She had no frame of reference for this, just vague memories, but everything
felt right, besides missing her sense of touch.
She rolled her weight from one foot to the other, and it felt perfectly natural. After a moment, she reached towards the metal floor, her palms coming to rest on it. There was absolutely no strain or wavering in her balance, and holding the position was just as easy as standing up normally.
Leah stood back up straight and looked at Taylor, who'd been watching her.
"There's a bit of artificial latency introduced and limits on possible force to match normal neuron signal transmission speed and what your brain expects, but that'll slowly decrease while you're awake over the next week and two weeks, respectively," the girl told her. "The lag's about one hundred-twenty milliseconds right now, though it varies based on distance from your head."
Leah just looked over herself, marveling at the body. It was practically a work of art.
"I'm sorry there's no skin except for your face. It was one of the last things I worked on and it took a while to find a way of making it realistic," Taylor said, rubbing her left arm and looking at the floor. "This is really only a prototype anyways. Now that you're awake I can start working on something better." The girl's head snapped up. "I-if you want to, that is! Not that you have to!"
Something
better than this?
Is worried about how you're taking this. Thinks it's going too well.
Leah couldn't help but laugh. "It's fine, Taylor. Really. Thank you. This is amazing."
She'd been dying, practically
dead, and now she was
alive.
The brunette just swallowed and nodded. "So do you have somewhere to go, o-or um, I guess you can't just walk around like that. I could give you a layer of locked nanomaterial for skin and clothes for now if you want so you can do things normally until the replacement's complete," Taylor said with a bit of reluctance. "Or I could go get you your stuff and bring it here if you want anything."
Somewhere to go?
More flashes (
trapped, discomfort, reluctant acceptance) but nothing concrete. "I… I don't think so. I can't remember. I can't really remember anything."
"Oh." The girl blinked. "…What
do you remember?"
Leah focused, scouring her mind and trying to find links,
feelings. "I…I think I had a brother." She couldn't even remember his face, not even vaguely. What else? She tried focusing on 'family' but the only sense she got was anguish and fear and worry and
nomore. "I don't think I have a family anymore. I think I lived by myself."
"And you can't remember anything about where?"
She focused, but all she got was a sense of
largeness, so she shook her head. "No."
"Well… if you really don't have anywhere to go, I guess you can come home with me then. You still need to drink and eat and sleep and if something goes wrong with your… body, I'd be right there," Taylor told her.
"Okay," Leah said agreeably.
Taylor nodded awkwardly. "Um. Here, then."
The floor around Leah suddenly
flowed, crawling up the frame of her body so quickly she had no chance to react, spreading over her before smoothing out and turning the color of pale flesh.
She just stared, looking at the way she now had fingernails and knuckle-wrinkles and false veins running over her hand.
"It… matches what you looked like when I found you. The areas that were still intact, at least. You're not, um,
anatomically correct, at least not this body, since it was a bit of a rush job… but the next one will be
much better since I managed to get a perfect-resolution model of your entire body, inside and out…" Taylor suddenly flushed and looked away. "
That sounded way less dirty in my head."
"Can I see?"
Taylor looked back up. "Um, sure?"
Without any signal the wall next to the doorway Taylor stood in turned perfectly reflective and Leah unconsciously took a step forward, reaching out to the girl she could see.
Straight blonde hair that went down to her mid-back, bright green eyes and a dusting of freckles over her cheekbones and nose, with perfectly clear skin. She was nude, but did it really count as nudity if there was nothing to show? Her body was softly defined, muscles not truly showing unless she tensed, hinting at least a decent amount of physical activity.
Leah knew that people would consider her attractive, perhaps even greatly so.
And this was what she'd been like before Taylor had recreated her?
Leah looked back at the girl to her left. "Now you said something about going somewhere…?" she asked, grinning.
"Because I'm
probably going to need some clothes for that."
The weather outside was 'balmy'. According to Taylor, there was a mild warm front starting to move in. Leah had to take her word for it, since she couldn't feel temperature right now.
The water sparkled around them as they crossed old ships to get to the shore, sunlight bouncing off the waves from the direction of the bay's entrance.
"What time is it?"
Taylor looked at her. "Almost nine. I was actually sleeping when you woke up, sorry. I didn't want to use my subnode to talk to you, since… they're a bit hard to take seriously."
"Subnode?"
The brunette nodded. "The uh, mini-me? With the number two on her forehead?"
Oh. "They're like… helpers. Semi-autonomous extensions of myself. I had that one waiting for you to wake up."
They moved over another ship, a tugboat, and then onto a small fishing boat before Leah followed Taylor down a set of stairs, winding through the hull to come out of a hole that emerged onto gritty rocks.
There wasn't anyone around, nobody to notice the two girls who had just come out of the gaping hole in the steel side of this boat.
She kept expecting something to happen, something that would trigger her memory: the salt of the ocean, the structures and shoreline, the oil rig in the bay that Taylor had pointed out with a force field that surrounded it like an iridescent soap bubble.
But nothing did.
Not the sounds, or the smells, or the way her shoes ground and scraped against half-broken cement.
Nothing.
It was paradoxically disorienting and easy to grasp.
She had no past, no history. No direction to move but forward.
In that sense, her actions were very,
very simple.
Leah supposed she could be considered lucky. She could have woken up without her memory in a significantly worse situation. Instead she got a (seemingly) very nice girl who had
saved her life for no reason other than she saw Leah dying.
She was going home with Taylor, and would have somewhere to stay rather than be on her own, homeless and left to fend for herself. And Taylor was some sort of seemingly
very capable genius or something, and more than willing to help her.
Yes, she was quite lucky.
Honestly? Losing her memory wasn't the worst thing that could have happened to her.
All she had to do was move forward, one step at a time.
I glanced over at the blonde girl walking next to me.
She was… surprisingly carefree and accepting of what had happened to her.
Most worrying, though, was the fact that she didn't seem to remember any personal details or past at all.
I'd known there was more than a little chance of brain damage considering how long I'd worked on Leah's brain. It had probably been at least seven or eight minutes before I had managed to get a steady supply of oxygen circulating, not to mention the glucose needed.
With those conditions, it was practically a miracle that Tattletale hadn't lost
more. And the more neurons she lost, the more her cognitive functions would have deteriorated.
Other than the personal memories, she seemed to be doing fine, though, and was taking her new state in stride.
Or maybe that was
because she couldn't remember anything else? Ever
being anything else?
I wasn't sure what to think of that.
Was she even still Tattletale if she couldn't remember being her?
Was I supposed to tell her about her previous life? Or was I supposed to just let her be, as she was now?
I was left being mostly reactive. If she asked, I'd answer. If she didn't…
Was she a totally different person? Had Tattletale
actually died? But if she still remembered her name, then there was some continuity of consciousness and memories, so Tattletale wasn't
gone?
And there was the chance that over time she'd get her memories back as certain sensations triggered things and fired the synaptic paths from auxiliary entry points.
I really had no idea what to do. I was basically just dealing with all of this by the seat of my pants. It was so complicated and entangled and I was
so out of my element, I just…
Yeah.
I'd been right, though. Having my nanomaterial be part of another person, even if for something as innocuous as skin and clothes, felt extremely uncomfortable. I could
feel every single twitch and movement, and the idea of somebody
wearing what was ostensibly a part of me… it was just too much.
But I dealt with it, because it was really the only way to get Leah home without attracting any attention.
The girl in question was dressed in a simple pale pink shirt and a pair of white shorts, simple sneakers on her feet,
not that she needed them, but walking around barefoot wasn't exactly inconspicuous.
I turned onto the path leading up to my house and Leah followed behind me as I opened the door, the sound of the TV audible from the hallway. I slipped my shoes off, Leah doing the same, and headed into the family room.
My dad looked over at me. "Hey Taylor…" He blinked when he saw Leah, and stood up to walk towards us, holding his hand out. "Hi, I'm Danny."
Leah hesitantly reached out and shook his hand. "Leah."
"She's… she's the one I was talking about, Dad," I said.
My father's eyes widened slightly. "You mean she's… you know?"
I momentarily made the nanomaterial on Leah completely transparent, showing the interior structure of the artificial body before returning it to opaqueness.
He blinked. "Okay.
Wow. I wouldn't even be able to tell if you hadn't told me."
Leah shifted awkwardly and I glanced at her before turning back to him. "Um. She doesn't have anywhere to go and right now she can't really remember anything from… before. So I was thinking she could maybe stay with us? She can have my meals if we need to do that."
My dad gave me a look. "We might be a bit tight on money, but we aren't
that tight, Taylor."
"I was just saying…"
"I understand, but it's unnecessary," Dad said, before looking toward Leah. "You're more than welcome to stay here while you're… adjusting. We've got a guest room you can use."
"Thank you. Really," Leah said.
Dad nodded. "I'll just… let you girls get to it, then."
I took that as a signal and turned away from him. "C'mon Leah, let's go upstairs."
She followed me up to my room, and I sat down in the chair in front of my desk and motioned towards the bed. She sat on the edge, twisting around to see out the window behind her before turning and looking at the model ships on her left. After few moments, she looked over at me.
"So. Um," I started. "…I'll admit I don't really know what to do here. Or what you want?"
She frowned for a second, looking down. "You… you thought my name was 'Tattletale'. Why?"
Hoooo boy.
How to answer this?
"Um. It's the name you go by as a cape. Went by?" I struggled out.
"I'm a… cape?" She sounded slightly confused.
"Just, just… here."
I took a blob of nanomaterial from myself and tossed it at the wall to her right, letting the nanomachines spread out over the surface and then start changing colors, showing a view looking up towards the edge of a building as a collection of panel-van sized monstrosities leaped overhead.
Leah watched the meeting with interest, the way Grue and I spoke, and the things she said herself.
The video paused after Tattletale called me interesting, and Leah reached out towards her smaller past-self.
"Remember?" I asked, and she shook her head.
"I'm a
superhero?" she asked, looking at me.
"Uhhhhh… not,
quite," I said with a wince.
"But… I…" She turned back to the image. "Then what?"
"…villain," I mumbled, and she snapped to look at me.
"What?"
"I said you are,
were a villain," I told her.
She stared at me with wide eyes. "…oh," she said softly.
I just nodded awkwardly.
"Um. You're a hero, though, right? You're 'Relentless'. Why did you save me if you knew what I was?" she asked.
"Because… because I didn't think you deserved to die. And especially not like that. Maybe if it was someone like Kaiser, or Hookwolf, or Lung. But you never directly hurt people, and always tried to keep civilian casualties low," I told her. "A-and I'll admit I was kind of freaking out and more worried about the girl who could have been one of my classmates bleeding out right in front of me."
She nodded, her face slightly pale. "What if I hadn't reacted well when I woke up? What… oh god. You controlled the ship. The
whole ship. That's how you did that thing with the floor and my skin and—" I just stared, where was she getting this from? "No, you're
all of them? What, I don't even… what does that
mean?"
Oh.
Thinker.
That made
so much sense. Her name was
Tattletale after all.
Someone who revealed others' secrets. So some sort of information gathering?
Anyways.
Better just answer her question. I got the sense that trying to hide anything from her was a bad idea, and she'd probably find out in the end anyways. Better to be open than burn any bridges by keeping secrets.
"I converted all of the Ship Graveyard to nanomaterial," I told her. "And I can control it all remotely." Leah just nodded. "But… yeah. I wouldn't have kept you prisoner or anything. I… I don't really know. If you'd really just wanted to go, I would have let you. You'd already seen my face when I was trying to save you. I probably would have asked you to promise to not to tell anybody it was me, but well," I shrugged. "The fact I'm a Tinker will likely come out eventually anyways. I'd really prefer to have control of
when and
how much, but with all of the Ship Graveyard I'd probably be able to handle the fallout.
"Either way, it's not really a problem, is it?"
Leah shook her head. "I was just wondering."
"Soooo. Supervillain. …Thoughts?"
"It feels… weird," she said, looking back at the impromptu screen. "I can see her,
me there, but I can't… understand it? I don't think it was by choice. When I think 'what would I do with a superpower?' my first thought isn't
villain. It's not
hero, either, but I'd like to think I'd rather help people than terrorize them? The world's already pretty bad off, isn't it?" she asked, looking at me, and I gave a hesitant nod. "Why would I want to make that worse? …Maybe that's unrealistically optimistic, though."
Huh.
"And if you could?" I asked.
She looked at me quizzically. "Could what?"
"Could help people," I said. "What if you could help people? Would you?"
Leah shrugged. "I mean, sure? I guess? People have
needs, right? Um. Ma—. Mas—.
Fuck."
"Maslow's hierarchy of needs?" I supplied.
"Right! That thing. I think that if I could satisfy all that
and help people, I… I guess I would?" she said, sounding unsure. "I don't know. Maybe. This is so confusing."
She looked up at me with an expression of mild discomfort. "Can we talk about something else?"
I nodded. "Um. Let's… let's figure out the guest room and stuff. And you'll need supplies and clothes and… yeah."
So that's what we did.
Lunch was slightly uncomfortable, compared to the ease of the previous night's dinner, with Leah there. She seemed especially unsure how to interact with my father, and she was still a bit off-balance from what I could tell.
Understandable, all things considered.
The sandwich she ate appeared to be handled without any trouble, which was good, since I hadn't had any human food to test her digestive processes on.
We'd done a not insubstantial bit of… window shopping? computer clothing browsing?
With my nanomaterial that could replicate any clothing design instantly, it was literally limited only to imagination and I could manufacture anything once she'd settled on something (which I was doing right then).
Leah seemed to like bright colors, skirts and shorts that showed off her legs.
Two months. Two. Months.
Just had to remind myself that I wouldn't be a stick figure for too much longer.
I'd made her a laptop out of some of the nanomaterial I'd made her skin from, and she was now in the guest room, browsing the internet, probably trying to find links back to her past or just reacquaint herself with the world.
I couldn't even imagine being in her situation.
'hey~'
I smiled slightly.
'Hey Victoria.'
'hows it goin?'
'Pretty good. I got that project done. It seems to be working well. They seem to like it.'
Better than I'd expected, too. Though the amnesia still worried me.
'oh? good!'
'Yeah. How're you?"
'doin good! Ames finished all the major stuff in the hospitals so shes home today.'
'homework tho, ugh'
I laughed.
'I know what that's like.'
'oh? whats ur fav subject?'
Hmmm…
'Mechanical engineering. And chemistry and physics, I guess.'
'ur one of those smart dual-major people arent you?'
'I guess, yeah?'
I just knew
so much that a dual-major would probably be unnecessarily easy once I got away from gen-eds.
'hahaha cool'
'What do you like?' I returned.
'psych and stuff? i'm in a dual-enrollment parahumans studies class.'
'Is it interesting?' It sounded interesting, at least.
'i guess? i like it.'
'hey, u want to do a patrol tonight?'
I grimaced. It would be nice, but I
really had something else I wanted to do instead.
A date involving me, the Ship Graveyard, and one-hundred eighty thousand tons of nanomaterial.
'Sorry, I've already got something planned.'
'oh'
'ok. maybe tues then?'
I blinked. I was pretty sure I wasn't doing anything Tuesday. …You know, considering I didn't really have much of
anything to do outside of school.
'Sure?'
'Cool.'
'Ames wants to do something, ttyl, k?'
I smiled and shook my head.
'Sure,' I sent back, leaving me shaking my head and smiling at my ceiling from the whirlwind that was Glory Girl.
It was nice to have friends again.
Fuck.
Leah worried at her lip as she scrolled through the web page in front of her. She'd kept to news sites and Wikipedia, (re)familiarizing herself with everything going on in the world.
That at least was coming back in fits and starts, barely.
It was like learning everything all over again, really.
It was a nightmare.
This world… How the
hell were people okay with this?
The Slaughterhouse Nine, the Blasphemies, Ash Beast, Moord Nag, the South American Lords, the various PRT Quarantine Zones, the Case 53s appearing from
nowhere.
This was just…
not okay.
Now that she knew that that weird source of information that had been feeding to her was a
power, things were clicking together. Patterns, plots and plans that she didn't think she would have seen were she
not learning about all of this from a fresh perspective.
And the things she was learning, were
not comforting.
Someone was pulling the strings behind the scenes.
Someone was
encouraging this, directing it.
The PRT and Protectorate emerging when it did was too much of a coincidence, not even
mentioning the various domino incidents that led to it somehow spreading across the US-Canadian border.
It was all too…
neat. Too
just right.
And Brockton Bay wasn't exempt from that.
The city had one of the
highest cape-to-civilian populations in the
world, and compared to others, the Protectorate/PRT were practically
useless, progress against the villains occurring at an absolutely
glacial pace. And it wasn't like the Elite or 'Accord' were involved either, which might make the lack of progress make sense.
Somebody
wanted it like this.
Leah rubbed her temples.
Fuck.
She needed to stop this.
She was back to her 'natural' appearance, as she'd labeled it. Beautiful black fiber and metal frame.
Her power had been practically
lavishing in its offhand analysis of her body, the intricacies and
elegance of it, the way not a single thing went to waste, how much more durable and protected she was.
She didn't really have any disagreements.
It was also just… cool, in some way, watching herself move around, the way her motions were practically fluid and liquid, thanks to her now-perfect balance and sense of orientation and the economy of motion and
precision the artificial muscles gave her.
You'd think that being practically
numb everywhere would be seriously inhibiting, except for the fact that she still had
internal sensation, just not external. And oddly, she
could feel, at least on her face where she had the small amount of finalized skin layer
Still, she was looking forward to her 'next' body, where she'd actually be able to feel things again.
It would probably also be
really weird after just adjusting to not feeling things.
Oh well.
She was seriously considering offering to help Taylor. To… try helping out the girl who had saved her in her heroic-ish ventures.
(Her power informed her that it was less intentional heroics and more just heroic actions lining up with Taylor's underlying desires)
And she really did have most of her immediate needs met right now. Water, food, shelter, comfort, interpersonal interaction, (minor) socialization, plus… she had a feeling her power wouldn't exactly just
go away. Better to use it than just try and ignore it, right?
Hm.
Maybe she'd have to think about how she'd like to go about it a bit and then when the details were figured out talk to Taylor about it.
For now, though, she had more research to do.
The afternoon was lazily passed iterating on my designs for Leah's next frame.
(I'd decided 'frame' was a better name than 'body'. Less personal and unnerving.)
I was also thinking about that night, having decided it was time to act on my more… immediate wants.
At dinner, Leah was slightly more talkative, asking Dad about what he did and about Brockton in general. She apparently vaguely remembered living somewhere else and didn't know
why she'd been in Brockton.
The information he gave her wasn't anything I didn't know or hadn't heard before.
And now… now it was eleven, and I was readying myself for what was next.
The Ship Graveyard.
I left the house quietly, retracing the same steps I made earlier in the day after being suddenly woken by my sub-node.
Nobody bothered me, despite the hour and the few shady people I saw. I took it slowly, content in not needing to rush this. There wasn't any reason to.
An hour later I was at the beach, looking at the broken, rusted shells that extended out into the bay.
On the way over, I'd had my nanomaterial eating through the last micrometers separating it from the outside, just a bare skin of the original metal maintaining the facade of the original, broken Ship Graveyard.
And now, I let them finish and watched everything collapse.
It was eerie in its silence. Something like this, watching all these once-steel ships—from the smallest fishing boat to the massive freighters in the bay—collapse and dissolve into nothingness, should have had
some noise, but there was absolutely none.
Less than thirty seconds later, there was absolutely no sign there had ever been any ships at all, my nanomaterial invisible beneath the waterline.
And that's that, I thought happily. A week and I'd done something nobody else had for fourteen years: gotten rid of the Graveyard.
The reactions were going to be
great.
I collected the nanomaterial beneath the water, my various projects and single subnode safe inside one of the collections.
The nanomaterial began slowly swimming towards the north end of the bay, in the direction of the old shipyards, using the small amount of antimatter and Squealer's small fusion reactor to help.
Actually.
There was nobody around, and no cameras, so this should be fine. Besides, I wanted to try something
different than what I did normally.
I took a small ball of nanomaterial and rolled it out of the bay towards me. In a second it had formed into a simple electric motorcycle with a hydrogen fuel cell to power it, and I swung my leg over it, shifting my weight to get used to it.
With a thought, the cycle started forwards, my nanomaterial swimming beside me.
It was forty-five minutes before I pulled up outside of the rusting chain-link fence topped in barbed wire. I clambered off the motorbike, walking up to the fence, staring before reaching out and grabbing on, one hand going over the other as I climbed up it, and then over, the barbs finding no purchase at all on me.
A hundred feet in, and I could finally see the shipyard.
Or rather, what was left of it.
Five dry docks, two massive and three smaller, all flooded. A long slipway up to land, rails rusted. A giant crane on tracks, off in the distance. Short, squat warehouse buildings, all long-abandoned.
I could almost see what it would have been like back in its heydey, people around in constant motion, the sounds of metalwork and construction, the steel skin and skeletons of ships being brought into being. A place where the work of thousands made multi-thousand-ton dreams reality.
I saw it, as it was. Dead, abandoned, discarded.
And I wanted it to live again.
This would be my home. Neglected and unworthy of notice, where I could be
me without fear of being revealed.
I breathed in the salty air and let it out.
Time to work.
My nanomaterial flowed out of the bay like a flood of silver, washing over the ground and the cement of the shipyard.
Where it passed, it scoured the ground, removing every sign of age and wear. Discoloration and dirt disappeared. Rust vanished from bollards and cleats and rails, cracks in the cement sealing as nanomaterial readjusted and fused the pieces together.
The dry-dock gates were fixed, gleaming in the moonlight, their steel cable rebound and various metal pulleys unfrozen, seals repaired. My nanomaterial flowed into the docks, displacing the water and making them look like pools of solid silver.
The flood slowly reached my feet and flowed past towards the warehouses, their progress unhindered. The dilapidated buildings received the same treatment, repaired as nanomachines washed over them until the silver flood reached the chain link fence I'd climbed over.
I took the few hundred pounds or so of steel that had been the skins of the ships I'd consumed and plated the fence, turning it from a simplistic barrier to one that was fifteen feet tall and impossible to see through, ensuring my privacy.
Hrm.
Maybe I should make this all legal?
I'm sure I could buy the prop… er… ty…
I blinked.
I hadn't even thought about it, but I was now (figuratively) looking at the internals of the city databases and document stores, specifically the entry and deeds for the land once owned by the now-defunct Brockton Bay Shipbuilding Company.
Which I was
100% sure were encrypted and protected.
How did I— Oh.
I could hack things.
I mean, okay,
duh that made sense, I was
the most powerful computing system in the world, and likely would be for centuries (at
least). Breaking current encryption schemes would be trivially easy. I guess I'd just never really tried before.
Okay. Um. Did I want to do this?
…
Yes.
And I'd even do it (technically) legally.
Let's just… create a shell company. The "New Brockton Bay Shipbuilding Company". Do all the paperwork and registration…
…
That was
way too easy.
Alright. Um. Find some money from various illegal organizations like...
([Coprocessor: Accessing network data index]) Gesellschaft, apparently.
Huh. Actual, real, Nazis. ...That works.
Alright, take some of
that without leaving any traces (which is more just decreasing their account balance and increasing mine minus the transfer history) and buy the deeds and pay the city hall for the processing fee and file it all myself and—
I was the proud owner of three-hundred twenty-seven acres of industrial shipbuilding history.
Former history.
Grinning, I watched as nanomaterial continued rushing inland like some sort of flash-flood, now collecting in warehouses and compressing down so that some (but not even a
half of my total) would fit.
The power station building I gutted, ripping apart the gas generators, HRSG turbines, and steam turbines to be processed into nanomaterial.
Sinking into myself, I focused on the building.
This would be where my fusion reactors would go (at least initially).
And I already had the designs for them.
Stellarator reactors with a combination of superconducting magnetic and gravitic fields for plasma containment, and simple static Klein fields that would absorb all excess heat and energy for output.
Nanomaterial fused into complete, perfectly-shaped parts, billions of times more accurate and efficient than what was achievable with human construction. Control systems with simple, easy-to-monitor software. Particle accelerators and neutralized-ion injectors for the ignition system. Deuterium and tritium gas for the fuel, confined inside the reaction chambers.
Jump-start with the antimatter reactor. Heat the fuel with electromagnetic radiation, accelerate ions and neutralize before injecting into fuel mass…
Ignition.
Rev up the injection. Temperatures rising… One hundred thousand degrees. Five hundred thousand. One million. Two million. Five million. Ten million. Twenty million. Thirty million. Fifty million. Eighty million. Ninety million.
Reaction is self-sustaining.
All systems green.
Reactors one and two functioning within expected output.
My spine straightened from the sudden live-wire of energy my systems had tapped into, my sigils flaring and rolling across my body.
Ohhhh that felt good.
Okay. Dark matter generation. Time to rip reality a new one.
Capacitor banks. High-energy non-baryonic particle accelerators. Folded-space capture/containment pocket.
And
pulse. Collision.
Pulse.
Pulsepulse.
Pulsepulsepulse.
Pulsepulsepulsepulsepulsepulsepulsepulsepulsepulsepulsepulsepulsepulsepulsepulse—
Alright. Firing faster than once a nanosecond now. Three months until I had enough dark matter to be able to produce an amount of thanatonium that could run a Gato-class sub for a standard 75-day patrol.
Not good enough.
Not even
close to good enough.
I growled and replicated the reactor/collider combo in every single one of my warehouses, leaving me with twenty four active stations over nine buildings.
Better. Now I only had to wait five days until I could create enough thanatonium for a standard cruise.
I brought myself back to my body and looked around. Without my focus, my nanomaterial had continued working and improving the naval yard around me, leaving me with an absolutely pristine shipyard.
The excess nanomaterial that either wasn't being used or in storage in the warehouses was still in the dry-docks.
I really shouldn't leave this all unattended. What if some…
curious person came by and stuck their nose where it didn't belong?
"Reporting!"
My head snapped up to stare at my little sub-node.
I still wasn't entirely sure what they
were, whether they were truly sentient or not. They seemed more like echoes of my self, exaggerated and simplified.
Still, I
could certainly use the help…
With a thought I created another fifteen from the silver around us, all little mini-mes of nanomaterial, thankfully not easily identifiable as Taylor Hebert
or Relentless.
Just in case anybody
did see them.
I internally gave them their orders: maintain and keep watch on the shipyard. After a moment, they all dispersed, off to do their tasks.
And now…
Now…
I took a breath.
I'd been putting this off, building up to it. It was why I was here myself, and not just lying in bed at home.
I wanted to
be here for this.
I reached out with my will, and
flexed.
Silver nanomaterial flowed around in the only empty dry dock—one of the smaller ones–filling in a shape I now somehow knew better than almost anything. A three-hundred eleven foot long 'v'-shaped hull that filled out to large curves near the stern. Flat deck, slightly canting upwards towards the bow. Framing like ribs, running the entire length.
Superconducting power cable and sonar and radar and radio and guns and torpedo tubes and thrusters and rudder and crew space and control room and conning tower and
engines.
Dead and quiet but I had them, oh I
had them.
They were only engines in the most liberal sense, more clustered reactors that acted as the power plant for the entire ship, but
that didn't matter.
After
three months I was finally whole.
I was Relentless X-1 and I was
Fog.
A/N: I was surprised that with all the images and comparisons people were throwing around to other series, and especially Gunnm, nobody brought up the topic of amnesia, even with brain damage being practically guaranteed.
But yeah. And now you know why the arc is called
Counterpoint:
- (music) the art or technique of setting, writing, or playing a melody or melodies in conjunction with another, according to fixed rules.
- an argument, idea, or theme used to create a contrast with the main element.
Each are independent and similar (in circumstances) people, but foils to one another.
On one side we have Taylor, the girl who became a machine, losing her physical humanity but keeping her memories and identity (and supposedly continuity of consciousness), who constantly questions if she's still the same person, or even human.
On the other we have Lisa/Leah, the girl who became a machine, losing her memories and identity but objectively retaining her
physical continuity and humanity, making her question who she
is as a person, even as she's not
quite entirely human anymore.
Anyways. This was
really complex. Leah's headspace and somewhat trauma-induced acceptance are so difficult to capture I'm still not even sure if it's quite right and it still feels a bit weird to me.
So, I'm going to keep it on SV for a couple days before crossposting, and I'm relying on you guys to critique and tell me if you think there could improvements or changes, and if so in what ways.
I'll iterate on this a bit, tweaking and improving based on feedback, and then it'll go other places.
But yeah.
Uh.
Tell me what you think?
Looking forward to the update.
