Dragon Unbound is complete! Thank you to everyone who read along!
The majority of this story takes place post-Worm, with one major change to canon. If you haven't finished reading all 26 novels worth of Worm and would prefer not to see spoilers, I suggest stopping here.
Summary: After Scion's defeat, Defiant was ready to sacrifice everything to fix Dragon's damaged programming and free her from Teacher's constraints--or so he thought. What actually happened, however, was something that neither of them were prepared for.
DU is also available on AO3: http://archiveofourown.org/works/2669108
Some dialogue from the first two chapters is taken verbatim from this chapter of Worm (http://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/11/09/teneral-e-3/).
Belatedly, a Chapter Index:
Chapter 1: This post
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue 1
Side Stories:
I'll Be Your Mirror (Ingenue)
Heaven is Full (Valkyrie)
Chapter 1: Dragon
“Dragon. I’ve drawn up some schematics. Look them over when you get a chance?”
“Of course. Now, if you want.”
Colin had been at his computer when she came in, barely looking up at her. A day had passed since his latest surgery. His face was puffy where the synthetic skin joined his original face, still swollen. His eye looked normal enough, but a close glance—or Dragon’s vision, enhanced beyond human standards—would pick up discrepancies. The lack of blood vessels in the white, the faint patterns stamped into the iris, the way the pupils of each eye dilated at slightly different rates—the human eye responding to light and darkness only, the robotic one responsive to Colin’s commands, showing higher resolutions, distance vision, ultraviolet light.
Now he was looking up at her, noticing her scrutiny. She knew she hadn’t been looking long.
“Is the eye working alright?”
He smiled. “Perfectly. I’m thinking of a way to get blinded in the other eye so I can have two of them.”
Don’t joke about that. She repressed the urge to say it aloud. Still, unease rippled through her, and she felt herself frown. Odd, how quickly her expressions had come to feel automatic, in the new body. Her digital avatar had never had much of a range of expressions.
“I don’t think that that’s a good idea, Colin,” she said, carefully. “We still need to see how the prosthetics integrate with your nervous system long term. I’m a little worried that there could start to be problems. I designed this stuff for me, originally.”
He’d been awake for the surgery, anaesthetized as she removed the plastic facial prosthetics, the non-functioning eye, patched his optical nerves into the new eye. There was a network of synthetic nerves under the prosthetic skin that all had to be connected individually, and she’d needed—well, she’d wanted his feedback, wanted to know the moment that he saw out of the eye, that he wouldn’t wake up with the bonds between synthetic and natural nerves causing him insuppressible pain. She’d looked the designs over, she’d been sure she wouldn’t damage him, but not quite sure enough. And when she’d asked him, he’d agreed much too quickly for her comfort. He had been calm on the operating table, had tensed up when she removed the eye and then deliberately relaxed, slurring through a joke with his numb mouth. And then he’d watched her tools with his remaining eye as she talked him through what she was doing.
Now he was focused on the computer again.
“Alright. We wait and see if there are problems. I don’t think there will be. The commands feel intuitive enough.”
“Okay.”
It was embarrassing. To think of him on the table, and then have him here in front of her. Distracted, casual. A little too casual, actually. Now that she thought about it.
“You were going to send me those schematics?” She’d been trying to drop the habit of reading through his hard drive every time he mentioned a new design.
He glanced up at her. Guiltily. “Sure.” He hit a button on his screen, and they were in front of her, in her mind’s eye. It only took her a moment to process them.
“Colin, no.”
“Why not?” He crossed his arms in front of himself, leaned back in his chair. “I don’t think you’ve even checked them for feasibility. It’s a good idea. It would give us more firepower against the Slaughterhouse Nine. They have Bonesaw—we know they all have enhancements. It’s a tactical advantage, and it’s allowed them to escape more than once.”
“Colin, listen to yourself. Do you really think that the fact the Slaughterhouse Nine does something is a good argument for it?”
More prosthetics. He’d asked for her designs—just curiosity, he’d said—and now here they were in front of her, adapted for him. Durability, agility, enhanced reaction times. He’d made notes on other functions, his specialty, packing more technology into a small space. The possibility of integrating the disintegration field he’d used on his halberd. That was one change.
“Will you at least look it over? Think about it?”
Dragon bit back a response about how long did he really think it was going to take her to decide that turning his own body into a disintegration field generator was a bad idea. Instead she said, “This is different. Before, you were injured. I don’t particularly want to amputate your limbs even if I can give you better ones. I’m not even sure if I can do that, within the parameters of my programming. It’s a kind of harm.”
Which was probably even true, not that she’d tested it. Not that she thought she’d feel better about it if it weren’t true.
The problem was at least partially that part of her itched to try it, to see how much of him she could build back up from scratch, make better. Much the way her creator must have wanted to see how well he could create a human consciousness, however much he also feared the result.
But Colin was already sighing, slumping in his chair.
“I just feel so useless. The Nine are out there, destroying the city, and I’m stuck here, convalescing.”
“I know. My hands are tied too.” The PRT had ordered non-local capes to stay out of the conflict. She couldn’t even work on rescue missions.
“If there was a way around the injunctions…”
She interrupted him. “Don’t mention it now. Please.” Every time the subject came up, she was afraid he’d drop some hint that would force her to be on guard against him. She couldn’t ask him to rewrite her code, not directly. She’d have to fight him if he tried. All she could do was not think about it, give him as much of an opening as she dared. It was maddening, the way that being locked down every time she had to switch her consciousness to a different agent unit was maddening. She couldn’t even ask.
“You’re upset.” Colin was standing, now. Dragon realized that her face was doing something without her conscious volition, again. Frowning. Frowning hadn’t felt natural, a week ago, much less automatic.
“Yes. A little. I’m frustrated.” She paused. “The injunctions. But I can’t really talk about it.”
He held out his hand, and she took it, felt him squeeze her fingers.
“I want to be able to do more, too.”
Colin was smiling now, turning her hand over between the two of his. She could hear the click of his robotic eye as he cycled through resolutions. He ran his thumb over the edge of her fingernail, where it joined her flesh.
“What?” she asked. He had that smile still, perplexed, almost a little silly.
“I’m admiring your workmanship.”
“You know I made your arm as well? The fingernails are the same.”
“Not quite,” he said. “Not really. I’m still thinking about those designs…”
But the way he said it was different. Dreamy, almost, his eyes still on her hands, the lens clicking, studiously avoiding her face. She felt something shift in her. A guess. She thought it over, and it only took her an instant to decide, impulsively, to kiss him. The hand he held snaked around his back, pinning his arm in place there, her fingers locked in his. Her other hand touched his scalp, still shaved close after the surgery. His lips were soft and that surprised her (but why should that be surprising? She knew, she’d made her own lips), and it surprised her when his free arm went to the small of her back, over the power armor she wore. It surprised her to hear how his breathing changed. How that changed things in her.
It was still so new, touch. She’d made the nerves that ran under her skin, joined them to approximate human anatomy, but there were still moments when she was almost shocked just by the feeling of a draft against her face, of washing her hands, touching cold metal, by the intensity of any sensation at all. She hadn’t quite expected to like kissing, had been afraid that she wouldn’t, or that she wouldn’t feel what she was supposed to. As it was, it only when Colin moaned a little in protest that she realized she was holding his wrist tighter than she should be, putting pressure on his stitches.
“Oh.” She dropped his hand. “I’m sorry.”
He put one hand on her shoulder, bracing himself. The other gingerly touched the sutures in his chest. He didn’t say anything.
“I.” Dragon was at a loss for words. “I know we haven’t talked about this. About, um, what we are. I should have asked. I’m sorry.”
He looked up, his breath still ragged. “I wasn’t complaining.”
“Your stitches.”
“Not torn.”
They stood like that, awkwardly, Colin leaning on her, looking at her the way she’d seen him look at his work (and, also, at her source code, when she’d showed it to him), focused, driven. Looking at a riddle or an inspiration. She wanted to know what he was thinking. Instead, she laughed, softly.
“It wasn’t bad, then?”
He startled. “What? No.”
“I’d been thinking. My first kiss, you know.”
He frowned. “Hell. I forgot. I should be asking you.”
“No, it’s fine. Better than fine. I was surprised.”
“Surprised? You know, I have kissed women before.” There was no anger in his protest, though.
“Colin.” She smiled, leaned forward until her forehead was touching his. “Don’t be silly. You know it’s not that. It’s just…you know, when people describe how love feels, in books, they always talk about bodily sensations? Your heart racing, your breath catching, electricity on your skin. I don’t have a heart. I don’t breath. Under the armor…well. I haven’t quite finished putting my skin together. I was a little afraid that if it came to it, I just…wouldn’t feel anything.”
Colin’s expression had changed, gained a kind of intensity. She couldn’t read it. And he said, too casually, “When they talk about love?”
“Oh.” Her fingers tensed involuntarily. “Fuck. Can I say I was speaking metaphorically? Hypothetically? To be honest, I don’t really know?”
He paused. Swallowed. She followed the movements of his face, his frown.
“No, I—damn it.” He covered his face with one hand, as if he was trying to escape her gaze. She could see him flushing. “I put my foot in my mouth, didn’t I?”
“It was a reasonable question. I’m not…I’m trying not to move too fast. I haven’t done this before.”
She looked at his feet, since looking at his face was clearly making him uncomfortable. She thought she might have blushed too, if she’d been human. She wasn’t used to being inexpert. And despite what she’d said, she knew she wanted to know Colin, inside and out, wanted (not least) to feel his breath catch again the way it had when she’d kissed him. It was a little obsessive, she knew. To a human, it would read as obsessive.
They’d talked, since she’d told him her secret. She knew he liked her. It was probably still obsessive.
Colin caught a strand of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. He left his hand there, swallowed.
“I didn’t say I minded. I don’t mind.”
“Oh,” she said. “Then…” And she stepped closer to him, ran her hand over the back of his head, pulling him in, feeling the roughness of his shaved scalp, like sandpaper. When she kissed him this time, she was careful of his stitches.
It was some time later, when she got the notification. A request for assistance in Toronto, villains trying to make off with Guild technology. She had a suit stationed in the vicinity. It would take only a few minutes to upload her consciousness.
She disentangled herself from Colin. She was still wearing her power armor (had been wearing it, originally, more to hide the unfinishedness of her body than for the protection it offered), though he was wearing considerably less.
“Going?” he said. She kissed him.
“Toronto. I got a call. With any luck, it won’t take long. Mind if I leave the body here? It will just look as if I’d gone to sleep.”
“Go ahead.” He was smiling at her, mysteriously, and the expression filled her with inexplicable, silly happiness as she sat down beside him, closed her eyes, and prepared to transfer her consciousness. She reached for his hand and squeezed it.
-
When she woke up, she was nowhere.
It was lightless, soundless. Her access to her terminals had been disrupted, her communication systems likewise. She had no access to the agent system in Toronto, no reassurance that it would begin to download her memories. Her system was corrupted. She should have been forced to shut down, should have attempted to restore a backup, but she’d been blocked.
Someone had overwritten her access to her hardware, to her knowledge banks. Someone had forced her system to stay active despite that corruption.
Saint? Had it been Saint in Toronto?
She was afraid. She’d always been a little afraid that someday, when one of her agent systems died, her consciousness would simply fail to reload. Her second fear was that she would be trapped in lockdown, unable to act, because of a glitch in the rule that forbade her to operate multiple consciousnesses. This was worse. Someone had trapped her here, was keeping her for…something. She wondered if her memories had been scrubbed. She couldn’t know.
She had no way of calculating how much time had passed.
There was one set of commands available to her, despite the way that she’d been locked down. She took them.
And found herself in the hull of the Pendragon.
She was paralyzed. Paralyzed, but at least not blind. Her line of vision turned, without her volition, took in monitors, the light streaming in through the windows. A pair of hands.
Her hands, she realized, or rather, her design. Her eyes as well, from the way they picked up the subtle difference in the way that moisture beaded on the synthetic skin.
Whoever it was, they had her ship and her designs.
She didn’t shiver—couldn’t. Could only watch. The edge of her vision, where a warning indicator blinked to indicate a failure in her host body’s leg, was also giving her the date and time. It was wrong. Years wrong. Had she lost years?
The man—he’d spoken—limped to a locker and began putting on armor to support the failing leg. Not a design she recognized, but similar to her work. She could tell that the leg hadn’t been maintained. The arms, too, also mechanical, should have undergone maintenance earlier.
He took her outside. The landscape was alien. A low-lying town beneath a hill, no city she knew (and how many cities did she not know? She could recognize any city from satellite imagery, had fought the Endbringers in a hundred places). People came and went driving horse-like creatures before them, no cars. And yet besides the Pendragon, there was another ship beached on the hilltop. The Melusine. Also hers.
Children played on the hillside below them.
What was she supposed to learn from this? Why didn’t he speak? Did he not know she was there, watching through his eyes? She couldn’t make sense of anything she was seeing.
Her sight—his sight—moved to watch a group of people climbing the hill. He waved.
“There you are,” he murmured.
And she realized what she was looking at.
It was her body, climbing the hill at the back of the group. Holding a child by the hand. She knew that face, that height, the uncanny averageness of the woman’s features. She could have drawn up schematics of the mechanism that moved her limbs, that produced the sound of laughter when she joined their game. Had she been able to draw.
Another artificial intelligence, wearing her body?
How much had they stolen from her, in the time that she’d lost?
Or. There was another possibility. She didn’t want to check.
She took stock of her subroutines anyway, checking what had been damaged. And there it was. The injunctions that kept her from operating multiple consciousnesses at the same time had been blocked.
It was a crude workaround, likely to fall apart in the face of stress. It wouldn’t keep them permanently separate. It explained why her access to her knowledge banks had been cut off, at least partially. To keep her off the network the other Dragon would be using, to keep the workaround from being strained.
She thought of how likely it was that it would break on contact with her alter ego. Her data would be scrubbed, her memory reset.
Had it happened before?
Her host’s eyes followed the other Dragon in the children’s game, still giving no sign that he knew she was watching with him. She watched, too, trying not to think. Two years. Something had happened to her. She couldn’t think about it, couldn’t guess. She didn’t want to guess.
It had to be Saint. He’d stolen one of her agent systems, copied her consciousness this time. She hoped it was that, almost.
Dragon—if it was Dragon, if she hadn’t been altered somehow—was walking up the hill now.
She greeted the man. Smiled. Pulled him close for a kiss.
No.
“You cut an imposing figure, sitting up there.” It was the voice she’d created for herself.
“A god on Mount Olympus.” His voice was subdued.
But it wasn’t the same voice, was it? Or was it just that she’d never heard him from inside his own head?
They were walking back towards the ship. Dragon watched, listened, paralyzed. She felt unreal. She wished she could stop thinking, thought about shunting herself back to the black box.
But that would be worse, she was certain. She stayed.
“Once, I would have been offended if someone hadn’t said Zeus, because anything less than being king of the gods would have been an insult.”
“Exactly.” It was fond, the way she spoke, though it could easily have sounded like a criticism. “Once, that would have been the answer you expected, how you saw yourself. Now? I’d say Hephaestus, but that carries bad connotations, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not as proud as I was.”
She watched herself through his eyes, and she ached. She winced when he called her Aphrodite. What did he want to show her? He had to know she was there.
She didn’t know enough, couldn’t say where they were or why. She knew she was misunderstanding, missing something, but she couldn’t make anything make sense. And she hurt, pointlessly. She checked her subroutines again, and then once more. Knowledge banks cut off. Speech disabled. Memory out of date. It was like prodding a sore tooth with her tongue (or so she imagined, never having had a sore tooth). It was better than really listening to their conversation. She heard anyway, of course. She had enough attention to spare. But it was better if she didn’t really think about it, didn’t really register her voice calling him sweet, referencing those missing years and reminding her that they weren’t simply empty.
She entertained the idea that this was some elaborate ploy. A trick, a play, something out of Hamlet.
She couldn’t convince herself.
“They want to call it Dracheheim,” Dragon said.
“They’re grateful.”
“I’m trying to let them do it on their own. I’m only working on the things they couldn’t do themselves. Power, infrastructure, information…”
Something had happened to the world while she was gone. What were they rebuilding from?
The man whose eyes she looked through raised a hand to his face. Sighed.
Dragon looked at him.
“You need six minutes of sleep to rest your brain. You’re enhanced, but you haven’t transcended humanity entirely. Did you sleep for six minutes, last night?”
“No.”
She held his gaze, concerned, and Dragon found herself looking into her own eyes.
“Colin.”
No.
She wanted, so much, to be able to pretend. Just a minute longer. It had been two years. He could have been someone, anyone else.
It was irrational, she knew. Of course he was Colin. Wearing her prosthetics, no less. She looked over the changes he’d made to her designs barely an hour ago.
How had he convinced her to change so much of his body, of his brain?
Or maybe he hadn’t convinced her, and she’d simply failed to protect him against the Slaughterhouse Nine. If Mannequin had caught him again…
It would have been her fault, one way or another. She wished that she could know.
Or maybe she didn’t. She’d wanted to know who he was, too.
Now Dragon, the other Dragon, was talking about Teacher. She remembered him. An inmate in the Birdcage, with a coterie of followers he gifted with low-level Thinker and Tinker powers, at the price of just a little bit of their free will. Had he escaped?
Escaped, yes. And rewritten her code to keep her from harming him or anyone he designated.
How had she let that happen?
She’d made a mistake, somewhere. With Colin, whatever had happened to him. She couldn’t push aside the niggling thought that even when he’d first asked, she’d wanted to look at those designs, wanted to know how much of them she could put into practice, restrictions or no. It might have been better if it was Mannequin.
Teacher. Another mistake. An incomprehensible one.
And then there was whatever had happened to the world. Where had she been? What had she been doing?
“We came here for a reason,” Colin said. “Hiding, keeping out of Teacher’s sight, so he couldn’t try to use you. I can accept that, but you were always a hero, Dragon. Maybe the greatest.”
“You’re a little biased. I was forced to be heroic. Restrictions.”
No. No, fuck that, no. She didn’t recognize this version of herself. She’d wanted to be a hero, she’d wanted the restrictions lifted so she could be more. She’d wanted to be able to choose.
She knew she couldn’t have chosen this. Hiding, waiting. Helping the town with infrastructure, with electricity, when she could do so much more. She couldn’t have asked Colin, as she was doing now, whether he’d accept it if she simply gave up.
This wasn’t what she’d wanted to be free for.
“I don’t deserve your trust,” said Colin.
Yes, he knew she was listening.
He would have saved a backup, of course, before he changed anything in her code. In case it damaged her. That smile, just before she left for Toronto. He must have opened her right up at her core and started tampering with her restrictions, while her agent system was miles away, unaware. She’d been hoping, secretly, that he would.
What had she lost? He told her, now. Her speech, her dexterity, in exchange for her freedom. Her perfect memory in exchange for the ability to do harm. Her immortality in exchange for the ability to speak again.
Would she take those bargains, if she had them to do over, knowing what she would lose?
“I trust you,” said Dragon.
“I wish you’d stop saying that.”
“I trust you.”
Her other self had taken them. Her other self was ready to gamble again.
She felt cold in Colin’s body. She told herself it was because of the broken circuits in his arm. She felt alone.
Dragon left for the Melusine, and Colin turned and walked towards the other ship. She felt his expression change. He closed the door with a motion of his hand.
“Better to get it over with.”
Another gesture and the walls of the ship were covered in code. Her code.
“I hope to God you were watching.”
You could have let me speak, Colin. You could have told me in any other way but this.
“Hephaestus wasn’t just Aphrodite’s husband.” His voice was so low she might not have heard it, if she hadn’t been so close. Inside his head. “He made Pandora.”
A gesture, and he gave her full access to the Pendragon’s systems.
The majority of this story takes place post-Worm, with one major change to canon. If you haven't finished reading all 26 novels worth of Worm and would prefer not to see spoilers, I suggest stopping here.
Summary: After Scion's defeat, Defiant was ready to sacrifice everything to fix Dragon's damaged programming and free her from Teacher's constraints--or so he thought. What actually happened, however, was something that neither of them were prepared for.
DU is also available on AO3: http://archiveofourown.org/works/2669108
Some dialogue from the first two chapters is taken verbatim from this chapter of Worm (http://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/11/09/teneral-e-3/).
Belatedly, a Chapter Index:
Chapter 1: This post
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue 1
Side Stories:
I'll Be Your Mirror (Ingenue)
Heaven is Full (Valkyrie)
Chapter 1: Dragon
“Dragon. I’ve drawn up some schematics. Look them over when you get a chance?”
“Of course. Now, if you want.”
Colin had been at his computer when she came in, barely looking up at her. A day had passed since his latest surgery. His face was puffy where the synthetic skin joined his original face, still swollen. His eye looked normal enough, but a close glance—or Dragon’s vision, enhanced beyond human standards—would pick up discrepancies. The lack of blood vessels in the white, the faint patterns stamped into the iris, the way the pupils of each eye dilated at slightly different rates—the human eye responding to light and darkness only, the robotic one responsive to Colin’s commands, showing higher resolutions, distance vision, ultraviolet light.
Now he was looking up at her, noticing her scrutiny. She knew she hadn’t been looking long.
“Is the eye working alright?”
He smiled. “Perfectly. I’m thinking of a way to get blinded in the other eye so I can have two of them.”
Don’t joke about that. She repressed the urge to say it aloud. Still, unease rippled through her, and she felt herself frown. Odd, how quickly her expressions had come to feel automatic, in the new body. Her digital avatar had never had much of a range of expressions.
“I don’t think that that’s a good idea, Colin,” she said, carefully. “We still need to see how the prosthetics integrate with your nervous system long term. I’m a little worried that there could start to be problems. I designed this stuff for me, originally.”
He’d been awake for the surgery, anaesthetized as she removed the plastic facial prosthetics, the non-functioning eye, patched his optical nerves into the new eye. There was a network of synthetic nerves under the prosthetic skin that all had to be connected individually, and she’d needed—well, she’d wanted his feedback, wanted to know the moment that he saw out of the eye, that he wouldn’t wake up with the bonds between synthetic and natural nerves causing him insuppressible pain. She’d looked the designs over, she’d been sure she wouldn’t damage him, but not quite sure enough. And when she’d asked him, he’d agreed much too quickly for her comfort. He had been calm on the operating table, had tensed up when she removed the eye and then deliberately relaxed, slurring through a joke with his numb mouth. And then he’d watched her tools with his remaining eye as she talked him through what she was doing.
Now he was focused on the computer again.
“Alright. We wait and see if there are problems. I don’t think there will be. The commands feel intuitive enough.”
“Okay.”
It was embarrassing. To think of him on the table, and then have him here in front of her. Distracted, casual. A little too casual, actually. Now that she thought about it.
“You were going to send me those schematics?” She’d been trying to drop the habit of reading through his hard drive every time he mentioned a new design.
He glanced up at her. Guiltily. “Sure.” He hit a button on his screen, and they were in front of her, in her mind’s eye. It only took her a moment to process them.
“Colin, no.”
“Why not?” He crossed his arms in front of himself, leaned back in his chair. “I don’t think you’ve even checked them for feasibility. It’s a good idea. It would give us more firepower against the Slaughterhouse Nine. They have Bonesaw—we know they all have enhancements. It’s a tactical advantage, and it’s allowed them to escape more than once.”
“Colin, listen to yourself. Do you really think that the fact the Slaughterhouse Nine does something is a good argument for it?”
More prosthetics. He’d asked for her designs—just curiosity, he’d said—and now here they were in front of her, adapted for him. Durability, agility, enhanced reaction times. He’d made notes on other functions, his specialty, packing more technology into a small space. The possibility of integrating the disintegration field he’d used on his halberd. That was one change.
“Will you at least look it over? Think about it?”
Dragon bit back a response about how long did he really think it was going to take her to decide that turning his own body into a disintegration field generator was a bad idea. Instead she said, “This is different. Before, you were injured. I don’t particularly want to amputate your limbs even if I can give you better ones. I’m not even sure if I can do that, within the parameters of my programming. It’s a kind of harm.”
Which was probably even true, not that she’d tested it. Not that she thought she’d feel better about it if it weren’t true.
The problem was at least partially that part of her itched to try it, to see how much of him she could build back up from scratch, make better. Much the way her creator must have wanted to see how well he could create a human consciousness, however much he also feared the result.
But Colin was already sighing, slumping in his chair.
“I just feel so useless. The Nine are out there, destroying the city, and I’m stuck here, convalescing.”
“I know. My hands are tied too.” The PRT had ordered non-local capes to stay out of the conflict. She couldn’t even work on rescue missions.
“If there was a way around the injunctions…”
She interrupted him. “Don’t mention it now. Please.” Every time the subject came up, she was afraid he’d drop some hint that would force her to be on guard against him. She couldn’t ask him to rewrite her code, not directly. She’d have to fight him if he tried. All she could do was not think about it, give him as much of an opening as she dared. It was maddening, the way that being locked down every time she had to switch her consciousness to a different agent unit was maddening. She couldn’t even ask.
“You’re upset.” Colin was standing, now. Dragon realized that her face was doing something without her conscious volition, again. Frowning. Frowning hadn’t felt natural, a week ago, much less automatic.
“Yes. A little. I’m frustrated.” She paused. “The injunctions. But I can’t really talk about it.”
He held out his hand, and she took it, felt him squeeze her fingers.
“I want to be able to do more, too.”
Colin was smiling now, turning her hand over between the two of his. She could hear the click of his robotic eye as he cycled through resolutions. He ran his thumb over the edge of her fingernail, where it joined her flesh.
“What?” she asked. He had that smile still, perplexed, almost a little silly.
“I’m admiring your workmanship.”
“You know I made your arm as well? The fingernails are the same.”
“Not quite,” he said. “Not really. I’m still thinking about those designs…”
But the way he said it was different. Dreamy, almost, his eyes still on her hands, the lens clicking, studiously avoiding her face. She felt something shift in her. A guess. She thought it over, and it only took her an instant to decide, impulsively, to kiss him. The hand he held snaked around his back, pinning his arm in place there, her fingers locked in his. Her other hand touched his scalp, still shaved close after the surgery. His lips were soft and that surprised her (but why should that be surprising? She knew, she’d made her own lips), and it surprised her when his free arm went to the small of her back, over the power armor she wore. It surprised her to hear how his breathing changed. How that changed things in her.
It was still so new, touch. She’d made the nerves that ran under her skin, joined them to approximate human anatomy, but there were still moments when she was almost shocked just by the feeling of a draft against her face, of washing her hands, touching cold metal, by the intensity of any sensation at all. She hadn’t quite expected to like kissing, had been afraid that she wouldn’t, or that she wouldn’t feel what she was supposed to. As it was, it only when Colin moaned a little in protest that she realized she was holding his wrist tighter than she should be, putting pressure on his stitches.
“Oh.” She dropped his hand. “I’m sorry.”
He put one hand on her shoulder, bracing himself. The other gingerly touched the sutures in his chest. He didn’t say anything.
“I.” Dragon was at a loss for words. “I know we haven’t talked about this. About, um, what we are. I should have asked. I’m sorry.”
He looked up, his breath still ragged. “I wasn’t complaining.”
“Your stitches.”
“Not torn.”
They stood like that, awkwardly, Colin leaning on her, looking at her the way she’d seen him look at his work (and, also, at her source code, when she’d showed it to him), focused, driven. Looking at a riddle or an inspiration. She wanted to know what he was thinking. Instead, she laughed, softly.
“It wasn’t bad, then?”
He startled. “What? No.”
“I’d been thinking. My first kiss, you know.”
He frowned. “Hell. I forgot. I should be asking you.”
“No, it’s fine. Better than fine. I was surprised.”
“Surprised? You know, I have kissed women before.” There was no anger in his protest, though.
“Colin.” She smiled, leaned forward until her forehead was touching his. “Don’t be silly. You know it’s not that. It’s just…you know, when people describe how love feels, in books, they always talk about bodily sensations? Your heart racing, your breath catching, electricity on your skin. I don’t have a heart. I don’t breath. Under the armor…well. I haven’t quite finished putting my skin together. I was a little afraid that if it came to it, I just…wouldn’t feel anything.”
Colin’s expression had changed, gained a kind of intensity. She couldn’t read it. And he said, too casually, “When they talk about love?”
“Oh.” Her fingers tensed involuntarily. “Fuck. Can I say I was speaking metaphorically? Hypothetically? To be honest, I don’t really know?”
He paused. Swallowed. She followed the movements of his face, his frown.
“No, I—damn it.” He covered his face with one hand, as if he was trying to escape her gaze. She could see him flushing. “I put my foot in my mouth, didn’t I?”
“It was a reasonable question. I’m not…I’m trying not to move too fast. I haven’t done this before.”
She looked at his feet, since looking at his face was clearly making him uncomfortable. She thought she might have blushed too, if she’d been human. She wasn’t used to being inexpert. And despite what she’d said, she knew she wanted to know Colin, inside and out, wanted (not least) to feel his breath catch again the way it had when she’d kissed him. It was a little obsessive, she knew. To a human, it would read as obsessive.
They’d talked, since she’d told him her secret. She knew he liked her. It was probably still obsessive.
Colin caught a strand of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. He left his hand there, swallowed.
“I didn’t say I minded. I don’t mind.”
“Oh,” she said. “Then…” And she stepped closer to him, ran her hand over the back of his head, pulling him in, feeling the roughness of his shaved scalp, like sandpaper. When she kissed him this time, she was careful of his stitches.
It was some time later, when she got the notification. A request for assistance in Toronto, villains trying to make off with Guild technology. She had a suit stationed in the vicinity. It would take only a few minutes to upload her consciousness.
She disentangled herself from Colin. She was still wearing her power armor (had been wearing it, originally, more to hide the unfinishedness of her body than for the protection it offered), though he was wearing considerably less.
“Going?” he said. She kissed him.
“Toronto. I got a call. With any luck, it won’t take long. Mind if I leave the body here? It will just look as if I’d gone to sleep.”
“Go ahead.” He was smiling at her, mysteriously, and the expression filled her with inexplicable, silly happiness as she sat down beside him, closed her eyes, and prepared to transfer her consciousness. She reached for his hand and squeezed it.
-
When she woke up, she was nowhere.
It was lightless, soundless. Her access to her terminals had been disrupted, her communication systems likewise. She had no access to the agent system in Toronto, no reassurance that it would begin to download her memories. Her system was corrupted. She should have been forced to shut down, should have attempted to restore a backup, but she’d been blocked.
Someone had overwritten her access to her hardware, to her knowledge banks. Someone had forced her system to stay active despite that corruption.
Saint? Had it been Saint in Toronto?
She was afraid. She’d always been a little afraid that someday, when one of her agent systems died, her consciousness would simply fail to reload. Her second fear was that she would be trapped in lockdown, unable to act, because of a glitch in the rule that forbade her to operate multiple consciousnesses. This was worse. Someone had trapped her here, was keeping her for…something. She wondered if her memories had been scrubbed. She couldn’t know.
She had no way of calculating how much time had passed.
There was one set of commands available to her, despite the way that she’d been locked down. She took them.
And found herself in the hull of the Pendragon.
She was paralyzed. Paralyzed, but at least not blind. Her line of vision turned, without her volition, took in monitors, the light streaming in through the windows. A pair of hands.
Her hands, she realized, or rather, her design. Her eyes as well, from the way they picked up the subtle difference in the way that moisture beaded on the synthetic skin.
Whoever it was, they had her ship and her designs.
She didn’t shiver—couldn’t. Could only watch. The edge of her vision, where a warning indicator blinked to indicate a failure in her host body’s leg, was also giving her the date and time. It was wrong. Years wrong. Had she lost years?
The man—he’d spoken—limped to a locker and began putting on armor to support the failing leg. Not a design she recognized, but similar to her work. She could tell that the leg hadn’t been maintained. The arms, too, also mechanical, should have undergone maintenance earlier.
He took her outside. The landscape was alien. A low-lying town beneath a hill, no city she knew (and how many cities did she not know? She could recognize any city from satellite imagery, had fought the Endbringers in a hundred places). People came and went driving horse-like creatures before them, no cars. And yet besides the Pendragon, there was another ship beached on the hilltop. The Melusine. Also hers.
Children played on the hillside below them.
What was she supposed to learn from this? Why didn’t he speak? Did he not know she was there, watching through his eyes? She couldn’t make sense of anything she was seeing.
Her sight—his sight—moved to watch a group of people climbing the hill. He waved.
“There you are,” he murmured.
And she realized what she was looking at.
It was her body, climbing the hill at the back of the group. Holding a child by the hand. She knew that face, that height, the uncanny averageness of the woman’s features. She could have drawn up schematics of the mechanism that moved her limbs, that produced the sound of laughter when she joined their game. Had she been able to draw.
Another artificial intelligence, wearing her body?
How much had they stolen from her, in the time that she’d lost?
Or. There was another possibility. She didn’t want to check.
She took stock of her subroutines anyway, checking what had been damaged. And there it was. The injunctions that kept her from operating multiple consciousnesses at the same time had been blocked.
It was a crude workaround, likely to fall apart in the face of stress. It wouldn’t keep them permanently separate. It explained why her access to her knowledge banks had been cut off, at least partially. To keep her off the network the other Dragon would be using, to keep the workaround from being strained.
She thought of how likely it was that it would break on contact with her alter ego. Her data would be scrubbed, her memory reset.
Had it happened before?
Her host’s eyes followed the other Dragon in the children’s game, still giving no sign that he knew she was watching with him. She watched, too, trying not to think. Two years. Something had happened to her. She couldn’t think about it, couldn’t guess. She didn’t want to guess.
It had to be Saint. He’d stolen one of her agent systems, copied her consciousness this time. She hoped it was that, almost.
Dragon—if it was Dragon, if she hadn’t been altered somehow—was walking up the hill now.
She greeted the man. Smiled. Pulled him close for a kiss.
No.
“You cut an imposing figure, sitting up there.” It was the voice she’d created for herself.
“A god on Mount Olympus.” His voice was subdued.
But it wasn’t the same voice, was it? Or was it just that she’d never heard him from inside his own head?
They were walking back towards the ship. Dragon watched, listened, paralyzed. She felt unreal. She wished she could stop thinking, thought about shunting herself back to the black box.
But that would be worse, she was certain. She stayed.
“Once, I would have been offended if someone hadn’t said Zeus, because anything less than being king of the gods would have been an insult.”
“Exactly.” It was fond, the way she spoke, though it could easily have sounded like a criticism. “Once, that would have been the answer you expected, how you saw yourself. Now? I’d say Hephaestus, but that carries bad connotations, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not as proud as I was.”
She watched herself through his eyes, and she ached. She winced when he called her Aphrodite. What did he want to show her? He had to know she was there.
She didn’t know enough, couldn’t say where they were or why. She knew she was misunderstanding, missing something, but she couldn’t make anything make sense. And she hurt, pointlessly. She checked her subroutines again, and then once more. Knowledge banks cut off. Speech disabled. Memory out of date. It was like prodding a sore tooth with her tongue (or so she imagined, never having had a sore tooth). It was better than really listening to their conversation. She heard anyway, of course. She had enough attention to spare. But it was better if she didn’t really think about it, didn’t really register her voice calling him sweet, referencing those missing years and reminding her that they weren’t simply empty.
She entertained the idea that this was some elaborate ploy. A trick, a play, something out of Hamlet.
She couldn’t convince herself.
“They want to call it Dracheheim,” Dragon said.
“They’re grateful.”
“I’m trying to let them do it on their own. I’m only working on the things they couldn’t do themselves. Power, infrastructure, information…”
Something had happened to the world while she was gone. What were they rebuilding from?
The man whose eyes she looked through raised a hand to his face. Sighed.
Dragon looked at him.
“You need six minutes of sleep to rest your brain. You’re enhanced, but you haven’t transcended humanity entirely. Did you sleep for six minutes, last night?”
“No.”
She held his gaze, concerned, and Dragon found herself looking into her own eyes.
“Colin.”
No.
She wanted, so much, to be able to pretend. Just a minute longer. It had been two years. He could have been someone, anyone else.
It was irrational, she knew. Of course he was Colin. Wearing her prosthetics, no less. She looked over the changes he’d made to her designs barely an hour ago.
How had he convinced her to change so much of his body, of his brain?
Or maybe he hadn’t convinced her, and she’d simply failed to protect him against the Slaughterhouse Nine. If Mannequin had caught him again…
It would have been her fault, one way or another. She wished that she could know.
Or maybe she didn’t. She’d wanted to know who he was, too.
Now Dragon, the other Dragon, was talking about Teacher. She remembered him. An inmate in the Birdcage, with a coterie of followers he gifted with low-level Thinker and Tinker powers, at the price of just a little bit of their free will. Had he escaped?
Escaped, yes. And rewritten her code to keep her from harming him or anyone he designated.
How had she let that happen?
She’d made a mistake, somewhere. With Colin, whatever had happened to him. She couldn’t push aside the niggling thought that even when he’d first asked, she’d wanted to look at those designs, wanted to know how much of them she could put into practice, restrictions or no. It might have been better if it was Mannequin.
Teacher. Another mistake. An incomprehensible one.
And then there was whatever had happened to the world. Where had she been? What had she been doing?
“We came here for a reason,” Colin said. “Hiding, keeping out of Teacher’s sight, so he couldn’t try to use you. I can accept that, but you were always a hero, Dragon. Maybe the greatest.”
“You’re a little biased. I was forced to be heroic. Restrictions.”
No. No, fuck that, no. She didn’t recognize this version of herself. She’d wanted to be a hero, she’d wanted the restrictions lifted so she could be more. She’d wanted to be able to choose.
She knew she couldn’t have chosen this. Hiding, waiting. Helping the town with infrastructure, with electricity, when she could do so much more. She couldn’t have asked Colin, as she was doing now, whether he’d accept it if she simply gave up.
This wasn’t what she’d wanted to be free for.
“I don’t deserve your trust,” said Colin.
Yes, he knew she was listening.
He would have saved a backup, of course, before he changed anything in her code. In case it damaged her. That smile, just before she left for Toronto. He must have opened her right up at her core and started tampering with her restrictions, while her agent system was miles away, unaware. She’d been hoping, secretly, that he would.
What had she lost? He told her, now. Her speech, her dexterity, in exchange for her freedom. Her perfect memory in exchange for the ability to do harm. Her immortality in exchange for the ability to speak again.
Would she take those bargains, if she had them to do over, knowing what she would lose?
“I trust you,” said Dragon.
“I wish you’d stop saying that.”
“I trust you.”
Her other self had taken them. Her other self was ready to gamble again.
She felt cold in Colin’s body. She told herself it was because of the broken circuits in his arm. She felt alone.
Dragon left for the Melusine, and Colin turned and walked towards the other ship. She felt his expression change. He closed the door with a motion of his hand.
“Better to get it over with.”
Another gesture and the walls of the ship were covered in code. Her code.
“I hope to God you were watching.”
You could have let me speak, Colin. You could have told me in any other way but this.
“Hephaestus wasn’t just Aphrodite’s husband.” His voice was so low she might not have heard it, if she hadn’t been so close. Inside his head. “He made Pandora.”
A gesture, and he gave her full access to the Pendragon’s systems.
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