Giant Robots: Everlasting Summer
Feb. 13th, 2014 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeThis is completely unrelated to Shadowthon! It's just a freebie story I worked on in my spare time.
Everlasting Summer
Prompt: Stuff100 “When,” H/C Bingo “time travel gone wrong”
Word Count: 3903
Summary: The world is ending, and the Pons System gets put on the fast track to development. Corners get cut, and M.D. gets… stuck. Warning: this is a body horror story involving medical abuse.
Notes: A Giant Robots fic, taking place four years before Feet on the Ground. I took the most horrifying connotations of both prompts and got this.
M.D. pulls a bobby pin out of the lining of her jumpsuit and starts chewing on the end, trying to get the rounded tip off.
Biff looks up from his side of the cell, but that’s it. She’s done this before, and she’s not very good at it, but it keeps her from bugging him. Not like she has much else to do.
She glances at him and holds up the stripped bobby pin. Also clenched in her fingers is a bent up paper clip. She jerks her eyes at the cell door. He sighs and vanishes her. He doesn’t expect her to succeed—she never has—but it’s not like he has much to do either. At least keeping her image going in the corner and her real one gone keeps him in practice.
She’s shit at dealing with being vanished. She uses her eyes too much, has no sense of her own body. He hears her trip, bark her shin on the corner of her bunk, the muffled sound of her hands hitting the bars. Biff keeps staring at his side of the ceiling and holds back a grimace. Pathetic.
He can just barely hear the click, click of metal on metal. He doesn’t know why she bothers. Entertainment or no entertainment, he figured she’d give up by now. She’s no cat burglar; she’s not—
Click.
It takes a lifetime of holding a freeze for Biff to keep from startling. He holds still, lets his breath out slowly, waits for M.D. to slip back and touch his arm. He can feel her grinning.
“And you said I couldn’t do it,” she chides, and her mind is all vodka and lemonade.
They’re caught and dunked back in the cell within fifteen minutes, and the locks get changed within the hour, but it doesn’t matter. M.D. has a new skill, and the PIN are going to regret ever giving her spare time.
Sydney gets nuked two hours later.
They hear about the monsters, of course. Biff was around for the wave of displaced Californians after the first one hit San Francisco, and a lot of them died of radiation sickness and Kaiju Blue in his neighborhood. And M.D… well, she picks up everything, so she hears about the others in Hong Kong and Manila and yes, Sydney.
They don’t hear about the Jaeger Program. They don’t hear about Drs. Lightcap and Schoenfield, who somehow manage to get their funding for giant monster-punching robots. They don’t hear about the test pilot fatalities either, or the subsequent volunteer drought, which leads to the funding drought. They definitely don’t hear about the OSHA noncompliance, or the mounting desperation, or the whispers that when the world is ending, anything is worth it if it means enough people live to court-martial you afterward.
It’s not like any of that matters, where they are. It’s not as though it has anything to do with them.
Their world is a six-by-ten cell. Nobody outside the facility even knows they exist.
…
M.D. has broken through two more sets of locks using pins, paper clips, and bits of wire when they come from her.
They aren’t the usual PIN docs. They’re older, sleeker, and they smell funny, like they came from somewhere cold and damp, far outside this tiny little cell block deep in the Arizona desert. They reek of money and politics, and Biff feels his hackles raise.
But they ignore him completely. They just look at M.D., and they smile. Nobody has ever looked at her and smiled, but they do, and then they take her away.
She’s gone for four days. When she comes back, her head is shaved, she has raw metal sockets and surgical staples in her head, and she can’t remember the past three months.
“I remember you,” she tells him in a drugged, delighted voice. “Lizzy!”
She blacks out before Biff can react, and she stays down for the rest of the day.
It takes her another day or two before she can hold a basic conversation. By then, Biff’s heard the words ‘PPDC’ and ‘Jaeger Program’ tossed around, but he doesn’t know what they mean. He tries to pump M.D. about it, plus ask where the fuck she got his old name from, but she can’t seem to keep a grip on anything. She keeps blacking out and twitching and forgetting things. Conversations that last more than a few replies just go in circles, and Biff finally gives up and gets used to answering the same questions over and over again.
“Ugh, my head. What happened?”
“You got surgery.”
“Oh.” Pause. “My HAIR!”
Then she cries for a while, then tells him her head is killing her and asks what happened.
The guard outside their door (they got him after the second set of locks) gets sick of her wailing and carrying on as she figures out what happened to her, over and over again, but there’s nothing much anyone can do about it. It’s like she’s trapped in September, 2014, and can’t move further forward, no matter what anyone does or says to her. The smiling doctors come for her again a couple times, but return her pretty fast. They seem disappointed. Whatever it is they did, it seems to have been a failure.
They still ignore Biff completely, but he catches more muttered words—‘anterograde,’ ‘hippocampal,’ ‘TBI.’
M.D.’s at least sort of lucid most of the time now. So Biff jabs her awake (careful not to hit bare skin; he doesn’t want to feel the inside of her cracked-up head) and since he knows he’ll never pronounce the others right, he asks her what TBI means.
“Traumatic Brain Injury,” she says, groggy and annoyed. “Why do you ask?”
Biff looks at the sockets in her head. “Nothing,” he says. “Forget it.”
And she does.
He lives in quiet terror for a while, positive that one day the doctors will come for him, crack his head open like an egg and spill secrets everywhere. But they never do. He must not have what they’re looking for. Maybe they only want busted-ass psychics.
Autumn turns to winter, and M.D. is still stuck in September. She stops complaining of headaches so much, but the twitching and blackouts and crying about her hair (which is growing back in, but still has her looking like a sad shaved cat) continue. She still can’t get Biff’s name right and the guard no longer thinks it’s funny. Finally, sick of hearing her and Biff talk in circles, he writes all her usual questions and their answers on a sheet of paper and passes them through the bars to her. That helps some; now, instead of answering the questions over and over, Biff has to tell her to read the paper over and over.
She says the same thing almost every time, in the exact same sarcastic tone: “This thing is magic!”
Eventually, the guard gets sick of that too, and adds at the end: “no, this paper isn’t magic. You just ask the EXACT SAME THINGS EVERY TIME.”
She doesn’t find that very funny. Even though her memory won’t move forward, she seems to understand on some level that something’s wrong, and she stops doing anything. She just sits in a corner, looking upset and confused and sometimes crying. He’s never seen her cry before, and now she doesn’t do anything else.
It doesn’t get him mad. It just unsettles him. And there’s nothing he can do but sit with her in that little six-by-ten cell with no windows and no toilet seat, because even if he tells her what happened, she won’t keep it for more than a few seconds.
…
M.D. doesn’t collect bits of wire or paper clips anymore. She doesn’t even look at the lock. All that stuff was from September, and she doesn’t remember it anymore. She just sits, and cries, and asks Biff the same damn questions over and over.
After a while, the guard stops lurking outside their cell. There’s no real point in him staying anymore. She’s not going anywhere or doing anything.
Whatever it was they did to her, it must not have worked.
…
One night, M.D. gets mixed up and falls asleep in Biff’s bunk and refuses to move. He tries arguing with her, but how do you explain that no, that’s her bunk, she’s been sleeping there the past four months, and finally he gives up and sleeps in hers for the night, hoping she reverts the next day.
Even though the bunks are functionally identical, it bothers him to be on her side. He shifts and turns, trying to get comfortable, make it like his, and as he’s wrestling with the pillow, trying to get it right, he jabs his finger on something.
M.D. has been listless and unresponsive for a while, but his swearing at least rouses her.
“Give me a good excuse or you’re in for a pillow-beating,” she groans.
Biff is busy looking for what drew blood from his finger, and he finds little bits of metal hidden in the padding. Huh. He wondered where she was keeping them.
It takes a while, but he finally finds the small hole in the seam and gets the picks out of the pillow. When he turns around, M.D. has rolled over to watch him, though he can tell she’s already forgotten snapping at him.
“Here,” he growls, shoving them at her. “These are yours.”
It’s late at night, but of course, she doesn’t remember that. She picks up the bits of metal, and after a moment of frowning, he sees the lights come on behind her eyes.
She gets up and goes to fiddle with the lock. Her movements are sure and certain; apparently muscle memory still works fine. Biff hastily takes his bunk back, and starts to doze off to the familiar quiet sounds of her trying to pick the lock. Until—
Click.
He hears footsteps pad towards him, then feels her hand on his arm: “And you thought I couldn’t do it.”
It’s the first time she’s touched him since they put the sockets in her head, and it’s a painful shock, electric, like a hit of his brain chemistry breaks down the walls in her head and reminds her of what she used to be. She’s stuck in September, but with his mind, she knows. It’s December, and she’s been altered, and she’d remember all of this if she weren’t busted.
He feels her terror, and she jerks back. For a moment, she stares at him—for just a moment, she can remember what’s wrong—but then she sees their cell door, open, and it’s gone again and the smile lights up her whole face.
“Hey look!” she whispers excitedly to him. “They left it open today!”
They get shoved in solitary and M.D. loses her picks while the PIN reinstate the guard and change the locks (all the while bitching), but M.D.’s got a hobby again, and Biff feels a little less worried.
…
Her mind puts itself back together slowly. She starts touching Biff more, because she keeps finding her picks and busting the lock for the first time again. It’s awful every time, because she has to relearn every time that it’s not September, but still, it’s better than her looking sad and confused and crying all the time. She’s using his memory as a back up, and when she’s touching him, she can almost function like before. Almost.
But then she lets go and forgets. And Biff doesn’t dare actually chase her down and grab her; it’d get him electrocuted.
Biff doesn’t like it, but during one of her blackouts—they’re getting shorter, at least—he goes to the guard, holding the magic sheet of paper.
The guard doesn’t look up from where he’s playing games on his cell phone. “What you want, Lizzy?”
“Pencil.”
The guard snorts. “No sharps. Tell me what you want written and I’ll put it on.”
Biff passes over the paper, and at the end, a new piece of advice is written: “If you’re confused, touch Lizzy.”
“You’re a sick man, you know that?” the guard says.
Biff ignores him.
It doesn’t work at first. The next time M.D. reads it, she goes, “Who’s Lizzy?”
Biff sighs, points to himself, and she falls down laughing, then gets up off the floor and says, “You’re not Lizzy. You’re Lizzy.”
It’s pointless, but he says, “No, I’m Biff.”
She stares at him like he’s stupid. She’s going to forget what they’re talking about any second now.
“Biff. Say Biff.”
She just sits there staring at him.
He tries again, slowly, like she’s three and doesn’t know English: “Biff.”
Hesitantly, looking alarmed, she goes, “…Vandorsky?”
Okay, so she knows his name on some level, she just can’t say it right, whatever. At least she calls him something. The guards, the doctors, the other PIN people, she doesn’t call them anything at all. And at least she’s in the right ballpark, even if Biff was always Beth or Biff when he was a girl. (Not that he told her that.)
Maybe she hasn’t lost everything. Maybe it’s just… blocked, or rearranged, or something. Regardless, Biff gets the guard to add a postscript: “Lizzy is Biff,” and that solves the problem, even though it makes her look at him like he’s crazy every time she reads it.
She obeys it, though, and touching is weird and uncomfortable but at least means he doesn’t need to refer her to the magic paper constantly. With his brain to back her up, she can keep some things, at least, even if she can’t access them afterward. Something’s shifting inside of her, like she’s learning how to get at the blocked stuff, even if she isn’t allowed to remember that yet.
Playing with the lock helps too. It doesn’t matter that the door is barred now (their captors have finally figured out it’s not worth the trouble); she just sits with her bits of metal, brow furrowed, and fiddles till the lock clicks open, and then she works and fiddles till it clicks closed. Even though it seems to be a pleasant surprise to her every time, he can tell she’s getting better and better at it.
That’s not the only thing she seems to subconsciously remember. It’s a gradual thing, but she’s touching him more and more. A hand on the shoulder here, a gripped wrist there, until they’re touching practically all the time, keeping her memory contiguous. At night, they go to their separate bunks and she forgets it all, but at least in the morning, she usually goes and touches him within the first three readings of the magic paper, and it gets easier and easier to explain everything to her each time. It’s still horrible, but she seems maybe a little less surprised.
Then, one night, as they’re gearing up for bed, M.D. doesn’t let go of his arm. Her mind is all clenching uncomfortable; she’s gotten more and more anxious over bedtime as she’s grown more aware of what it means. Normally she covers it up with talk, like she can drown it out, but now all she says is, “Don’t leave me alone?”
He should say no, but he doesn’t.
Biff’s short, and M.D.’s like a half-drowned rat without her hair, but fitting them both on his bunk still takes a lot of work and elbows to the face. Biff hasn’t had to share a bed with anyone since his little sisters, and M.D. is not his sister. The only thing that helps even a little is that she’s as uncomfortable as he is. He can feel it, tense cables in her brain and in her back pressed against his chest. His skin is crawling, her skin is crawling, she’s remembering all those warnings about stranger danger and prison sex (he can feel in her memories someone’s voice, “if anyone has to worry about it early, it’ll be you,”) and he can’t really blame her. Look at him. If he was her, he’d worry about getting raped too.
Normally, he’d never tell her. The only reason he does is because he knows that all he has to do is kick her off his bunk and tear off the bottom of the magic paper, and she’ll never know what it was she forgot.
“I don’t like you,” he says. He can’t say anything else, but he doesn’t have to. His mind says it for him anyway.
It doesn’t take her as long to get it as he worried, and she relaxes a little. “Oh thank god,” she says. “The feeling is mutual. For a moment, I was concerned…”
They’re able to sleep after that, and in the morning, he wakes up to her drooling on his arm. Her mind is drowsy white noise, or maybe it’s ocean sounds, but before he can pin it down, she wakes up too.
“Eeewww,” her mind says with a grimace. But then she blinks and beams and it’s an explosion of starlight in her head. “I still remember!”
He’s so relieved he doesn’t even kick her off when she wipes her face on his arm.
…
That’s the beginning of her upswing. Oh, it’s no miracle, she can’t touch him all the time, and the twitching blackouts are still a thing, but she seems to be handling them better, and when they do have to stop touching, she comes and grabs him sometimes without looking at the magic paper first. After the first few startles, he starts letting her. As her hair covers her scalp again, she’s even able to remember some things without him.
He’s just starting to feel like things will be okay when the doctors come back. They’re smiling again. She’s recovered so well, they say. They look at the lock and they look at Biff, and they mutter about social contact and meaningful activity.
Then they take her away again.
It’s awful. They’ve been in near-constant contact for three days, and now he feels like a machine missing half its parts. He’s also afraid. She’s only just started pulling herself back together. What’s going to happen now?
He’s still mulling over that one when they come back. They aren’t smiling anymore, and they’re giving Biff the stink-eye, as though whatever went wrong is his fault. They dump M.D. back in the cell with him and then park in folding chairs next to the guard, staring. Biff waits, but they don’t say anything, just watch, so he ignores them as best he can and goes over to M.D. She’s out cold and her nose is bleeding, and he reaches over for her arm.
Her mind is leaden, heavy, sedated, and there’s also an ozone-burn crackle smell in there, like an electrical fire. It makes him groggy, but he holds onto himself and digs around in the morass, searching for the indefinable thread that’s M.D. She might be sedated, but his brain’s still sober.
He can’t wake her up, really, and maybe that’s for the best, but she does mumble and lurch a little before blacking out again. He lets her hand drop, and then he turns to glare at the doctors, since they’re still there.
For a bit, they just stare at him. Then everyone’s eyes light up like he just told them the secrets of the universe. They look at each other, and laugh, and smack their foreheads, and they all seem really damn cheery for people who stare at prison cells for fun. Then they all start talking at once—“dual-pilot system,” “share the neural load,” “Pons system,” and they scurry off, chattering excitedly.
Biff stares after them and frowns.
“What’s their deal?” he asks the guard.
The guard smiles. “You just saved their funding, boy,” and he goes back to playing cell phone games.
…
M.D.’s out for hours, and she wakes up slow and stupid. The moment she starts twitching and mumbling, he rushes over to her and takes her arm again, but it’s no good. She didn’t have him to be her memory for her, and all she has are shards and flickers that disappear when focused on. He can feel her frustration, and she dives into him, looking for something familiar to connect the shards to, and he tries to relax into it and stay open.
He doesn’t expect her to be able to piece much together, stupid and drugged, so he doesn’t ask her to try, but she does. Some of her memories come clearer when his memories are similar; she’s heard the words ‘Jaeger Program’ and ‘Pons System’ before, and she knows what the pons is. He can feel her thought processes whirring in the back of his head, piggybacking on his sobriety, and then the trail goes cold and she makes a sound of frustration and buries her face in her arm.
“Giant robots,” she says. “It’s something to do with giant robots.”
Giant robots? It doesn’t mean anything to Biff, just brings up cheesy memories of crappy TV shows like Mecha Rangers. People in colorful costumes doing karate and fighting Godzilla-wannabes…
M.D.’s brain suddenly lights up. She gloms onto the memory—apparently she didn’t watch Mecha Rangers when she was little—and digs around, trying to find things that ring a bell. Biff tries to speed the process up and thinks through the show as best he can, of the colorful characters in the cockpit, with gearshifts and panels of flashing lights and buttons, communicating through psychic radio…
“No,” she says finally, and he feels it too, the shock that anyone would be so desperate and so stupid. “You’ve got to be kidding me…”
Pretty much.
“It had to be an American who came up with this. You just know it is.”
Then she abruptly throws his hand off, rolls over to face the wall, and starts to cry. He doesn’t try to touch her, because he doesn’t have to; he can feel the residual ghost of her in his head, and knows what she’s thinking. That maybe she could handle this shit if it’d been something dignified, but no, it’s something childish and stupid like piloting giant robots with psychic powers, like something from a kid’s cartoon, and she can’t take it seriously, and it’s just not fair.
Biff just sits there. It’s not admirable, but he’s too busy worrying to comfort her, because he knows that now that they’ve seen, the doctors will be coming for him too.
Somehow, knowing that they might die doing something so stupid and pointless makes it even worse than just dying outright.
Everlasting Summer
Prompt: Stuff100 “When,” H/C Bingo “time travel gone wrong”
Word Count: 3903
Summary: The world is ending, and the Pons System gets put on the fast track to development. Corners get cut, and M.D. gets… stuck. Warning: this is a body horror story involving medical abuse.
Notes: A Giant Robots fic, taking place four years before Feet on the Ground. I took the most horrifying connotations of both prompts and got this.
M.D. pulls a bobby pin out of the lining of her jumpsuit and starts chewing on the end, trying to get the rounded tip off.
Biff looks up from his side of the cell, but that’s it. She’s done this before, and she’s not very good at it, but it keeps her from bugging him. Not like she has much else to do.
She glances at him and holds up the stripped bobby pin. Also clenched in her fingers is a bent up paper clip. She jerks her eyes at the cell door. He sighs and vanishes her. He doesn’t expect her to succeed—she never has—but it’s not like he has much to do either. At least keeping her image going in the corner and her real one gone keeps him in practice.
She’s shit at dealing with being vanished. She uses her eyes too much, has no sense of her own body. He hears her trip, bark her shin on the corner of her bunk, the muffled sound of her hands hitting the bars. Biff keeps staring at his side of the ceiling and holds back a grimace. Pathetic.
He can just barely hear the click, click of metal on metal. He doesn’t know why she bothers. Entertainment or no entertainment, he figured she’d give up by now. She’s no cat burglar; she’s not—
Click.
It takes a lifetime of holding a freeze for Biff to keep from startling. He holds still, lets his breath out slowly, waits for M.D. to slip back and touch his arm. He can feel her grinning.
“And you said I couldn’t do it,” she chides, and her mind is all vodka and lemonade.
They’re caught and dunked back in the cell within fifteen minutes, and the locks get changed within the hour, but it doesn’t matter. M.D. has a new skill, and the PIN are going to regret ever giving her spare time.
Sydney gets nuked two hours later.
…
They hear about the monsters, of course. Biff was around for the wave of displaced Californians after the first one hit San Francisco, and a lot of them died of radiation sickness and Kaiju Blue in his neighborhood. And M.D… well, she picks up everything, so she hears about the others in Hong Kong and Manila and yes, Sydney.
They don’t hear about the Jaeger Program. They don’t hear about Drs. Lightcap and Schoenfield, who somehow manage to get their funding for giant monster-punching robots. They don’t hear about the test pilot fatalities either, or the subsequent volunteer drought, which leads to the funding drought. They definitely don’t hear about the OSHA noncompliance, or the mounting desperation, or the whispers that when the world is ending, anything is worth it if it means enough people live to court-martial you afterward.
It’s not like any of that matters, where they are. It’s not as though it has anything to do with them.
Their world is a six-by-ten cell. Nobody outside the facility even knows they exist.
…
M.D. has broken through two more sets of locks using pins, paper clips, and bits of wire when they come from her.
They aren’t the usual PIN docs. They’re older, sleeker, and they smell funny, like they came from somewhere cold and damp, far outside this tiny little cell block deep in the Arizona desert. They reek of money and politics, and Biff feels his hackles raise.
But they ignore him completely. They just look at M.D., and they smile. Nobody has ever looked at her and smiled, but they do, and then they take her away.
She’s gone for four days. When she comes back, her head is shaved, she has raw metal sockets and surgical staples in her head, and she can’t remember the past three months.
“I remember you,” she tells him in a drugged, delighted voice. “Lizzy!”
She blacks out before Biff can react, and she stays down for the rest of the day.
It takes her another day or two before she can hold a basic conversation. By then, Biff’s heard the words ‘PPDC’ and ‘Jaeger Program’ tossed around, but he doesn’t know what they mean. He tries to pump M.D. about it, plus ask where the fuck she got his old name from, but she can’t seem to keep a grip on anything. She keeps blacking out and twitching and forgetting things. Conversations that last more than a few replies just go in circles, and Biff finally gives up and gets used to answering the same questions over and over again.
“Ugh, my head. What happened?”
“You got surgery.”
“Oh.” Pause. “My HAIR!”
Then she cries for a while, then tells him her head is killing her and asks what happened.
The guard outside their door (they got him after the second set of locks) gets sick of her wailing and carrying on as she figures out what happened to her, over and over again, but there’s nothing much anyone can do about it. It’s like she’s trapped in September, 2014, and can’t move further forward, no matter what anyone does or says to her. The smiling doctors come for her again a couple times, but return her pretty fast. They seem disappointed. Whatever it is they did, it seems to have been a failure.
They still ignore Biff completely, but he catches more muttered words—‘anterograde,’ ‘hippocampal,’ ‘TBI.’
M.D.’s at least sort of lucid most of the time now. So Biff jabs her awake (careful not to hit bare skin; he doesn’t want to feel the inside of her cracked-up head) and since he knows he’ll never pronounce the others right, he asks her what TBI means.
“Traumatic Brain Injury,” she says, groggy and annoyed. “Why do you ask?”
Biff looks at the sockets in her head. “Nothing,” he says. “Forget it.”
And she does.
He lives in quiet terror for a while, positive that one day the doctors will come for him, crack his head open like an egg and spill secrets everywhere. But they never do. He must not have what they’re looking for. Maybe they only want busted-ass psychics.
Autumn turns to winter, and M.D. is still stuck in September. She stops complaining of headaches so much, but the twitching and blackouts and crying about her hair (which is growing back in, but still has her looking like a sad shaved cat) continue. She still can’t get Biff’s name right and the guard no longer thinks it’s funny. Finally, sick of hearing her and Biff talk in circles, he writes all her usual questions and their answers on a sheet of paper and passes them through the bars to her. That helps some; now, instead of answering the questions over and over, Biff has to tell her to read the paper over and over.
She says the same thing almost every time, in the exact same sarcastic tone: “This thing is magic!”
Eventually, the guard gets sick of that too, and adds at the end: “no, this paper isn’t magic. You just ask the EXACT SAME THINGS EVERY TIME.”
She doesn’t find that very funny. Even though her memory won’t move forward, she seems to understand on some level that something’s wrong, and she stops doing anything. She just sits in a corner, looking upset and confused and sometimes crying. He’s never seen her cry before, and now she doesn’t do anything else.
It doesn’t get him mad. It just unsettles him. And there’s nothing he can do but sit with her in that little six-by-ten cell with no windows and no toilet seat, because even if he tells her what happened, she won’t keep it for more than a few seconds.
…
M.D. doesn’t collect bits of wire or paper clips anymore. She doesn’t even look at the lock. All that stuff was from September, and she doesn’t remember it anymore. She just sits, and cries, and asks Biff the same damn questions over and over.
After a while, the guard stops lurking outside their cell. There’s no real point in him staying anymore. She’s not going anywhere or doing anything.
Whatever it was they did to her, it must not have worked.
…
One night, M.D. gets mixed up and falls asleep in Biff’s bunk and refuses to move. He tries arguing with her, but how do you explain that no, that’s her bunk, she’s been sleeping there the past four months, and finally he gives up and sleeps in hers for the night, hoping she reverts the next day.
Even though the bunks are functionally identical, it bothers him to be on her side. He shifts and turns, trying to get comfortable, make it like his, and as he’s wrestling with the pillow, trying to get it right, he jabs his finger on something.
M.D. has been listless and unresponsive for a while, but his swearing at least rouses her.
“Give me a good excuse or you’re in for a pillow-beating,” she groans.
Biff is busy looking for what drew blood from his finger, and he finds little bits of metal hidden in the padding. Huh. He wondered where she was keeping them.
It takes a while, but he finally finds the small hole in the seam and gets the picks out of the pillow. When he turns around, M.D. has rolled over to watch him, though he can tell she’s already forgotten snapping at him.
“Here,” he growls, shoving them at her. “These are yours.”
It’s late at night, but of course, she doesn’t remember that. She picks up the bits of metal, and after a moment of frowning, he sees the lights come on behind her eyes.
She gets up and goes to fiddle with the lock. Her movements are sure and certain; apparently muscle memory still works fine. Biff hastily takes his bunk back, and starts to doze off to the familiar quiet sounds of her trying to pick the lock. Until—
Click.
He hears footsteps pad towards him, then feels her hand on his arm: “And you thought I couldn’t do it.”
It’s the first time she’s touched him since they put the sockets in her head, and it’s a painful shock, electric, like a hit of his brain chemistry breaks down the walls in her head and reminds her of what she used to be. She’s stuck in September, but with his mind, she knows. It’s December, and she’s been altered, and she’d remember all of this if she weren’t busted.
He feels her terror, and she jerks back. For a moment, she stares at him—for just a moment, she can remember what’s wrong—but then she sees their cell door, open, and it’s gone again and the smile lights up her whole face.
“Hey look!” she whispers excitedly to him. “They left it open today!”
They get shoved in solitary and M.D. loses her picks while the PIN reinstate the guard and change the locks (all the while bitching), but M.D.’s got a hobby again, and Biff feels a little less worried.
…
Her mind puts itself back together slowly. She starts touching Biff more, because she keeps finding her picks and busting the lock for the first time again. It’s awful every time, because she has to relearn every time that it’s not September, but still, it’s better than her looking sad and confused and crying all the time. She’s using his memory as a back up, and when she’s touching him, she can almost function like before. Almost.
But then she lets go and forgets. And Biff doesn’t dare actually chase her down and grab her; it’d get him electrocuted.
Biff doesn’t like it, but during one of her blackouts—they’re getting shorter, at least—he goes to the guard, holding the magic sheet of paper.
The guard doesn’t look up from where he’s playing games on his cell phone. “What you want, Lizzy?”
“Pencil.”
The guard snorts. “No sharps. Tell me what you want written and I’ll put it on.”
Biff passes over the paper, and at the end, a new piece of advice is written: “If you’re confused, touch Lizzy.”
“You’re a sick man, you know that?” the guard says.
Biff ignores him.
It doesn’t work at first. The next time M.D. reads it, she goes, “Who’s Lizzy?”
Biff sighs, points to himself, and she falls down laughing, then gets up off the floor and says, “You’re not Lizzy. You’re Lizzy.”
It’s pointless, but he says, “No, I’m Biff.”
She stares at him like he’s stupid. She’s going to forget what they’re talking about any second now.
“Biff. Say Biff.”
She just sits there staring at him.
He tries again, slowly, like she’s three and doesn’t know English: “Biff.”
Hesitantly, looking alarmed, she goes, “…Vandorsky?”
Okay, so she knows his name on some level, she just can’t say it right, whatever. At least she calls him something. The guards, the doctors, the other PIN people, she doesn’t call them anything at all. And at least she’s in the right ballpark, even if Biff was always Beth or Biff when he was a girl. (Not that he told her that.)
Maybe she hasn’t lost everything. Maybe it’s just… blocked, or rearranged, or something. Regardless, Biff gets the guard to add a postscript: “Lizzy is Biff,” and that solves the problem, even though it makes her look at him like he’s crazy every time she reads it.
She obeys it, though, and touching is weird and uncomfortable but at least means he doesn’t need to refer her to the magic paper constantly. With his brain to back her up, she can keep some things, at least, even if she can’t access them afterward. Something’s shifting inside of her, like she’s learning how to get at the blocked stuff, even if she isn’t allowed to remember that yet.
Playing with the lock helps too. It doesn’t matter that the door is barred now (their captors have finally figured out it’s not worth the trouble); she just sits with her bits of metal, brow furrowed, and fiddles till the lock clicks open, and then she works and fiddles till it clicks closed. Even though it seems to be a pleasant surprise to her every time, he can tell she’s getting better and better at it.
That’s not the only thing she seems to subconsciously remember. It’s a gradual thing, but she’s touching him more and more. A hand on the shoulder here, a gripped wrist there, until they’re touching practically all the time, keeping her memory contiguous. At night, they go to their separate bunks and she forgets it all, but at least in the morning, she usually goes and touches him within the first three readings of the magic paper, and it gets easier and easier to explain everything to her each time. It’s still horrible, but she seems maybe a little less surprised.
Then, one night, as they’re gearing up for bed, M.D. doesn’t let go of his arm. Her mind is all clenching uncomfortable; she’s gotten more and more anxious over bedtime as she’s grown more aware of what it means. Normally she covers it up with talk, like she can drown it out, but now all she says is, “Don’t leave me alone?”
He should say no, but he doesn’t.
Biff’s short, and M.D.’s like a half-drowned rat without her hair, but fitting them both on his bunk still takes a lot of work and elbows to the face. Biff hasn’t had to share a bed with anyone since his little sisters, and M.D. is not his sister. The only thing that helps even a little is that she’s as uncomfortable as he is. He can feel it, tense cables in her brain and in her back pressed against his chest. His skin is crawling, her skin is crawling, she’s remembering all those warnings about stranger danger and prison sex (he can feel in her memories someone’s voice, “if anyone has to worry about it early, it’ll be you,”) and he can’t really blame her. Look at him. If he was her, he’d worry about getting raped too.
Normally, he’d never tell her. The only reason he does is because he knows that all he has to do is kick her off his bunk and tear off the bottom of the magic paper, and she’ll never know what it was she forgot.
“I don’t like you,” he says. He can’t say anything else, but he doesn’t have to. His mind says it for him anyway.
It doesn’t take her as long to get it as he worried, and she relaxes a little. “Oh thank god,” she says. “The feeling is mutual. For a moment, I was concerned…”
They’re able to sleep after that, and in the morning, he wakes up to her drooling on his arm. Her mind is drowsy white noise, or maybe it’s ocean sounds, but before he can pin it down, she wakes up too.
“Eeewww,” her mind says with a grimace. But then she blinks and beams and it’s an explosion of starlight in her head. “I still remember!”
He’s so relieved he doesn’t even kick her off when she wipes her face on his arm.
…
That’s the beginning of her upswing. Oh, it’s no miracle, she can’t touch him all the time, and the twitching blackouts are still a thing, but she seems to be handling them better, and when they do have to stop touching, she comes and grabs him sometimes without looking at the magic paper first. After the first few startles, he starts letting her. As her hair covers her scalp again, she’s even able to remember some things without him.
He’s just starting to feel like things will be okay when the doctors come back. They’re smiling again. She’s recovered so well, they say. They look at the lock and they look at Biff, and they mutter about social contact and meaningful activity.
Then they take her away again.
It’s awful. They’ve been in near-constant contact for three days, and now he feels like a machine missing half its parts. He’s also afraid. She’s only just started pulling herself back together. What’s going to happen now?
He’s still mulling over that one when they come back. They aren’t smiling anymore, and they’re giving Biff the stink-eye, as though whatever went wrong is his fault. They dump M.D. back in the cell with him and then park in folding chairs next to the guard, staring. Biff waits, but they don’t say anything, just watch, so he ignores them as best he can and goes over to M.D. She’s out cold and her nose is bleeding, and he reaches over for her arm.
Her mind is leaden, heavy, sedated, and there’s also an ozone-burn crackle smell in there, like an electrical fire. It makes him groggy, but he holds onto himself and digs around in the morass, searching for the indefinable thread that’s M.D. She might be sedated, but his brain’s still sober.
He can’t wake her up, really, and maybe that’s for the best, but she does mumble and lurch a little before blacking out again. He lets her hand drop, and then he turns to glare at the doctors, since they’re still there.
For a bit, they just stare at him. Then everyone’s eyes light up like he just told them the secrets of the universe. They look at each other, and laugh, and smack their foreheads, and they all seem really damn cheery for people who stare at prison cells for fun. Then they all start talking at once—“dual-pilot system,” “share the neural load,” “Pons system,” and they scurry off, chattering excitedly.
Biff stares after them and frowns.
“What’s their deal?” he asks the guard.
The guard smiles. “You just saved their funding, boy,” and he goes back to playing cell phone games.
…
M.D.’s out for hours, and she wakes up slow and stupid. The moment she starts twitching and mumbling, he rushes over to her and takes her arm again, but it’s no good. She didn’t have him to be her memory for her, and all she has are shards and flickers that disappear when focused on. He can feel her frustration, and she dives into him, looking for something familiar to connect the shards to, and he tries to relax into it and stay open.
He doesn’t expect her to be able to piece much together, stupid and drugged, so he doesn’t ask her to try, but she does. Some of her memories come clearer when his memories are similar; she’s heard the words ‘Jaeger Program’ and ‘Pons System’ before, and she knows what the pons is. He can feel her thought processes whirring in the back of his head, piggybacking on his sobriety, and then the trail goes cold and she makes a sound of frustration and buries her face in her arm.
“Giant robots,” she says. “It’s something to do with giant robots.”
Giant robots? It doesn’t mean anything to Biff, just brings up cheesy memories of crappy TV shows like Mecha Rangers. People in colorful costumes doing karate and fighting Godzilla-wannabes…
M.D.’s brain suddenly lights up. She gloms onto the memory—apparently she didn’t watch Mecha Rangers when she was little—and digs around, trying to find things that ring a bell. Biff tries to speed the process up and thinks through the show as best he can, of the colorful characters in the cockpit, with gearshifts and panels of flashing lights and buttons, communicating through psychic radio…
“No,” she says finally, and he feels it too, the shock that anyone would be so desperate and so stupid. “You’ve got to be kidding me…”
Pretty much.
“It had to be an American who came up with this. You just know it is.”
Then she abruptly throws his hand off, rolls over to face the wall, and starts to cry. He doesn’t try to touch her, because he doesn’t have to; he can feel the residual ghost of her in his head, and knows what she’s thinking. That maybe she could handle this shit if it’d been something dignified, but no, it’s something childish and stupid like piloting giant robots with psychic powers, like something from a kid’s cartoon, and she can’t take it seriously, and it’s just not fair.
Biff just sits there. It’s not admirable, but he’s too busy worrying to comfort her, because he knows that now that they’ve seen, the doctors will be coming for him too.
Somehow, knowing that they might die doing something so stupid and pointless makes it even worse than just dying outright.
