Been thinking of Matrix and Cygnus, sometimes I feel bad for both of them but for different reasons. Yes I know I wrote them this way but also I don't call it trauma I call it ✨ character development ✨
Now back to why I still sometimes feel bad for them and why I gave them a currently pleasant experience come renegades—
With Cygnus it's the fact he didn't ask to be a babysitter to what was supposed to be a forgotten inhumane experiment but the Nine said "NOOOO— have this cursed crab thing Mochi rezzed in the DSC ruins". Cygnus being someone who basically chases little bits of history to log and write down hurts me in hindsight when I realize there is a genuine conflict of interest with his own morals in the case for Matrix-01. Mostly because the more he found from digging, the more he realized some things were actually just better left alone.
Matrix by all accounts should've stayed dead. Perhaps it would've also been a mercy. He remembers nothing of his 11 predecessors(a kindness the light spared him as the memories of the other 11 were supposed to be cumulative and uploaded into his frame)— but at the same time dragging him into a time where he is no longer needed, nor has a directive to fulfill seems ridiculously harsh for a machine that wasn't intended to have free will in the first place.
Cygnus still sometimes mulls over the fact the light isn't necessarily ethical or even on any moral high ground. He never had to think of it until he'd unearthed everything about Matrix's past and even then he remembers the cold fury that boiled in his blood and the acid taste in the back of his throat. If there was one thing Clovis never really emphasized enough in his old records and memoirs— it's the sacrifice it took to get Exos to where they are in the present. Matrix-01(and by proxy the 11 part of his "[Number]-unit" line, as Failsafe likes to call them. She calls Matrix 12-Unit.) were function first, form second. Which meant a lot of the humanity or "human-adjacency" that most current exos have weren't applied to them.
It always haunted the both of them that:
1) Matrix never asked to be revived(as with most guardians) BUT he had to learn his autonomy as it never came naturally when he'd been rezzed. Matrix always lived with the idea of following a directive as asking too many questions would cloud his periphery with errors or syntax failures in red. (He actually succumbs to DER in EoF because of the whole "YOU ARE THE WEAPON" thing the Nine did, idgaf how broken from canon that might be I needed to give Matrix an actual lore reason for why the Nine picked the guardian because the story did not sit properly with me so WAHAHAHA. The only difference being Mochi kept trying to rez him because she got traumatized and refused to let him go)
2) Cygnus doesn't know why the light chose someone who would actively only be in more pain from existing in a time period that had visibly moved on from him; and he might never get an answer he can parse or stomach. (Funny thing is he's never stopped looking, it's one of his character flaws that he can sometimes be so thorough it's often to his detriment)
3) Matrix doesn't hold anything against his ghost Mochi, even if she still freaks out sometimes when he goes too silent because she thinks he'll crash his systems or traveler-forbid degauss systems again. (I'll explain this more when I explain Matrix's lore, I'm still trying to figure out how to write it without making it seem like horror for the sake of it)
4) Passenger still sometimes talks to Cygnus about being more hesitant or careful when finding answers or unearthing history. Some things are better left forgotten, Matrix being the currently most painful example of such a thing. Sometimes it's a good reminder to know the price of innovation is often ethics, morals, and humanity.
5) Cygnus and Matrix are still friends, albeit through blood sweat and tears(literally). But they can spill into thoughtful silences whenever someone asks how they met or how they became friends.
6) Matrix's current look(and why he isn't just a corpse when by all accounts after EoF he SHOULD'VE BEEN) is because he'd actually been sliced out of his old exoskeleton and ship of Theseus'd by Ada-1. While she didn't initially care to help— Cygnus basically tricked her into trying(because of her expertise with synthweave) due to the fact Ada does her best to preserve anything from the black armory and Matrix is unintentionally involved with the said creators since his line was actually made by the same founders when they still worked under Clovis. Matrix still doesn't have a face, as Ada refused to touch his head and helmet due to the risky complications. But she was willing to try and rebuild his body so long as Cygnus was there to keep feeding her the information she sought.
7) Cygnus doesn't ever tell Matrix that he isn't technically a "01" where Exos are concerned.(Even if that is what Matrix calls himself, since as far as he is concerned— his mindframe hadn't ever been reset, so he is simply a 01) Matrix can't be reset or uploaded into another body as APPARENTLY there aren't any other functional versions of his Exo line left, and uploading him into a modern chassis would actually just cause him to immediately die from the hardware difference(it's like plugging in the OS from an IPhone 4 into an IPhone 13. Shit will NOT WORK). But he should've been a cumulative of a previous 11. None of those 11 were ever reset, just compounded, compounded until eventual expected insanity.
