summary: peter is having a hard time finding a new job, but refuses any help. johnny is there to terrorise him.
warnings: swear words. i realise now i always make peter swear quite a lot. it’s the new yorker in him. english is not my first language. don’t repost anywhere! you can check for more blurbs in my masterlist!
By the end of the first month, Peter started to grow uneasy.
To be fair, sharing an apartment hasn’t been terribly bad, even with Johnny Storm as part of the package.
Yes, they’d bicker like children, and sometimes yell like children too, and Johnny had the particular ability of turning Peter’s everyday thoughts into a fiery rage, but honestly they haven’t been alone around each other much. They’d barely cross paths in the morning, and always have dinner with Bob and Joaquin. So even though Peter thinks he’s an attention seeker snob, they haven’t killed each other yet, which is a win.
What actually bothered him so much these days was his inability to find a new job. A better job. He had been working as an intern for a software development company for almost a year now, and though he was aware of his great skills and true possibility of actually being hired, he had hopes of getting to work as a chemical engineer, the degree he had fully dedicated himself to for four years of his life.
Except he had been in contact with so many companies now.
“Have you tried that car manufacturi-”
“Yes, all of them.”
Joaquin hums, and sits back on the couch, defeated. He seems to be too deep into coming up with an idea, and to Peter, that’s never a good thing.
“You know I can’t do much in your favour in the company… But you could talk to John—”
“No.”
“Peter…”
“Absolutely not!”
Like he was summoned, Johnny walks into the door, backpack hanging by one shoulder.
“Hey,” Johnny walked past Peter sitting at the kitchen table, fully ignoring his presence, and talked directly to Joaquin. “sorry I couldn’t walk with you. Reed wanted to see me.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it. Peter and I were just talking about you, though.”
Johnny looks up at Peter, suspiciously.
“Yeah?”
“Yes! We were actually wondering if you think Peter could work at Baxt—”
“Nope.”
“Oh my god, what is up with you both interrupting me? It’s work, for fucks sake! You won’t even work on the same floor!”
“For the record, I said no.” Peter pointed out, like he needed Johnny to know that he also wouldn’t want that.
“Okay, rude. Why wouldn’t you want to work at Baxter?”
“What? But you just said–”
“Anyways, even if I wanted to help, which I don’t–” Johnny turns to Peter, him too making sure his roommate knew of his sour feelings, “I don’t think I could do much. Reed was just talking about being done with interviewing potential new employees. So I guess it’s too late now, bug.”
“Don’t bug me, we’re not friends.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“What do you m–”
“Shut up, both of you!” Joaquin got up from the couch, walking to the door. “My god, you’re so annoying! I can’t deal with that, I’ll see if Bob needs help with dinner.” Then he left, not without slamming the door behind him.
Peter and Johnny looked at each other, just briefly. Deep down both of them knew that they were really tiring Joaquin out with their bickering, but none were willing to bring up the huge, annoyed and sometimes loud elephant in the room. With a shrug, Johnny simply turned his back to Peter and walked into his room.
-
The next week, Peter was going through a different sticky situation: dinner with May and Happy. His aunt came up with the idea of having him come over for dinner at least once a week. Empty nest, she alleged. Sometimes she’d sneak Happy into it too, wanting oh so much for them to get closer.
So much that she was the one to bring up Peter’s haunt for a new job.
“May, I don’t think we have to talk about that.”
“Nonsense! Happy works in a tech company, I’m sure he could help you!”
“Actually…”
“I don’t want anybody’s help!” Peter got up, suddenly feeling very overwhelmed. He feels like he’s just repeating himself now, reliving that same conversation he had with Joaquin and Johnny the previous week. “I don’t know why it's so hard for someone to trust that I don’t need anyone to… to nepotise me!”
“Honey, I don’t think that’s a word–”
“I have a nice resume! Great, even! I don’t need Johnny’s, or Happy’s, or anybody’s help!”
Peter sits back down, huffing. He can hear Happy muttering something along the lines of “who’s Johnny?”, and May just shakes her head, like she’s saying “not now”, and turns to her nephew, gently stroking his now messy hair out of his face.
“Well, that’s a shame…” she gives him a small smile, knowingly. “Cause Happy was just telling me that they want to see you on Monday.”
Peter looks at her, eyes wide open, then at Happy.
“Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.” He smiles, his right hand over his chest. “And I swear I didn’t put in a good word for you, just handed them your great resume.”
Peter feels embarrassed for his outburst now. He gets up again, walking around the dinner table, hands hiding his grin.
“Thank you, Happy…” Peter nods at him, and turns to May, hugging her shoulders “And Aunt May. I guess a little push won’t kill me.”
“Don’t be silly. Sit back and finish your dinner, please.” May points at his half eaten steak, and Peter launches himself at it, suddenly starving. “Now, remind me again which one of your friends is Johnny?”
Peter drops his fork, smirking. He is really fucking glad he won’t have to work with Johnny.
notes: can you believe i had to put off writing this cause i had to do taxes?? hate being an adult. anyways this isn’t my best work imo but we need to keep the plot going!!! things to happen!!! bridges to cross!!! i’m quite excited for the next ones <3 thank you so much for reading!
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Elon Musk’s former employees are trying to use White House credentials to access General Services Administration tech, giving them the poten
Elon Musk’s minions—from trusted sidekicks to random college students and former Musk company interns—have taken over the General Services Administration, a critical government agency that manages federal offices and technology. Already, the team is attempting to use White House security credentials to gain unusual access to GSA tech, deploying a suite of new AI software, and recreating the office in X’s image, according to leaked documents obtained by WIRED.
Some of the same people who helped Musk take over Twitter more than two years ago are now registered as official GSA employees. Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter HQ as an unofficial member of Musk’s transition team, has high-level agency access and an official government email address, according to documents viewed by WIRED. Hollander’s husband, Steve Davis, also slept in the office. He has now taken on a leading role in Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Thomas Shedd, the recently installed director of the Technology Transformation Services within GSA, worked as a software engineer at Tesla for eight years. Edward Coristine, who previously interned at Neuralink, has been onboarded along with Ethan Shaotran, a Harvard senior who is developing his own OpenAI-backed scheduling assistant and participated in an xAI hackathon.
“I believe these people do not want to help the federal government provide services to the American people,” says a current GSA employee who asked not to be named, citing fears of retaliation. “They are acting like this is a takeover of a tech company.”
The team appears to be carrying out Musk’s agenda: slashing the federal government as quickly as possible. They’re currently targeting a 50 percent reduction in spending for every office managed by the GSA, according to documents obtained by WIRED.
There also appears to be an effort to use IT credentials from the Executive Office of the President to access GSA laptops and internal GSA infrastructure. Typically, access to agency systems requires workers to be employed at such agencies, sources say. While Musk's team could be trying to obtain better laptops and equipment from GSA, sources fear that the mandate laid out in the DOGE executive order would grant the body broad access to GSA systems and data. That includes sensitive procurement data, data internal to all the systems and services GSA offers, and internal monitoring software to surveil GSA employees as part of normal auditing and security processes.
The access could give Musk’s proxies the ability to remote into laptops, listen in on meetings, read emails, among many other things, a former Biden official told WIRED on Friday.
“Granting DOGE staff, many of whom aren't government employees, unfettered access to internal government systems and sensitive data poses a huge security risk to the federal government and to the American public,” the Biden official said. “Not only will DOGE be able to review procurement-sensitive information about major government contracts, it'll also be able to actively surveil government employees.”
The new GSA leadership team has prioritized downsizing the GSA’s real estate portfolio, canceling convenience contracts, and rolling out AI tools for use by the federal government, according to internal documents and interviews with sources familiar with the situation. At a GSA office in Washington, DC, earlier this week, there were three items written on a white board sitting in a large, vacant room. “Spending Cuts $585 m, Regulations Removed, 15, Square feet sold/terminated 203,000 sf,” it read, according to a photo viewed by WIRED. There’s no note of who wrote the message, but it appears to be a tracker of cuts made or proposed by the team.
“We notified the commercial real estate market that two GSA properties would soon be listed for sale, and we terminated three leases,” Stephen Ehikian, the newly appointed GSA acting administrator, said in an email to GSA staff on Tuesday, confirming the agency’s focus on lowering real estate costs. “This is our first step in right-sizing the real estate portfolio.”
The proposed changes extend even inside the physical spaces at the GSA offices. Hollander has requested multiple “resting rooms,” for use by the A-suite, a team of employees affiliated with the GSA administrator’s office.
On January 29, a working group of high-ranking GSA employees, including the deputy general counsel and the chief administrative services officer, met to discuss building a resting room prototype. The team mapped out how to get the necessary funding and waivers to build resting rooms in the office, according to an agenda viewed by WIRED.
After Musk bought Twitter, Hollander and Davis moved into the office with their newborn baby. Hollander helped oversee real estate and office design—including the installation of hotel rooms at Twitter HQ, according to a lawsuit later filed by Twitter executives. During the installation process, one of the executives emailed to say that the plans for the rooms were likely not code compliant. Hollander “visited him in person and emphatically instructed him to never put anything about the project in writing again,” the lawsuit alleged. Employees were allegedly instructed to call the hotel rooms “sleeping rooms” and to say they were just for taking naps.
Hollander has also requested access to Public Buildings Service applications; PBS owns and leases office space to government agencies. The timing of the access request lines up with Ehikian’s announcement about shrinking GSA’s real estate cost.
Musk’s lieutenants are also working to authorize the use of AI tools, including Google Gemini and Cursor (an AI coding assistant), for federal workers. On January 30, the group met with Google to discuss Telemetry, a software used to monitor the health and performance of applications, according to a document obtained by WIRED.
A-suite engineers, including Coristine and Shaotran, have requested access to a variety of GSA records, including nearly 10 years of accounting data, as well as detailed records on vendor payments, purchase orders, and revenue.
The GSA takeover mimics Musk’s strategy at other federal agencies like the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Earlier this month, Amanda Scales, who worked in talent at Musk’s xAI, was appointed as OPM chief of staff. Riccardo Biasini, former Tesla engineer and director of operations at the Boring company, is now a senior adviser to the director. Earlier this week, Musk cohorts at the US Office of Personnel Management emailed more than 2 million federal workers offering “deferred resignations,” allegedly promising employees their regular pay and benefits through September 30.
The email closely mirrored the “extremely hardcore” note Musk sent to Twitter staff in November 2022, shortly after buying the company.
Many federal workers thought the email was fake—as with Twitter, it seemed designed to force people to leave, slashing headcount costs without the headache of an official layoff.
Ehikian followed up with a note to staff stressing that the email was legitimate. “Yes, the OPM email is real and should be taken very seriously,” he said in an email obtained by WIRED. He added that employees should expect a “further consolidation of offices and centralization of functions.”
On Thursday night, GSA workers received a third email related to the resignation request called “Fork in the Road FAQs.” The email explained that employees who resign from their positions would not be required to work and could get a second job. “We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” it read. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”
The third question posed in the FAQ asked, “Will I really get my full pay and benefits during the entire period through September 30, even if I get a second job?”
“Yes,” the answer read. “You will also accrue further personal leave days, vacation days, etc. and be paid out for unused leave at your final resignation date.”
However, multiple GSA employees have told WIRED that they are refusing to resign, especially after the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) told its members on Tuesday that the offer could be void.
“There is not yet any evidence the administration can or will uphold its end of the bargain, that Congress will go along with this unilateral massive restructuring, or that appropriated funds can be used this way, among other issues that have been raised,” the union said in a notice.
There is also concern that, under Musk’s influence, the federal government might not pay for the duration of the deferred resignation period. Thousands of Twitter employees have sued Musk alleging that he failed to pay their agreed upon severance. Last year, one class action suit was dismissed in Musk’s favor.
In an internal video viewed by WIRED, Ehikian reiterated that GSA employees had the “opportunity to participate in a deferred resignation program,” per the email sent by OPM on January 28. Pressing his hands into the namaste gesture, Ehikian added, “If you choose to participate, I offer you my heartfelt gratitude for your service to this nation. If you choose to stay at the GSA, we’ll work together to implement the four pillars from the OPM memo.” He ended the video by saying thank you and pressing his hands into namaste again.
Herres began with a revelation: nothing could save the world from the Faro plague. He went on to detail the projected rapid explosion of their population as they continued to self-replicate, consuming every living thing on the planet and degrading conditions until the air was poison and the lands uninhabitable. There was no hiding from the swarm; they would leave a barren earth behind them and at the first sign of returning life, they would wake from slumber and fuel themselves with whatever they could find. It would take decades to generate the swarm's deactivation codes, but the world had barely more than a year.
Operation Enduring Victory was a lie from the very beginning. There was no hope and there never had been. From the moment Elisabet reviewed Faro's data in Maker's End, she must have known. That explains why the War Chiefs at US Robot Command were so horrified with the idea of Enduring Victory. All they were doing—all those people standing between the swarm and the next city, fed false hope—was buying time for project Zero Dawn.
Then he revealed Elisabet's image, a small glimmer of hope. She was to explain the true purpose of the project in the next theatre. It didn't make any sense—if none of the Old Ones survived the swarm, then how did life continue?
I was right about the Shadow Carja. It seemed that the vents opening gave them other routes down. The kestrels were ignorant of the ruin's true nature, but I knew that once the Eclipse caught wind of the breach, they were certain to start salvaging data for Hades. I couldn't let them find Zero Dawn's secrets before I did.
I took a few of the kestrels out undetected before picking up one of their Firespitters and dispatching the rest.
The rooms were full of recorded interviews with various Zero Dawn 'candidates'. They were scholars, all from disparate fields of expertise. Experts in art and history, in environmental conservation, in robotics and engineering and artificial intelligence. There was a particularly colourful character named Travis Tate who I gathered was some sort of criminal. All of them were requested by Elisabet herself, and all of them had very different reactions to learning that all hope was lost. Anger, resignation, grief, confusion. Many questioned whether the swarm was truly unstoppable, who was culpable (a man named Tom Paech was out for Faro's blood), and why they of all people were chosen for the project.
They were all skeptical about what Elisabet could possibly have come up with to save a doomed world. One named Ron Felder latched onto the idea of a vehicle to take people away from Earth, a 'generation ship'. I never suspected that such a voyage was possible, though Ron didn't seem to think so either, at least that it could save only a handful of people if successful given the resources involved. One of the candidates was even a Faro employee himself, a lead developer of the Chariot line's self-replication procedures. He was overcome with guilt, eager to see his work quashed by some miracle of science.
In the next room, Elisabet's presentation began. She confirmed Herres' assessment of the situation, then expounded her solution.
A seed, she called it, from which new life could grow on a dead world: Gaia. An AI—a true AI, she said—engineered to deactivate the Faro robots and grow life on Earth anew. The central intelligence was joined by nine subordinate functions, not AIs in themselves but still complex software systems, each serving a different purpose. It was as their names were revealed in the presentation that some of my greatest questions were answered.
Hephaestus, and Hades. Both of them were part of Gaia, her subordinate functions. But if they were once part of the system, how did Hades end up in the body of a Horus leading a Carja cult, and how did Hephaestus end up scattered across Cauldrons and infecting Cyan?
Only a few of the functions were mentioned: Hephaestus was meant to build the machines of the wilds, Aether to purify the air, Poseidon the water, and Minerva generated the codes that deactivated the swarm decades after the Old Ones fell—and its tower pictured looked just like the Spire. Artemis spawned animals, many of the holographic silhouettes familiar to me from the wilds, and Eleuthia...it spawned human beings in 'Cradle Facilities'. The presentation didn't explain how.
One function stood out to me: Apollo. It was meant to be a repository of all human knowledge that the children of the Cradle Facilities would learn from. The picture showed a Focus used to channel this knowledge, but what happened to it all? Could it still be intact somewhere? Whatever happened, that knowledge never made it to the people of the tribes, and Elisabet's hope that the people of the future wouldn't repeat the mistakes of the Old Ones was dashed.
Elisabet ended her presentation by imploring the candidates to join the project and help Gaia achieve a rejuvenated earth, and I can't deny her words were rousing. It was a beautiful dream, daringly ambitious, perhaps even close to impossible given what little I know about Old World technology. At the very least, creating a 'true' AI was strictly forbidden by all corporations, but at the end of everything, what did those regulations matter? What better to combat a machine of destruction than a machine of creation, a true peacekeeper?
Moving on, I came to another holding area. All candidates who experienced the presentations were given three choices to decide their fate. First, to comply and participate in the project, working with their assigned team to build Gaia and her subordinate functions. If they refused to comply, they would be detained indefinitely, without a chance to reconsider after two days' time. Given they knew the truth about Operation Enduring Victory, they could not be allowed to leave and spread that information. It seemed cruel, but I can understand the need for strict secrecy. If people found out that there was no hope for humanity as they knew it, they would be likely to throw down their arms and try to end their lives as peacefully as possible, instead of in pain and fear in resistance against the swarm.
The third option was medical euthanasia; to die painlessly, alone, holding this secret forever. I saw the room where it happened. One bed, cold metal, cold lights striping the walls.
The interviews recorded showed all three reactions. Some were eager to contribute, willing to give all they could for a slim chance to save the future. The Faro employee, for instance, was thankful for a chance to undo his mistakes. Others were more skeptical but still willing to try, while others found the idea ridiculous. Ron Felder thought it even more far-fetched than space flight, calling the whole thing nothing more than a fantasy with a crazy hologram display to match. I gathered he was detained.
Perhaps the most interesting reaction was that of Travis Tate. He called the whole notion of trying to re-engineer the natural world unnatural, even abominable. Another reason that they couldn't let the secret out was that others would agree with him. I suppose I can see his point, but surely it was worth trying. Benefit of hindsight, I guess. Having no conception of what the natural world once was, it's beautiful to me. Maybe to them it would feel wrong, artificial.
More kestrels further on, all touting Firespitters. Once one was down the rest were easy prey.
Unfortunately I was right about the Eclipse. The deeper reaches of the ruin were already crawling with them. I was hoping to sneak around and climb the elevator shaft to Elisabet's office above, where the most classified data was sure to be kept, but the entrance was sealed. There was no way I could search for other exits and go undetected. I tried to take out the Eclipse unseen, but was spotted and they called for reinforcements, running in from neighboring chambers and rappelling from the upper level. It was a tough scrap, but there was plenty of cover. I lost them easily in the dark and was able to sneak around. The real problem was that now they knew I was here.
While exploring I came across the workstation for the Hephaestus function. There was a holographic recording of its director, Margo Shen, an ex-colleague of Elisabet at FAS before they both left the company. She explained that their job wasn't to design machines, but to program Gaia to use the tools and data contained within Hephaestus to design machines of her own. Hephaestus was clearly never meant to be intelligent, to feel emotions of its own—so what happened to it?
Sylens suggested it might have gone 'rogue' like the swarm and stopped answering orders. Maybe Gaia is out there, unable to communicate with the tribes or get Hephaestus and Hades back under control. If Hephaestus struck out on its own when the Derangement began, when did Hades escape—the same time?
I recognised some of the mechanical structures and holographic designs I found from Cauldrons, iterated on and grown wild. Everything was beginning to make sense.
Further on I found a similar recording of the leader of Apollo, Samina Ebadji. She spoke of collating, organising, and storing records of human knowledge across millions of different topics, and building a learning interface where the people of the future could gain that knowledge through a game-like process. Such an important station, authoring what would shape the future of human civilisation—choosing what would be remembered and what should lay forgotten. From the datapoints I discovered, the project was running on schedule and they were planning to store the data in 'synthetic DNA'. If Samina's project didn't fail, then what happened to it?
More Eclipse in the next chamber, which I dispatched undetected. I found a recording from General Herres—some sort of testimonial, an apology for the lies and injustices of Operation Enduring Victory. I can't imagine the guilt, but it was the right thing to do. It has to be, or nothing would have survived. The swarm would have swallowed this facility long before Gaia's completion.
In more datapoints I found, Margo and the other function leaders were named 'Alpha candidates'. Back in All-Mother mountain, when the door denied me, it said that the Alpha registry was corrupted. Was it trying to match my identity to the list of Alpha candidates on the project? If that piece of data was part of all Zero Dawn's associated facilities, I suspected I could find it here as well.
Next, I entered Hades' old domain and listened to an introduction by Travis Tate, the eccentric 'hacker'. From what I could gather, his crimes consisted of exposing the dark secrets of corporations and orchestrating sort of technological pranks on a global scale. Elisabet trusted him enough to put him in charge of the Hades function, but judging by what's happening now his work left something to be desired.
Hades was Gaia's extinction function. 'Apocalypse on speed dial', Travis called it, the idea being that Gaia was unlikely to engineer a perfect Earth-like biosphere on the first go. It was a delicate balance to recreate, and in the event of firestorms and poison skies irrevocably locked in a cycle of chaos, Hades was built to temporarily take control of the system away from Gaia and undo terraforming operations, returning Earth to the barren rock it was when the swarm subsided so Gaia could begin again. One of the datapoints spoke of a facility where Gaia and Hades were tested together, where Travis tried to engineer the correct feedback and reward behaviour to ensure the entities passed control back and forth as desired. It seems that of all the subordinate functions, Hades was the most intelligent, as it needed to be able to manipulate the other functions in event of a catastrophe. Though, again, it was never intended to possess emotional responses.
But Gaia succeeded long ago, why would Hades wake now? Did it try to take control, causing Gaia to expel it from the larger system? If it no longer had Gaia's tools and functions available to it, it seems logical that its next best course to undo Gaia's work would be to wake the Faro bots themselves to resume their gruesome conquest. Thanks for that, Travis.
Next on my journey to Elisabet's office, I passed Eleuthia's headquarters and listened to an address from its leader, Patrick Brochard-Klein. He spoke of perfecting the technology to create humans inside machines, and to build 'servitors', robotic guardians resembling humans themselves, who would care for the new generations inside their Cradles. He stressed that this was a project of preservation, not 'genetic engineering', and spoke of regulations around...cloning, which he refused to transgress. Clone, as in copy.
There were many 'ectogenic chambers' inside the workshop—the machines from which new humans were spawned. The logs I found said they were donated by Far Zenith, whose conception of the technology was far ahead of public scientific records. I've come across a few datapoints mentioning the organisation before, sometimes called simply 'FZ'. They were a mysterious group of billionaires (a word for the wealthiest and most powerful of the Old Ones), their identities unknown to all outside the group. They had their own 'think tanks' and scientists developing technology in secret, much like a corporation, or a co-merging of many corporations, using the exhaustive profits of them all. I know they bought a space station called the Odyssey, though when I first read this I didn't understand what it meant. From Ron Felder's tirade, I knew then. A structure built to travel away from this world, through the stars. With the most advanced technology and near-infinite resources available, could they have succeeded?
Thoughts gathered in the back of my mind that I wished to ignore. It was clear to me that All-Mother mountain must have been one of these Cradle facilities, given the ruin inside and the bunker door, answerable to Elisabet. Every Nora myth pointed to this too: the life-giving goddess within, and its battle against the Metal Devil. Perhaps some knowledge of the Old Ones did survive and was imparted to the first new people of the earth. And of course...I came from that mountain. I was found just outside its doors, alone. I suppose some of the first people might have remained behind the door. Perhaps there was a schism long ago, or they're protecting the Apollo archive inside. Maybe helping Gaia to operate. But why wouldn't they try to communicate with the world outside?
Finally, I made it to Elisabet's workshop. There were a number of preserved recordings inside. The first, an argument between Elisabet and Ted. I'd hazard a guess that this happened often. To think that he still had the gall to argue with her after everything he did...I suppose she had to put up with it considering he was funding the operation.
Faro was disputing Elisabet's assertion that Gaia had to have complex emotional capabilities to properly rebuild and safeguard the world. She needed 'skin in the game', Elisabet said—I suppose if she felt no emotional connection to life, human or otherwise, she'd have no incentive to put their needs first, or the means to conceptualise their needs accurately to begin with. Intelligence and emotion go hand in hand, as Cyan explained.
Faro was wary of 'repeating past mistakes'. I'm don't think he was only talking about the swarm, because they had no emotional capacity themselves, only strategic intelligence. He wanted a kill switch, which I gathered ended up being Hades—a way to wrest control from a version of Gaia gone wrong. Gaia herself chimed in and agreed with him, understanding her own volatility. Her voice was beautiful: smooth and deep and full of care. Maybe it was only a clever trick of programming in those early days, but she sounded like she had developed emotions already. Her projection didn't match the figure I saw in Elisabet's presentation though. She was just a golden ball of liquid light.
More recordings, the first of Elisabet and Gaia discussing her emotional responses to mass extinction events of the ancient past. It seemed her development was going well, but it was cut short. In the final recording, Elisabet was panicked, erratic, irritable. She was trying to lock everything down and evacuate the facility before the swarm hit, evidently ahead of projected schedule. Gaia comforted her, and for the first time I witnessed a moment of weakness in Elisabet. She lamented all the lives lost in Enduring Victory—all those deaths, those lies, would be for nothing if she couldn't complete Gaia in time.
In Elisabet's office, along with plenty more data to sift through, I found just what I was looking for: an intact copy of the Alpha registry. I made the mistake of voicing my wish to meet my mother inside All-Mother mountain's Cradle, which Sylens shut down with derision. He said there would be no people behind that door, only machines. I refused to believe it.
As I was downloading a copy to my Focus, more Eclipse soldiers began to descend from above. I couldn't leave until the transfer was complete, and just as it did I went to make my escape, but behind the glass was Helis. We locked eyes for the first time since the Proving. Before I could react, he threw a bomb and detonated it in front of the glass, blasting it inward and knocking me back against the desk.
I only fell unconscious for a few moments, but it was enough for Helis to land at my side, glare smiling with those pale, manic eyes, and kick me back into the darkness.
Warnings: language, bit of depression, fighting. In short, there is angst in this fic. Hope the ending makes up for the rest.
Linguistics and foreign languages are two of my personal passions, so please bear with the bits of language talk that I couldn’t resist including. Brief word of clarification: a lot of expressions we use in English either translate into something extremely rude or don’t make sense in other languages. Translation companies have been trying for quite some time to make sure they don’t accidentally send a client a translated instruction manual that reads “fuck your mother” instead of “for questions, contact your local energy department.” All right I’ll get off my soapbox. :)
The phrases in foreign languages, marked with *, are translated into English at the end. Enjoy!
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Rowan’s day had been shit. The second he walked through the door, he’d been bombarded with an endless slew of crash reports, malfunctioning equipment, faulty passwords, and best of all, having to rewrite half the security firewalls because one of the rash young idiots in his department couldn’t be bothered to check his work for errors before sending it to management. And management thought it was the department boss’s job to fix all of his employees’ fuckups.
He hated IT.
Even more so since being promoted to department chair.
All he wanted to do was the fun stuff--program design and development, fixing the flaws in his own designs, and of course making those who tried to break into his company’s systems regret their pitiful existence. But Cadre Tech’s bitch of a CEO refused to let the best software engineer on her staff actually do his job.
Most days, he could cope with the pile of useless shit she directed to his desk. Most days. Today was not one of those days. Probably because on top of all the meaningless tasks he’d had to field, he was also forced to sit through one of Maeve’s bullshit “department head strategy sessions,” where every department chair had to pretend they gave a single shit about any word coming from their CEO’s garishly red, pinched mouth.
As if she knew anything her staff actually did.
Thanks to the compulsory meeting, Rowan was stuck in his office at nearly ten o’clock, painstakingly combing through the final draft of the update to CT’s translation program. This program had shot the company to fame and fortune, or at least insane stock value. “A Google Translate that actually translates,” their marketing department called it, and by the gods, that stupid slogan worked. And made sense. Rowan knew the program was just as good as it claimed to be.
He’d put in the hours, alongside a team of linguists, software engineers, designers, and people fluent in at least one other language. Frequent were the sessions where the project whiteboard turned into a jumble of words in twenty or more languages, Spanish alongside Arabic next to a column of simplified Japanese characters spilling over into a row of Cyrillic lettering. Rowan himself spoke German and some Spanish, but even he was lost amid the cacophony of eighteen different people switching from language to language, trying to figure out how idiomatic expressions translated from one language to another and what words should never, ever be placed together.
It took the team well over a year of bickering, or as they called it, friendly linguistic disagreements, to make it from loosely mapped concept to functioning program. By the time it hit the market three years ago, the software had been so well promoted that companies all over the world snapped up their chance to finally communicate properly with the client they’d offended years ago with a bad translation.
At launch, of course, Maeve stood in front of a sea of shouting reporters brandishing microphones, smiling her serpentine smile, and proceeded to thank the creative team for all their “contributions” before taking all the credit herself.
Said creative team went to the bar that had become their usual gathering spot that night to get drunk and shit-talk their horrible boss, not necessarily in that order.
His favorite memory of that night was hearing the chief linguist, an outside contract with multiple advanced degrees who spoke eight separate languages besides English fluently, refer to Maeve as “quella puttana rugosa che non riusciva a convincere un cazzo a venire a dieci metri da lei se si vestiva da figa.*” The Italian speakers on the team were crying with laughter, and so was everyone else, once she translated it.
And then she downed another shot of vodka and hissed something that sounded like “sukya bliyad, no puedo mich betrinken con esta ordures.**” When everyone blinked in confusion, she sighed and relayed the sentiment in English.
Nobody had laughed as hard as Rowan. Aelin Galathynius just had that effect on him.
She brightened his darkest days.
But she couldn’t ease the strain of today.
And it was all his fault.
~
Aelin glanced up at the clock on her wall and cursed in three different languages when she saw that it was nearly eleven. Without meaning to, she’d spent all afternoon and evening writing lesson notes on idiomatic expressions. She really couldn’t help herself once she got into the topic; it was her pet project.
And the subject of one of her dissertations. Yes, she had multiple.
She’d worked her ass off for years to get through college, then through graduate and doctoral work while teaching at universities to offset costs, then earned a full-time teaching position at one of the top-ranked universities in the world. She got to teach linguistics, her lifetime love, and give guest lectures at other universities and at conferences, teaching people all over the world about the complexities and interrelatedness of language. Hell, she spoke ten; she’d be qualified to speak on linguistic relationships by virtue of that alone.
Gods, she was the chief linguist behind the most successful translation software ever produced. Even if the bitch who owned the rights to said software had literally threatened to sue over ownership rights if any of the people who’d poured their figurative blood and sweat and literal tears into building the program tried to claim a small piece of the credit each of them so richly deserved.
That software and her role in its creation--even though Maeve Ond had claimed the public credit, the creative team spoke at interviews and made news features for their work in Cadre Tech’s massive success--had solidified her credentials as a professor of linguistics, had boosted her into her lecturer spot.
Last year, her university granted her tenure.
She should have been overjoyed, and she was, but not as much as earning tenure deserved.
Because there was nobody to share her joy.
Three years ago, in the wake of CT’s overnight jump to worldwide fame, Aelin fled a love she did not and never would deserve.
She told herself she would never look back. But she did. Almost every day, she looked back at the life she’d shared with Rowan and tried to convince herself that she did the right thing.
Try as she might, she could never silence the whisper that echoed always in her mind.
“You broke both of your hearts”
Someday, she told herself, someday she would be back in Doranelle. Someday, she would have a chance to apologize. Someday, maybe she could fix the Rowan-shaped chasm that gaped wide in her heart.
Yet here she was, sitting in a very nicely appointed hotel room in the university district of Doranelle, typing furiously away as if burying herself in notes and prep for tomorrow’s lecture could make the urge to contact Rowan disappear.
~
Three years earlier. Doranelle.
“Knock, knock.”
Rowan’s head jerked up from where it had most definitely not been slumped on his desk. “Wha--Oh. Hi, Aelin.”
“You’re falling asleep, buzzard, let’s go home.” He heard laughter in her soft voice.
“As if you won’t just get home and start cross-checking every single one of the phrases on your ‘potential problem’ list.”
She chuckled, walking over to him. “Fine. We’re both perfectionist work whores. Doesn’t mean we don’t need sleep.”
“I know you too well to believe you’re actually going to sleep.”
“All right, you win. Come home now, I’ll make some food, and you can put me to bed.” She winked saucily at him, leaving very little doubt what putting her to bed would entail, and he was up out of his chair in seconds.
“Hand over your computer, Fireheart,” he grinned as they walked into the small house they shared on the outskirts of the city.
“What?”
“Your computer, love. I’m leaving both of our work bags on the shelf by the front door so we can actually catch some rest tonight.” He pressed a finger to her mouth to silence her protests. “Uh-uh, Ae, we have interviews tomorrow and I won’t let the genius behind this program’s flawless word-to-word be anything but well-rested.”
She sighed, but he saw the love in her eyes. “Here, then, my dear brilliant software engineer. Leave your notebook, too, because I know if it’s anywhere near you, you’ll be up at three in the morning scribbling blocks of gibberish and picking apart your faultless code until you go insane.”
Both of their work satisfactorily put aside, Aelin made good on her promise to cook Rowan dinner.
And then he made very good on his promise to put her to bed.
The next morning, they were both awake with the sunrise, content to lay curled in each other’s arms as the morning light spread across their room.
Rowan drifted back into sleep, waking for good when he caught a whiff of coffee from the kitchen’s direction.
“Morning, you sleepy buzzard,” Aelin grinned, sipping from her mug.
Rowan dropped a kiss on her head as he reached for his mug. He took a long drink, sighing as the milky, sweetened caffeine hit his mouth.
“I will never understand how you drink your coffee black, Fireheart.”
“Not all of us need to sweeten the hell out of coffee to drink it, Ro. Maybe if you can’t handle the real thing, you should go back to your pretty little cups of crappy cafe tea.”
“Mention my pretty little teacups again, Ae…”
She giggled. “You be quiet and drink your coffee-flavored milk, my love. We both know you’re impossibly grumpy until you have caffeine in your veins.”
He grumbled something unintelligible as he drank his coffee.
They were nearly late to work that morning, even having planned an extra half hour to arrive, thanks to Aelin wearing what Rowan dubbed her “sexy professor suit.” She fixed the pins in her French twist in the car, making herself once again a portrait of professionalism, and slipped Rowan’s hand from her leg.
“Two hands on the wheel, Whitethorn.”
He pouted. “But I’m a safe driver and I want to hold your hand.”
“My hands are over here, love, not down by my skirt.”
When he pulled into his spot, Aelin closed her eyes and took a deep, slow breath.
“You good, Fireheart?”
Gods, she loved hearing him call her that. “Yeah. I just…needed a moment to settle myself. To tell myself the cameras aren’t here to tear apart what I say.”
Rowan wrapped his hands around hers. “Dr. Aelin Ashryver Galathynius, the bland reporters are here to stand in awe of your expertise. Not a single word you say will come across as anything but brilliant and beautifully said.”
She squeezed his hands, her usual confidence returning. “I love you, buzzard.”
“I love you too, Fireheart. Let’s go talk about our amazing achievement.”
The day sped by in a blur of reporters, interviewers, teleprompters, practiced speeches, lights, cameras, and crew. When the last bleached-blonde anchor of the last interview of the day cut her crew’s cameras, Aelin flopped against her second-in-linguistic-command, Dr. Nehemia Ytger, the expert on ethnic African languages.
“If I never see a news crew again, it’ll be too soon,” she sighed. “I’m beat.”
Nehemia snickered. “But we’re done talking about how proud we are that Maeve and her marvelous company have done such a grand service to the world.”
Aelin snorted softly. “Right. And now we servicepeople want to go home and take off our heels.”
“Amen to that.”
As the team filed out of the studio, Rowan made his way over to Aelin. “Holding up?”
“Not anymore,” she said, leaning casually into his side. “My heels are killing me, there’s a hairpin stabbing into my scalp, and I really, really need to pee.”
Rowan laughed, deep and husky. “Let’s get you home, then.”
“I’m stopping in the bathroom first.”
Just before she left the ladies’ room, Aelin heard voices in the break area. Familiar voices--Rowan’s, Maeve’s, and the snippy, borderline whiny tones of Remelle Frelau, who worked in the marketing department and had a hell of a boner for Rowan.
“--looking at revenue over--” Maeve’s voice cut out, but from the gasps of the other two, the revenue was through the roof.
“And it’s all thanks to this genius here,” drawled Remelle, who if Aelin had her guess was probably clinging onto Rowan like a platinum-blonde leech.
“Ms. Frelau, this was the product of a team. No single person could possibly have made it happen alone.”
“Oh, call me Remelle, or even better Remy. And you’re the team leader, so you practically did create it by yourself.”
Aelin snickered to herself. Vapid bitch had no idea what she was saying.
“That’s not how teams work, Ms. Frelau. We wouldn’t be here without Dr. Galathynius and Dr. Ytger’s language expertise, not to mention the creative genius of the engineers, graphic designers, linguists, and programmers.”
“Ms. Frelau, though her judgment is clearly biased, has a point, Mr. Whitethorn,” Mave said. “You demonstrated remarkable collaborative leadership qualities throughout this project, and I fully expect that you will continue to do so.” Maeve’s heels clicked away. Rowan’s voice followed her.
“Thank you, Ms. Ond, but I have to credit Dr. Galathynius--”
“Will you stop kissing that woman’s ass?” snorted Remelle. “Gods, she’s not worth your time or your praise; all she does is translate words into different languages and you idiots drool over that like it means anything.”
Aelin jerked like she’d been slapped. She knew Remelle was a self-centered, shallow, spiteful bitch, but she hadn’t known she would do this.
“--did more for this project than you and your useless whiteboard of catchphrases,” growled Rowan.
“I don’t care what she ‘did for the project,’ Rowan, she’s never going to be good enough for you.”
“Thank you for caring about my welfare, Frelau, now please kindly fuck off.”
Aelin chose that moment to saunter out of the bathroom and head straight for Rowan, her face showing no hint of having heard that conversation. She did note with satisfaction Remelle’s vain attempt to march out of the room with some semblance of dignity. Too bad her heel caught on the seam of the hallway carpet and the break room’s tile flooring and she had to grab the doorframe to keep from collapsing.
“You’re awfully quiet, Aelin.”
“Just thinking. Processing, really. It’s been a hell of a day.”
Rowan nodded. “I bet.”
“And hearing fucking Remelle rip into me for being useless…didn’t make it better.”
“Shit, you heard that?”
“Yeah. I heard that.” Her voice was hollow.
Rowan pulled into their driveway and shut off the engine. Reaching across the console, he cupped Aelin’s face in his hands. “Aelin. You are brilliant. You are terrifyingly smart. You are a force of nature. Nothing, nothing you will ever do is useless. Don’t let that jealous bitch make you think you are less than the perfect woman.”
She smiled tentatively at him. “She…she told me before that last interview that I could never be enough for you. Because you--because of Lyria.”
Rowan raked a hand through his hair. “Ae, can we talk about this inside?”
That night, he told her about his former fiancé, Lyria. He told her about their whirlwind romance, their youthful dreams. He told her about the horrific crash that stole away Lyria’s life. A drunk trucker, a narrow pass in the mountains. He showed her the box in which he kept all the memories of that life. He cried. Aelin cried. He curled against her, let her comfort him.
“Sometimes, I wish she was still here. She’d understand everything. She always did.”
Aelin had no response. She let Rowan fall asleep, his weight shifting off her and into his bed, and looked through the box. Everything she saw served as another reminder that this was the first woman he loved, the woman who understood everything.
She was worthy of him.
But was Aelin?
The more she looked at Rowan and Lyria’s happiness, the more the answer solidified.
No.
When Rowan woke up the next morning, Lyria’s box sat on Aelin’s side of the bed, a side that had not held Aelin.
He glanced out the window.
Her car was gone.
He got up and frantically paced through the house.
Everything she’d brought into his home was gone.
As was she.
~
Present day.
Rowan opened his front door mechanically, pulled off his shoes, dropped his work backpack on its shelf, and was halfway to his bedroom before he realized he’d just opened his front door. His front door that was always locked.
Someone was in his house.
Someone who either had a duplicate key or insanely good lockpicking skills.
Exactly one person owned a duplicate key to his house.
Aelin.
That’s impossible, she lives in Orynth, she can’t be here, he told the traitorous part of his brain that leapt with joy at seeing Aelin’s face again.
He turned around and made his way through the kitchen--nobody there--to the living room. He flicked on a lamp, casting a soft light around the room.
And nearly had a heart attack.
Aelin Galathynius sat on his couch.
For a moment, he just gawked at her. She looked so…different. Older. Gone was the infectious smile that had captured his heart. Dark shadows smeared under her eyes, testament both to the long hours she devoted to her work and to recent sleepless nights. She was twisting a ring on her right hand, a familiar sign of her nerves. From his angle, Rowan could see a hint of dark script on her wrist. A tattoo. The Aelin he knew didn’t have tattoos.
“I’m not a ghost.” Her voice, weary and hollow, broke the tense silence.
Rowan crossed the room, propped an arm on the fireplace. “Why?”
“Why am I here? Why did I leave? Why did I cut you out of my life?”
“Everything.” He couldn’t keep the waver from his voice, but his eyes burned into hers.
She took a steadying breath. “I’m here to apologize, first of all. I’m here to face what I ruined and to try and start mending it. I’m here to come to terms with everything I broke when I left three years ago.”
Whatever he’d expected her to say, it certainly wasn’t that.
“I’m sorry, Rowan. I’m sorry I left like that. I was…I was scared.”
“You can’t just run away from your fears, Aelin!” He couldn’t keep the frustration from his tone. “You can’t just abandon someone when you have a bad day!”
“I’m sorry! I know I shouldn’t have left! I know I can’t run from my fears; I’ve spent the last three years trying and fucking failing to do that! But I don’t know what else to do.”
“Saying something about it would have been a good first step.”
“I’m bad at emotions, Rowan. I tried. It wasn’t enough.”
“That’s not a good enough excuse.”
Aelin flicked a tear from her face. “I know.” Her shoulders slumped. “I’m so sorry, Rowan. I should never have left. I let some stupid comment root into my head and make me doubt myself. I made myself believe I would never be good enough for you. I left you. I loved you, and I still left you. I still love you, even though I’ve tried to suppress it. I can never make up for that. I…I just wanted to tell you how much I’ve regretted that horrible decision all these years. I want you to be happy, Rowan, I--”
“How am I supposed to be happy without a source?” He’d dropped onto the couch, close enough to touch her but still keeping his distance.
“What?”
“You didn’t just take yourself away, Aelin. You were my happiness. I’ve spent three fucking years trying to make myself believe I’m better without you in my life, and I can’t.”
She was unabashedly crying by that point. “What do you want me to do? How can I make up for abandoning you?”
“Stay.”
Her gaze locked onto his, both of their eyes pooling with tears.
“Stay with me, Fireheart.”
“But--”
“I never stopped loving you either.”
A choked sob ripped out of Aelin. Rowan couldn’t hold himself in check any longer; he reached out and tugged her gently into his arms. To his shock, she didn’t resist, burying her face into his chest as sobs shook her shoulders. When she calmed, he tilted her chin up.
“Will you stay, Aelin?”
“Yes. Even though I will never deserve your forgiveness, yes.”
~
Translations:
* = “that pinched old whore who couldn’t convince a dick to come within ten metres of her if she dressed up provocatively” (Italian)
** = loosely translated as “Fucking hell, I can’t get drunk off this garbage.” (in order, Russian (badly phonetically spelled out because Rowan POV), Spanish, German, Spanish again, French) (the Russian doesn’t directly translate, so it could mean several different variations of expletive)
Ugly Man Chronicles Reignition Book 2 Chapter 2: My Breakfast With Evan
Just a couple dudes getting to know each other.
“If you must know,” Evan sighed, spearing a glistening sausage on the end of a flimsy plastic fork, “my jackass older sister thought it would be hilarious to give me a cupcake she'd baked with about a dozen powdered viagra for my fifteenth birthday. I wound up passing out eventually. Burst a lot of blood vessels. Damaged the erectile tissue beyond usefulness.”
Titus froze mid-coffee-sip. “Seriously? What a bitch!”
“Buddy, you don't know the half of it.”
“So... no signs of life down there?”
“Nothing for twelve years.”
“I think I would literally kill myself.”
“It's not so bad, I guess. At least I don't have to drain the blood out of it any more.”
“Eugh! Fuck! Did not need to hear that!”
“Well, maybe you shouldn't ask questions you don't want the answer to.”
“Do you get, like, blue balls all the time, then?”
“That's basically my ground state of being.”
Titus whistled flatly, avoiding looking Evan in the eye. He settled for staring at the table. There wasn't a lot of Evan's face that he felt comfortable looking at; every part seemed to at least be adjacent to some unpleasantry or another. About the only safe area was his right eye, which, as luck would have it, was directly opposite Titus's 'good' eye. Titus rallied and met Evan's gaze again. “Alright, your turn.”
They'd agreed on a sort of mutual interview process, taking turns asking questions to suss out what the other was capable or if he was worth having around. Evan took a bite out of the sausage and chewed thoughtfully for a moment.
“Who's Moreno?”
Titus hissed through his teeth. “A real piece of shit.”
“I'm going to need more than that.”
“I'm getting to it. He's basically, like... a freelance henchman? Like, sort of a mercenary criminal. Sells his services to the highest bidder.”
“And why's he matter?”
“That's another question.”
“No, it is not,” Evan said, quiet and serious. “Do not argue with me in bad faith, Titus. I have very little patience for it in the best of times.”
Titus regarded him for a long moment. The man across from him was wider than the table they sat at. His muscles were so pronounced in some points that Titus could tell when he was about to move by the way they bulged and contracted. Yet he gave the impression that he was constantly trying to pull himself inward, to make himself smaller. He spoke quietly and with a simple formality, but only hours before Titus had watched him single-handedly beat down some of the nastiest people he'd met in the past month.
Hmm.
“Fine. Moreno matters because I'm after the guy he's working for. You see, Moreno isn't just a normal scumbag. He works for people who need nasty things done. Not like regular nasty, either. How much do you actually know about magic?”
“I've got some... notes. So far I'm not able to find a lot of coherent rules. It mostly seems like it relies on things that nobody would normally do.”
Titus snapped his fingers and pointed at Evan. “Hit it right on the head. Rituals, reagents, that kind of thing... the reason—well, one of the reasons—magic doesn't just happen all the time by accident is that it's all weird little things. A lot of the more heavy magic relies on some pretty elaborate and obtuse shit to get it going.”
Evan momentarily thought back to the Book of Fate and his ritual in the woods. “So Moreno does these things for people?”
“Yeah. Thing is, though...” Titus stopped raising a forkful of eggs halfway to his mouth and set it down again, as if he'd momentarily lost his appetite. “The people who use his services generally practice some pretty vile magic. Real depraved shit. And to empower depraved magic, you need depraved rituals. Moreno is the guy you go to when...”
“I think I get it,” Evan interjected, since Titus seemed to be struggling with deciding whether to continue. “Your turn.”
Titus tapped his fingers on the table for a moment, then looked Evan in the eye. “How smart are you?”
The scars on Evan's face squirmed around as he actually smirked. “What kind of question is that?”
“Hey, we agreed no 'whys'.”
“Alright, alright. Well, there's really no objective metric for it, but... I have Master's degrees in computer science and theoretical physics, Bachelor's in those in addition to mathematics and electrical engineering, and associate's degrees and certificates in everything from EMT training to ballet. I should have my doctorate in physics, but...” he said, with a bitterness that Titus made a note of, then changed gears. “Oh, and I also speak Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, French, and Arabic pretty fluently. I also know ASL. I can get by in German and Russian, too. I don't know if any of that is what you meant but--”
“Jesus, I get it,” Titus muttered, rubbing the side of his head. “How the fuck do you make money?”
“Software consulting, mostly. I specialize in security and processing efficiency. People pay me to break into their systems and then patch the holes, or to make their code run quicker or make their programs smaller. I've got a few patents I've licensed that bring in most of my income nowadays, though.”
“Anything I would have heard of?”
“If you've used a computer made in the last four years it probably has something I wrote integrated somewhere into it. I also helped develop a protein-sequencing program that helped develop a vaccine for this nasty SARS variant that broke out in China last year. They say if they hadn’t nipped it in the bud it could’ve spread worldwide and we’d be looking at millions of deaths by now.”
Titus scrunched up his face. “Oh yeah, just say that like it’s no big deal.”
“I’m just glad it turned out not to be one. What I'd really like to do is get my compression algorithm out there, but if I do that, somebody's going to try to hoard it all for themselves.”
“Are you talking to yourself or me?”
“Look, I... a few years ago I figured out a way to compress memory down by a exponential factor of six with zero loss. All it takes is a couple software plugins that don't take up much room themselves. Essentially, I could make a gigabyte fit in a kilobyte with very little trouble, now that the math's figured out.”
“Holy fuck, that's insane! Why haven't I heard anything about this?”
“Mainly because I don't tell people. If I put it up on the market, some ISP would buy it and bury it. If you make information smaller, you make it faster. Can you imagine what it'd do to internet access if dial-up and barebones cellular networks suddenly had the bandwidth of fiber optics? It would... maybe not revolutionize our society, but it would level a lot of playing fields. Bring a lot of underdeveloped areas of the world—hell, this country—up to modern levels with no extra cost. The telecomms would crash and burn so hard. But I don't have the means to get it out there without going through someone else. Yet,” Evan added. “So I basically work watered-down versions of the compressor into the software I make. Nothing that can be duplicated, and nowhere near its full potential, but enough to get me hailed as some kind of genius and pay the bills.”
“So why aren't you on your own private island or something somewhere instead of puttering around God's Ashtray in a shitty old Bug?”
“Hey, the Beetle is not shitty,” Evan said, defensively. “And I'm just waiting for the AC in my RV to get fixed or I'd be driving that.”
“Oh hot damn! Now that's the way to live!”
“Not the one I'd choose voluntarily, but it could be worse.”
“How come you're doing it, then?”
“I think it's my turn to ask,” Evan said, mildly.
“Fine,” Titus said grumpily, crossing his arms.
“How do you make money?”
“That's easy. I'm basically a freelance bailbondsman. I just roam around, drop my advertising around bars and courthouses.”
“You get many clients that way?” Evan asked, cocking his remaining eyebrow.
“Oh, you'd be amazed how desperate people can get,” Titus said, shrugging. “Of course, they're usually not the most responsible people, so when they bounce, I track 'em down myself, drag ‘em back to jail, get the money back. My eye usually makes it super easy. Sometimes they don't even see me before I get the cuffs on 'em.”
“Why did you feel the need to rob a bunch of drug dealers, then? The thrill of it?”
“I had a pressing need for a large amount of cash that my normal work doesn't bring in. That got me enough to hold it off for a while. My turn.”
Evan waved down a waitress for a refill of his coffee, trying not to take it personally when she gasped upon seeing his face. “Go ahead…”
“No, no, hang on.” Titus waved a hand dismissively. “I want to try something. Take your hair out of the ponytail.”
“What? Why?”
“Humor me.”
Evan groaned and reached back, removing his hair tie. After shaking his head, his hair fell over his face, obscuring everything but his nose and mouth. Titus pursed his lips and regarded him seriously for a moment.
“Can you see?”
“Yeah, I guess. Well enough to not walk into things, I think, and I could probably read if I had to.”
Titus snapped his fingers. “Good. Go with that from now on.”
“Why?”
“Because now you don’t look like God’s mistake. Now you look like a big, dumb-but-lovable goon. Like Jack Black would voice you in a cartoon.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“Do you like seeing people contemplating their own mortality and the general cruel absurdity of the tragic farce that is human existence when they get a glimpse of your face?”
Evan felt his cheeks burn and was actually grateful his hair was covering most of his face. “…not particularly, no.”
“Then there you go. You’re welcome. Okay, question time. Uh… how did you get your powers?”
“Which one?”
“Oh, now who’s arguing in bad faith? Fucking all of them, you thick-lipped gargoyle.”
Evan had the feeling he hit a sore spot. Titus's easy-going, jocular tone had bled away from him, leaving behind the hard-edged razor-blade of a man that had ambushed him the night before. He decided not to belabor the point.
“I don't know why I can rege—why I heal so quickly. No, I'm serious, as far as I know, it just started happening sometime in the past few months. I can't remember. Don't look at me like that, I'll get to that in a minute. When I was younger I recovered from a lot of injuries a lot quicker than the doctors thought I would, so maybe it's something I was born with and it just got stronger recently for some reason.”
Evan took a sip of coffee, mainly to buy a few seconds to think of how much to explain for the next part.
“The ability to shut off powers... that's part of, well, I guess you'd call it a magic ritual, because I don't know what else to call it. I found a weird old book that said it contained the key to making someone an instrument of universal justice, or something of the sort. Since then I can see... I guess they're souls? Maybe? I can sort of move mine and when I run it into someone else's it seems like I can shut off their powers. Or... take them entirely, if they're dying.”
“Horseshit!” Titus scoffed. “That's... that's like meta-magic. I don't even know if that's real.”
“No, seriously! I don't think it's just magic powers, I think it... 'normalizes' things.” He briefly recounted his encounter with the pain monster.
“Are you kidding me? That...” Titus took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair, exhaling slowly and loudly. “Look, I don't know much, but the fact that you even ran into something like that, let alone survived... those odds are astronomical. And you say you negated not just its powers, but its whole form?”
“Yeah. Once I... reached into it, like I did with you—oh don't make that face. Grow up—I kind of disrupted what made it... different, I guess? Like I cut it off from its special qualities. Like it was...”
“Disjuncted,” Titus cut in.
“Yeah, that's a good word for it. Like the old Mordenkainen spell?”
“Fucking nerd.”
“Eat my ass. Anyway, after I killed it, I was able to reach into its... soul? Animating force? Aura? I don't know what to call it. I was able to grab something and pull it out and it just got pulled into me.”
“Not aura.”
“What?”
“Aura's a different thing,” Titus said, dismissively. “So what did you get from doing that?”
“I.. I feel pain differently. I don't flinch or get adrenaline rushes from injuries that don't actually impede my ability to function. I think I have a better sense of what is actually dangerous to my body now. It still hurts, but I don't react to pain like people normally do. It's like...hmm.” Evan drummed his fingers on the table. “Do you know anything about video games? Fighting games, specifically?”
“I used to fuck around on an old Alpha 3rd Strike cabinet when I was a kid. Why?”
“Do you know what 'super armor' is?”
“Isn't that where a move can't get stopped by being hit when you're doing it?”
“Right. I'm kind of like that now. Pain doesn't interrupt me.”
“Fucking nerd.”
Evan's fist involuntarily clenched. “I'm trying to put this in terms you can understand, you stupid reprobate. My experience with your judgment thus far hasn't given me much faith in your intellect.”
Titus burst out laughing. “So he does know how to banter! I thought you might be one of those Rainman types.”
“Oh sure, call it 'banter' to try to excuse the fact that you've been insulting me for the past half hour. Do you say you're ‘just joking’ when people get mad at you for saying stupid shit, too?”
“C'mon, lighten up! We're partners now! Tell me more about this soul thing. I still think you're full of shit.”
Evan sighed through his nose, then held up his left hand, forming his fingers into a circle and peering through them.
“Yours is... a sort of cross between a sea green and an oil slick. The tendrils of it keep reaching out and snapping back, going all over the place. It seems to keep expanding and contracting. It's almost flickering, like... it's indecisive. Very chaotic. The tendrils that aren't snapping around seem to be kept pretty close to your body, wrapping around you like... I can't tell if it's protective or restrictive.”
Titus's expression slowly became serious. “What does that mean?”
“I don't know. I have a lot of theories, but nothing solid to go on. I'm not sure if it's allegorical or a literal representation of a person's... power, maybe? Yours definitely looks a lot different than most people's.”
“I don't believe this for a second. Let me see.”
“How would I do tha—hey!”
Titus grabbed Evan's wrist and held his hand up to his eye. “Ho-lee...”
He pulled back from Evan's hand, staring at him. Then he looked around the room, mouth slack as he took in the diner's other occupants.
“Huh. Did you know it keeps working until you blink?” He said after a moment, a faraway tone to his voice.
“I didn't even know other people could do it,” Evan said, awe in his voice. “Hey, wow, you're right!”
“Jesus, yours is, like, really blue. It looks like... a bunch of steel cables. It's weird, I felt like I both could and couldn't see the edges of it...”
“I can kind of move it, but I'm not sure if I can do anything with it beyond interfering with people's powers. It's like learning to use a muscle you didn't know you had.”
“Huh.” Titus was again silent for a long moment. “Your turn.”
“Can you do anything else supernatural? Besides your time-eye?”
“Don't call it that, it sounds stupid. And... sorta. I seem to have whatever innate talent you need to actually do magic, but it's not like it's easy to find instructions. Most of the people I know who can use it just dabble with half-broken magic items—wands, amulets, charms,” he pulled the silence charm out from under his coat and bounced it at the end of its chain. “I guess I'm sort of a dabbler. I know a few tricks, I can use a lot of magic tools, I can sense magic pretty well, I can dowse... Most of the time I really never have to use anything besides the eye, though.”
“Is the eye all-or-nothing?”
“Yeah. It's not nearly as useful as you'd think, but any edge is an edge.”
“When I turned off your power and it was coming back, though, you started speeding up—or, I guess, everything else was slowing down? You were moving faster, one way or the other. You were able to touch me, and those punches hurt.”
“Huh, yeah, you're right.”
“Do you think there's a way you could learn to only partially activate it?”
“That'd be great, wouldn't it? Thing is, just using it is a huge strain, and that time spend outside of time adds up. Going by normal calendar time I'm only 26.”
“Fuck, I'm 27!” Evan laughed.
“Yeah, well, I'd rather be prematurely gray than what you've got going on. My turn. Uh... huh, I can't really think of anything else. Uh... are you gay?”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“No, but the question still counts.”
“I'm bi,” Evan mumbled, crossing his arms across his prodigious chest. “Not that it matters. And before you ask, no, you are not my type. We're done talking about this.”
“Huh. You ever sucked--”
“We. Are. Done. Talking about this.”
“Fine, God. Go.”
Evan mentally circled back to an earlier question he felt hadn't been properly answered. “Why are you after Moreno?”
To Evan's surprise, Titus didn't hesitate. “I'm actually after his current boss. He's just the best lead I have to go on.” He took a deep breath, then started talking with a rushed, deadpan pace, as if he was eager to get the words out as quickly as possible so they wouldn't be in his mouth very long.
“Moreno is working for a guy only known as the Soultaker. He has an innate supernatural ability to pull a person's soul out of their body. When that happens, the person just... shuts down, usually. No motive force behind them. Eventually they just die of dehydration, usually. I've seen some people so set in routine that they keep going without a soul, but... it's not really life.
“It seems like the extraction process takes a while, so he can't just walk past you on the street and pickpocket your entire essence. So he needs people rounded up for him, held until he can do his nasty juju. So that's where a degenerate like Moreno comes in.
“So when he pulls out a soul, it, well, it looks like this.”
Titus pulled a battered, faded Crown Royale bag out of his jacket. It bulged strangely and made a quiet clacking when he set it on the table. He pulled out what looked like a large marble, or maybe a dull pearl, and handed it to Evan.
Evan brushed his hair out of his eyes and peered into the milky depths of the sphere. After a few moments of staring, the murky clouds inside the thing seemed to clear and a face floated to the surface. A black man, maybe in his late 40s, going thin on top. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be sleeping, but his expression had a look of discomfort to it, as if he was having a bad dream.
“Jesus Christ,” Evan whispered, “I've seen this guy... Martell Calloway? I saw some news article about how his family found him tied up in his apartment and completely comatose! But he didn't have any injuries beyond being a black eye... so he's dead?”
“Life support,” Titus said, taking Mr. Calloway's soul back from Evan's unresisting fingers, “technically, he's one of the lucky ones. They found his body before it wasted away to nothing, and I was able to intercept his soul before it got to a buyer.”
“Why would someone buy something like this? What use is it? Can you fix him?”
“A human soul is a damn near exhaustible arcane battery,” Titus said gravely. In the split second between sentences, Evan noticed something—after he'd put the bag back into his jacket, Titus surreptitiously touched a pocket on the other side of his jacket, as if he was making sure something was still there.
“If you know what you're doing, you can power a lot of magic using a soul. And you can reuse them as long as you don't overdo it. If you know what you're doing, you can wring all but the last drops of essence out of a soul and let it heal or recover or whatever, and it'll eventually be back to full strength. Very resilient things,” Titus continued. “I don't think they're conscious in there, but... anyway, it's supposed to be really hard to extract a soul. But this guy was born with or spontaneously developed or somehow figured out a shortcut to the whole process. So the market is getting flooded with torture-batteries and ECUs are getting flooded with vegetables. And families are winding up with loved ones who are as good as dead, without having any idea why this happened to them. Dozens of them have been taken off life support in the past few months. Half these souls have no body to return to. And no, I can't fix it. At least not yet,” he sighed again. “I was hoping once I found him, I could somehow get the secret out of him or force him to put them back, or... maybe I thought if I killed him it'd reverse the effect. He needs killing, either way.”
Titus's eye widened as a thought struck him and he looked Evan in the eye for the first time since he'd started the story. Evan realized what he was thinking and looked down at the tattoo on his left arm, flexing his fingers.
“If you can take people's powers after they die...”
“...then we can save these people.”
Titus put a hand over his mouth and for a moment Evan thought he saw his eye well up.
“I'm in,” Evan said, a sense of righteous purpose welling in his heart. “I don't really know what the universe wants, but I doubt... I know it's not this. We'll find him, we'll stop him, and we'll save as many of these people as we can.”
“...thanks,” Titus mumbled behind his hand. He swallowed hard, then seemed to come back to himself. “We're back to square one, though.”
“You said you could dowse? Like, for real?”
“Yes, for real. I can find things and people with the pendulum method. It's handy for tracking down bounties.”
“Why don't you dowse Moreno?”
“Why didn't I think of that?!” Titus said incredulously, smacking his forehead. “Because he's warded. He's not magic himself, but he's collected enough gear through his career that my normal methods don't work.”
Evan rubbed his chin. “What if we used an abnormal method?”
-------------------
An hour later, they were in the RV. Titus was poring over the collection of Evan's notes and the strange papers he'd bought from Delmann's shop. Evan was very carefully slicing a strip of skin from his own ankle up all the way up his leg. The Guiding Light—the Finder's Follysat on the table between them, filled with fresh blood.
“Even if this works, he's going to know we're coming,” Titus muttered, engrossed in the pages. “Remember what I said?”
“That's why we're not going to look for him,” Evan said, adjusting his grip on the potato peeler. “I don't know how we'd even write his name. Can you read that, by the way?”
“Kind of. This is... most of this is written in, like, arcane pidgin. Who compiled these notes?”
“I did, I think.”
“You think?”
“Oh yeah, I forgot to clarify on that. Apparently a couple months ago, before the ritual, I drilled a hole in my own brain to erase some kind of very dangerous memory.”
“You what.”
“That's not a metaphor or anything. Really did it. I could show you the video.”
“I'll pass. So you don't remember where this came from?” Titus shook the Book of Fate at him.
“Nope.”
“Jesus shit, do you have any idea--”
“How reckless that was? Yeah, yeah, I'm still here and I'm the answer to your fuckin' prayers, aren't I?” Evan gave a whoop as the peeling skin reached his thigh. “Got it this time!” he said cheerfully, snipping the flesh-ribbon off with scissors.
“God, that's so fucking gross. Anyway, you haven't explained how we're going to use that thing to find Moreno.”
“We don't set it to look for him. We look for somewhere he's been. Maybe the last place he slept. Do you think you can describe him well enough in that language for it to work?”
Titus looked like he might actually be impressed, but he hid it well. “Yeah, probably.”
“Good. I've got a dictionary I've put together on that tablet next to you, but I'm not sure how accurate it is. Maybe it'll help?”
---------------------
Two hours later, they had it.
Find where a man born between the 27th and 28th north parallels during a new moon under the sign of capricorn with black hair and green eyes who has killed at least 10 people slept in the past week.
They really had to squeeze the letters in, but when Evan put a flame to the wick, it sprung to life, wavered for a moment, and then pointed east. Both men cheered. Evan threw Titus the keys.
“Drive! Drive north until I tell you otherwise!”
While Titus started the engine, Evan spread a map of the United States on the table in front of the lamp, then produced a protractor and a notebook from a drawer. “Okay, you bastard... let's see where you've been hiding...”
It took three days—one spent driving north, one spent driving back to where they'd started, and one spent driving south. While Titus drove, Evan made meticulous notes of the flame's direction, marking angles on the map. Finally he threw the pencil down triumphantly.
“He's in Salt Lake City.”
“Well, that narrows it down a little, I guess. So what, do we just go there and hope this thing points us in the right direction?”
“Too slow,” Evan called, stepping back into what used to be his bedroom and sitting at his computer. “Now I work my magic.”
After parking, Titus walked back to look over Evan's shoulder. The half-dozen monitors on the wall were flickering between rapidly-changing pictures of faces and what appeared to be CCTV footage.
“What is this?”
“This,” Evan said with dramatic pride, “is Blaccat. Facial recognition algorithms that the CIA wishesit had. I actually started working on it years ago before I thought about the implications of it, but I shelved it. I figured since I may be needing to, uh...”
“Be Batman?”
“...yeah...that I should get back to work on it. Right now it's comparing faces to the description you gave me and cycling through every damn security camera in the city looking for it.”
“How illegal is this?”
“Soooooo illegal.”
“Oh, hey, can you get into police department records?”
“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”
“See if you can get into the Las Vegas mugshots from... February 2019. Run your face-recognition thingy there.”
“Alright.... and... is that our boy?”
A handsome Latino man in his early 30s with shoulder-length jet-black hair and piercing green eyes stared at them from over a booking clipboard.
“That's him,” Titus breathed.
“Perfect! Now I just have to feed that into... wow.” Evan made a gesture and a black and white video popped up on the biggest monitor. The man in the mugshot was walking along the street, flanked by a short stocky man in bandanna and a lanky man with the ugliest white-boy dreads Evan had ever seen.
“That's him! Where is that? When is that?”
Evan grinned up at Titus. “That's live. I can track him and put us at the nearest intersection.”
Titus smiled, eye overbright, and began breathing heavily through his nose. “We got him.”
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It’s the waning days of 2021, which means it’s time for my annual summary of the computer history efforts I’ve made in the past year.
I published interviews with 29 people across 28 episodes of ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast. Many of those interviews can be grouped into specific subjects that I gave extended attention to. Those subjects were:
The Capital Children’s Museum and Interactive Picture Systems. The museum was home to a large lab of Atari (and later, Apple) computers, as well as the office of Interactive Picture Systems and the “Superboots” software development lab.
Atari Research. I did five interviews with people who worked in Atari’s famed R&D lab.
Atari computers at the science fair. I interviewed three people who, as kids, used their Atari computers for school science fair projects.
Computers: Expressway to Tomorrow — a deep dive into a multimedia school assembly, sponsored by Atari, that was seen by more than a million middle- and high-school students in 1983 and 1984.
Some of the folks that I interviewed still had old source code, which they gave to me and allowed me to share with you. I unearthed the Forth code for Worms? by David Maynard as well as his development notes; three published and two unpublished programs by Ed Fries; and LOTS of Apple II Forth source code — both published programs and their development tools — from Prentice Associates.
In a collaboration with programmer Peter Liepa, I preserved the source code to several versions of Boulder Dash, but I am not able to share them due to German copyright law. (A German company owns the rights to Boulder Dash and still publishes new versions.) Still, it’s good to know that the code won’t be lost.
The media I digitized wasn’t limited to code. Filmmaker Lucy Hilmer generously gave me a U-Matic videotape of The Magic Room, Atari’s 1983 documentary about Atari computer camps, which I had professionally digitized, as well as a folder of production documents related to the film. After digitizing them, I donated all the material to The Strong Museum of Play.
After my interview with Suzanne Ciani, she found an unpublished song that she produced for Atari and allowed me to share it. “My Atari” is a bop.
I also unearthed Brenda Laurel’s Atari research memos on the subject of interactive fantasy, which she didn’t have anymore but were buried deep on a very old, very janky hacker site.
I scanned a figurative ton of material in 2021, even purchasing an A3-sized bookedge scanner for larger-format material. I scanned 83 issues of Home Computer Advanced Course magazine, completing the Internet Archive’s collection of that fun UK publication. I also scanned dozens of Atari newsletters, including issues from Jersey Atari Computer Group, Atari Interface, South Shore Atari Group, Atari Times, Bay Area Atari Users Group, Atari Computer Enthusiasts, and Atari Dealer News. (In a herculean effort to organize my workspace, I donated these newsletters to The Strong also.)
Dan Kramer sent me amazing batches of material to scan. Dan, who worked at Atari from 1980 to 1984 in the consumer engineering group, created the Trak-Ball accessories for the Atari game consoles and computers. He also worked on the prototype Atari 2700 and various other projects. I scanned his Atari engineering notebook as well as the schematics and notes that he had saved regarding the Atari Cosmos, an unreleased holographic tabletop game; the Atari 2700 with radio-controlled joysticks; SECAM video versions of the Atari XL computers; and more.
I continued work on the Scantastix project, adding 310 items (primarily Apple II manuals provided by 4AM.) Those 310 items totaled at least 8,000 pages. I lost count.
Other projects that I completed in 2021:
Copying my back catalog of 450+ audio interviews onto YouTube to increase their visibility and reach.
Creating The Internet Archive Research Assistant (TIARA), a tool for researchers who use Internet Archive.
Processing videos of the presentations at Vintage Computer Festival West and VCF East 2021.
Looking ahead: to be perfectly honest, I doubt I will be as productive in 2022 as I was in 2021. The end of December, and the end of 2021 in particular, probably isn’t the best time for me to write this summary. The short winter days weigh on me. I am healthy, but the lingering effects of wave after wave of covid are draining me emotionally. I can’t predict how much energy I will have to devote to these projects in 2022. I need a break from so many interviews (each is more time-consuming than you might guess), and spending hours processing piles of scanned documents does not appeal to me at the moment. It’s possible that a bunch of exciting new projects will reveal themselves this year, and it’s possible I’ll regain the energy and emotional bandwidth to dive into them. It’s also possible that 2022 will be a quieter year. So I’m making no predictions, setting no goals. I’m going to take things a little bit at a time and see where 2022 takes me.
Thanks to my supporters for joining me on this journey, whatever waves and crests it endures.
New World, Old Words by thedeafwriter (G, 641 w., 1 Ch. || Deaf Sherlock, Sherlock Whump, Pining Sherlock, Marriage Proposal, Fluff, Always John) – It was disconcerting to experience. One second, he was laying on the table, breathing in the gas that would make him sleep, the next, he was dragging his eyes open to look around the bright room, trying to wake up.
Promise of Sussex by LittleLongHairedOutlaw (T, 705 w., 1 Ch. || First Person POV Sherlock, Sherlock Whump, Angst, Pining, Ambiguous Ending) – John tries to keep Sherlock conscious after he’s been shot on a case.
Idiot by Anesthesiologist (T, 1,229 w., 1 Ch. || Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Alternate TGG / Explosion, BAMF John, Sherlock Whump, Inner Monologue, John Saves Sherlock, POV Sherlock) – What the heck happened? He remembered the pool and Moriarty, but then what? Had he been dying?
Angel by MrsNoggin (T, 1,513 w., 1 Ch. || Winglock, Friendship, Chromoesthesia, Drugging) – John is an angel. That can be the only explanation. A response to the challenging request for a realistic wingfic one-shot.
They’re Taking My Wisdom by whitchry9 (K+, 1,939 w., 1 Ch. || Hurt/Comfort, Drugging, Dentists, Friendship, Anxious Sherlock, Humour) – Sherlock goes to the dentist. Of course, being Sherlock, things have to be complicated. Oh and drugs. They’re always fun.
Stay by sussexbound (M, 2,067 w., 1 Ch. || Post TAB, Suicidal Ideation Mention, Implied / Referenced Drug Use, Kissing, Love Confessions, Frottage, Coming in Pants) – “Why? Why did you do it? Hmm…?” He takes a deep breath, waits, lets it out again. “Look at me.” There’s no denying him when he takes this tone. “Why did you kill him? Hmm…? For her? After…” A muscle twitches in the corner of John’s eye, and he clamps his jaw down tightly, swallows and sniffs a little before continuing. “For her? After everything she’s done?” “For you.” Before he can even stop himself. Just like that.
The Rational Machine by Solstice Zero (K, 2,924 w., 1 Ch. || Hurt / Comfort, Malnourishment / Fainting, Doctor / Minder John) – Sherlock passes out. John muses on the reasons why. Containing an absorbing case, two bags of shopping, and a few apples.
Better Late Than Never by sussexbound (NR (T), 3,021 w., 1 Ch. || Post-S4 / TFP Doesn’t Exist, Sherlock POV, Love Confessions, Drunk Sherlock / Sober John, John Takes Care of Sherlock, First Kiss, Jealous Sherlock, Emotional Turmoil) – He suddenly wants John Watson out of his bedroom, out of his flat, out of his life, because he has been lying to himself these last few months, he realises. He doesn’t want John here, not with the way things are. He doesn’t want 221b Baker Street to be nothing more than rest stop John returns to on his journeys between women. He doesn’t want to play co-parent if Rosie is going to be snatched away from him and placed in the arms of whatever nameless woman du jour John lands on next. He doesn’t want to keep being so careful, so generous, so, so…
The Oolong Disaster by unicornpoe (T, 4,151 w., 1 Ch. || John’s Beard, Fluff, Humour, Frustrated Sherlock, John Takes Care of Sherlock, Case Fic-ish, Pining Sherlock, First Kiss, Possessive Sherlock) – John has a beard. Sherlock has a panic attack.
Experiment by Gwen’s Blue Box (K+, 4,222 w., 3 Ch. || Non-Con Drugging, Hurt Comfort, Friendship) – Of course John has always known about his flatmate’s irregular sleeping habits, especially when they’re on a case. This time, however, the case is taking longer and longer, and soon John starts to worry. But there’s not much he can do, is there? Because drugging Sherlock isn’t an option. Not yet, maybe, but will it be soon? {{CW: John drugs Sherlock without his consent}}
Welcome Home, John by slashscribe (G, 5,504 w., 1 Ch. || Post-S3, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Awkwardness, Stabbed Sherlock, Protective Sherlock, Panic Attack (Sherlock), Self Esteem Issues, Love Confessions, First Kiss) – When John moves back to 221B, he thinks he’s the broken one, but after a while, it becomes clear that he might not be correct.
He’s Not Paid Enough to Deal with This Shit by janonny (T, 9,828 w., 1 Ch. || Personal Assistant AU || Humour, First Meetings, Snarky John) – One of the first things John did was to write up step-by-step instructions on how to conduct a proper job interview before handing it over to Mycroft for his perusal. There were no kidnapping, deserted car parks or stolen therapy notes anywhere on that list. (Or the one where John returned from the war and ended up working for Mycroft as his personal assistant slash doctor on retainer. Everything was fine, until he was sent to post bail for one Sherlock Holmes.)
And Here We Are by J_Baillier (T, 12,416 w., 2 Ch. || ASiP Fic, Alternating First Person POV, Drama, Friendship, Mild Case Fic, Autism Spectrum Sherlock, Insecure Sherlock, Protective John, Pining, Homophobia, Loneliness, Angst, Humour, Domestics, Morbid Fluff, Kidnapping) – All the little things we never got to see when an army doctor and a consulting detective were adjusting to sharing a flat. And a life.
Shuteye Shenanigans by Ayakae (K+, 13,263 w., 8 Ch. || Post-TRF, Friendship / Epic Bromance, John’s Nightmares, Angsty Fluff, Bed Sharing, Humour, Cuddles, Taking Care of Each Other, Domestics) – John Watson has never slept with Sherlock Holmes. Never ever ever. And never will, thank you very much. Well, there was that one time, but John didn’t count that. It was completely different, just like the second time it happened. And the third. And the fourth. Epic bromance, but it can be read as pre-slash if you wish.
First Response by Arwen Jade Kenobi (T, 13,516 w., 8 Ch. || Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Five and Ones, Whump / Injury) – Five times John had to perform first aid on Sherlock and one time Sherlock had to perform it on John.
Pattern Behaviour by SilentAuror (E, 14,835 w., 1 Ch. || POV First Person Sherlock, Jealous Sherlock, Pining Sherlock, Introspection, Stroppy Sherlock, Light Humour, Friendship, John Takes Care of Sherlock, First Kiss/Time, Wall Kisses, Fluffy Angst, Happy Ending) – Sherlock doesn’t even know why he resents John’s dates so much. Until the day he does know. Slight angst, unrequited feelings (but don’t let that scare you off!)
Software Malfunction by tiger_in_the_flightdeck (E, 16,679 w., 1 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Android Sherlock, Love Story, Unhappy Ending, Angst, Suicide, Jealousy) – “You think I can’t love you? Just because you’re made with metal, and detailed programming?” The doctor propped himself on his elbow, and looked down at it. “I am nothing but blood and bone, and tissue. Things just managed get mashed together in a manner that made me like this. Just like you were put together to make you how you are. When I kiss you-” he did so, briefly, to prove his point. Then more deeply, and lingering, because he could. “When I touch you, or smile at you, does it make you feel different from when others have done it in the past?”
Turn Left at the Park by Glenmore (NR (E), 37,409 w., 28 Ch. || Alternate First Meeting / ASiP Divergence, Case Fic, Depression, Suicidal Ideation, Loneliness, No Mary, Possessive Sherlock, Fluff & Angst, Nightmares/PTSD, Sherlock Saves John, Sherlock Whump-ish, Doctor John) – So what would have happened if John hadn’t walked through the park and met Stamford?What if, instead, he walked around the park and just went home?
A Hundred Crimson Sols by elldotsee (E, 55,536 w., 16 Ch. || Astronauts AU || Mars Exploration / Space Travel, Slow Burn, Shy Sherlock, Scientist Sherlock / Biomed Engineer John, Alternating POV, Mutual Pining, UST, Angst with Happy Ending, Domestic Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Injuries, Suicidal Ideation, Zero-G Sex) – Will Holmes is a chemical researcher recognized widely for his contributions to the new Mars exploration program. Thanks to his ground-breaking developments, the IMMC (International Mars Mission Corporation) is one step closer to Martian colonization. Will and his team of scientists are headed out on the first of three manned missions before the first group of settlers arrive. Three days before launch, one of the crew has to be replaced. Will panics because…new people. The replacement is of course one John Watson, biomedical engineer and space hottie who was pretty sure he had retired from actual space exploration and was now content to work in the nice, quiet research lab. Can the crew survive this TOTALLY ROUTINE trip? Will they be able to endure each other for the looooooong trip in close quarters? Gonna be a wild ride… prepare for blast off. Part 1 of the SpaceBois go to Space series
The Vapor Variant by 88thParallel (CanadaHolm) (M, 72,684 w., 18 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Post-THoB, John Whump, Protective Sherlock, Guilty Sherlock, Anxious/Worried Sherlock, Virgin Sherlock, Angst with Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, PTSD John, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Suspense, Virus, Sickfic, Big Brother Mycroft) – They stood face to face in the middle of a clearing. The dim light of the moon barely allowed Sherlock to see the glassy terror in John’s eyes and the sweat that glistened off his forehead. His nose was bleeding again, blood dripping in a slow stream from his right nostril. They were both gasping for air, John’s eyes locked on Sherlock’s. There was no recognition there, just wild animal fear. Time stood still for an eternal few seconds, and Sherlock took a shaky breath. “John—”Spell broken, John spun and bolted back into the woods. Still heaving for air, Sherlock took off after him.
Summit Fever by J_Baillier (M, 78,802 w., 18 Ch. || Mountain Climber AU || POV John, Angst, Tragedy, Suicidal Ideation, The Himalayas, Mountain Guide / Doctor John, Mount Climber Sherlock, Loneliness, Drama, Suspense, Slow Burn, Injured Sherlock / Sherlock Whump, Pining John) – After graduating from medical school, John Watson followed his heart to the Himalayas. Ten years later, he’s a haunted cynic working for his ex-lover’s trekking and mountaineering company. Will leading an expedition to Annapurna I—the most lethal of all the world’s highest mountains—shake John out of his reverie, and who is the mystery client added to the group at the last minute?
The Wedding Garments by cwb (E, 105,390 w., 36 Ch. || Alternate Future AU || Alternate First Meeting, Dating / Arranged Marriages, Romance, First Kiss/Time, Heavy Petting, Cuddles, POV Sherlock, Virgin Sherlock, Idiots in Love, Slow Burn / Falling in Love / Dev. Rel., Nervous/Anxious Sherlock, Jealous/Cranky, Hiking, Vacation Homes / Honeymoon, Sherlock’s Family, Horny John/Sherlock, Patient John, Massages, Hand Jobs, Assassination Plots, Hand Jobs / Oral Sex, Case Fic, Emotional Love Making, Bath Time Fun) – This is the story of a young consulting detective who wants nothing to do with marriage and an army doctor who wants to find true love. It’s 2020 post-Brexit England and the British government is encouraging arranged marriages. Candidates meet through state-run agencies and date in hopes of finding love (and tax benefits). Sherlock doesn’t need or want a spouse, at least not until John Watson shows up. Hesitant to give in to his more carnal urges because of the way they derail his mind, how will Sherlock progress toward the more intimate aspects of a relationship? The answer lies in a very special wedding gift.
"Hamilton's code was good — so good, in fact, that it very well might have saved the entire Apollo 11 mission. The rendezvous radar (the radar system to be used when leaving the moon and reconnecting with the control module) and the computer-aided guidance system in the lunar module used incompatible power supplies. The radar, which didn't really have a purpose in the landing portion of the mission, started sending the computer lots and lots of data based on random electrical noise, just as Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were attempting to land. This overloaded the computer and threatened to leave no room for the computational tasks necessary for landing.
"And that's what would have happened if Hamilton hadn't anticipated the problem. But she did anticipate this kind of problem, and made the Apollo operating system robust against it. She and her team, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight author David Mindell writes, were "very proud of their 'asynchronous executive,' and when the overloads came up, this feature allowed the computer to drop low-priority tasks." The computer was also programmed to automatically and nearly instantaneously reboot, so as to flush out unimportant tasks, like dealing with the radar data.
"Hamilton is now 78 and runs Hamilton Technologies, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company she founded in 1986. She's lived to see "software engineering" — a term she coined — grow from a relative backwater in computing into a prestigious profession.
"In the early days, women were often assigned software tasks because software just wasn't viewed as very important. "It’s not that managers of yore respected women more than they do now," Rose Eveleth writes in a great piece on early women programmers for Smithsonian magazine. "They simply saw computer programming as an easy job. It was like typing or filing to them and the development of software was less important than the development of hardware. So women wrote software, programmed and even told their male colleagues how to make the hardware better."
"I began to use the term 'software engineering' to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering," Hamilton told Verne's Jaime Rubio Hancock in an interview. "When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline."
