#wsmb.fic

Only the left side of his face smiles. Both could, if he wanted them to, but he has found a certain pleasure in the uncanny fear people get from the exposed metal above his right cheek. “My point stands, Reagan. I’ve read more about psychology than you’ve read anything in your miserable human life. You are quantifiably abnormal.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Hey.”

Reagan tilts her head back so she can look at him. She never shies away from his visage, though she doesn’t look in his eyes. He doesn’t take offense to that, though- she tends not to make eye contact with anyone. That represents another data point on his graph. He drags a smile onto the other half of his face for her, even though he doesn’t need to, and takes the shoulders of the chair in his hands. Two hands, he thinks quickly, both attached and functional. 

“I also absorbed a lot of research,” he starts, “and therapy could really help you. Not change you, not in the ways that matter, but help you cope with your… everything.”

The door to Reagan’s office slams open before she can respond, and while there’s only a handful of people in the building with the balls to enter her office like that, AlphaBeta still yanks the chair back and slots himself between Reagan and the intruder. 

“Dude-!”

“Hi, Reagan!”

“Prepare to-”

“AlphaBeta, stand down!”

At Reagan’s panicked order, he does, sidestepping and taking his requisite place behind her once more. Brett gives him a somewhat shaky thumbs up with one hand, the other still holding the door open from his dramatic entrance. Just this idiot. Again. AlphaBeta connects to Reagan’s personal security cameras and pulls up the feeds for her office, allowing him to study Brett from every direction. This allows for unflattering angles and a high-definition rendering of the sweat on his upper lip, which AlphaBeta gleefully saves to his hard drive for later. 

“You guys have to stop doing that,” Reagan groans. “He’s gonna blast your face off one of these days.”

He smiles with the left side of his face. 

“My pleasure.”

Brett audibly gulps and loosens his tie. “Not necessary, Mr. ROBOTUS, I will start knocking!” Clearing his throat, he tightens his tie again, then fixes his suit carefully in the kind of meticulous way that anyone besides Reagan would have mocked by now. She and Brett seem to be cut of the same cloth, as humans say, but her section was clearly far superior. Perhaps they’re merely similar in origin. AlphaBeta scans his knowledge for a better metaphor and settles on paintings. Reagan and Brett were both painted with the same tubes of thick oil paint, but Reagan’s creator was a master with his brush, and Brett was made by her painter’s two year old son.

“Anyways, Rea, I came to tell you that Gigi has officially certified me in the-” Here, Brett stops to fish a notecard from the interior of his blazer, “-art of manipulating the stupid masses with my pretty face and subliminal messaging.” Now the notecard goes back in place, and Brett pats his chest over it as if to ensure it feels tucked away inside. “So I’ve done my lab certs with you, I learned how to milk Myc- yuck, by the way, and now media. What’s next, boss?”

“Andre and Glenn,” AlphaBeta answers for her, “obviously.”

He reads and archives the several emotions that flit across Brett’s face in quick succession. Overall, it’ll take him through the afternoon to process them in the background, but he gets the gist easily enough. Brett isn’t excited at the prospect. He has always had a weak stomach for a Cognito employee, or so AlphaBeta understands, and it doesn’t seem like a shock he has no excitement for drugs and weaponry.

“Do you have a preference?” Reagan asks, haltingly. 

Brett interprets her tone just as AlphaBeta does: a statement of forced nicety. “Do you?”

“Yeah, actually.”

She shoots out of her chair and to the decorative bookcases against the wall. With a gentle tug to a thick blue volume, the shelves spin into the wall, a computer interface taking its place. Truly, the system is a work of art, possible only through the most talented mind the human race has to offer. 

“I trust you to use common sense in Andre’s lab, so…”

“Brett, common sense? Really?” AlphaBeta questions. 

Reagan ignores him. “It would make more sense to learn there first. Glenn has a certain zest for blowing things up, and in case it’s contagious, you’ll still need to know how to do things quietly.”

“Look at me, coming up in the world and learning all about our company!” Brett exclaims. The excitement is fake, but AlphaBeta pockets that information for later. “I’ll just go, then?”

“Yeah, uh, tell Andre I sent you.” Reagan has gotten sucked into something on her screen, but it’s the one system AlphaBeta isn’t connected to, so he isn’t sure what. “See you at McUltra’s tonight?”

Brett gives a silent thumbs up behind her turned back, but she doesn’t acknowledge his lack of an audible response, nor does she seem bothered by his departure. While she can get sucked into work, usually Brett’s presence serves as a potent distraction, so whatever she’s looking at must be the source of her stress. AlphaBeta comes up behind her to stare at the holographs. 

The screen she scrutinizes is written in some sort of cipher, but unfortunately for her, she’s the one who programmed AlphaBeta’s computer, and he cracks it in under a minute- a new record for him, but he keeps that to himself. Instead, he translates everything and documents it behind a secure firewall. 

“Lovely eulogy,” he comments. “Very kind.”

Reagan draws her knees up to her chest. “Ron isn’t dead.”

“You think he faked his death again?”

She doesn’t answer him. AlphaBeta takes the liberty of scrolling through the page himself, reading everything that was released. Ron Staedtler, active agent of the Illuminati, died in the field, literally and figuratively, in Appleton, Wisconsin. It makes sense on the surface, but he knows better. He was built better. Ron had no memories left, and was alive the last time Reagan turned on her surveillance of his home, before her guilt won out as per usual and she disabled it again. The last thing that sack of meat was doing was field work for the agency he fought so hard to leave. Besides, even if he was, his death would have gone unreported. No one cares about the footsoldiers of the shadow world. Whether or not he’s alive, this publication was made for a single reader, and she seems exactly as shocked as one might expect. 

When it takes longer than the standard five seconds for her to return to normal, AlphaBeta places his hand against the back of her neck, careful not to squeeze or press too hard. Data pours in. Her heart rate is extremely elevated, as he suspected, as is her temperature and blood pressure. Her respiration and oxygenation are fine. Her blood glucose is slightly low, however, and he pings an intern to bring her a donut and some water.

“Reagan,” he prompts gently. 

“No, it’s fine. They almost found him and he got away, so now they’re covering their tracks. It makes perfect sense.”

Reagan stands suddenly and stiffly powers down the system. It goes back into its hidden spot behind her bookcase as she begins pacing behind her desk. She jumps when a knock sounds at the door, though she hadn’t for Brett’s arrival. 

“It’s alright,” AlphaBeta soothes, checking the cameras to be safe as he approaches the door. “I sent for some breakfast.”

He opens the door enough to take the water bottle and box of assorted donuts from a terrified intern with six eyes and shuts it as softly as he’s able. He deposits both onto Reagan’s desk and fusses over picking a donut for her for a moment: she likes the ones with strawberry frosting and rainbow sprinkles, but the closest this variety offers is chocolate. He’s going to fire that intern, and he’s going to use real flames in the process..

“Thanks, but I’m not hungry right now. I have to figure out where he’s hiding and help him.”

Reagan pulls the corner of her lab coat up to her face to chew on it and opens one of the drawers of her desk. She goes through it like a madman, tossing irrelevant finds over her shoulder in a way that reminds AlphaBeta too much of her father. Rand is a genius, much like his daughter, but she has the distinct advantage of emotions. No, not that, he corrects himself. Rand is capable of selfish emotions like pain and paranoia and possessiveness and pride. What he lacks is the array, filled with beautiful and hurtful human things like love. 

“Reagan-”

“I need a minute.” She lifts a small notebook from her desk and flicks through the pages. “Just- a little space? For the morning?”

AlphaBeta nods. “Of course. If you need anything-”

“I know, I know.”

At that, he lets himself out of her office. He heads straight to Andre’s lab with the purpose of supervising the two overgrown children, but arrives to see Myc there as well. To be honest, AlphaBeta has yet to make up his mind on Myc; on one hand, he’s not a human, and he is rather funny, but on the other, he remains deeply irritating. The two of them cannot read each other, which serves as a point of friction for two entities so used to simply knowing. 

“Really? That many?” Brett asks, oblivious to AlphaBeta’s entrance as he looks into a microscope. “Honestly, I tapped out on number three.”

Andre pats him on the back. “You have to work up to it, man, I’m telling you. If you want, I could whip you up a cocktail that’ll make you jizz your brains out.”

“That doesn’t sound very good.”

Myc makes a partially indignant, partially distressed noise from his position in the corner. “I can make Brett jizz his brains out just fine without artificial chemicals, thank you very much.”

While he tries to process all of that information, and Brett’s now obvious lie about his opinion of “milking” Myc, AlphaBeta makes finger guns and pretends to shoot them, complete with little “pew pew” sounds. All three turn to look at him. 

“If I was a real intruder, you would all be dead.”

“I hate when you sneak up on me, it’s fucking rude,” Myc informs him. “I can’t hear you, you know. You don’t think. It’s really freaky.”

AlphaBeta rolls his eyes. “The feeling is mutual. What are you working on?”

“None of your business, Robo-Asshole.”

“Spores that turn you into a Cognito controlled zombie. I engineered it from Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis, the fungus that turns ants’ brains to mush in rainforests.”

“I’m not sure but it looks cool under a microscope!”

Carefully skirting the side of the worktable, AlphaBeta reaches for the microscope. “May I?”

At Andre’s nod, he lowers his face to the lenses and peers at the slide. He has to adjust the focus, as it seems Brett didn’t bother, before he can make out the microscopic cells that have the power to control a human mind as easily as any machine. They look innocuous. Yet, if it does come from O. Unilateralis, there is a nonzero possibility that recovery from infection is impossible. The one thing to soothe AlphaBeta’s rising frustration is the fact that both Brett and Andre have gloves on. He superheats his face and hands briefly after leaving the microscope to kill anything that could have clung to him, lest he transfer it to someone unintentionally. 

“We start human, and humanoid, trials next week,” Andre says, unable to contain his excitement, instead allowing it to leak out in his loud enunciation, glossy eyes, and big smile. “Apparently The Robes have some prisoners for us to test it out on!”

“Lovely,” AlphaBeta says, before consulting a book on effective management techniques and adding, “good work. Keep it up.”

Even though Myc has no eyes, AlphaBeta gets the distinct sense he might be rolling them. He pastes his half-smile in place and beams at each of the three employees in turn, delighting in the squirmy discomfort it elicits from them- Myc included. 

“If you’ll excuse me, I have other matters to attend to.”

He leaves as abruptly as he’d arrived, pushing his navigation to Gigi’s office into background processing to make room for this. The list of prisoners was sent through Reagan’s official encrypted email, which AlphaBeta has the distinct pleasure to manage, but had not yet been sorted for its official purpose. He hadn’t known it. He hadn’t particularly cared, either, nor would he now if not for a single name on the list he knows Reagan can’t agree to. 

AlphaBeta rolls that footage for her as well, focusing most of his energy on interpreting her responding expressions. She has an impressive poker face, though, and he must wait for his chance to ask questions. 

"This is kinda low level, even for you," Gigi says once he ends the hologram. "I know you never liked the guy, but everyone lies about their excitement in the workplace. Do you think I enjoy doing everything Reagan tells me to?"

He pulls up the feed from Andre’s lab and watches him, Brett, and Myc goof off around dangerous chemicals and bioweapons in the background. “You’re not understanding. Brett lies the least of any Cognito employee. I ran the statistical analysis and he is, on average, 19.4% less likely than anyone else to lie. When factoring Reagan into the conversation, he’s 85.3% less likely to lie to her specifically. So why would he lie to her?”

Gigi tilts her head. “How-”

“You lie about ten percent more than the average employee, but 2.6% less than the average employee to Reagan.”

Then she purses her lips, like that wasn’t the question she intended to ask, but she doesn’t seem to have another to take its place. AlphaBeta moves on. He picks up a glass statuette from Gigi’s desk and turns it over in his hands, feeling the smooth contours and sharp edges of which it comprises. There’s text engraved on the base, which he makes sure to feel as well. It’s not a language in his database. Not human, then, nor anything Reagan knows. 

“What language is this?”

“Fuck if I know. Myc gave it to me.”

“Did he?”

AlphaBeta chips the edge of the statuette and tucks away his new shard before setting the crystal back down, careful to line it up perfectly with its previous placement, down to the correct angle. Gigi doesn’t interrupt him. Instead, she waits patiently for him to be satisfied before continuing with their conversation.

“I still think you might be overreacting, Brett’s pretty harmless.”

He looks at her. 

“Okay, less so, these days. Glad he finally grew a backbone. But he wouldn’t do anything to hurt this team, especially Reagan. You know that, right?”

The humming sound from his processors revs up enough to approximate a verbal response like a human would give, acknowledging speech but with a distinct air of disinterest. While far from the latter, it remains the most advantageous response. His panel of the overhead camera in Andre’s lab pings, so he holds up a finger to tell Gigi to wait, and tunes more attention into the stream. 

“This is insane,” Andre says through the tinny microphone, a lit hand-roll of some kind in his grip. “Fuck everybody else, work in my lab.”

“Oh, come on, it wasn’t that hard.”

Myc, who has wound his short flagella around a chair’s seat rather than slouching in it as he typically does in the interest of seeming less alien, makes an audible groan. “This is the best shit I’ve ever smoked.”

“Seriously, what’s your secret?”

Brett scratches the back of his neck and ducks his head so his face is harder to see. AlphaBeta simply pulls up the rest of the cameras to better see him. “It’s really nothing, you guys, I was just messing around. Glad you like it, though!”

“Is this what getting high feels like for you?” Myc asks, presumably Andre, though it can be hard to tell with a faceless fungus. “I can’t fucking think. Can’t even hear you assholes think. It’s so quiet up here.”

AlphaBeta hits Gigi’s desk with a booming sound. “Brett is drugging Andre and Myc.”

She raises her eyebrow. 

“I know it sounds ridiculous, but I am quite literally smarter than you hundreds of times over. They’re all doing drugs in Andre’s lab--yes, yes, like always--but this is something Brett made and it’s dampened Myc’s psychic abilities. It cannot possibly be an accident, or safe.”

As if to prove his point, Reagan gets an email from the automated sensors in the lab, labeling it a cognitive hazard. Such a turn of phrase had started as a joke Gigi made, but it’s a rather apt way to calmly inform people that Andre’s lab is a glorified hotbox. He flags it and sends an alert to Reagan’s desktop in her office so she knows to read the message. 

“Andre’s lab just got labeled C-Haz, so I would refrain from paying them a visit,” AlphaBeta tells Gigi, “unless you’d also like to experience Brett’s homemade substances.”

 Finally, that earns the closest approximation to a laugh AlphaBeta has ever personally elicited from Gigi. He takes that point of pride privately. “I wasn’t planning on it, but thanks for the tip, Ro. “

He smiles at her, not with his full face but with more than the left side alone. “I should be getting back to work. I just wanted to… share my concerns with someone more objective than Reagan.”

They shake hands, firm but polite, so he can take his leave. It would be safe for him to go to Andre’s lab, seeing how he has no lungs to inhale the smoke, but he has no clue how helpful interrogating anyone under that level of influence could be, which in turn has him trotting the familiar path back to Reagan’s office. 

He knocks twice on the door. “Reagan?”

Her office security footage shows her waving him in, so he he enters and closes the door behind him. She is once again engrossed in the wall computer, typing furiously with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and stays that way even as he comes up behind her. He sorts the cipher even faster this time to decode a message from another member of the Illuminati, presumably from her Anonymous Anonymous group. This contact, named Bill, agrees with Reagan that Ron’s sudden death is suspicious. 

“I think he means that he finds the timing suspicious, not that Ron Staedtler survived,” AlphaBeta tells Reagan.

She jumps, then turns to glare at him. “You can read this?”

“You designed me, of course I can read it.”

“Yeah. That checks out.” Reagan stands up and stretches. Her joints spatter with pops at the motion. “I’m gonna send a team out there to gather evidence and see if we can figure out where he’s hiding.”

He knows she will not here reason at this point in her grief. She has just lost her father, as well, possibly in a much more definite way soon, according to the email he still hasn’t directly forwarded to her. She’s far too busy for every little detail of the company’s runnings. He pulls it up just to read the crisp text again. And he does plan to bring this up to her, but he has yet to decipher what Brett is up to, and presenting an incomplete picture is the worst thing he could do.

“At least everything is going well here,” she says. 

If this were The Office, which AlphaBeta has devoured with great pleasure, he would look into the camera. It is not, so he refrains from staring directly at any security cameras in Reagan’s office. 

“So Andre already got Brett high?” Reagan asks, skimming the email he sent her. 

“The opposite, actually. Brett made something that got Andre and Myc both ‘baked,’ as they might say. Myc’s psychic powers were affected by the potency.”

She blinks at him. “Brett made it.”

“Yes, within ten minutes of me leaving the lab. I stopped by to monitor their progress.”

“Yeah, the uh, the…” Reagan shuts her eyes briefly while she tries to find the memory in her mind. AlphaBeta doesn’t need to do that to collect information, but then again, neither do most humans. He plots this point on his graph. “The mind control fungus, right?”

“That would be the one.”

She kicks the underside of her desk. “The Robes sent me a list of subjects for Andre to test it on. Fun fact, they hired an intern to do that kinda stuff. It’s really freaky imagining being an intern for Them. If I ever had to do that job-- I don’t even wanna think about it. Anyways, the list. It hasn’t crossed my desktop yet.”

AlphaBeta gets a warning that his temperature is rising faster than the cooling system can regulate.

“I have not forwarded the email.”

“Any particular reason, or just to annoy me?”

“If I may revisit an earlier topic of conversation,” he begins, pausing longer than he originally intended when Reagan narrows her eyes at him, “I think that therapeutic intervention could be very good for you. Perhaps I could find you a therapist specializing in trauma, or-”

“Don’t even say it,” she interjects. 

He nods in acquiescence. “I will refrain. But my point stands, Reagan, and I know your friends would agree.”

“I’ll consider it if you tell me what you’re hiding.”

Negotiation. AlphaBeta was originally supposed to replace the president, before he gained consciousness, and is still the most advanced being on the planet besides his creator. He also has the advantage of reading her tells when his own cold body has none. Every movement he makes is deliberate.

“I’d be willing to strike a deal that satisfies both parties,” he says.

“Yeah?” Reagan crosses her arms. “What do you propose?”

“After you complete an intake session with a licensed professional, I will forward your list.”

“I could check your system myself.”

The coded equivalent of a chill running down his spine floods AlphaBeta’s awareness for a moment. He hates having his system tampered with, manually accessed in such a way. It feels so beyond invasive, like her dexterous fingers are crawling around inside every thought he has, and leaves him feeling picked over and hollowed out even though she has never erased anything. The glitches, too. They resolve on their own after a day or two, but their presence is equal parts frightening and humiliating. 

“Fine, schedule an appointment and I’ll forward it.”

Reagan takes a moment to mull it over, glancing between his nose and the floor, before finally saying, “Okay. Whatever. Schedule the appointment and I’ll go, now forward me my fucking email, dude.”

He takes the opportunity to do both, finding a therapist he bookmarked earlier with openings that work around Reagan’s erratic schedule and filling out the forms as he simultaneously sorts out the correct email and sends it to her desktop. It is closely followed by the confirmation email for her appointment. 

“Oh,” she says when she finishes the list. “Huh.”

“I was trying to protect you from that, until I knew you could handle it.”

The camera on her desk shows that she’s upset. He doesn’t get the chance to offer comfort. “I don’t need your protection. Or anyone else’s. I’m the fucking CEO of Cognito and that means something. I made you, didn’t I? And I got here on my own, not because of my dad, or you, or Brett, or-” Reagan presses the heels of her palms into her eyes and takes a shuddering breath. “I am a grown woman. I can handle stress. Fuck you. Okay. I’m putting together the team for Wisconsin, and then I’m checking on Andre and Brett’s progress personally, and then I guess I’ve gotta talk to The Robes.”

“Do you hope to change Their minds?”

She minimizes the window. “I don’t know.” Reagan rolls her sleeves back down and reaches for the half-eaten chocolate donut still sitting on her desk. “You said Brett made whatever they’re high on down there?”

“Evidently. I checked the cameras when they’d already started smoking whatever it was.”

“Hmm.”

Donut in one hand, mouse in the other, Reagan retrieves the security feeds and pulls up the lab for the two of them to watch together. The latest evolution shows that Myc is in the corner doing something relatively sheltered from their view but clearly inappropriate, while Andre sleeps on the table as Brett places his suit jacket over him like a blanket. AlphaBeta notices that someone had the foresight to clear the table before Andre slept on it. 

“Does Brett seem high at all to you?” Reagan asks. “The smoke in there was potent enough to set off the sensors, so even if he didn’t take anything directly…”

“He was behaving strangely earlier today, but does not seem to be high in that footage, or objectively more out of character than he had been prior to entering the lab.”

Reagan hums again and switches to a camera with a better angle of Brett’s face, showing no bright flush and no dilated pupils. They watch it together, switching between cameras when Brett finishes covering Andre in his jacket and instead goes to check on Myc.

“Hey, buddy, you wear yourself out yet?” Brett asks. 

“I don’t want to watch this.”

At that, Reagan clicks off the feed. AlphaBeta continues to stream it privately, to keep an eye on the situation. He will need to gather more explicit evidence to convince her. Easy. At the end of the day, he is a machine, one she built, and there is no better being in the world to collect and archive data for analysis. 

“If I recall correctly, you were hardly a fan of Brett yourself when he started here,” he points out. “You told me all about the biggest thorn in your side and how convinced you were that he had something to hide.”

She rolls her eyes. “Then I got to know him, and it’s just not that deep, Brett’s not- there’s not a conniving bone in that man’s body.”

“What makes a bone conniving?”

Reagan waves her hand in a presumably dismissive gesture, and AlphaBeta retires to his corner of her office. The corner is exactly as the word implies: two walls meet at a ninety degree angle, forming a hard edge in Reagan’s office, though this particular corner is special. When AlphaBeta stands in it, there’s a portrait of Reagan and her friends to the left of his head, and an old-fashioned looking cuckoo clock that hides a security system he had the fortune to help design to his right. Below the portrait, and slightly closer to the corner itself, is a power outlet for him to connect to if needed. It is a simple and functional corner. He doesn’t mind it; it’s his. 

He leans against the comforting support of the thick walls and starts surfing the security cameras again, starting in Gigi’s office. He does not peep on her day often, out of respect for her privacy, but still checks when he cycles the cameras to ensure her safety. He finds her with her feet up on the desk, talking on the phone, and moves on without tuning into the microphones. He checks each department after that, and even makes the time to look in on Glenn’s day, which seems consumed with an argument about the best kind of missile. AlphaBeta knows the answer. He switches the feed. 

Back in Andre’s lab, the doctor is still asleep, while Myc appears to have finally tuckered himself enough to do the same. AlphaBeta can find it difficult to discern when Myc is asleep, but he has to assume him to be, given the complete silence and stillness of his body. Brett is not with them. Immediately, AlphaBeta checks Brett’s office. Empty. He initiates a broad search to locate the man.

In the end, he locates Brett in the parking garage, upper body leaning against the cold exterior of his own hybrid, hands stuffed in his pockets. He appears to be speaking, so AlphaBeta connects to the audio as well, quickly finding the black smudge on the feed over Brett’s ear, which must be a bluetooth device. 

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Brett says.

Those words are not unfamiliar. Such a particular turn of phrase is one which he reaches for with the same ease and frequency as a bee collecting nectar from the nearest meadow, but the tone is all wrong. It tends to be coupled with an uncertainty. A lack of personal strength, perhaps. This time, when Brett says those words into his earpiece, his voice is smooth and confident, like that of a man whose opinion on what does and does not constitute necessary actually matters. 

“No, absolutely not.” Brett pushes away from the car and spends a useless fifteen seconds pacing. “Mm- no excuses, either. Just- just get it done, and get back to me, alright? This petty bullshit isn’t getting us anywhere.”

AlphaBeta nearly closes the live feed in his haste to make sure he saves every second. 

“Good. Please don’t make me say it again, okay, buddy? Okay. Have a good one.”