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CHARACTERS: Heather Mason and Rex Salazar
LOCATION: Kitchens on floor 36
WARNINGS: none...probably
SUMMARY: Meeting. Eating. Talking robotics.
NOTES:

Rex wasn't too worried about vague threats from security personnel about upper floors not being safe. The only reason he'd moved down to a lower level floor was to interact with more people. He'd spent enough time alone (or almost alone) for a lifetime. But the desire to hang out with the kids his own age hadn't stopped him from breaking away to scout the forbidden decks. He could handle himself, after all. Besides, the scariest thing he'd seen on the ship so far was way too many adults' dongs in the pod room.

He selected floor 34 and whistled to himself as the elevator lurched to life. Whoever designed the ship certainly liked dark metal and that disconcerting blue glow that flickered with every deck passed. "Creepy," he muttered. Floor 34 appeared on the screen briefly, but the elevator continued its ascent. Rex reached a hand out, nanites humming under his skin, but he paused before making contact. The last time he'd interfaced with the ship, it had been so eager to talk and yet so unwilling to help. It had left his head buzzing for hours afterward, too.

He didn't have too much time to contemplate a course of action, as the doors opened just two floors later. Part of him wanted to ask the computer why, but the pulsing blue light in the small room was really starting to creep him out. He stepped out of the elevator and saw a hallway lined with rooms much like every other floor he'd visited thusfar. The only difference he could perceive was the faint scent of fresh coffee.

Rex cautiously followed his nose and peeped into the kitchen, where a fain clattering could be heard. He caught sight of a young face and mussed blond hair. He strode into the room without any further hesitation.

"Morning," he greeted enthusiastically. He froze when she about jumped out of her skin, and raised his hands in something of a placating apology. "Didn't expect to see anyone else up here... guess you weren't either, huh?"

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"How do you know."

That was a bad habit she'd picked up - questions spoken like statements, like demands. But there the kid was telling her that nanites - which she was apparently full of, with the tattoo and the leg and fucking everything the stupid ship had done to her - could turn people into what he refused to call and she definitely thought of as monsters?

Hell no. It wasn't the kid's fault, and he wasn't in danger of getting a coffeepot smashed over his head (yet), but she wasn't just going to take his word for it.

"You just got here. How do you know the nanites here are - programmed?"

"Because I talked to them," he blurted, more imploring than defensive. He never was all that good at keeping secrets. Or holding back.

Before that explanation had time to sink in as too crazy, he stretched an arm away from her and realigned his own nanites, coaxing them into the familiar shape of a robotic arm. He flexed his fingers once for effect and let his arm fall back to his side, the metal retreating before it could brush the ground. "So... I can do that. Control nanites. Aaaand deactivate and reabsorb malfunctioning nanites." He smiled weakly and re-introduced: "Rex Salazar, EVO cure and humanity's last hope. Nice to meet you." He trailed off weakly.

Well.

That was a lot to take in. It was also, in hindsight, pretty damn embarrassing. Just pop your leg off in front of the kid, Heather, that won't be fuckin weird at all. Especially when he has a pretty decent explanation and then you realize how undignified getting it back on will be!

She sighed, riffled the hand not being used for balance through her hair, and shrugged at him.

"Humanity's last hope. There's a few of those around here. Tends to be a pretty raw deal, usually." She gnawed at her lip a moment, looked at the prosthetic and back to him, although her eyes slid off his face pretty quickly.

"Do you think you could - check it? Just real quick? Humor me."

Awkwaaaaaard.

"Well I'm on call 24/7 and suffer from recurring amnesia but I've seen the world," he shrugged and with a cautious smile, added. "And the food's not terrible."

He followed her gaze to her abandoned prosthetic and hopped over the puddle of spilled coffee and shattered porcelain to retrieve it. "No problem," he reassured, even though that wasn't how it worked. Humoring, he could do. It was his dumb mouth that had freaked her out to begin with.

Blue light pulsed from his palm, threading in geometric patterns up his arm and over the leg. He wiggled the toes discreetly (how weird it must be to see someone else wiggle your toes??) and tried to ignore the heavy weight of the Tranquility's AI pressing in, politely observing. He got the distinct impression that he was only integrating with the machine because it was indifferent.

"It's clean," he smiled. "Do you want help re-attaching it?" He sincerely hoped she was going to be re-attaching it.

It was incredibly weird to watch somebody else wiggling her toes, especially after all the mental hard work she'd put in to finally accepting them as - you know, her toes. And the lights traveling over both the limb and his arm were a liiiiittle freaky. Clean, though - clean was good. Clean she could work with. And -

"No!" Okay, that came out a little fast. "I mean. I can get it on okay, would you just - bring it over here?" Which was probably what he meant, anyway, so she shut up until he did so and then tried to imagine she was completely alone while she reconnected it to the port in her thigh. Grimaced through the familiar pins-and-needles sizzle of reconnection (something she still wasn't sure was real and not imagined) and straightened, dusting imaginary dirt off her palms.

"I know this is kind of an asshole thing to say after you just did me a favor, but you really shouldn't do that anymore. People have gotten sick from hooking into the stuff here."

Rex had the good sense to offer her the privacy of is back, and began to stack the largest shards of the mug into the palm of his hand.

"Thanks for the heads up, but I've been avoiding it already, trust me. The AI here is... friendly." Unflinchingly, unblinkingly friendly. He shuddered.

Judging by his tone, he meant that dude who stands too close in the elevator friendly rather than helpful and kind friendly, and she couldn't quite suppress a shudder of her own.

"Aw, hell. Man, that's not gonna help me sleep at night."

Once she was decent - well, still pantsless, but at least with her leg on - she moved to his side to help with the mug. He wouldn't have dropped it if she'd had enough manners to keep all her body parts attached.

"Hey, what's a - that thing you said. Evo?"

"Sorry. I'm bad at being smoke-and-mirrors about this stuff." He'd disobeyed direct orders to show off his skills and offer the world some transparency regarding Providence's methods. It was rather hard to hold back now.

"I've got this-- unless-- do you know where the towels are?" And when she went to retrieve one, he continued. "EVO. Stands for 'Exponentially Variegated Organism.' Doc Holiday coined it. People used to refer to them as 'spoiled meat' but that wasn't really scientific enough to stick after I started bringing people back to normal."

"Spoiled meat?"

Her voice rose in both pitch and volume, something that was familiar to anyone who knew her as the sound of Heather working up an outrage. Rex... would probably figure that out, soon enough. In the meantime he got Heather plunking back down next to him with one hand full of paper towels, one with a bowl to put the shards in until they could dump them, and the presence of mind to keep her knees together.

"And they're just - people? With hinky nanites? Who could be saved? No offense, but you come from a shitty world."

"Yeah-- at the time nobody knew that, but..." He shook his head and pushed down the rising tide of dread that crept up every time he started thinking about how many lives had been lost to misguided violence.

"It's better now. EVOs get taken down and detained as humanely as possible until I can reach them. Backlash against sentient EVOs is way down." He shrugged. "There's hope. Or... there... was..." His stomach suddenly sank and that repressed dread surged back up, all consuming, as the repercussions of his absence in his world sank in. His first two weeks he'd spent treating the ship like a temporary holding area-- like the time Breach blipped him into another dimension-- but that had been for a few hours and he'd been in constant communication with Providence throughout it. This-- he had no way of getting home from this. And he was The Cure. Without him, people were going to start slaughtering each other again.

He couldn't decide if the sudden tightness in his chest or his churning stomach was worse.

"Rex?"

It was a beat or two of silence before she looked up from the mess on the floor to his face, the harrowed look there, and for the first time (despite his many mentions - always me, not we, humanity's last hope) realized that it was him. Just him. She reached for the shards of mug he held and dumped them into the bowl, put a hand on his shoulder.

"Rex, look at me, dude. We don't know how this works. We don't know if time keeps going where we're from or if it freezes of if it's like - fuckin' Narnia, years going past here in the blink of an eye there. I've known people who vanished from here and then came back and said it was like their lives picked right up where they left off. Sometimes I think maybe we're just - copies of ourselves back home."

She squeezed lightly. None of this was great, but it was the best she had to offer.

"You don't know what's happening back there without you. It might be nothing. Someone might still be saving those people. Hell, it might even be you."

Rex made no move to look at her, fairly certain that if he did so he would suffer some kind of lengthy emotional breakdown. He did listen, however.

It took a while to process, but there was comfort to be found in the presented arguments. It didn't occur to him that she might have been making it up or sugar coating it to comfort him-- his caretakers at Providence had stopped any attempt at that when he started breaking down firewalls to fact-check.

What she claimed wasn't exactly fact and couldn't be tested in any way that he could think of, but any evidence-- even anecdotal evidence-- that his world would be okay while he was stuck was something to be embraced. He wasn't well versed in dimension-hopping or any of the surrounding theories of time-travel, but from what little he did know, it was possible. He thought of his brother's unwavering focus on science and logic and wondered if it was his way of coping with the chaos the nanites had caused.

It still felt like there was an elephant on his chest, but it was more like a baby elephant now. He released the stale air from his lungs and brought a coffee-scented hand up to wipe distractedly at his nose and eyes. "Yeah-- that makes sense. It'll be okay," he affirmed, voice thin but unwavering. Just saying it out loud was stabilizing.

He resumed mopping at the puddle of coffee. "So what do you think of the security department here?"

He wasn't totally buying it, she could tell. She couldn't blame him, but he seemed to have taken enough of it on board to let him keep moving. That was the important part, right?

Asking about security, that was was a start. She snorted, dumped a handful of wet paper towel into the bowl along with the shards of ceramic.

"Bunch of bossy jerks who think they know best and don't hesitate to tell the rest of us all about it. Doesn't matter that most of them probably aren't any more qualified to do what they do than the rest of us, they joined the department and now they're all princesses."

She might not have been over the security decision that had her fleeing to a higher floor in the first place.

"Sounds like the people I work for," he grinned. "Might just have to join up. I'm not that great at following orders, but I do enjoy being in the loop." He paused and tapped his chin thoughtfully. "Plus... it might be nice to be a princess." Yeaaaah jokes.

The kid bounced back fast. Or - seemed to, which was both the whole point of Heather's princess comment and something she could relate to. Sure, sometimes it was good to pack up all your shit and go play hermit until you could get yourself sorted out, but sometimes you just had to cram it all down and keep going. She could respect that.

"You see a tall girl walking around with a whole bunch of dogs, she's the one you want to talk to about that. Taylor. Do the arm thing, they'll love it. And hey, lemme know when you get a tryout. I'll loan you a dress."

His contemplation of the security department's apparently eclectic leadership was interrupted by Heather's next comment. A startled snort of laughter escaped him, which was followed by a wide grin as he got to his feet. It was a rare occurrence for the folks at Providence to have any reaction beyond a quirked eyebrow to his jokes. He could get used to people playing along.

"Yeah, I'll let you know," he promised as he scooped up the bowl of sodden towels and the coffee cup's remains. He washed his hands with cool water and took a moment to splash some on his stress-warmed face. His stomach hadn't settled entirely, but he couldn't see that happening for a while anyway.

"Thanks... For believing me. And not freaking out about the arm thing." That was a lot more than most people from his homeworld did-- and he did his best to prove that he was a good guy in those situations. Before things had a chance to get too mushy, he shot her a smile.

"So which department are you in?"

Hey, she didn't freak out over the arm thing, he didn't freak out (too badly) over her practically flinging her prosthesis at him - in her opinion, they were just about even. At his question she extended her wrist again, showing the tattoo and the prefix to the digits.

"Agricultural. We maintain the Oxygen Garden, which is pretty much what it says on the tin. Produces oxygen for the ship. And all the food that doesn't come in scary tins or packets."

She watched him, a little upward tilt to her chin, wondering if he'd ask why she'd go for something as boring as gardening when there was security, or gunnery.

Rex blinked. He'd been to the oxygen gardens, but it had never occurred to him that normal people on the ship maintained it. "I figured the computer had all the ship's vital functions automated," he offered in explanation for his extended contemplative silence. ~~Extended meaning like 2 seconds lbr here~~

"Well, a lot of it is," she admitted, shrugging and refilling her mug. "I don't know if you've been in there but the top levels are all kind of jungle-y, there's enough plant life going on up there to keep us breathing. It's more the food. Plus keeping an eye on the chemicals in the hydroponics, that kinda stuff. Most of the time everything runs okay, but the ship has little tantrums sometimes so it's usually better if everything's running optimally before it all goes to hell."

Which. Was not a comforting thing to say to a newbie, probably, but hey. It was true.

"Kinda seems like that's what most of the departments do, really. Hang around acting busy until something goes wrong, then lose our damn minds trying to fix it."

Rex considered this information. His first and second impression of the Tranquility's interface was not good. It wasn't as overtly homicidal as Zag RS, but it had an air of menace about it that led him to believe that keeping humans alive might not have been its top priority.

"Well I'm glad we have a department for it. ...But I'll probably stick to one where when things go wrong, I just have to punch something."

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