Flood: Spoiler Alert
Mar. 16th, 2018 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oddswerebad[Video 1]
"You're fucking with me," the woman says, laughing. Her sharp black uniform with it's crimson armband is a stark contrast to the man's white lab coat and rumpled 'it's not rocket surgery' t-shirt but despite that they share an easy sort of camaraderie, two people who've grown comfortable with each other over the years.
He laughs too, shaking his head. "I only wish I was. I swear, I lost a hundred bucks on a game played four years ago. I'm lucky that he probably thought I was joking so I wasn't taken for more."
The lab is white and sterile under the fluorescent lights, no shadowy corners for anyone to get lost in, yet the figure on the edge of the screen could almost be overlooked on first glance; the adults certainly aren't paying any attention.
Nico can't be more than thirteen, sickly pale and thin and very, very still. It would be hard to be sure if he's even alive if he was wearing anything apart from the restraints that keep him sitting almost upright. There are several still red scars across his chest. Apart from the slight rise and fall from uneven breathing and the blood dripping from his face, there's no movement.
"Okay, maybe that does count for an embarrassing secret. Plus being just sad if you made it up. Local games are one thing," the woman says, shaking her head, "But the world series?"
He smirks at her, refilling his mug with coffee. "Hey, some of us were busy."
"Yeah, yeah, rub in your gainful employment a bit more, I might have missed it the last hundred times." She smirks back. "On the other hand, freak watching? I think I might prefer baseball." She glances down at a watch, taking up a more alert stance as she adjusts her gun a little. "Talking of boring and painful, you better finish your coffee if you don't want a lecture from Todd."
The man makes a face, even as he sets down his coffee cup. "Thanks for the reminder, like that asshole needs a reason. He's still pissy about having to scrap his personal project after those two test subjects had to be trashed." Despite his grumbling, he clicks on a recorder. He adopts a more formal tone; "Initial notes: Subject 0274 does not display any visible difference in reaction when calm control is employed two minutes after two hundred forty volts than when after the same length of time for two hundred volts. EEG reading tomorrow before three hundred -"
*
[Video 2]
“—you promised! You promised you wouldn’t do this again!” Nico's hands are gripped in his black hair, making it stand on end instead of it's usual slicked-back shape. His face is red, as if he's been crying. "And you did it to her! How could you hurt Ruby? How could you?" He's pacing alongside the door to a cell; a clean white room with a stack of books and a bed that Clancy is sitting, on cross-legged. He looks annoyed but otherwise unfazed by Nico's breakdown.
Clancy's eyes shift over to where Ruby has just run into the sight of the camera, arms coming up to cross over his chest. Nico turns to her too, tears in his eyes. "Ruby - he can't keep getting away with it! He can't! You have to make him leave, just let him go, before -"
"Finally," Clancy says to Ruby, cutting off Nico without bothering to look at him now he has a focus for his attention. “Can you please get him out of here? I already have enough of a migraine.”
“If your head aches now, imagine how it’ll feel when I rip it off your neck,” Ruby snarls back.
Clancy smirks, looking her up and down. “It looks like you had an interesting night.”
“Shut up! Shut up! Ruby, he—” Nico sucks in a breath. “It’s like I told you — he can control other people’s bodies. He can move them around like puppets without them realizing it. He did it all the time, to all of the researchers, I know he can do it —and he made you — he made you send those messages through the server!”
Clancy smirks at Ruby. "Really had you going there, didn't I?"
“You...” Ruby looks sick, anger mixed with growing horror. She folds her own arms, like a defense against his words. "How long?" She demands.
“How long have you been having those ‘stress headaches’?” Clancy folds his hands in his lap. “They’re the worst, aren’t they? I’m glad I haven’t been suffering through them alone. But you should know you only have yourself to blame. Every time you enter someone’s mind, you form a connection with them—their memories, thoughts, will become yours. Each time you came into my mind, each time I got you while your defenses were down, you let me reinforce our bond. You’re the reason I was able to do this.”
“What did the messages say?” Ruby says, stepping up to the glass as Nico slumps down against a wall, hiding his face in his hands. “Who were they sent to?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Clancy says. “You’re both clearly too emotional to understand."
*
[Video 3]
Ruby is standing by a whiteboard, facing Nico. Or facing his back, his shoulders bunched up with tension as he focuses on a computer in front of him.
"How would you do it?" She asks, jerking her chin in the direction of a blank space under the word 'Thurmond'. Nico turns at her question. He looks sick, face pallid and drawn, frayed and faded with exhaustion; he's not any older than he is on the barge but in worse condition.
He stares at her for a full sixty seconds of awkward silence before he takes a tentative step closer. "It doesn't matter what I think."
“You said I wasn’t paying attention to the details,” She prompts. “What did you mean by that?”
Nico looks down at the floor, running his shoes over the tile. “The Oasis plan is okay,” he says, finally. “The way we have it now makes sense. Based on the size of the camp, there’ll only be two or three camp controllers, and it’ll be easy for you to figure out who is in charge of security and sending the status updates to their network. It won’t work that way at Thurmond.”
He wrings his hands, still not looking up at Ruby. “There’s going to be, what, two dozen camp controllers in the Control Tower? That was the estimate in...in Clancy’s files. Its position at the center of the camp means that anyone forcing their way in through the gate is going to have to fight through all of the rings of cabins to get to it to subdue the PSFs and controllers inside, and by then the camp controllers will have called for reinforcements. Even if you found a way to subdue all of them, it would still be too late. All they’d have to do is turn on the White Noise and we’d be done. The power generator and backup generator are all on the camp premises, and I have a feeling cutting the power would automatically trigger an alarm on the military’s network.”
Ruby hesitates a second, clearly trying to summon up resolve that had been lost as he'd laid out the problems. “So we’ll need a bigger attack force. One that can work faster, get them in and out.”
“Liam’s idea about trying to get the parents to storm the camp might work,” he offers, “but its success depends half on us being able to inspire civilians to revolt and come after the camps, and half on whether or not the PSFs would fire on civilians or figure out some other way to deter them.”
“He has an actual plan?”
“Not in the technical definition of the word. I just heard some kids asking him about what he would do.” Nico shrugs. “His option isn’t perfect, either.”
“Is there a third option?”
Finally Nico moves, with tentative, halting steps, walks to stand beside her, though he doesn't take the marker she offers and still shrinks away a little. "Are you sure you want to know?”
“Try me.”
“The only way I can think of to disable the camp controller’s access to the camp’s systems—not even disable or disarm the system itself, but lock them out and keep the system running so no one outside notices anything amiss—is to install a Trojan horse program in their system and control it remotely. They’ll be so disoriented that the tactical team will have an easier time of it.”
“Is that something we could upload into their server?”
“No, the programs don’t install automatically like a virus. Someone has to install it,” he says. “And with all of the security safeguards in place, I don’t think one of them would carelessly download any kind of email attachment.”
“So someone would have to go into Thurmond and install it before the assault. But the camp has been closed to new kids for years.”
“They take escaped kids back into the camp they were originally processed in,” Nico says quietly. “I already started coding the Trojan horse. Cole told me to...”
Ruby holds up a hand, cutting him off. “Cole approved this already?”
He nods, eyes wide. “He said he’d talk to you about it. I can have it ready in a week. They’ll be powerless to stop it once the program is installed.”
Ruby's face registers every bit of her sudden horror. "No. No way -"
“I meant me,” Nico says quickly. “Not you. I could bring the Trojan horse program in on a flash drive, the same way we’re bringing the cameras into Oasis. Glasses frames. Have you seen them?” Nico crosses out of view of the camera, coming back with a pair of glasses with black plastic frames.
Ruby leans against the desk, seeming to need the support to stay vertical. “Nico — no.”
“It’s already installed — right there,” he says, ignoring her as he points.. “This is the camera, and this is just a screw the frames don’t need. We had to make them seem as real as possible. Tommy said they’re fine, so he’ll get this pair. For Thurmond, maybe I could take one of the thicker frames—break up one of the arms that hooks behind the ear and replace a piece of it with a small flash drive? It’s either that or embedding it under my skin, but they still do strip searches, don’t they? The cut would be too obvious.”
“Nico!” She interrupts him. “Listen to me! No. There’s no way in hell you’re going back in there! Even if they brought you back into the camp, how would you get yourself into the Control Tower to upload it? You haven’t been there since the camp changed. They don’t just let you walk around unsupervised. Every move you make in there is choreographed down to the minute. And it’s the most fortified building in the camp.”
He pauses, thinking. “I’d need to observe the schedules of the PSFs, figure out a moment I could slip away. It doesn’t matter if they catch me in the end, not really. It would be okay...I would get to...there’s not anyone left for me now that Cate’s gone. And this is how I could make it right.” His voice drops to a whisper, almost inaudible. “This is how I could make it right for Jude.”
Ruby stands straight at that, whirling to face him fully. “Throwing yourself into danger...throwing your life away...what would Jude say about that? What would Cate say? I haven’t been a good friend to you these past few weeks, but Nico, I swear to God —please, I forgive you, I do, I understand what happened and I’m sorry I treated you the way I did. I’ve been up in my own head too much, and it was hard for me to see things clearly. But please listen to me—”
“It’s okay.” Nico’s voice is hoarse.
“It’s not!” She pauses a moment, when she goes on it's obvious she's trying to keep her tone calm. “We can’t change what happened in Los Angeles. I was angry — I was so damn angry that he just...slipped away, and I couldn’t save him. I should have talked to you, should have helped you, or at least tried to understand what you’d done. I let everyone down, but it was easier to blame you. It hurt less. But the truth is, I knew what Clancy was capable of. I should have tried to confirm some other way that what he said was true. And you know what? Jude would have wanted to go anyway, even if I said no.”
“He was my best friend,” Nico chokes out.
“I know. But...it’s different with Clancy, isn’t it?” She says quietly. “Rules don’t apply when you love someone. And that’s how it was with Clancy, right? It’s not like how you loved Jude, or the way I love Chubs. You trusted him, and he took your words and twisted them for his own ends. I was so angry with you for believing him, for giving him everything you did. But I know firsthand that people are capable of doing things for the people they love that they never would have considered before.”
Nico buries his face in his hands, letting out a shuddering breath.
“I didn’t mean to ruin everything,” he whispers. “I trusted him. All the intel I gave him, he swore he was using to help us and I thought...”
“You thought that he would help keep us away and safe, didn’t you?” She finishes. “I know. It sounds to me like maybe you fell into my pattern for a while there.”
“I don’t know why — I knew it was wrong, that it was bad, but he was good. When I knew him, he was good and he helped me. And I just extrapolated it would apply to everyone else. The only reason you were there was because I forecast the results incorrectly. I didn’t factor all of his behavioral outliers in.” His voice grows too soft to hear for a few moments, blocked entirely as Ruby leans in to listen.
“I’m sorry,” She says. “For not letting you explain. For acting the way I did and not being there for you.”
“I have to fix this,” he says, voice ragged, “I have to make things right."
"You're fucking with me," the woman says, laughing. Her sharp black uniform with it's crimson armband is a stark contrast to the man's white lab coat and rumpled 'it's not rocket surgery' t-shirt but despite that they share an easy sort of camaraderie, two people who've grown comfortable with each other over the years.
He laughs too, shaking his head. "I only wish I was. I swear, I lost a hundred bucks on a game played four years ago. I'm lucky that he probably thought I was joking so I wasn't taken for more."
The lab is white and sterile under the fluorescent lights, no shadowy corners for anyone to get lost in, yet the figure on the edge of the screen could almost be overlooked on first glance; the adults certainly aren't paying any attention.
Nico can't be more than thirteen, sickly pale and thin and very, very still. It would be hard to be sure if he's even alive if he was wearing anything apart from the restraints that keep him sitting almost upright. There are several still red scars across his chest. Apart from the slight rise and fall from uneven breathing and the blood dripping from his face, there's no movement.
"Okay, maybe that does count for an embarrassing secret. Plus being just sad if you made it up. Local games are one thing," the woman says, shaking her head, "But the world series?"
He smirks at her, refilling his mug with coffee. "Hey, some of us were busy."
"Yeah, yeah, rub in your gainful employment a bit more, I might have missed it the last hundred times." She smirks back. "On the other hand, freak watching? I think I might prefer baseball." She glances down at a watch, taking up a more alert stance as she adjusts her gun a little. "Talking of boring and painful, you better finish your coffee if you don't want a lecture from Todd."
The man makes a face, even as he sets down his coffee cup. "Thanks for the reminder, like that asshole needs a reason. He's still pissy about having to scrap his personal project after those two test subjects had to be trashed." Despite his grumbling, he clicks on a recorder. He adopts a more formal tone; "Initial notes: Subject 0274 does not display any visible difference in reaction when calm control is employed two minutes after two hundred forty volts than when after the same length of time for two hundred volts. EEG reading tomorrow before three hundred -"
*
[Video 2]
“—you promised! You promised you wouldn’t do this again!” Nico's hands are gripped in his black hair, making it stand on end instead of it's usual slicked-back shape. His face is red, as if he's been crying. "And you did it to her! How could you hurt Ruby? How could you?" He's pacing alongside the door to a cell; a clean white room with a stack of books and a bed that Clancy is sitting, on cross-legged. He looks annoyed but otherwise unfazed by Nico's breakdown.
Clancy's eyes shift over to where Ruby has just run into the sight of the camera, arms coming up to cross over his chest. Nico turns to her too, tears in his eyes. "Ruby - he can't keep getting away with it! He can't! You have to make him leave, just let him go, before -"
"Finally," Clancy says to Ruby, cutting off Nico without bothering to look at him now he has a focus for his attention. “Can you please get him out of here? I already have enough of a migraine.”
“If your head aches now, imagine how it’ll feel when I rip it off your neck,” Ruby snarls back.
Clancy smirks, looking her up and down. “It looks like you had an interesting night.”
“Shut up! Shut up! Ruby, he—” Nico sucks in a breath. “It’s like I told you — he can control other people’s bodies. He can move them around like puppets without them realizing it. He did it all the time, to all of the researchers, I know he can do it —and he made you — he made you send those messages through the server!”
Clancy smirks at Ruby. "Really had you going there, didn't I?"
“You...” Ruby looks sick, anger mixed with growing horror. She folds her own arms, like a defense against his words. "How long?" She demands.
“How long have you been having those ‘stress headaches’?” Clancy folds his hands in his lap. “They’re the worst, aren’t they? I’m glad I haven’t been suffering through them alone. But you should know you only have yourself to blame. Every time you enter someone’s mind, you form a connection with them—their memories, thoughts, will become yours. Each time you came into my mind, each time I got you while your defenses were down, you let me reinforce our bond. You’re the reason I was able to do this.”
“What did the messages say?” Ruby says, stepping up to the glass as Nico slumps down against a wall, hiding his face in his hands. “Who were they sent to?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Clancy says. “You’re both clearly too emotional to understand."
*
[Video 3]
Ruby is standing by a whiteboard, facing Nico. Or facing his back, his shoulders bunched up with tension as he focuses on a computer in front of him.
"How would you do it?" She asks, jerking her chin in the direction of a blank space under the word 'Thurmond'. Nico turns at her question. He looks sick, face pallid and drawn, frayed and faded with exhaustion; he's not any older than he is on the barge but in worse condition.
He stares at her for a full sixty seconds of awkward silence before he takes a tentative step closer. "It doesn't matter what I think."
“You said I wasn’t paying attention to the details,” She prompts. “What did you mean by that?”
Nico looks down at the floor, running his shoes over the tile. “The Oasis plan is okay,” he says, finally. “The way we have it now makes sense. Based on the size of the camp, there’ll only be two or three camp controllers, and it’ll be easy for you to figure out who is in charge of security and sending the status updates to their network. It won’t work that way at Thurmond.”
He wrings his hands, still not looking up at Ruby. “There’s going to be, what, two dozen camp controllers in the Control Tower? That was the estimate in...in Clancy’s files. Its position at the center of the camp means that anyone forcing their way in through the gate is going to have to fight through all of the rings of cabins to get to it to subdue the PSFs and controllers inside, and by then the camp controllers will have called for reinforcements. Even if you found a way to subdue all of them, it would still be too late. All they’d have to do is turn on the White Noise and we’d be done. The power generator and backup generator are all on the camp premises, and I have a feeling cutting the power would automatically trigger an alarm on the military’s network.”
Ruby hesitates a second, clearly trying to summon up resolve that had been lost as he'd laid out the problems. “So we’ll need a bigger attack force. One that can work faster, get them in and out.”
“Liam’s idea about trying to get the parents to storm the camp might work,” he offers, “but its success depends half on us being able to inspire civilians to revolt and come after the camps, and half on whether or not the PSFs would fire on civilians or figure out some other way to deter them.”
“He has an actual plan?”
“Not in the technical definition of the word. I just heard some kids asking him about what he would do.” Nico shrugs. “His option isn’t perfect, either.”
“Is there a third option?”
Finally Nico moves, with tentative, halting steps, walks to stand beside her, though he doesn't take the marker she offers and still shrinks away a little. "Are you sure you want to know?”
“Try me.”
“The only way I can think of to disable the camp controller’s access to the camp’s systems—not even disable or disarm the system itself, but lock them out and keep the system running so no one outside notices anything amiss—is to install a Trojan horse program in their system and control it remotely. They’ll be so disoriented that the tactical team will have an easier time of it.”
“Is that something we could upload into their server?”
“No, the programs don’t install automatically like a virus. Someone has to install it,” he says. “And with all of the security safeguards in place, I don’t think one of them would carelessly download any kind of email attachment.”
“So someone would have to go into Thurmond and install it before the assault. But the camp has been closed to new kids for years.”
“They take escaped kids back into the camp they were originally processed in,” Nico says quietly. “I already started coding the Trojan horse. Cole told me to...”
Ruby holds up a hand, cutting him off. “Cole approved this already?”
He nods, eyes wide. “He said he’d talk to you about it. I can have it ready in a week. They’ll be powerless to stop it once the program is installed.”
Ruby's face registers every bit of her sudden horror. "No. No way -"
“I meant me,” Nico says quickly. “Not you. I could bring the Trojan horse program in on a flash drive, the same way we’re bringing the cameras into Oasis. Glasses frames. Have you seen them?” Nico crosses out of view of the camera, coming back with a pair of glasses with black plastic frames.
Ruby leans against the desk, seeming to need the support to stay vertical. “Nico — no.”
“It’s already installed — right there,” he says, ignoring her as he points.. “This is the camera, and this is just a screw the frames don’t need. We had to make them seem as real as possible. Tommy said they’re fine, so he’ll get this pair. For Thurmond, maybe I could take one of the thicker frames—break up one of the arms that hooks behind the ear and replace a piece of it with a small flash drive? It’s either that or embedding it under my skin, but they still do strip searches, don’t they? The cut would be too obvious.”
“Nico!” She interrupts him. “Listen to me! No. There’s no way in hell you’re going back in there! Even if they brought you back into the camp, how would you get yourself into the Control Tower to upload it? You haven’t been there since the camp changed. They don’t just let you walk around unsupervised. Every move you make in there is choreographed down to the minute. And it’s the most fortified building in the camp.”
He pauses, thinking. “I’d need to observe the schedules of the PSFs, figure out a moment I could slip away. It doesn’t matter if they catch me in the end, not really. It would be okay...I would get to...there’s not anyone left for me now that Cate’s gone. And this is how I could make it right.” His voice drops to a whisper, almost inaudible. “This is how I could make it right for Jude.”
Ruby stands straight at that, whirling to face him fully. “Throwing yourself into danger...throwing your life away...what would Jude say about that? What would Cate say? I haven’t been a good friend to you these past few weeks, but Nico, I swear to God —please, I forgive you, I do, I understand what happened and I’m sorry I treated you the way I did. I’ve been up in my own head too much, and it was hard for me to see things clearly. But please listen to me—”
“It’s okay.” Nico’s voice is hoarse.
“It’s not!” She pauses a moment, when she goes on it's obvious she's trying to keep her tone calm. “We can’t change what happened in Los Angeles. I was angry — I was so damn angry that he just...slipped away, and I couldn’t save him. I should have talked to you, should have helped you, or at least tried to understand what you’d done. I let everyone down, but it was easier to blame you. It hurt less. But the truth is, I knew what Clancy was capable of. I should have tried to confirm some other way that what he said was true. And you know what? Jude would have wanted to go anyway, even if I said no.”
“He was my best friend,” Nico chokes out.
“I know. But...it’s different with Clancy, isn’t it?” She says quietly. “Rules don’t apply when you love someone. And that’s how it was with Clancy, right? It’s not like how you loved Jude, or the way I love Chubs. You trusted him, and he took your words and twisted them for his own ends. I was so angry with you for believing him, for giving him everything you did. But I know firsthand that people are capable of doing things for the people they love that they never would have considered before.”
Nico buries his face in his hands, letting out a shuddering breath.
“I didn’t mean to ruin everything,” he whispers. “I trusted him. All the intel I gave him, he swore he was using to help us and I thought...”
“You thought that he would help keep us away and safe, didn’t you?” She finishes. “I know. It sounds to me like maybe you fell into my pattern for a while there.”
“I don’t know why — I knew it was wrong, that it was bad, but he was good. When I knew him, he was good and he helped me. And I just extrapolated it would apply to everyone else. The only reason you were there was because I forecast the results incorrectly. I didn’t factor all of his behavioral outliers in.” His voice grows too soft to hear for a few moments, blocked entirely as Ruby leans in to listen.
“I’m sorry,” She says. “For not letting you explain. For acting the way I did and not being there for you.”
“I have to fix this,” he says, voice ragged, “I have to make things right."
