what's past is prologue (ellen tigh)
You could hear rapid gunfire in the distance, the noise of fighting barely drowned out by the sounds of the city. It was getting closer, and some people had evacuated the city days ago. You and the others hadn’t, because of your research. Others had stayed as well, either out of cynicism or refusing to face the facts. You didn’t care; you knew everything was taken care of for Saul and yourself.
You still feel fear when the apartment building shakes and the world outside the glass windows disappears behind a blinding flash. Your first thought is get to Saul. He was up the stairs, getting the mail while you chatted to one of your neighbors.
The next bomb strikes closer, and the shockwave shatters the windows and collapses the ceiling. You don’t even feel the debris that knocks you down, at least not until you’re on the floor and mentally cataloging your injuries. Suddenly leaving didn’t sound like such a bad idea, but you remind yourself that it wouldn’t have mattered where you went. The war had already devastated large parts of the planet, the consequences of having a culture that depended on artificial intelligence.
You’re calling for Saul now, because the upper level hadn’t collapsed. He’ll be looking for you. There’s nothing he can do for you, but you want to be with him before you die. You can taste blood in your mouth and you know you’re bleeding internally. You can’t feel your legs.
He reaches you and begins lifting some of the debris off, sending dust flying and making you cough.
“Saul,” you say, trying to get him to stop because you’re sure you don’t have long. “Saul, it’s okay. Everything’s in place. We’ll be reborn again. Together.”
He stops and stares into your eyes before another bomb falls, whiting out your vision.
*
You were at your grandfather’s funeral and you were five. You wanted to be anywhere else but that house. You cried the entire time because you didn’t want to be there. James Cavil didn’t like you anymore than you liked him, and your father never got along with him anyway so you didn’t understand why you were there.
It was a short service, but boring nonetheless. It went by in a blur, and you were thankful when it was over. You went back home and before going to bed, you whispered an apology to - well, you don’t know who, your grandfather or the Gods, whichever - because even at that age you knew you shouldn’t be grateful that someone had died.
*
It was a few years after that that you discovered art. Your first real picture was a landscape, the park just down the street from your friend’s house. Your mother hung it in the parlor, though it was barely worth framing. Still, she showed it to everyone.
“My Ellen did that,” she would say, and you would beam with pride.
*
You heard glass shattering, the scream of metal rending metal, a solid thunk as the car crashed into a pole. Your vision was dotted with spots, partially from the bright lights of the city and partially from the impact taking your breath away and slamming your head back into your seat.
You were eleven when your mother died.
The body in the casket, wearing a white dress your mother would never have worn and with pale, washed-out skin, barely looked like your mother. Looking at it, you could almost believe that someone had made a mistake and your mother was still alive. If you closed your eyes and concentrated, you could feel your mother standing next to you, her arm wrapped around your shoulders protectively. You cried harder than at your grandfather’s funeral. You loved your mother.
A priestess presided over her funeral, speaking kind words of Delia Cavil, doctor, wife, mother. Your father said nothing, not even a eulogy. You accepted the hugs and kind, meaningless words of people you only knew as your parents’ friends and colleagues. Afterward, you walked into the parlor and took down any and all pictures you had drawn and your mother saw fit to hang.
*
School didn’t mean much, after your mother’s death. Your peers looked at you as if you were a freak. Your teachers looked at you as if you were a creature to be pitied. You threw yourself into religious studies, because you had to try to understand why the Gods would take someone like your mother away from you. It helped ease the pain some.
You met Thea and Daphne and Meda, your first real friends since your mother’s death, in the class.
They had little interest in the technical classes you were all required to take, and preferred the artistic and religious courses that were optional. They planned to get away from the city once they graduated, enrolling in an art college in one of the other cities. You fell in love with the idea, because getting away from the city you grew up in sounded perfect.
*
It was at Castor’s house - Castor was Thea’s boyfriend, a year ahead of you and the girls, and he was handsome in an obvious way - that you got drunk for the first time. It was an expensive sort of wine and you didn’t really like the taste but it was thrilling.
Castor used a device he had designed himself to crack the lock codes to get into his parents’ liquor cabinet. You paid more attention to it at first, surprised he had built it. Castor was failing Cybernetics as far as you knew. You didn’t get the chance to ask him about it, because someone handed you a glass of wine, and you found the more you drank it, the better it tasted.
*
Your first boyfriend was Lucas... What was his last name? Priam? You were in your second-to-last year at school and he had recently moved to the city, and the girls insisted you talk to him because you still hadn’t had a boyfriend and you were sixteen, for Gods’ sake.
(They cited the Scriptures of Aphrodite and managed to get every quote wrong. You didn’t bother correcting them.)
After class, you introduced yourself to him as Elle, because that’s what they called you back then. He smiled, looking up from a sketchpad, and offered you a seat. Outside in the sunlight and sitting next to him, you noticed his eyes were a peculiar shade of brown that you had no words to describe.
*
You broke up two years later. At some point, you stopped dreaming about leaving the city and becoming an artist, but Lucas never did. You were shocked when he told you he was moving away to go to an art college, but he didn’t want you to come with him.
“We’re just going in different directions, Ellie,” he said to you over dinner. “I’m going to travel after college. You’ve got to stay in one place so you can get your degree.”
You only said one thing: “Are you serious?” After he answered, you stood up and walked out, calling for a taxi and ignoring him when he followed you.
When you got home, you threw everything that reminded you of him in the back of your closet, and didn’t answer his phone calls. You never saw him again.
*
Graduating from university - top of your class, too - was... not nearly as thrilling as you thought it would be. Really, you loved the whole experience, but graduating brought on equal parts relief and fear. Relief that the late-night study sessions, working last minute on term papers, and grueling tests were finally over; fear because what did you do now?
Your father actually managed to be there for the ceremony, even gave the keynote address because he was an alumnus (and there had been plenty of talk of nepotism getting you in, but that lasted half a semester when you proved you could keep up with the other students).
You felt like an actual family for the first time in years when he hugged you after it was over.
*
Your first job was a research tech for a pharmaceutical company. You did that for all of a year before deciding pharmaceuticals really wasn’t your thing. After that, you began working at one of your father’s research facilities. Everyone knew your name, knew you were the daughter of John and Delia Cavil. Talk of favoritism continued to plague you, but you were used to the whispers by now.
You studied the correlation between biology and cybernetics, learning more about where you stopped being a machine and started being a human. You were more suited for that, despite your lack of natural talent with cybernetics, and you found it all very fascinating. You learned, more in-depth than any schooling ever taught you, what made your bodies work, learned how those little mechanical parts left over from Kobol bonded with the cells.
By the time you published your first paper on the subject, your colleagues in the facility stopped talking about you as “Dr. Cavil’s daughter”. Finally, they called you Dr. Cavil, or Ellen.
*
It was at the facility that you met Saul. He was a biochemist who had taken an interest in your paper as well as your current research regarding healing nanorobots (originally started by your mother). You had little idea about him, beyond that he was well-respected in the facility, and the few papers you had read by him back in university. The two of you got into a heated “debate” concerning artificial intelligence that lasted for your entire shift, and even when it was time to go home you weren’t ready to stop arguing. You got the feeling he was growing tired of the subject, but he mentioned a nearby bar he frequented.
And well, you were never one to turn down the offer of a drink, so you coyly smiled as you accepted the offer.
Neither of you brought up artificial intelligence for the rest of the night. Instead, you talked about everything but. By the end of the night you were doing shots even though you knew you’d regret it when you had to wake up bright and early the next morning. You matched him, drink for drink, and you only stumbled a little when you walked out to the cab. And, okay, you might have needed his help to get your apartment door open. But only a little.
You did the same thing the next night (without the shots, because Gods that hangover was a bitch, what the hell did you drink?) and the night after that, and the night after that. It continued for the rest of the week, and you were beginning to think he would never ask you out on a real date when finally, he did.
Three months later and he proposed. You were married in a small religious ceremony, though he was an atheist. Some of your colleagues and a few friends from university were there. Even your dad came, much to your surprise. And if anyone heard you talking to yourself (actually a projection of your mother) in your dressing room before the walk down the aisle, no one said anything.
*
Married life brought a new set of rules. You never were good at following someone else’s rules. Your definition of fidelity was different from most.
There were rumors in the facility - there were always rumors no matter where you went: middle school, secondary, even university where you’d think everyone could be adults - and you ignored them as you always had. Back in secondary, Lucas never asked if they were true, not even the one about you and Castor (which, incidentally, was partially true).
At the time, you thought it was because he loved you and trusted you. After the breakup, you decided it was because it didn’t matter to him. You were never sure how you felt about that.
To his credit, Saul never asked about the rumors either. You could tell they bothered him, though.
It culminated in him catching you standing too close to one of your colleagues. With more emotional control than you thought he had, he waited until you were both home that evening before he brought it up. It didn’t take long to escalate into a fight, full-on shouting and you even threw a small sculpture the two of you picked up during your honeymoon at him. (It missed, because you’ve always had bad aim.)
You locked him out of the bedroom (he was damn lucky you didn’t lock him out of the house) and avoided him at the facility for two weeks before you both made up.
*
Researching organic memory transfer came about as a result of your father slowly losing his mind. You didn’t understand how a civilization as technologically advanced as yours didn’t have a cure for senile dementia, but you were going to come up with it. And organic memory transfer seemed like a good start, if not the solution.
Finding information about it wasn’t easy. What little was left of the technology was nearly impossible to find and any texts had been lost or deteriorated over time. It took months just to find any historical text more in depth than “we used to do this; now we have children”. Nonetheless, you rounded up all the information you could find.
More intimidating than finding information was construction. You knew you wouldn’t be able to do this project on your own. You had no talent for engineering, and though you knew how your bodies worked, you had never designed them. Finding someone good enough to build something from scratch as well as someone else who could make the bodies work with that something was just as hard as getting the information.
Surprisingly, finding Galen and Tory was easy. Galen was the top bioengineer for a subsidiary company of your father’s. Tory ran the biotech department of Cavil Cybernetics, designing the latest artificial intelligence.
You stumbled upon Sam. Tory had brought up that a neuroscientist would be beneficial to the project and then you came across an article of his. It was on a topic similar to your project, and the next day you contacted him at the university he worked at.
The five of you worked astonishingly well together, considering you had never done so before. Galen managed to build a prototype machine that would receive and store the memories in months while the rest of you were working on the copies still. Making copies of your bodies was simple enough for Tory, but bringing them to life was nearly impossible.
Sam couldn’t explain it. “They’re just not responding,” he sighed.
“It doesn’t make sense,” you said, hand submerged in the datafont, studying the readouts. “They’re perfect replicas.”
“I don’t know what we could be missing.” Tory had given up looking at the data and taken to pacing the room. “We’ve tried everything!”
“It’s definitely something on your end,” Galen spoke. “The machine has the data and it’s sending it to the body, but it’s not picking it up.”
“But why?” You slapped your hand in the liquid, breaking the connection and sending data slopping up the edges of the font.
“We’re not going to figure it out if we stay up all night,” Saul finally said. “Let’s call it a night and try again tomorrow.”
The others agreed, saying goodbye and filing out. You moved away from your desk and sat at Galen’s, sliding a hand into the datafont.
“Ellen?”
“I’m not leaving yet. You go on home, Saul,” you said without looking up.
He sighed, “Ellen, you can’t keep doing this.”
“Saul, we’re so close to getting this right...”
“You need to realize there is a high chance that this won’t work, even if we get the bodies to respond. No one’s ever transferred an entire conscious before.”
“No one since organic reproduction,” you corrected him. “Besides, the transferring isn’t the problem.”
“As far as we know right now.”
“Saul, what’s your point?”
“You might not be able to save your father.”
Your head snapped up, and you sat still for a moment, unable to process what he said. Once you were absolutely sure that he had, in fact, said what he did, you were out of your seat and your hand met his cheek with a loud smack, the force turning his skin red and leaving yours stinging.
“Don’t you say that again, Saul Tigh.” Your voice was deadly low, and you felt more determined and focused than you had in weeks. Keeping your momentum going vocally, you stared into your husband’s eyes and let your voice build, “I can do this. I can figure this out. I will get this to work!”
He stared back at you, in shock or something else, and then his eyes hardened and he nodded once. “All right. I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said, and side-stepped you, walking out.
You didn’t follow him, didn’t even think about apologizing, and instead moved back to your desk. You weren’t going to cry, not over him, not over what was said, and not over the possible truth in his words. You placed your hands back into the datafont, the liquid cooling the burning skin of your right hand. The data flooded your senses, submerging you in a world of code. Studying it as intently as you ever did, you scrolled through the lines, digging deeper and deeper, and then...
You had it.
*
The beginnings of war started not soon after you completed the first tests. It was a distant threat, and you doubted it would even reach your city. An AI uprising would be easily quelled, you thought.
Saul and Galen insisted on moving the technology to a ship in orbit, just in case. The five of you had numerous copies of your bodies ready, from the testing stages. Tory even managed to replicate the resurrection technology so that in the case of death, the consciousness was transferred into a waiting copy.
Your father died before any of it could be implemented.
*
There was gunfire in the distance, the noise of fighting barely drowned out, and getting louder as it moved closer. You thought maybe you should have left the city after all, if only to avoid this a little longer.
The blinding flash was unexpected and sudden, and the building shook underneath your feet. Get to Saul, you thought, because he was on the upper level, getting the mail.
The next flash was closer, and the shockwave shattered the windows and the ceiling fell in on you. You were knocked off your feet by the debris, and you could taste blood in your mouth immediately. Despite having the wind knocked out of you, you shouted for your husband. You tried to move, but you were trapped.
When you saw Saul’s face, you coughed out his name again. He was trying to get you out, but you knew it would do no good. You were dying. “Saul, it’s okay. Everything’s in place,” you reminded him. “We’ll be reborn again.”
You prayed that was true as your vision went black.
*
When you open your eyes again, you’re still coughing, and writhing in something slippery. Everything comes back to you in a rush and you feel like your head is going to explode, like you’re on fire and someone’s dumped you in ice, and every nerve ending is sparking to life, and it’s too much...
And then it’s over as quickly as it began, and your brain is interpreting signals properly again, like nothing was ever wrong in the first place.
You blink several times and wipe at your eyes, because the amniotic fluid is clinging to your eyelashes, obscuring your vision.
“Saul?” you cough out, and everything still hurts, and you wonder if that’s because of the transfer or the debris that fell on you. “Saul?”
“I’m here,” he says from somewhere on your left and you look at him. He’s kneeling next to the tub, already wrapped in a white robe, and he’s stroking your face like he thought he’d never see you again. You take him in, eyes examining as much as they can see to make sure he’s all right. You’re barely aware of what he’s saying, “I’m right here, Ellen. We’re all here. It worked.”
You smile, or try to, giddiness and success rising before the full force of what has happened can touch you, and you say, “Of course it did,” as if you never had any doubts.
You still feel fear when the apartment building shakes and the world outside the glass windows disappears behind a blinding flash. Your first thought is get to Saul. He was up the stairs, getting the mail while you chatted to one of your neighbors.
The next bomb strikes closer, and the shockwave shatters the windows and collapses the ceiling. You don’t even feel the debris that knocks you down, at least not until you’re on the floor and mentally cataloging your injuries. Suddenly leaving didn’t sound like such a bad idea, but you remind yourself that it wouldn’t have mattered where you went. The war had already devastated large parts of the planet, the consequences of having a culture that depended on artificial intelligence.
You’re calling for Saul now, because the upper level hadn’t collapsed. He’ll be looking for you. There’s nothing he can do for you, but you want to be with him before you die. You can taste blood in your mouth and you know you’re bleeding internally. You can’t feel your legs.
He reaches you and begins lifting some of the debris off, sending dust flying and making you cough.
“Saul,” you say, trying to get him to stop because you’re sure you don’t have long. “Saul, it’s okay. Everything’s in place. We’ll be reborn again. Together.”
He stops and stares into your eyes before another bomb falls, whiting out your vision.
*
You were at your grandfather’s funeral and you were five. You wanted to be anywhere else but that house. You cried the entire time because you didn’t want to be there. James Cavil didn’t like you anymore than you liked him, and your father never got along with him anyway so you didn’t understand why you were there.
It was a short service, but boring nonetheless. It went by in a blur, and you were thankful when it was over. You went back home and before going to bed, you whispered an apology to - well, you don’t know who, your grandfather or the Gods, whichever - because even at that age you knew you shouldn’t be grateful that someone had died.
*
It was a few years after that that you discovered art. Your first real picture was a landscape, the park just down the street from your friend’s house. Your mother hung it in the parlor, though it was barely worth framing. Still, she showed it to everyone.
“My Ellen did that,” she would say, and you would beam with pride.
*
You heard glass shattering, the scream of metal rending metal, a solid thunk as the car crashed into a pole. Your vision was dotted with spots, partially from the bright lights of the city and partially from the impact taking your breath away and slamming your head back into your seat.
You were eleven when your mother died.
The body in the casket, wearing a white dress your mother would never have worn and with pale, washed-out skin, barely looked like your mother. Looking at it, you could almost believe that someone had made a mistake and your mother was still alive. If you closed your eyes and concentrated, you could feel your mother standing next to you, her arm wrapped around your shoulders protectively. You cried harder than at your grandfather’s funeral. You loved your mother.
A priestess presided over her funeral, speaking kind words of Delia Cavil, doctor, wife, mother. Your father said nothing, not even a eulogy. You accepted the hugs and kind, meaningless words of people you only knew as your parents’ friends and colleagues. Afterward, you walked into the parlor and took down any and all pictures you had drawn and your mother saw fit to hang.
*
School didn’t mean much, after your mother’s death. Your peers looked at you as if you were a freak. Your teachers looked at you as if you were a creature to be pitied. You threw yourself into religious studies, because you had to try to understand why the Gods would take someone like your mother away from you. It helped ease the pain some.
You met Thea and Daphne and Meda, your first real friends since your mother’s death, in the class.
They had little interest in the technical classes you were all required to take, and preferred the artistic and religious courses that were optional. They planned to get away from the city once they graduated, enrolling in an art college in one of the other cities. You fell in love with the idea, because getting away from the city you grew up in sounded perfect.
*
It was at Castor’s house - Castor was Thea’s boyfriend, a year ahead of you and the girls, and he was handsome in an obvious way - that you got drunk for the first time. It was an expensive sort of wine and you didn’t really like the taste but it was thrilling.
Castor used a device he had designed himself to crack the lock codes to get into his parents’ liquor cabinet. You paid more attention to it at first, surprised he had built it. Castor was failing Cybernetics as far as you knew. You didn’t get the chance to ask him about it, because someone handed you a glass of wine, and you found the more you drank it, the better it tasted.
*
Your first boyfriend was Lucas... What was his last name? Priam? You were in your second-to-last year at school and he had recently moved to the city, and the girls insisted you talk to him because you still hadn’t had a boyfriend and you were sixteen, for Gods’ sake.
(They cited the Scriptures of Aphrodite and managed to get every quote wrong. You didn’t bother correcting them.)
After class, you introduced yourself to him as Elle, because that’s what they called you back then. He smiled, looking up from a sketchpad, and offered you a seat. Outside in the sunlight and sitting next to him, you noticed his eyes were a peculiar shade of brown that you had no words to describe.
*
You broke up two years later. At some point, you stopped dreaming about leaving the city and becoming an artist, but Lucas never did. You were shocked when he told you he was moving away to go to an art college, but he didn’t want you to come with him.
“We’re just going in different directions, Ellie,” he said to you over dinner. “I’m going to travel after college. You’ve got to stay in one place so you can get your degree.”
You only said one thing: “Are you serious?” After he answered, you stood up and walked out, calling for a taxi and ignoring him when he followed you.
When you got home, you threw everything that reminded you of him in the back of your closet, and didn’t answer his phone calls. You never saw him again.
*
Graduating from university - top of your class, too - was... not nearly as thrilling as you thought it would be. Really, you loved the whole experience, but graduating brought on equal parts relief and fear. Relief that the late-night study sessions, working last minute on term papers, and grueling tests were finally over; fear because what did you do now?
Your father actually managed to be there for the ceremony, even gave the keynote address because he was an alumnus (and there had been plenty of talk of nepotism getting you in, but that lasted half a semester when you proved you could keep up with the other students).
You felt like an actual family for the first time in years when he hugged you after it was over.
*
Your first job was a research tech for a pharmaceutical company. You did that for all of a year before deciding pharmaceuticals really wasn’t your thing. After that, you began working at one of your father’s research facilities. Everyone knew your name, knew you were the daughter of John and Delia Cavil. Talk of favoritism continued to plague you, but you were used to the whispers by now.
You studied the correlation between biology and cybernetics, learning more about where you stopped being a machine and started being a human. You were more suited for that, despite your lack of natural talent with cybernetics, and you found it all very fascinating. You learned, more in-depth than any schooling ever taught you, what made your bodies work, learned how those little mechanical parts left over from Kobol bonded with the cells.
By the time you published your first paper on the subject, your colleagues in the facility stopped talking about you as “Dr. Cavil’s daughter”. Finally, they called you Dr. Cavil, or Ellen.
*
It was at the facility that you met Saul. He was a biochemist who had taken an interest in your paper as well as your current research regarding healing nanorobots (originally started by your mother). You had little idea about him, beyond that he was well-respected in the facility, and the few papers you had read by him back in university. The two of you got into a heated “debate” concerning artificial intelligence that lasted for your entire shift, and even when it was time to go home you weren’t ready to stop arguing. You got the feeling he was growing tired of the subject, but he mentioned a nearby bar he frequented.
And well, you were never one to turn down the offer of a drink, so you coyly smiled as you accepted the offer.
Neither of you brought up artificial intelligence for the rest of the night. Instead, you talked about everything but. By the end of the night you were doing shots even though you knew you’d regret it when you had to wake up bright and early the next morning. You matched him, drink for drink, and you only stumbled a little when you walked out to the cab. And, okay, you might have needed his help to get your apartment door open. But only a little.
You did the same thing the next night (without the shots, because Gods that hangover was a bitch, what the hell did you drink?) and the night after that, and the night after that. It continued for the rest of the week, and you were beginning to think he would never ask you out on a real date when finally, he did.
Three months later and he proposed. You were married in a small religious ceremony, though he was an atheist. Some of your colleagues and a few friends from university were there. Even your dad came, much to your surprise. And if anyone heard you talking to yourself (actually a projection of your mother) in your dressing room before the walk down the aisle, no one said anything.
*
Married life brought a new set of rules. You never were good at following someone else’s rules. Your definition of fidelity was different from most.
There were rumors in the facility - there were always rumors no matter where you went: middle school, secondary, even university where you’d think everyone could be adults - and you ignored them as you always had. Back in secondary, Lucas never asked if they were true, not even the one about you and Castor (which, incidentally, was partially true).
At the time, you thought it was because he loved you and trusted you. After the breakup, you decided it was because it didn’t matter to him. You were never sure how you felt about that.
To his credit, Saul never asked about the rumors either. You could tell they bothered him, though.
It culminated in him catching you standing too close to one of your colleagues. With more emotional control than you thought he had, he waited until you were both home that evening before he brought it up. It didn’t take long to escalate into a fight, full-on shouting and you even threw a small sculpture the two of you picked up during your honeymoon at him. (It missed, because you’ve always had bad aim.)
You locked him out of the bedroom (he was damn lucky you didn’t lock him out of the house) and avoided him at the facility for two weeks before you both made up.
*
Researching organic memory transfer came about as a result of your father slowly losing his mind. You didn’t understand how a civilization as technologically advanced as yours didn’t have a cure for senile dementia, but you were going to come up with it. And organic memory transfer seemed like a good start, if not the solution.
Finding information about it wasn’t easy. What little was left of the technology was nearly impossible to find and any texts had been lost or deteriorated over time. It took months just to find any historical text more in depth than “we used to do this; now we have children”. Nonetheless, you rounded up all the information you could find.
More intimidating than finding information was construction. You knew you wouldn’t be able to do this project on your own. You had no talent for engineering, and though you knew how your bodies worked, you had never designed them. Finding someone good enough to build something from scratch as well as someone else who could make the bodies work with that something was just as hard as getting the information.
Surprisingly, finding Galen and Tory was easy. Galen was the top bioengineer for a subsidiary company of your father’s. Tory ran the biotech department of Cavil Cybernetics, designing the latest artificial intelligence.
You stumbled upon Sam. Tory had brought up that a neuroscientist would be beneficial to the project and then you came across an article of his. It was on a topic similar to your project, and the next day you contacted him at the university he worked at.
The five of you worked astonishingly well together, considering you had never done so before. Galen managed to build a prototype machine that would receive and store the memories in months while the rest of you were working on the copies still. Making copies of your bodies was simple enough for Tory, but bringing them to life was nearly impossible.
Sam couldn’t explain it. “They’re just not responding,” he sighed.
“It doesn’t make sense,” you said, hand submerged in the datafont, studying the readouts. “They’re perfect replicas.”
“I don’t know what we could be missing.” Tory had given up looking at the data and taken to pacing the room. “We’ve tried everything!”
“It’s definitely something on your end,” Galen spoke. “The machine has the data and it’s sending it to the body, but it’s not picking it up.”
“But why?” You slapped your hand in the liquid, breaking the connection and sending data slopping up the edges of the font.
“We’re not going to figure it out if we stay up all night,” Saul finally said. “Let’s call it a night and try again tomorrow.”
The others agreed, saying goodbye and filing out. You moved away from your desk and sat at Galen’s, sliding a hand into the datafont.
“Ellen?”
“I’m not leaving yet. You go on home, Saul,” you said without looking up.
He sighed, “Ellen, you can’t keep doing this.”
“Saul, we’re so close to getting this right...”
“You need to realize there is a high chance that this won’t work, even if we get the bodies to respond. No one’s ever transferred an entire conscious before.”
“No one since organic reproduction,” you corrected him. “Besides, the transferring isn’t the problem.”
“As far as we know right now.”
“Saul, what’s your point?”
“You might not be able to save your father.”
Your head snapped up, and you sat still for a moment, unable to process what he said. Once you were absolutely sure that he had, in fact, said what he did, you were out of your seat and your hand met his cheek with a loud smack, the force turning his skin red and leaving yours stinging.
“Don’t you say that again, Saul Tigh.” Your voice was deadly low, and you felt more determined and focused than you had in weeks. Keeping your momentum going vocally, you stared into your husband’s eyes and let your voice build, “I can do this. I can figure this out. I will get this to work!”
He stared back at you, in shock or something else, and then his eyes hardened and he nodded once. “All right. I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said, and side-stepped you, walking out.
You didn’t follow him, didn’t even think about apologizing, and instead moved back to your desk. You weren’t going to cry, not over him, not over what was said, and not over the possible truth in his words. You placed your hands back into the datafont, the liquid cooling the burning skin of your right hand. The data flooded your senses, submerging you in a world of code. Studying it as intently as you ever did, you scrolled through the lines, digging deeper and deeper, and then...
You had it.
*
The beginnings of war started not soon after you completed the first tests. It was a distant threat, and you doubted it would even reach your city. An AI uprising would be easily quelled, you thought.
Saul and Galen insisted on moving the technology to a ship in orbit, just in case. The five of you had numerous copies of your bodies ready, from the testing stages. Tory even managed to replicate the resurrection technology so that in the case of death, the consciousness was transferred into a waiting copy.
Your father died before any of it could be implemented.
*
There was gunfire in the distance, the noise of fighting barely drowned out, and getting louder as it moved closer. You thought maybe you should have left the city after all, if only to avoid this a little longer.
The blinding flash was unexpected and sudden, and the building shook underneath your feet. Get to Saul, you thought, because he was on the upper level, getting the mail.
The next flash was closer, and the shockwave shattered the windows and the ceiling fell in on you. You were knocked off your feet by the debris, and you could taste blood in your mouth immediately. Despite having the wind knocked out of you, you shouted for your husband. You tried to move, but you were trapped.
When you saw Saul’s face, you coughed out his name again. He was trying to get you out, but you knew it would do no good. You were dying. “Saul, it’s okay. Everything’s in place,” you reminded him. “We’ll be reborn again.”
You prayed that was true as your vision went black.
*
When you open your eyes again, you’re still coughing, and writhing in something slippery. Everything comes back to you in a rush and you feel like your head is going to explode, like you’re on fire and someone’s dumped you in ice, and every nerve ending is sparking to life, and it’s too much...
And then it’s over as quickly as it began, and your brain is interpreting signals properly again, like nothing was ever wrong in the first place.
You blink several times and wipe at your eyes, because the amniotic fluid is clinging to your eyelashes, obscuring your vision.
“Saul?” you cough out, and everything still hurts, and you wonder if that’s because of the transfer or the debris that fell on you. “Saul?”
“I’m here,” he says from somewhere on your left and you look at him. He’s kneeling next to the tub, already wrapped in a white robe, and he’s stroking your face like he thought he’d never see you again. You take him in, eyes examining as much as they can see to make sure he’s all right. You’re barely aware of what he’s saying, “I’m right here, Ellen. We’re all here. It worked.”
You smile, or try to, giddiness and success rising before the full force of what has happened can touch you, and you say, “Of course it did,” as if you never had any doubts.