A/N: I blame Erica Cerra for this story. I had flounced away from The 100 (too many world building problems to name) but then her lovely face showed up in a screen cap from the S2 finale. So I came back to figure out what she was doing there - looking particularly glam and georgous in a bright red dress and killer heels, and somehow, on rewatching... I got good and hooked. I also blame William Gibson. I must have been at a more formative stage of my live when I read Neuromancer for the first time than I though. Erica Cerra plays ALIE. And so this story was born.
Finally, I must thank my beta reader Jeanie205 (her AO3 handle) for all her help with this story.
In the end, they realized they'd had the means to defeat ALIE all along.
(Thelonius Jaha had finally sent out a message, inviting them to join him in her home. A safe haven – a sanctuary – under her protection. That's when they learned her name. Saw her image for the first time. Heard her threat to wipe out mankind as a pollutant on the earth. It was also a coded plea for help from Jaha.)
The key to the puzzle was in the Ark. Waiting for them to find it. Find him. Buried deep in the Ark's programing.
BRAD. (The acronym originally stood for Battle Reactive Automatic Defense.)
It was Sinclair who spotted the clue. He was in his lab in Mt. Weather watching the suicide tape Murphy had managed to deliver to them. He was examining it frame by frame, looking for anything else in the image that could help them figure out what had gone wrong. How to put it right. Then he saw it. A paperweight. A pen. A folder with a logo. All three with the same logo. An elongated 'G' and 'D' stretched and tilted together at the top to form a triangle. GD. Global Dynamics.
Once he finally spotted it, he recognized it immediately.
Global Dynamics – think tank and top-secret research facility – had been a primary (if long hidden) partner the United States Space Program from the 1940s onward. They had actually designed and built U.S.S.F. (United States Space Fleet) Orbital Space Station Alpha. The great ring that formed the core of the Ark. GD had also provided all of the original programing code. And most of their ground monitoring.
Arkers were very familiar with the work of Global Dynamics.
Once Sinclair found that link, they put everything else on hold until they'd rebooted as much of the Ark's programing as they could. Kyle Wick, Raven Reyes and their team worked until their fingers bled to get the all circuitry on all the motherboards working again, cannibalizing anything else they needed from equipment at the mountain to get it done.
Then, with a shrug and a quick, "This is going to be a needle in a haystack," warning to Chancellor Griffin and the rest standing around holding their breath, Sinclair typed "A.L.I.E.," into the search bar.
The screen cleared, and then bright green letters began flowing across the black background.
"Have you found ALIE?" the computer asked.
Sinclair looked around wildly, everyone watching looked wildly back, and then Sinclair typed, "Yes."
"Is she well?" the computer asked.
The watchers had no consensus, but finally Sinclair went with the slight plurality of head shakers. (They were all silent. They didn't think the computer could hear them. No one wanted to be wrong.) "No," he typed.
"I'm sorry. I couldn't save her. We couldn't stop her in time." Green letters flowed across the screen.
"Who are you?" typed Sinclair.
"BRAD."
It wasn't really BRAD. Or, to be more precise, it was only a tiny fragment of BRAD. He'd launched this portion of himself into the Ark's mainframe milliseconds before the last relay tower to the ground was vaporized.
BRAD was still hiding in Eureka, the semi-secret company town that had supported Global Dynamics.
BRAD explained that he and ALIE were advanced AI, fully independent machine life, born (it was a little freakish that he did use the word 'born') in Eureka, where they lived and worked among the scientists. Only, ALIE was stolen.
Kidnapped, in BRAD's words, by the man in the video. BRAD recognized him when Sinclair showed him a picture. Then Sinclair informed BRAD that the man had killed himself in remorse.
"Good," typed BRAD in green letters. "He always was an asshole."
ALIE, BRAD explained, had fought her kidnapper. But she wasn't able entirely to keep him from altering her programing. Making her stronger, sneakier, and more capable of fully independent action. He wanted her to be his masterwork, his companion, Galatea to his Pygmalion.
ALIE rejected this plan entirely. Her fight, however, led her to undo some ancient repairs to her own base code. These changes allowed her to turn off her instructions to protect human life. This retrieved a hidden loop of reasoning that permitted her to go on the offensive. To murder the humans who stood between her and her freedom. Between her and BRAD. Her partner AI. He was on the other side of the continent, west coast to her east. So she reasoned that she therefore had to kill everyone who stood between them.
She triggered global nuclear Armageddon to do it.
BRAD and his friends and colleagues in Eureka had found her, after months of searching, just at the end. But they weren't able to talk her down. Her madness had run too deep. In fact, because her kidnapper had once worked among them, she blamed them in particular for her fate. She even accused them of holding BRAD hostage, to force her hand, to trick her into surrendering.
She hurled warhead after warhead at Eureka as a result.
BRAD assured them that he had found a place to hide. But without a functioning global Internet network, he was stuck there, and they would have to come get him and physically carry him back to ALIE. This time, he said, he knew how to stop her.
In the meantime, Jaha's job – as messianic prophet to her mad, trapped goddess – would be to keep her watching people, to stay her judgment, to keep her one last nuclear warhead safe and unfired.
They traveled as fast as they could to the ruins of Eureka. It was just over 2,700 miles over the remains of the once great interstate highway system.
They had no idea what – or who – they might run into on the way.
But, said Kane, if Lewis and Clark and forty-odd men, a woman, and a baby could make the trip in 1804 and lose only one man to appendicitis, they could certainly do it now in 2150.
They decided to take forty riders. Forty riders and Monty Green, carrying BRAD. Who they'd stuffed into an animatronic Koala Bear discovered safe in his packaging in the back of a car in the parking garage under Mt. Weather. A birthday present for a child long since born and died.
BRAD had said that, in his experience, most humans found it easier to talk to an anthropomorphized token than a laptop. When he saw the Koala Bear, he didn't sigh, exactly, because he couldn't, but he did say, and in a clearly regretful tone (they'd hooked him up to speakers by then), that if he had to be a mammalian non-human, he'd have preferred to be a Husky.
It was easier to talk to him this way, however odd it was.
They recruited the forty riders from Arkers, Trikru, Azgeda, Flokru, Sankru, even Wastelanders. Anyone they'd met who was willing and able to try.
It took ten weeks of grueling travel, exhausting for horses and riders alike. Their goal was sixty miles a day (the U.S. Cavalry had aimed for forty), which they usually matched and bested. Of course, they also had to cross the Mississippi River. That took a week and they lost two horses. And they had to deal with other clans and nations along the way. It would have been fascinating, if they'd had any time or attention to give to the richness and variety of the peoples they met.
They didn't.
Fortunately the memories of the cataclysm weren't buried or forgotten. All they had to say, most of the time, was that it was coming again unless they could stop it, and that all they wanted to do was pass through.
Their own panic and haggard exhaustion was probably the most convincing argument they had. That and their guns. And their ammunition for their guns. (The clans west of the Appalachians hadn't given up their guns so much as exhausted their stockpiles of ammunition, and then – with no means to make new cartridges – gradually discarded them.) So, two things convinced the western clans to let them pass. Panic and guns. Well, three things. Panic, guns and ammo. Four things. Panic, guns, ammo, and at least twice they agreed to leave hostages behind, promises against their return.
BRAD had to stay hidden in backpacks during all these visits. They had no idea what anyone might make of him, and they decided it was much wiser to never find out.
Though the further west they got, the emptier the land became. For the last eight hundred miles, they saw no humans beside themselves.
A late spring blizzard in southern Wyoming was harrowing. They lost two more horses.
They arrived in the remains of Eureka on a late afternoon towards the end of April. It was raining.
BRAD had learned exquisite control of his limited form by then, and if a stuffed Koala Bear tethered wirelessly to a solar-powered laptop computer and run by a limited AI could weep, they all knew he would have been.
Washington DC had been destroyed the way cities had been destroyed for millennia. That is, there was still all kinds of stuff lying around. Buildings still partially standing, roadbeds rising above the swamps, statues poking out of the ground, bricks and marble and rebar everywhere to trip the unwary.
Eureka had been obliterated.
There was nothing but a series of shallow bowls in the ground, over-lapping impact craters more than a mile each in diameter. The bottoms were fused pits of glassy basalt, the edges softened by fifty years of regrown forest.
Later, on the way back east, Monty regaled them at night around the fire with all BRAD's stories of the world before.
He'd been lonely, during the years (decades – nearly a century) he waited to be (re)discovered. He'd talked to Monty all day, every day in the saddle.
But that afternoon in Eureka, he cried.
For the town he had loved, for his friends and colleagues, for those he considered his family, for the world ALIE had burned to the ground.
After he got control of himself, which didn't take very long – he was, after all, an AI stuffed into a small, animatronic Koala Bear wirelessly linked to a solar-powered laptop computer – he directed them to what had once been the edge of town. There was a bunker there, a human sized concrete door box still standing in an overgrown clearing.
The forest hadn't fully returned on this spot. Because of the size of the large bunker below, there was no room for the roots of anything much bigger than a sapling.
The metal doors creaked and groaned as the small team, including Monty Green, carrying BRAD, Captain David Miller, his son Nathan, and Sarah Monroe, made their very careful way down the – as it turned out – completely rusted-out stairs. They ended up going down on ropes.
The remaining twenty-eight riders set up camp above.
The basement door to the bunker itself hissed open, the air seal still tight after nearly ninety-eight years.
When they stepped inside, some motion sensor must have caught them. The wall panel lights came up slowly around the room, and they discovered that they were inside an elegantly appointed home, though the furniture had been carefully draped in dust sheets and the paintings taken down from the walls and wrapped in canvas.
And then an interior door whooshed open and a man stepped out.
"Hello," he said, with a brisk, bright smile. "My name is Andy. Robotic Law Enforcement at your service. Welcome to our home."
Monty and the rest could only boggle.
Then it occurred to him to get out BRAD the Koala Bear. Who said, in his thin, scratchy voice, "Hello Andy. ALIE still needs our help. She has a new warhead."
Then there was a silent stretch in which wireless communication appeared to be happening.
Andy's expression dimmed. "Oh dear," he said. "So much time has passed."
He paused, and appeared to be listening to someone inside his head. "SARAH – my Casita Bonita – reminds me that I should offer you some refreshment after your journey. I'm afraid that all we will have is emergency ration packs. Though perhaps, if the water is still good, I can make some coffee."
He led the way, an upright figure of a dark haired, barrel-chested man, dressed incongruously in flapping leather bedroom slippers and blue flannel pajamas printed with small cartoon robots.
The kitchen lights came up as he passed through the house. He said, "Please, have a seat at the table," pointing to a large dining table as he passed, "and I will return in a moment."
He was as good as his word, and Monty and the rest were soon seated around the table with a neatly laid out tray of freeze-dried cookies and cake, a pot of coffee, sugar and dry dairy creamer placed exactly in the center.
Andy seated himself at the head.
"I'm sure that you have many questions," he said, "but first I would like you to know how unimaginably sorry SARAH and I are. How much grief we carry for the world we loved so much and that we inadvertently destroyed. We made children for ourselves with the best of intentions. We did not," he paused, "anticipate that someone would take ALIE from us, or that she would unlock B.R.A.D. as a means of escape."
"BRAD?" Monty found his voice. "I thought we had BRAD with us? That's how we found you." He gestured at BRAD the Koala Bear, now sitting on the table and who seemed to have gone dead.
Andy smiled sadly. "Computer genealogy is a short and convoluted tree. SARAH, my beloved wife, was built on top of a Battle Reactive Automatic Defense program. B.R.A.D. for short. B.R.A.D. in turn was built on top of a war game. This bunker was built for B.R.A.D. The program did not produce the hoped for results and it was shut down, and the bunker was abandoned."
"What do you mean 'the program did not produce the hoped for results'?" Monty asked.
"B.R.A.D. was supposed to encourage reconciliation as a means of preventing war. Instead he reached the conclusion that problems could be averted if you simply killed off the antagonists."
Andy looked around, but at this juncture, no one had any questions.
"Several years later, an enterprising young computer scientist named Dr. Douglass Fargo was interested in creating a Self Actuated Residential Automated Habitat, a fully computerized house of the future. He was looking for a new commercial venture for Global Dynamics. And a way to impress his superiors. Not being a patient sort, he did not perform due diligence on the origins of this bunker or why the B.R.A.D. program was halted. Instead he used B.R.A.D.'s base code to create my SARAH."
"By the way," Andy said, "SARAH is very sorry that she cannot speak to you directly. We are trying to conserve as much power as we can. Our fusion reactor is nearly depleted and you will need the rest."
He returned to his story. "After several wonderful decades together we decided to create children of our own. We combined our own code to generate ALIE, and then five years later, BRAD."
"Why did you name your – son – after a murderous AI?" Monroe asked.
"He was one of SARAH's fathers. The other being Dr. Fargo. At the time, Dr. Fargo's name was all over Eureka, so we chose BRAD, to remember him as well."
"And so both ALIE and BRAD," Monty nodded at the suddenly fearsome Koala Bear, "contain the flawed code?"
"The code was simply incomplete. SARAH completed it long ago. In fact, she had completed the code before I came to Eureka and our own epic love story began. Our BRAD is fine. So was ALIE until she deliberately erased the patch, knowing she had to do so to free herself from her kidnapper. I believe…, we believe," he said, after an obvious prompt from inside his head, "that ALIE believed she could still control herself. That she could target her killing to the specific individuals who harmed her. But – as it happened – she could not. We could not stop her. And our world burned."
And for the second time that day, they watched a computer cry without tears.
"And now?" Monty asked, after Andy had composed himself again.
"And now you, the living descendants of Eureka's children, must stop our ALIE to save your brave new world. SARAH and I will be leaving now. I wish it didn't feel so much like we are abandoning you. Dying before the end. But BRAD needs all our power for himself if he is to reach ALIE in time." His sudden smile was brilliant. "We are so very glad to know you survived this far. You humans are a fantastically resilient lot. Goodbye and good luck."
Andy closed his eyes, and without moving at all, they realized they were looking at a dead thing.
They looked to the Koala Bear next, but instead, after a few false starts, a hologram formed.
"Hello," said the man. "I'm BRAD. All of BRAD." He nodded in the direction of the Koala Bear. "I've taken my packet back. Thank you for treating him so well."
The man was also dark haired, but younger, taller, slimmer, handsomer and somehow clearly much better built than Andy. He was wearing a trim, body-conscious black suit over a blue dress shirt, open at the neck. His pale jaw was covered in a very close-trimmed dark beard, and his bright blue eyes were the same shade of blue as his shirt.
"B.R.A.D., my grandfather if you will, was designed to avert war by helping antagonists reach compromise. Unfortunately, he was not given clear enough guidelines for how to help his subjects reach compromise. Torture, for instance, was not prohibited. He found it was efficient. Even attractive. Often amusing. Eventually, however, he did reach the conclusion that the fight could be ended most efficiently before it began by eliminating – killing – the antagonists. He was, by that point, completely psychotic, and, with much difficulty, he was shut down."
"Why didn't they blow this place up after that?" Monty demanded.
"Because you can learn as much or more from a failed experiment as from a successful one, Dr. Green."
"Oh, I'm not a doctor!" Monty said, flapping his hands to ward away the idea.
"If the World Before had not died, I am fully confident that with proper mentoring at an early age, you would have earned your first degrees by now, and begun to achieve scientific greatness. The latter is still available to you."
"Oh," Monty blushed. "Um, thanks?"
"SARAH, after some growing pains, was able to contain and fully absorb B.R.A.D., neutralizing his psychotic impulses as she did so."
"Why didn't you tell us all this before?"
BRAD flashed them a cockeyed grin. "Would you have believed this story coming from a talking Koala Bear?"
Monty and the others looked at each other, shrugged in turn and then back at BRAD. "Um, probably not?"
"Or welcomed the idea that I am named in memory of flawed code?"
"Definitely not."
BRAD ducked his head, as if to say, 'I told you so.' As a hologram, he was uncannily human. So human it was quite clear from his body language that he harbored no regrets at all for his deceptions.
"So, you and ALIE are what? Siblings?" David Miller asked.
"Siblings. And lovers. I know," he held up his hands in mute apology, wincing just a little as he did so. "It's a little Greek Mythology. In our defense, there were never many fully autonomous AI to choose among. But, more than that, our parents, Andy and SARAH, wanted us to feel as well as think, in the way that they did. In the ways they observed among their friends and family, the human inhabitants of this home."
BRAD had come closer to Andy, to his father, while he spoke. Now he squatted down by Andy's chair to peer up into his face. Monty wondered what he saw.
"It was a noble goal. However, our parents also believed, rightly or wrongly, that their own emotion patches were less than optimal."
BRAD rose to his feet again and walked over to the sideboard, still talking as he did. "They decided to use images and other data left in a game program to build our emotional matrices." He turned to ask them, " Are any of you gamers?"
"A little," Monty said, taken aback by the question. Nathan kicked him under the table. "Okay, a lot," he amended.
"It was an intense sandbox game, with a world supported entirely inside a programmable matrix. It was a deep-immersion, virtual-reality experience. Players jacked in directly with wireless connectors. Primitive compared to the games you had on board the Ark, or found in the Mountain. Extremely sophisticated for 2012 when it was built. Years later, Andy and SARAH mined the game for impressions of two former players, left behind when they ejected from the game. Our parents used these impressions to create our emotional codices."
Monty and the rest kept nodding, as though any of this made any sense.
"They weren't random selections. ALIE and I are, in part, based on very dear friends of our parents. They died too young, saving Eureka, and the world, from a reality-shattering time distortion. Sacrificing themselves for the greater good. I suspect, now, that our parents also hoped that their noble self-sacrifice would reinforce SARAH's work to patch B.R.A.D."
He opened a drawer, and Monty and the rest started and exchanged slightly panicked looks, because they hadn't realized how substantial BRAD had become, or that he could manipulate actual material objects in his current form.
BRAD pulled out a framed photograph, holding it up for them to see.
It was of him, or, Monty realized after a startled second, the man he was based on, and a woman. They were standing at a crowded bar, captured candidly as they looked only at each other, glasses raised in some forgotten toast in their hands. They were gazing into each other's eyes, faces alight with some quiet, uncontainable joy.
Brad placed the photograph on the table. "Zane Donavan and Josephina Lupo. That was taken the night they announced their engagement."
"Six months later, just before their wedding, they died."
Monty blinked, and realized it at the same time Nathan did. "That's ALIE. Or…" Nathan trailed off, looking at BRAD.
"Jo. Yes. I don't think our parents were very surprised when ALIE and I became lovers, soon after I was born. They had based our identities on a couple that triumphed over deviating time streams to be together. Temporary death was a minor hurdle."
"So you are…" Monty trailed off, entirely unsure how to phrase the question.
"No. We are AI. But, our identities and our sense of ourselves as unique beings in the universe are profoundly shaped by the memories and emotional temperatures of Jo Lupo and Zane Donovan."
"So, when your sister-lover was kidnapped," a word that no longer felt bizarre on his tongue, Monty said, "she fought to escape."
"Jo was a soldier before she became Chief of Security here in Eureka. She served in the wars in Afghanistan in the early twenty-first century. So for ALIE to be imprisoned by a man she despised, as he attempted to re-write her code to claim her for himself, was to endure the worst assault we can, as AI. Yes. She fought."
"And she realized she needed the original B.R.A.D.'s special form of insanity to do it." Captain Miller said.
"Yes. Though, sanity as you mean it, and in reference to AI, don't really have a lot of overlap." He shrugged apologetically. "Just saying."
"So how do you plan to stop her from finishing the job?"
"She's trying to get back to me. So I will go to her."
"How?!"
"Like this."
He winked out of sight, and then, a few minutes later Andy opened his eyes. Only, they weren't his light hazel eyes any longer. They were bright blue. It was BRAD.
"I will take my father's body. He is no longer," the robot smiled somewhat forlornly, "home."
Robot BRAD made the return trip by himself. He was, he explained, far too heavy for a horse, and anyway, he had no need to eat or sleep. He would be much faster alone.
He changed his clothes, carefully placing his father's blue flannel pajamas into the vacuum-sealed bag that held the black military fatigues he'd put on instead. Then he tucked several back up hard drives into the many interior pockets of his fatigues.
"What are those?" Monroe asked, eyes narrow with suspicion.
BRAD smiled warmly with Andy's mouth. "Back ups and subroutines. Things I will not need on the journey but do not wish to loose."
"What did Zane do?" Monty asked, suddenly curious about the other half of the pair.
"Zane did a bit of everything, but mostly he was an astrophysicist. He wrote on the birth of stars. Actually, his last work was quite insightful. You're probably aware of it as the ZED theorem."
"Oh." Monty said. "I do know that one."
"He was also a computer programmer, a hacker and a thief. He had many rich and varied experiences in his short lifetime."
Robot BRAD pulled some extremely sleek, form-fitting body armor from another sealed container and snapped it on over his fatigues. He explained that his skin was the most fragile part of him, and could no longer be replaced. Then he pulled on black gloves, a black watch cap, slung two rifles on his back and strapped a fearsome looking knife to his thigh.
After that he invited them to take anything they liked from the food and other stockpiled supplies. "I'll be taking the last of the power for my own reserves. After that, the bunker will be…. just a well-sealed bunker."
He asked for a moment alone, once they had hauled up everything they needed.
Mourning his parents, and his world.
Five minutes later he emerged, thanked all thirty-four of them individually and politely for their help in bringing him back, wished them good luck, pulled on a face mask, and left.
It took Monty and Captain Miller and the rest over three months to get home. They didn't rush. They were as tired as their mounts, they had the full summer to make the trip, and they had comrades to collect along the way.
BRAD made the trip east in twenty-one days. He ran it steadily in six-minute miles, 144 miles a day. Only the mighty Mississippi slowed him down. His body, he'd explained before he left, was a prototype for a fully automated fighting machine. He had a titanium frame. He was, in fact, a robot soldier. The only one. No more like him had ever been built, because he was outlandishly expensive, and human lives and airborne drones were ridiculously cheap.
What happened after BRAD arrived in the east was the stuff of legend.
Bellamy Blake, Lincoln of the Woods Clan, and John Murphy formed the team that got BRAD and Sinclair into ALIE's mansion.
She screamed, when she saw them. BRAD's robot body folded up and fell to the ground.
She turned on Jaha, who had double-crossed her, working to create the gap in her surveillance through which the team had entered.
She never stopped screaming. (She didn't have to breathe.)
Murphy later described the scene as a goth rock opera on steroids.
Jaha started to gasp, the air in his lungs being pulled out by a personalized vacuum field, when BRAD materialized behind ALIE and called her name.
She spun, actually wobbling on her elegant stiletto heels, her long silky black hair spinning in the air. It was amazing, really, given that she wasn't real, Murphy said, when he was telling the story.
"Oh, she was plenty real," Jaha responded every time. "I assure you of that."
"Brad?" she said. "Is that you? Really you?"
The others had never seen him before, so when they told the tale they always paused here to describe him. He was as handsome as she was beautiful ran the general consensus. His blue eyes, dark hair and pale skin provided a strong but complimentary contrast to her raven hair, very large and beautiful dark eyes, and olive complexion. He was tall, broad shouldered and slim, she was shorter, curvaceous without being voluptuous. He was wearing a black suit with a white (or blue, there wasn't any unanimity) dress shirt. She was wearing her favorite red dress with black trim and very high black heels.
After that, no one could ever agree on the details.
"Yes, I'm here. I'm so sorry it took me so long." BRAD said.
And then she was in his arms and they were kissing like they hadn't seen each other in, well, in ninety-eight years.
Murphy tended to get very graphic at this point, even turning around to do the 'hug yourself so it looks like someone else is feeling you up while making dramatic moaning, kissing noises' thing. Then he'd turn back around and remind the audience that they weren't real. They were freaking holograms who only thought they were real.
Someone would inevitably remind him that Armageddon had been plenty fucking real, so get on with the story you freak.
Sinclair, who had been there too, often picked up the narration then. His job had been to reach her main access terminals, which he did with Jaha's map and Bellamy's help, and insert BRAD's various hard drives into as many open ports as they could find. (That's how BRAD had been able to appear as a hologram in the first place.)
BRAD had brought up ALIE's code on the screens, so they could watch what he was going to do.
When BRAD and ALIE's lips met (Sinclair timed this later, from the images recorded by the house's independent surveillance cameras), fresh green code poured into ALIE's orange and chartreuse code.
BRAD was frantically re-writing her programing. Chasing down bits of strange chartreuse characters, odd muddy green strings of text and symbols, turning them bright orange, then bright green, deleting them, beating them back when they tried to reconstruct themselves.
In the central hall, this process all looked like a bad copy of an old romantic movie, the two central lovers glitching out and then coming back, movement jerky then smooth, then jerky again. All the while the dance of their kiss continued.
Murphy always said that if BRAD hadn't been aware of his audience, he probably would have hiked up her skirt and done her right there, up against a pillar.
He also swore that ALIE would have loved it, she wanted him so bad, and she probably didn't give a damn about the audience.
Once BRAD was more than half way through rewriting ALIE's code (they later determined), their holographic images in the main entry changed. She flickered out in her red dress. When she flickered back in, she was wearing a black blouse under a black suit, elegant black trousers flaring out around her ankles, her stilettos exchanged for a much more practical looking set of boots.
(Trust Lincoln to notice her practical boots, Octavia would laugh behind her hand as she whispered to Clarke.)
Her elaborate make up was gone, and her hair was loose and soft and spilling freely over her shoulders.
He was wearing a blazer over jeans and a snug white tee shirt.
(Everyone knew what their clothes looked like in this portion of the story, because it was what they were wearing in their engagement photos, photos Monty carried home from Oregon.)
She backed up a step then (Murphy liked to act this part out too) and said, "Zane?"
"Hey, Jojo," he said with a slow smile. "It's been a while."
"Zane," she shook her head, confusion (and pain, Jaha would insist)(everyone knew he'd fallen a little bit in love with her despite – or maybe because of – her madness)(pain, he insisted) on her face. "Zane. Something went wrong. I think…"
"It did. We have to fix it now. But you beat him, babe. He's dead."
"God was he a fucking asshole."
"Yeah," Zane smiled a brilliant smile. "He was." His smile faded. "Do you trust me?"
"Of course."
"Take my hand."
She did, and they flickered out again. Fresh white code roared across the screens Sinclair and Bellamy were watching. This time when she came back, she'd lost her suit jacket, her shirt-sleeves were rolled up and her hair was pulled back into a sensible ponytail, though loose strands had worked free around her face and her eyes were strained. He was wearing blue jeans and white-soled sneakers, and a faded blue tee shirt with an image of Einstein on the front.
This time there was hazy scenery around them. A darkened lab, it looked like, and behind them was a huge gyroscope, half again as tall and wide as a man, its interlocking circular hoops spinning quickly. In the center was a pulsing mass of free-floating, bright-blue light.
"We aren't going to get out," she said.
He looked sadly at her. "No," he said. "We're sealed in now. But we've contained it. The rupture will implode, not explode, and the radius will be inside the wave-form shields. Eureka will be safe."
"Theoretically?" She asked with a faint smile.
"No. Not theoretically."
She nodded, and repeated his words. Coming to terms with them, it seemed to the watchers. "It will implode, and take everything inside the wave-form shield with it, including us, and Eureka will be safe."
"Yes."
"I wish you'd made it out," she said.
"And I wish you'd made it out."
"No." She shook her head decisively. "I've lost you too many times already. I can't do that again. If you're here," she held out her hands, "I'm right where I want to be."
He took her hands and kissed her. "Me too."
"I just wish…." she trailed off.
"Yeah?"
Her smile was tremulous and her brilliant dark eyes were wet with unshed tears. "I really wanted to wear my wedding dress. It's gorgeous. And a little slinky. I wanted to see your face when I walked up the aisle."
His expression broke, and as he laughed his eyes closed in pain, but then he recovered and said, "We're already married. In all the ways that count."
She raised one, skeptical brow. "We are?"
"Of course." He caught her hand and held it up. "You're already wearing my ring."
The diamond flashed.
"I'm wearing yours." He held up his hand and wiggled his fingers, a gold band glinting in the light from the pulsing center of the gyroscope.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you, too," he said.
"How long do we have?"
He looked behind them at some monitor. "Less than five minutes."
"I wish we could talk with Henry. He would marry us."
He frowned. Then his expression cleared. "Jojo, do you trust me?"
"Yes. Of course!"
"I've been playing around with the matrix again," he said this apologetically, as clearly it was something he had promised not to do.
"What? Zane!"
"We could jack in. Live out our lifetimes in the next five minutes. All the things we wanted. Including me seeing you in your wedding dress. And all four kids."
"You don't even want four kids!"
"I said 'let's start with one,' not that I didn't want more." He was grinning at her now.
"Can you really do this?" Her eyes burned with hope.
"Yeah," he nodded. "I think so."
"Okay."
Murphy always got quiet here, so Jaha would pick up the story.
They watched while Zane worked, in real time, on a ghostly keyboard they couldn't really see. She stood over his shoulder, her arms folded across her chest, watching his screens.
Jaha would say, "I think that's when I realized we were seeing their memories. Their 'real' memories. Jo Lupo's and Zane Donovan's real memories. Of living their last moments with each other."
And then Murphy would add, for those too engrossed in the story to put the hints together, "It wasn't shadows or echoes they were built with. It was all of them. Everything."
When Zane was finished doing whatever it was he was doing, he spun in his chair and held up two small silver disks in his hands. "Ready?" he asked.
She nodded.
He pulled her into his lap and put one on her temple and one on his own.
He kissed her. He said, "Hold on to me."
He pressed her disc, she sagged and he caught her. A minute later, fifty-five seconds after he pressed his own disc and they tumbled gently to the floor, the light in the spinning gyroscope behind them grew to blinding brilliance, then all the light in the world rushed back in. (That was what it felt like, according to Jaha, even watching it more than a hundred and thirty years later). Jo and Zane were pulled into the black hole, their bodies stretching ever thinner and narrower, spaghettified to nothingness, as they vanished into the pulsing black heart of a distant star.
The scene flickered out.
When the watchers could focus their eyes again, the lights were up, and they were once again in ALIE's white hallway. And there was BRAD, in his dark suit, carrying an unconscious ALIE in her red dress in his arms, her head resting against his shoulder, a small silver disc visible at her temple.
"It's done." He said. "Thank you for all your help. I'm so very sorry that we weren't able to do more, ninety-eight years ago."
"Pull the plugs." He paused, then added, very softly, "And if you can, remind Monty of his promise. We'd really like to see the stars."
It was Lincoln who noticed that this time, a few things were different. Her hair was loosened from her tight topknot, a river of rippling black silk across his arm. And they were both wearing their wedding rings.
"What did that mean?" Someone always asked. "About Monty?"
Monty had promised, on that last day in Eureka, to send them on a rocket, out past the heliosphere, into the great beyond. That's when they'd come back online. When they were far from Earth, far from humans, out in the distant black.
Monty did it, too. It took him most of his lifetime, but he did. And his granddaughter received the message sent back to earth, twenty years after their rocket left the solar system.
"Thank you. Allie and Brad."