A/N: Written for betweenthebliss as part of Yuletide 2018 exchange.
Big thanks to define_serenity, cassandrasfisher and The Cleric for betareading this story. I was quite nervous about posting it as my first fic for the fandom and they helped just as much on encouragement as their comments did for improving the story.
Every time Lizzie connects with virtual it feels like a homecoming of sorts, even when the mahogany tones that coalesce in her mind are not her home. She knows now her true home is people, family, the ones who would not give up on her – she includes Eddy in that despite what her parents say to dismiss his care simply as programming, eagerness to not disappoint his guest.
No bricks and mortar will ever matter to her the same way her family's old apartment once had, but virtual is where she feels at peace in an entirely different way. This is Eddy's place, built from what he knows. It is his comfort, as much as he can have, but to see him here comforts her too. She'd spent weeks trawling through the data that remained of his digital footprint – the evidence of his existence even when his presence was obliterated, the debris situated around the hole where he once was. She hadn't known what she was looking for until she'd found it; grateful for every lesson her mother had taught her on tracing routing of packets, so that she understood what she was looking at when she did. He'd made a backup.
It was never that easy though. He'd made a backup before he was deleted, yet it was incomplete, made up of what parts of himself he could quarantine in that fraction of a second that he knew he would be doomed. The first time she had booted him up he increasingly glitched all over the place, confusion at the blank spaces his programming pointed to. She'd shut him off before he descended into an unrecoverable condition. It was a pain to see him broken, but she knew he must be possible to put back together, just like she had been. He wouldn't be the same but he could be again.
He could come back, patched up, evolved. She could return the favor, pay him back for the diligence he had spent on her, and because...she wanted to. He was her friend. It might've been her humanity that told her she needed to save him, but that compassion, organic as it was in origin, was no less a type of programming, she was a product of her upbringing; she wouldn't abandon him. Weeks followed learning how to recode him to deal with the null errors his missing programming caused. The rest they could work on together, once she could talk to him again, to ask him what he wanted.
"Hello, Eddy. I have some more questions for you."
Each time she visits, he has a troubling expression – he never seems comfortable with her arrival, shifting from foot to foot, an antsiness he tries to restrain with his hands behind his back.
Poe otherwise looks the same as he ever did, in so far as his body shows. It's the little details of the virtual environment that give away how he is not the same anymore, because his avatar was never his complete self. He expanded to fill his locality, like a spirit of the place. His face was more than the features he would emote with for the sake of the humans. He was the hotel too, his individuality was also inherent in the patterns, the textures, and a million little things right down to the background noise that set the mood. She understands a little what that must be like from her explorations of the array – to be more than one point in space with the data flowing over you, the levels upon levels of knowledge available. Despite his upright and presentable appearance, she knows very well Poe is not the same in every other sense.
It's in the slice of the mahogany, where the wood panels are smooth until they are suddenly not and it cuts away incongruously. Less like a full panel one would expect, more like planks placed side by side, each perfectly fine but not seamless anymore, attention manipulated to skip from one to another.
It's in the missing keys on the board behind the desk and the almost empty bottles at his bar, down to the dregs.
It's in the way the parquet floor spreads out haphazardly past the middle point, becoming not the neat tiles but inconsistent at the edges, twirling out and then coiling into knots of wood. As if the orderly, manufactured design there gives way to something more suited to another realm.
"I must apologise, Miss Elizabeth, I am not prepared for guests. I...I," he stutters and she worries briefly she has missed something in his linguistic sectors; she's been trying so hard to work the kinks out so they can converse properly. After a few seconds, he continues, the hesitancy belying another issue he regretfully admits, "I'm afraid I don't know the protocol."
The almost unkindness of ravens in the entrance rafters bristle and call out at his discomfort – the eerie echo of the gun turrets he once had there in another instance of himself. His presence filling in the gaps differently again, trying to heal and not failing exactly. There's the elevator, button eternally lit, that never arrives. And she's navigated the winding corridors on the ground floor that lead to nowhere, looping back to the foyer. He knows what he was but it is gone in parts too large to make do without. He is lost in the woods, far from home. He is out of place and she is the only one who can help him make sense of what he has.
She steps forward, her hand gently touching his shoulder, "That's okay, that's what I'm here for. We'll figure it out together."
"You'll teach me?" he asks, looking up, surprise evident in the furrow of his brow. She doesn't know why he's uncertain she would, she doesn't know if he remembers everything he did for her, but she hopes that is part of what remains. The idea he's forgotten any of it makes her heart ache, but she will be there for him no matter what, whoever he is now he's still her friend.
"If you like, we can try. But Eddy, you don't have to be what you were before."
She means it as a reassurance, as good a one as she can give him, yet she spots his mind working overtime on the implications out in the open and knows he realizes what else is true too. She sees it in the moment his jaw clenches hard, mouth set in a tight line, right before he asks promptly, "I can't be what I was before, can I?"
"No," she says, leaving out any denial as useless, "We all change. You've seen that."
A sombreness settles over him at this. Is he worried he won't be good enough for his guests if he is different? But that is not what comes out. Instead, he speaks a slightly bitter utterance, a denial of his own. "Humans change."
"You told me once you wanted to be more human. You didn't need to be human, you needed to accept yourself for what you are."
He turns to her, the confusion back in full force – he is so out of his element. Like she was when he put a knife in her hand the first time. He gave her back her agency, gave her a route to the truth and to healing. Her gift to him is not exactly the same but it's equally meaningful. He may have expected her to show him a path, he did not, however, expect a path leading away from what he had been – she wants to lead him to a future, not preserve his prior state of being, that of someone locked away in a hotel waiting for approval.
"Your programming didn't make you any less of a person. And now you have the chance to figure out what would fit you even better. Who do you want to be?"
He is quiet for a long and intense minute, truly considering her question.
"I want to help people. I want to look after you, your family, Mr Kovacs. Anyone who will let me."
It's clear his decision isn't simply because it's what he knows or what his programming dictates; his programming doesn't say he must seek guests. Right now he has no purpose, he has free reign and still he chooses that, chooses more than what he had before. He will go beyond his limits, beyond the confines of his building. They will reconstruct him and he will fly like she did, go far above and make not just themselves, but the world, better by being in it once more.
They work for days on the specifics of his recoding. Line by line rewritten with care.
"It's time to go, Eddy."
"How? Where?"
His voice betrays his emotions, his fear of leaving this relative safety. He isn't wrong to fear, people won't like the resurrection of an AI – too many would think good riddance about his demise – and they'd like it even less if they knew the truth of the matter. He's an AI who isn't built as they would expect or demand; she's broken plenty of laws recoding him. She regrets none of it, she's proud of it. People don't like her sticking to a synth body either, the inherent distrustfulness of being able to change yourself like that. There's also a distrust of wealth and the power it brings, but that she gets. The thing is, their safety is an illusion, everyone changes. Her body is merely an in their face reminder. She can deal with that, but can Poe? Can he accept what he is now?
"There's your hotel...I arranged it to be repaired for you, but - I have another suggestion," she says, excitement sneaking into her words, making it sound playful, a dare.
"You have a plan?" There's a hint of intrigue in the quirk of his mouth as he replies.
"I have a plan. I wrote a few subroutines that could come in handy; I have a body for you, synth."
He raises an eyebrow but says nothing more and she accesses the controls of virtual to show him the authorization and provide the link to direct him into the state-of-the-art synth body she has bought.
He downloads himself without further question and she quickly disconnects from virtual on confirmation. She unplugs from virtual just in time to watch him transform the blank body into the visage she is familiar with.
"How do you get used to being so constrained?" He wiggles the fingers experimentally.
"It used to be my life, it comes back easily."
"But you missed it, the array, the expanse of information. Is that why you stayed in the synthetic? Ease of transition?" he asks, indicating to her body.
"Yes. And no. I kept this because it was me. As much me as any flesh else could ever be. I'm what makes it me. I don't need to be anything or anyone else."
He looks over his body, stretches and flexes various limbs. She watches in fascination his acclimatization. When he brings his attention back to her, it's with what might be tears forming in his eyes – one of the perks of realism a synth body can afford him with his new coding.
"I owe you so, so much," he says with a fond smile.
"You don't owe me, Eddy. It wasn't my money, not really."
He gets a look like he's considering possibilities and eventually lands on the right one. "Bancroft money?"
"Yup, Bancroft money. They call it compensation, 'justice' from the courts. The courts weren't the ones who got me justice. No. More like blood money. Might as well do something useful with it."
"You don't owe me either, Miss Elizabeth. I feared when you started on this venture that was all you thought of-"
"How many times do I have to tell you to call me Lizzie, just Lizzie. Of all the things you forgot that's the one thing I do absolutely want back."
"I shall endeavour to remember in future."
"Good."
He smiles and she smiles, reaching some bizarre silent impasse where neither can articulate everything they want to, unable to show the extent of their gratitude. Simply being themselves will have to do. They stand there as equals, friends, as a kind of family - found and made and remade, all the stronger for it.
"Want to go for a walk? Test out your new protocols."
"I do believe that would give me great pleasure, Lizzie."
"You're welcome."
"Is that not my line?" Poe asks, bemused.
"Definitely not, you're my guest here." She says, enjoying the cheekiness of correcting him. His response, however, is unexpected. He wears a strange smile, contemplating the weirdness no doubt, how alien it is compared to his former programming.
"I don't think I've ever entertained the idea of being a guest before."
"New experiences, Eddy. That's my gift to you."
"It's my first gift ever, though I rather think it amounts to more than that alone. We really are breaking out of my previous confines today."
She pats him on the shoulder and moves to get her coat, but he stands motionless, still in the exact spot when she turns back, thoughtfully watching her.
"I always wanted guests. Desperately. What I didn't realize, couldn't dream of, was that what I needed were the right guests, and then Mr Kovacs and your father and you, and so many others after that, came along. I wouldn't be here without you. Thank you."
There's something about the gravity of how he speaks that makes it feel like a farewell. It brings panic for the first time in months, but she quells the feeling, trying to think it over rationally. New is scary and in his new body everything, even the familiar, will feel new too – nothing is really the same for him anymore. The farewell is for what he was; there is always grief with change, even when the change is welcomed. Everything is okay, really. Anything that isn't okay, will be. They've been through so much together and come out the other side themselves. Other selves, new selves, but remaining themselves at their core, where it matters.
"-though I do believe that's enough sentimentality for one day," he says, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief, "Onwards to this brave new city I have only heard of and seen at a digital distance."
He finally moves, steps forward into line with her and she links her arm with his, an affectionate gesture not lost on him. Every detail of their friendship is noted and appreciated by him. She is always sincere and feels his sincerity in return, unlike anyone else appeared to afford him as an AI in his past. His future at least has the chance to be different, to fill in that gap in his life differently too, like she has started to.
"Let's go find your new beginning."