Title: Flight of Shadows
Part One:
The Dark Side: Chapter One
*Slightly updated since first posting* same with Chapter Two
Author: Stormhawk
Rating: PG-13 *read note*
*This is the note*
In chapters 1-3 of this part there are a couple of gross…what I'll call Whitman scenes. Anyone who has read Whitman will know what I'm talking about. It's not that graphic but it's heavier than the other violence in this series. It's still within the PG-13 rating so don't worry.
Disclaimer: This all belongs to The Wachowski Brothers and Warner Brothers. And the Agents, don't forget the agents. Stef, Stevie and Carol are mine. Vincent Greer is Overlord Mordax's.
Notes: This is not for people new to the Agents universe. If you are there is required reading. Go read 'Whitman' and 'Reality' at the very least. Agents and You May Dream (By Overlord Mordax) are also recommended.
Stef's eyes are blue-gray, Whitman's are Azure. This is important to remember.
This is the first Agents fic to be uploaded chapter by chapter so be nice and review each.
Hey – I'm finally uploading them in HTML format. This is a good thing.
This story is in three parts, with at least five chapters in each part. Some chapters are shorter than others. I'm starting to become a fan of evil cliffies.
Word Count: 1886
Summary: Whitman left a dangerous imprint on Stef that makes her take on some of her traits. It becomes deadly when she decides to follow Whitman's path.
Please Read and Review.
It was 3.27am; Stef Mimosa was in her office aimlessly typing on her computer. Sighing, she wished for the 334th time that it were possible for agents to sleep. Even a screensaver mode would suffice, but they had nothing similar.
Agents must always be aware. It was the nature of their being.
Maybe there was a standby mode but she just didn't know about. After Whitman she had realized that there were a lot of things that she didn't know about.
Taking a break from typing for a few moments she let her hands rest on the keyboard. Dropping her head forward she yelped in shock as she saw her hands.
The code. She was seeing the scrolling green Matrix code. Visible just beneath her skin like some sort of living tattoo. She had had it happen once before, in the final stages of her code addiction.
Visible code like this was indicative that an overload was imminent. The last time they had cut the access before it had killed her.
The mainframe had denied her access to it. She shouldn't be seeing it; it wasn't supposed to be possible.
She shifted as quickly as she could to Smith's office. His office was larger than hers but the same furniture and same dull color scheme greeted her. He looked up from his own computer. "Yes Stef?"
"Two things Smith. One, I'm seeing code under my skin like I'm going to overload. Two – what the hell do you do at this time of night?"
"Paperwork mostly. What code?"
She walked over to him and held her hands out. There was nothing there now. It had disappeared, if it had even been there in the first place. "I saw code there. What's wrong with me?"
He took her hand and examined it. "I don't see anything."
"It was there a few seconds ago. I swear."
"This isn't my field. I don't know what to tell you. Go see Jones."
"Ok." She smiled weakly and shifted to the door of the tech agent's office. She knocked on the door.
"Come in," came his reply a second later.
She opened the door and stepped in. "Mimosa," he said with a slight nod, as he required one of the monitors to go blank.
"Jones, I…"
"Yes?"
"Um…" she looked down at her hands. She was starting to feel rather stupid, it wasn't there. Maybe she had just been hallucinating.
"Is something wrong?"
Stef swallowed her pride. "I saw code under my skin."
"I see. I wondered if this would happen."
"What?" why hadn't he said something? It was his fault that she had almost overloaded. It was his fault that she could have died.
It was his fault that…
She shook her head slightly. It wasn't his fault; she had lied to him and asked him for the access.
But it was still his fault for giving it to her.
All his fault…
"Would you like to sit?"
She sat down on the spare chair next to his desk. "It's an aftershock from the near overload."
Well, he would know what he was talking about. He had had the same addiction. "They happened to you?"
"They used to. Give yourself a few years. They will disappear within five years."
"Five years?"
"That is the upper range of the time frame. My own went away after three years." He tried to assure her, after all he was telling her the truth.
"So there's nothing wrong with me?"
"No. There isn't Mimosa. There's no need to worry."
"I'm not worried Jones."
"You aren't a good liar." Stef smiled, she could keep her secrets when she needed to. She had managed to keep a lot of secrets.
She really hadn't spoken to Jones a lot. He and Brown kept to themselves, working as partners or by themselves. But he didn't have the same animosity toward her that the combat agent did.
She had to ask him; it was something that she had been thinking about for weeks now.
She could have asked Smith, he would know the answer and wouldn't have a problem answering her but it felt more appropriate to ask Jones. Well, no time like the present.
"Jones?"
"Yes?"
"Was she…?" Stef didn't need to say which particular 'she.' "Was she a code addict like us?"
Jones sat back in his chair and thought for a second on how to answer her. Also, he was surprised with how blunt she was being. Usually it was, 'yes sir' or 'no sir' or answers with the absolute minimum of emotion.
"Yes and no. It will take a minute to explain."
"I've got a minute."
Jones sighed and started to explain it to her. "She was the first, you know this already. What you don't know is that before she came along we had never even considered turning a human into an agent. The mainframe hadn't even organized any experiments pertaining to anything similar until Smith suggested making her one of us when we found her body."
One of us. He had accepted her as one of them, now she only had to convince Brown of the same thing.
"Ok."
"There was no time for tests. The order was given for her body not to be flushed…"
"Flushed?"
"Access your files later. She had been dead for an hour already before we began the process. Honestly we had no idea what we were doing so for certain points we had to improvise."
"Improvise?"
"Since there had been no neural activity for an hour her encoded memories began to degrade. The degradation was very slow but nonetheless it was happening."
"She lost data?"
"A significant portion before we could stop it. If she had brought online in that condition she wouldn't have lasted more than a few seconds." He paused for a moment. "In hindsight that would have been a good thing."
"No kidding," Stef muttered darkly.
"But we did not know what she was going to become at that time so we had to…to bring it down to human terms…"
"I'm not human Jones."
"Nor are you a true agent. You are as close as you can become but for you most things are still on a human level."
Was that just a statement? Or was it an insult? Or some really strange sort of compliment? Compliments from agents, which are few and far between are always veiled.
"In human terminology we had to de-fib her."
Stef rubbed her hands and mimicked someone being zapped by the paddles. "Clear?"
With a slight hint of amusement crossing his face he nodded. "Yes, exactly but instead of electricity we used…"
"Code," Stef said poignantly, "you used code didn't you?"
"Yes. It filled the small but numerous gaps in her code and stabilized her. In a sense she was born from the same overload that almost killed us."
"But was she an addict?"
"No. She never chose to access the mainframe. But she may have if she had lasted any longer."
"Was it the code that sent her insane?"
"No one, not even the mainframe is certain as to the origin of her insanity. But whatever mistakes that we made with her we have apparently corrected for your transfer."
Stef bit her lip. Ouch. Score one for the geek. That was one of her unspoken fears that she hadn't even expressed to Smith. What if they hadn't? What if flaws and glitches were hiding below the surface waiting for a chance to surface?
"Sometimes I'm afraid." The words tumbled from her mouth before she could stop them.
"Of what?" For some odd reason he wasn't rebuking her for admitting an emotion. Very strange.
Since she had already spoken the least she could do was to explain herself. That way she wouldn't feel like the idiot she thought she must be for expressing something like that to Jones.
"I'm afraid that you didn't correct all the problems you had with Whitman. You've only done it once before so it just isn't possible that you fixed all the glitches. I'm afraid of turning into her."
"Mimosa…""That's why the mainframe ordered all of you not to tell me about her. You were afraid that if I knew what I was capable of that I would do it. Follow her example. Well, I'm afraid of the same thing."
"You've been online almost a year and you seem to be fine. No serious errors in your code that would suggest you're going to malfunction."
No serious code errors. Only a decompile, a glitch, a death (but Jonas had brought her back so that could be classed as divine intervention) and of course, the addiction.
Jones looked at her and could guess her train of thought from her expression. "Would you like me to give you a check up?"
Huh? "Um…what are you talking about?"
"If you are worried about the state of your code I can give it a quick check."
She shrugged. "Ok." He required his monitor back to life and taped a few keys on his keyboard. He brought new meaning to the words 'touch-type'; he never once looked at his keyboard.
Unobtrusively, Stef looked over at it. It was in three sections, the middle was a standard QWERTY keyboard (and numeric keypad etc), but on the right and left of that there was rectangular keypads with Matrix code symbols on them.
It was quite a sight to see him operating both Matrix keypads at once. A tech agent skill undoubtedly.
"You're fine Mimosa."
"Thank you Dr. Jones." Stef smirked, something she didn't do in Jones' company often. She was glad however, that agents were blind to culture references, as she really didn't want to decide whether or not she would say she was referring to Indiana Jones or the song from Aqua.
"If in doubt, require a self diagnostic."
"Thanks."
"You have put on a little weight however." Stef blinked a few times and waited for something to be added to that statement. He smiled.
"I was speaking digitally of course. There is a little more to your code than when you were originally brought online."
"What could it be from?"
"I would assume that it's some stabilizing programs. I had a few myself for a few months after the purging. They simply do their jobs and then disappear."
"Ok." She nodded her head and shifted away.
"Well?" Smith asked as she dropped into the spare chair.
"I'm fine. It's just something to do with the addiction."
"Good. Sure you're all right?"
Azure eyes flashed under her sunglasses. "I'm better than I have been in ages." A small smile settled on her face.
"I have to do this work," he said politely.
"Smith you need to get a life." His head snapped up and he stared suspiciously at her.
"What?" maybe that was a line she shouldn't have crossed. But she'd done much worse. "What'd I say?"
"It wasn't you. Whitman said that once."
"I'm not Whitman. You should know that."
"I do, she's just a nightmare."
Stef smirked in a not all together nice way before shifting away.
Smith shook it off as he turned back to his computer.
It was just Stef.
Still, for a second he could have sworn that it had been Whitman saying that.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Ok, that was the end of Chapter One, it was originally twice as long but I cut it in half so all the chapters are about the same length.