Fine Winding Tendrils that Strangle the Heart
By eternitywaits
*Originally posted on LiveJournal November 9, 2009
*Note to my fanfiction-net readers – this story was originally written before Episode 1x09 "Life" aired. Had I seen that episode first, I would have made some changes to this story. However, I've decided to keep it as is. I hope you can still enjoy it.
The other scientists are put off by Chloe Armstrong's near constant presence in the control room. They are disturbed by the way she sometimes speaks to Eli in a tone too low for the others to hear, or the way she sometimes pulls Doctor Rush off to the side and they exchange words. And Rush doesn't yell at her for interrupting or getting in the way, that's what bothers them most of all.
Volker still remembers how Rush made him feel like an idiot, reducing him to cowering four year old, just for questioning his assumptions. And Chloe Armstrong is a civilian. She certainly doesn't know anything about astrophysics or alien technology. Yet when she speaks to him, Doctor Rush alters his calculations. Sometimes he abandons their projects altogether.
When the scientists try to explain their unease to Colonel Young they can not articulate the precise nature of their disquiet. They stumble over words, and since everything on the ship is running incredibly smoothly, Young dismisses them and pays their seemingly paranoid concerns little mind.
And if Young notices that the Senator's daughter looks a little pale, a little wane, if he notices her tone isn't quite soft enough, or her choice of words is not quite right, he keeps it to himself. They've all been having a hard time of this, after all, and he knows that they need all the help they can get.
*****
Three weeks earlier...
Everything can be translated into numbers. This isn't Chloe's thought, it's Destiny's, and she pushes it aside for the moment, like brushing a strand of hair out of her eyes.
It's hard to look at Matthew and not see him as a collection of carefully balanced chemicals; to measure the seconds it takes for his heart to beat, the timing of the flow of blood through his veins, how the organs communicate with each other, just so, all reduced to equation, chemicals, timing.
If she lets herself, she can find herself watching the processes of his body for hours. It's fascinating. Although to her or the ship, she can't tell.
Sometimes it's like that, and she has difficulty separating where her thoughts end and Destiny's begin. The more Destiny understands about how the human body functions, the better she will be able to regulate what supplies they need to keep her necessary systems functioning, of which she has generously factored in her new human components.
They need this much oxygen. They need this much water. They need this much gravity. They need...
So Chloe doesn't try to hinder her, but she feels the ancient ship nudging gently down the neural pathways of her brain, igniting connections and stimulating thought processes she never would on her own, and that's upsetting, even though she asked for it.
There are things she didn't expect, and the Destiny curls around the abyss of her mind flexing and stretching, pawing at this and scratching that. She's got dark tendrils snaking out everywhere, wrapping Chloe up in an embrace like a lover (or a lecher) from the inside out.
Even lying in bed, with Matthew, when she watches him she's aware of the Destiny measuring his breathing and heart rate, calculating how much food and water he will need to consume in the following hours, and so forth.
She also knows the lights are flickering three corridors down. She knows there's a damaged hull on the far east side. She knows Rush is performing nine different database searches, and she knows what he is finding. She knows he should really cross-reference such and such with something else, even though she doesn't quite comprehend what those things are. She has the feeling that she will, however, in time.
"Stop it," she hisses, pressing the heels of her palms into her eyes. Destiny's consciousness recedes for the moment, and she presses her head into the mattress.
Matthew stirs and blinks at her, blearily. "Huh? Chloe? Is something wrong?"
"No," she lies. "Everything's fine."
The concern on his face should bother her, touch her, stir something in her heart, but it doesn't. She has a bizarre sensation of not being able to bother with it, as though emotion were a switch you could flick on and off when convenient. She feels vaguely sick at the thought, unsure if it's hers and Matthew Scott stares at her for a while, but he doesn't press and she doesn't offer.
When she breaks it off with him three days later, he looks at her with regret and also a touch of poorly concealed relief.
*****
Eli is the first to notice. She is surprised by how quickly he is able to grasp the situation for what it is, and afraid. He confronts her in the control room at one of the rare times when Doctor Rush is absent.
"Chloe, you can't do this!" he says, his voice frantic. "It's not safe! It's not sane! It's not normal person thinking to say, 'ooh look an ancient alien space ship, I think I'll plug it into my cerebral cortex and hope my brain doesn't explode!"
She pauses, her fingers stilled over the rapidly flying columns of Ancient that fill the screens. If he's already figured it out, there's no use hiding what she can do. "Eli, please don't be upset. Please don't look at me that way. You know I'd never want to hurt you, right?"
"Hurt me? Hurt me?" he asks, "No, Chloe, this could kill you! The whole brain exploding thing? Not so much a metaphor."
"Destiny was grown with a sentient processing core," she explains calmly, "She's - aware - of everything that goes on, but she's damaged and limited in what she can do to analyze data, repair herself and help us.
"There should have been an active AI module running to assist, but it was damaged long ago. Someone has to serve as a link between us and the ship, or we aren't going to be able to survive here."
She drops her gaze back to the console, tucking a loose strand of long black hair behind her ear. "And in the end, it's done anyways."
"Well, undo! Undo!" he says, slamming his hands down in front of her. She looks up at him in surprise.
"Your brain can't handle this overload of information indefinitely. Even if we do need some sort of human-ship medium seance-y thing you don't have to be the one to do it! I mean, come on," he says, "mind melding with the Destiny has to be like Rush's wet dream. Let him do it. There's no reason for you-"
"And if it kills Doctor Rush who exactly will get the people on this ship home?" she asks.
He gapes at her for a second, mouth opening and closing as he tries to think of an argument. Finally his shoulders slump. "Chloe..."
She smiles the cool practiced smile of a politician and lies. "I'll be fine. I'm better this way. I have - something useful that I can do. I can help like this. I told you I was tired of being a dead weight. This is something that needs to be done, and I'm expendable," she pauses, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. She fights them back valiantly, "like my father."
Rush picks that moment to walk in. He's muttering to himself, lost in his own thoughts, and makes straight for the nearest of Destiny's control panels, seemingly unaware of them.
"Does he know?" Eli mouths to her behind Rush's back.
Chloe straightens her shoulders, and the tears are all gone, the cool professional mask slides back into place. She gives the slightest shake of her head. "It is not necessary," she pauses. "Yet."
Eli stares at her round-eyed. "Okay, was that you talking just now, or-"
Rush glances up at them, irritably, "Excuse me kids, some of us are actually trying to get work done here. If you're just going to 'hang out' why don't you do it elsewhere?"
"But-" stammers Eli, "but Chloe is-"
"Yes, yes," Rush says, waving a hand at them in dismissal. "I'm sure it's all very important. Now go."
*****
"He doesn't notice human things," Chloe says bitterly, as they walk down one of Destiny's corridors. "I don't think he's even really looked at me since he killed my father."
"That wasn't really his fault," Eli says quietly. "And um, just b.t.w., you do know where this corridor goes, right?"
She gives him a look.
"Oh. Right," he says, pointing to his head. "You've got the wacky mojo going on upstairs. How could I forget?"
They fall into another silence. Her heels click on the floor, her legs move calm and sure beneath her skirt. Her jacket is thick, expensive material. She has almost managed to recapture the same feeling she used to get on Earth, at her father's offices, of being important, of being in control.
"So does it hurt?" he asks, finally. He can't stop shooting nervous glances at her head. "What does it feel like? Do you, like, talk to each other?"
Chloe doesn't answer because she can't explain. There aren't words to describe it, because no human being has ever had to before. It's not like talking with words, like she does with Eli. It's not like thinking on her own though, either.
Deep inside her, the Destiny wraps itself around her heart and soul, and squeezes her close. It is a presence like an overprotective guardian angel, or a neurotic and ravenous parasitic worm, she can't tell which.
"Through here," she says, nodding to a locked door.
"What?" he says, looking at her in confusion. "We don't know what's through there, it could be damaged-"
"It's the ship's medical bay. It is intact. There's equipment and medicine. The medicine isn't for humans, but the ship can generate new formulas and dosages for our metabolism. It will be of help to Lieutenant Johansen."
"Uh-huh," he says, looking from her to the door, and back.
"Just call Doctor Rush," she says, shaking her head, "and get the door open."
*****
"You're here late, Miss Armstrong," Rush's voice breaks her concentration and she spins away from the control panel. He looks past her. "I didn't realize you knew Ancient."
"Your time measurement based on solar cycles is not applicable in space," she says it, but Destiny shoots the concept into her head.
When he stares at her, she elaborates: "I'm not here 'late,' as you put it, Doctor Rush. I'm merely here when I choose to be."
"I see," he studies her. "And the Ancient?"
They stare at each other for several minutes.
"You know," he tells her, "despite what you may think of me, I do, in fact, notice, when one of the people I am sharing an Ancient ship with billions of light years from home suddenly, and for no apparent reason, undergoes a dramatic change in both personality and intelligence."
"Excuse me?"
"Oh, not that Miss Armstrong wasn't a very bright young woman in her own way. I had nothing but respect for her, for what she was, but she did not, for example, spend her nights brushing up on flight instruction manuals for alien spaceships written in Ancient."
"Oh I don't need to read them," she sniffs.
"Smart in her own little way." The condescending ass. Well, she'll show him she thinks. She's sure that's her thought because Destiny tangles itself up at her emotions and is unsure how to respond, sending her all sorts of information at once.
She plasters on a sickeningly fake smile and turns to him. "I am merely arranging the data in a slightly different way so that it will be easier for you and Eli to find. Seeing as you've been looking for the past week and haven't gotten to it yet."
"You could just tell us," he says, pacing around her at a wide breadth. "Why keep it a secret? That you're walking around in that body?"
"Because I'm still here, too you jerk and I don't want everyone to know!" she shouts, and for a second it's all Chloe Armstrong, and the emotion ripples across her face so suddenly Rush actually blinks in surprise and takes a step backwards.
She takes a bit of satisfaction in having surprised Rush, but not enough.
"I see," he says simply. "Well that's very dangerous for you, isn't it, Miss Armstrong?" he considers. "You need to stop."
"What?" she laughs. "Please. Like I don't know you're excited about this," she regards him slyly. "The Destiny can measure the chemicals in your brain, for God's sake. You're just dying to talk to her, ah, face to face."
He's flustered. "Look, that's not the point!" he tells her. "The human brain was not designed to host a consciousness as vast and intricate as that of the Destiny, period. It doesn't matter what I find interesting, Miss Armstrong. The simple fact is that this is going to cause you severe brain damage. Stop it now."
"What do you care? This is beyond useful! The Destiny can communicate with us, and we can make our needs and desires more clear to her. It is - a superb interface. Imminently valuable to you."
His face hardens. "You may think of me as an ogre, Miss Armstrong, but I wouldn't watch a twenty-three year old girl have her brains cook and boil in her skull on my account!"
"Not on your own account, no, but for the Destiny you would sacrifice her, if need be."
"That's not fair," he says.
"But it's true," she counters.
"There has to be a better way. Use my brain as a conduit instead-"
"No," she says quickly, "your mind is already so full of things, Doctor Rush. It would...not be desirable for either of us. And the consequences to the crew should you perish would be dire."
"Fine then," he says, but he looks offended. "If you need empty heads to work with we have dozens of military personnel and civilians. They can take turns, rotate shifts, that will lessen the neural trauma and-"
She shakes her head. "No. They don't like Destiny. They're afraid, resentful even. They won't let her in, and she can't be forced on them. It won't work."
"And you want this?" he asks, incredulous. "Miss Armstrong the risk is -"
"The risk has been calculated. Believe me, Doctor Rush, if anyone on board this ship is aware of what this will do to my brain, I am. Besides, I'm surprised at you, I thought the sacrifice of one valueless person wouldn't mean much at all. Didn't last time."
"Fine," he growls. "You want to do this to yourself? Kill yourself. Be my guest." There's an angry bitterness in his words the Chloe part of her mind can't quite reconcile.
She hears his footsteps approaching the doorway, but then he stops and half-turns back to her. "But remember, I didn't kill your father, Miss Armstrong. The Destiny did."
Arms of data and information twist and writhe so deep in her mind she can feel it in her gut. Of course the Destiny didn't kill anyone, Rush is just trying to manipulate her, but still, it stings, like tiny insects biting all over her skin, and she falls shakily to the ground, letting Destiny go over shipboard inventory with her until she can remember how to move her legs.
*****
Six weeks later...
"You realize if we dial Earth successfully they will make us both leave the Destiny," Rush tells her. His voice is subdued. They are the only ones in the control room, again. He's sitting at a table. He looks tired.
"And you don't want to," she says.
"And you can't," he says, staring at her. "Miss Armstrong's body - Miss Armstrong, your body, has undergone serious trauma. I realize this must be difficult to hear, but-"
"Destiny carved out its own spaceship-sized hole in my brain. This body will hold together aboard the ship, for the time being anyways, but if I were ever removed the shock to my system would kill me instantly.
"Which means," she sighs deeply, "that I can never see my mom again, I can never see my best friend again, I can never- but , that's beside the point, isn't it?" she says, scrubbing her hands over her eyes. "It's not fair to everyone else to keep them from going home just because I can't."
"It doesn't always have to be about self-sacrifice and nobility and courage, you know," he tells her, "contrary to what popular entertainment would have us believe, there is a certain...nobility inherent in just staying alive."
"In being selfish?" she chides softly, her lips pulling into smirk. "I know that you don't want to leave, Doctor Rush. You don't have to make this all about me."
"Fine," he says easily, "I'll admit it. I don't want to leave. I don't see why I should lose my dreams for the sake of a bunch of whiny, idiotic imbeciles who don't recognize what this ship has done for them. They're like plankton jealous of the sea that gives them life!"
She smiles, leaning forwards on the table, her chin in her hands. "Ye-es. Well that's very flattering, Doctor, thank you."
He looks startled for a second, as though he had forgotten exactly who he was speaking to. He coughs. "Yes, well, it's an accurate observation. You are keeping them all alive."
"Chloe wants them to go home safely." A pause while a change comes over her features. "Doctor Rush don't even suggest that we lie to these people and keep them here against their will when we have it within our power to send them home! It's cruel!"
He shrugs, taking her abrupt switches of personality in stride. "So you're that eager to die then, are you?"
She frowns. She's pale and tired and he can see the moral struggle waging behind her eyes. Destiny appears to have stepped out of the way, putting the entire weight of the decision on Chloe Armstrong.
"Miss Armstrong, I apologize for upsetting you. Just because we have done these calculations does not mean we need to come to any immediate decision - no one will know unless we tell them, after all. I sincerely doubt the ability of anyone here or an Earth trying to work out similar-"
"Doctor Rush," she says suddenly, looking at him through a curtain of hair, "you really need to start calling me Chloe."
*****
The kiss is like fire searing through her, it's the first time she's felt this - real - in months. This alive. This touchable, solid. She murmurs something about the necessary requirements for dropping out of FTL drive, and he pulls back suddenly, breaking contact.
"Stop it," he says, grabbing her wrist when she reaches for him and holding her at arms length. "This isn't fair to Chloe. You've just hijacked that body. And while I'm certainly very flattered, I hardly think she'd want to be kissing a man twice her age. Not to mention the fact that she blames me for the death of her father."
"I don't, not anymore," she says, but he isn't listening to her. Colonel Young is on the radio, calling them all for a meeting, and she feels the chance slide through her fingers like gossamer spider webs. Well, that's that, then.
She stares after him in despair as he walks away. "You think the ship wants to sleep with you, Doctor Rush? God, the size of that man's ego," she sighs, and then she's distracted by a routine maintenance scan and he's gone, anyway.
*****
Later, they're sitting together in the control room, going over the data again, wondering about dialing back to Earth. She looks over at him, bent over their calculations, absorbed in thought. She wonders if he hasn't noticed the change in her attitude towards him. She's still unsure about what, outside of the ship, and himself, he sees.
"You know it's strange, how all of this science stuff makes sense now. It's so easy, like the puzzles I used to do when I was, like, six. This piece goes there, this piece...snap! Obvious."
"Hm," he murmurs, glancing at her. "And how does your head feel when you do this...snap?" he asks her.
She doesn't answer. He finally stops what he's doing and turns to regard her fully. "Chloe," he says, taking her by the shoulders. "It's not too late to give this up-"
"Yes it is," she says, her eyes filling with tears, which she hates herself for, but she just has to say it. "Doctor Rush, I've been dead since the first second I let Destiny inside my head."
And as much as she hates it, the Destiny is incorrigibly silent and her hands are shaking, the familiar tug of its spectral arms is missing, and like it or not, she begins to cry.
After a few awkward moments of her crying and him holding her at arms length he gives in, pulling her against his chest. "Miss Armstrong, please don't-"
"I told you call me Chloe!" she sobs.
"Chloe, alright, Chloe, I - well, it's no use saying it will be alright, is it? I mean you know better than I do, apparently."
"So?" she says, clutching at him, "lie to me. You always lie! Don't go all honest on me just because I'm - I'm - "
He kisses her hair, and her eyes, their lashes are like the spines of tiny, fragile animals.
"Do you believe I'm Chloe right now?" she asks, tears drying on her pale skin. It's all emotion and want and need, and nothing to do with Destiny at all.
"Yes," he replies hoarsely.
She opens her eyes and captures his face in her hands, watching him intently as he's regarding her, with eyes that keep trying to slip into cool detachment, and failing.
When they kiss it's slow, simmering and restrained. There's something almost painful about it, like they're both holding their breath, waiting for the other one to pull away.
"Doctor Rush," she says, in breathless frustration.
"You," he says, "really need to start calling me Nicholas."
*****
Two months later...
She wakes up one morning and she can't remember what California is, but it's meant to be significant. She runs system checks, sending out hundreds of information spiders through the databanks to gather any record of this California, and comes up blank.
Doctor Rush finds her sitting on the edge of his bed, staring into space. "There must be an error in my systems. This word - California - is in my head, but I can't bring up the record-"
He stares at her for a second, a look crosses his face that Chloe would have recognized for pain. He sits beside her, taking her hand.
"Chloe," he says her name with emphasis, trying to find the place in her eyes that tells him it's her, "it's where you grew up. Your father was Senator."
She looks at him like he's just told her the hull is full of flying monkeys.
"Your father..." he prompts. "Senator Armstrong. A good man."
"Oh. Oh yes," she says, wincing and rubbing her head. "My father. He was a great man. I wanted to be like him."
"Yes," says Rush, the relief takes little out of the worry lining his face.
"We need to run a diagnostic on the ventilation system in J-12," she gasps, buckling forwards.
"You need to rest."
"Doesn't make any difference," she gasps, "some things you can't turn off. You know you can disengage the autopilot if you just try superseding the-"
The ship trembles. Threads inside her fray and snap, but bits that are left aren't the right bits, not all of them. She falls back on the bed, body contorting.
Her skin is ashen and grey and ugly. There are dark circles beneath her eyes and her lips are bloodless and chafed.
"This body is dying," she says, once with cold clinical detachment and then again with frantic terror, "I'm dying! I don't want to die!" she reaches out blindly, into the air.
Rush grabs her hand. "No," he says softly. "No one ever does."
"You're so calm. Why are you so calm?" she demands. "I hate you for being this calm!"
"Well, I've done this before," he says too quietly for her to hear. He carefully guides her back down to the mattress and pulls the sheets up around her. "Just rest," he says. "You'll be fine."
"She's all inside me. In my eyes and in my lungs and in my heart. And that wasn't a convincing lie!"
"I'm sorry."
Chloe's body makes a sound that's not a scream, not a whine, something so horrible he feels it reverberating in his sinew.
"She wants to stay. It's hard. She likes you. Let me stay. All of you. Humans. Stay. Stay with me! Stay!" She gasps. Her nails dig into his hand, her other hand claws blindly at the sheets.
"They'll blame me for this," he says.
It's not what he should be saying, but she's beyond comprehending his words, anyways, and he thinks he can't possibly hate himself more than he hates himself for not having more pain to give her.
He's already been this angry, this sad. When Gloria died he punched a doctor, put a hole in the wall with his fist, ranted and screamed like the world was coming to an end. And here and now he just feels numb and pragmatic.
"They'll say I killed you. Malevolent old Doctor Rush, conniving Doctor Rush, tricked the poor sweet Senator's daughter into filling her brain with alien technology-"
He finds that he is crying, despite himself. He's not sure if the tears are for her, or for him, for Destiny that betrayed him in the end, or for Gloria, whom he betrayed, somehow, he's certain.
"And maybe they should. I brought us here. I - created the situation. You were right, Miss Armstrong. Chloe. Blame me."
She's still now, her neck craned back, wide glassy eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling, her skin corpselike and grotesque.
"You can not kill me. I am Ancient and Forever. I have sailed along the waves of infinity. The light of stars burning pales beside me. I have been the marvel of millennia," she says in a voice like grinding stone and the hardest edge of a star.
"Let me talk to Chloe," he says, the words come out like a growl, he clutches her hand so hard he knows he's hurting her, and he also knows it doesn't matter.
The figure on the bed is still for minutes longer.
"Who's Chloe?" it asks.
And then there is silence.
END.