ASCENDING
By Eekz (Nackety)
Disclaimer: I am so not clever enough to be Joss Whedon.
Spoilers: Series... sort of?
A/N: This happened because the Alpha in "The Fever Sings in Mental Wires" wasn't as unhinged as he ought to have been and I'd like to get more comfortable with his character before trying again. Constructive criticism is welcome, reviews are adored but not solicited, and thank you for reading!
As an infant, the Greek god of thieves crept from his cradle and stole fifty of Apollo's precious cattle.
As a doll, Alpha creeps from his pod and slays fifty of Adelle's precious cattle. Handlers, dolls, the doctor with leathery hands and grandfather smiles. Animal sacrifices, mindless creatures worthy of slaughter. He comes alive soaked in their blood.
.
"It's all you, amigo," Topher says. The Haloperidol makes his hands shake and fails to erase the glassy distance in his eyes, but he flops easily into his desk chair, like he used to before he decided to pack up his things and live in a hole.
Also—although this is more normal than Topher's appearance in the Programming Center—Alpha has no idea what he's gibbering about. None of Alpha does.
"You," Topher goes on, "are a sociopath."
Well, yeah. (Not all of us.) Shut up, Paul.
"By which I mean that you are, obviously, but also the you-you, the original C. W. Craft—he was a card-carrying member of the Secret Society of Sociopaths. And that's it. That's how you took thirty Prince Charmings and a dozen okay guys and brewed your special soup of evil." The raving techie spins his chair around and adds with deranged glee, "It's your brain."
Riiiight. It's time to find DeWitt and tell her to put her pet madman on a leash. Except—no, wait, what if he's onto something? (Does it matter? We're not so slice-up-your-face antisocial anymore.)
"There's this theory—multiple theories—that sociopathy is rooted in brain structure. Sometimes, anyway; I think there's about as much supporting evidence as the other kind, but we don't change the gross anatomy here. Just your substrates and NT's. So," he spreads his hands in front of him, "I didn't make you crazy."
.
Topher makes him crazy.
At least, he assumes so. The only pre-Topher memory he has is kinda waxy: the dance instructor imprint that promptly developed all sorts of fun schizophrenic symptoms. Catatonia? Exactly as uncomfortable as it looks.
But after Topher comes along with his unchecked experiments and nimble fingers—that's when the imprints start hearing whispers, little quiet voices in the back of their heads that no one else seems to hear, indistinguishable murmurs that make it harder to walk the earth like humans do. The doll hears whispers too, louder, loud enough to fill the empty space he lives in—the pasture he grazes, content and well-fed until his master leads him to the slaughterhouse.
They talk to him. They tell him things he doesn't know and remember things he can't imagine: gritty streets and bodies writhing between tangled sheets, things that intimidate and intrigue him because all he's ever known are oak walls, gentle lights, a safe cocoon.
.
It's the dark hair and the shadows under her eyes, the dirt on her hands. The way she follows Adelle like she's walking into hell. The way she looks right past him.
He sees her and he knows—all of him knows, all of him humming in synchrony—that she will ascend, like he did. He knows he'll guide her into the light.
.
Somewhere – he doesn't know where yet, but he will soon enough – is a wedge encrypted with his body's mind.
It's not the one in the Dollhouse Archives. That's a fake, a watered down version of the man who once occupied this skin: Carl William Craft, declawed and housebroken. That's the version they were gonna release back into the wild once the devil returned his soul. (They couldn't have known he'd get bored of waiting and grow a new soul. An ascended soul.) That's the wedge he smashed to bits during his escape.
He's itching to destroy the real one too. This body is his now.
.
Isaac was designed to be the worst kind of paranoid and every type of crazy—the perfect schizophrenic to check into a mental ward the government thinks is hurting its patients. He's probably the sanest guy in Alpha's head.
So when Isaac decides he's a god, based on all the evidence, Alpha knows he's right.
He's always been so much more than human.
.
Is he a he or is he a we?
.
The gods of old were static: one character apiece and all slaves to their people. Enki, who breathed life into the ancient Sumerians. Ra, whose eyes shined on Egypt. Bragi, with runes carved into his tongue, who filled dreary times with poetry. Krisna, who promised to free humans from the cycle of rebirth and asked for only devotion in return. Bres, who made the arid soil of Ireland fertile. Zeus, who did a lot of sleeping around and not a whole lot of anything else.
The more current nebulous god is swiftly falling out of a vogue, buckling under the weight of science and catastrophe. It's its own fault, really, for not controlling people, for remaining incorporeal and untouchable even as humans grow more suspicious of things they can't see.
But he is right here, everlasting, independent, tangible, and well-dressed. He's the god of the future.
.
Alpha's not like Echo.
It takes him a couple of years to figure it out, but—it's obvious. They're not the same. He wants them to be (why? He doesn't know. It's not like he's lonely or anything. Getting lonely isn't something sociopaths do), but they're not.
She keeps the imprints apart in her head. Neatly tucked away in labeled compartments, boxes she opens when she needs to. Meanwhile, he's swimming in an ocean of voices and conflicting emotions—always dealing with forty-nine different interpretations of the same damn moment and forty-nine voices, sort of, except that there's not forty-nine of them anymore. They've blurred, corrupting each other, melting into—what did Topher call it?—a special soup of evil. He can't always tell them apart, even when they're saying different things.
Anyway, point is: he's got the mental peanut gallery, she's got the mental filing system.
She's Alpha 2.0.
.
He's a student of human behavior.
They're senseless creatures. Wastes of matter and oxygen, all of them. (There's something in him that thinks they'd be fun to paint. Something else that thinks it'd be more fun to paint them red.) They're even worse like this, wide-eyed and doe-like and excruciatingly defenseless. He won't need to study them much longer.
"It's nice to see you so relaxed, Alpha," Dr. Saunders says.
When the good doctor looks away, Alpha reaches for the scalpel lying unattended on his desk. Calmly, he replies, "I try to be my best."
.
The man sits across from him in an expensive blue suit and asks, "How long is your sentence, Mr. Craft?"
First instinct: make a bad pun. But he doesn't, because this man has a leather briefcase and a calculating look in his eye. He reminds Carl of a shark… dressed in business attire.
"Twenty-five years," Carl answers.
It would've been worse if he hadn't done such a thorough job of cleaning up the last two murders. Wouldn't have been anything at all if he'd remembered to turn away from the ATM when he kidnapped that stupid girl, since he might've gotten away with "she's hysterical and just wants to blame someone" if they didn't have video evidence of him forcing her into the car. Still, his "evil twin" explanation was pretty compelling; he'd hoped to get at least reasonable doubt with that.
The man smiles, cold and thin. "How would you like to cut your time in half?"
Carl snorts 'cause he knows when he's being played. He leans back in his chair.
"I'm here on behalf of Rossum Corporation," the man continues. "And I'm going to make an offer that will change your life."