Like so many of his conversations with Dana, this particular one consisted mostly of him listening while she bounced ideas and theories off of him. He helped her think and she helped him think, just not about the same things at the same time. As long as he at least half listened, taking in most of what she said without processing it, she would keep going, the tone of her words creating pleasant background noise and easing the flow of his own thoughts.
Listening and maintaining an entirely separate train of thought was a trick he had learned from the Hunters he had consumed, the partitioning of brain function to allow for information to be taken in at the same time different information was analyzed. Under normal circumstances he used it to remain aware of all of his surroundings when he was fighting, or in the increasingly rare instances where he killed and consumed a person for information so that he was not overwhelmed by the flood of memories and sensations.
Her concerns centered on what to do to save the two of them and then the rest of the world from enemies, both real and imagined. His focus was on her and the very real dangers that she seemed willfully ignorant of. The rest of the world meant nothing to him compared to her.
First things first was a kind way of looking at it. The less kind, and more accurate assessment was that he had nothing other than her and was willing to do anything to keep from losing her again.
"… so this is bigger than I thought, but things are starting to come into focus. From what I've found I think that it's safe to say Hope was a eugenics project started by…"
Dana had been working toward her own goals and he had been trying to help. It was such a shame that her efforts were largely pointless. She still thought that she could clear his name and put a stop to Blackwatch and she was so enthusiastic when she thought that she was on to something that he almost felt bad about the truth. He would have felt bad about it, but it was too…petty to think that way. Feeling worse about Dana's ignorance than all of the rest of it did not sit right with him. A lot of things no longer sat right with him, many of them for reasons he was unable to figure out.
He felt bad about all of the violence for all of the wrong reasons.
"… and if we can get the word out about it they'll have to accept that you had nothing to do with it. The worst of it happened long before you were born. I mean hell, I know that you'd never knowingly get involved in…"
There was no way to clear his name, the original Alex Mercer had been a monster and a madman of the worst sort and he knew far too much about Blackwatch to believe that the organization was beatable. He seriously considered correcting her, but he was sure that she would lash out at him. One thing he had learned about Dana was that she did not like to be told that she was wrong. Though she was willing to listen to him she was also quick to explain to him why he was wrong about certain things and there was nothing he could say to convince her otherwise. She had decided that she was the brains of the operation and there was nothing he could do to stop her at this point. It was true that in terms of coming up with new ideas and creative solutions she was far beyond his capabilities, but she was badly hindered by her lack of information. The problem was, information was dangerous and there were so many things he had no desire to explain to her, mostly things about himself.
Maybe that was selfish of him, but after all that he had been through, how many times he had been used by friends and enemies alike, he felt that he had earned the right to be selfish, especially when it came to Dana.
"… but there are still problems, big ones. The genie's out of the bottle so to speak and as bad as it is, we might be able to have it work out for the best, not to sound cynical or anything. What I think is …"
Thinking, that was something he had a lot of time to do lately. He had long since given up on trying to sleep. The strange, jumbled nightmares that came from stolen memories made it an exercise in futility. Not to mention the dreams that might actually have been his own. Just trying to make sense of them had been frightening. It was easier not to sleep at all, besides, he had to do planning of his own.
"…so if we hold out until the last of the infected are gone and getting out of the city isn't such a bitch we can…"
Holding out, that was a bigger problem than Dana might want to accept and explaining why was a can of worms he would rather leave unopened. Getting out of the city, hell, even waiting until the infection was eradicated was going to be impossible for him. He needed to stay in a place with high population density for him to blend in and Manhattan was really the only option available. No matter how perfect his mimicry might have been, there was a certain point at which it broke down. If he was around anyone for too long they would eventually get the sense that there was something off about him. Maybe it was the way he carried himself, something about the look in his eyes, his expression or lack thereof, hell it might have been pheromones for all he knew, but people could tell there was something wrong with him.
How Dana failed to notice was beyond him. One explanation might have been her lack of human contact. Since he had known her he had never heard her talk about friends except in the context of people who could do or get things for her.
In Manhattan her situation was almost normal. Lack of real human contact seemed to be a way of life. People went through the motions of basic interactions while largely ignoring each other. He figured it would be the same in most large cities, but Manhattan was what he was used to and that helped. It was his home or his territory to put it in simple, animal terms and thinking of it that way worked for him.
There was more to it than blending in anyway. He had tried, he really had, but there were certain aspects of his own biology he was unable to fight. The Blacklight virus was what it was, and it had a very specific set of needs, a narrow range of conditions in which he could survive. He had tried to force change, but even Blacklight, mutable and adaptive as it was, had limits to how far it could go. What it came down to was that he was a predator by nature. More than that he required fresh prey.
Dana had made him eat with her plenty of times and while he could go through the motions just fine, the food did nothing for him. Every meal he had with her ended the same way, with his thanking her for the meal, leaving and throwing up some slop of rot and partially broken down food. He needed live prey and with the numbers of infected dwindling he would soon be forced to look elsewhere. Manhattan had a large enough population to support him and the lingering chaos would facilitate it perfectly.
"… and another thing to keep in mind is that we don't need to focus locally. Blacklight is a global concern and things are too much of a mess to be sure of anything. Trying to get in touch with people overseas might be our best bet. I'm thinking somewhere in Europe, but…"
He nearly laughed at that. Smuggling him out of the country would be an effort well beyond Dana's capabilities. He had ideas of how it could be done, more than ideas really, but taking Dana would be impossible. Coping with the trip in a shipping container would be harder for her than it would be for him and then he doubted that any of the lists of places in Eastern Europe and South America that he was considering would do anything for her. It would not be a pleasant life, but he was willing to accept that, especially since it would be easier for him there.
Dana was thinking of places where people could help them. He was thinking in terms of places where he could be ignored, where he could vanish as thoroughly as if he never existed to begin with. More than that, he was focused on places where he could easily survive while remaining hidden. Dana had no desire to remain hidden beyond what was necessary and what she needed to survive comfortably was different. None of the places he had come up with even remotely matched up with what she was looking for.
There were places where people went missing so often that no one would care, rampant problems with street children with no one to worry them and all sorts of unsavory characters that he would be doing the world a favor by killing. He would be able to move around as he wished and it would give him a chance to gather his thoughts. It was impossible though.
For him to survive as he needed, he would have to abandon her.
"…that's going to be the biggest challenge. It's our best option though, unless you're willing to…"
Alex wanted to stop here right there, but what could he say to her? He was willing to do anything to keep her safe, not that he could manage to put it into words. Part of it might have been due to his determination to do something right. Thinking of her as his sister made him feel human, or at least helped him pretend. The original Mercer had been a monster in his own right, but at least he had been human. Looking out for his sister kept Alex focused, which was getting harder and harder for him all the time. The constant noise, both in and outside of his head, and always having to worry about Dana left him feeling spread too thin. Any time he tried to bring up his concerns with her, she brushed it off, claiming that she could take care of herself. As much as he tried to appreciate the gesture, her assurances that looking out for him was what mattered the most to her, he knew that she was way out of her league.
"…some of my contacts might be able to help us by…"
Contacts? That was new, and one more cause for concern. He was the perfect example of why sharing information with too many people was a dangerous thing. As careful as she might be, all it took was one wrong move to bring all sorts of danger crashing down right on her doorstep.
The one time he thought that he had lost her had been enough to nearly drive him insane and she still took all sorts of unnecessary risks because she worried so much about him. If only there was some way to make her understand that he was nowhere near as important as she was. Nothing he had tried had worked, which had brought him down desperate paths. Once he nearly went to Ragland to figure out terms under which he could turn himself in, only to realize that as a specimen in a lab he would be unable to protect Dana, not only from his enemies, but from her own risky behavior. She was small, fragile, human and there was so much in the world that could do her harm.
"…getting back to the facts, here's what we need to consider. Every tinhorn despot and fringe group is claiming to have the virus. If even a tenth of them are telling the truth we're in trouble. I want your opinion on this list I got from one of my sources. Just listen to these…"
After the first ten organizations were named he already had his opinion. Though none of the groups she was naming could have gotten it, it was likely that at least one organization somewhere had managed to get their hands on the virus, simply because Redlight had been everywhere in the city. Blackwatch had been playing catch up since its founding and was only going to find itself completely overwhelmed in the very near future.
The real threat was not an outbreak somewhere in the United States. Blackwatch would be able to stop it if that were to happen. The problem was if it happened elsewhere in the world, especially if it happened in a sufficiently isolated location, such as the places he had been considering going to, things would be bad. The Manhattan outbreak had revealed a side of the virus Blackwatch had never anticipated and if given more time there was no telling what might happen. All the outbreaks between Hope and Manhattan had been dealt with so quickly that the true potential of the virus never got the chance to emerge. Frightening as Greene may have been, an ordinary Runner given months undisturbed in some isolated area could likely turn out things far more frightening.
"…the MILF. Don't laugh, it stands for… Wait, Alex are you even listening?"
"Uh, yeah. I know what it stands for," it took him a moment too long to realize why she had warned him against laughing and by that point his forced attempt at a smile fell flat. At least she had stopped talking, giving him a chance to at least try and say his part, "You don't need to keep going, I get what you're trying to say and I think that maybe it's time we talked about things."
Her expression darkened, "Last time I wanted to talk you never gave me any answers and we ended up talking in circles for hours."
That was a lie, not that he was going to call her on it. He had given her answers, just ones so convoluted and wrapped up in technical terms that she had been unable to decipher any of it and the talking in circles had been her fault. Every time he tried to make a point, to tell her what he thought about a situation, she went and moved the goalposts until the discussion fell back to something they could both agree on, such as Blackwatch being a problem.
"So what exactly do you want to talk about?" her voice was calm, hopeful even, and it made him feel even worse about what he was going to say.
"Maybe you should just forget about me," he chose his words carefully, or at least carefully by his standards, not wanting to say too little, or too much, "I'm too dangerous for you…"
He trailed off as she stared at him, her expression completely unreadable, which gave him the feeling that even after saying so little he had still managed to say the wrong thing.
"Alex!" she reached out to grab him and he barely managed to avoid her touch, "I'm not going to give up on you this easily. We can fix things."
There were times he wished that Dana was less stubborn, or at least less reactive, but in her own way she was as quick and violent in her responses as he was. That tendency toward escalation made their conversations all the more dangerous, especially with the way his state of mind had been lately.
Taking a deep breath, he focused on keeping calm, "Maybe things aren't worth fixing. Did that ever occur to you? Maybe I'm a lost cause and you should worry more about yourself."
"No!" she practically screamed, "Don't talk like that. You're not abandoning me again!"
She was baiting him and her words hurt in more ways than she could ever understand. He had not been the one to abandon her, and he wanted to believe that if he had been in that position he never would have left her. Or maybe he only thought that way because he wanted nothing to do with the original Alex Mercer. Any decision the original had made, he wanted to do the opposite.
"I'm not talking about abandoning you," he said quickly, hoping to get her to relax before he was forced to flee. Lately arguing with her put him on edge far more than it should have, probably because of everything else he had on his mind. It was getting hard to keep it all compartmentalized, "What I'm trying to say is that I'm too dangerous. It's not Blackwatch, it's not Gentek, it's me."
"No," there was a slight smile playing across her lips, an expression as predatory as any he could manage. Somehow she had set a trap and he had fallen into it, "I need you to protect me."
"From what?" he countered, "If I leave things are fixed. Hell, turn yourself in, offer to help them catch me. Say you've seen the truth, that you despise me. Call me a monster, an animal, a terrorist, anything to make them believe you. It won't matter. You'll be safe, too valuable for them to do anything to and they'll never catch me. I'll be long gone and you can get on with your life."
"Do you really think Blackwatch will let things work that way?" she snapped back.
"Yes," he had absorbed enough officers and sifted through their memories, killed his way through the chain of command until he understood the organization better than anyone else left alive, "They're never going to waste a resource and right now they're doing damage control. You go to them and it'll be exactly what they need to recover from being dragged out into the open, the ultimate propaganda victory. Justification of their cause and the perfect bait to lure me out."
"So you're saying I should side with those bastards? Those genocidal, psychotic assholes that get off killing innocent women and children? That I should pretend everything I know is a lie just because it's too dangerous to do what's right?" she came towards him as she spoke, radiating such righteous indignation that he could not help but back away.
If things went any further he was going to have to bolt for the door. His arms ached with tension and he could practically feel the matter of his hands becoming more fluid in preparation to shift into claws.
When he spoke he practically snarled, "And what do you know? Not just about Blackwatch, but about everything, about Gentek, about me. How about you tell me what I was doing in Pen Station when the virus got out. Tell me how I was infected and what it did to me. I found answers for myself, but maybe what you know is better. Maybe you've found a neater, prettier truth."
It was like a switch had been flipped and a light went out somewhere behind her eyes. Something was running through her head, something she did not want to think about. Somehow he had struck a nerve, he only wished he knew what it was. The night he had accidentally chased her down the hall had frightened her, but there had to be more to it than that. Maybe she had filled in the holes in what she knew while he had been doing the same with what he knew. On principle she would disbelieve anything that cast him in a negative light, but there were some things that were harder to deny. If not reports from civilians about the times he had gotten carried away chasing someone down, then what? Blurry video from a cellphone? Black and white footage from a security camera that Blackwatch had been too slow to confiscate? Whatever it was, it had to be something unofficial, meaning that short of her telling him, he would never know.
"Okay, alright," her words was slow and her voice hesitant at first, growing in strength and confidence as she went, "Maybe I don't know everything, but if you really care about my safety tell me this: Can Blackwatch keep the virus contained anymore? Can they be sure that none of those organizations ever get it, that there are no more outbreaks anywhere, ever? Let's say I do what you say, what's going to prevent a copycat from doing it all again?"
She was moving the goalposts again, which did not thing to prevent her from being absolutely right. In the past Blackwatch had managed just fine, but it was a whole different ballgame now. In America things would continue as they always had, out in the rest of the world governments would be less prepared, and that was in places where there were governments controlling things to begin with. He had been just thinking the same thing himself, so there was no way for him to argue with her, at least not without playing the part of the hypocrite.
This had him on dangerous ground so he had to tread carefully. One misspoken word could bring everything back to some useless tangent where he would have no choice to agree to whatever she was saying, "You're right, but I don't see where you're going."
Dana spoke slowly, carefully choosing her words, "You can keep me safe. Anything that happens, I want to know that you'll be there for me. I know, even with… I know you care about me and I know that you can…do whatever it takes to protect me."
The frequent pauses were not lost on him, the silences meaning just as much as her words. She was right that he would do anything to protect her, the thing was, she had no clue how far anything could go.
Could he do it? Most of what she as saying was probably a childish conviction that he, as her older brother, could save her from anything, but could he?
"There's a lot of scary shit out there," she went on, "and I know you're the only one who can handle it all."
All of it? Everything? Maybe.
Maybe things were starting to fall into place.
It fit, he had to give it that much. Everything that had happened since he 'saved' Manhattan might have been pointing in that direction from the start. The unremembered dreams from before he had given up on sleep, the constant worrying, the horrible accident in the elevator with Karen Parker, his little mental experiments, all of it.
If it was him versus the world in a battle over whether Dana would ever be out of danger maybe he had to look at things differently.
When he had been thinking practically all of it revolved around short term survival, continuing living as he was now. There was no big picture because it was too large, too frightening to try and account for all the things that might happen. The times he let his mind wander though, those were the times he came up with more interesting ideas. Those ideas frightened him, but there was a certain appeal to them where there had once been ignorance or, if he wanted to take a revisionist view of his past, revulsion. Not being human, he was uncertain if the process could be considered maturation or if it were simply the result of the continuous mutation of the virus that made him.
He could theoretically do it, hell he wanted to do it, just to see what would happen. So far he had resisted those urges because the risks were too great, but now Dana was presenting him with a new set of risks. How far was he willing to go to keep her safe? How far would be far enough? He had already decided that she was all that mattered in this whole fucked up world and he was not about to change his mind on that.
"But would it work?"
The look Dana gave him told him that he had spoken out loud and he ran from the room before she could question him. It was too early for him to try and explain to her and no way for him to tell her anything without telling her too much. The start of an idea was not enough, but a finished, fully formed and tested set of results? That he might be able to make her understand.
A window at the end of the hall was the quickest way out and he jumped. The fall, both exhilarating due to all manner of notions from stolen memories and relaxing due to its familiarity, helped his relax.
It all fit together too easy, it was all too perfect that he knew it had to be wrong.
Nothing should ever come that easily to him, nothing, especially not such a simple, desirable solution.
Running though the empty streets of the still abandoned area of the city where he kept Dana hidden brought his thoughts into sharper focus. The scientist in him, really, all of the scientists in him, told him why it was a bad idea, but what were their experiences worth? Half of them were ignorant, the other half had less than half of the story and none of them knew what he knew.
As things were now it would go wrong, there was no question about that. It always had in the past. Countless man hours and even lives had been wasted to come to that conclusion. There had been innumerable failures and only one success, albeit partial and very messy. The question then, was why did it go wrong? That was where things got interesting because the only person who knew that was forever beyond his reach. He had the results, just not the methods. It would just take testing to figure those out, but it was not like he was going to be starting from scratch. Working backwards from what he had could be doable.
Just to be sure he would go to Ragland. It had been a while since he had spoken with the doctor, but he trusted him. Dana had been right, despite his line of work Ragland was one of the good guys and Alex knew that as long as he kept his discussion with Ragland strictly in the realm of hypotheticals he would be more than happy to go along with it. It was part of the reason Blackwatch allowed Ragland to continue along his course of research despite their well founded suspicions.
Hell, it was a question Alex knew Blackwatch had been asking over and over again, looking to Ragland for input and then, disappointed, leaving him to his own quiet studies. Could the remarkable results of Alex Mercer's infection be reliably replicated?
Of course it could.
All you needed was a large enough test group.