For all the times it could have happened.

Timeline F: (x-y)=0.9 (life=1:11) (n:corrupt)

Have you ever watched the one you love do what they were trained to do?

Nanomachines never shut down. They are another thing that you just get used to.

Some people play music while they work at computers. Hal had the sharp hiss of tranquiliser darts, hoarse breathing and the shuffle-thump-crack of unwary guards being taught valuable lessons in alertness to keep him company. It was almost relaxing, in a Schoenburg kind of way. Having worked out several of the guard rotation plans himself, he would find himself subconsciously counting off the footsteps, muttering small triumphal "Yes!"-es whenever the sibilant hiss of a dart indicated that a gamble had paid off. One cannot help but join in the hunt- it is the same reason you find yourself leaning in the direction of racing cars as they go around the track.

And occasionally, of course, there were the bad times: where there should have been seventeen more steps and then the hiss of a door, he would hear the shriek of alarms and hoarse, guttural curse words (in Russian or Lithuanian or whoever had decided they needed a giant bipedal robot to make them feel better) and his heart would leap into his mouth, and he would jump to the active console, praying that this time wasn't the time, oh god oh god please don't let it be this time please oh god don't let it-

"Otacon. The codes aren't on this level."

And he would have to stop his voice from wavering, and he would pull up the required floor plans or scan for infrared beams or anything else, because he found his hands shook less on a keyboard.

Because at some point, training is not enough. No matter how good you are, however well you plan and train and work, how much you sweat over the details, eventually luck takes over. Hal was not comfortable with luck. It was a grey area. Binary didn't have grey areas. (Not until you get to the real freaky stuff anyway- Ed.) So it was easier, he found, in the long hours of the night, when the alarms started to caterwaul and his palms suddenly sprung into sweat and his hands, normally so sure, slipped and clattered on the keyboard, creating uncertainties- to think of each decisions that led up to that point as a binary decision. Two outcomes. One or zero. On or off. Dead or Alive. And that held back the fear, if only for a moment, because you could spend your time thinking which choice had gone wrong- which choice you had made go wrong- and ignore that the shifting, swirling grey fog of circumstance, that horrible non-entity, that hateful thing, that was in fact the cause of all the screaming, rather than your careful, rational house of sticks built on the swamp of real life. And hopefully, you would never have to face up to that fact that all your decisions and planning and sweat had boiled down to chance; a freak occurrence; a lazy guard or a repaired security camera, and that you had caused the death of a loved one.

There was no big pair of hands in the sky guiding you. There was no system you could study that would not eventually fall to entropy. And the human body- oh the human body- basically a mass of twitchy, unstable on-off switches that demanded frankly unimaginable resources to work even reasonably well. If it was a PC, Hal would have long ago consigned it to the scrapheap as a marvellously designed but indulgent system.

That, he had found, was the effect of more than seven hours at the CODEC. Most of Snake's mission took ten hours. The crick in the back was annoying, but it was the lingering existential dread that really niggled at him.

But there was comfort to be had in goals achieved, threats evaded. And watching Snake at his work.

Hal knew he had a fairly focused mind, when it came to certain subjects. The differentiation was necessary, as many who had worked with him before had remarked. Uncharitably often, he felt. And loudly. He could expound for hours- wearying, tiresome hours, some had said- on the magic of C++ and how easy it made coding and how simple it was to do (It was usually at this point that his kind offer to demonstrate was turned down, and he usually adjusted his time accordingly) or on the really fascinating symbolism of the works of Hideako Anno, because of course the Christian cross is not such a widely recognised symbol in Japan, isn't that weird? So it's inclusion at several key points in the Neon Genesis saga was almost entirely random, and the imagery that our western eyes drew from it offered an almost unparalleled insight into the-

At this point, either he was told to shut up, or gun-wielding men burst into the room and started knocking him around- both had happened so often that he minded neither.

But this same mindset was tied to another- the other Hal- who could spend comfortably over fifteen minutes searching for his glasses before being reminded by a passing Samaritan that they were perched gently on top of his head, apparently quietly enjoying the view. So he knew instinctively that he would not make a good soldier, in the same way a rabbit will never stick two toothpicks in its upper lip and try to kid the other animals that it was a small, floppy-eared tiger.

But watching Dave move through obstacles to an objective was something of a comfort in the long hours. Hal appreciated fine art in the same way that, say, a duck would appreciate a new pair of dancing pumps, but he could see in Dave a kind of grace and purity of intent he had only seen before in the most highly trained dancers, or wild animals moving in for the kill. Seeing as how his own brain never really shut down, he was magnetically attracted to this silvery hunter's energy- where every thread of thought was drawn in the brain was drawn to one point at the instance of the kill.

...

The noise drew him back.

Shuffle, thump. Crackle, crackle hiss.

"Okay Snake, you're looking at a keypad now. Behind that door should be the plans for PRIME, so just key in the code that I showed you."

Pause. He shifted uneasily.

"Do you read?"

Nothing. Silence.

"Snake, do you read me?"

Nothing further. There might have been, in the background, the noise of boots, and congratulatory back-patting for the man who had brought down the intruder. That and dead air.

Panic started to well, hot and tight, in his throat. He tapped at the mic again, convinced he was missing something. Hoping he was missing something.

"Snake?"

"Snake!"