Desmond quickly escaped Rebecca's workroom to change clothes, and returned just as quickly afterwards, demanding she swear an oath of secrecy about his Animus-induced ejaculation.
"Don't be so ashamed, bud," she said in response. "Just think of that memory as basically a hyper-realistic wet dream. You've been pretty stressed lately, I think you needed some release."
He scrunched his hands in the pockets of his robe, barely able to talk to her, much less make eye contact. "Maybe I did need it, okay!? Didn't need you to watch it happen though!"
"C'mon, it's a natural physiological process. I'm not gonna get all weird about it, so you don't need to either." But in the end she did agree not to tell anyone.
"So did you want to keep going today?" she asked as he sat down on the Animus chair to give his swollen feet a rest. "You weren't in there more than forty minutes."
"I... well... maybe? Is the next memory from inside Magda's uterus?" he asked, placing a hand over his own. "Don't know if I could handle that right now."
Rebecca shrugged. "I can't see 'em before you sync 'em."
Desmond closed his eyes and grimaced, rubbing his hand back and forth.
"Oh, is he kicking? Like, showing you he knows you're talking about babies and uteri?"
"No... I... I'm just thinking about him... being born." He stuck out his tongue. "Gross."
"That'll be far from the grossest thing you'll have to deal with. You ever changed a diaper before?"
"Gaaagh!" He frantically shook his head, both to indicate "No" to her question and to try to expunge the nasty mental image it had prompted.
"Shit happens, y'know. Literally."
He looked at the floor. "Can we not talk about that right now?!"
"It'll happen whether you talk about it or not, but fine." She shrugged again and focused back on her screen. "Well, obviously that night of Polish passion was the last memory recorded from Alojzy's life. So, including the one we just saw the conception of, there are one, two, three, four,five ancestors before we're down to Junior himself."
A thought popped in Desmond's brain and he sat up abruptly. "Hey Becca, you've been in the Animus, right?"
"Yeah, but just briefly, for testing purposes. I only relived one ancestor." Her chair creaked as she idly tilted it back and forth. "Someday I wanna get back in and find out if the famous Ichabod Crane is really in my family tree. My granddad swears he was, but that guy was a little kooky sometimes; it coulda been just another one of his tall tales."
"Was your ancestor in Italy, Austria, Germany, or Poland?" He felt incredibly stupid for not thinking to ask this sooner.
"Prussia. That was part of Germany, right? I think? Ask Shaun or Colin, they'd know."
"Was his or her name Schreiber?"
Rebecca chuckled and shook her head. "I know what you're getting at. But just because the one guy I synced wasn't a Schreiber doesn't mean Junior couldn't be mine. The number of ancestral pathway branches increases exponentially with each generation back in time. So if I'm the unwitting DNA donor for Junior, the branch with my Karl von Pöhlmann in it is a completely different one from this Carlo Poletti line we're exploring."
"So... there's no way to know." Desmond hunched over in defeat.
"Not until you sync close enough to the present that we can recognize a family member. Buck up, you'll be getting to that point pretty soon." She snapped her fingers. "Oh, forgot to tell you. I added an IM feature."
He looked up. "Huh? What for?"
"Usually when you're in a memory, you're able to talk with your actual Desmond mouth, but the other day with the new synchro config, you had some paralysis going on, remember? I bet you were trying to yell out for me to help you or something but you couldn't."
Desmond nodded. "Right, I was trying to tell you everything was all fucked."
"Well, now you'll be able to send telepathic texts to my end of the system, if you need to. And I can type back at'cha. And it'll be saved to a log in case we need to reference our chit-chat later."
"Oh. Nice."
"So, let's move along to Maggie's kid. Maybe you're in her uterus now, maybe not," Rebecca made an ambivalent see-saw gesture with her hands, "but really, would it be so bad to learn how Junior spends his days?"
His eyes lit up with realization. "Oh. I hadn't thought of it that way."
"How the hell could you not think of it that way?"
He chuckled. "Honestly, all I was thinking of was how weird it felt when I was Connor inside Ziio."
"Come on, we eat 'weird' for breakfast."
There was a strange grumbling sound from Desmond's gut. "Speaking of eating," he began, but Rebecca cut him off, saying "Didn't you just havebreakfast before syncing Alojzy?"
"You've clearly never been pregnant." He gesticulated at different spots on his torso. "Kid's taking up all the real estate from here to here, so my stomach's all cramped up in this tiny space right under my ribs, so I can't fit a lot of food in there... Plus he eats from what I eat, so I gotta up my intake. Put those two together, obviously I gotta eat more often than normal!"
"Right, right," she acknowledged. "Go get your grub on, for Junior's sake. Hey, you been having any crazy cravings?"
He stood and shook his head. "Sorry to disappoint. Just craving straight-up food."
Desmond was so food-focused that he didn't notice the other person in the kitchen until he heard a click from behind him while rooting in the fridge. He almost banged his head snapping to attention and spinning around to locate the sound's origin.
"The hell?! Colin, is that a camera?! You took a picture of me like this!?"
"Affirmatory," the scruffy blonde answered. "It's important to capture mementos of this brief and magical time."
Not brief enough! Desmond thought. "I don't need any mementos! It's not like I'll forget this shit happened to me, so you can just delete that!"
"Can't delete it. It's Polaroid." Colin held up a square of plastic.
Desmond was incredulous. "Polaroid? Who still uses Polaroid in the year twenty-fucking-thirteen?"
"Digital cameras have all that digital garf in 'em. GPS, social media integration, who knows what else besides. Too much of a security risk if the data was ever accessed by you-know-who."
"Whatever, just give it here," Desmond grabbed the photo from the younger Assassin and watched the image resolve. "This picture sucks balls," he opined. "All you can see is my back. Can't even tell I'm pregnant from that angle. Kinda defeats your whole 'memento' purpose, doesn't it?" He tossed it down and resumed his search for a snack.
Colin held the viewfinder to his eye and affected a campy semi-British, semi-Australian accent. "Roight, give us a pose then, luv."
"Take pictures if you must, but they'll hafta be candid snaps, I'm not posing." He happened to look up from building his sandwich just in time to get a faceful of flash as the camera went off. "Gah!"
"Whoops, bad timing on that one."
Desmond blinked spots from his vision. "If any of these preggo pics end up on the Assassin database, you're so fucking dead."
He did indeed have to relive the prenatal life of the next ancestor. Floating in warm fluid, all curled up, not even able to open his eyes, the steady thumping of Magda's heartbeat somewhere above him the only sound he could identify; Desmond supposed he would have considered it boring, if not for the fact of his pregnancy making the experience relevant to his own life.
He whiled away the time testing the limits of fetal motion, extending one leg, then the other, first slowly, then faster, then repeating the process with his arms, then turning his head side to side, back and forth. Whenever he bumped against the uterus, it would shift slightly as Magda reacted to feeling her baby move. Sometimes she responded with laughter, and Desmond was slightly saddened, as the sound reminded him of his own mother. Man, what would she think if she was here? If she had to watch her son being pregnant? I guess she probably wanted grandkids just like every other mother does... Oh geez. My Dad's going to be a granddad. I wonder how he feels about that... Did he ever even think about me having kids? If I had stayed at the Farm, would he have set me up with some nice Assassin girl? What if I'd gotten married after I left? Would Abstergo have come after my wife and kids?
He shook his head, or rather, the baby's head. Why am I even thinking about this?! I did run away, and I didn't get married! The Desmond that became a bartender in New York was the one the First Civ needed; none of the other Desmonds are relevant... Do they even exist? In some parallel universe? Or are they nothing more than possibilities I could have chosen, alternate paths I could have taken?
Thinking of Those Who Came Before made him wonder, for about the majillionth time, why exactly Juno had impregnated him. If she wanted to have a body again, surely she wouldn't have used human DNA to make it? She was always going on and on about how inferior humans are. So my kid definitely isn't her. But then why? Gee, I guess if we ever run into her again, I'll have to ask.
Somehow, Desmond realized he could now open his eyes, and he looked down at the body he was inhabiting, though he could barely see anything. Only the barest hint of light was available to him, most of it filtered out by Magda's clothing, skin, and uterine walls. But he tried anyway. So... this is what my kid looks like. He regarded the chubby form, and felt a tingle of some strange emotion he couldn't quite put a name to. That there must be the uh, umbilical cord. He followed the meandering string of vessels outward from his navel, and found an alien-looking blob of tissue. And that's the uh... doohickey. Mental note: re-read that dumb pregnancy book. Wait, no. It doesn't matter what it's called. What matters is how it works, and I remember that much. It's the thingy that'll come out after he comes out. It connects him to me and it's how he gets all his blood and food and stuff... Heh, I guess he technically is a parasite, when you think about it.
From time to time he was semi-aware of Magda's conversations and activities. I wonder how far along she is? Is she close to giving birth? Do I have to relive that part too? What about breastfeeding? God, that'd be weird. Ah, don't start thinking about boobs, Desmond, you'll get another boner!
As he tried to push the thought of breasts from his mind, the ancestral child did a strange rapid half somersault, and Magda's heartbeat was below him now. Hold up, no, her heart is still above me. I'm just upside-down now. He remembered Stacey's explanation of his kid's position. Yeah. Because babies come out head first... Oh crap. A baby is really going to come out of me. Ugh.
June 2, 2013
Either due to Rebecca's modifications or to the natural quirkiness of the Animus, the next genetic memory after the one in utero was the ancestor as a teenaged boy.
Desmond felt goosebumps rise on his skin as the simulation loaded. The winter was harsh in Poland, even though he was curled beneath heavy feather blankets. He didn't want to move from this spot of comfort and relative warmth, but he could sense that each minute he stayed in bed was chipping away at his synchronization level. Guess this guy was an early bird. Desmond finally allowed the ancestor to rise and begin his day.
He prepared a mug of coffee, which tasted terrible and had way too many grounds in it, but at least heated him up. Then, after donning a thick woolen overgarment and boots, he headed outside and tromped crunchily through the snow.
So, he's a farmer, Desmond realized when he came to a barn. He heaved his weight against the doors to open them, revealing bleating livestock inside. That's why he had to get up so early. The ancestor pulled a stool and bucket over to one of the cows and began to milk it. Oh, this is familiar. I've done this on the Farm, and now I'm doing it on a real farm. Heh.
But something felt... off. Something Desmond couldn't quite put his finger on. He hazarded a try at the newly-added IM feature. She said it was 'telepathic'... so I guess I just need to think something to her. Rebecca? You there?
He was startled to see the words appear in his vision, superimposed on the cow's spotted hide and formatted like an internet chat room.
Desmond: Rebecca? You there?
Then a reply popped under it.
Rebecca: w00t! it works!
He mentally aimed some more words at her.
Desmond: This feels weird.
Rebecca: yeah i bet thought to text is pretty trippy right?
Desmond: I mean the memory feels weird.
Rebecca: what, milking a cow is weird?
Desmond: Not that. It's hard to describe.
Rebecca: try me.
The initial lines of their conversation faded away as more recent ones took their place.
Desmond: It's like my- No, his body feels unusual.
Rebecca: ? you can still feel jr inside you? you shouldnt be getting any tactile stimuli other than fom the memory
Desmond: Not my kid's body, this farmer guy's body.
Rebecca: ? oh i get it lol
Desmond: Huh?
Rebecca: u're not reliving a farmer guy
Desmond: Excuse me?
Rebecca: i guess the reason you feel wierd is becus this ancestor's female lol
Desmond looked down at "himself". "He" had breasts, albeit small ones.
Desmond: Oh. Yeah. That could explain it. Why the hell didn't I notice that before?
Rebecca: guess you assumed you would only ever be synced with dudes? check ur male privelege bud, baby is fully capble of simulating womans' lifes
Rebecca: gender of teh user dosnt matter, ive synced a guy b4, remeber?
Desmond: Speaking of checking things, you should check your spelling.
Rebecca: tushe
Desmond: What? Was that supposed to be "touché"? Case in point.
Rebecca: soz! ur messages are coming in so fast im just tryina keep up!
Rebecca: u just haveto think it and it sends what u think, but im havin t tpye everythin out n also monitoer your sycnh n vitals at the same time!
Desmond: Okay, all right! Don't worry about replying to me then, if it's distracting from your monitoring duties. I just wanted to check that nothing was going screwy with the Animus.
Rebecca: nope nothin screwy, this is just wat it fels like for a girl
Desmond: God, Shaun would have an aneurysm if he saw the way you type.