Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Kickstart My Heart-Motley Crue Vol 2. Wk 14
Setting: Season Three Episode "731"
AN: Yeah, so Scully's a bit obtuse with Pendrell's obvious infatuation. I'm projecting a bit on Scully here, as a red head myself in real life and I actually do not find other red headed men very attractive, (Damian Lewis being a notable exception). I don't know why that is, but you know, I might have to change my mind for Pendrell. He really is very sweet.
AN 2: Borrowed dialogue
Had Agent Pendrell been any other FBI crime lab agent he would have been far less cheerful about seeing Scully at his office at 7:30 at night.
"I was wondering if you would be able to get in," Pendrell kidded as she swept through the Sci-Crime lab door, cursing rush hour, DC traffic under her breath.
"I was out in Arlington when I called, and it seemed everyone in Northern Virginia had the same idea I did," she muttered, throwing her overcoat on the nearest chair that looked the furthest away from anything potentially delicate and breakable. "I'm sorry for keeping you so late."
"It's not a problem…anything I can do to help," Pendrell waved off her apology as if she had simple asked him to fetch her a cup of coffee, not give up his entire evening. "Besides, you chip has proven a tricky mystery. Its not often we get those down here."
"Tricky," her eyebrows raised curiously as she glanced at the station where Pendrell had been working. "How?"
"Let's just say I won't see this sort of complex chip in a remote control car anytime soon," he waved her over to the complex set up of electronic equipment and computers. "I ran some preliminary tests on it, just to see what the chip was designed to do." He pulled a rolling office chair from one of the workstations and held it out for her, the sort of gracious move that Scully rarely saw out of fellow, male FBI agents these days. She smiled gratefully as she took the seat and rolled it closer to the computer monitor that Pendrell had earlier displayed the chip in full view under the microscope.
"As you can see, the chip is pretty quiescent now," Pendrell moved between the various machines around his set up, flipping on switches as he returned to the microscope. "Chips work just like the nervous system of the body, working on electrical impulses to read and perform functions. In this case, this chip was overlaid with a neural network of sorts, a complex data storage device if you will."
"Like a computer disk," Scully tried to relate it to something a bit more tangible.
"More like a computer hard drive, only unlike a computer hard drive this chip is limited in what it can do. It's created for a specific set of processes, unlike a computer which can usually handle many processes simultaneously."
"So what was the chip designed to do?" That was the crux of the question Scully wanted answered. Could it hold the truth about her missing memories and the testing done to her?
"That's what my tests tried to find out," Pendrell bent his bright head over the microscope, clicking blindly at his keyboard as he did so. On the monitor a graph appeared with various lines running across it.
"This graph shows the electronic impulses I'm feeding to the chip," he looked up enough to nod at the screen. "I'm feeding the chip impulses. The graph is recording its output, which, when I remove the current, changes slightly but continues. This means the neural network is storing information."
That was just what she had hoped to hear…and feared. "Biological information?"
"That was my first guess. You've already told me the chip was placed subcutaneous under the back of the neck, right?"
She nodded slowly, feeling the scar tissue on the back of her neck twinge.
"So it makes sense that it would be recording impulses traveling to and from the central nervous system." Pendrell frowned at the graph, his strawberry blonde eyebrows crinkling thoughtfully. Something obviously wasn't making sense for him.
"But what," Scully's voice cut sharply as she glanced between the graph and Pendrell's studious confusion over it.
"But look at the graph." His fingers circled one area of the data, one that apparently had meaning for him. "Those are what we call reverbatory loops. They indicate the presence of circular neuronal activity in the brain."
She felt her mouth dry as if filled with cotton. "Memory formation." Flashes of the white place blazed alive in her memory.
"Yeah, the chip seems to be mimicking that process, replicating the memory process in the brain."
"Like a computer hard drive," that explained his earlier analogy.
"Yeah, but no hard drive we've ever seen. This kind of neural network could be not only collecting information, but artificially replicating a person's mental processes."
"You could know a person's every thought." Ice began creeping down under the skin of her neck, trickling and freezing down her spine.
"Frightening," Pendrell agreed gravelly, shuddering slightly under his white, lab coat. He rose from the computer, rounding the table to what looked like a desk beyond. Quietly Scully followed, the sickening idea of just what that chip might have taken from her memory churning in her stomach.
"Anyway, I showed the chip to some of my tech heads and they weren't as blown away as I thought they'd be," Pendrell murmured, vaguely disappointed.
"They've seen this technology before?"
Pendrell flipped on a light over his desk, rummaging across a field of papers and receipts, sticky notes and discarded pens. "Well, they've seen neural nets before, but never one as complex as that... nor are they likely to anytime soon."
"What do you mean?"
"The chip's so delicate that I effectively destroyed it when I began working on it... but I found something in the silicon matrix, what I believe is the name of the manufacturer." Deftly he plucked up a sheet of paper from one of the piles.
Scully didn't need to be told where it was made…she had a sinking feeling she already knew. "It's Japanese….isn't it?"
If the tech heads lack of enthusiasm for the chip hadn't deflated Agent Pendrell, her question certainly had. "How did you know?"
"Oh, it was just a guess," she shrugged, glossing over the flush on her face as Pendrell passed her the paperwork, Japanese characters circled on the page.
"Well, I checked for you. I assumed you'd want me to." He sounded rather proud of himself for thinking of it. "But there's no record or information on the manufacturer either here or in Japan, except this."
He passed her another sheet, this one a computer print out with a West Virginia address and a Japanese name…Zama. She frowned. He wasn't Ishimaru. An associate perhaps, someone working with him, perhaps a fellow Cold War refuge brought over by the government?
"I had Fed Ex, U.P.S., the postal service... every commercial courier go through their computer records. They turned up one shipment, sent to a Doctor Shiro Zama at a research facility out in Perkey, West Virginia." Pendrell was fairly beaming now, bouncing on the balls of his heels briefly, delighted he had been able to sift out a piece of data that Scully was fully willing to admit she highly doubted either she or Mulder could have found. And for only ten hours, even Scully was impressed by the fast turn around, this type of investigation normally would drag out through any other FBI lab for days.
"Well done, Agent Pendrell." She meant it, most lab techs, especially those who knew her work with Mulder wouldn't have been bothered with taking her phone call this late of an evening, and certainly wouldn't have stayed late to explain it all to her, nor have bothered to track down Zama's West Virginia address, all crucial links to whatever it was that Mulder's informant wanted her to find, the information to what it was Mulder was tracking down on that train. She didn't have that sort of time to waist, and bless Pendrell for doing the work without questions or hang ups, simply because she asked. On impulse she reached for his arm, patting it gratefully as she frowned down at the West Virginia address, already wondering how long it would take her to drive there at this time of night and find this Zama. "Keep up the good work," she murmured thankfully as the thin, red haired man flushed a bright, lobster pink in front of her.
"Hey, thanks," he shrugged affably. "Keep it up yourself."
His turn of phrase gave her pause…he didn't know about the case she and Mulder were working, did he? She blinked at the poor man for the briefest of moments…had she given something away about it? She had simply said that the chip was from a woman, and it had to do with a case, but no other specifics…would Pendrell be terribly shocked though if she had told him where it was from? After all, it was an X-file, and to be honest, who in the department didn't know the strange things that entailed. Perhaps he would be someone worthwhile to go to in the future for these types of things that came across their desk.
After all, she smiled, he was quick, he was eager, and very, very sweet in his own way. A nice kid…in that nerdy sort of way, she supposed. And good enough to give up an evening to help her save her crazed partner from himself, she realized as she glanced at her watch, praying that she had enough time to get to wherever Zama's address was in West Virginia and get to the bottom of whatever it was on that train before Mulder did something exceedingly foolish and got himself killed. Perhaps, she mused she might even find some evidence of what exactly was done to her in one of those train cars. What tests had they performed on her and on Penny Northern and Betsy Hagopian? What did it have to do with Purity Control or with the green ooze she saw in the video? And what did this all have to do with the burnt out boxcar laying in the New Mexico desert near the Hosteens' home?
Thank God for Pendrell, she breathed as she rushed to her car, one of her few good finds from her days teaching. If she made it out of this latest escapade alive, she'd have to think of some way of making this up to him.