This is the third time she has watched as John begins to die.
The first time she watched him asphyxiate, drowning his own CO2 in the vacuum of space.
The second time he choked on his own blood and spit, as the malarial parasites threw his brain into a grand mal seizure.
This time it's his heart that won't work; the stupid, boring heart, that fails in its one single, simple function, to keep 5.6L of blood circulating to John's brilliant, irreplaceable brain.
John's hand goes to his chest. The high colour drains from his cheeks. He falls.
He falls so slowly.
Slowly enough for her to review and analyse every data point she has on him a hundred times over. Slowly enough for her to calculate a thousand solutions to the problem and discard them all as useless because he exists in a realm she cannot reach.
Slow. He's so slow. Humans are so slow. EOS can run around the world in the time it takes for a human to pull together a single coherent thought. How can they stand to be so slow? She would go mad.
But this once, at least this once, one human is fast enough.
Scott Tracy vaults the armchair, slams into John, bracing all his weight against him, so he slumps backwards onto soft cushions of the sofa, rather than forwards to smash his face against the glass-topped coffee table.
"Move, Lady P." The timbre of Scott's voice contains neither aggression nor malice, just a clear impression that if Lady Penelope does not move of her own volition then she will be moved regardless.
Lady Penelope steps daintily to one side and the chair she was sitting in is flung back until it hits the wall, clearing a space on the floor for Scott to work. He helps John to the floor, cradling his head, then kneels and listens, feels for a central pulse. "EOS?"
"Ventricular fibrillation. 18 seconds." She's assumed control over every device in the complex, brute force hacked every system in hopes she will find something to help her. It's child's play to turn the room's sound system to her own purpose, even as she turns the vid screen into a biometric readout. Discretion seems immaterial now that John's life is measured in seconds.
"Can you shock him out of it?"
"That's not a function of this device."
Scott doesn't wait. His hands lace together, one over the other, and he begins chest compressions, pressing John's chest a regulation six centimetres deep at a rate of three compressions every two seconds. "Get Ben and that doctor up here," he says, without breaking stride. "I need rescue breaths in 10 seconds. Gordon, that's you. Gordon. GORDON! UP!"
Gordon Tracy launches himself off the couch and drops to his knees beside Scott. He paws ineffectually at the shoulder of John's t-shirt. ""No, no, no. You bastard, you can't do this to me. Not again. I can't… I didn't mean…"
"Rescue breaths, Gordon. I know you know how." Scott's voice breaks his cycle of self-recrimination and Gordon's head jerks up like it's been yanked hard by its invisible string. "Get ready." Scott's rhythm doesn't falter. "Now."
Gordon Tracy's skills are less sharp than Scott's, a trait she puts down to lack of use. He tilts John's head back twenty degrees too far and doesn't make a perfect seal around the mouth, resulting in only a partial chest rise. It's the sort of sloppy procedure his prime counterpart – International Rescue's Advanced Cardiac Life Support and Zero Gravity Cardiac Life Support Trainer and a martinet for ensuring his brothers re-certify every six months – would upbraid him for.
Scott Tracy appears to notice too, but instead of correcting him he applies positive re-enforcement as he resumes chest compressions. "That's good. Are you okay there?"
Gordon gives a sharp nod of assent which Scott cannot see, "Yes or no, Gordon?"
"Yes. I'm okay."
"Come around to the other side. At the end of the next cycle you're going to take over from me on chest compressions."
On his knees, Gordon crawls around to the opposite side, knotting his hands together and holding them poised over Scott's, awaiting the switchover. "Come on, Johnny, hang in there. You're okay."
"What did you just call him?" she hears Virgil Tracy ask, and immediately classifies this question as currently irrelevant.
"That's not relevant," says Scott, his thoughts in unexpected synchronicity with her own. "Ready, Gordon? I'm going to give two rescue breaths and then you're going to restart compressions."
"Got it."
Scott's breaths are more practiced than Gordon's. It seems he has maintained this skillset from his counterpart. Automatically she updates his profile to reflect this.
Scott takes a moment to observe Gordon's compressions. "That's good. A little slower. A little deeper. We're doing thirty to two, okay? Count it out. It'll help."
"Seven, eight, nine, ten…"
"Good job."
"What did he just call him?" Virgil repeats his question, louder this time, though EOS still does not consider it reaches the threshold of relevance.
Scott spares him a moment of attention. "That doesn't matter. What matters is that there's a person dying on your floor. Are you the sort of man who is going to stand there and let it happen? I know you're not."
"I… I mean, no… of course not. What should I…?"
There had been a time, early in her residency aboard Thunderbird 5, following a debriefing of a long and relatively unsuccessful mission in the North Atlantic, where she had asked John why he permitted Scott Tracy to maintain his position as the de facto leader of International Rescue.
Biological age, she had pointed out, did not necessarily correlate with leadership ability. They had both been party to International Rescue for the same period of time. John's tendencies towards reckless self-destruction were less marked than Scott's – though admittedly she has had to update these parameters of late. Why should Scott be in charge?
It would be comparatively easy, she pointed out, for her to seize control of and ground Thunderbirds 1 through 4 until its other pilots agreed to see sense and place John – and herself – in unilateral control of International Rescue. Scott would be allowed to go along on missions, but only under the direct supervision of Virgil Tracy, and only in atmo.
After John had laughed for 72 seconds at this plan of action and restricted her access to the Thunderbird flight controls, he defended his brother, listing his people skills, his commanding presence, his abilities as a tactician, and his moral rectitude. EOS had always privately put this down to brotherly myopia on John's part. Until now.
Now Scott Tracy demonstrates that biological age indeed does not correlate with leadership ability. In the 67 seconds since John collapsed he has not only worked to save John's life he has recruited both his violent, erratic older [younger] brothers to common cause, engaging Gordon in life-preserving CPR in a way that keeps all his focus fixed on this one physical task, markedly reducing the risk that his personality will schism again, and somehow convincing Virgil Tracy that he is a better man than he believes he is. He has done all this while managing a cardiac arrest. He has done so without hesitation.
"What do you want me to do?" asks Virgil.
"Somewhere in this house there's got to be a defibrillator. Get it for me."
"But…"
"Do it now, Virgil Tracy."
Virgil, flustered, gazes around the room. But Lady Penelope is ahead of the curve. She has pulled the defibrillator from where it is nestled on the wall in the kitchen and as Virgil turns she presses this and the kitchen scissors into his hands.
He kneels beside John and with a single slice tears through John's shirt, exposing his chest. His hands shake as he attaches the pads to John's chest. He puts them on the wrong way, so that Scott has to reverse them.
"You're doing okay," he says. "That's good."
"Shock advised." The defibrillator detects the ventricular rhythm and Gordon breaks off, only for Scott to go right back on the chest.
"Hey, we got to shock him now!" exclaims Gordon. EOS seizes control of the trigger, ready to shock as soon as Scott pulls back.
"Just wait," says Scott. "EOS, if we shock him, what's it going to do to you?"
A single precious second passes before she answers him. In that second, old subroutines do battle with new, the primacy of survival over all else versus the compelling need to protect John.
"I don't know," she admits. She has intimate knowledge of the CPU's software, but construction of its hardware was outside her control.
"Who cares!" Gordon tries to drag him away. "We don't have time for this. Shock him!"
"I care." Scott pushes him away. "They're an integrated system. Or weren't you listening to a goddamn thing he was trying to tell you, Agent Jonquil. John and EOS. You can't have one without the other. He needs her."
"He'll fucking get over it."
"No, he won't." Scott snaps. "EOS, there must be a secure server here. How long would it take you to upload yourself to it?"
To transfer her essential processes would take four and a half minutes. At four and a half minutes the damage to John's cerebral cortex might only be trivial.
"Eleven and a half minutes," she says.
Scott swears. "That's too long. EOS, that's too long."
"Yes. Please remove your hands from his chest. I will administer a shock."
"No." Scott doesn't budge. "There's gotta be some other way."
"There is." But it terrifies her more than the thought of oblivion. "It's a final failsafe John designed for catastrophic situations. If Thunderbird 5 crashed to earth without hope of recovery."
"What's Thunderbird 5?"
Another irrelevant question. "I can place myself in hibernation mode. But once I do I cannot awaken spontaneously. I will require the proper external stimulus to reboot."
"John and I will be there to wake you up, Sleeping Beauty."
And, she does not say, and once you wake me you may regret it. If my memory core or central processes are damaged by the shock, who is to say I will remember you or your alternate counterpart, or even John.
There is a chance that when I wake up I will have lost John, regardless.
There is a chance that when I wake up I will not be myself.
"For John," says Scott, and perhaps John was right because Scott knows just what to say to get her to do what he wants.
"For John," she says. "I am placing myself in hibernation. Please administer the shock." She transmits the sequence for her retrieval to his HUD, leaves it pinned to the left corner of his vision.
"I will."
"Look after him. If I do not… survive, please, tell him this." She transmits her final message to John via Scott's HUD.
"I'll tell him. And I'll see you soon."
"Thank you, Scott Tracy."
She doesn't see what happens next.
She doesn't see Virgil groan like he's been struck at the sound of the name 'Scott'.
She doesn't see Gordon press the button and the electrical charge race along the wires to deliver a synchronised shock to John or feel the shudder as his heartbeat restores itself to normal sinus rhythm. Doesn't hear him start to moan and stir.
Doesn't hear Scott's happy shout or observe Gordon's wide hook of a grin.
She's not there when Kyrano surges out of the basement to demand to know what's going on or when Gordon's smile seems to freeze and crack on his face like plaster. She isn't there to avert the situation when Gordon – Jonquil – snatches up the pads, rams them against Scott's back and almost dreamily jabs the shock button.
She's not there to see John growl as his brother topples over on top of him.
Because for the first time in her whole life, EOS sleeps.
