An AU built from S1 and S2 with an injection of realism and a stretched and rearranged timeline. Will deal with some mytharc from later seasons, Escher, the Freelancers, because i have A Plan to deal those dropped plot points, but no "red" and "green" timeline and no Brad & Dark Kellogg timeline.
Aside from those basics... yes, I made Alec a little older. Hear me out here, it's not (just) for Eventual Pairing Reasons, but because he seems very, very much like one of those brilliant but aimless guys who took a gap year, and then another, and then another, and so on, and drifted away from his high school friends, and just basically couldn't figure out how to make a beginning with the talent he has. That isolation and dissatisfaction is a big part of his character so it made more sense with how he's actually written. He isn't written in the show as a fresh faced kid, he's written as a talented but bitter and aimless 20-something. I think SB got caught up in the math for Old Alec and forgot that with extreme wealth and tech, they could have made Young Alec even ten years older and Future Alec still could have been a powerful old man full of regrets and plotting a last ditch, though misguided effort to save humanity.
So, as per Clock Wise canon, Alec's birthday is December 28th 1989 and he had been 22 for 3 months when Kiera landed in 2012. Kiera's birthday is in 2049 as per Showcase's timeline and also according to their timeline she entered the military at 16, was 28 when she left 2077. I'm on the fence about that but it does make sense from her behavior that she was indoctrinated from a young age. Kiera's birthday is May 5th.
I'm doing my best with Kiera's backstory, and am working from a streamlined version of it with hopefully not so many contradictory pieces of information. I lean towards the early characterization of Kiera, a young woman who is naive and indoctrinated, but when forced into this alien landscape of the past she is able and willing to learn, and broaden her understanding, and questions a lot of her assumptions.
Yes, this is an eventual Alec/Kiera pairing fic, but my main focus is exploring Kiera herself, and then the closeness and difficulties of their unusual partnership and how they both cope with the potential power and influence given their inside knowledge. At its core it's a close and complicated friendship. As for the less-platonic side? I hope i will make my case and you will trust me enough to go with it... but there is still a long way between here and there.
The first time she realized that she was adjusting to life in the past was the tender, fragrant June of 2012, four months into her ordeal. Summer was cooler than she remembered back home, and the affluent didn't flee the city for the countryside the way they did in her time. It was still hot enough, though, her little, once fine but now slightly shabby and worn down hotel didn't have centralized air conditioning, just a box the manager installed in her window. She'd seen such things in movies set in the past, but she'd stared in dismay when it was put in.
She didn't spend much time in her hotel, in any case. Liberate had been active with dozens of petty crimes. She kept busy, her and Carlos and Betty, with Alec on the other side of her ear piece. She'd been there long enough that her colleagues' prodding inquiries into her origins and intentions had fallen off, at least to the point where she and Alec could manage them with practiced routines.
The work was good, it was satisfying. She felt like she was making progress. Not with her way home, no, but with the effort to keep the Liberate massage from spreading and taking over, or at least in keeping them from harming too many more members of the public. She left herself little time to be concerned with the broader picture of her life, and she was getting something done and that was enough.
She'd always craved routine, even as a small child, never minding her father's regimented strictness, and floundering in her mother's haphazard style when he was gone. It shouldn't have surprised her when she developed a routine in the past, but it did. She hadn't even noticed at first, it had snuck up on her while she buried her head in case-files and constant half-arguments about time travel theory and morality with Alec, rather than actually sitting and thinking of the reality of it.
She'd stopped expecting to hear hover traffic overhead. She'd stopped trying to find insta-zolve packets in the drug store when she needed something to ease the pains of a tough fight. She'd learned which of the restaurants and coffee carts around the hotel and the station had dishes she liked or the most affordable lattes, and which Carlos would take her to when they needed a break from a case. She even went to the farmers market every other saturday because the Sadler-Randall family sold produce there in the summer and fall, and Alec's mother usually pulled a dutiful-son-who-ought-to-be-in-college-by-now guilt trip on him in an effort to get him to go outside and talk to people sometimes, and dragged him along.
She liked those days actually. It was nice to spend an hour or two by the waterfront, people watching at the popular summer market, basking in the cool breeze off the shore. Alec was usually surprisingly good company, although he was usually in a foul mood at first, after a morning of being patient and accommodating with Roland and Julian. It was nice to actually see the face of the person she talked to so often.
She even had a little bit of spending money by then, thanks to a loophole that allowed for a small per diem from the VPD while she was 'transferred' to their department. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough to clothe and feed her if she was careful. Things were a lot cheaper in the twenty-tens anyway, and it wasn't like she was planning on setting up a household. She hadn't found herself flat broke since landing in the past, at least.
It was a tiny, limited social circle, and a small number of routine comforts, but it was something. It was more like a life and less like a waiting period. It was a sign that she was beginning to put down roots without even noticing it.
One of the few actually prosecutable cases she'd worked on had gone to court. She stopped at the coffee cart in the plaza by the station and the barista smiled at her in recognition and asked after her partner, wrote her name on the paper cup from memory. It wasn't the first time it had happened either, since Kiera stopped at the cart a couple times a week, and the petite, round faced girl with the thick, dark braid was sweet and chatty. For some reason, though, that grey, muggy morning it startled her.
She knew people in 2012 and people knew her, talked to her, expected her presence. In an hour or two she'd be giving evidence in a courtroom, her name on the record. She wasn't just floating invisibly through life in the past on her way to getting home. No matter how hard she tried to limit her interference, her life intersected with other lives, and she was getting used to it.
She made it to the courthouse before coming to a complete, panicked stop. She was irrationally sure that just going and having her name on the record was going to get her in trouble down the line. But then, it was probably too late to prevent that anyway, she was one of the detectives on record on a number of cases by then. Her fingerprints were out there, her supposed employment with Section Six. The more people looked over it all, the more likely it was that someone was going to notice that nothing about her quite lined up.
"You have to get me back out of the system, Alec," she said abruptly, forgetting to pantomime a phone call. She got a couple odd looks from passers by, but she ignored them.
"What system?" he asked, right away, and ready to go with it.
But he balked when she explained that she wanted him to start wiping away the trail he'd made for her, her forged legitimacy.
"It isn't completely perfect, okay, but it's what's keeping everyone from looking more closely. You need that, Kiera. Maybe we're not as suspicious and big brothered now as in your time, but we're still pretty serious about it. I made it look as normal as i could while still being intimidatingly classified. It'll hold. It's like that old spy thing about being noticeable to blend in."
She hadn't been completely convinced, hadn't been convinced at all really. She felt like she could see her doom barreling down on her from bureaucratic highways. It was warm, and the clouds had cleared away in a sweet breeze, so the gentle 2012 summer sun was shining on her skin. But she felt chilled as the day she'd landed in that strange time, that unusually icy night in March.
She let it go though, in the end. She had to. Carlos came out to look for her, wondering why she hadn't met up with him in the lobby at the time they'd agreed on. She'd fumbled for her phone and pretended she was wrapping up a difficult call, pacing away from him to cover her lapse.
He'd asked if it was family trouble, said she had that wound up look. She had absolutely no idea what to tell him, no convenient lie sprang to mind. She changed the subject, tried to avoid noticing his concerned frown. That was something, too. She'd been there long enough for the people around her to worry over her when she was acting strange. It was human nature. In some ways it was nice, reassuring to know her partner cared, to know that Alec was looking out for her. In a lot of other ways though it reminded her of the guilt that rose and fell in her like the tide.
It started with a long stint of tracking the actions and funding of yet another grass roots protest group to see if it had Liberate connections or whether it was simply another disenfranchised Occupy off-shoot. Mostly it was street kids and college kids banding together with signs and tents and a system of hand gestures, trying to keep the original occupy spirit alive. They kept trying to camp the park and the city was trying to straddle the line of living up to their liberal-minded reputation, and trying not to let the movement grow to be a public safety and health hazard.
Kiera went along on a lot of casual interviews with protesters and realized that the real activists among the opportunists and the homeless hoping for some entertainment and a place to camp were people who had broken away from the militant factions in a self righteous huff. They were pacifists, a little naive and more than a little arrogant, but not likely to start something dangerous on their own.
No one was sure how Liberate was going to react to a non-violent organization pushing in on their territory. She had urged caution to Dillon and the others in the meetings at the station about how hard they cracked down when the time came. She was worried that Liberate would take the chance to start an out and out conflict between the protesters and police, firming up public antipathy to the government and bringing in more followers. She knew all too well how quickly it could and would spiral from there, with the protesters becoming more radicalized the more they saw themselves as persecuted.
It was November, 2012 dwindling away in a slow creep of dim, grey and green days thick with cloying damp, and Kiera spent her afternoons lurking around the edges of the Occupy encampments, watching for Liberate interference. The Occupy protests were largely ineffective and also not the media circus that the Wall Street originator had been, but the people of this time didn't know how quickly the tides would turn in the coming decade, or maybe the next. The protests would begin escalating in the coming years and the coming strife, though she couldn't remember exactly when. Liberate would know, would remember more clearly than she did most likely, the pattern that built to what happened in Chicago, and then New York, and then DC under the last American president.
She'd been cold and footsore for what felt like weeks on end. Even when the protesters that had homes to go to shambled off for the night, she walked the city, feeling ghostly and agitated as she passed by shop windows that had already begun to fill with holiday displays and dark, damp alleyways where homeless milled and tried to camp out. She'd been restless, between cases but no nearer to understanding her situation, and trying to avoid nights alone in her long-stay hotel room.
The tension broke one pale, bitingly clear and cold afternoon, just before the bulk of the protest would have naturally dissipated. An angry young man, just a kid really but tall and broad-shouldered, got into a shoving match with the cops trying to herd a breakaway group back onto the sidewalk, his friends jumping in to defend him. The frustration on both sides turned to confrontation, and the officers on scene had leapt at the chance to break up the demonstration.
She'd been at the station when it happened, all set to say that the protests were petering out and it didn't seem like Liberate was interested. By the evening several contentious arrests had been made, and by midnight there was a cellphone video of the young, unarmed teenagers getting slammed down and restrained by cops in riot gear going viral. Not plot, or a plant, a genuine altercation.
The next few days were chaos. The Occupy protestors lost their nerve, but they were replaced by Liberate supporters galvanized into action, though not the original members themselves. A few storefronts were smashed, a couple cars were burned, the media swarmed, the poor kid from the video was released on bail with a minor charge. Uniform mopped up with an implacable fervor that was only a taste of what was to come. The numbers on both sides only seemed to be growing, and the people showing up weren't naive kids, but angry adults looking to yell and fight, many of them bussed in from out of town following online calls to action.
Kiera was sure they were headed for yet another grotesque display of brinkmanship and violence. She'd seen Garza sniffing around the scene one day, and Valentine the next, she was sure Liberate proper was about to get involved, but suddenly the weather turned. Pelting rain and high winds, great walloping body-blow gusts of the kind that would have been softened and eaten up by the wind breaks and turbines along the shore back home in her time.
A storm had blown in off the water and even the angriest protesters couldn't stick it out. They'd dispersed, intent on finding shelter, grumbling and slinging a last volley of insults as they melted away from the police barriers and into the grey, sodden city. The uniform cops had filed back into the station, sodden and vigorous, and put away their riot gear. They'd nodded to each other and joked around, as if congratulating themselves on their victory, as if they'd driven the protesters away and not the brutal wind and blinding rain. The stand-off had been diffused for the time being, but each side had walked away more sure that they were the ones in the right.
Kiera looked on from the sidelines, suddenly feeling that the whole thing was an exercise in futility. Her actions, Liberate's actions, all of it seemed surplus to requirements, society was going to churn itself to pieces on the way to the future no matter what she did, or they did, how hard she dragged at the machinery to slow it, or Liberate tried to hurry it along.
Liberate wanted to start a war, but they were too late, the war was already there, it was already being fought even without the interference of a handful of agitators shipwrecked in a strange land. She wanted to laugh, she wanted to go tell them how pointless it all was, how they were wasting their time. She wanted to go tell them how little their anger and their menace and their grandiose fantasies mattered in the face of a world that had already passed its breaking point, was already disintegrating without their help.
Mostly, though, she wanted her head to stop aching. And maybe to sleep for a solid week, catch up on some of that rest she'd been unable to get for far too long. She sat at her borrowed desk at the station and rubbed her temples and wondered vaguely if Alec could simply switch her off for a while, like a computer terminal on standby, since the conventional methods of lying down and closing her eyes hadn't been working so well lately.
The next thing she knew, she was blinking blearily and lifting her head from the desk as someone shook her shoulder and someone called her name in her ear and her head felt like someone driving something sharp and burning slowly through it.
"Kiera, are you okay? Kiera? Can you answer me? I'm getting some kind of weird readings over here."
"I think I fell asleep," she mumbled, squinting around at the thankfully dim bullpen and noticing that her HUD was popping up on its own and then flickering strangely.
Betty was looking down at her, a concerned expression on her face. "I noticed. You okay, there? It's getting even nastier out there, Dillon's sending all non-essentials home so we're not driving around in it."
"I'm getting some really weird feedback over here, Kiera, when you have a minute," Alec repeated, and she could hear a strained edge in his voice that would worry her if she could care about anything beyond the pain in her head.
"That's good, it's been a long couple weeks... I'm just going to wake up a little more and then head out."
She smiled politely and Betty let it go with a doubtful look, probably too eager to get on the road to give her colleagues' awkward manner too much thought. She was grateful for that. She needed to collect herself a little and then contact Alec. Maybe the other way around since he'd been pestering in her ear for a response, and she had the vague feeling that he'd been trying while she'd been out, too.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket, remembering even in this state that she would look like a crazy person without it. She wished her HUD would stay off when she tried to deactivate it, it was making her feel disoriented.
"Something's wrong," was the first thing she said.
"Yeah, I can see that. The whole interface seems to be malfunctioning. I'm trying to get in there to assess from my end, but I can't get access, it's not working well enough for me to repair. I think I need the hard connection, get you and the suit hooked up to the main rig."
"My head is killing me, and my HUD's not working right, it's very distracting. Can you break that down for me?"
"I don't want to worry you, but I'm running into a brick wall. You need to come here so I can hook your CMR and suit up directly, channels aren't cutting it," he said, and his voice sounded tight, stressed, and she knew how much it took to rattle him.
"I can't drive like this, Alec, not with all this visual static."
"Yeah. And you were really out of it for a while, when the interface froze. Okay, that would not be safe. What about Betty, she just left, I bet you could still catch her and get a ride with her."
"And tell her what, exactly? I need you to drive me to this farm an hour outside town and leave me there, and I may not stay conscious the whole time but you can't ask any questions?"
"Well, yeah. I mean, it would get you here faster and we could come up with something later. She's a cop, right? she should understand about 'classified,' right?"
"Cop is just a way of saying snoop with a badge, Alec. I don't want her knowing anything more than she has to."
"Right. No, that was never going to work. Shit. I'll have to come get you. The mysterious future tech just had to go and bork itself when it's stormpocolypse out there, didn't it."
"I don't mean to be such a burden to you," she snapped, "It's not great timing for me either, you know."
"You're not, Kiera, I promise you are not. But it's gonna take me forever to get out your way in this weather, and then we have to get back. You're going to be uncomfortable for at least a few more hours and I can't monitor you from on the road. At least if I can't get into your systems, we can be pretty sure no one else can either."
"Oh. I didn't think about that. You don't think it's Ingram again, do you?"
"No, no outside interference. You okay, Kiera? I can hardly hear you"
"Yeah," she said, and closed her eyes, trying to shore herself up, "Fine. I should probably try and get to the hotel, Dillon sent all non-essentials home because of the storm, it'll raise questions if I keep sitting around here."
"You just said you weren't okay to drive, Kiera. Maybe you should stay put."
"My legs work, and I don't think getting rained on can actually make anything worse at this point. It's not a long walk, anyway. I'll be fine."
"You could hide in the conference room again, at least then you'd stay warm and dry."
"I don't need you trying to mother me, Alec. Anyway, I don't think you coming to the station is much better than Betty driving me out to the farm."
"Fine, fine. Just remember that this was your choice when you come down with pneumonia. Your readings already don't look so great."
"It's just safer this way," she insisted, "And what have I told you about looking at the biometrics?"
"I was checking because you were unresponsive for a bit there, I was worried something had happened. That is totally a special circumstances exemption, and you know it," he said, sounding remarkably like he was lecturing her.
"Oh. Right," she said softly, realizing that she'd scared him, "I'm still going back to the hotel though."
"Yep. Of course. I knew you weren't going to listen, but I had to give it a try."
"Just get here already, Alec," she said, voice sharp and strained, and dropped the phone in her pocket, as though that would do a thing to sever the comm line in her head. He didn't say anything more though, and she supposed the real, urgent concern in his voice earlier meant he wasn't interested in dragging his feet or indulging in banter any more than she was at that point.
The fact that Alec seemed truly worried unsettled her, though, and the fact that she apparently depended on the confidence of a 22 year old kid to buoy her own unsettled her further.i
She already wanted to go back on her determination to get back to her hotel and go sit quietly in the darkened conference room, as Alec had suggested. But both her possible discovery and Alec's eventual appearance would both raise questions she couldn't answer without more strings of lies that could eventually trap them both.
She'd managed to carry on despite burns or bleeding wounds back in the Frontier War, she wasn't about to let a headache and a malfunctioning HUD stop her. It was a twenty minute walk she'd made dozens of times in the nine months she'd been in 2012. She would be fine.
Walking back to her hotel turned out to be, as it was always going to, a mistake. The rain fell solidly, in fat icy drops propelled this way and that by gusts of wind, so that they were as likely to strike her in the face as anything, and she'd badly overestimated the weather resistance of her trusty green anorak. The cold and the walking jarred her headache until it filled up her head, leaving her with nothing but blankness and pain and desperation to get somewhere warm and dry where she could hold still.
At least in the dark, with the rain blurring the amber sodium lights, which were long replaced with brighter, more cutting fixtures in her own time, the flickering and failing of her HUD switching itself on and off didn't bother her as much. Maybe her brain was filtering out the flickering of her visual interface, or maybe the system had stopped asserting itself and had shut off at last, she wasn't sure. She was squinting through the rain and wind most of the time anyway, feeling the wind shoving her this way and that, leaving her feeling as unsteady as a drunk.
The manager who sat behind the front desk most nights was asleep reclined in his chair with earbuds in and a smartphone or some kind of device balanced on his chest. She glanced in at the kiosk and then stopped for a while at the foot of the stairs and came to a decision. The lift had been out of order the entire six months she'd been camped out at that down-at-the-heels long stay establishment. She wasn't going to walk up three flights of stairs only to come down them again in a short while, not when the mere thought of jarring her head that much made her nauseous.
She ducked around the main desk to the alcove with the bank of post boxes, and settled on the hard bench beneath them. It was warm, it was dry, the light was golden and diffuse and the air smelled faintly hot and dusty, an oddly comforting combination. She was out of the way of drafts and passers by from the front door to the stairs, private enough for sitting and waiting.
Her suit was already warming up next to her skin, even if her blouse and jacket were still sodden and cold. Her surroundings felt dreamlike, seemed to shift fuzzily around her. She tipped her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.
She woke to Alec's voice in her ear again, saying something that sounded urgent but she wasn't tracking it very well. It didn't feel like a specific hot, stabbing pain in her head anymore, nothing so localized. Instead it was like static, loud, painful static that caromed through her skull and buzzed in her joints.
She was ill, she realized, not just suffering from malfunctioning tech, but sick like she hadn't been since she was a little girl, kept in bed with a fever that raged and burned. It had been during the Swine Flu epidemic of 2055, and her mother worried so much she'd convinced Kiera's father to pay for the doctor to come to their apartment, but in the end it had just been a normal virus. Kiera had been very young and oblivious to the danger, and her mother hadn't told her how worried they'd been until several years later, but the memory of those half-delirious nights and her mother's white, pensive face above her had disturbed her for years.
She hardly ever got sick, not with the regular vaccines provided by the military and the CPS. She hadn't recognized the feeling. She didn't like it. It made her feel young and lost and stretched wire-thin. It made her think of her mother sitting at her bedside, patient and doting in a way that she never was when Kiera was older, made her think of how unlikely it was that she would ever see her mother again.
She protested softly and tried to duck away from the persistent noise. What noise? Oh right, Alec. Saying something, saying something with a growing urgency.
"What is it, Alec?" she mumbled irritably.
She was curled up on something hard and uncomfortable, but resting there was preferable trying to make sense of the world. The world could wait five minutes for once. He said her name again, more insistent, and then was startled to feel a hand on her arm. She opened her eyes and saw that Alec was there, in front of her, not talking to her through the comline. He looked rain-spattered and wind-blown and faintly amused.
"Ah, she wakes at last," he said, "Come on, the truck's right out front."
"Okay," she said, and failed to move.
"Wow, you are out of it, huh? I'm sorry, Kiera. I'll get this sorted out soon. Do you need a hand up?"
"No," she said.
But it was slow going levering herself away from the low, wooden bench, and she relented and let Alec manhandle her upright. She leaned heavily on his shoulder as they headed back out into the night. The November storm hit them with a wet slap as they crossed the sidewalk and she squinted against the lingering mist.
She didn't really remember the ride out to the farm, although she was partially aware of the sensation of traveling at some speed. It was still strange to her and she wasn't sure if she would ever get used to it, if she would be around in this time long enough to stop noticing. Traveling by road car was a much more full sensory experience, more visceral.
She dozed as Alec drove, and her fevered awareness slipped between the feel of the road buzzing in the pit of her stomach and some dark, hollow dream like a wasteland of space where she drifted. Time stretched, endless and unmoored.
Then she was being cajoled out of the truck and into an immense, cavernous place, pungent with a grassy, earthy smell; a huge old-fashioned barn. Alec ushered her up a flight of stairs, along a wooden balcony where their footsteps echoed, surprisingly in synch, up another few steps. She watched him key in a code on the pad beside the door and he glanced at her with an intent look that she couldn't interpret.
"You know, I've always wanted to show this place off to you, but I didn't figure it would be under such shitty circumstances," he said, his voice pitched low and full of wry regret.
When she first arrived in 2012 she was so sure it was all only temporary. If she'd been flung through time once, then it must not be so inconceivable that the same device could be used again, the same conditions replicated, to be returned. She'd thought of her time as a place, a simple destination that continued to exist in her absence, as though she'd merely taken one the shuttle flights and just had to wait for the next transport home.
She'd even heard a scientific interest piece on the news one late night, when Sam was just a baby and up all hours, fussing and chewing on teething toys, about how moments in time might be sort of like particles or atoms that had always existed and always would exist, and we only passed through them one at a time because that was how we perceived things and made sense of them. She'd liked the idea at the time, the idea that there were still permanent, living moments out there where Hannah was alive and happy, that her boisterous childhood was preserved somewhere out there, even if Kiera couldn't find it or see it again.
Deterministic, they'd said, a deterministic universe, and she'd liked that too. It was comforting, it meant that as messy and tedious and strung together with tragedy and uncertainty as her life often seemed, she was going the right way, doing what she was meant to be doing, what she was always going to have done.
The longer she stayed in the past, though, and the more her attempts to get all the right components in the right place to get her home failed miserably, the more her certainty dissolved. Her life in the future wasn't just a location, but an outcome of hundreds of thousands of choices that had to happen exactly so, or nothing would be as she remembered it. And it was clear that the universe didn't, after all, resist change, the fact that Kellog's grandmother had been killed was proof enough of that. He hadn't been winked out of existence in their uncertain present, in the past, but who knew what of his influences in their home time had been erased.
And then there was Alec. She'd heard the usual gossip about him in the future, they all had. SadTech was powerful, famous, a leading voice in the corporate lobby and was heavily subsidized as a result. It was a company that reached fingers into all aspects of ordinary people's lives and it flourished madly in the free market economy. Alec Sadler of 2077 lead his company with vision, shrewdness and an iron fist. He was arguably more powerful than the figurehead president in Washington, and while his genius was widely lauded, and every SadTech innovation dominated the news cycles, the unspoken truth was that he was widely feared.
Greg claimed it was all rumour and innuendo, but what was he going to say? He had begun a meteoric rise through the ranks at work, his allegiance was always going to be to Sadler and the work. She hadn't ever felt the need to push the issue, she and Sam benefited just as much from Greg's favoured position at work and she didn't want to show discontent or become a nagging wife. She'd been sure there had been some truth to it though; there was too much evidence to support the case that the head of SadTech was ruthless and too fond of power.
In the green and fertile present of 2012, though, she couldn't connect that rumoured figure with the young man she knew. He was earnest, he was hopeful, he was so very sweet. He went to such endearing lengths to help her and support her, breaking laws, hacking into government databases, staying up all hours to be her constant tech support. His eyes were bright and watchful and his smile was shy and full of self deprecating humour. He had a bit of a problem respecting her boundaries, but then she had to admit to herself, after whatever crises of the moment had passed, she didn't do a great job of respecting his either. In short, he was nothing like the formidable old man she'd met just once, who'd spoken to her kindly but dismissively, as though he'd been assured in the fact that he owned the whole world, including her.
The existence of the future she remembered, the one where her clever, shy, precious baby boy waited for her to come home, hinged on the rise of SadTech and Alec Sadler. The more she got to know Alec, though, the more she had the creeping feeling that that was a morally dubious proposition. And maybe not even possible, given the hints she'd unwittingly given him about his future, and the way he'd reacted to them.
Would he still blindly seek power and fame? Could she really demand that he follow the same path from the timeline she knew, despite his obvious reservations? She wasn't sure anymore.
The first thing Alec did when he showed her to his workroom was sit her in his high backed desk chair the wrong way around, and connect a cable from his sprawling nest of equipment to her CMR port.
"Okay, hang on," he said, "I'm going to do some sampling, and then I'm going to force a full system shut down. You may feel a twinge but then you should be more comfortable."
Alec's loft in the barn was faintly damp, the air clammy and cool, and the rain drummed on the metal roof high above them with a constant eerie roar. The light came mainly from the dozen or so monitors arranged around his ring of desks, and a few unshaded work lights beyond them. The air was thick with the smell of warm electronics and cut wood and moist earth. It was surprisingly comfortable, sheltered and cave like, as though Alec had managed to hide her away somewhere, far from harm.
He muttered vaguely to himself, things she didn't try to follow, the habit of long hours of work alone and unobserved. There was a concentrated clattering of keys. She folded her arms across the chair back and rested her head atop them, closing her eyes. After a few minutes of typing and quiet plotting, she began to fidget the rolling chair backward and forward with her foot, not a lot, just a little. She felt restless and achy, like she wanted to twitch away from the unpleasant cycling and failing of her tech, the nasty static in her head.
"Please don't move," said Alec, turning away from where he was hunched over a desk to stop her bodily with a hand on chair and a foot on the casters. She'd taken his only chair, she realized, but the quarters were still cramped. He waited until she looked up at him, catching his serious expression. "If you get disconnected while I'm doing this, it would probably be… not so good."
"You could tell me what you're doing," she said, thinking that if he talked to her instead of vaguely in her vicinity, it would distract her from worrying.
"I did tell you," he said shortly, "I'm sorry, okay, but would you rather I fixed it or explained it?"
"Fine."
"Anyway, I wanna know is what the hell is wrong with me," he said, sounding outraged and entirely serious, although she feels a little lost.
"With you? I'm the one who…"
"Not now me, future me, future apparently arrogant jackass me who decided it was a good idea to put a lot of very complicated, very fragile tech into people's brains. What kind of person does that? What kind of person doesn't even think about the consequences of when the thing inevitably breaks or malfunctions? I have a hard time believing I could possibly be that deluded or insensitive."
"You probably thought that there would always be people around who knew how to fix it. I always got regular updates back home. No one could have expected my particular… everything," she said, confused by his vehemence. It was the first time he'd seemed less than impressed with her integrated tech. She felt surprisingly defensive, even though that tech was currently making her miserable.
"It's incredibly stupid, Kiera, sticking tech right into your head," he snapped, peering close at one screen, and another. He didn't seem to realize what he'd said to her.
"I'm not stupid," she said, so softly she didn't think he'd heard and frowning down at her folded arms. The hot, muffling feverish feeling dragged at her. It had been a long, grinding couple weeks and she was ill and in pain and suddenly her closest friend in that time seemed to be calling her stupid. It was too much.
"What? Oh wait, this looks like- Oh, thank fuck. I found the off switch. Ready, Kiera?"
But he didn't wait for her answer, just did whatever it was. He was right, there was a jolt. It was almost like a sound, a loud and brief sound, except it only happened on the inside of her ears. Her jaw clenched involuntarily for a couple seconds, and then there was silence. No HUD. No CMR reset loop. No static in her head, no stabbing pain at the port site. No database either, or feedback from her suit.
He'd turned the whole system entirely off. She was as completely disconnected from her support system as she'd ever been since joining the CPS.
"What did you do?" she asked, hollow voiced.
"I'm pretty sure I can fix it," said Alec, his voice young and soft and hopeful for her approval for the first time that night, "It might take me a little time, though."