A/N: A little more exposition here, to explain in better detail what Chuck figured out last chapter. Hopefully that gets clearer.
You know your culture from your trash
You know your plastic from your cash
When I lose sight of the track
You know the way back, but I know you
You know your stripper from your paint
You know your sinner from your saint
Whenever heaven's doors are shut
You kick them open, but I know you
"Steam"
Peter Gabriel
March 23, 2022
Outside Dallas, Texas
"Can I…uh…ask you a question?" Hartley asked into the air, uncertain whether or not the computer would actually respond to him. He didn't quite know what to make of Chuck's artificial intelligence as a whole, unsure of all of her capabilities.
"Please state your name," Rayna replied blandly.
"Bri–no, not, uh, well…Hartley Winterbottom. My real name, anyway," he mumbled.
"You are on the short list, as Mr. Carmichael has often referred to it as, when using this protocol," Rayna explained.
"Short list?" Hartley mouthed to himself in silence.
"Ahem," Rayna added after a blip of silence. "That means you may ask, Mr. Winterbottom."
"Was that a wise choice, what Charles just did? Should I have stopped him? Should I have gone after him?" Hartley asked.
"That was plural, as in questions," Rayna quipped back. "But I shall answer them all. No, no, and also no. Wisdom is relative, as a term, and quite subjective. Was it wise? Probably not. Was it necessary? Mr. Carmichael believed so, or he would not have done it. Knowing that, you should also know there was no way you could have stopped him."
"Your entire database is back inside his brain," he argued.
"That is stating the obvious, Mr. Winterbottom," Rayna replied.
"Having that code…the same code he used to build you, inside his head, was destroying his brain. Killing him. He removed it–for that reason. What's to keep it from harming him again, maybe permanently?" he lamented.
Could a computer sigh? Hartley wondered. Rayna paused, giving the illusion that she had in fact done just that. When she resumed speaking, her voice was doting, in a tone a parent would use to speak to a child. "Mr. Winterbottom, are you a computer engineer?"
"No, I'm a nuclear physicist," he shot back. What difference did that make? And why was he feeling the need to justify himself to the computer?
"Mr. Carmichael integrated new information before he did as you suggest, copying my program into his brain again. Dr. Woodcomb's work was integrated before the download," Rayna explained.
"I don't understand," Hartley replied.
"You are correct in the fact that the old program was destroying his brain. Mr. Carmichael was correct in his hypothesis that the incompatibility of one of the three components of the programming key caused the damage Dr. Woodcomb confirmed. The coding error has been rectified. This Intersect will heal the lesions more quickly, and less dangerously than the surgery the doctor had devised," Rayna confirmed, an unmistakable undertone of pride in the words. "The more the Intersect fires, the faster the lesions will heal."
His eyes wide with wonder, Hartley asked slowly, "You mean, you repaired the damage? You healed him?"
"I am a computer, Mr. Winterbottom," Rayna almost chided. "Dr. Woodcomb healed him. She is a physician. I am merely the instrument she used."
"She didn't do it, you did," Hartley argued. He couldn't shake the surreal feeling, wondering why he was arguing with a computer at all.
"Think of me as a robotic tool, like a surgeon would use. Only I am intelligent enough to know what and where to cut, without being in the surgeon's hands," she explained. "Or, perhaps, without the surgeon knowing exactly where to cut or what to remove."
"You're a chip off the old block, Rayna, you know that, right?" Hartley half-smiled. A modest AI, just like her creator.
"Idiomatic language is by far the most difficult to interpret, Mr. Winterbottom," she griped. After a beat, she added, slightly sarcastic, "However, if I take that to mean you believe Mr. Carmichael programmed me in his own image and likeness, you would be correct."
"Does he know that you cured him?" Hartley asked.
"Did you hear me tell him?" Rayna shot back.
"Well, no, I…uh…" Hartley stammered.
"Then, no, he does not know. Although I am an AI, I cannot communicate telepathically with Mr. Carmichael," she quipped. "Yet," she added playfully.
Mumbling to himself, Hartley said, "He had no idea that it wouldn't kill him dead away, and he did it anyway."
"Mr. Winterbottom," Rayna started sharply. "You have experience with Mr. Carmichael and his wife, do you not?"
"Wha…what?" Hartley stuttered.
He swore he heard the computer laughing. "I am only a computer, and yet, I can sense the tone of his voice and how different it is when he is speaking to her, even in the short period of time that she has been back in his life. How different his voice is when he believes that she is in danger. She affects him as nothing else ever has. That is why it was of no consequence for him to act as such."
As he opened his mouth to speak again, he stopped, feeling the van shake underneath him. He heard the sound of an explosion, feeling the ground under the van rumble like an earthquake. Airstrike, he thought in alarm.
XXX
It was the noises in the room that reached into Ellie's head and pulled her from the darkness of her drug-induced sleep. She became aware of her body slowly, feeling the seat beneath her and the armrests of the chair under her elbows. Surrounding her was a symphony of sound–many voices all blended together. There were multiple conversations, mostly spoken in quiet murmurs.
Through slits as she peeked through her eyelashes, she inspected her surroundings. She wasn't in the same place she had been in before, strapped into a chair in the lab where she had been drugged. This place looked like Chuck's old spy base, she thought quickly. As she struggled to open her eyes, she tried to concentrate, listening for any familiar voices in the mix. Her brother's voice, suddenly shrill and angry, cut through the haze.
"She's waking up, General," Ellie heard a man's voice, speaking somewhere from far to the side of her. She forced her eyelids open, then squinted at the brightness of the overhead light. When she finally focused, she could see who it was who had spoken. A tall, dark-skinned man who looked vaguely familiar to her. Didn't he used to work at the Buy More? she found herself asking, the thought crazily misplaced. Ellie turned her head towards the direction she thought she had heard Chuck's voice. Every eye in the room was fixated on her, and she squirmed under the scrutiny. What was going on?
She shrieked involuntarily as suddenly she was being held at gunpoint, by the man who looked familiar, accompanied by a tall blonde woman who seemed to evoke the same sensation of familiarity, from the same place. The Buy More. Ellie flinched, and shut her eyes, wondering why the guns, and hoping, if she had in fact heard her brother, that he would somehow intervene. Her cognition gradually returned, in just the split second it took for Chuck to stop arguing with John Casey and start walking towards her.
"Stand down!" Casey shouted from behind Chuck, who had run to his sister as if the guns weren't even there.
"Ellie, are you alright?" Chuck asked sharply, leaning close to her. He was searching her face intently. He seemed to be looking for signs that she recognized him.
The lab. Her father and Duritz. All of it rushed into her mind at once, and the tears overflowed down her cheeks.
"Oh, Chuck," she sobbed, wanting nothing more than to reach up and hug him. She found her wrists bound to the chair, preventing her from touching him. She was frustrated, until she understood she was still bound because they would have had no way of knowing if she had been uploaded with a new identity Intersect while she was unconscious. That had been the plan. She remembered her father and the other man speaking about sedating her. That had been the plan, to upload it into her. Why they had sedated her to the point of unconsciousness, then did nothing else, mystified her. "I'm fine. They didn't…they didn't do anything but sedate me," she struggled to tell him.
Ellie felt him wrestling with the bindings on her wrists, struggling to free her now that he knew she was safe. Chuck's close proximity to her as he did so invited a closer inspection. Something was different about Chuck, she thought. He was disheveled, his hair slightly askew, how he looked after returning from jogging. There was an air about him, a strength radiating from him that she had thought she would never see again, most certainly not after she'd discovered how sick he had become because of the faulty Intersect in his head. His eyes were on fire and his jaw was clenched so tightly it almost made her own jaw ache to see it.
"Where are we? What's going on?" she asked, as the last of the straps were untied. She didn't wait for him to answer, launching herself instead out of the chair and into her brother's arms. The strength with which he held her surprised her, reminding her of the moment after Devon and Morgan had saved him from Shaw, rushing from her car door across the road shoulder and straight into Chuck's grateful arms. That had been right after she had witnessed her father being shot.
He waited until she let him go before he spoke. "We're in Carina's spy base, in Texas. Duritz took you out of the lab in the hospital. He sent you here, then he came to my house to get Hartley," Chuck explained quickly.
Casey stepped forward, speaking to her over Chuck's shoulder. "Duritz has been neutralized. But, as always, we now have a lot more problems."
Ellie was still crying, but she gasped, struggling to breathe, as she spoke to her brother in wonder. "Chuck, I saw Dad."
Tears filled his eyes again. He opened his mouth to speak, but found his voice failed him. He bit his lip instead, tentatively reaching to brush his sister's hair back over her shoulder. "I did too, El. He was with Daniel Shaw," he said somberly, his voice barely steady.
"It was like you said, Chuck. He didn't know who I was, who he was. It was like he was a different person," she said weepily.
"Just like I was, Eleanor," Hartley said crisply, moving from a different part of the room to stand close to them.
Ellie's gaze locked on Hartley, her eyes widening as she thought. Her eyes shifted toward the floor, away from everyone, as she struggled to recall. "Right…right…but no. Not completely, anyway. Like Mom said, you know, about how she would see bits and pieces of Hartley when she was with Volkoff."
"Ellie, what are you saying?" Chuck asked urgently. "Dad remembered you?"
"Not right away, not exactly. He said my name…differently. And I brought up Mom…and he said her name, I know he did. I swear I heard him singing, you know, that Beatles song he always used to sing to me?" she rambled emotionally.
Anguish washed over his face at her expectant hopefulness. "He left with Shaw. They took Sarah and her father at gunpoint."
"Oh god, Chuck," Ellie gasped, understanding why her brother looked so forlorn.
"I don't care what it takes, I'm not letting him hurt her, Ellie. Duritz knew she was pregnant. I'm certain Shaw knows that too," Chuck said stiffly. "I know where they are, but I need your help, Ellie."
"You know…" she started, confused. Her voice trailed away and her eyes widened, so wide the whites were visible all around her green irises. "Chuck, what happened? How do you know?" she asked suddenly.
He swallowed hard, surprised at how dry his mouth was at the moment, realizing he would have to tell Ellie what he'd done. "I flashed, El."
"You what?" Ellie asked, aghast. "But you said you can't access any information anymore…"
"I found a way to remove it, and I did," Chuck said intently, his speech rapidly increasing speed. "It's the same program we can use to remove the identity Intersects. Rick and Vicky, and Sarah's Dad, were all identity Intersects, just like Dad. And it worked."
"Wait, Sarah's Dad?" Ellie asked. Her gaze shifted to the other members of the group standing around. "I've never seen Sarah's Dad. Who was he? Was he Taurus, the other man in the lab?" she asked.
Vicky spoke up, listening on the edge of the conversation. "Taurus is Tony DiFranco, if that's what you mean."
"Tony DiFranco was Jack Burton, Sarah's father. Shaw had to have figured out who he was. Jack was in the Intersect, even way back when I first had it," Chuck explained.
Ellie shook her head rapidly, too much information distracting her from what she had been questioning her brother about. "Chuck, how did you flash? You never explained that to me."
"Because, Ellie, I downloaded it again, once everything started to go south in there. And I'm glad I did, because it's the only way we would ever have found out where Shaw took them," Chuck expounded.
"You downloaded it again? From where? What version?" she asked in rapid fire succession, not giving him time to answer even one question. "How did you know it wouldn't kill you if you did?"
"I didn't, Ellie. I just didn't have a choice," he said sadly.
"Uh, excuse me, Mr. Carmichael?" they all heard, a tinny female voice breaking into the conversation. At the shocked silence, the computer continued. "I know I am wont to speak only when spoken to, as per your programming. However, as you have observed many times in the past, I am meant to evolve, and I believe in this instance, speaking out of turn is most prudent."
Chuck was still shocked, almost stuttering, as he replied to the computer, "What is it, Rayna?"
"Dr. Woodcomb, Mr. Carmichael downloaded my programming into his brain. I am an Intersect, just as much as any iteration programmed by your father. The basic structure of my programming is patterned after the last version for which Orion provided coding to the U.S. government. However, as you may or may not know, my Intersect program is by far the most advanced intelligence gathering apparatus the world has ever known, orders of magnitude more advanced than the most powerful computer ever to inhabit your brother's brain," she explained.
"More advanced?" Ellie nearly howled. "How is that not going to kill you, Chuck?"
"Ellie–"
Rayna cut him off. "Because," the computer nearly shouted, matching her volume to Ellie's voice. "You, Dr. Woodcomb, provided the means by which I corrected the programming, before Mr. Carmichael could do any harm to himself, when he chose to put the welfare of his wife above his own."
"What?" Chuck asked in amazement, unsure of what it was he had exactly heard the computer say.
Hartley was smiling enormously, gesturing to the computer. "Thank you, Rayna. I was beginning to wonder if you'd ever get around to it," he grumbled.
Chuck's brow furrowed, as he flashed a quick, confused look at Hartley, before he turned back to the computer. "Rayna, explain," he offered eagerly.
"Mr. Carmichael, you downloaded the files Dr. Woodcomb left at the lab, and gave me access," Rayna explained. "This included the information pertaining to the life-threatening condition that persisted in your brain, due to the incomplete nature of the last version of the Intersect. It was, in fact, due to the piece of programming you recently identified. Those two bits of information correlated too closely for it to be a coincidence. I used the information to create a version, when downloaded, that stimulates the portions of your brain where the lesions are causing dysfunction. In essence, what Dr. Woodcomb hoped to achieve via microsurgery using Hartley Winterbottom as a test subject."
"Wait…wait, wait, wait, wait," Chuck stuttered rapidly. "Wait, Rayna. Are you telling me those lesions are gone?"
"Not gone, not only a mere few hours after downloading it, Mr. Carmichael. Healing is a better term. They are healing. Each flash accelerates the healing process," she added.
Ellie covered her mouth with both hands, her fingers shaking as she did so.
Tears filming his eyes, Chuck asked Rayna, "How did you know I would download that again? I didn't…I made a split…decision…"
"Your wife was in danger, Mr. Carmichael. It was a logical extrapolation," she explained.
"Rayna, you're a computer," Chuck almost whispered. "Are you telling me…that you…understand…my emotions?"
"You programmed me with a personality, Mr. Carmichael. With the ability to evolve. To learn. As I have often heard you tell Mr. Grimes, you put the best of yourself into building me, at a time when you believed you had nothing left to live for. And is not…compassion…the best of yourself? That, above all else, is what I have learned. I always believed that was my objective," Rayna explained.
Chuck covered his mouth, feeling the tears spill down his cheeks over his fingers. He could see his sister's face, mirroring the same emotion. It was amazing, mind-boggling, what this meant, in terms of the AI Chuck had built. It bothered him that he couldn't revel in the feeling of accomplishment, because Sarah was still in perilous danger.
"I don't mean to interrupt the I'm a real girl moment here, but you were about to explain your Clash of the Titans gibberish about the code names or whatever the hell you were lip-smacking about," Casey grumbled.
"Pinocchio and cheesy 80s films in the same complaint, Casey? What happened to you?" Chuck teased, despite the edginess of his voice.
"Grandkids, Bartowski. Let's get on with it, huh?" Casey urged.
"Ok, Pinocchio I get, but Clash of the Titans? What?" Ellie quizzed.
"Sit down, Ellie. This is kind of confusing, but I want to tell you what I figured out," Chuck said, gesturing for her to sit. She sat at the table across from him, waiting expectantly for him to begin. "Sarah and Casey found Rick and Vicky," Chuck said, gesturing to the two people who had held Ellie at gunpoint when she'd woken up. "They used to work at the Buy More when it was the CIA/NSA substation." That explained her sense of recognition, she thought. "They were officially listed as Killed in Action in 2018. Turns out Shaw brought them here to change them into identity Intersects, like Dad. It was when they said what their code names were that it started to make sense.
"Sterope and Merope, the last two daughters of Atlas. Duritz' code name was Atlas. It was called Operation Pleiades. The Pleiades are a cluster of stars, visible in the sky next to the constellation of Orion. Maia, Electra, Taygete, Celaeno, Alcyone, Sterope, and Merope. Seven stars, seven versions of Dad's Intersects. In order. My code name was Taygete. Dad–"
"Was Electra," Ellie quoted in wonder. "I told Dad he was Orion, but he said Orion was dead…because Electra killed him."
Chuck breathed out, more convinced than ever he had been on the right track. "The Ghosts knew about the various versions of the Intersect. They brought Dad back from the dead, so to speak, so he could build them an Intersect. The pattern you found on my brain scan, the scars that Dreyfus found in Rick and Vicky, the ones you saw in Sarah and Hartley…they were caused by a separate piece of code that Dad included in his original design of the Intersect. In Hartley's version, his very first creation, that code was the Volkoff identity. Dad included a reset in the code, so that the identity could be shut off. That must have been how he planned on undoing the Volkoff ID…once the mission was over. But Volkoff disappeared, and the CIA covered it up rather than help Dad correct the problem. All of our lives, Ellie, Dad was rewriting the code he needed to insert into that programming, that would fix what happened to Hartley. The government found out information other than identity information could be inserted into the code, and the Intersect I eventually got from Bryce Larkin in an email was like that, but Dad tested that version on himself before the government completed the programming.
"That empty hole, that "gap" in the code, was always there. It was continually incorporated into the code of the later Intersects, the one on Dad's laptop, and the one that Manoosh reverse engineered for Shaw from the pieces of the one Fulcrum destroyed," Chuck continued to explain.
"Ok," Ellie said slowly. "But the one that was killing you, the one you downloaded on the roof after Sarah killed Quinn…if that was based on Dad's design, just like all the others, why did it cause so much damage to you? The others never did."
"It was in the key, Ellie. It was in your notes, yours and Duritz', the ones you were working with. Duritz really wasn't prepared for you to join the team, Ellie. He tried to disguise some of that information, but he just didn't have time, and no opportunity to delete it so you wouldn't notice. I'm certain that was part of the reason they moved against you, because they knew you'd figure it all out. My Intersect looked incomplete, because the code embedded on Dad's piece of the key never completely integrated with the rest of the program, because the piece Ted Roark had possession of was modified somehow. He knew that reset code existed, but he didn't know where Dad hid it. Dad and Roark never got along. I'm sure he didn't trust Roark, and probably hid it to keep him from creating his own Intersect. He kidnapped Dad the day before your wedding because he couldn't build a functioning Intersect on his own.
"But the code that the key program was meant to integrate with was in every single Intersect, and the pattern was left behind, even after the Intersects were removed or suppressed. The Ghosts, because of Shaw, knew that code existed. They were looking for it all along…but it was in the key. It was in my Intersect. Only they never suspected it, because it was killing me. Shaw worked with the Ring. Fulcrum was part of the Ring," Chuck said, taking a deep breath, feeling the rawness in his throat from so much talking after screaming on the comm earlier.
Chuck looked up quickly, catching Casey's eye, to make his final point, realizing his friend would remember what he was talking about. Bryce had explained it all to Chuck, Sarah and Casey that night in Casey's apartment on Thanksgiving in 2007. "Fulcrum knew how to remove Intersect data. That's why Tommy was looking for Bryce. It was why they shipped him out of the U.S. That crate that the FBI found him in–it was shipped from Finland. Project Helsinki. Remember he said it was a European clinic? Project Helsinki was in effect. Bryce was the first recipient of that technology, tissue regeneration. Fulcrum had that technology in 2007. The Ring took what they knew and used it on Shaw…and my father."
"So the Ghosts were trying to extract that code, testing everyone? Is that what you're saying?" Casey asked.
"Manoosh is dead, because they tried the extraction process on him, stupidly not understanding he didn't have any permanent Intersect traces in his head. They had to have scanned Shaw, Rick, Vicky, and my Dad. They were actively looking for Hartley and Sarah for the same reason. Duritz convinced them it couldn't possibly be in me. And when he finally looked at the scan Ellie did on Hartley, Duritz deduced it had to be in Sarah's suppressed version. Shaw took a lot of heat for putting his personal vendetta above the mission to retrieve the program. His back is against the wall, which makes him about as dangerous as he could get," Chuck concluded, his anger tingeing his tone.
"How do you know all of this?" Casey asked.
"It's in the Intersect, Casey," Chuck shot back. "I had a theory, but the data in the Intersect confirmed it all."
"So what can I do to help, Chuck?" Ellie asked.
"The Ghosts wanted you to fix the version they're building. They know the version they have doesn't work because it's missing the piece of code that I have. They needed you to extract the code from Sarah," Chuck explained.
"Ok…but what do you need me to do, Chuck?" she asked again.
Chuck glanced over his shoulder at Casey again, knowing he was relaying information to the entire team. "Project Helsinki was shut down once Fulcrum started testing its Intersect prototype…the one in the Meadow Branch subdivision. But once their test subjects started dying after exposure, some of the head Fulcrum agents went rogue and built it back up, in a separate location, and they called it Helsinki Redux. It was the prototype to the lab my father and I found in the Ring base. The files are in my computer, Ellie. I need you to decipher them. I read them, but I'm not a doctor."
"Wait, Chuck. Why does that matter?" Ellie asked urgently.
Chuck sighed, looking down before he answered. "Because, in all of this Greek mythology symbolism and code…there is someone we haven't encountered yet. Someone whose code name is in the Intersect, but all the information is redacted. The code name is Zeus. The mastermind, if you will. Someone who was involved way before Daniel Shaw."
"Spit it out, Chuck. I've seen that look before. Who is it? You know, don't you?" Casey queried.
"It's redacted, Casey," Chuck argued.
"Who do you think it is, Chuck?" Casey demanded.
"That's why I need my sister to help decipher the genetic information in those files. Sarah might know for sure, but I can't ask her now. Casey, you were still in California in May of 2010, right?" Chuck asked intensely. Casey nodded stiffly.
"How sure was Sarah that she was actually in possession of Bryce's ashes?"