"What do you think this is, human? A game?"
-- Ares, 'The Journeyman Project'
Surge pulled more of the obsidian black greatcoat he wore around himself, and merged with the shadows once again. He shifted back into the darkness as far as he could possibly go without putting his backside against wet, mossy bricks. His hands were trembling as they always did when he visited this place, this world, this city that never was, jerking softly on the ends of his wrists as though they wanted to leap free of him and escape the tension. Instead they reached into the swathes of black material, taking out a crushed, nearly empty packet of 'Lucky Strikes' - cigarettes, no less. Over his head were steel steps, the simulated summer sun beating down from a sky so blue it could have been painted, and under the soles of his boots was wet, dripping sewage. That, he didn't need. He plugged the Lucky into his lips and pulled his lighter, setting the tiny tobacco tube alight and drawing a long breath. That, he did need. Craved.
Volt was beside him in the dark, murmuring dejectedly under his breath a number of anti-smoking campaign slogans that Surge had heard thousands of times before, but was as deaf to now as he always had been. Volt's malachite eyes lifted to a chink in the staircase where the sun was arcing through the darkness, motes of dust dancing across the plane of silver which lanced over his pale face. "Don't see anything yet. Jack's been a while." An insignificant little blue light pushed aside some of the black for Volt to read the time from his fancy sportswatch. "An hour or so, I guess. You think he's okay?" A couple of inches shorter than Surge, though heavier by a good few pounds, Volt's round face was set as calmly as he possibly could manage; his lip was twitching constantly into the nervous tic he'd developed.
"Of course he is. It's Jack, right?" Jack had an annoying habit of being alright, and thinking that he was all right at the same time. The man, he was never wrong, although the times he had actually been wrong were many, and he'd barely covered up his wretched mistakes before Joule, Volt, Bulldog or Panzer could tell he was not the leader they all imagined him to be. Surge wanted no more of that. Today was going to be one of *those* days in the Matrix, he had that hot itch behind his left ear he always did when something would happen. Bulldog joked, calling him the Oracle. He had remembered her words to him, then, from over five years past... 'Remember, a man is not measured by what he can't be... A man should be measured by what he is.' Surge gave another muted grunt, and sunk to the brick beneath him so he could kneel onto the cap of one boot.
***
He was seven years old. It was another perfect day, the kind where the sky is baby blue, the grass is greener than you thought it could be, delightfully soft under young feet. The earth that he had never seen through open eyes would squelch beneath those same feet, because of the fact that the hands on the same body as those feet were clutching a hose, dragging it across the back lawn of the Dalton residence to refill the family's pool. Andrew, renown amongst the school Soccer team for being incredibly agile for his age, was hauling the hose towards the pool with it hosing - as hoses tend to do - water all across the grass, and the ground was becoming rather slushy, like chocolate pudding... Andrew had eaten enough dirt, but those days were over according to him. Eating dirt was for little kids. He could hear Mr Raines next door, singing something about a 'Three Hour Tour' whilst he pruned his roses. Andrew lifted a pudgy young hand and waved over the waist height fence. Mr Raines didn't so much as look up. John O'Brian, another of the Soccer team's targets, called to his friend from the doorway to the house. "D'you want a chocolate muffin?"
Of course he did. He shifted on one heel, trying to turn and wave his affirmative to his friend at the same time. The mud beneath his feet chose that moment to mount a rebellion, turning hideously slick. Andrew's feet simply took off out from under him, sailing into the air above his head as his top end tumbled over the edge of the pool, and he was in, the hose snagging around his arm. The green coils slithered around his arms the more he struggled, the water churning around him, up his nose and into his mouth whenever he tried to snatch a breath into his heavy chest. As his eyes began to fall closed, he fancied a bright flash of light from over the fence, and something vaulted the fence which he couldn't make out beneath the layer of foam over his head...
"Are you alright?" The question came from a voice so calm, so devoid of anything related to human emotion, that young Andrew Dalton would have sworn that it had come from that really neat talking computer he had seen on the television. He opened his blue eyes - significantly watered, but no worse for wear - and looked up with his back against the mud which threw him in the pool, onto a man whose eyes he could not see, but he guessed held about all the warmth and compassion as a frozen halibut. A pair of black, rimless sunglasses covered his eyes, and the cord to an earplug hanged from his right ear and into his black suit jacket. "Andrew Dalton, are you alright?"
Andrew, Mr Dalton, Surge, could think of only one thing to respond with. "Can you hear the radio on that thing?" One arm which was covered in less mud than the other lifted out of said brown goo and pointed to the earpiece.
The man leaning over him seemed oblivious to the amount of wet, cloggy dirt that was over his knees. "I can hear all sorts of things on this."
The boy's eyes shot wide open, eager to have a demonstration of this fantastic contraption. "Can I have a go?"
"No, I'm afraid you're not allowed to hear. Not yet." He stood, remarkably dignified despite the fact his knees had almost as much mud on them as the seven year old he had saved.
Suddenly, an important question finally struck Andrew that should be asked. "How did you know my name?"
"I know a lot about you, Andrew."
"Who are you?" asked Andrew, curious.
"Agent O'Brian." The suited man turned, headed towards the front of the house, and was gone, leaving only Andrew Dalton, cold, wet, confused and worried, equally certain he had just come across something terribly important but had no idea what it was. His mother appeared in the doorway that John had waved to him from, telling him that his little friend had to go home suddenly and had dropped his muffin all over the new carpet in the hallway and he had better go and clean it up bloody fast or there'd be no TV for him that night. Her presence served only to practically erase the importance of the events beforehand, placing in his mind one imperative: There were chocolate muffins to be had. He had four before he finally decided that he would regret having any more. They were good muffins, with just the right amount of sugar, cocoa, and that stuff that he called 'Bacon Flower' until he was six, all mixed the way they should be until they were, well, muffins.
***
That was, though, the day he first had The Itch. That itch behind his left ear, which always seemed to tell him something was going to happen. Under a set of steel stairs that led into a building he had never before known of and couldn't bring himself to care about, he had it again, tickling at the warm spot just behind his left earlobe, which was being pushed out by one digit scratching around there in habit while he was either itching himself, or thinking. At that moment, he was doing both; thinking about where Jack might be, and scratching himself... Because he was itchy, after all, and regardless of the fact he knew the itch wasn't real, it was quite seriously beginning to irritate him. He ran through a few irrelevant things in the silence of the space that he and Volt occupied. A recipe for chicken salad, the first time he had sex, the exact way to hotwire a '69 Dodge Charger so you could swipe it from under the nose of the neighbour that had moved in after Mr Raines had disappeared, and left his rose garden untended and uncared for. Since O'Brian had overwritten Caleb Raines, and saved his life. It just didn't make sense to him at all, and he would never ask another's opinion.
Within the recesses of comforting memories that had never taken place, Surge failed to notice the sharp rap on the door that made Volt squeak with a half-subdued yelp, scrabbling backward in suprise and falling flat on his rear into the gunk on the brick beneath them. "I got pies," said Jack, swinging open the door, the fresh light chasing the shadows into the corners, and off Surge's face. "Volt, I gotcha mince and cheese." He tossed the greasy bag towards Volt, which simply bounced off his chest and landed in the cold water he was attempting to pick himself up out of. With a self- satisfied sneer, Jack held out the bag which contained the hot pastry filled with meat he had bought for Surge. "Gotcha chicken."
If Jack was attempting to illicit some response from Surge, he was bitterly disappointed in the calm, aloof way in which the latter received his pie, taking it from the bag and chomping down on the crust, gravy dribbling over his chin and narrowly avoiding his coat before landing with a noiseless splat on the ground. Surge had long since learned to ignore Jack's childish taunts, and this was going to be no different. Regardless that Jack had been the one to unplug him, Surge felt no loyalty towards the man other than allowing him to stay on the Resistor. The pie was good, at any rate, even if it did taste like everything. "So? Do you have anything important, or have you just come back from your extended lunch break?" His tone was high, mocking, treading the fine line between flippant and challenging.
Jack was the type to rise to any challenge to his authority much faster than Surge, perhaps the one human who was faster than an Agent at anything. Bristling with indignation, his hands balled into fists, mashing the mince pie in his left into something that was quite inedible, but did a fine job of burning his hand so it felt like he had put it to a hotplate. Volt let off another characteristic squeak at the display, trying desperately to salvage his pie. "I got something, yeah. Kid's in a house not far from here, I caught him playing Half-Life." Jack held aloft a pair of binoculars as high as he could in the small cell-like enclosure. "Saw him edit the program, and kill the G-Man."
Volt punctuated the sentence with a low whistle of appreciation. They had *all* contemplated the ultimate downfall of that animated goon, and for a kid no older than sixteen or so to manage it... Since the advent of 'Counterstrike' there had been no greater accomplishment. Surge gave a casual shrug. "Great, so he kills the G-Man. You think he can do the same thing with an Agent, Jack?"
"I don't have to think," Jack retorted. Surge bit back a comment that no, he never did think. "I know he could." He looked with half-interest at the stinging mess he had made of both his hand and his pie, shaking the pastry debris off his palm and wiping it clean on the knee-length black jacket he wore. "Spike's a smart kid, got an inquisitive streak on him a mile long from what I've seen so far. Could well learn a thing or two you ain't even thought of yet, Surge."
The long slur on his name did not go without Surge noticing, the only outward manifestation being a tiny quirk in one eyebrow, a lá Spock. "He could, yes. But that is the idea behind being The One, Jack, unless you'd forgotten. He isn't any good to us if he turns out to be another Ghent."
"Ghent was stupid," Volt interjected. The other men turned slowly to stare at the crouching figure so inept towards speaking his mind, taking that exact moment to do so. He may as well have been overwritten by an Agent for how unusual it was. "I mean... His name and all was about the uh, only smart thing he... Um, ever picked out. He couldn't write programs for nuts, an' when he, uh, y'know... Tried to fight the Agent?"
They did know. Surge nodded slowly, Jack instead chose to stare at the wall. "Come on. Ghent is gone, and Spike's going to replace him. Spike *is* The One, and he's going to work out just fine."
"Well, then standing around here will get us nowhere, if you're so confident, mon capitane." Surge pulled himself into the open air again, taking a deep breath of digital air into virtual lungs. "Let's just go and get him, then we'll worry about whether or not he turns out to be who we're after." A brief pause hung in the air before the scrape of the flint in his lighter ended it, the flame being reapplied to his cigarette. "Or another Ghent."
-- Ares, 'The Journeyman Project'
Surge pulled more of the obsidian black greatcoat he wore around himself, and merged with the shadows once again. He shifted back into the darkness as far as he could possibly go without putting his backside against wet, mossy bricks. His hands were trembling as they always did when he visited this place, this world, this city that never was, jerking softly on the ends of his wrists as though they wanted to leap free of him and escape the tension. Instead they reached into the swathes of black material, taking out a crushed, nearly empty packet of 'Lucky Strikes' - cigarettes, no less. Over his head were steel steps, the simulated summer sun beating down from a sky so blue it could have been painted, and under the soles of his boots was wet, dripping sewage. That, he didn't need. He plugged the Lucky into his lips and pulled his lighter, setting the tiny tobacco tube alight and drawing a long breath. That, he did need. Craved.
Volt was beside him in the dark, murmuring dejectedly under his breath a number of anti-smoking campaign slogans that Surge had heard thousands of times before, but was as deaf to now as he always had been. Volt's malachite eyes lifted to a chink in the staircase where the sun was arcing through the darkness, motes of dust dancing across the plane of silver which lanced over his pale face. "Don't see anything yet. Jack's been a while." An insignificant little blue light pushed aside some of the black for Volt to read the time from his fancy sportswatch. "An hour or so, I guess. You think he's okay?" A couple of inches shorter than Surge, though heavier by a good few pounds, Volt's round face was set as calmly as he possibly could manage; his lip was twitching constantly into the nervous tic he'd developed.
"Of course he is. It's Jack, right?" Jack had an annoying habit of being alright, and thinking that he was all right at the same time. The man, he was never wrong, although the times he had actually been wrong were many, and he'd barely covered up his wretched mistakes before Joule, Volt, Bulldog or Panzer could tell he was not the leader they all imagined him to be. Surge wanted no more of that. Today was going to be one of *those* days in the Matrix, he had that hot itch behind his left ear he always did when something would happen. Bulldog joked, calling him the Oracle. He had remembered her words to him, then, from over five years past... 'Remember, a man is not measured by what he can't be... A man should be measured by what he is.' Surge gave another muted grunt, and sunk to the brick beneath him so he could kneel onto the cap of one boot.
***
He was seven years old. It was another perfect day, the kind where the sky is baby blue, the grass is greener than you thought it could be, delightfully soft under young feet. The earth that he had never seen through open eyes would squelch beneath those same feet, because of the fact that the hands on the same body as those feet were clutching a hose, dragging it across the back lawn of the Dalton residence to refill the family's pool. Andrew, renown amongst the school Soccer team for being incredibly agile for his age, was hauling the hose towards the pool with it hosing - as hoses tend to do - water all across the grass, and the ground was becoming rather slushy, like chocolate pudding... Andrew had eaten enough dirt, but those days were over according to him. Eating dirt was for little kids. He could hear Mr Raines next door, singing something about a 'Three Hour Tour' whilst he pruned his roses. Andrew lifted a pudgy young hand and waved over the waist height fence. Mr Raines didn't so much as look up. John O'Brian, another of the Soccer team's targets, called to his friend from the doorway to the house. "D'you want a chocolate muffin?"
Of course he did. He shifted on one heel, trying to turn and wave his affirmative to his friend at the same time. The mud beneath his feet chose that moment to mount a rebellion, turning hideously slick. Andrew's feet simply took off out from under him, sailing into the air above his head as his top end tumbled over the edge of the pool, and he was in, the hose snagging around his arm. The green coils slithered around his arms the more he struggled, the water churning around him, up his nose and into his mouth whenever he tried to snatch a breath into his heavy chest. As his eyes began to fall closed, he fancied a bright flash of light from over the fence, and something vaulted the fence which he couldn't make out beneath the layer of foam over his head...
"Are you alright?" The question came from a voice so calm, so devoid of anything related to human emotion, that young Andrew Dalton would have sworn that it had come from that really neat talking computer he had seen on the television. He opened his blue eyes - significantly watered, but no worse for wear - and looked up with his back against the mud which threw him in the pool, onto a man whose eyes he could not see, but he guessed held about all the warmth and compassion as a frozen halibut. A pair of black, rimless sunglasses covered his eyes, and the cord to an earplug hanged from his right ear and into his black suit jacket. "Andrew Dalton, are you alright?"
Andrew, Mr Dalton, Surge, could think of only one thing to respond with. "Can you hear the radio on that thing?" One arm which was covered in less mud than the other lifted out of said brown goo and pointed to the earpiece.
The man leaning over him seemed oblivious to the amount of wet, cloggy dirt that was over his knees. "I can hear all sorts of things on this."
The boy's eyes shot wide open, eager to have a demonstration of this fantastic contraption. "Can I have a go?"
"No, I'm afraid you're not allowed to hear. Not yet." He stood, remarkably dignified despite the fact his knees had almost as much mud on them as the seven year old he had saved.
Suddenly, an important question finally struck Andrew that should be asked. "How did you know my name?"
"I know a lot about you, Andrew."
"Who are you?" asked Andrew, curious.
"Agent O'Brian." The suited man turned, headed towards the front of the house, and was gone, leaving only Andrew Dalton, cold, wet, confused and worried, equally certain he had just come across something terribly important but had no idea what it was. His mother appeared in the doorway that John had waved to him from, telling him that his little friend had to go home suddenly and had dropped his muffin all over the new carpet in the hallway and he had better go and clean it up bloody fast or there'd be no TV for him that night. Her presence served only to practically erase the importance of the events beforehand, placing in his mind one imperative: There were chocolate muffins to be had. He had four before he finally decided that he would regret having any more. They were good muffins, with just the right amount of sugar, cocoa, and that stuff that he called 'Bacon Flower' until he was six, all mixed the way they should be until they were, well, muffins.
***
That was, though, the day he first had The Itch. That itch behind his left ear, which always seemed to tell him something was going to happen. Under a set of steel stairs that led into a building he had never before known of and couldn't bring himself to care about, he had it again, tickling at the warm spot just behind his left earlobe, which was being pushed out by one digit scratching around there in habit while he was either itching himself, or thinking. At that moment, he was doing both; thinking about where Jack might be, and scratching himself... Because he was itchy, after all, and regardless of the fact he knew the itch wasn't real, it was quite seriously beginning to irritate him. He ran through a few irrelevant things in the silence of the space that he and Volt occupied. A recipe for chicken salad, the first time he had sex, the exact way to hotwire a '69 Dodge Charger so you could swipe it from under the nose of the neighbour that had moved in after Mr Raines had disappeared, and left his rose garden untended and uncared for. Since O'Brian had overwritten Caleb Raines, and saved his life. It just didn't make sense to him at all, and he would never ask another's opinion.
Within the recesses of comforting memories that had never taken place, Surge failed to notice the sharp rap on the door that made Volt squeak with a half-subdued yelp, scrabbling backward in suprise and falling flat on his rear into the gunk on the brick beneath them. "I got pies," said Jack, swinging open the door, the fresh light chasing the shadows into the corners, and off Surge's face. "Volt, I gotcha mince and cheese." He tossed the greasy bag towards Volt, which simply bounced off his chest and landed in the cold water he was attempting to pick himself up out of. With a self- satisfied sneer, Jack held out the bag which contained the hot pastry filled with meat he had bought for Surge. "Gotcha chicken."
If Jack was attempting to illicit some response from Surge, he was bitterly disappointed in the calm, aloof way in which the latter received his pie, taking it from the bag and chomping down on the crust, gravy dribbling over his chin and narrowly avoiding his coat before landing with a noiseless splat on the ground. Surge had long since learned to ignore Jack's childish taunts, and this was going to be no different. Regardless that Jack had been the one to unplug him, Surge felt no loyalty towards the man other than allowing him to stay on the Resistor. The pie was good, at any rate, even if it did taste like everything. "So? Do you have anything important, or have you just come back from your extended lunch break?" His tone was high, mocking, treading the fine line between flippant and challenging.
Jack was the type to rise to any challenge to his authority much faster than Surge, perhaps the one human who was faster than an Agent at anything. Bristling with indignation, his hands balled into fists, mashing the mince pie in his left into something that was quite inedible, but did a fine job of burning his hand so it felt like he had put it to a hotplate. Volt let off another characteristic squeak at the display, trying desperately to salvage his pie. "I got something, yeah. Kid's in a house not far from here, I caught him playing Half-Life." Jack held aloft a pair of binoculars as high as he could in the small cell-like enclosure. "Saw him edit the program, and kill the G-Man."
Volt punctuated the sentence with a low whistle of appreciation. They had *all* contemplated the ultimate downfall of that animated goon, and for a kid no older than sixteen or so to manage it... Since the advent of 'Counterstrike' there had been no greater accomplishment. Surge gave a casual shrug. "Great, so he kills the G-Man. You think he can do the same thing with an Agent, Jack?"
"I don't have to think," Jack retorted. Surge bit back a comment that no, he never did think. "I know he could." He looked with half-interest at the stinging mess he had made of both his hand and his pie, shaking the pastry debris off his palm and wiping it clean on the knee-length black jacket he wore. "Spike's a smart kid, got an inquisitive streak on him a mile long from what I've seen so far. Could well learn a thing or two you ain't even thought of yet, Surge."
The long slur on his name did not go without Surge noticing, the only outward manifestation being a tiny quirk in one eyebrow, a lá Spock. "He could, yes. But that is the idea behind being The One, Jack, unless you'd forgotten. He isn't any good to us if he turns out to be another Ghent."
"Ghent was stupid," Volt interjected. The other men turned slowly to stare at the crouching figure so inept towards speaking his mind, taking that exact moment to do so. He may as well have been overwritten by an Agent for how unusual it was. "I mean... His name and all was about the uh, only smart thing he... Um, ever picked out. He couldn't write programs for nuts, an' when he, uh, y'know... Tried to fight the Agent?"
They did know. Surge nodded slowly, Jack instead chose to stare at the wall. "Come on. Ghent is gone, and Spike's going to replace him. Spike *is* The One, and he's going to work out just fine."
"Well, then standing around here will get us nowhere, if you're so confident, mon capitane." Surge pulled himself into the open air again, taking a deep breath of digital air into virtual lungs. "Let's just go and get him, then we'll worry about whether or not he turns out to be who we're after." A brief pause hung in the air before the scrape of the flint in his lighter ended it, the flame being reapplied to his cigarette. "Or another Ghent."
