Salutations from the sunny southern coast o' England! Here's Chapter Two, on schedule as promised.
Additional disclaimer: I own none of the "Lord of the Rings" characters. Don't worry, I'm not off me rocker and this isn't becoming a X-over—it's just a vague and casual reference and I don't take chances when it comes to big companies.
Just to re-iterate, I am making NO, that's ENN—OH money from this! Oh, I really have to stop shouting...killer migraine alert...
Spoilers: All Too Human in particular
A/N: The science involved here may be a 'bit dodgy'—I'm no scientist, I'm no computer expert, and this is just a weird idea I had a while back. I'm not up to speed on techno terms, 'kay?
The contents of this chapter include the original idea that kicked me off on this entire crazy caper—what if when Harper overdosed on the lukaprine he actually saved his own life by doing so, staying alive just long enough for...well, the next step in the development of this plot, shall we say. This is where things really get going, so enjoy...
CHAPTER TWO:
A DEATH IS LIVED
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"A gasp of breath,
a sudden death:
the tale begun."
—The Book of Counted Sorrows
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Specific time: After the Eureka Maru's return from the mission to Machen Alpha
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"He's got Magog larvae in his gut. He's dying—suffering."
Less than twelve hours ago, Tyr Anasazi had uttered those words. He had washed his hands of the diminutive engineer—or so he had thought.
Less than two hours ago, Rommie had used a stolen Magog swarmship to tow the Eureka Maru into Andromeda's hangar. He had been recovering well from his enforced hypothermia, and although Harper had remained unconscious, he had believed—as the android and the Reverend Behemial Far Traveller had believed—that the young man would recover.
Now, the Nietzschean sighed as he inhaled from the lukaprine phial that hung around his neck. Harper had been rushed to Medical where Trance had awaited.
He had been waiting outside for quite some time now, and still there was no news. The Purple One and Rommie had sealed the doors after shooing him and the others out. After they had explained the full scale of the situation to them all.
He had honestly and dearly hoped that a way could be found to cure Harper. For if such a method worked on the youth, despite all his disadvantages, then surely there was hope for himself?
Every time his thoughts strayed towards the larvae, his mind would eventually tread that same path. Each time, he would present that piece of sound, Nietzschean reasoning to himself in justification.
Each time, he couldn't help but know that there was something else. Some other reason that every instinct he possessed screamed and ranted at him that such a thing could not possibly be true.
In many ways, he admired the young man. He fought desperately and often surprisingly successfully in life. He had been born into a hellhole where death and all other atrocities ever committed against sentient beings were very far from out of the ordinary. His physiology was flawed beyond belief—had such a child been born to Nietzschean parents, he would have been immediately euthanased and their bloodline forever marked as tainted and eventually die out. His immune system was a joke, and he was so very weak, save for when those whom he cared for were truly imperilled and the individual responsible was before him..
He had suffered many things on Earth. Committed acts that even he, Tyr, far from his closest of friends, could tell that Harper sincerely regretted.
And still he fought, still he refused to surrender.
He almost had, upon learning that he really was infested with Magog larvae. It had been hard for them both. Still Tyr found himself privately wondering whether it would be best to destroy himself and ensure the larvae within him would never live. Still he found it difficult to go on.
And yet they had both fought onwards. Both had experienced hell and found themselves on a quest to rebuild an entire dream-like civilisation.
Had Seamus Zelazny Harper been born a healthy Nietzschean, he would surely have been an Alpha of his own little Pride by now, of this much Tyr was sure. Or perhaps not such a little Pride...
And now, if things went well, there was indeed a way for Harper to be saved, albeit a highly unorthodox way that didn't entirely match his personal idea of being 'saved'. And it would never, could never, work for him.
Harper, himself and the others had worked obsessively to find a cure to the sixteen larvae that plagued them both. But if this procedure worked—and that was not a possibility he discounted out of hand as idly as he would have done a year ago—would they continue to do so? Did the others regard him, Tyr, as a close enough friend and sufficiently valued ally to want to save his life and his alone?
He could not truly say.
He waited. He watched.
And he hoped. Hoped for the survival of the one he called his friend.
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She had dove into a star. Been suspended in time on the edge of a black hole's event horizon. Lived through a nova bomb detonation. Fallen in love, and had her heart broken.
Andromeda had all these memories and experiences, as a ship and a soldier and a person. And yet, in so many ways none of them worried her so thoroughly as this.
She soared through the datastreams, approaching the barrier. She hated to do this, but any other course of action would lead to failure. And of all the things she had ever done, she could not afford to fail in this task.
The dataport's firewalls parted at her forceful touch, intact but barring her way no longer—
In a flash, she was in.
He looked surprised to see her, to see the background change from the Maru's interior to one of dataflows and holograms.
"R- Rommie? H-how...are you real? You're really there?"
"Don't worry Harper, I'm not a dream," she assured him. "I'm accessing your mind much the same way you enter mine, through your dataport's matrix."
He nodded, folding his arms. "Something's wrong, isn't it. The last thing I can remember was that the larvae were acting up again, and I'd just used the lukaprine to calm 'em down...it's bad, right?"
She nodded sadly. "It is. To be honest with you, well..." She trailed off, unable to bring herself to admit the severity of the situation.
He grinned resignedly. "It's gonna be the big one, right? The larvae're comin' outta my gut and there's absolutely squat you guys can do about it."
"Harper," she fought to speak, voice choked. "Harper, listen to me. Hey!" she forced him to look at her. "Harper, I'm sorry about this, but I didn't come here just to give bad news." She smiled, placed a hand on his shoulder reassuringly. "There's good news as well."
"You mean Rev's been talking to his Divine to give me a break after I'm dead?" he groaned. "Geez, thanks."
"Will you just listen to me for a minute?!" she cried in exasperation. "Harper, what would happen if you were in my virtual reality matrix and someone removed the jack from your 'port?"
"My mind would be left stranded in VR, and that's if I was lucky," he automatically replied. "So what?"
"Beka came up with a plan for if we couldn't get the eggs out of you. A plan to let you survive."
He stared at her, an expression of complete and total confusion dominating his features. "Rom-Doll...are you feeling okay? 'Cos that just makes no sense at all."
She sighed. "Harper, you're familiar with equipment locker six and the supplies in there, right? You've raided it for parts to repair me often enough."
"Yuh-huh," he slowly nodded, still confused.
"And you know the storage capacity of my reserve data modules in there."
"Yeah, just one of 'em could hold your entire mainframe and have room to spare. Why?"
She groaned inwardly; why did he have to make things so awkward? But still, she owed him for the many times he had willingly worked himself to exhaustion, so greatly he cared for her, so he deserved some slack. "Harper, one of those modules is with you, Trance and my avatar in Medical right now. I'm here to guide you out of your body and into the module."
"W-w-wait a minute. Out of my body?! Leave my body? You're serious?"
"Yes."
Harper moaned weakly as he ran his fingers through his hair. "Will it work?"
"Well, to be honest with you it's far from guaranteed. But you have a chance to survive like this, and with me helping you from in here, that chance is greatly improved. And Trance and my avatar are outside monitoring every step of the way. It can work, you have very real opportunity to live, Harper."
"And what happens then, huh? Say it works, hell, say it's an all-out, full- blown and qualified success. What do I do then? I mean, am I just gonna be stuck as a 'brain-in-a-box'?"
"You'll be able to access my virtual reality matrix, and we can connect you to some of my systems so you'll be able to generate a hologram of yourself." Dammit, we're losing time here! "Harper," she said softly, "this is your only chance and we don't have very much time. If you want to try it, let me know now, because we need to begin immediately if you do."
Harper threw up his hands helplessly. "Dead if we don't, possibly dead if we do. Why're you even asking, of course I want to do this. Sure, I might get depressed or whatever later on, but at least I'll be alive to do so, right? Sure, get me outta here Lady Galadriel."
She nodded as she closed her eyes, communicating with Trance and preparing herself.
She was under no illusions that this would in any way be easy. Although Harper's mind and all the knowledge he possessed were somewhat larger than the mind of an average human—thanks to all the data he'd crammed into it since getting his dataport years ago—it was still miniscule in comparison to her own, still easy for her to contain and manoeuvre between his body and the data module. What would make things difficult would be its fragility and the processing rate of the dataport. If she attempted to extract him just a little bit too fast, Harper's mind would be torn to pieces.
And if she went too slowly...
She refused to let herself consider that possibility.
If truth be told, she had more than her fair share of worries and concerns that made her greatly doubt her ability to succeed in this, much as the idea pained her. So many things could go wrong, in so many ways Harper could die...
"Rommie?" Harper's worried call seemed so very far away.
"What is it?" she gently asked, as she finished her preparations and returned her focus to the dataport's matrix.
Although in the information universe things such as tears were impossible, Harper certainly looked fearful indeed. "You won't let me die, right? I mean, sure it's gonna be difficult, but you won't fail, right? I know I've been annoying—hell, I've been a complete asshole half the time—but you'll keep me alive won't you?"
She smiled as her fears and doubts evaporated at his pleading tone. In the core of her very essence, she now knew she would succeed if for no other reason than that she had to succeed, for him if not for herself. Too many people who had trod her decks as her crew had died. Harper would not. It was a blindingly simple and pure equation.
She refused to allow this young man to die. She vowed to herself upon her honour as an Officer and Ship of Her Majesty's Fleet that he would live and that she would fight to the limits of her power to ensure that he could survive.
She stepped forwards, bringing her image close to his, and rested a hand gently on the side of his face. "You will live, Harper. I promise you, you will live to see this day's end and tomorrow begin."
He visibly calmed and raised his arm, lightly resting his fingertips upon her hand. "What do I need to do?"
"'Just hold still, darlin'...'" she drawled in a passable imitation of his Bostonian accent. "Relax as much as you can...still your thoughts. Empty your mind." His head drooped a little, as she monitored his brain activity. "Empty your mind...calm."
This was it.
The dataflows vanished, as did the images that represented herself and Harper.
She reached out...
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It was, to the outside universe, the work of no more than a second.
To Andromeda, a second was an eternity. An ordinary, uneventful second.
This particular second seemed to stretch much further beyond even that.
In a long, drawn-out process, she eased Harper out through his dataport. All her considerable focus was intent on the operation. As she grew more and more obsessed with her work, life support ceased to function on her lower, unused decks. The lights in Command went out. Her androids halted squarely in their tracks as her consciousness withdrew from them.
As her engineer's mind pulled free of his body, as Trance and her avatar stepped back as the larvae fought to grow and free themselves of their host as they sensed their doom, Andromeda fought down a flicker of emotion, of relief.
She wasn't finished yet.
Slowly, gently, she guided the precious, delicate little spark of light that was Harper's mind toward the data module.
He was so very fragile like this. So vulnerable. The slightest error...
The slightest error will not happen, she mentally chided herself, then focussed once more on the task at hand.
If her mind had had a physical, organic form of its very own, it would have been sweating at that very moment. By the bucketload.
With a slight digital whisper, he was in, he was through. Protocols, algorithms and interfaces flickered into life within the data module, establishing an environment into which his mind could unfold in safety. She followed him in, gently and carefully settling him into his shell of connections with the physical world...
An interface matrix was swiftly established.
And at last it was over.
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Tyr's gauss pistol was in his hand within a second when he heard the howls and squeals of larvae. The tearing of flesh and Trance's cry for Rommie echoed clearly through the corridor as he pounded at the med deck doors, demanding that Andromeda open them. His assault on the doors only intensified as he heard a force lance being fired, a volley of screaming effectors snarling within Medical.
At last he slumped, desperately inhaling the lukaprine to subdue his larvae, and knew in his heart that Harper was surely dead.
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Harper blinked—or at least, the image of him inside the matrix blinked.
It had changed, he realised. Most less-technically-minded people would have been hard-pressed to notice the difference, but to one such as himself who spent a great deal of time in such environments, he knew it was a completely different matrix.
"Is...is it over?" he cautiously asked as Andromeda flickered in beside him.
"It is...done," she gasped, looking exhausted. "Ugh...I won't be doing that again any time soon."
"Are you alright? Is it something I can help with?"
She shook her head as she recovered herself. She grinned broadly as she felt herself returning to normal, as lights, life support and all other activities she had suspended returned to normal. "It's nothing, but I appreciate the concern," she assured him. "You'll need to get used to this. After that, we'll move onto the use of screens, and then see if we can get a hologram generated. But for now...I don't know about you, but I need a rest."
"Just as long as I don't stop you from generating your own," he quipped. "Rommie..." He found himself unable to express the words in his heart fully, and so used what he could. "...thanks." He threw his virtual arms about her in a hug. She smiled, partly from relief, partly from the happiness that welled up inside her, as she returned the embrace warmly, as he shook with unwept binary tears of relief and thanks.
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Smoke rose from the muzzle of Rommie's force lance, as she and Trance stared at the remains of the larvae that had torn their way free of Harper's corpse.
The beautiful android shuddered at the sight of her engineer's still and rapidly cooling form. Even though she knew full well that he was alive and perfectly safe within the data module, it still pained her to see his body.
"Rommie...?" Trance hesitantly asked from behind her.
"He's fine," she assured her. "He's alive...and safe."
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Author's Note: What do ye reckon? Any ideas, opinions etc? Any preferences regarding Tyr's situation, and who wants what to happen to the Harpster now the li'l so'n'so's gone digital? C'mon, talk to me already.
By the by, thought you might like a taste of the first chapter of something else I'm working on; "Late Knight's Fall," coming soon to a certain Fan Fiction Dot Net near you. This is another AU fic, 'R' rated. Disclaimer: I own the Quicksilver Arrow, her captain, Carl Forbes, and the mercenary Cassius Anasazi. Tribune owns anything that I don't invent (anything from the little screen, in other words). See below for the teaser:
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"Give up, you can't win," he told Beka.
"I told you before," the blonde woman said, spying Harper's force lance. Telemachus noted the movement, saw his own force lance, and they both leapt away at the same time.
Time slowed again.
Beka lunged over the console, tugging the weapon from her now-unconscious chief-engineer's holster, whilst Telemachus spun over the fire control station to where his weapon had dropped.
"Time dilation is increasing," Andromeda reported, her voice slurred by the distortion.
"Pessimism is not a survival trait!" Beka shouted as they both raised their respective force lances.
Telemachus fired and she recoiled, the ruby-red effector just barely missing her.
They leapt into the air again, firing at each other. Telemachus' shot almost clipped his Captain, but Beka's aim was to prove the surer, and punctured the Nietzschean. Both fell heavily to the deck.
Beka crossed to her dying friend. "Telemachus, what have you done?" she asked, wracked with grief at her own actions.
The other gasped in pain, fighting to speak as he gently grasped her hand. "I'm proud of you. You should be..."
Time stopped.
The Andromeda Ascendant had reached the event horizon of the black hole.
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The Quicksilver Arrow shuddered as the Kalderan fighters came about for another pass. Seated in the pilot's chair at the very fore of the cluttered cockpit, Reverend Behemial Far Traveller prayed fervently to the Divine under his breath, his claws clinging to the controls as he desperately manoeuvred the salvage vessel to avoid the worst of their firestorm. A steady stream of choice and intense swearing punctuated the opening of the attack run as Carl Forbes blazed away at them with the ship's AP gun batteries to little avail.
"Come on, come on me old son. I got you ya li'l bastard, I got you...in...my...sights. Lights out, sunshine!" he snarled victoriously as a fighter erupted into an expanding ball of flames under his barrage. "Reverend, come about to zero-two-niner, negative thirty degrees and cut to half cruising speed."
"Coming about," the Magog priest agreed, carefully and swiftly executing the manoeuvre.
"Trance, how're we doing back there?" the young man hollered. Since the intercom system had finally given up the ghost last year, they were reduced to either using radio headsets or simply shouting at the tops of their lungs.
In the depths of the Arrow's engine room, Trance Gemini relaxed her grip on a pipe with her tail and tumbled to the deck below, landing neatly in a roll onto her feet. She groaned as she stowed her nanowelder into her toolbelt as she crossed to one of the consoles. "Go easy on the sub-light engines!" she yelled. "Keep under two-thirds, the AP tanks are starting to become unstable! I'm gonna try and lock them down as best I can, but it's not going to be easy and I'll need to cut all engines in a few minutes else they'll either shut down or blow up on us!"
"You get that Rev?" Carl asked.
"I certainly did," came a gravelly reply.
"Cut to one third and come about to five-eight-one at forty degrees positive. Lining up a shot..."
Rev sweated, staining his fur and robe as he set their new course. The remaining pair of fighters seemed to be learning from their pack mates' demise, and were spreading out their formation so as to avoid the enfilation techniques that the Arrow was reputed and famed in spacer circles for executing so perfectly.
"Come on...right this way lads...that's it..."
"New contact!" Rev shouted. "Closing fast from behind the Kalderans... they're firing! Missile contacts from the Kalderan fighters!"
"Firing!" the blonde man barked, loosing shots from the AP guns.
"The new contact...sensors say it's a Gargoyle-class Nietzschean fighter!"
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Hope you enjoy the finished product...
As I mentioned earlier, "Late Knight's Fall" is an AU fanfic and I've got another one of these (albeit not quite so drastically different an AU) along with a second X-over in the pipe as well, "Andromeda: A New Dawn" and "Warriors Displaced" respectively. I also seem to have an idea on strength that involves bringing in a force from some Brit sci-fi I enjoy (nothing from the telly, you'd need to get down a decent bookshop to find this stuff) that will make the vaunted 'Spirit of the Abyss' seem about as threatening as the cuddly toy otter that I still have from my childhood. More on that later...
This is Union-Jack2.0, signing off.