Hello, everyone! This is Chapter 12, a little quicker than usual. Looks like my I'll be able to wrap this up next chapter, I've got a bit of an epilogue thing I need to cover. This chapter doesn't feature tech commentary (Gasp! Shock!) but instead some thoughts on the how and why of my version of Nathan. It's not exhaustive, but I hope you'll get some insight into my story thinking process.
On with the show!
---
Say what you will about Nathan Ambrose, but that night, he earned his paycheck.
"Ambrose, are you seeing this?" Jaime asked, her voice a constant companion through his headset. Nathan had sent all of his prior research and calculations to a virtual holding cell. The twin screens of his workstation were completely covered with Jaime's telemetry, one through gauges and meters, the other by displaying the snapshots transmitted from her bionic eye. Nathan pulled a few clear shots of the timing device's interior and opened them into an image processing program to get a better look at the details.
"Blowing up the stills now," he replied. The dearth of wiring was odd - Nathan was no expert for explosive devices, but he would have recognized explosive charges and detonator caps.
"Word choice, Ambrose!" Jaime growled. "I'm standing next to a bomb!"
"Nope," Nathan said, short and sweet. "See, the good news is, it's not a bomb, probably."
Not that Nathan knew what it was, yet. Instead of rearranging the program windows, Nathan had simply covered the whole screen with the image he was looking at - better for finding details, but not so good for keeping track of Jaime's now hidden telemetry.
"Probably not a bomb," Jaime said. "Huh, that's a real relief. But of course now you're going to tell me the bad news, what it is instead, and it'll be worse."
"Endorphin release," a soft female voice said. Given Nathan's multitasking requirements, the monitoring system was set up to avoid message pop-ups in favor of speech synthesis, tapping another sensory channel instead of adding to the visual overload. Not that he was paying a lot of attention to the message - it had been popping up all evening and merely signaled the operation of the mental safeguards, which made it quite tune-out-able. Besides, Nathan was far too busy rolling his eyes. Jaime Sommers had a habit of throwing his smartass right back at him when he really couldn't afford to be engaged in verbal sparring. It took all of his attention on the image to - shit, are those valves?
"I hate being predictable almost as much as saying that you're right," Nathan said, "but yes, that was what I was going to get to, the bad news part, which is really 'no good at all' very bad. Uh, not to scare you, Sommers, but you're looking at a high-pressure chemical dispersal system, designed to spray a really nasty chemical weapon right into the prevailing winds over the City. And it appears to be -"
"On a clock, yes, I can see that for myself! How do we disarm it?"
"I've got it," Jordan said, and the voice came through Nathan's headset distant and in low fidelity, just a low-bandwidth stream of Jaime's hearing. Note to self, get direct jack into team radios, Nathan thought. "Mechanism for the pressure vessel, right? I can see some piping behind the PCBs, and this thing looks like a servo. If we can block the servo's movement, it can't open the valve."
Nathan hit the mute button on his headset.
"How fucking stupid can you be?" he shouted, venting a sudden burst of anger. He had the image right there, saw what Jordan had seen, but given the lack of any solid information whatsoever, it seemed just as likely as not that sabotaging the valve would set the device off early. They still had minutes on the clock, more than enough time to get their bearings and not charge right after the obvious booby-trap. Nathan collected his thoughts, took a deep breath and unmuted the connection. "Tell Sergeant Smartass that we can't be sure this is the main valve, the only main valve or even really a valve, not to mention the servo itself could be a red herring," he said. The finishing phrase - EOD my ass! - remained unspoken.
"Heart rate dropping," the speech synth said. Nathan was still tuned out.
"Ambrose thinks you're full of shit," Jaime said, moving the corners of Nathan's mouth just a bit upwards. Not quite the intricate message he had intended for her to relay, but it would do to keep the grunts from touching random components and making the situation worse. Nathan missed the stretched, unclear sounds of Jaime's voice.
"Airflow below critical," the speech synth said. Somewhere in Nathan's brain, the association "critical = bad" clicked into place, and with that, his attention swung away from the not-bomb onto the matter of Jaime's condition. With a few clicks, he banished the still images and brought the telemetry gauges back up. There were a lot of details to keep track of, meters and toggles to rival a fighter cockpit, but also like a cockpit, the important ones stood out. Heart rate. Brain activity. Airflow to lungs. All of them were blinking red.
"I'm -" Jaime managed to croak into his ear.
"Endorphin release."
"Shit," Nathan whispered. "What the fuck -"
"Can't control," Jaime gasped. Nathan's eyes skipped from the 'shit be fucked up' meters to the 'how and why' ones: Jaime's stress levels, measured from a dozen weighted physiological factors, were just below the ceiling. The activity of the system's endorphin pumps - part of the psychological stability enhancements - was pegged solidly at maximum. This is impossible, he thought, this is literally fucking impossible. This can't be happening!
"Heart rate below critical."
"Sommers," he said, trying (but failing) to stay calm, "this is very important -"
"Get out of - of -" was her response between fits of giggling.
"What?" Nathan said. "I'm sorry, but..."
Fuck, what is that? Nathan thought. Chems, nanos, no, that would show up on the blood sensors. Sys diags green, no rogue killcode. What? What the fuck is it?
---
"What would you have done instead?" Bledsoe asked.
"Morphine," Will said. "250 milligrams, just to make sure."
---
"Oh, fuck me," Nathan said. He tore his eyes off the screens and looked up to see Jonas Bledsoe approaching, attracted by the audio warnings. "Bledsoe, she's crashing!"
"Airflow stopped. Respiratory drive failure," the synth said, adding a repeated warning. "Endorphin release. Endorphin release. Endorphin release..." Nathan turned down the audio volume of the warnings.
"What's the problem?" Bledsoe demanded.
"The stability system...crashed," Nathan said. "It's flooding her with endorphins and shutting down her heart and lungs."
"Is this going to kill her?" Bledsoe asked.
"Uh, yeah, sure, eventually," Nathan said. "Not the problem, though. I need her to disarm the - doohickey, the not-bomb-thing. So if you could keep the grunts off it..."
"I've got it," Bledsoe said. He pulled up a chair at the next workstation and opened a new telemetry link to Jaime's implants. The remote system access was far from perfect, with many useful options still only available via a command line interface, but the communications subsystem was covered by nice, friendly icons. Bledsoe linked the cellphone connection with the radio transceiver in Jaime's arm, jacking into the tactical team's radios. "Palace to Hitman, come in."
"Uh, this is Hitman," Ginsburg's voice answered with a hint of surprise. "We read you, Palace, go ahead."
"Hitman, I need a countdown on the device."
"Stand by, Palace." A pause. "Countdown is two - two - eight. We're looking at it right now, and -"
"Don't touch it," Bledsoe said.
"Ah," Ginsburg said. "We, uh, we copy that, Palace, don't touch the device. What about Tin Man?"
"Being fixed as we speak, Hitman."
Bledsoe looked over to Nathan's workstation. The screen was now positively cluttered with open windows, most of them big blobs of text.
"Tell me good news, Ambrose," Bledsoe said.
"Uh, I didn't compromise system security with undocumented backdoors?" Nathan replied, quickly skimming through his own documentation on the control software for Jaime's implants. "Seemed like a good idea at the time, but inconvenient now that I'm trying to break the system myself."
"Just switch it off," Bledsoe suggested.
"...I am the only one who read the software specs, huh?" Nathan said. "Explicitly verboten - if that module goes dark, the entire system shuts down. Security measure."
"Countdown at two - zero - zero, Palace," Ginsburg added. "I say again, countdown at two minutes."
"Point of order," Nathan said, "even if I get the pumps disabled, we'll need to hit her with some go-juice. Uh, like, epinephilim - no, epinecromancer...epidermis? Noooo. Ah, dammit, you know, that - adrenaline stuff."
"Epinephrine," Bledsoe said cooly and nodded. "Palace to Hitman, get a first aid kit to Tin Man. She needs epinephrine. Stand by for dosage when you're ready." Bledsoe turned to Nathan again. "How much epinephrine?"
"I don't know!" Nathan replied. "How would I know?"
"They have a kit," Bledsoe said. "They use pens. That narrow it down?"
"Ah, okay, not really, just - " Nathan rolled his eyes upward - "just stick her until she's on her feet."
"Okay, we'll figure that out later," Bledsoe said. "The pumps?"
"Can't go, I'm counting at least twenty module dependencies, so we're - wait a minute. I can lie!" Nathan shouted with a grin. "I can fucking lie! Hah, I think I just outsmarted myself." With renewed confidence, he clicked on a few buttons (apparently bringing up an existing file) and launched into a furious typing mania. Bledsoe looked over his shoulder and saw him working on the text, rewriting some numbers at the beginning. For a code segment, it seemed almost nice, with a mostly readable syntax and a few comments. Most of what Bledsoe had seen of Nathan's production code looked...denser.
"Countdown at one - three - zero, Palace," Ginsburg said, beginning to sound - to put it mildly - nervous. "Epi ready on your go."
"What are you -" Bledsoe began, but Nathan cut him off.
"Shush! Genius at work! Give me three, two, one -"
Nathan tapped the Enter key in the way a great opera conductor might swing his baton for the final note of a grand performance.
"Thank god for version control," Nathan said, "I just pulled the old debug stub, switched the version number and threw it at the autopatcher. Compiled, signed, uploaded. Now we just need to reboot the system -"
"How long is that going to take?" Bledsoe asked.
"Remote unit online. All systems nominal," the computer said softly.
Nathan cracked a wide grin. "He shoots! He scores! Nathan Ambrose wins the day again!"
"Hitman!" Bledsoe growled, "Epi, now!"
---
The principal difficulty of applying autoinjectors to Jaime was in finding the right spot, as Antoine Ginsburg could attest. In first aid training, everything was simple - autoinjectors go into the meat of the thigh, case closed. But that only applied to, well, humans - not to a person with two bionic legs. Ginsburg had settled on opening the quick release on Jaime's tactical vest and pulling up her shirt - getting one of those injectors stuck in the belly wouldn't be pretty, but there was, at least, a decent chance that it would work.
Nothing left but to do it.
With a mighty stab, he plunged the epi-pen's needle into Jaime's abdomen, adding half a milligram of epinephrine to her already destabilized system. It wasn't quite "Two wrongs make a right", but that was as good a way as any to describe the plan from the men sitting in the operations central. After a moment, Jaime groaned and moved weakly, though a sudden miraculous return to full awareness seemed a distant possibility at best. Ginsburg stole another glance at the device's countdown and found his superior sense of timing at work again.
"Countdown at one - zero - zero, negative on Tin Man," he radioed. "We're down to a minute; permission to kiss our asses good-bye, Palace?"
Bledsoe managed to make his scowl audible through the communications link. "We're not done yet. Use all remaining pens, Hitman. I say again, all pens."
Nothing like a last hurrah, Ginsburg thought, gathered the two remaining pens from the first aid kit and stabbed them into Jaime's belly, one in each hand. That produced a result; after a few seconds, Jaime's eyes flew wide open. She looked at Ginsburg. She looked at the three autoinjectors sticking out of her.
She screamed.
Ginsburg had to hold her down; with little thought to tenderness, he used his free hand to rip the pens out of Jaime and discard them.
"You're okay!" he shouted. "You're okay!"
"What - what - the fuck?" Jaime replied in kind.
No time for explanations, Nathan's voice sounded in her head. We need you for another minute, Sommers, just a minute and then you can freak out all you want, okay?
Jaime's breathing was as fast and deep as she could make it; her left hand was trembling quite spectacularly, making for a motif she couldn't remove her gaze from.
Forget the damn hand! Nathan shouted. Your right arm in the device guts, now.
Maybe it was that Jaime was already deadened to the rollercoaster ride of the evening, or that her specific state of shock made her more susceptible to being ordered around, or perhaps Nathan actually shouting at her for the first time. However you want to explain it, Jaime shoved Ginsburg out of her way and scrambled madly for the device. Some of the distance, she covered on her feet, some on her knees. It didn't matter.
"I'm here!" she said breathlessly.
Okay, careful now! Nathan said.
"Countdown at zero - three - zero," Ginsburg dutifully radioed.
You see that valve in the back? You need to reach in there, grab it and keep it closed, with all your strength. But the whole casing is studded with what looks like accelerometers. You have to go slow and keep absolutely steady. Any bumps and this thing goes.
"That's nuts!"
I know. You're the only one who can do this.
The seconds ticked away as Jaime slowly raised her right arm and reached deeper into the bowels of the weapon release mechanism.
"I'm playing Operation with the whole city," Jaime said to herself.
"Countdown at zero - one - five!"
Steady...
Jaime closed her eyes. "God, don't -"
The device sounded an ear-splittingly loud single beep; Ginsburg, already focused on the countdown display, watched it jump to zero. Reflexively, he held his breath.
---
The comm system reproduced Jaime's groan with astounding fidelity. Nathan took a deep breath and made a "Phew!" sound.
"I've got it," her voice came, clear as day in Nathan's headset. "I've got the valve!" The speakers - both from the connection to Jaime's bionic ear and the link to the tactical team's radios - were filled with cheering.
"I'm - I'm -" he stammered helplessly for a moment, trying to process the tangle of thoughts in his head. The chaos only cleared when he heard Bledsoe speak next to him.
"Are you feeling any resistance from the valve, Miss Sommers?" Bledsoe said.
"I did for a few seconds," Jaime said. "It jumped as soon as I touched it, but I got it before it could unlock. It struggled for a bit but then it stopped. And I'm - what is that smell? It's like a - it smells like a broken TV."
"That would, ah," Nathan cut in, "I think you blocked the servo. Must have eaten itself in the struggle."
"Wow," Jaime said.
A part of Nathan - well, okay, most of Nathan - considered telling Jaime about the power-to-weight ratio of dumb servos the size of which she'd outwrestled, that they would not require very much resistance at all to gleefully destroy themselves, and that, therefore, this wasn't as good of a test for the strength of her bionic arm as she might have thought. He held his tongue. This, perhaps more than any other event of the evening, fell under the auspices of the term "miracle". But Nathan was no saint; one line held back did not make for an effective dam to all of his thoughts, and knowing that he had to express himself, he hit the mute button on his headset, leaving Jaime to bask in her victory.
"I can think of at least a dozen ways this could have - no, should have - gone horribly, horribly fucking wrong," Nathan said. "And I don't know the first thing about IEDs. Did we just win the goddamn lottery or what? I mean, what the hell just happened, old man, huh? It's wild!"
"...old man?" Bledsoe replied, somehow managing to draw out and emphasize every single letter.
"Ah, I'm -" Nathan looked to Bledsoe, where - for the moment - bemusement was still winning out over scowling. "That was, uh, nothing, Mr. Bledsoe, Sir."
---
The mop-up, such as it was, took the better part of the next hour. While Jaime still held onto the valve for fear of it being opened by some hidden mechanism, the soldiers dealt with the slightly more mundane issues: intercepting the police patrol cars that finally rolled up as response to the gunfire and selling the cops their hastily-arranged cover story, searching the rest of the building for hidden equipment or enemies, and finally clearing a landing zone for the helicopter. After a while, more people flooded in: bomb squad, FBI SWAT, the fire department's Hazardous Material Team.
It was okay to let go then. Jaime did, got up and worked her way through the crowd, all of whom busied themselves getting good looks at the device. She heard the beginnings of jurisdictional squabbles and saw the pervasive baffledness on their faces, but that, too, was no longer her problem. When she left the building, the midnight air outside was cool and dusty. Ginsburg, Jordan and Calavera were already waiting for her, as was the idling Berkut helo. Jaime chanced a look at the highway stretching above; even through the engine noise and the bustle surrounding the building, she could still hear the cars driving up above. The city, at large, didn't seem to care about how close it had come to destruction. That was, perhaps, the only healthy attitude to take.
"You dropped this," Calavera said, and handed Jaime her discarded P226 pistol. She offered him a weak smile, took the gun and ran it through a quick safety check before pushing it back into the drop holster with a satisfying click. Together, Jaime and the soldiers approached the helicopter, taking care to duck under its main rotor, and climbed in. The inside of the helo's rear cabin felt more familiar this time, as if getting into it tired but satisfied after a long night triggered a memory of the day before's fuzzy events. Ginsburg was the last in and pulled the door shut from inside; the engines howled and spooled up just as he found his seat and strapped in. Momentarily, Jaime felt the helicopter lift off, taking to the skies again. They rose above the highway, affording Jaime a good look at the rest of the city: still lit up, still alive.
And so, it was back to Wolf Creek.
---
They put her through the tests in the examination room again, blood and skin samples, implant checks, everything but asking Jaime her favorite color. Through it all, she remained strangely wired, not like the forced wakefulness of the implants but in a distantly familiar way. It took her a while to recognize it, but finally, she made the connection. She was awake like she had been when they took Becca to the hospital.
Another fine example of the Jaime Sommers effect. Another cruel thing she'd rather not be reminded of.
Will wasn't there for the check-ups, just some of the medical staff Jaime hadn't gotten to know. The same male nurse. Jaime didn't get to ask his name, either. They weren't talking to her. Her clothes were in a trash bin. Again.
---
In the conference room, the team was assembled - Bledsoe in the middle, talking; Kim by himself as usual; Truewell and Will, just back from Paradise, and Nathan in a corner trying not shiver. Will was nursing a cup of a liquid that bore as much resemblance to coffee as the sun did to a lightbulb. It went down his throat like engine grease, but it kept him awake.
"We've all had a long day and I'll keep this brief," Bledsoe began. "We've done our job. Good results, expectations exceeded. Just what we needed. Good work, everyone."
The room was quiet. Bledsoe continued after giving it a second to sink it.
"That said, we're left with a lot of loose ends. We don't know who the bad guys are. I've forwarded what we've found out to our contacts in the community, and I hope we'll have a better idea of who we're up against at the end of the week. But whoever they are, they've got a head start on us. Anthros, you've gotten a look at the weapon. Anything you'd like to add to your preliminary?"
"Um, no," Will said groggily. "Not really. I'll need lab time with the original agent."
"That's a given", Bledsoe said. "The bulk of the weapon has been turned over to the Army's Chemical Corps for destruction. We'll get a few samples to work with."
"Ah, okay," Will said.
"Next point on the agenda is the malfunction in Miss Sommers's implants." Bledsoe paused for a moment. "We can't afford horseshit like that. We can't afford 'teething problems'. We can't afford 'Oops!'. I want stepped-up testing of all components and a full code audit on the control software before we make any other modifications."
"Uh, Sir," Nathan began, but Bledsoe cut him off.
"And I'm aware that you can't do that on your own, Ambrose. We're critically short-handed, as the last few days have shown. I can't change the OpTempo. What I can do is make sure we're not doing this by ourselves. I'm put in an emergency request that Wolf Creek be brought up to full operational staffing as soon as possible. We'll just have to hold the fort down a little longer. Now, I think we all deserve some sleep for tonight. Truewell, Anthros, I want to speak to you two in my office. The rest of you are at liberty until Thursday oh-eight-hundred. Dismissed."
With 'the rest of you' constituting Nathan and Kim, the two loners shot each other a glance and made for the door. Kim was the first out, followed by Nathan. Will thought he heard the computer specialist strike up a conversation with Kim, but the door closed too quickly behind them to get any inkling of the content. Will was fairly sure it didn't concern him, anyway. After a moment's sip on his cup to finish the coffee, he walked outside, trying to prepare himself for whatever the morning still had in store for him.
One of those things, it turned out, was Jaime.
She was leaning against the wall next to the door, dressed once more in government-issue sweatclothes and not looking all too thrilled about it. But then she noticed Will, and her face lit up. Will deployed a counter-smile just in time for her to push off the wall and step up to him.
"Hey," she said, drawing the greeting out as if to showcase a peculiar half-pout. "Where have you been?"
"Just a little road trip," Will said. "Hello, Jaime. Are you okay?" His hand brushed her face softly.
"I'm beat," Jaime said. "Can we talk later, I need to -"
"Miss Sommers," Bledsoe said, stepping out of the door frame just enough to let Truewell pass; she walked off down the hallway, and Will looked after her wondering if he should follow.
"I need to talk to Mr. Bledsoe," Jaime said. "Alone, please."
Will gave Jaime a quick peck on the cheek, then jogged after Truewell. Jaime watched him go; Bledsoe had his gaze locked solidly onto her face.
"Hell of a scrape you got yourself into," Bledsoe said. "I didn't think the lab would let you walk out."
"If all the tests check out, you don't keep a piece of equipment for observation," Jaime said. "You don't ask a 78 million dollar weapon system how it's doing, right?"
"Poked and prodded you, hm? Engineering degrees don't teach the best bedside manner. It's a bad habit, but it is a habit, and after a few years of static testing, it's hard to break."
"I'm serious, Mr. Bledsoe. I deserve to be treated like a real fucking person. Look me in the eyes, use my name, shake my hand, all that good social interaction stuff. Send out a memo, sign them up for a teamwork seminar - I don't care how you do it, but get it through their skulls."
"I'd like to say you've just caught us at a bad time," Bledsoe said, "but that doesn't excuse everything. We're working on it. And the malfunction -"
"- haywire implant," Jaime said, tapping her forehead. "I'm not in the mood to argue about this. That has to stop."
"The plug is pulled, pending a full code audit. We'll get it working right."
"No. I mean everything that's messing with my brain. The head voices, the 'emotional stability', combat mode, the -" Jaime's eyes clenched shut. "Son of a -" she cursed.
"Headache?" Bledsoe asked.
"I get these - attacks," Jaime said, forcing her eyes back open. "They told me I've got some swelling. In my brain."
"Concussion, stress and overstimulation will do that to you," Bledsoe said.
He offered his hand; Jaime took it. With his help, she managed to crouch against the wall. Bledsoe walked to a water dispenser down the hall and filled a plastic cup, then brought it back with him and offered it to Jaime. She thanked him with a nod and took a few careful sips.
"Maybe we can figure out a way to get some use out of your brain implants when we're sure they won't accidentally kill you," Bledsoe said. "Throw out the automation and put them under your direct control."
"They're out," Jaime said emphatically. "They're out and that's that."
"Of course. You should get some rest, Miss Sommers. God knows you deserve it."
"Yeah, that sounds like - sounds fine."
"There's a couch in the break room down that way," Bledsoe offered. "Come on, I'll steady you."
---
Waiting in Bledsoe's office was attacking Will's nerves at a prodigious rate. He sat on the strangely homely couch tucked into a corner, face buried in his hands, and looked to the entrance. Truewell stood in front of Bledsoe's desk, arms discreetly folded behind her back.
"What did you tell him?" Will asked, not looking up. "What did you say to him?"
"I didn't leave anything out, if that's your question", Truewell replied, no hint of malice about her. "This isn't the right time or place for secrets, Dr. Anthros."
Will laughed nervously.
"You can get your 'Ha ha, CIA people are professional liars' joke out of the way now," Truewell said. "I've heard them all."
"No, it's not that - do I look like I'm in the mood for jokes?" Will asked.
The door opened to admit its master. Jonas Bledsoe stepped into the room as if expected the fire to be stoked and dinner ready to be served.
"Sir?" Truewell said quietly. "We're ready for you."
"Good, good," Bledsoe said. He closed the door behind him, then swept past Truewell, climbed past his desk and idly pushed the chair behind it away, preferring to simply stand. "I'm sorry for the delay, but I had to reassure Miss Sommers. You can have a seat, Truewell."
"If you don't mind, Sir, I'd rather stand," Truewell said.
"Fair enough. Now, I've skimmed over both of your preliminary reports, and of course I talked to Truewell while you were still in the Paradise area. Which brings me to you, Anthros."
Bend over, Will thought, here it comes.
"I think you should take the next two weeks off," Bledsoe said.
"...excuse me?" Will said, expecting a straight cross but instead reeling from a kidney punch. He suddenly noticed that being the only sitting person in the room placed him at a height disadvantage, so he took the opportunity to rise up and stand next to Truewell. "Mr. Bledsoe, this is a critical stage in our project. I've got my hands full with supervising the implants, and soon I'll have the agent samples to go over."
"Mr. Kim and Ambrose can take care of the implants, and we're not the only ones who will get samples," Bledsoe said. "Further, it's clear to me that you're suffering from a lot of stress over the events of the last days."
"Yes, but -"
"That brings us to the matter of your unsanctioned stimulant use," Bledsoe said, and his expression darkened. "I like to think you're fairly smart, Anthros. I'm willing to write this off as a lapse in judgment on your part, and in recognition of your contributions to our cause, I'm going to skip the part where I tell you to drop trou and submit a urine sample while two of my men hover over your shoulder. I think you can still be brought around without resorting to humiliating you in front of your peers and your girlfriend. But let me be clear: drug abuse does not count as 'personal eccentricity'. It does not happen under my watch. I take pains to keep a clean house, Anthros. You're at two strikes. A third fuck-up will not be tolerated. It will not even begin to happen, because the minute I get any indication that you're going maverick on me again, I will have you pulled and put into storage."
Will blinked. It was a good blink, slow and deliberate. It didn't help, though.
"The next two weeks are either a vacation or a suspension - your choice," Bledsoe said plainly. "Pull yourself back together, Anthros. Find a new place to live and spend time with your girlfriend. I assume two weeks will be ample time for detox, too. Do you have any problems with that, Anthros?"
Will unclenched his teeth. "No, Sir," he said quietly, "I understand, Sir."
"Goddammit, Anthros, don't ever put me in this position again," Bledsoe said, shaking his head softly. "I left Miss Sommers in the break room. Now get your ass out of my office. Dismissed."
---
Jaime was slumped onto a leather couch, her head on the armrest and her legs pulled in. As sleeping positions went, this was a few hairs under acceptable, mostly from the uncomfortable toughness of the leather. But with a pounding head and some paracetamol in her system, it wasn't the right time to move, either. What alternatives did she have? She'd be damned if she dragged herself into one of the hospital beds, and a drive home wasn't in the cards either. Jaime shifted her weight slightly. She'd slept in worse places.
She could recognize the rhythm of Will's footsteps coming down the hallway, painting a smile on her lips. She turned and opened her eyes when he entered the room, and ended up looking directly at a ceiling light. She quietly cursed and looked away, letting a small groan escape her mouth. A second later, she felt Will's lips against her cheek. She put her arms around him and pulled him in for a proper kiss.
"Hello again," he said. "I brought blankets."
"Hey, you," Jaime said weakly. "Where did you get blankets?"
"Stopped at my lab and plundered the hammock," Will said. "So, I've got a soft one, and a snuggly one. Oh, and some pillows."
"What's the difference," Jaime said, "between the soft one - and the snuggly one?"
"I'm, uh," Will said, "they feel differently?"
"Hold 'em out," Jaime commanded. Will offered up both, and she felt them blindly with her left arm. "Soft, please."
Will unrolled the soft blanket and laid it on top of Jaime's body; she pulled the edge up to her neck, while he helped tuck the material under her body. After a little squirming, a content smile spread over Jaime's face.
"Did you know that this room is 3 degrees warmer than the others?" Jaime said softly.
"It's still pretty cold," Will said.
"No kidding. Are you sure you guys paid your heating bill?"
Will chuckled. "Well, we did just spend -"
"- 78 million dollars," Jaime said. "That's going to take forever to pay back on a government salary."
"Hey, now, don't say that," Will said. "I can pitch in, you know."
"Half of forever, then," Jaime replied. "Can you get the lights, Will?"
"Uh, sure," Will said.
He walked over to the break room's entrance, closed the door and hit the light switch. That left the sparse illumination from the vending machine (of which Will suddenly wondered who restocked that thing), just enough for him to find his way back to a leather chair and pull it up next to the couch. He stuffed a pillow behind his lower back and one behind his neck, then laid back and spread the snuggly blanket as well as he could.
"Good night, Jaime," he said. He didn't get an answer.
Jaime's second day on the job was officially over.
Character Commentary: Nathan Ambrose
So, I have a problem with the way the series treated Nathan.
He didn't even get a last name in the series. The limited screentime he got just didn't work out in his favor, which is a pity because I kind of liked the idea of having a "lower decks" kind of character who wasn't always so deadly serious. Unfortunately, it left a fairly serious plot hole: with Will Anthros dead in the pilot, Nathan was the only character shown to work on the technical aspects of Jaime's implants, but only in the context of some low-tech fixes. It was as if Berkut couldn't muster any dedicated experts.
To fix this, I wanted a sort of three-way split between Nathan, Will and Jae Kim for the bionics. Will would mostly bring his surgical expertise and cover the nanotechnology angle. Kim, as I hope to show off soon, is responsible for the biomechanics of how Jaime's movements work and involved with the nerve/implant interface work. (I don't know what the hell 'Endophysics' is supposed to mean, but that's another rant...) That left the software and communications angle for Nathan. I don't think a lot of people pay attention to this bit, but any modern computer-based system needs a hideous amount of coding done, often in an obtuse programming language on a system that can be surprisingly low-spec. In terms of power, military-grade hardened computers are so far behind the curve of civilian tech it's not even funny, but that's the price you pay for resisting impact, shock and radiation as well as fulfilling rigid standards in reliability and redundancy.
Now, working off that bit, who's my Nathan Ambrose? He's older than you'd think - past thirty (as mentioned once in the pilot and shamefully not repeated so far), which puts him several years over Will and Jaime. He's got advanced degrees in computer engineering and communications engineering, and like many computer geeks, he relishes opportunities to learn new things, which has given him a good practical knowledge of cryptography and electronics, among others. However, he also tends to be a little...unprofessional. Even after a few years of working at Berkut, he's still got a disposition that seems more at home at a LAN party than in a secret government organization.
Nathan's dynamic with Jaime approaches the classical "straight man operative, wacky tech guy in the van" dynamic, but I've tried to put a little twist on it. Nathan's got power over Jaime, and to a degree he really likes that. He sees himself as the godlike operator handing down wisdom like manna from heaven. In his mind, Jaime's lost out there without him. He has a hard time accepting her as intelligent when her fields of expertise - literature, bartending and other assorted odds and ends - are so alien to him, and admittedly, watching Jaime try to adapt to her new abilities doesn't help his first impression. But Jaime's not easily cowed, and she's already working on clawing her way up on top of their relationship. It'll be some time before they've truly figured out where they stand.
And Nathan is oddly deferential to Will. It's easy to suspect that, given Will's combination of degrees in medicine and chemical engineering at a relatively young age, Nathan figures him for a one in a billion genius. Not to say that Nathan isn't extremely intelligent - but Will is pushing frontiers and working on truly visionary technologies. It seems you can't spend a lot of time working around someone like that without either developing hero worship or a grudge.
One of my scribbled notes says "Nathan is not harmless". I hope I can show you why that's true.