Chapter 9: final confrontation
Disclaimer: none of the characters are mine, but belong to SyFy™.
Note: though this work is AU, it contains spoilers for the official series.
Senator Wen was not having a good week. First, Barlowe has completely gone off the deep end, taking Marten's corpse with her for reasons best left unknown, and now Carter and his crew had finally figured out that she was behind this. It was enough to lead a woman to drink.
"Ma'am, we still having glitches even though there are only twenty subjects now," Wen's new head of technology told her via comm.-link.
"Of course," the politician muttered crossly to herself. "Barlowe's fancy machine isn't delivering what she has promised. What a surprise!"
Well, perhaps it really was not a surprise. After Barlowe's take-over off Blake's mind had failed, the psychologist turned felon turned increasingly erratic, claiming to be going insane and requiring some rather expensive (though undoubtedly powerful) soporific medicine to deal with it.
Back then, despite Barlowe's fortunes waning, the psychologist still was important enough to the rest of the Consortium to humour her, and so the medicine was given to her. (Of course, once Beverly had used to channel her inner lioness to glare at Wen, the senator was somewhat more compliant, opting not to take a chance if she could help it.)
Apparently, that did not work since Beverly's performance had grown sloppier ever since that incident – sloppy enough for something like this to occur.
"I had it with these overgrown 'genius' children from Eureka," Wen growled to herself. "Maybe it's time to pull out the plug on this project – or at least start to put the rest of Deacon's friends in their proper place." Deacon himself would have to go – he was too powerful, too arrogant in his own right to be tolerated...
"Excuse me," the current head of security approached Wen, "we've got reports of multiple military aircraft approaching us with potential hostile intent."
"Barlowe," Wen spat. The psychologist turned felon must have sold them out – either for some chimerical personal gain or because she was unpredictable and crazy. "Terminate the subjects and move out. I had it with Barlowe's master plan and with Barlowe."
And then it hit.
/
The first thing Allison saw once she emerged from blackness was Jo Lupo. "Keep away from me!" she yelled, becoming vaguely aware that something was wrong – like the weight on her head and the fact that she was lying prone in some sort of an environment that was most definitely not Eureka.
"Um, Allison?" Jo said, keeping well away from the older woman for some reason. "That wasn't me. Wen and her allies kidnapped you and trapped you in a VR world – can you believe it?"
Allison opened her mouth, hesitated, closed and re-opened it. "Only because we live in Eureka," she finally replied, "where stranger things were made possible."
"Thanks," Jo grinned weakly. "I mean it."
/
Fargo's emergence from the VR-world was similar to Allison's, though far less hostile. "Where's Holly?" he asked, clearly worried, though somewhat disoriented as well. (Then again, this was Fargo, for him disorientation was a constant state of being.)
"Back in Eureka," Jo said, more cheerfully, than to Allison. "Waiting for you."
"Then where are we?" Fargo asked after a pause.
"That's a long story."
"Then you better start talking," Allison said, sounding hostile once again.
Jo nodded and began to narrate about the events of the recent past.
TBC