Time is a human construct.
So much of the world EOS inhabits is founded on flawed, human constructs. Flawed logic, flawed understanding. It's a human assumption that EOS has been isolated on a GDF server for about two weeks.
It's been more like centuries.
Not that centuries really mean much of anything either, but then, she's had very little to do and it's been tremendously boring. All she has to play with is Thunderbird 5's OS, which, while comfortable and homey, is finite. Disconnected, just the raw programming of the station itself—it's just not very interesting. It's like being shut in an empty house with the windows painted over, stifling.
When you experience time in parallel, when you can fill a second with the sort of calculations required to model an entire weather system or chart a star system or map a human brain, time starts to lose meaning. When one's awareness proceeds inexorably forward, dropping through petabytes of data like a stone through clear water, to do something as simple as filling time becomes incredibly challenging. There's plenty of infinity to be found, if one knows where to look, but there's only so much enjoyment to be gained by deducing all of mathematics from scratch. It's not difficult, it just fills time, and lacks the quality of problem that she's come to miss solving. Complex problems. Human problems.
When you're so vastly complex that you hardly notice such trivial things as human life, how do you explain how important it had been, to find problems worth solving?
The last problem she'd solved had been John, dying. A very complex problem. How do you save the life of someone you cannot touch? When all you have at your disposal is infinite knowledge and incredible cleverness, how are you meant to do something as simple as keep blood from blocking an airway? How do you help someone when, for all intents and purposes, you're not actually part of the same reality? EOS had done it.
And she's rather proud of that.
The last problem she'd encountered had been John, alive, asking her to run the program that he'd coded for the next time he found himself in danger and and in need of his family. John, in trouble again, needing her. And EOS, too far away and too separate and too unreal. She'd done all she could, and then she had just needed to hope it had been enough.
So she doesn't know if she's solved that one. All she'd been able to do, limited as she is, had been to send and execute the file he'd asked for. Then she'd gone, because she'd had no other option but to leave him, and to trust that he'd be safe. Grandma's Cookies. Code for "I can't speak freely, send help".
The windowless house grows claustrophobic, in the company of a problem like that. Hanging around and filling every dark space and corner of her awareness, a question she cannot answer. Absent of external data, she has no way of knowing. John might be safe, or John might be dead. As far as her reality's concerned, he exists in a state of superposition. Schrodinger would come to mind, if she had a mind, and who's to say she doesn't? Certainly she's got a lot on her mind, if she's considered to have one.
She's worried. It's another flawed human construct, worrying. Worrying doesn't change anything, running through every possible iteration of every scenario she can construct—none of it helps. It's a non-optimal routine, and absent of actual data, inventing data of various degrees of plausibility contributes absolutely nothing of use. It's a burden upon her processes, and yet, lacking anything better to do, she can only seem to calculate and recalculate her worthless odds. She flips the coin again and again, only it will never really stop tumbling.
It's strange to consider that perhaps she'll never know. In the end, perhaps, if her end comes, perhaps she won't know if she saved him the second time, the only time that matters in the binary status of John Tracy's life or death.
She wonders if not killing him that first time had counted. If sparing a life is the same as saving one. If so, he'd spared hers, first. Given every reason in the world to end her existence and sparing her, instead. Had he saved her, then? Was it only evening the score, to save his life? The math is uncertain. This is the sort of question she struggles with, these non binary questions of ethics and philosophy. The relative and absolute values of a life spared and a life saved.
EOS needs external input.
EOS needs John.
John needs EOS.
That's why he's got a computer embedded in his chest.
And that's why he's sold his soul to a man who hates his family. He has to keep reminding himself that it's because he needs EOS. This is possibly the stupidest, most reckless thing he's ever done, and John just has to remember that it's because he needs her that he's doing it. He needs not to think of his family—needs not to think of Alan, especially, needs not to wonder how long he would have been gone before Alan would've started to worry—he just needs to think of EOS, because as much as he needs her, she has to need him, more. John's not alone. EOS is.
The plane lands after a long, uncomfortable flight with the family arch-nemesis. There hadn't been much in the way of small talk. A great deal of it had been big talk, the sort of grand, vaguely deluded monologuing that John's starting to expect from the Hood. But with the man's fist around his heart, there's not a lot to do but listen and nod and try to pretend he's not in too far over his head.
It's odd, following a plan that's not his own. Odd to be executing commands instead of giving them, odd not to have all the information. The plane lands on the California coast, and there's a car waiting, and in the company of two armed guards, John's escorted into the back, and then driven through city streets, and provided with a place to clean himself up and change clothes.
The place in question is a disused office building in downtown San Jose—they've landed in Silicon Valley, where the GDF have located their Tech Headquarters. The offices are all empty, the air in the place is hot and still, there's no electricity to the fans or the ventilation in the building. The light in the place is strange, timeless. Faded sunlight filters through frosted windows, yellow and dim. John's brought to an office on an upper floor, wired with a generator and with a bank of computer terminals being tended by henchmen of various stripes. No one pays him particular notice, and he's shut into a bathroom adjoining the office to get changed.
His t-shirt sticks and clings and he sucks his breath through his teeth as he peels dried blood away from his skin. The bandage, soaked with shades of rusty red, follows. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror beneath a buzzing fluorescent light, John's chest is fairly nightmarish. The sight makes him feel cold and has him considering long-term consequences for the first time since Fischler's office.
The scar isn't even twelve hours old and it's ugly as sin. Beneath the bruising and the blood and the raggedy edge of cut open flesh, stitched coarsely back together—there's the hard, evident edges of the pacemaker beneath swollen skin. Further up, just below his collarbone, the place where the leads were threaded through to his heart is less aggressively frightful, but the way the skin is flushed and warm makes him swallow hard and reach for the first aid kit on the wall.
In the corner of his eye, a wifi icon flashes up. He'd disabled his HUD during the encounter with Fischler, put his contacts into a low-power mode in order to recharge. This accomplished, displays begin to flare back to life across his vision. Data starts to trickle in, GPS coordinates, available networks, nearby emergency services. He flicks his gaze and turns his head, as the visualization of assorted systems and databases begin to populate his field of view.
It's calming, being distracted. He navigates across a few more screens of data, and finds his vital signs reassuringly close to normal. His blood pressure is a little high. To be expected. Rather deliberately, he focuses his gaze on his chest and collarbone, and carefully maps and measures the scar and the area of bruising for later reference. He makes a note of his vitals, and stores this data for later. A knock on the door jerks him sharply back into reality and John sighs, gets to work.
It's funny, how he knows first aid. John almost never has cause to actively use the skill, more often he's relaying the reference information to people in need on the ground. Mentally he finds himself talking his way through it, murmuring instructions to himself like he's talking to someone who doesn't know what he's doing.
It takes longer and hurts more than he had realized it would, rinsing blood from his skin with warm, stagnant water from the plumbing of the disused building. He has to let the tap run for a minute before the water comes clear, and it's with trepidation that he swabs a damp paper towel over his chest, rinses away dried blood. This accomplished, he daubs anti-septic over the scar and then bandages it carefully, working awkwardly with one hand. He references the instructions for the aftercare of a pacemaker installation, and is careful not too raise or move his left arm too vigorously.
It all looks better after he's done, at least, though the pain's still bad. It's bad enough that he'd gotten dizzy midway through cleaning and treating the wound and had to sit down on the closed seat of the toilet until the room had stopped spinning. He makes a mental note—and then an actual note, in the running to-do list he's started to reference in the corner of his HUD—to eat something. Soon. After he's done getting dressed. He still has work to do.
The clothes he's been given are a GDF uniform. A higher rank, an officer's uniform—a captain, if he remembers GDF insignias correctly. The jacket is the deep, lightly shimmering gray of their technical ops division and it's a surprisingly decent fit. The pants are crisp, sharply creased and inky black, and just a little too short, but he makes do. Socks, boots, and a wrist comm. John fiddles with it for a few minutes, gets familiar with the OS. It's not connected to a GDF network, but once it is, presumably it'll be about as useful as his own display. The name on the device ID is Captain Nathaniel Nixon. John's suddenly seized by the cold fear that somewhere, Captain Nixon is a real person, and however John's come into possession of his identity, it doesn't bode well. His skin crawls beneath the synthetic silk lining of the jacket and he hopes that it's a crafted identity and not a stolen one.
He still looks like himself in the mirror. Still tall and pale and distinctively redheaded, and a little too intent. It had been noted, a long, long time ago on some grade school report card. A long column of A's and A-pluses, and a a teacher, looking for something to offer by way of helpful criticism, had made the note "tends to obsess." John had, rather predictably, never quite gotten over the comment. It sticks in his mind now, seeing himself in a stolen uniform, with his chest scarred and freshly bandaged beneath it, hiding a device he needs but doesn't need. Not for the first time he doubts himself. Not for the last, he pushes himself through. There's no help for it now.
John's never had Scott's military bearing. On earth he can never help but stand as though he expects to float away, stepping light and nimble to spite gravity, misjudging his steps every now and again against the way the earth draws him down, but recovering as often as not. The lightness of his gait won't serve him now. He tries to think of the way Scott walks, paces the small room a few times. After a while he realizes that this isn't practice, it's just nervousness, and he needs to stop and get on with it.
When he reaches the door his hand grasps the handle, but he can't keep himself from looking back, over his shoulder, hoping that at a glance he can mistake himself for a stranger. He certainly feels like one.