(A/N) Right all, time for another update, and this one was written by Warg, and I'm pretty sure that you've all learned by this point that it means you're all in for an awesome chapter! And then, you find out it's a Georgia chapter, and that certainty only becomes further solidified in your mind. And hell, you'd be right! Also, a quick little shout out to Jerem6401, whose show – Imaginary Achievements – debuted on Achievement Hunter's channel this week, and is definitely worth the watch!
Enjoy!
Chapter Seventy-One – Completely Current Coppelia
Agent Georgia
Written by WargishBoromirFan
"Carrots! Medicinal carrots! Personal-use medicinal carrots that were here when I moved in and I'm holding it for a friend!"
– Dr Stephen "Alpha" Kepler, Dollhouse: "Briar Rose"
"Read my shirt."
– Margaret B. Browning, "College Roomies From Hell!" 9/14/99, 4/2/00, 9/25/01, etc.
"There's something wrong with this sight!" Alpha insisted. Georgia had adjusted the sniper rifle for him at least five times already and tinkered with both arms and the optical sensors, which the A.I. insisted had just made things worse. To judge from his ability to hit anything, Georgia wouldn't necessarily say that the adjustments had made any difference.
"Do we have the coke-bottle frames?" he asked Voisine. How they'd laid hands on the Director's lens prescription didn't really bear thinking about; Georgia would owe Dr Jay for months, if not the rest of his time in Project Freelancer, but that didn't seem the sort of thing to ask the boss about.
"I thought you already integrated those," the other engineer to get personally involved in the alpha project said, pulling in the target just long enough to find it completely untouched.
"I designed this model with better than 20/10 vision, but maybe it's a mental block," the Freelancer shrugged, pulling down his ballcap. He'd changed out of his usual green and pink armour while in the lab, staying in comfortable clothes that wouldn't rub his stitches whenever he could at his roommate's continued fussing, though Georgia was starting to regret his choice of zipped coveralls and graphic tee for more than what Voisine might infer from his casual-wear. Alpha was better at hitting ricochet angles than a direct bullseye.
"I'm sure if I just visualized hitting the target, it would make it all better," Alpha grumbled, turning the rifle downwards. "I thought you said you were good at making robots, Jacobs!"
The middle name had become Alpha's standard way of addressing him. Around Jarvis Voisine, Georgia didn't correct him. "I thought you were supposed to be a smart A.I. Maybe we're both out of practice, Church." As long as the Director wasn't there, there was no harm in calling the Alpha by his preferred name. "And maybe it's time to face the fact that you shoot worse than my dad."
"I thought the usual insult was worse than your mom or girlfriend," Vosine spoke up as he went to fish out the results of Operation Four-Eyes.
"Well, of course he shoots worse than them. My mom taught me how to use a rifle," Georgia, son of a eighth generation farm girl and an overenthusiastic city slicker replied.
"And your girlfriend's non-existent." Alpha gave up on "adjusting" the rifle himself and pulled his helmet for refitting. There were times when Georgia thought he did too good a job, honestly. "Church" was not an exact mirror image of the Director, preferring a less lined and greying appearance, but could probably pass for his human incarnation's past reiterated. Glass-green eyes beneath ebon brows narrowed at the gun as if it had shot him instead of simply missed his target. When the robot turned, that pale mouth twisted up from a scraggly-stubbled, but otherwise carbon copy, version of the frown that greeted the freelancers after a less than successful mission, into its usual near permanent smirk, despite the range of expression the model offered the A.I. The smirk, much like Church's inability to shoot straight, Georgia chalked up to a quirk of the software.
Quirks could be ironed out. When they annoyed their creators, they should be. "You really want to talk about non-existent girlfriends, Alpha?"
Church opened his mouth, about to fire an insult back, but stopped himself before he'd completed the first syllable, a hint of pain flashing red behind those green eyes. "Tech support isn't worth such a fucking low blow, man. Do you want me to share what goes on here with the Director?"
"What, that you have trouble with a simple machine that F.I.L.S.S. could operate and take your temper tantrums out on us?" The A.I. had a knack for getting under his skin, but even Georgia knew he'd gone too far as soon as the words left his mouth. He didn't need Jarvis Voisine's sideways eyebrow to be goaded into offering some form of recompense. "But I'm guessin' that F.I.L.S.S. isn't the program of your dreams, to set you off like that."
"The girl I used to know could kick your ass," Alpha grumbled under his breath, allowing Voisine to approach with the glasses. Much like his helmet's face-plate, the lenses were thick enough to hide those eyes from view. It made it almost more eerie to open him up for recalibrations, honestly.
"The best women always can," Georgia allowed.
Voisine looked between them, backing away from the robot. "Are we really having this conversation? You know what this conversation signifies? What you're really learning about here?"
"Pfft, I'm not gonna bring it up at the next briefing," Georgia waved him off. "Are you?"
Voisine looked away, shaking his head like a drowning man finally catching hold of a sharp rock in the whirlpool before backing off for the door. "Your funeral," the paler engineer insisted, turning up his palms as he left the workroom in search of more ammo for Alpha to spray wildly at something other than Voisine's own reputation. Georgia shrugged and went back to tinkering with his notes as he watched Church reclaim his helmet and gun.
Nothing else he had on the burner was as fancy as this first custom "manned" model, but he had team members upstairs in "Project Canada" working on generic backups now, ready to be improved upon once the prototype was up to snuff. There were notes to be written and data to classify, because no matter how little the boss like letting others know about the exact nature of their server, a flash-cloned A.I. wasn't the sort of project you just restarted from scratch if the prototype glitched. Backups were absolutely necessary, and the Director cared enough about this project to give Georgia and his team a lot of physical tools to play around with.
"You think he'll be back, or is he running off as soon as you've introduced the monster, too?" Church asked, thumbing after the retreating tech. If Georgia didn't know better, he might have heard disappointment beneath the A.I.'s sarcasm... maybe even loneliness.
The A.I. was unique, special, and despite how arrogant the mouthy thing could be, Georgia still liked Alpha, not in the least for how well the A.I. could figure out the upgrades to his robotic body almost before the engineer could. Georgia had to create the best possible vessel for the Alpha sheerly to see if he could stump him, and that required plenty of man-hours in the lab. There was enough work to make it necessary for a trusted few others to join the freelancer in the upstairs workshop, but Georgia still insisted upon making the final adjustments himself. It made things run smoother if he didn't need to clear the rest of the team all the way down to this particular lab.
"You know once he enters this part of the project, there's no backing out. Voisine probably just didn't wanna find out how deep the rabbit-hole goes." The Director wanted as few hands as possible on the A.I. itself; as few ears as possible hearing and as few eyes as possible seeing exactly what was being produced out of the individual components, and he'd reluctantly trusted Georgia with uploading the program, so all completed parts were going through him before the Alpha slipped into control.
"So he'll be standing outside the room I've been cramped up in, sticking his fingers in his ears and rocking back and forth as he tries to convince himself that I don't exist. 'Cause that's fun for everyone." As far as Georgia knew, it was only the Director, him, and maybe the Counselor that had been directly introduced to the Alpha before he'd brought Voisine down to what he still mentally referred to as the science dungeon. While Voisine hadn't acted too surprised about hearing the A.I., Georgia's name for it had been another story, entirely.
"You know once you prove you can protect yourself out in the field, the Director might at least let you out of here long enough to meet the rest of the agents." In some ways, Georgia was looking forward to the day when the Director relaxed the security on this part of the project a little more himself, as nice as it was to be able to prove his personal skills. It wasn't always easy hiding exactly what he was working on from the other agents. Utah could be waved off with buzzwords and technical jargon, but Kent and Nevada were as shameless as they were curious and intelligent. Georgia had started blueprints of an actual prosthetic for Jersey just to have something to show them in case the other technically-inclined agents did catch wind of his more specialized android pieces – under other circumstances, the mere challenge of where to fit in a grenade launcher on one of Dr Cassidy's babies would be reason enough, but while the Alpha was still figuring out his new body, the robot took priority.
"Yeah, right," Church sighed in poorly-hidden frustration as he sighted once more down the rifle. Until then, though, the basic bits could be all but mass-produced, now. To the majority of his crew, the robot bodies were being built as kits for the Simulation bases, and not a few of them probably would be sent out as raw material. Georgia hoped they wouldn't end up going through all the models, but at least there would be more than enough backups in case they did need a spare.
Such as a case of Church shooting himself in the foot or annoying Georgia far enough to require percussive maintenance to the current prototype. He just kept missing. "It's like you're not even trying, Church."
"Oh, fuck off," the Alpha shot back. "I'm just not used to this body, is all. I'll get it soon enough so that you can go back to whatever awesome freelancer adventures outside this tiny little room in the ship I've interrupted you from."
"They're the kind that sometimes need another wing man I can trust, Alpha," Georgia told him. "I wanna let Nev, Kent, and Connie see what I've been up to, but until you're ready to go, I've gotta hide things from them. How're they supposed to trust me when I gotta cover up the existence of a whole person from the rest o' my friends?"
That made the A.I. pause and readjust his aim. He still missed horribly, but at least he was visibly aiming for the target. "There's too much being kept under wraps here, and if I don't know what the others're hiding, they don't know what I secrets I'm keeping, and none of us have any clue what's going on with the boss, is it any surprise when we end up blindsiding each other? I understand issues of military security and trade secrets, but fuck it, man, you shouldn't be property, especially not military property to be zipped up in some level-zero-password-protected file. You can think. Sometimes," the engineer added as cover as he leaned against a workbench, most of the tools pushed out of the way for the rifle case.
"Eh, the government owns all our asses." Church shrugged, and his next shot at least clipped the edge of the target square.
"I had the choice, though. I could've stayed on the farm with my mom and brothers. I'd've probably been bored to tears and gotten myself blown up with some homemade fertilizer bomb, but I could have missed meeting out on all of y'all." He would have made the same decision again, given the consequences. The only change Georgia would have made was grabbing that goddamned mystery file that Ark had fetishized like a lucky penny away from him and making sure it got shared with more than just one person before that someone decided that he had to carry the weight of all the UNSC's dirty secrets by himself. "You didn't get to decide if you'd've rather stayed outta the fight with your kickass girl and raised kids or something."
"You know it doesn't work like that." The A.I. shook his head, and the next three rapid shots went wide again. "Even if this was a real body, she would have joined up whether I liked it or not."
Despite the melancholy in the Alpha's voice, Georgia felt his lips twitch upwards on one side. "I gotta ask: she a blonde?"
"Something like that, yeah. Blue-green eyes. Not that tall, really, but the way she carried herself, she looked like the biggest, toughest thing in the universe. And she was."
Georgia nodded. "I knew you had good taste."
"Well, I didn't exactly get much choice when the Director'll only let me hang out with you." Georgia clasped the robotic shoulder, readjusting Church's stance as much as the A.I. would let him and guiding the last few rounds still in the rifle a little closer to centre. Then he waited for Church to lower the sniper rifle.
He walked down to the far end of the range, unzipping the coveralls over his t-shirt and ghosting a marker into his toolbelt for easy reach. "Hey, Church, put the damned gun away for a minute. Quick vision test: how much o' this can you read?"
"'This is my Horde-Killing Shirt?'" The Alpha snorted. "Your dorkiness knows no bounds." Church left the rifle at rest, pointed towards the ground while turned toward him, but Georgia wasn't completely convinced that he hadn't seen it already and was merely cheating from his memory logs. As often as the Alpha "forgot" his last name, there were plenty of terabytes left in that processor and none of them had shown proof of failure yet.
Georgia just nodded, drawing out the marker. This shirt was an old favourite, with the stains to commemorate it as such. Time to truly let it show why. "All right, then we'll try the back." He reached over his shoulder to add a letter in front of the silkscreen in black ink before he turned around.
"D Jenkins?"
"That's a P, and you'd best remember it," he shot back over his shoulder. He could start by claiming his true name here.
"Dude, your handwriting sucks."
"So I'll get it embroidered." And then reclaim his secrets outside.