Here is a new post from everyone's favorite async, Bartleby
Spoilers for tonight's game.
[spoiler]Bartleby sat down, hunkered against the wall of the craft. His back itched. The Yakuza tattoos of his new morph still irritated him. It was female, which he insisted on because he wanted to minimize his profile while they were on Luna. At least it was a futura. It was the only morph he felt truly stable in. He had tried a splicer once. He jumped at the littlest thing. Nothing seemed as real. Never again, if he could help it.
He looked at the AGI's cortical stack, still in his left hand. The poor thing had sacrificed its morph to guarantee that the explosion would happen. Its plaintive cries still bounced around in his head. It felt responsible for Preston's death. When they had time to recover, he would ask what it wanted. He could try to treat it, to speak the soothing words he had learned, but he wondered if it would want to carry on. It might demand it be restored from a backup - a backup not scarred by the trauma of losing a comrade, of encountering the exsurgents, of death. Are the exsurgents worse for an AGI to see? To know that the same AI technology that created it could also create a new TITAN? The AGI could also ask to press on, despite its guilt or perhaps because of it. It might even ask for death - to be deleted or to retire so that Firewall could send them a new, less damaged agent. It deserved whatever it wanted - whatever he was in a position to grant, he would do so. It deserved that much at least.
Preston had no decision to make. He was dead of course. One of the digging drones had bitten through his vac suit and infected him. After they had slain the exsurgents, he had turned on them. He had no choice but to empty a clip into his friend. His friend. How could he call him his friend after that.
Bartleby looked at the pistol in his right hand. Loaded.
It was easy to rationalize the murder. That Preston would have wanted to die rather than face life as an exsurgent. That there was no choice. That Preston was better off this way - his backup would be as jovial and entertaining as ever. If he had survived, his audience would surely notice the difference. They would see the horror in his eyes. But that's not what concerned Bartleby now. With his eidetic memory, he remembered every detail, including how he felt when he pulled the trigger. Nothing. No fear, no regret, no guilt. Bartleby only reduced to Preston to an abstraction - an obstacle to survival. Survival meant everything.
He couldn't trust anyone. If he failed, then the Red Queen won. Alice depended on him and him alone. He had to survive to find her.
He closed his eyes, putting his hands to his face. The cool metal of the gun and diamond armor of the stack pressed against his cheeks. He didn't even realize he was crying.
After escaping Luna, he had fled into deep space. Became a brinker. Did whatever it took to survive. Trusted no one. He would have died as a paranoid recluse but Firewall saved him. Made him realize that trust was the real key to survival. Belief in a greater cause.
That's why he didn't space Fayen. She had been exposed to the exsurgent virus as well. She didn't react like Preston though. After hauling her to the craft, he had given her a sedative to make her sleep. As they reached orbit, every instinct in him screamed to space her. But he couldn't. He didn't want to be a monster. He didn't want to be a soulless killer, the freak like everyone else in the LOST project. They were friends and comrades in the fight to save everyone. If Bartleby couldn't control himself, how could he save anyone?
The opposing desires to trust and to survive raged within him. The emotional dampeners had already overloaded from the fight with the exsurgents. The war abated as he thought of a compromise.
He watched her as she slept and realized there was only one way to know for sure if she was infected or not. He placed the cortical stack down and commanded the vac suit to remove itself around his hand. He felt her forehead and concentrated. His other hand aimed the pistol at her head. A few moments later the capillaries in his eyes hemorrhaged. A thin trail of blood ran down his nose.
OOC: Bartleby will use deep scan on Thad's character in order to make sure she's not infected.
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