Participants:
| Scene Title | Leading Zeros |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | A leading zero is any 0 digit that comes before the first nonzero digit in a number string in positional notation. |
| Date | July 7, 2021 |
Today has sucked. So many reminders of traumas ancient and recent. Of people who look like people but aren’t. Of people who look like the man that Elliot used to be. Of words that stunned him to an unfeigned silence that now ricochet around his skull, demanding to be formed into action and put into a gun and used to kill.
He doesn’t even have a gun. He doesn’t normally need one, his knife has taken more lives more reliably. But there’s something familiar about shooting a man in the back. Something comforting.
The Flooded Timeline
Streets of New Chicago
Wednesday, July 7th
He stands in the street, needing to take a moment to control his breathing before it spirals out of control again. Before he lashes out in ways that are both unproductive and misplaced.
Nathalie looks over to Gracie, for the first time since the ambush, and her smile turns decidedly unfriendly. "I would advise you," she says, ice in her voice, "to keep clear of me." There's just a moment's pause before she adds, "I don't like your face."
He taps on—left photo which has bee—overexposed to pure black, the photo—boy with small hands—into storage and couldn’t cry for help as—to die.
It’s hard to not give into the rage as Nathalie stumbles out of a bar into the neon-lit road in front of him. But she isn’t the person Elliot is angry at, even if he should be.
Not giving into rage is exactly what drove Nat from one bar to another tonight. And by the glow in her cheeks and the smile brightening her face, alcohol has done its work in numbing away the sharp edges of her mood. Given how up-and-down she's been since the ambush, it's hard to say how long lived it will be. She's enjoying it while she can.
Seeing Elliot, she has to blink but she seems to belatedly realize that his is a familiar face. Her hand comes out to brace against the doorframe for balance and she points at him— in acknowledgment, perhaps. Then, she gestures at the neon sign. "I was going to say," she says, words deliberately steady and too slow to sound sober, "that this place is like a wet Blade Runner. But then, Blade Runner was pretty wet, wasn't it." When she attempts to step away from the door, she moves in an unsteady wobble and instinct has her reaching out his way to help her catch her footing.
Elliot is poised to respond something about tears in the rain when Nathalie’s unsteady footing has her seeking a handhold. He acts reflexively, moving with sudden force to put distance between the two of them and leaving her to fall. “I’m sorry,” he says preemptively. He’s embarrassed by it, but he’s also repulsed by the thought of being touched and terrified by the thought of being touched by her.
When Nathalie realizes that there is no help to be had, it's too late to really save herself from falling. She does her best to stay upright, but over corrects and ends up dropping on her ass. But, onto a crate, where she attempts to save at least her dignity by crossing one leg over the other as if that is how she always sits down. She glances up at him to belatedly understand what exactly happened and why, remembering that many of these people know what Richard held. And where it is now.
"Oh my dear," she says with the deep sigh of a long suffering parent, "don't worry so much. I only kill people on purpose."
Which is probably not the comfort she seems to think it is.
Elliot roils at both the patronizing tone and the incorrect assumption of her intent versus what he knows. The anger plays out across his face before he can fully contain it, but he returns the long-suffering sigh as he composes himself. “I don’t like to be touched,” he says as a way to push off the part of the conversation needing preamble.
“It’s a recent development,” he adds to avoid talking about how the twelve-year-old boy whose trauma he inherited is a person that she accidentally killed.
There was a time when it mattered very much to Nat that people thought well of her. Particularly people who know what she is. She worried constantly about their fear, their anger, and worst of all, their calculation. But that was before. Before she died. Before she lived other lives. Before she learned that there are worse things. So she only waits out his anger with one eyebrow arched until he gets his face under control. Apparently that's good enough for her.
"I'll remember that," she says, seriously. She's not going to judge anyone for their idiosyncrasies, especially ones like that. "I suppose it's nice that it's not just me."
Elliot looks away, grateful to not be questioned about it. She seems sober enough to attempt a conversation right now, so he looks around for something to lean against as he puzzles out how to bring it up.
"I realize we've never really talked before," he says, settling on an opposing stack of crates. "But I feel like I should let you know a few things about our unknowingly shared history. Things I only learned a few months ago. That you wouldn't have had the context for until a few days ago. I don't feel comfortable keeping you in the dark about it."
"My partner and I work for Wolfhound, for one." It's an admission that he, for some reason, already knows who she is, or at least knows of the person who became who she is now. "I'll understand if you don't want to talk about that part," he adds.
"Not much in the way of opportunity," Nat says, her head tilting in birdlike curiosity, "unless you want to chat over the convoy radios." Obviously not, says her tone. The shared history, unknown, gives her enough of a clue about where this conversation is heading. There's one glaring chunk of her life that she has only scattered knowledge of, and much of it from reading files rather than her own memory.
If she wasn't sobering up already, she is now.
Wolfhound isn't the organization she was expecting, and it hits her in the gut like a speeding train. There are questions she could ask— that nearly come tumbling off her tongue. About her sister. About her friends. Whether her father did something suicidally reckless after he heard what happened.
She exhales. And doesn't ask anything. Instead:
"I take it that's not our shared history."
Elliot shrugs in admittance. It's certainly not all of it. "Different time periods, obviously," he says. "I was before and after you."
He sighs sadly, looking away from her after a moment. "But no, that's not it," he continues. "Though I don't remember if we ever met where we were living together. My memories from that time are in bad shape."
He laughs bitterly at himself and shakes his head. It wasn't really living for either of them. He looks up to her again, taking a slow breath in and gesturing toward her with an open hand. "Detainee zero zero zero eight—" he says, then turns his hand on himself, "—Detainee zero zero zero zero point one."
Nathalie remains still as he explains, although her fingers curl tightly around the edge of her crate. Tight enough that it seems like it should be painful. Her silence stretches— awkward in normal conversations but fitting in this one.
"Point one?" Eventually, she finds her voice and a sort of detached coldness with it. "That's not very flattering, is it. Are you a clone or something?" Her tone does admirably in seeming trivial, but her statue-still pose and tense muscles give away the upset below the surface. "I have to assume we didn't meet. As I understand it, not many people I met there survived the encounter."
Elliot returns the silence and blinks away a tear without fully feeling the emotion that propels it. He clears his throat, maintaining eye contact and trying to put words in order. "Iteration numbers," he explains. "Denoting our distance from the focus of the project. After me was the third tier, zeros point one point one, zeros point one point two. Honestly I think it was just a way to continue to hide the project in the records, as all leading zeros shouldn't return a search result."
He forces his hands down into his pockets, folds in on himself. "Gates," he says, "one of the guys who sent us here, thinks there were as many as eight hosts in the network." He doesn't want to believe he's forgotten that many people, but what trauma can't explain, the First Lock can.
His jaw clenches. "If that's true, I don't remember most of them at all," he says without looking back up. "If what I've learned more recently is true, it's because you were linked into the network and killed all but two of them. Including a twelve year old boy I swore to protect." When he looks up, the fury he expected doesn't show in his expression, just a sadness he's been keeping at bay for a decade.
"His name was Bastian," he says, the grief finally beginning to make itself heard in his tone. "I can't remember what he looked like." The uptalk at the end of his sentences makes it almost sound like a question.
The name doesn't strike any recognition in Nat's expression, but that isn't entirely unexpected. At least, she isn't surprised. Not at her own missing memories or that such an… experiment was attempted.
"If that's true," she repeats, as if to remind him that the possibility exists that it isn't. "It must have been a nightmare. For you. When it happened." Her words break up, separated from one another as if they were unconnected thoughts. She doesn't move aside from her eyes watching him, the movement of his hands, the changes in his expression. "I was twelve. When they got me out. I'm sorry about the boy." He would have gotten out then, she's suddenly sure. The Ferry got a lot of the children out. "It's alright if you need to hate me for it."
She knows it hurts much more to hate something large, vague, and mostly gone the way the Institute is. Something difficult to strike out against.
Elliot peels out of his self pity with some effort. "I don't hate you, Nathalie," he assures her quietly. "You were a child roped into your own simultaneous mad science horrors. You were asleep when the attempt was made and your ability probably acted reflexively to wake you up from sedation. I know it wasn't you, wasn't intent. Someone else is responsible and he's long dead."
"I just thought…" he looks away, embarrassed or unsure of what he thought. "I was wondering if maybe one of your… dislocated former hosts could tell me what happened. I'm guessing the Ghost of Christmas World War One was a bit old for it, but he's the only one I've seen. He was there when I was plugging the hole in your chest."
"Noted," Nat says, as far as not hating her. But she doesn't take it back, leaving the offer open should he need it later. "There were a lot of people responsible. It's why I joined Wolfhound in the first place." She doesn't elaborate. He gets it.
His request shifts her demeanor, though. She perks up, eyebrows lifting with all the curiosity of a small kitten. "Hmm," she says, a foot swinging and banging back against the crate, "well, technically speaking, they were all there. It's just a matter of who was or wasn't paying attention at the time. Or if any of them were. It depends on how it all happened. Do you know the details at all? Was it all through the network or were they physically in the room with me at the time? What was the trigger? Was I hurt? Was someone else? Was it just an overload from an interplay of abilities involved in the network?" She pauses a moment and refocuses on him again. "I can always try and ask them, they might even answer." She's not repressing the conduits the way she had been before, when she was trying to hide that they even existed, let alone that she had them.
After a beat, a crooked smile crosses her face. "You understand quite a bit about this. Was that Richard?" It's curiosity rather than judgment in her tone. She knows he was never in a position to hide what he carried the way she was able to.
Pete lifts his hands up to his mouth and blows on them, pacing back and forth as he talks. “We had a kid in storage, “triple-zero eight.” He says flatly, for lack of a name. “I got notified she was being moved, was a part of a project I was managing called Obelisk. Had some folks researching the ability the world’s favorite Nazi—Kazimir Volken—used to possess.” The way Pete talks about it all is so nonchalant.
“I didn’t manage the day-to-days, that was Clark’s responsibility.” Pete says, still winding down this rambling diversion. “Anyway, Zimmerman wanted to borrow her for his pet project. Tried daisy-chaining her to the Zero whatever-the-fuck he had going on. Whatever happened went bad and some of the test subjects died. I didn’t get details on how or who, not my circus not my monkeys. But it also woke the girl up out of sedation, ‘cause if I had to guess she sucked the fucking life out of those folks and triggered a regenerative episode that burned off the drugs.”
Pete shrugs. “They put the genie back in the bottle, somehow.
“Unfortunately I don’t remember the interaction at all,” Elliot says. He doesn’t dwell on the lack of meaningful reaction to his lack of hatred. “I would have to be the one setting the link, but I survived where other people didn’t so I can’t say for sure they weren’t using a different method of entry, I only know the abilities of the hosts who made it into the culvert with me. I was just told that it triggered a regenerative episode in you that burnt off your sedatives before they eventually got you back under. This was on November eighth, if that helps.” The least chaotic day on their shared calendar.
“I have talked to Richard about some of this,” he admits, “though my familiarity with mindscapes and dislocated consciousness is my own. Seeing one of yours was confusing to me, I don’t understand how that happened without you being linked in. Maybe just proximity and the fact that our mindscapes are probably expansive enough to have collided. That’s happened to me before with Agent Gates.” He doesn’t actually prefer the word mindscape, as it’s reductive, but he’s not ready to get any deeper into Aquifer physics. Even Richard didn’t seem to know anything about that.
"Well, that's probably a good thing." Not remembering. Uncomfortable, but perhaps a kindness. Nat shrugs it off though and stands up to her feet— much more stale now. "We can only work with what we have. I can try." That's the only guarantee she can give, that she'll try.
"Seeing Maes— that's the world war one guy— normally I would say that was impossible. But. There was a lot of bleed happening. Over in the bus, we were practically sitting in the seats. And where you were… well, given what was happening with me… crossing over. It was thin. And if your head lets you connect to other people, well. Extra thin for you. At least you didn't see the bogeyman. Small mercies." Kazimir Volken, she means. "I wish I could say it wouldn't happen again, but who the hell knows what the rules are anymore."
“If you can,” Elliot says, “If any of them answer, just… I don’t know. Ask them not to touch me. None of us want them accidentally swapping homes with mine.” The Palace should be protected against intrusions, but like she said, the background world is always bleeding through. He looks around like he isn’t sure if this is either the time or place for an attempt, though in this unfamiliar city his options are limited either way.
"I'll make sure they don't touch you," Nat says, because she certainly doesn't want them touching anyone without her say so. And she seems decently confident that she can manage it. "We'll have a seance. It'll be fun."
It's almost like the reason for this has slipped her mind.
But more likely, she's just trying not to think too hard about purposefully trying to revisit a traumatic moment that her mind helpfully blocked out for her. Whistling in the dark. As it were.
"Let's go see what sort of room Cujo's handler has for us." That's probably Seren. "I'd rather not try this out in the street."
Elliot winces, then scratches his head. “Probably shouldn’t go back there right now,” he laments. “For continuity reasons. They think I’m the local. Maybe they have a Best Western here?” He laughs, scratching at what he can no longer honestly consider to just be stubble.
“Also,” he says, looking mildly irritated at himself, “wait. This means a lot to me but I’m kind of steamrolling you with it here and I’m sorry about that. You’ve been drinking and I don’t want to cajole you into dredging up childhood trauma. I’m well aware of how unpleasant that is, and very recently. If you want to take some time to think it over I invite you to. We can try it in a time and place you feel more comfortable. With Richard around if you need backup, he’s aware that I was planning on broaching this topic with you.”
"Hmm," is all Nat says about his troubles with having a twin running around the city, choosing instead to jump over it for now.
"What's a little childhood trauma when you've just been to the heart of time itself and seen the abject horror that powers the universe?" She speaks as if this were a joke, a crooked smile on her lips and a chuckle on her words. "Could be fun." Reaching into a pocket, she pulls out a handful of small pretzels, presumably from the bar she stumbled out of. "But we can wait until we're somewhere less… you know. Just less." She doesn't mention who she would or would not like being there with her, it's likely a topic she needs to give some thought to, now that they're not running off to handle it right this second.
"Have you thought about killing him," she says, popping a pretzel in her mouth, "your double. He sounds inconvenient."
"I do have a running joke with my partner back home about having to knife-fight a doppelganger," Elliot admits with a laugh. He seems more at ease now that they're forestalling getting answers he desperately wants. "But no, he's not that kind of a problem, just unexpected. With the Bomb not having gone off in this Manhattan, I had assumed he would have died and wasn't prepared for a run-in." It suggests that this Elliot only lived because of it, which is odd.
"My partner says 'Hi,' by the way," he adds. "Wright. You may have heard her name before. Also I'd love to know what you mean by being in the heart of time, if you're willing to talk about that. I'm constantly struggling to understand temporal mechanics so I can better torment Wright with hypotheticals."
"Okay, but if you regret not taking the opportunity for that knife fight, I'll be the first to say 'I told you so.'" She's probably not serious. At least, not completely. Nat does lift an eyebrow at the implication of Elliot and his survival, her head tilting. "Is that when they got you?" Any thought of approaching the topic of the Institute gently is, apparently, out the window. "And the split here started further back, the dominos that led you to the bomb… they were probably pretty different for him here. At least, different enough that your fates don't line up so neatly here."
Wright's name, or perhaps the greeting, gets a softer smile from Nathalie, and she acknowledges it with a nod. "Tell her hello, too. Perhaps the three of us can discuss how to prep Avi and Emily for the fact that I'm less dead than I used to be. Assuming I make it home. And assuming they're alive. Don't tell me, either way. Not yet." The idea that they might not be there for her to return to is too heavy a thought for her to carry right now. And she needs the hope that she'll see them again to keep putting one foot in front of the other. "Lucille will probably take it in stride, but those two… well. Just something to start planning for."
She falls silent for a moment, her brows furrowing. "It isn't a lack of willingness to talk about it. It's a lack of *language*. But that's how I got here. From one timeline's afterlife to another, through a central point where they all converge. From where they all started. Or where they're all heading toward. Or both."
Elliot is happy to put off the topic of Nathalie's family, having recently veered close enough to that shortly after her resurrection. "Yeah, I have an understanding of the divergences," he admits instead. "A lot looser than I'd enjoy. Time travel is kind of a special interest of mine. Though I've only ever interacted with the perpendicular kind that got us here. But when I was in a group home, a bully was about to throw me from the roof when somebody told us the bomb had gone off, and it's the only reason I didn't die. So I assumed he would have made the plunge. But…" He shrugs, Here we are.
"Are you saying that the Graveyards all converge in one place in the Aquifer?" he asks. Richard had mentioned there being more than one Graveyard, but Elliot feels more confident now that there's only one Palace. He realizes he'd intended not to get into that, but even without accessing conduit ghosts it's useful information to him and he might as well learn. "That's what I call the place where mindscapes exist," he clarifies. "Richard didn't seem to be familiar with my terminology. Infinite space of scintillating black, kind of an impression of up and down but still feeling closed in despite the infinite nature of the plane?"
Nathalie doesn't respond at first. Instead, she tilts her head for a long moment, attention seeming to drift off for a long moment.
"When you say mindscapes," she asks, blinking herself back to the moment, "do you mean the space that a telepath would go to dig through your mind or do you mean something else?" She shifts, moving to stand as if she can't manage to sit still any longer. "Richard mentioned the aquifer to me and seemed decently certain it had something to do with the graveyards. But on first blush, I would have to say that isn't the impression that I have of the places I was in. And the moment at the center of them, I don't think it's quite so hospitable." Even to the being connected to it. Perhaps especially to them.
Elliot looks around, this conversation would be better on the move. He nods to the side, inviting Nathalie to walk somewhere less in front of a bar.
“Mindscapes, dreamscapes, other mnemonic architectures created with mental abilities,” Elliot says, “exist because they’re supported by the Aquifer. It’s like a scaffold that allows for projection of thought past the brain, which should otherwise not be able to think beyond its own physical boundaries. Some of these places are more… substantial than others. Presumably the Graveyard has that kind of staying power.”
He grimaces. “Bear in mind that while I’m using a lot of jargon here,” he admits, “I don’t remember where I learned it. So you might use different terminology, or even perceive similar spaces, differently than I do.”
“And if I had to choose one word that absolutely does not describe the Aquifer,” he adds, “it’s hospitable. Even things that replicate it in a mindscape are difficult to comprehend locally.”
"I understand the jargon," Nathalie assures him as she falls into step next to him. "I'm not sure that the graveyard works in that way. Rather… I don't know that it was created by abilities. I think it was the other way around. I can't say if the place I saw is your aquifer, and I'm not inclined to crawl back in there to find out." That part comes with a wry smile. She suspects few people would, who had seen it.
"In any case. I have to hope they're not the same, otherwise mental abilities are going to get very messy pretty soon. The graveyards are sort of," she pauses, her hand waving in the air as she tries to find an appropriate word to describe what is happening on the other side of Nowhere, "Eschering in on themselves."
That'll have to do.
"Well," Elliot says with regretful foreknowledge, "the Decimation and all that." He doesn't want to suggest the two are connected, but there's a wide gap between correlation and causation. Either way, everybody, telepathic or not, is going to lose their abilities in the coming years.
"And yeah, no," he says. "I wouldn't want you to go full xenonaut just to satisfy my curiosity. Breeching those spaces is never to be undertaken lightly." He's been recently reminded of this, his passage of convenience risking the minotaur's easy access to the Switchboard.
"I'd love to learn more about the Graveyards," he says, "but I also get that it wasn't fun for you to be there. So if you'd rather talk about literally anything else, I'll respect that."
"Jack and Jill went up the hill," Nathalie says, a distracted distance in her tone, "but couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again."
And then, as if she hadn't said anything at all, she looks over at him. "Who said it wasn't fun?" It's possible that's meant to be a joke, but she doesn't quite pull it off. Likely because it was not fun at all. "Maybe someday we can sit down and go over it. But um. Not today." She pauses a moment, brow furrowed as she deliberately brings the place to mind. "But for now… imagine if Dickens wrote Lovecraft. That'll give you a general… vibe." A beat passes, but then she nods to her own words, satisfied with that comparison. At least for now. "It isn't a lack of willingness," she says, repeating her own words with a tired smile sent in his direction.
Elliot nods. "I get that," he says with real sympathy. "The space I access isn't a picnic. Imagine David Lynch directed Rose Red." He laughs bleakly.
"The only other person I've even told about it is Richard," he continues, "and only due to what I learned about the project before deploying. Because it's honestly frightening. I'd appreciate it if you didn't pass this on to anybody, I don't think I'm ready for people to know. Though I realize that I'll probably have to, eventually." It's not an eventuality that he's excited about, clearly.
"At least they're interesting," Nat comments dryly as far as their pockets of other space go. She lifts an eyebrow as he goes on, but gives him a nod. "I understand. No one will hear about it from me." She did her own turn at keeping secrets. And lived with— and through— the inevitability of it all coming out.
Well. Nearly lived through it. And even if it had all gone smoothly, she wouldn't hasten someone else's secrets spilled out for the world to see.
"I hope, if it does turn out that you need to let the secret out, that it happens on your terms."
“Thanks,” Elliot says. “I hope so too.” Hoping that he can be forgiven is one of the only things to make it happen on his terms. Maybe the age of lying really is coming to an end.