Logs:Somebody That You Used To Know
| Somebody That You Used To Know | |
|---|---|
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia
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2024-04-17 "Duress." |
| Location
<XAV> X-Men Locker Room - XS Sub-Basement | |
Cerebro, Halim, Joshua, X-Men, Mutants Training has long since been over, and Joshua's teammates have long since finished cleaning up and leaving. Joshua should have been finished, long since as well by all rights, but somewhere along the way ADHD has interrupted. And so, despite the fact that he could be blipped home in half an instant, at the moment he is seated on a bench in jeans and a plain white undershirt with tzitzit tied at the corners. His gym bag is open on the bench beside him, things messily shoved inside. The tee shirt he was going to put on over top (purple, with the Hebrew text 'אמת' printed on the front, the aleph smudged near to illegibility) is draped across one knee, his sneakers untied, shaggy hair still slightly damp and very mussed from its towelling. He's idly spinning his kippah (embroidered vibrantly like a slice of watermelon) around and around one finger, his phone in his other hand as he scrolls through a Google Doc outline of a medic training lesson plan. One of B's ubiquitous insectoid robots flies in and lands on Joshua's gym bag. Though still no doubt alarming to the uninitiated and the entomophobic, this one skews Cute and Minimally Intimidating: a baseball-sized bumblebee, its shiny chassis anodized to a rainbow oilslick finish and its translucent wings iridescent to match, its big compound eyes glowing faintly in a slow cycle of colors. "Hey," the bee says conversationally, in a clear high tenor with a touch of received pronunciation. "How was training? I guess that was a while ago. Do you have a moment to talk, though?" It starts grooming its antennae, the gesture somehow coming off nervous. "I'm the Sysadmin. By the way." Joshua looks up from his phone with a start, though this seems more directed at remembering the rest of the world exists than at the bee, specifically. He's blinking -- first at his phone then at the robot. Then back at his phone, where he's flicking away the document and glancing at his calendar with a groan. "Fuck," has the tone of, not really, but he isn't getting up, anyway. Instead he is swiping out a quick apology text to one of myriad group chats in his Signal ("a20 training 🖤"): sorry, got sidetracked, be there in a few, and then, on a reconsideration, deleting that message and rewriting it in a different group chat ("a20 trainers"). "You're what." He's running his fingers through his hair a few times, which straightens it somewhat but not very well. "I fuck something up?" The robot resettles itself while Joshua writes his texts. "Sysadmin. Cerebro. The guy you text when you get locked out of your email." There's a brief hesitation. "I'm not aware that you fucked anything up in particular, but you're only human and average standards for 'fucking up' are obnoxiously arbitrary, so. Probably?" The bee's eyes pulse a little faster through the cool colors. "That was a bit rude, wasn't it?" The question was apparently not completely rhetorical. "I'm never sure. See aforementioned arbitrary standards for fucking up. I'll try to be brief, at least." But then he hesitates again before tumbling ahead into, "You know Halim Tawadros, right?" "Don't check my email." This is kind of reflexive. A little muffled as Joshua tugs his tee shirt on. He's side-eying the bee once he pulls it down over his head. His brows knit, and he's just coming around to a bemused hff at the question about rudeness when the bee continues. "... the fuck," he says again, no flatter than his usual toneless voice but his shoulders have gone just a little bit droopier. "Knew. Long back. Labs killed him." "I've read the documentation, yes." This is just a bit impatient. "But I recently had a remote encounter with a very powerful technopath working for the US government who I believe may be doing so under duress. So I cross-referenced all my Prometheus data -- some of which came from him, incidentally, before he was recaptured." The bee isn't preening, exactly, but there's something of it in Cerebro's tone when he continues, "Based on my analysis, I am approximately 99.9-repeating percent confident he's alive." Joshua is smoothing down his hair again, once his shirt is on. He's busy pushing the small dents out of his kippah, but doesn't get as far as putting it back on his head before he's squeezing it hard in both hands and leaving it much more crumpled than before. "What." His fingers curl in harder and then start smoothing the skullcap out again. "Where." The bee shuffles its delicate legs and flutters its wings just once. "I didn't get his location," sounds faintly miffed, but he quickly amends to, "I could have. Only, I didn't want to risk exposing -- the school." The robot's eyes pulse softer. "I realize this may be very difficult for you." Cere absolutely sounds like he is reading this off of -- presumably the Internet. "We can revisit this conversation later, if you need time to process this information or seek support from friends and loved ones." Joshua has clipped his kippah hastily, messily, askew on his head and is starting to swipe out another text message: sorry emergency won't make it after all, but he doesn't remember to hit enter. His expression is blank, his breathing slow and deliberate, until all at once he snatches up his gym back and vanishes -- -- to reappear in an fairly nice studio apartment, spacious and open. It looks like a showroom piece, minimalist decor impeccably coordinated and barely used, though there's a preponderance of unnecessarily smart gadgetry in the kitchen. The large windows have a stunning view, the night-lit monuments of Washington, D.C. clear in the distance. On the couch is a man -- slight of build, dark-skinned, close-cropped thick curls and a dark shadowing of beard, in sweatpants and a plain grey tee. Older, thinner, sickly-sallower, but he certainly looks like Halim. He could almost be confused for a statute of Halim, given that he does not move or look up at the intrusion. The overactive flux of his power is clear enough and familiar enough to Joshua. It doesn't seem to change in its busy humming pattern either -- at least not for a second or so after Joshua has arrived. And then -- well, he still doesn't move, his expression unchanged, but there's a curious probing stretching out to investigate the little bee-bot. The robot bee is still clinging to Joshua's gym bag, but its eyes go briefly dark after the jump, only to start pulsing white. Halim can see the drone frantically reestablishing its connection, routing its signal through half a dozen remote servers and sucking down a startling amount of bandwidth for a small device with such limited functionality, however advanced it may be. The bee's eyes go back to pulsing in color and it starts flexing each appendage in an automatic re-calibration sequence. Cere's re-calibration sequence is only legible to Halim, his scan of the network an easy organic riffle followed by a spike in his processing. "What the actual entire bloody --" The bee freezes, all its sensory equipment focusing sudden and sharp on Halim. "-- fuck." Joshua has frozen from the moment of arrival. He isn't looking towards Halim -- his eyes are fixed on the view of the monuments out the window. But he's focused on the other man all the same, an intense attention to the shifts in the technopath's power. He almost does not breathe, until Cerebro's voice breaks the silence. And then his eyes are dropping, not to the drone but to the polished floor. "Duress." Muttered, just nuder his breath. "Thought you were dead, man." For a short moment, Halim is still motionless, not looking towards Joshua any more than Joshua is looking toward him. He's still poking with a fascination at the small bee, and after a closer examination he finally is moving -- just slightly, a small and intrigued tilt of his head. "You're dead." He doesn't mutter; it's just a bland observation, most of his attention still more on the bee than on Joshua. "File said --" Somewhere in here his mind is shifting, slipping with perhaps distressing ease into the drone, or maybe the drone is slipping into his mind. It's all the same, really; when the bee lifts to move to the coffee table in front of him it's with a flex as effortless as moving his own limb. Maybe more, given how little his actual body has yet to move. The drone does -- nominally -- retain its own processes, or at least, Halim hasn't yet seen fit to arrest them, though Cerebro can no doubt see that he's capable. At the moment, actually, Cerebro can likely see a whole lot more -- to most telepaths, likely, the arcane matrix of Halim's mind would be only a nails-on-chalkboard headache, but in digital it makes an elegant sense. The drone has been sequestered; there are a million million other processes running just out of sight, some (such as the coffeemaker, starting to brew a fresh pot) slightly more intelligible while others are too obscured to grasp. His thoughts around the drone itself are coming clearer still -- marveling at its intricacy, curious enough about its workings that he's entirely setting aside his many other calculations: a loooooooong (and distinctly impersonal) file on Salinas, Joshua L. A. that covers both his wildly dangerous mutation and his wildly dangerous activities together with the quiet deaths of several other ex-Prometheus contractors in the months since the program's closure are swiftly adding up into a calculation that suggests this Surprise Visit is not great for him. Maybe this should be more concerning, but it seems almost a side thought until he notes the oddly human-like processing of the drone. He's mostly disappointed in himself as he tries to correlate What Technopaths might have been around Salinas, Joshua L. A. recently and gives this up as futile. Instead, he's asking -- silent and digital to the drone, not Joshua, though it's clear he thinks they are likely one and the same: << Are you here to kill me? >> The drone's firmware is entirely novel but yields to/becomes Halim easily enough. The mind on the other end of that firmware is obscured somehow, and not just by electronic defenses. Even so, Halim can feel through the shared control interface that the other user is absolutely terrified. Aloud, the robot doesn't sound terrified so much as petulant. "Kill you? I thought you needed help, that's why I --" The simulated (but very lifelike) voice looses an inarticulate sound of frustration, and the drone's bandwidth surges. "I thought you were friends!" "Kill you, wh --" Joshua's gym bag is whumping to the floor. "-- he said --" He's blipped out of place, closer to the coffee table where with a small tap of the drone he sends it back to perch on his duffel (conveniently with himself now between the drone and Halim). "I thought --" But somewhere here his mind is catching at least halfway up to this fractured half-a-conversation, and he's settling into just confusion. "We were friends. Halim, what the fuck." Halim gives a quiet acknowledging huff that in no way reflects the jumble (relief followed swift by confusion and, last, a sharply renewed curiosity) that accompanies this exchange. When it's clear the drone isn't Joshua's, at least not in any way that matters, he's plucking the bug back up to draw it near once more. At the same time he's comparing files again, running back over what he knew of Joshua's time in Prometheus. Comparing this to his work there. "Never worked with you." Something twinges sharply uncomfortable in his mind, and he's clarifying blandly: "Too dangerous. Never allowed." Here, now, he is trying to start teasing through the complicated routing- and re-routing of the drone's connective path here. "You really should go." "What the hell was that for?" the voice from the drone demands after Joshua teleports it across the room. The infinitesimal disruption of its signal doesn't disconnect the remote operator this time, but Halim can distantly sense his disorientation. It doesn't really make the trace any easier, but might make it more interesting, since Halim can feel the feed fluctuate with the other technopath(?)'s unseen thoughts and with the spillover of his emotions. When the drone obligingly pilots itself back across the room its original operator groans. "Oh, come on!" But underneath all the grousing, he's feeling his delicate way around that twinge in Halim's mind. "He doesn't remember," must be directed at Joshua, as if Halim weren't right there, and also as if the amnesia weren't fairly obvious by now. "They hacked his brain, speaking of which, he's hacking me so yes, we should go." "Sorry, is this fucking up your night?" Joshua is scrubbing a hand down against his face, which makes the glower he is giving -- to the drone? To Halim stealing back the drone? who knows, both those nerds are getting a glower -- look slightly more baleful. "S'a million of those lying around." Now his hand is smooshing back up, fingers curling into his hair and further displacing his already skewed kippah. "You were on my team. -- if you don't. If they. It could get unhacked. Right?" "Yes." Halim is offering this terse reply to Joshua, whether he's speaking to the drone or to him and -- well, those are kind of one and the same at the moment. Silently, swiftly, there's another brief shift in processing -- visible to Cerebro where Joshua's phone has become part of them, just long enough for Halim to hit send on the apology text Joshua never sent to his training group. The phone is released, the bee is not; Halim is still doggedly working through its tangled signal. At the same time he's flicking through what he knows of Joshua's team, the extensive files he's been fed in the course of buffing up Prometheus's security and the places this information does (and does not) successfully cross-reference with his own memories. << who are you >> murmurs back to the drone, now, pensive. << You aren't his team. >> Externally, he's shifting for the first time, turning to properly look at Joshua, and while there is no stir of recognition past the thorough briefing he's had on all the raid team, there's a tired disappointment when no recognition comes. He is, kind of dutifully, also cross-referencing this with a long list (there are many Brotherhood members on it) of current mutant targets for [acquisition/extermination]; there's a vague sense of relief when Joshua's name isn't there. "Prometheus is done," is what he says aloud. "You have no team." "Yes! And it's bloody well like to fuck yours up, too. I can't disconnect and he's tracing my signal." Cere is diligently searching for the code that's tethering the drone to Halim, but it isn't there, at least not in a form he can interface with right now. Even so, when he reflexively tries to stop Halim from hacking Joshua's phone he still does it with mundane code and -- absolutely fails to even establish a connection. << All that groping about and you still can't tell? >> His digital voice, unfiltered, lacks the bravado he desperately wants to project. << I'm just a shiny toy. Chanda. >> Despite dressing down Joshua in spirited fashion just a moment ago, he is quick to bristle at Halim's perceived slight to his not-actual-teammate. "He said 'you were on my team,'" the drone replays Joshua's words. "Past tense, dickwad." "He's wh-- fuck. Fuck." There is a brief hesitation, Joshua's jaw clenched when he looks to Halim. "-- still want to be on your team, man." He reaches down to the drone and -- -- then they're back in the locker room in the sub-basement. Joshua is dropping back heavily onto the bench, the bee beside him and his head falling heavy into his hands. His eyes squeeze tight, and he says nothing. Well. Alhamdulillah that that escapade is over, right? The danger left far behind in the suburbs of DC and the school -- No, hang on a minute. There is still definitely a hitchhiker riding along in Cerebro's drone. Considerably more disoriented as the drone re-sync's to the school's network, and not too pleased about it, Halim is scrabbling to get his bearings now. Perhaps to helpfully signal its shift to evil, the bee's eyes are flashing an angry red. Cerebro's network, to technopathic senses, is an immense galaxy of systems, devices, databases, processes, and other elements represented in beautifully intricate geometries whose orbits shift as they interact. Some of the elements are readily identifiable, while others are abstruse and slippery. Some are physically impossible, some distinctly organic, and some pulse in and out of partial existence. The whole of it is majestic and overwhelming in its orderly chaos, and it feels alive. Somewhat literally back in his element, Cere re-syncs in an effortless shimmer of connections rippling across the network, but his relief only lasts a few nanoseconds. He doesn't need his automated diagnostics to tell him there's an intruder, he's already furiously slamming down internal firewalls around the bumblebee drone, each layer of defense rendered in mesmerizingly detailed simulations (except for the one that's just a featureless void). Of course, he can't wall it off completely, with his feed still pinned to the control interface of the drone which, unfortunately for them both, is still part of Halim. The innermost firewall is an empty cubical room, entirely black except for the bright yellow grid lines on every interior surface. Well. Not quite empty. There's Halim/the bee drone, of course, and there's also a man, or something that looks like one. He's small and kind of androgynous, with thick black hair and light brown skin, wearing a purple dress shirt, a white vest with silver filigree, and gray slacks. "Get the fuck out," he says curtly. In meatspace, other drones are converging. "Motherfucker followed us," a sleek metallic praying mantis tells Joshua without preamble as it moves in on the bumblebee. "I have to burn this." "Tss -- what. Oh, fuck." This time the fuck comes in the slightly resigned tones of someone who Probably Should Have Seen This Coming. Joshua does not lift his head from his hands. He exhales a hard breath, slumping just a little further before he reaches out a hand and -- blip -- the drone disappears. His elbow returns to his knee, palm returns to his forehead. "Guay de mí." In the instant after the drone vanishes, a text message is sent to Joshua's phone. Slightly confusingly, it's from Cerebro's number.
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