roci | First Warden-Inmate Meeting w/ Jedao

First Warden-Inmate Meeting w/ Jedao

The file does show up, as promised. It's actual paper, not milled stone but milled wood, and it's folded into some kind of off-white wobbly cardstock. It actually takes Jim a second to realize that's a fucking file folder. He takes it up into the ops deck, and starts reading. Might be that some people are delicate about it, ask their inmate before reading the file, but Holden doesn't have time to fence around, and he doesn't want to get into games with Jedao.

Which turns out to be a pretty ironic thought, as he reads about the game Jedao created as a cadet, the one that led to the suicide of a friend. He's barely even begun when the Roci lets out a completely unexpected chirp, an information downloading notification coming up on all screens.

That should definitely not be happening, not without authorization. "Rocinante," he says, "Cut off download." A negative chirp -- damn, what could he -- "Quarantine the download," he tries, but it's too late, the message wipes out, and a whole tree of files appears in the air above the center ops console.

He absorbs a few of the file names, dates and details that don't have any context, then he realizes what this is.

"Holy shit," he breathes. "How much did we just get?"

The Roci displays a number. Terabytes. Terabytes of information, video files and text and audio, thousands, and all of them about Jedao. Four hundred years, he realizes, of someone's fucking records. Way more than he could possibly review before Jedao contacts him to have a conversation. In fact, Jedao probably already has.

"Holy shit," he mutters, again, under his breath. "Can you index that?" A positive chirp. "How about -- by names, dates, locations -- if it has a location, and, uh. Actually, proper nouns. And tag them by category, type of file, if it's video, audio, text, hologram--" he wouldn't leave that out of the question -- "Or any other identifiable type." A beat. "And game. If there are any games, pull those out first."

The computer informs him that it would take actual days to go through all of it and create an interactive indexing system.

"Well," he sighs, "get started. But leave the files open for me to access."

The computer begins processing.

Holden returns to the file, and reads through the rest. It's thin. Ridiculously thin, for someone 400 years old, or 400 years dead, or whatever he is. He can't stop muttering curses and pausing, sometimes, to stare blankly ahead. Jedao killed millions -- an inconceivable number. And they kept him trapped in the dark, an inconceivable amount of time. He is a genius, resistant to mental coercion, brilliant, insane, but not as insane as people thought.

When he looks up, there is a game file that the computer has pulled out. With a gesture, he pulls it up. It's the game, the one Jedao made as a cadet, though as he opens the file, there are seventeen more games that the computer finds and populates into a list.

It's not hard to understand the rules, but it's very hard to figure out the context. Holden has to page back and forth, try it out in his head, twist the scenarios around before he realizes that the point is heresy. This whole thing, it's an obsession with heresy. Heresy as a game.

Not that Holden blames him. In a society like that, Holden would be obsessed with heresy too.

He sits back in the crash couch. He needs a way to get more time on this. He isn't processing half of what he just read, and there's a lot more here to unpack. This data might include a lot more information on Shuos and Kel and, what was it, Liozh?, as well as threshold winnowers and mothdrives and the High Calendar, and he wants to be a lot better informed before he goes into this conversation. So he needs a distraction. Something that'll buy him a day.

Games.

"Pause index," he tells the Roci. "Do you have any games on board?"

The computer brings up the list of -- twenty-one, now.

"No," he says, "I mean games like -- games from Earth, or Mars, or the Belt."

There's a pause, and an affirmative beep. Several of the crew apparently had personal game files, plus there's a few wargames that are part of the ship, probably for training purposes. Holden dismisses those with a swipe, and starts going through the rest. Most are pointless, shooting games or variants of chess, solitaire, blackjack, poker. He's not entirely sure what he's looking for, but then he finds it. A pandemic game, simulating disease spread throughout the solar system. It's an old one, that he remembers from when he was a kid -- probably some Martian from Earth kept it for nostalgia factor. It's a good one, too, simple rules and simple mechanics, but a new challenge every time.

"Are you able to unpack this?" he asks. "Reprogram it?"

The affirmative beep sounds, somehow, a little sarcastic.

"Okay. I want you to replace all mentions of disease with heresy. Physical symptoms to psychological things, like rebelliousness. You can draw symptoms from the DSM-70. It should still spread physically, but..." Radio. Heresy could travel at the speed of light. And it would; it would be impossible to stop. But that wouldn't make the game useful.

He keeps talking. "Win conditions are that you've wiped out heresy. Lose conditions... you're down to less than ten percent of the population, or you lose Ganymede, Earth, and Mars." Everywhere that can grow decent crops and produce oxygen in any quantity. "Or you start a war. Randomized what faction you're playing as, but it can be Earth, Mars, or Belters."

The faster-than-light is still a problem.

"What if the heretics were trying to keep it secret?" he asks, out loud. "Spread it slowly, at first, and then when they get caught, go all-out?"

The computer flashes a lack of understanding.

"If all ports that are infected with heresy are quarantined," says Holden, "they all broadcast at once. Heresy starts spreading at the speed of light, and the longer it goes on before you jam it, the more people are infected at once, everywhere."

The computer starts displaying dozens of questions, decision trees for the programming. Holden has to get down into that for a few minutes, straightening out the true/false conditions. He ends up adding in Ceres as the best vector for infection for the Belt. Cringes a little, but Eros is one that's a port of call for tourists everywhere, so that one's got the most far-flung connections. It's hard to spread through the Belt, but hard to eradicate all the little asteroids where heresy colonizes. It's easier to spread across Earth, because of the hundreds of network connections across the ocean can't all be severed, and trade and travel are so ubiquitous. It's hard to get onto Mars, because the vector is most likely to be diplomats or military vessels, but once you've got Mars, they spread it onto every ship they inspect. You can absolutely without question eliminate any place with heresy, but don't drop the population too far...

He spends actual hours on this, and it's a pretty clumsy effort, but thankfully the base game is simple enough and solid enough that it's not too broken. He makes it very hard to win. There are a few more twists, similar to the broadcasts: Belters can hide heresy better, because their language is difficult for outsiders to understand and they're already so independent, Mars has a tendency to strike back if any of its facilities are struck, and Earth has internal variation and borders that mess with transmissions. Something can spread easier from China to Mars than North America to Mars.

"One last thing," he says. "If you open your ports, and let the heresy in, then I want a way to win without bloodshed."

And this ends up being a very narrow path, too, and dependent on Mars not getting provoked, but it can work.

Finally, it's done -- or, as done as it can get, and he downloads it to one of the portable devices from the ship. He ducks outside, and places the little tablet outside Jedao's place, and thankfully makes it back before Jedao sees. On the way back, he drops a note on the network: Look outside your door.

And now he gets to work.

A few searches ("Shuos" turns up most of the files, "Kel" only slightly fewer, but combining the names of all seven of the factions brings up only about a hundred, easy enough to screen through them) gets him to a sort of treatise about the factions, describing roles and traits as though to a child. It's probably some kind of brainwashing material, but it gives him a good place to start. Liozh aren't mentioned anywhere; that means he has to search again and screen through those results before he can figure out that Liozh were philosophers and ethicists, idealists, and, wow, no fucking kidding they were wiped out from this society.

Next, the High Calendar, and every image that Jim sees is worse than the last. Some of it isn't so bad; base six numerical system, a year is this long, this is how you tell time, but then he gets into the cultural components. Every holiday that he pulls up more information on has a bloody and awful history, and some of them come with graphic images of torture and dismemberment. He has to steel himself against it, try to pull back from it, distance it from what he's personally witnessed. And he knew there was ritual torture, but the extent of it, how widespread and often, the way it's used as a common and acknowledged and normal tool, appalls him. He's starting to wish he pushed a little harder on the do you think it's worth it, instead of backing down the second he realized he was thinking more about the protomolecule than Jedao.

But, he remembers the conversation about the geese -- bite their hands off -- and he thinks, no, Jedao doesn't believe this is worth it.

But he slaughtered millions to get in a possible position to take it down. Just possible; not guaranteed. And as far as Holden can tell, mostly what he did was get himself killed at the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Weird name. Maybe it sounds better in the native language.

The scale of it is literally unthinkable. And Holden is tempted, several times, to call up the Admiral and call this whole thing off. How the hell is he even supposed to attempt to redeem someone a dozen times more clever, more thorough, more experienced, and a cold-hearted bastard on top of it?

He keeps reading, though. Because a lot more than millions are gonna be at risk if he doesn't manage this task. Humanity could get wiped out. It's already on the verge. He has to.

All of this crap is long on info and short on analysis. The file had some, but not enough. It's all just so thin. And Holden has never been good at connecting dots like this, seeing inside someone's head. Most people that he's dealt with in his life had pretty straightforward problems, things that could be eased or solved by listening and doing some pretty simple stuff.

This problem compounds the longer he reads. He goes through the battles at Scattered Needles over and over until he gets the basic gist of the technologies involved, and grasps most of the strategy (though the propaganda game is beyond him; how are you supposed to convince anyone to be on your side with images like that?). And then there's... shit. There's documentation of the threshold winnower.

Image after image. It takes him a shocked second to realize that he's looking at people, otherworldly tears in their flesh, not just blood and scars but horrific immediate mutations. People who clawed their own eyes out, or ripped flesh off the bone. One body that convulsed so hard its spine was at a horrible, wrong angle.

And, when he touches the screen at the wrong moment, one body is isolated and a picture pulls up. A short summary. A name.

Holden stumbles to his feet and the next thing he knows, he's in the head, vomiting up... well, acid, mostly, because he hasn't really eaten in a while. He puts his head between his knees, curled against the cool wall, and breathes, breathes, breathes. The minutes tick away, endless.

Maybe he falls asleep, because he gradually becomes aware of a soreness in his neck that wasn't there before.

He washes out his mouth, and gets back up to the ops deck, and goes back in -- dismissing the images of the winnower.

The rest isn't even fully indexed yet. He starts looking through some of what Jedao was pulled out to do during his centuries of death, and he can't focus. He's on the verge of asking the ship for some juice, when he stops.

He's approaching this totally the wrong way.

He leans back in the crash couch, eyes on the ceiling. He's pretty sure his communicator pinged a while ago. It's long past the time he should have fallen asleep -- starting to approach the time he should be waking up. There's no rush on this and he shouldn't have pulled an all-nighter, but hey, he just had an epiphany, and maybe it required a half-conscious mind to make that happen.

He's been doing this wrong. He's been trying to figure out Jedao from the details of his life, but Jedao's been doing all he can, for hundreds of years, to obscure his thoughts by adding noise to those details. The big-picture stuff isn't the problem.

-- Which is fucking unbelievable, given how awful the big-picture stuff is. Even Jim, though, can understand how people can get driven to do insane things in an insane world. Doesn't mean he's going to let Jedao off the hook for it, of course.

The problem is the way Jedao treats individuals.

And once he thinks this thought directly, the Admiral's reasoning clicks into focus. Jedao purports to be someone who is good -- or, no, purports to be someone who's crazy, but underneath, he's trying to do good, or so it seems to Jim. That doesn't gel with the way he terrorizes people near him, people who aren't innocent, but only insofar as they participate in an un-innocent system. The key to this is going to be breaking Jedao down so he can connect. Start to heal, from being fucking raped and brutalized himself, from causing his friend's suicide and being trapped in a box for 400 years and being driven to the point where he felt he had to commit mass murder in order to have a hope of being good in a society like this.

Jedao didn't succeed. He isn't good, and the threshold winnower is a perfect example of that. But he didn't just knuckle under, and Jim can work with that.

For the first time, Jim feels a stirring of hope. He's still totally out of his depth, stranded in the black, but at least he knows which way to go.

So he goes, and he sleeps for a while, and after he gets up and shaves and has something to eat, he pulls out the communicator. He checks for messages first, but, regardless of what's there, he texts: My cabin?

There's literally no way in hell he could conceal the fact that the Roci's a military ship of the line, on the inside. Might as well get it over with, because Jedao's gonna know that sooner or later. Jim's just picked over a significant part of Jedao's life, and he already owed Jedao one anyway.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He adds all of the cream, tastes it, shows no reaction whatsoever, and then adds the sugar as well.

"I liked the game," he says. "A little clunky, but it knew what it was trying to do." Which is to say, the approach was right, the approach to using a game at all. Which is not an insignificant compliment, from a Shuos.

"I don't consider you an enemy," he says, carefully. It's easier to be straightforward when he's emotional; much easier when it's not about him. "You want to graduate me and I want to graduate. If you need time - now, or later, you can have it."

Jim has the faintly dubious look of a kid who's just used the password to the secret clubhouse, but is still pretty sure that the other kids aren't going to let him in. In this case, it's the idea that Shuos really do like games, yes, that much, and that this one wasn't a complete half-assed failure.

"Okay," he says, deciding to take it at face value. He hesitates. "But that was all right? The way I asked for it." He says asked because if Jedao had come banging on his door, he wouldn't have refused.

The base game did a lot of the work, and Jedao is judging him gently, with the full knowledge that he slapped it together in a few hours. But effective reskinning is a skill in itself, to transform the experience and informational content of something without fucking up the functioning of the skeleton, without ending up with poorly-chosen elements working against each other. And he can't deny that he was engrossed for a while.

He smiles, a little; it wasn't precisely a test, but it was easier to tell the truth while telling himself that he'd learn something useful, going forward, based on whether or not Holden believed him.

"It was fine."

Enigmatic motherfucker.

But that's probably about as much as Jim could possibly hope for, given how quickly he slapped it together. So he lets it drop.

"You want to graduate," he says. "So you can keep working to bring the Hexarchate down?" Because that's not the only possible reason. Graduate so he could die, that would be one Jim wouldn't consider out of the question.

There's a fast moment of perfect, terrifying blankness on Jedao's face, and then he shifts, leans forward a little in his chair.

"There is nothing you - nothing anyone, anywhere could bribe or threaten me with that would make me choose to go back there. I did -"

He chokes, swallows, closes his eyes and breathes in, once, slow. When he speaks again it's steady, forcefully calm, not quite emotionless. "I did everything I was capable of, and I got a lot of good people killed for nothing and it wasn't enough so no, I am not going to do that."

Good thing he's set the coffee down, because he gets what the magnitude of that reaction is. His hands move reflexively into an outward-sweeping gesture, one that he picked up fast because it's not that different from what it would be on Earth: calm. But Jedao's not a damn Belter, and he cuts it off halfway.

"Hey," says Jim. "Hey. Jedao. I'm not fucking judging you for wanting to get out of there, okay? Or judging you for fighting them." Or arguing with the fact that he got a lot of good people killed.

He - pulls calm over himself, like tugging on a vacuum helmet. He stills, holds himself in, at his hands, at his shoulders. He looks off to the side.

"You should want me upset," he murmurs, not quite casual. Patient, as though he were an instructor, correcting Holden's stance. "Work the momentum. I'm much more likely to lie if I have time to think things through." Not necessarily better or worse at it; just more likely. To lie, or deflect, or twist away.

He doesn't consider Holden an enemy. But this is - fox and hound, he's so exposed. And Jedao doesn't trust him, either, even if he wanted to.

Jim gives Jedao a flat look.

"I'm doing this my way," he says. The fuck if he knows what his way is, but it's not dragging someone over the coals just because that's more honest. It's not completely bad advice, and Jim's going to keep it in mind -- he fully expects Jedao to lie early, lie often. Lie in self-defense, even if he does want to graduate. Shade the truth, when a lie won't do.

He sits back, picking up the coffee mug again.

Shit, he doesn't even know where to start.

"So you tell me," he says, "why you think you're here."

His mouth quirks for a moment - he did tell the admiral to match him up, already, did ask for specifics. He supposes now he has to work with what's he got. Holden's way. He hasn't fucked up dramatically yet, so - fair enough.

"The Admiral asked me something similar when I badgered her," he admits. He hadn't answered then - it was enough of an answer to his question, which was whether the admiral had any intention of being straightforward about her requirements.

He looks genuinely relaxed, now, without any sharp moment of transition, shoulders back down, leaning a little on the table, idly rolling the coffee bulb in little arcs with one hand.

"I know I'm a monster," he says, gently without being coddling or cloying, amiable and matter-of-fact. "And not a blind, heartless gullet like Kujen. I know other people are real. I know every one of them deserves a chance to live. And I killed and killed and killed anyway. I can't for the soul of me decide if the Admiral thinks I should have never tried or if I should have gone really big, just torched everything, wiped out the rot and let more brittle and less subtle tyrants move in to motivate the survivors..."

He thought about it, about what would happen if he just took his swarm and broke everything he could, as hard and fast as he could, faster than Kujen could change the rules on him. He knew he'd be playing at a disadvantage but if he were brutal enough - not even Calendrical warfare could stave off the collapse, and soon enough it would be a self-perpetuating implosion -

He's thought about it, especially in the cradle, playing what-if uselessly with himself. But when he said I did everything I was capable of, it means: he thought about it, and he couldn't do that.

"You don't seem like one for not trying. Which is a species of relief." He doesn't know what it would take, to make himself believe that would have been the right choice. He can feel it nearby, razor-sharp despair like a knife hidden under a pillow, much closer now that he's finally, really failed. But he didn't want to grasp it.

Edited 2017-08-28 23:25 (UTC)

Jim stares at Jedao for a good long moment.

Long enough to make it clear that there's something not computing, here.

"That's it?" he asks. "That's all of your speculation? To rebel or not to rebel -- are you kidding me?"

Maybe he shouldn't fault Jedao, because, hell, he just spent most of a day missing the point completely, and he had some actual perspective on the problem.

But he waits a second, just to make sure that Jedao isn't kidding him.

"I spent several lifetimes dwelling on the matter of how, but I thought you might appreciate a more concise version," he says cooly, a little waspishly. No, that isn't all. But it is, he assumes, the heart of the matter. Millions of deaths is rather the obvious candidate; and if thought about the people close to him at all - about Ruo, about Gized, about his mother and Sereset and Cheris - he would have dismissed the entire idea as woefully self-indulgent.

Jim sits back against the wall, at a loss.

"I guess I should enjoy this," he says, "because it's probably the only time I'm gonna feel smarter than you."

But he's not. He's just feeling the magnitude of the task in front of him. How the hell did he ever think he was gonna be able to do this?

Okay. He has to start somewhere.

"Jedao," he says, shifting forward again. "You lived in a world where it's impossible to be a good person. You're either complicit, or you're dead, or you're actively evil." He says 'evil' without a trace of irony; he really believes in it. "You tried anyway. And you did a pretty bad job. But you didn't do a bad job because you tried, and you sure as hell didn't do a bad job because you didn't burn everything down when you had half a chance."

He feels like he's trying to speak another foreign language here.

"Deciding to fight them was the right thing to do." He can't put it any more clearly than that.

A species of relief, he said, so lightly, but it's different, to hear it straight out, to get it from - from the person who's supposed to help him, supposed to be his guide, and it doesn't have to be about trust if it's just a matter of who is in a position to know, to have the right intel - who must have been chosen for that position, that perspective -

It hurts. It hurts in ways he doesn't understand and doesn't have words for, like when his nerves started coming back online for the chunks of his ribs medical had to reconstruct after he got shot with burrower ammunition. He's spent so long being the terror, the traitor, the madman, notorious and reviled. There were so many people - good people, or as good as he ever knew anyone could be, loyal and honest and brave - that couldn't see the things he saw, that he couldn't trust or convince without getting them killed, too. All the things that were worse because he tried, all the consequences he ever saw - you did a pretty bad job, Holden says, and he can't dispute it, but it was all he had; and worse, he knew it was a long shot, knew he didn't have the right tools without the fucking math, knew it was going to be a mess. So he's never, ever been able to separate it from trying from the way that he tried, from the choices he willfully made, the only ones he could find.

If he were alone, he'd cry, with confusion and hurt and relief, but he's not alone, he can't do that, he can't fall apart over - over -

No one has ever told him he did the right thing, any right thing, not since he was alive and lying constantly to everyone and getting feted and promoted for being the shining star in Kel Command's talons, for strengthening everything he wanted to tear down.

Complicit, dead, or evil. He did know it - could see it, sideways, out of the corner of his eye, could make out the inexorable and terrible and inescapable shape of it, the way the system ruined people, without ever having seen what people might look like, unruined. He knew it without having any sense of the details or the alternatives, but he saw just enough to know he had to force a change. Some way. Any way.

Complicit, dead, or evil.

"I guess I got the hat trick," he says, chokes out, not meeting Holden's eyes.

Jim gets it. The whole mess of emotions, he gets it, because he felt it not too long ago.

"Few days ago," he says, "the thing I didn't want to talk about? I was pinned by a cargo crate and I was dying, and this guy on my crew -- you know, a year ago, I would've said I didn't know him, and six months ago I'd've said he scared me shitless, but somewhere in the meantime, he became family. And so there I was, poison from my own crushed bones getting into my blood, and he talks to me. He says thank you."

This is gonna sound like I'm bragging, thinks Jim.

"He said thank you for trying," Jim says. "That I'd done a lot of stupid things since I took over as captain -- those were his words, 'a lot of stupid things' -- but that I always tried to be a good man, and that he was grateful, because it felt good not to have to worry about being on the right team."

He's really not trying to brag here. That was one of the best things anyone had ever said to him, and it made Jim feel full up and brimming over; it made him want to try a thousand times harder, this time to be smart and good, so Amos wouldn't ever have to worry about it again.

"So I'm pretty good at trying," he says, "and you're pretty good at doing the smart thing. So here's hoping the Admiral knows what he -- or she -- is doing." And that's about as close as he's going to get, right now, to admitting that Jedao has something to teach him back.

There's a bitter twist to his mouth - an awful cocktail of jealousy and contempt, at the idea of it being that easy, to just find someone who could try. At the idea of believing there was a good team, somewhere, at all. But he likes the story at the same time, likes all of Holden's rueful microtells. He's intimately familiar with the particular awkwardness of this is going to sound like bragging, given his battle record. He feels an inevitable sense of kinship over it.

He thinks about his own last, quiet thank you, and suddenly he misses Cheris like his chest was blasted open again; they would have been so good together, he thinks, they would have been something, if only he hadn't gambled wrong and tipped their hand. If only they'd had more time.

"Research suggests pairings are more productive than most of his decisions." Tiffany had said it was the one thing she trusted the Admiral to do; and his own grid-diving backed up the idea. Even unsuccessful pairings often seemed to develop rapport and some behavior modification before one member vanished.

Edited 2017-08-29 02:34 (UTC)

"They told me it would be more than a month." It's almost a complaint, exasperated and a little frazzled. "And then that I'd get a temporary inmate."

He's so rushed into this. And it's funny, it's hilarious, how lost he feels at this and how he's feeling more and more that it'll be okay.

"So." The coffee mug is empty, and he sighs, thinking that he probably shouldn't have another cup. (He really wants another cup.) "You want to take a turn interrogating me, or...?" It's an offer. He's ready enough to get into it, why he's here. Jedao has a right to know what it is his redemption is going to buy.

He huffs out a breath, the sort of soft rush that might have been a laugh, if he weren't already dealing with so much. It's probably his fault, haranguing the Admiral for a permanent warden, which he decides not to mention, because it's tied up directly with what he wants to leave the barge to do. Which he doesn't actually think Holden would disapprove of, exactly, but he doesn't want to talk about it yet. It's too much, it's too important, and they've managed to completely sidestep the original question which is - just fine by him.

"You're afraid that your world is about to change," he says, more because he is just curious, than because he thinks he has to know for their relationship to work, picking out what he knows from Holden's original sloppy projection on the promenade. "A lot of potential reward, a lot of potential harm. And something about it scares the shit out of you in a way that doesn't actually have anything to do with astropolitics." He pauses. "And you feel responsible for it. You think your choices are going to matter, even aside from the deal, which you're still internalizing as a real thing."

He doesn't say it as though he thinks Holden is wrong. He knows perfectly well how much difference the person on the spot can make when a new system comes together.

"Have I got anything wrong yet?" Which doesn't put Holden on the spot as directly as what scares you or what did you do; it gives him the freedom to say whatever he thinks is the most important part of the situation.

Jim's lips are pressed together. He shakes his head; nothing wrong yet.

"Not about to change," he corrects. Jedao wasn't wrong about that, exactly, but -- "Cascade failure's already started." Everything that they knew is about to go. World's already changed, it just hasn't realized it yet.

And that change is going to be a shooting war between Earth and Mars and the Belt, thinks Holden, fears Holden. He can imagine Fred Johnson opening up the warhead with the protomolecule inside, twisting open the casing, and there it is, blue glow and all, a material a billion times more explosive than uranium was to the 20th century.

"It's such a small system," he says, and means it, thinks it must be terrifyingly vulnerable. It was all there in the game: only three food-producers, and no real way to develop more; belters with so little to lose and plugged into every transit system, with access to everyone; the military volatility from the martian side, knowing it's their only real point card.

(He does not think: a thousand food producers don't do any good if surplus and population are lightyears apart; he doesn't think about how vulnerable they have always been, if he dared to think about threatening the mothdrive.)

"Anything worth shooting for everyone goes down. So what do people think is worth it?"

His stomach clenches. Such a small system; fragile in so many different ways. He's so afraid for the fate of humanity.

He moves to his feet. Movement will help; he wants to pace, wants to stand. "Come on," he says, and he leads Jedao up another level of the ladder, to the ops deck. There's a console there flickering through files, indexing, but he dismisses it with a wave of his hand.

"Rocinante," he says, "show me a simulation of the system."

A hologram fades into existence over the center table, about an armspan wide. It's not to scale; simplified for ease. Jim reaches in and zooms to Phoebe. "One of the moons of Saturn," he says. "It was an extrasolar capture, a few billion years ago. Turns out it's not a coincidence that it ended up in this solar system. Group of research scientists were on it, and they found something they were not looking for. They called it the 'protomolecule.'" His voice is tight and angry; something like that, and their first reaction was to give it a brand name. Even more aggravating is that it's caught on.

"We don't know what it was supposed to do," he says. "But they figured out that it does something. A molecular structure packed with instructions. It can..." The words stick in his throat. He forces one out: "Reprogram."

There are a lot of pieces he knows he isn't getting yet; he doesn't know if reprogramming means people, or matter, or logic, or some more perverse combination of those and other things. He thinks of fungal canisters, the way they can break down an ecosystem in hours; he thinks of the Vidona with their whispers and veils. His shoulder-blade itches.

One thing doesn't quite -

"Not a coincidence. So it chose to come to this system, or it was drawn there by some attractor, or it was sent."

"It's not sentient," he says. So: drawn, sent, whichever, but something made it. Aliens, he doesn't say. "Whatever it is, it makes something that's anaerobic, that feeds off of radiation. It takes whatever life is present, and it," he swallows, leans heavily on his palms over the console. The light shines, flickers where it would pass through him. "It takes it apart and uses it."

He stares at the solar system model for a moment, and pulls back. Moves just to move, to reassure himself that he's not frozen and still. The panic is back, but it's not as fresh as it was, he thinks, and he's in familiar surroundings, and Jedao deserves to know. All those reasons mean he has to push through it.

"Protogen was the company, the place that employed the scientists," he tells Jedao. Protogen; protomolecule. "They thought their researchers weren't that useful because, I don't know, they had personalities and consciences, so they magnetically bombed the area of the brain that makes people sociopaths. They created a whole facility of scientists who didn't give a shit about individuals, and those scientists decided the best way to figure out what the protomolecule did was to let it try."

His fists are clenched.

"They used Eros."

Edited 2017-08-29 12:41 (UTC)

What he thinks is: nice torch. He always appreciates when a weapon can do two things at once; the idea that something could be recouped off planets that would otherwise be just glassed is appealing, although probably bad incentive.

It reminds him a little of a few Hafn weapons he saw in the new tech files - but not enough to be useful.

It's the matter of the researchers that makes his head jerk around to stare at Holden.

"That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard." It isn't that hard to find monsters, he thinks. Or maybe in Holden's world it is, and they went and made themselves a whole batch of Kujens, ready to eat their way through his soft little system like a Borer beetle through fruit, like an invasive species, like burrower ammunition. "You need to kill them. You need to kill all of them, or one asteroid will be -" nothing, he doesn't say. "- just the beginning."

Edited 2017-08-29 14:47 (UTC)

Holden has the sudden and spectacular urge to laugh, and the simultaneous urge to punch Jedao in the face. Neither of these things are actually Jedao's fault; they're Miller-related reactions, and Holden is able to go still and blink a couple times until both of them pass.

"All you need is the hat," he mutters. Breathes in, and straightens up. "We raided their main outpost, and." Well. "Almost all of those are dead."

Saving the one, who's currently in the fantastically unreliable custody of Anderson Dawes.

"Their leader is dead," he says. "But there were more, off that station, and they've."

It's just not even worth it, going through it chronologically, unless he goes through everything. So he summarizes, succinctly: "Earth and Mars have shot at each other. Eros is gone. Ganymede is dead. Earth, Mars and the Belt all have the protomolecule. And it's all so fucked up that I honestly came here looking for a miracle to fix it."

"If you ever throw that punch," Jedao says, grinning just a little at the dual reaction. They could use a puncture for the tension, probably. "I promise to try not to break your arm."

He runs a half-gloved hand through his hair. Well, at least they're both motivated.

"Does this thing have personnel files at all? Archival copy of public grid records, even? I'm going to need to know the individual players."

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