First Warden-Inmate Meeting w/ Jedao

[roci]

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.

Comments

[ninefox]

Pick a card, he thinks about saying, but Holden isn't quite with him, and he's already off balance, and he's - not an anchor, not a fledge. He's not someone Jedao has to win over and obfuscate at the same time.

"I'm not talking about family. Think about it like -" He doesn't say like a Shuos. "- a game. If it's a game, are we competing, or are we coordinating? Are we playing against each other, or are we on a team? Obviously that isn't a pure binary. We both have multiple objectives, and some of them align and some of them don't. But you can sort by priority and get a first approximation. I don't have to be your people to work with you. And I have certain ways of doing that."

He sweeps up the cards, shuffles again, then deals seven cards. He picks them up and shows them, fanned out. A Glory of Feathers. The Kel are a team, even though he was lying to them too, killed plenty of them. Team members can, under the right circumstances, ask each other for resources. Shous never would, unless it was a layer in some other scheme.

Holden made the face people always make, when they are weary of dealing with Shuos. It's obviously not quite as simple as treating him like a Kel instead, and letting him enjoy the illusion. He is a Shuos. But that also means: he'll play with whoever's playing, and he'll play more like a Shuos the more he feels like he's on his own.

He doesn't think Holden was wrong to restrict his access - nor does he think it was entirely about him - but he responded to the bait, moreso because of the degree of suspicion that preceded it, in response to something he did ask for directly. And if Holden wants him to ask for things, instead of being sketchy about it -

"You did point me at a war." Kel bait, instead of Shuos bait. Inviting him onto a team with a particular objective. I thought you knew what were doing, he'd said, and approved.

[roci]

Holden's expression clears. Jedao's talking at him sideways, and that kind of thing always makes Holden a little tetchy, but he thinks he understands.

"Actually," he says, "on this, I do trust you." It's not that life-or-death bond that formed between his four people. That doesn't mean it's not trust, and when he says that, he does it directly, taking the half-step back up to the console, looking at Jedao. "Because I think you tried to be a good person, and that matters. And I think you look at this and you see a puzzle to solve, and, beyond that, you're gonna want to save those kids."

He taps his knuckles on the console, briefly obscuring the projection of Saturn. "For this? I want you on my team. For the Barge? For you?" There are too many teams inside Jedao already, thinks Holden.

He considers, for a moment, telling Jedao that he thinks he knows what Jedao's biggest problem is, according to the Admiral. He could point Jedao at interpersonal relationships and tell him start there. It just doesn't seem like the right time, or like Jedao is in a place where he'd necessarily believe Holden's assessment. That has to come more organically.

"Jesus Christ, Jedao," swears Holden, soft and angry, "every single fucking person that I saw in that file who had power over you has tortured you. What the hell reason do you have to think I won't do the same?" His voice breaks a little on that. And Holden would never, not on purpose, he would never, but you don't let go of that kind of pain that fast, especially when you don't even know how wrong all that is. God, Jedao was subjected to horrors, and Holden doesn't even know how to begin on that stuff.

"You've survived by having however many plans going at once, and contingencies, and by being crafty and making lying into a way of life." A beat. "And a way of death, and even with the whole thing spelled out for me, I went off on the wrong track for hours. You're smarter than I am, and you're more experienced, and you're faster and more graceful and stronger. And you're a prisoner here. So of course I don't trust you, even though we're coordinating, not competing, because I don't see any reason for you to trust me." And as long as he thinks Jedao has reason to have plans in place against him, he's going to expect that Jedao will.

"But you're right, I invited you on -- in my cabin, I know it's not my ship," even though the illusion is giving him a lot of comfort. "I pointed you at a problem. Because I need you on it, or someone as smart as you, and because I can't think of a better way to start getting that trust in than working together on something." And that's a tactic he employed on the Cant -- getting suspicious people to engage in projects with each other. It even worked sometimes.

[ninefox]

He sweeps up the cards early in Holden's speech, mostly keeps his eyes down, shuffling and listening, shuffling and listening.

He starts laying out cards again, one by one. Queen of Gears, Cadet of Scales, Queen of Feathers. When he speaks, his voice is low, steady and logical but not cold.

"There was my mother," he says softly. "And my brother." Because what's a little near-drowning between siblings? And he was mostly asking for it. "High General Anien was pretty alright. A few of the other Kel officers, on my way up. They just weren't important enough to make it into your briefing, I guess."

He sweeps up the cards. Shuffles.

"I don't believe you won't hurt me. But I mostly believe you don't want to. You don't watch other people watch remembrances your whole life without figuring out who likes it and who doesn't. And when you do hurt me, it'll be because of all of that - because you're scared of being in over your head and not having another way to stop me and you feel responsible, so you'll just throw a live grenade into whatever it is you think I'm planning. And you have so much ammunition." His voice wavers, just for a moment. "But, fuck it. The damage is done. At least I don't have to sit around worrying about letting things slip."

He still hasn't looked up.

"And there's nothing I can say to convince you that I might ever not be planning something, is there? Because anything that sounds convincing would be a trick, and I'm smarter than you. And I can't stop you from reacting. There's no amount of brutal I can be that would put you out of the game, or take away how much you know about me. And frankly I just don't want to seduce you, even if I thought it would work. So I've got no moves except waiting out in the open until you decide you were maybe wrong. And even that - you know that I know how to wait." So that could be a ploy too.

He doesn't really have no moves. The most obvious is to wait until Holden bonds with a few other barge denizens. Threatening them would be a fucking nightmare, because he can just see Holden losing his shit about it, but it would be some leverage, and Jedao can stand to be more brutal than Holden can, if it turns into attrition. But that doesn't get him out of here. Defending a covered position is no good if you're pinned there and surrounded. He's broken enough sieges to know.

He starts laying out the suit of barbs, in order, deuce on up. The suit associated with the Vidona.

"I believe that the Admiral wants inmates to graduate. It might not be his only motive, but he puts too much skullfucking effort into this place for it to be nothing but a screen. If he just wanted us to be entertaining, or to suffer, or to fuel some other bizarre fetish of his, he could subject us to this whole fishbowl farce without the element of graduation at all. So that's a real motive. And I believe he chose you because something about you is suited to producing the outcome that he wants. Which, incidentally, is also what I want. It isn't trust. But it's a reason to believe you aren't - exactly the same."

He glances up, grins with a grim, toothy bleakness.

"Unless I'm supposed to believe that more torture is what I really need to grow as a person. Maybe just a smidge? Sometimes you have to break assets a bit before you can turn them. But to hear the other inmates tell it, he can handle that part himself."

[roci]

Jim's chest has gone tight, during this. The mix of emotions is impossible to separate out. Aching sympathy, and that fierce need to defend his own home (even if this is just an imitation), and fear, and some sinking realization of the accuracy of Jedao's words. He strongly suspects Jedao intends to be manipulating during this. It almost doesn't matter, though: what he's saying is true, and Holden is smart enough to realize that.

(Damn, he's glad seduction is off the table. Jedao is handsome and sharp, and Jim has always been a little weak-willed when it comes to determined and repeated offers. It would become a complete time sink, distracting as hell, because he wouldn't let himself say yes but he'd think about it all the fucking time.)

He just doesn't know what to say after this. There's a fierce look in his eyes at the mention of torture -- no fucking way, he won't let that happen. He might not have the power to stop it, but by God, he would try. He would try until it killed him. He doesn't say it, though; Jedao can probably see that anyway.

He swallows. Lets some saliva spread through his dry mouth.

"Well," he says, after a moment. "This is a pretty weird way to start a game, with both of us explaining how bad our opening position is."

And it's not a game. It's his solar system. It's Jedao's existence. Jim knows that.

Jedao's vulnerable; Jim's vulnerable. Jedao has strengths; Jim has strengths. They're both scared. They both need the same thing. Around here is where, in his own solar system, he'd propose a completely reasonable alliance, and extend provisional trust until proven otherwise. In a sense, that is what he's doing.

Jedao doesn't have zero routes to Jim's trust. Frankly, if they keep working together, learning more about each other, depending on each other, it's pretty much inevitable. And he also believes, somehow, that they're going to work well together. That it'll be okay.

He almost laughs, suddenly.

"Remember when I said I had a weird urge to tell you it was gonna be okay, and you said I shouldn't, because I'm a bad liar?" He waits until Jedao's looking at him. And he says, with full and honest faith: "It's gonna be okay." This is all insane! They will have rough patches, and some of those rough patches might be terrible! Even so.

"Shit," Jim says, suddenly, "glow sticks." Because somewhere in the back of his mind he's been thinking about the black cradle, and darkness, and light. He crosses over to the emergency supply locker, on the ops deck in case of decompression or power outages. And right tucked in there are some blank plastic loops, small enough to fit on a wrist. He pulls out a handful, and crosses back over to Jedao. "Here," he says, "happy warden/inmate day." Dryly. "Twist this part, and it'll start a chemical reaction -- it'll glow." He looks up, his expression serious, tentative. "In case you get stuck in the dark."

Who the hell knows what kind of power outage there might be on the Barge? What kind of magic?

"They last about a week," he says, "so if lights haven't come on by that point, you probably have bigger problems." He shifts. This seems idiotic, suddenly.

[ninefox]

"Lots of games start with bidding rounds," he counters, with a faint quirk of a smile, less terrible than the one he used to discuss the potential efficacy of suffering. "Communicating your hand to your partner effectively is an important skill." Which is not the same thing as being honest, but. It's close?

He smiles back, when Jim says it's gonna be okay, a little sad and dubious but sincere, too. Certainly Jim does believe it, and - that's not nothing.

"Oh," he says, very softly, just - touching them, with his fingertips. I went blind a few months ago, he wants to say, just to puncture the terrible overwhelming gentleness of it, to lash out and say you can't really save me. But the words shudder and catch in his throat like tumblers in a lock, and he can't, he can't. His fingers tighten - carefully, carefully, he doesn't want to waste one - clutching the glowsticks to him.

[roci]

It's not a perfect solution, it's not a fairy godmother or a Barge deal, but James Holden understands the value of small, simple ways to alleviate enormous problems. EMP won't take this out; an electrical failure won't touch it. The chemical reaction is dead reliable. He doesn't know shit about magic, so maybe magic can still break it somehow. Might not save anyone. Might not ever even be useful. Just having it, knowing there's a safety net, might be all it ever does.

Still, he'd bet on it above any other more complex fix. The simpler something is, the harder it is to fuck up.

He takes a breath, feeling a lot less stupid after that quiet, painful reaction, and talks for a few minutes, just to give Jedao a second where Jim's not obviously focusing on him. He doesn't figure it matters what he says. "They're made to go on a carabiner, a hook, a loop, around a wrist, on a lanyard -- hell, even over your damn ear -- that's why the circular design. Hundreds of years ago, when they only lasted a few hours, they were usually just sticks." He's pretty sure? Somehow, he never got History of Glowsticks in school.

"The idea of Martian military ships is make sure nothing goes wrong, but make sure you have idiot-proof solutions for when it does." Like inflatable airlocks. "This is about as idiot-proof as it gets, and has the bonus feature of not being subject to being disassembled by techs and sold for parts."

A beat.

"There's more where that came from," he says. "You run out, or lose 'em, or give 'em away, whatever, you don't have to explain." Jedao can hoard every glowstick in the Roci, if it's important enough to put that look on his face.

"And, speaking of," he says, "almost forgot about the Bajoran candies. They're in the cabinet under the coffee machine, down in the galley."

[ninefox]

He shoves one of his sleeves up - even that small amount of skin decorated with a shiny star-shaped burn and a few messy shrapnel scars - and slips one onto his wrist, tightens it so it won't slide off. His motions are quick and jerky, trying to run on autopilot before he does something mawkish and stupid and irrevocable, like grab Holden and hug him too long.

"I need. I'm going to." He needs to get out, he hates this, he hates even thinking about the dark, he's going to fucking cry like a two-week cadet about to wash out, and a useless defensive part of him itches to slip the switchblade down from his other sleeve and just stab Holden before he sees Jedao fall apart.

"Go stash these."

There. That's. A perfectly reasonable logistical excuse to run.

[roci]

A nod. "Yeah." He's not going to stop Jedao from getting out of there. Or even make a big deal out of it. Sure as hell Holden was pretty close to making an idiot out of himself and running the first time Jedao asked him -- tell me about your monster.

Jedao knows the way.

[ninefox]

He meets Holden's eyes for a moment, an he doesn't know - what he means to say by it. He's still - restrained, holding himself tightly in - and then moves, swift and deft, grips Holden's wrist for a second with his free hand.

Thank you, he wants to say, but he's too exposed already, and the literal translation from his Mando'a lessons is echoing in his brain, vor'entye, I accept a debt, and he's too deep in already and he can't do it.

And then his hand is gone and Jedao is gone, out the door and back toward the barge, the shadow's eyes slipping around the corner after him.