Those spiders were pretty distracting.

Come to think of it, the whole thing does seem like something that Harper would have pulled. Not the torture prison cells and taking away amenities, but...the thoughtlessly joining with the ship.

Harper wouldn't have taken away the bar, and probably would have added a virtual reality strip club besides.

Want to talk over the network or in person?

Either. [Though being the social monkey that he is, he would prefer in person.]

I had wondered if those incidents had happened with you as well.

Which incidents? When he accidentally had super-knowledge downloaded into him? Or when he accidentally activated Andromeda's hidden personality and mission protocol and she nearly killed us? Or when he started accidentally shifting time when he built that Tesseract machine?

[Oh Harper. It's a good thing he's a damn good engineer, otherwise Dylan would be tempted to shoot him out of an escape pod and never let him touch Andromeda again.]

You're only a few doors down. I'll be there in a few. [Dylan is also a social monkey.]

[He's pacing in his room when Dylan shows up, finally giving himself time to think about it. He remembers mentioning to Toshiko that she didn't feel well.]

All of those things happened to me as well. [He says as he makes a turn to walk slowly around his desk, hands tucked primly behind his back.] I wouldn't have been able to change fate if it hadn't been for the Tesseract machine.

But Harper killed thousands of people when he did that to remove the Magog. His survival would end up saving millions more. But... if there had been a stable Commonwealth, Harper would have never been permitted to hold rank on a ship again.

[He looks at Dylan dryly.] Did you mention that we are familiar with what sort of dataport Toshiko has?

On a real High Guard ship, they probably wouldn't have let Harper so much as walk in the door.

[Dylan helps himself to a seat and watches Rhade pace.]

I haven't mentioned it. I'm not sure how familiar I am with it. I've seen it from a distance but... [He shrugs.] I don't know how similar it is to Harper's. I always assumed that it came from her universe.

Are you telling me that it didn't? [He has a feeling that that's where this is going.]

I've seen it up close. It's like the ones we're familiar with. [He finally does have a seat, too, beside of Dylan.]

Her and Harper were very close, when he was here.

Close, like...Harper finally got a woman to like him, close?

[Harper's personal life aside...]

So you think he might have made it for her?




You realize that would mean that this is all indirectly Harper's fault. [God damn it, Harper. If you were here right now, Dylan would make a point of giving you a Look. And advise you to just give your girlfriends chocolates next time, and not a brain-surgery dataport.]

There was not much notably public, but she does have a dataport, she did want to avoid discussing him once, and she is the sort of woman that might reciprocate his advances.

He at least played a role in knowing that they exist, but I wonder if he warned her of the dangers. He didn't necessarily like to admit his mistakes. Not to me, anyway.

[But he gives Dylan a look that says that he did make a lot of those mistakes.]

Edited 2013-04-11 09:58 am (UTC)

Not to me, either. And brilliant as he is with machines, he's not very good at considering the consequences of things.

Like the Tesseract machine.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it slipped his mind to mention possible dangers or side effects

I am wondering how much we should tell them about the dataports and if it would do any good. I'm relatively certain that, though she was carrying a great amount of hatred that should be addressed, the actual attack on the ship was unintentional.

Whether it'll do any good or not, we should tell them what we know. It might not change anyone's decision, but at least they'll be better informed when they make it.

Alright.

...I don't know how helpful I can be. I wasn't aware of what had happened until it accelerated. Those last few days.

That is actually very telling.

I know you weren't exactly comfortable talking about Harper when I mentioned him before, but he's relevant. Similar incidents happened aboard the Andromeda when he was using his dataport. Not precisely similar, but he ended up with a vast amount of information transferred directly into his mind one time, and altered the directive of the ship another.

It's fine. I don't mind talking about him.

What do you need to know?

After you realized, can you theorize or remember any point before specifically that might have been the catalyst and it escalated on its own? Or do you believe it was a progression, from you using it more than once changing it a bit more each time?

I don't know. I know that's not very helpful, I'm sorry.

I remember doing as thorough a job as I could with maintenance and monitoring on the day of the blackout, but nothing seemed unusual about it. I don't remember anything precipitating the power cut. Everything seemed so routine I couldn't have imagined it having anything to do with me, and then the Admiral's announcement...

After that, nothing much happened to me or the engine room between the initial blackout and...and what happened at the end. Every time something changed, nothing really registered wth me, until the 'Admiral' made his announcement about Warden deals.

It's helpful.

Did the ship put up any resistance when you were attempting to fix the damage? Or was it a relatively- not simple, but straightforward procedure once you realized what the source of the problem was?

If the ship has any consciousness of its own, I wasn't aware of it. There was no resistance.

When did you start trying to undo the damage? As soon as you realized?

No.

[There's a brief burst of frustration, probably the first display of actual upset she's shown since her Admiral rant:]

Because I'm a sadistic monster who gets off on other people's suffering, haven't you heard?

[There's a pause, and she pulls in a breath.]

I was terrified. It felt like doing anything would just make it worse.

I've heard. [He's actually surprised to hear it out of her, finally, and he actually looks a touch sympathetic despite everything. It was a terrible mistake, one that shouldn't be taken lightly.] But if I believed that were the case I wouldn't be asking you now. [And he knows she's trapped here with a whole ship full of people she indirectly harmed; one or two was bad enough for him. Harper didn't make his opinion of Rhade much of a secret. People holding her accountable for the wrong thing would be more unceasing misery than any punishment that the wardens could agree on.]

It's a pitiful way to find common ground. [He knows she needs help, and he's upset about what she said. But in the end, she's still the person he brought back a gift for. She's still more like the Harper he knew to him than the Harper that was here.]

Was your dataport initially deactivated when demotions occurred, leading you to correct the error manually? Or did the Admiral only deactivate it after control of the ship is returned. It's an important question, because it means that the changes to the ship were occurring even after you were unhooked and out of control.

It was deactivated when I was demoted. Before and after that, what control I had was more...intuitive. For a week after the blackout I wasn't in the engine room at all.

I honestly don't know if the dataport would have been necessary for what happened in the first place. It might have been possible to do what I did manually.

[Ben has been... strange, since the incident. He's more detached, certainly, though Rhade has managed to keep him from completely disengaging through close attention and by encouraging him to stay connected to the things he'd been learning to like. He doesn't respond to X5-493, at least, though he does still insist on Sirs and Ma'ams and sticks to his routine like clockwork. But he trusts Rhade implicitly and that's why when Anya takes refuge in his room he comes to his warden, perplexed and angry, though not at the girl; it's because he trusts Rhade that his warden gets to see the flashes of anger, personal and undesirable in a good, mindless soldier who will follow orders blindly.

It's because they're something approaching friends that he doesn't get a blank, hollow answer. He gets a slightly petulant edge, though it takes longer than usual for Ben to reply.]

I had nothing to do with his disappearance.

I didn't think you did. He disappeared on his own. His door returned to normal.

I wanted to ask how you were feeling about it. [Rhade is actually glad, but he's not going to say so. Ben barely knew Ladd; just enough to dislike him.]

[Another long delayed reply, although the petulance is gone when he comes back. Not blank-gone, just gone.]

I have been otherwise occupied. I have not allotted much energy to concerning myself with Ladd Russo's status as long as he's been avoiding causing disruption.

[But he sure did notice pretty much immediately when he stopped seeing the other inmate, and then the door.]