Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ The Palace of Justice ❯ 17 ( Chapter 17 )
[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
By: Lethanon 
Anime/Manga: Gundam Wing Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Romance / Sci-fi / Thriller | Type: Continuation | Uploaded On: 01.22.2011 | Pages: 3 | Words: 5.2K | Visits: 280 | Status: Work In Progress
Anime/Manga: Gundam Wing Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Romance / Sci-fi / Thriller | Type: Continuation | Uploaded On: 01.22.2011 | Pages: 3 | Words: 5.2K | Visits: 280 | Status: Work In Progress
17:
“Morning Triton.”
Giles found him before he’d managed to even put his backpack down, surprising even Trowa and he just clung his backpack back over his shoulder and followed the man out of his Hanger and back over to the broken Pad.
“Morning,” Trowa muttered, still sipping on his take away coffee.
“I had a few ideas for the new Pad, and for Hatty actually, so I drew up these plans and thought I’d run them by you...”
The man had what? Trowa just stared at the notebook he thrust into his hands, not bothering to read it until they got to Hanger101, and then cast an amused look at Giles. The man was a workaholic, and way too enthusiastic. It was a little creepy, really.
“You know it’s not healthy to take your work home with you,” Trowa muttered but Giles was just grinning at him, ready to get to it. They got to the broken Pad and Trowa felt a little better about things when Giles doubled over and puked again while he merely staggered forward to the table and sat down in front of Hatty.
“Oh, don’t worry, Triton! It gets easier, I promise!” Were they just programmed to tell you that to make you feel better? Trowa glared up at her and didn’t bother replying, batting away her hands when she tried to pet his head.
“Stop that!” He checked on what she had been doing all night, not at all surprised to see she had done exactly as requested and monitored Giles.
“Aww, isn’t that sweet. Hatty watched you scribble down your ideas all night.”
Giles just glared at him as he staggered to the other seat and sat, still looking sick. Hatty pet his head and Giles shuddered but put up with it, which was more than Trowa could say for himself.
“He didn’t sleep for very long,” Hatty observed. “You slept much longer,” Hatty observed curiously and Trowa frowned up at her. She had spied on him all night as well. Great. “And he slept alone, but you didn’t...” Definitely uncool!
“Hatty...why did you watch me?”
“Because I wanted to,” She observed as if it were obvious. She clearly saw no problem with it and he didn’t know how to begin explaining the concept of stalking to a machine. If she really was a machine. He was beginning to understand just how fine the line was between machine and ‘something else’.
“Why did you sleep with someone else?” That she sounded both curious and jealous made Trowa feel cold and anxious and he stopped checking over the laptop and stared at her instead. Not wanting to have this conversation with Duo seemed childish now, when he was apparently going to have to have it with something far, far less appealing.
“Wufei is my boyfriend, Hatty. I always sleep with him.” Or he was going to from now on. She didn’t need to know it was a new thing, or that Wufei could choose not to be his boyfriend. She just needed cold hard facts and the ones that suited him best were Wufei was his boyfriend and he slept in his bed, no exceptions.
“Why?” Did machines really need a why? What was she, like five?
“Because I like it.”
She was quiet, thinking it over, and Trowa had no idea what there was to think about. Wufei was his, and he liked it when they slept together, end of story.
“I don’t like it,” she said eventually and even Giles was frowning at her now. What did she know of like? What did she know of love...they were questions that had plagued his dreams long after he climbed out of the shower with Wufei and went to bed, letting Wufei tug him into his lap for once and falling into sleep. He hadn’t come on this mission expecting to have to comprehend the level of humanity attainable by a being a man had made in a laboratory, but he feared he was going to have to do so before he was able to return home.
“You don’t have to like it, Hatty, you just have to know it’s true. Wufei is my boyfriend, I love him, and we sleep together in the same bed because we both like it.”
She was quiet again and he was relieved by the silence, taking deep breaths and letting his thoughts settle into some sense of normalcy, if such a thing were even possible in Frank.
“Creepy, having to explain your personal life to a robot,” Giles grumbled, but he was pulling out the journals and reading over Harry’s notes, making his own notes on the drawings he’d made last nights and Trowa left him to it, going to collect the next lot of parts he needed to complete the next piece of the Pad replica, sitting down on the floor where he could spread things out more and getting to work. It took an hour for Hatty to stop sulking and start singing again.
“Hatty, who taught you to sing?”
“Harrison taught me! He was a great singer!” In her mind, Harrison’s or fact? He didn’t dare to ask.
“Do you have a music archive?”
“Of course! Let me see...oh, I have a work playlist? Harrison made it, would you like to listen?”
“Yes please,” Trowa agreed, more curious than anything, and suddenly Bach’s toccata was playing through speakers Harrison had placed strategically around the Hanger. Hatty still sung along, but it was more amusing than anything.
“La la la la! La la la la! La di di, la di di, la di di di la di daaaaaa.”
The music helped Trowa find his space again, settling into the empty feeling and letting his hands work. It felt good, to not over think anything, to just know he had to do a particular job, in this case build something, with no other agenda. It felt like old times and while he doubted it was a sign of good mental health to enjoy being in a war, he thought there were particular skills a person learnt in that environment that people would have found useful in times of peace. Resilience being primes among them. Normal people had none, and it drove him half mad.
“La di da di, la di da di, la di da di, la di da di...”
Giles moved to the floor sometime later, and when Trowa finished his next component he moved to help Giles assemble the battery packs, not even blinking when Giles had to go back to the main Hanger to steal some extra batteries. He returned not a half hour later and they finished the packs, moving on to the next component.
“So I was thinking about Hatty and the newer model and the only difference I can see is that the new model is capable of integrating its human responses with its mechanical, right? As in, it’s human brain is capable of merging with some part of the machinery and it all works together to simulate human responses...at least, that’s as much as I could understand from Harry’s notes?”
“That’s about it,” Trowa agreed, not sure where this was going.
“Yeah, well, so...the problem is the System, Frank, is too intelligent. He runs all our systems but he’s also always thinking about the next step; the things people haven’t thought about yet. People dream about the future and make plans, but those plans change. Frank is making concrete plans; he’s not allowing for a changeable future.”
It wasn’t something Trowa had thought about and he wondered why Giles had, even if the man had no real personal life. When Trowa went home the last thing he wanted to think about was Frank’s motives, he was trying to leave that up to Duo and Heero, who definitely hadn’t considered whatever Giles was talking about as far as he could tell.
“ The problem isn’t that the System isn’t working, the problem is that it’s too good,” Giles concluded. “If you want to fix it, you don’t need to replace the Origen with a replica that’s going to do just as good a job. You need to hinder it with something that’s going to do a crappy job.”
Trowa blinked at him and then looked over at Hatty, not sure Giles really understood what he was talking about, but equally sure he’d given it a lot more thought than Trowa had, which was to say nearly none. His focus was getting Wufei home, he didn’t think it a bad focus.
“You want to plug Hatty into Frank...instead of Nataku.”
“Maybe, I’m not sure yet, but I think before you look at possibly destroying the colony you need to look at other options. The people here haven’t done anything wrong, and they’re happy...genuinely so. Do you realise how rare that is? To have community that actually cares, not just about its own immediately group of friends, but about the whole?” Giles shook his head and it was clear he knew it was rare, that he’d experiences places that weren’t like that and Trowa was forced to think of his son, and the fact that it wasn’t his death that pained Giles the most, but the fact it was so pointless. It wasn’t just that a child had stabbed his son for money neither of them had, but that his son had bled to death there because no one had come to his aid. Trowa had to admit that would never happen here. If someone was injured, everyone dove in to help. He knew, because his jaw was the talk of the military and every random stranger he spotted had come to offer him advice on remedies their great great something had tau
ght them that worked wonders on bruises. And if they didn’t have a great great whatever or a remedy to offer they just came to ask if he was okay and if there was anything they could do, which got really annoying when you were trying to sneak around and get to Hanger101 without anyone noticing.
Community mattered to these people. They understood its value and Giles wasn’t willing to give up on it.
“I think we need to dumb Frank down; make him less intelligent, take out the processes that make him think it’s okay to decide anything! Go back to letting humans make the decisions. Much like what we do here; you give Hatty an instruction and she follows through, but she’s not making any decisions on her own.”
“You mean, apart from watching me sleep,” Trowa rolled his eyes and Giles just chuckled. But he was thinking about it, and Giles could be right. They were looking for more advanced ways to beat Frank; ways to trick him with replacements like Nataku, or ways to get around him but they weren’t thinking about the problem itself, which was as simple as Harrison having gotten carried away with what he could achieve, trying to combine the master and its creation instead of letting them remain separate entities.
Only God could separate and be one at the same time. Trowa wondered if there wasn’t a reason for that after all.
“It could work,” he agreed softly, looking over at Hatty where she was singing and waving her arms around in what he could only assume was her concept of dancing to Brahms’ lullaby.
“That’s what I thought! So I thought we could build this converter...” Giles flipped through his notes to what looked like a giant mixing desk. Duo would have loved it, but he’d labelled each shifter with an essential system that existed in Frank and connected to the Origen. Trowa studied it carefully but knew without referencing back to Harrison’s notes it was effectively gibberish to him.
“What does it do...basically?”
“Erases Frank’s automotive directive to act, makes him wait for a command. He can observe and gain as much intel as he likes, but has to give the controller all the information, just as Hatty sends all the information she gets to the laptop, or...you, really. Then the controller can process all the information and tell it what action to take.”
“Giving a decision making process back to a human, instead of a machine.”
In its current state, those decisions were being influenced by a human conscience, but it was still Frank making the final decisions and that clearly wasn’t working. This was an alternative that might work.
“It still leaves the colony in the situation of having a totalitarian society, where one person could end up with all the power,” Trowa warned and Giles shook his head.
“Not if we tell these people what’s going on. Not if they know how things work and they take equal responsibility for what has to be done. Sure, there will be some rich folks on Level 5 who will protest and try and take control for themselves, but they don’t own us. If we know what’s going on and what we need to do, the people here will do it, without complaint.”
Trowa looked carefully at the plans Giles had drawn up and the notes he had made and slowly gave in. The man had done the research, seemed to know what he was doing and it wasn’t like they didn’t have time to spare and the equipment to manage it.
“Okay...we finish the Pad replica, and then we do this. Worst that can happen is it doesn’t work and we’re back to where we are now. No harm done.”
Giles grinned and nodded in agreement, looking over the list of Pad parts they needed to make and getting started on the next one on the list. They were well past halfway already and Giles had made a few alterations to some of the major parts that meant they could ditch some of the older, more clunky bits and pieces, streamlining the process. He’d even managed to steal a few broken parts from the mechanics Hanger so they only had to repair them instead of entirely rebuilding.
“Thank you,” Trowa found himself saying in between repairing a piece of motherboard.
“For what?”
“Helping. You could have been a real pain in the ass, thrown a hissy fit, tried to tell someone what I was doing, caused all sorts of trouble. But you didn’t. Instead...I couldn’t have gotten this all done alone. I’d still be trying to steal extra batteries.”
Giles laughed at that and just shrugged, fiddling with an intricate set of wires, braiding them into a more manageable bunch and then sorting out which had come from where. It looked confusing but he seemed to manage it just fine while having a conversation. Trowa had to admire the skills Giles had acquired in his life. He was a very good mechanic.
“I’m old, not senile,” Giles noted in amusement. “Once you explained what was going on, I understood why you’d done what you did. You’re just trying to help people. Wouldn’t be much of a person if I interfered with that now, would I?”
Trowa supposed not. They settled back into their comfortable silence while Hatty sang alone to a Kyrie.
When it was time to go, Trowa was amused by Giles wanting to stick around a while longer and start on the container for his controller and Trowa agreed it would be a good idea, if he felt up to it, which he clearly did. Hatty was excited because she wasn’t going to be left alone in the dark.
She was not quite excited when Trowa packed up his things and got ready to leave.
“But why?” Was she pouting? There was definitely something odd going on with her mouth. Trowa winced.
“Because I need a shower, and food and to sleep, Hatty,” Trowa tried to explain and wondered why he was bothering. He didn’t really want to piss off the robot, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he did. At least, he didn’t think it would be but who really knew what she might do to him in if he did piss her off? She had already watched him sleep...what if she could gas him while he was asleep? That would suck. Killed by murderous robot while sleeping. Not exactly what he’d planned to have written on his grave.
“You can sleep with me,” Hatty pointed out, as if this were an entirely reasonably proposition. Giles and Trowa both just stopped and stared where they were getting the Pad ready to send him to His Room.
“You know...I think Hatty likes you,” Giles muttered, as if nervous they would be overheard. How good was Hatty’s hearing anyway?
“I think so too,” Trowa muttered back, not liking it at all. Why couldn’t she develop a crush on Giles, and what was a robot doing with a crush anyway? If Duo found out Trowa would never hear the end of it. As in Ever.
“Hatty...I need you to understand this. I love Wufei. He is my boyfriend and that is never going to change. When I get to see him, it makes all the stress and bad feelings that build up during the day disappear. I like seeing him, spending time with him and getting to sleep with him. So I need to go home in the evening to be with him, okay?”
She was quiet for a long time, thinking this over and Trowa waited it out, wanting to make sure she understood and wasn’t going to kill him in his sleep.
“You could bring him here, and sleep with me,” Hatty finally countered and Trowa sighed, looking to Giles for help. He was laughing hard at them both, shaking his head as he pushed Trowa onto the Pad and went back to set the controls to send him on his way.
“Go, go...I’ll try and explain things a little more to our charming Hatty.”
Trowa could have kissed the man, except Giles wasn’t the man he wanted to be kissing right then.
“Thanks, Giles. See you tomorrow Hatty!”
“See you,” Giles and Hatty replied together, but Giles followed it up with a ‘you owe me.’ Trowa couldn’t deny it and wondered what sort of beer the man drank.
He braced himself against the wall of the shower, taking deep breaths and telling himself it was getting better. Really. Only it really wasn’t, it still sucked and he wasn’t buying into the whole it gets better thing anymore. Anyone who believed that was an idiot with stomach cancer who’d lost all connection with his guts.
“Trowa?” Duo stuck his head in the door.
“Yeah, just...give me a minute.” Or ten, seriously it was not getting any easier. He hurriedly showered and got changed, excited to see Wufei and a little disappointed when he didn’t come in and join him, but when he emerged it was obvious why.
“Where’s Wufei?” The bed was empty.
“He wanted to go for a walk, so Heero’s taken him to the temple. They wanted to see the monk anyway, see if his brother’s name really is Harrison and what not.”
Trowa’s panic receded into a vague worry that Wufei would hurt himself or get tired, but being with Heero was very much like being in your own personal security bubble so he relaxed and went to lean against the bench, watching Duo get things ready for dinner. Some sort of stew apparently.
“You get up to much mischief today?”
“Got the rest of the details on the people in charge and tailed them for a bit, trying to get a feel for their daily routine but they’re so jumpy about the Origen being missing that it’s hard to tell what’s normal and what’s not. Made a few notes on it, but Heero agrees with me that we can’t take any of it as being concrete. How about you?”
“Giles and I finished some of the major parts of the replica. Just need to put the last few bits together tomorrow and we’re done. But we’re thinking of trying to build this other thing that might help us fix Frank.”
“Fix him?” Duo paused in stirring his pot and looked at him strangely. “Didn’t know he was broken.”
“I’ll explain better if we actually manage it. Really not sure it’ll work at all, we’re not exactly experts on the technology.” To put it mildly. They were both taking random guesses on a lot of things but Giles at least had some idea of what Harrison was talking about when he broke things down into their components.
“So your mechanic reported for duty this morning without you having to hunt him down?”
“Earlier than expected, with a pile of notes he’d made overnight,” Trowa rolled his eyes again. The man was far too eager to throw himself into more and more piles of work. He really needed a hobby. Or a girlfriend. Something, anyway.
“As I said, you make the strangest friends,” Duo laughed and Trowa thought of Hatty and was once again grateful Duo had no idea the idiot robot thought she had a crush on him.
He moved over to the bed and pulled out the components they had sent through, starting to assemble what he could and when Duo was finished his preparations he came down to the floor to help, a little stunned by just what Trowa had been up to the last few days. It was one thing to tell them about the technology he’d been messing with, it was another to get up close and personal. Trowa understood the awe a little too well and wished he didn’t.
It was another hour before the door opened and Heero helped Wufei inside. Trowa looked him up and down but there was no sign of injury, only sweat and a pleased turn of lips because he had managed a walk. He also looked a little surprised to walk in and find Trowa and Duo up to their elbows in grease and grime and the floor littered with parts.
“I didn’t realise how much of it there was.” So he had noticed the random things appearing under the bed. Trowa should have known he would.
Wufei went to shower and Trowa didn’t try to follow, focussing on getting as much assembled as he could without a few of the tools from the workshop. When they’d done as much as they could Heero helped them push it back under the bed and Trowa went in to the bathroom to wash his hands and help Wufei re-bandage himself.
“Where’d you walk to?”
“Just to the temple,” Wufei murmured, holding his arm out wearily while Trowa wound it tight in gauze. “Talked to Farrar for a bit. His brother’s name was Harrison.” He was at least telling them the truth, it was a good sign he could be trusted.
“Did you get what you wanted to get done?”
“Yeah. Giles has some good ideas too. He’s a great help. I think I can trust him as well.”
Wufei just nodded and when Trowa finished putting on the last bandage he was surprised when Wufei leaned in and wound his arms around his waist, hugging him tightly. Trowa didn’t protest, just pulled him in and held on, happy to do so for as long as Wufei wanted.
“I missed you.” It won a soft laugh from Trowa, because Wufei had no idea. He definitely wasn’t telling Wufei about Hatty and her strange crush, the man would laugh and then quite possibly decide the robot had to die, and he still needed her, so he would wait and tell him afterward. Maybe. It might be best just not to mention it at all. Giles could keep a secret, surely.
“I missed you too,” he admitted softly, still holding on as if someone might try to take Wufei from him and it didn’t seem such an irrational fear, all things considered. He held him so tightly that Wufei had to push away, forcing him to loosen his grip and he bit his lip to keep from protesting, reminding himself this was new and Wufei needed time. He needed to be able to breathe too, if he was going to live, but that felt minor somehow.
“You’ve been working really hard,” Wufei whispered, looking up at him with eyes like pools of darkness, sucking Trowa in and not letting him go. He could drown there, if only Wufei would let him. “It didn’t really sink in til I saw all the parts under the bed at lunchtime. It was why I wanted to go for a walk, I felt...not lazy, but inspired to do more I guess. I wanted to try as hard as you’ve been trying, to feel the effort of it I guess.” He sighed. “Does that sound stupid?”
“No,” Trowa replied immediately before his expression softened and he reached up to stroke Wufei’s cheek, wondering how in such disaster he had found such pleasure. How in such adversity his desires only thrived. “Not stupid at all.” Brave, not stupid, and they could definitely be the same thing so it really was saying something.
“Duo keeps asking me about you,” Wufei mused quietly and Trowa finally laughed, wondering where Duo got his perseverance, and if he didn’t have a death wish because asking Trowa for details of his personal life was one thing. Asking Wufei was another thing entirely.
“You don’t say...” It was obvious from his expression that Duo had been nagging him for days now and Wufei just laughed, a hand soothing a path up Trowa’s shoulder and over, wrapping around the back of his neck to draw him down and then Wufei was kissing him, lightly at first, drawing Trowa out of his weariness until the rest of the world faded and all that existed was Wufei’s mouth and the sweetness of his kiss. Then it deepened and there was heat and want and Trowa moaned into, losing himself to Wufei until it broke apart and he was left staring down into half lidded eyes, his own heavy breathing mingling with the soft pants of Wufei’s own.
“I want you.”
“Only you,” Wufei agreed. “But not in the shower cubicle of Your Room inside Frank.”
Trowa was immediately back to his senses, recalling Hatty and her incessant questions. Wanting to know why he slept in the same bed as Wufei and asking him to bring Wufei back to the Hanger so they could all sleep together. Immediately disturbed, he swallowed past the dry lump in his throat and forced a smile, nodding emphatically to Wufei. Definitely not anywhere inside of Frank.
Wufei released him and Trowa forced himself to follow him out into the main room where Duo was dishing up his stew, casting curious glances at them both but staying his tongue.
Trowa ate in silence, aware of Wufei leaning against him, content to just be together. He wondered if Hatty was watching them. He wondered if Giles was still with her, or if he had gone home. He wondered if Hatty understood why Wufei was leaning against him, if she had any comprehension of why his heart felt too large for his chest. He wondered if she knew anything of longing and if she could wait for years before someone showed they felt the same way, and if she could still love them as strongly all those years later. He wondered if No would change her mind, or if she could continue to feel the same way, despite rejection. He wondered if she understood what Yes could mean.
He hoped she understood possibility. Because without that, a thousand Hatty’s could replace the Origen and it would make no difference. Until a machine understood that the future was not concrete; that choices built a thousand bridges into the infinity of what could be...until then, a machine was just a machine, and if it held control of their fates they were doomed.
Trowa didn’t want to be doomed. He wanted the infinite possibilities he felt in Wufei’s fingertips when they caressed his skin. He wanted the many futures he saw open up to him when Wufei pressed against his side and the heat of his body mingled with his own. He wanted to drown in the vague uncertainty of what might or might not be every time Wufei’s dark gaze met his own.
The future wasn’t written in stone. It couldn’t be calculated. You could ask the Origen to tell you what to do, but nothing was concrete. Not even the Origen could make something happen. Mankind didn’t have a finite answer, and until it did Frank couldn’t be allowed to win. Frank wasn’t the answer to humanity, the people he homed were, and while he sat there eating his stew, Trowa thought Giles was right. The answer wasn’t to better themselves at all.
The answer was to accept that they were flawed, with good reason. The answer was to allow mistakes. The answer wasn’t frank, it was to be simple. Ease and error.
The answer was human. Not machine.
“Morning Triton.”
Giles found him before he’d managed to even put his backpack down, surprising even Trowa and he just clung his backpack back over his shoulder and followed the man out of his Hanger and back over to the broken Pad.
“Morning,” Trowa muttered, still sipping on his take away coffee.
“I had a few ideas for the new Pad, and for Hatty actually, so I drew up these plans and thought I’d run them by you...”
The man had what? Trowa just stared at the notebook he thrust into his hands, not bothering to read it until they got to Hanger101, and then cast an amused look at Giles. The man was a workaholic, and way too enthusiastic. It was a little creepy, really.
“You know it’s not healthy to take your work home with you,” Trowa muttered but Giles was just grinning at him, ready to get to it. They got to the broken Pad and Trowa felt a little better about things when Giles doubled over and puked again while he merely staggered forward to the table and sat down in front of Hatty.
“Oh, don’t worry, Triton! It gets easier, I promise!” Were they just programmed to tell you that to make you feel better? Trowa glared up at her and didn’t bother replying, batting away her hands when she tried to pet his head.
“Stop that!” He checked on what she had been doing all night, not at all surprised to see she had done exactly as requested and monitored Giles.
“Aww, isn’t that sweet. Hatty watched you scribble down your ideas all night.”
Giles just glared at him as he staggered to the other seat and sat, still looking sick. Hatty pet his head and Giles shuddered but put up with it, which was more than Trowa could say for himself.
“He didn’t sleep for very long,” Hatty observed. “You slept much longer,” Hatty observed curiously and Trowa frowned up at her. She had spied on him all night as well. Great. “And he slept alone, but you didn’t...” Definitely uncool!
“Hatty...why did you watch me?”
“Because I wanted to,” She observed as if it were obvious. She clearly saw no problem with it and he didn’t know how to begin explaining the concept of stalking to a machine. If she really was a machine. He was beginning to understand just how fine the line was between machine and ‘something else’.
“Why did you sleep with someone else?” That she sounded both curious and jealous made Trowa feel cold and anxious and he stopped checking over the laptop and stared at her instead. Not wanting to have this conversation with Duo seemed childish now, when he was apparently going to have to have it with something far, far less appealing.
“Wufei is my boyfriend, Hatty. I always sleep with him.” Or he was going to from now on. She didn’t need to know it was a new thing, or that Wufei could choose not to be his boyfriend. She just needed cold hard facts and the ones that suited him best were Wufei was his boyfriend and he slept in his bed, no exceptions.
“Why?” Did machines really need a why? What was she, like five?
“Because I like it.”
She was quiet, thinking it over, and Trowa had no idea what there was to think about. Wufei was his, and he liked it when they slept together, end of story.
“I don’t like it,” she said eventually and even Giles was frowning at her now. What did she know of like? What did she know of love...they were questions that had plagued his dreams long after he climbed out of the shower with Wufei and went to bed, letting Wufei tug him into his lap for once and falling into sleep. He hadn’t come on this mission expecting to have to comprehend the level of humanity attainable by a being a man had made in a laboratory, but he feared he was going to have to do so before he was able to return home.
“You don’t have to like it, Hatty, you just have to know it’s true. Wufei is my boyfriend, I love him, and we sleep together in the same bed because we both like it.”
She was quiet again and he was relieved by the silence, taking deep breaths and letting his thoughts settle into some sense of normalcy, if such a thing were even possible in Frank.
“Creepy, having to explain your personal life to a robot,” Giles grumbled, but he was pulling out the journals and reading over Harry’s notes, making his own notes on the drawings he’d made last nights and Trowa left him to it, going to collect the next lot of parts he needed to complete the next piece of the Pad replica, sitting down on the floor where he could spread things out more and getting to work. It took an hour for Hatty to stop sulking and start singing again.
“Hatty, who taught you to sing?”
“Harrison taught me! He was a great singer!” In her mind, Harrison’s or fact? He didn’t dare to ask.
“Do you have a music archive?”
“Of course! Let me see...oh, I have a work playlist? Harrison made it, would you like to listen?”
“Yes please,” Trowa agreed, more curious than anything, and suddenly Bach’s toccata was playing through speakers Harrison had placed strategically around the Hanger. Hatty still sung along, but it was more amusing than anything.
“La la la la! La la la la! La di di, la di di, la di di di la di daaaaaa.”
The music helped Trowa find his space again, settling into the empty feeling and letting his hands work. It felt good, to not over think anything, to just know he had to do a particular job, in this case build something, with no other agenda. It felt like old times and while he doubted it was a sign of good mental health to enjoy being in a war, he thought there were particular skills a person learnt in that environment that people would have found useful in times of peace. Resilience being primes among them. Normal people had none, and it drove him half mad.
“La di da di, la di da di, la di da di, la di da di...”
Giles moved to the floor sometime later, and when Trowa finished his next component he moved to help Giles assemble the battery packs, not even blinking when Giles had to go back to the main Hanger to steal some extra batteries. He returned not a half hour later and they finished the packs, moving on to the next component.
“So I was thinking about Hatty and the newer model and the only difference I can see is that the new model is capable of integrating its human responses with its mechanical, right? As in, it’s human brain is capable of merging with some part of the machinery and it all works together to simulate human responses...at least, that’s as much as I could understand from Harry’s notes?”
“That’s about it,” Trowa agreed, not sure where this was going.
“Yeah, well, so...the problem is the System, Frank, is too intelligent. He runs all our systems but he’s also always thinking about the next step; the things people haven’t thought about yet. People dream about the future and make plans, but those plans change. Frank is making concrete plans; he’s not allowing for a changeable future.”
It wasn’t something Trowa had thought about and he wondered why Giles had, even if the man had no real personal life. When Trowa went home the last thing he wanted to think about was Frank’s motives, he was trying to leave that up to Duo and Heero, who definitely hadn’t considered whatever Giles was talking about as far as he could tell.
“ The problem isn’t that the System isn’t working, the problem is that it’s too good,” Giles concluded. “If you want to fix it, you don’t need to replace the Origen with a replica that’s going to do just as good a job. You need to hinder it with something that’s going to do a crappy job.”
Trowa blinked at him and then looked over at Hatty, not sure Giles really understood what he was talking about, but equally sure he’d given it a lot more thought than Trowa had, which was to say nearly none. His focus was getting Wufei home, he didn’t think it a bad focus.
“You want to plug Hatty into Frank...instead of Nataku.”
“Maybe, I’m not sure yet, but I think before you look at possibly destroying the colony you need to look at other options. The people here haven’t done anything wrong, and they’re happy...genuinely so. Do you realise how rare that is? To have community that actually cares, not just about its own immediately group of friends, but about the whole?” Giles shook his head and it was clear he knew it was rare, that he’d experiences places that weren’t like that and Trowa was forced to think of his son, and the fact that it wasn’t his death that pained Giles the most, but the fact it was so pointless. It wasn’t just that a child had stabbed his son for money neither of them had, but that his son had bled to death there because no one had come to his aid. Trowa had to admit that would never happen here. If someone was injured, everyone dove in to help. He knew, because his jaw was the talk of the military and every random stranger he spotted had come to offer him advice on remedies their great great something had tau
ght them that worked wonders on bruises. And if they didn’t have a great great whatever or a remedy to offer they just came to ask if he was okay and if there was anything they could do, which got really annoying when you were trying to sneak around and get to Hanger101 without anyone noticing.
Community mattered to these people. They understood its value and Giles wasn’t willing to give up on it.
“I think we need to dumb Frank down; make him less intelligent, take out the processes that make him think it’s okay to decide anything! Go back to letting humans make the decisions. Much like what we do here; you give Hatty an instruction and she follows through, but she’s not making any decisions on her own.”
“You mean, apart from watching me sleep,” Trowa rolled his eyes and Giles just chuckled. But he was thinking about it, and Giles could be right. They were looking for more advanced ways to beat Frank; ways to trick him with replacements like Nataku, or ways to get around him but they weren’t thinking about the problem itself, which was as simple as Harrison having gotten carried away with what he could achieve, trying to combine the master and its creation instead of letting them remain separate entities.
Only God could separate and be one at the same time. Trowa wondered if there wasn’t a reason for that after all.
“It could work,” he agreed softly, looking over at Hatty where she was singing and waving her arms around in what he could only assume was her concept of dancing to Brahms’ lullaby.
“That’s what I thought! So I thought we could build this converter...” Giles flipped through his notes to what looked like a giant mixing desk. Duo would have loved it, but he’d labelled each shifter with an essential system that existed in Frank and connected to the Origen. Trowa studied it carefully but knew without referencing back to Harrison’s notes it was effectively gibberish to him.
“What does it do...basically?”
“Erases Frank’s automotive directive to act, makes him wait for a command. He can observe and gain as much intel as he likes, but has to give the controller all the information, just as Hatty sends all the information she gets to the laptop, or...you, really. Then the controller can process all the information and tell it what action to take.”
“Giving a decision making process back to a human, instead of a machine.”
In its current state, those decisions were being influenced by a human conscience, but it was still Frank making the final decisions and that clearly wasn’t working. This was an alternative that might work.
“It still leaves the colony in the situation of having a totalitarian society, where one person could end up with all the power,” Trowa warned and Giles shook his head.
“Not if we tell these people what’s going on. Not if they know how things work and they take equal responsibility for what has to be done. Sure, there will be some rich folks on Level 5 who will protest and try and take control for themselves, but they don’t own us. If we know what’s going on and what we need to do, the people here will do it, without complaint.”
Trowa looked carefully at the plans Giles had drawn up and the notes he had made and slowly gave in. The man had done the research, seemed to know what he was doing and it wasn’t like they didn’t have time to spare and the equipment to manage it.
“Okay...we finish the Pad replica, and then we do this. Worst that can happen is it doesn’t work and we’re back to where we are now. No harm done.”
Giles grinned and nodded in agreement, looking over the list of Pad parts they needed to make and getting started on the next one on the list. They were well past halfway already and Giles had made a few alterations to some of the major parts that meant they could ditch some of the older, more clunky bits and pieces, streamlining the process. He’d even managed to steal a few broken parts from the mechanics Hanger so they only had to repair them instead of entirely rebuilding.
“Thank you,” Trowa found himself saying in between repairing a piece of motherboard.
“For what?”
“Helping. You could have been a real pain in the ass, thrown a hissy fit, tried to tell someone what I was doing, caused all sorts of trouble. But you didn’t. Instead...I couldn’t have gotten this all done alone. I’d still be trying to steal extra batteries.”
Giles laughed at that and just shrugged, fiddling with an intricate set of wires, braiding them into a more manageable bunch and then sorting out which had come from where. It looked confusing but he seemed to manage it just fine while having a conversation. Trowa had to admire the skills Giles had acquired in his life. He was a very good mechanic.
“I’m old, not senile,” Giles noted in amusement. “Once you explained what was going on, I understood why you’d done what you did. You’re just trying to help people. Wouldn’t be much of a person if I interfered with that now, would I?”
Trowa supposed not. They settled back into their comfortable silence while Hatty sang alone to a Kyrie.
When it was time to go, Trowa was amused by Giles wanting to stick around a while longer and start on the container for his controller and Trowa agreed it would be a good idea, if he felt up to it, which he clearly did. Hatty was excited because she wasn’t going to be left alone in the dark.
She was not quite excited when Trowa packed up his things and got ready to leave.
“But why?” Was she pouting? There was definitely something odd going on with her mouth. Trowa winced.
“Because I need a shower, and food and to sleep, Hatty,” Trowa tried to explain and wondered why he was bothering. He didn’t really want to piss off the robot, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he did. At least, he didn’t think it would be but who really knew what she might do to him in if he did piss her off? She had already watched him sleep...what if she could gas him while he was asleep? That would suck. Killed by murderous robot while sleeping. Not exactly what he’d planned to have written on his grave.
“You can sleep with me,” Hatty pointed out, as if this were an entirely reasonably proposition. Giles and Trowa both just stopped and stared where they were getting the Pad ready to send him to His Room.
“You know...I think Hatty likes you,” Giles muttered, as if nervous they would be overheard. How good was Hatty’s hearing anyway?
“I think so too,” Trowa muttered back, not liking it at all. Why couldn’t she develop a crush on Giles, and what was a robot doing with a crush anyway? If Duo found out Trowa would never hear the end of it. As in Ever.
“Hatty...I need you to understand this. I love Wufei. He is my boyfriend and that is never going to change. When I get to see him, it makes all the stress and bad feelings that build up during the day disappear. I like seeing him, spending time with him and getting to sleep with him. So I need to go home in the evening to be with him, okay?”
She was quiet for a long time, thinking this over and Trowa waited it out, wanting to make sure she understood and wasn’t going to kill him in his sleep.
“You could bring him here, and sleep with me,” Hatty finally countered and Trowa sighed, looking to Giles for help. He was laughing hard at them both, shaking his head as he pushed Trowa onto the Pad and went back to set the controls to send him on his way.
“Go, go...I’ll try and explain things a little more to our charming Hatty.”
Trowa could have kissed the man, except Giles wasn’t the man he wanted to be kissing right then.
“Thanks, Giles. See you tomorrow Hatty!”
“See you,” Giles and Hatty replied together, but Giles followed it up with a ‘you owe me.’ Trowa couldn’t deny it and wondered what sort of beer the man drank.
He braced himself against the wall of the shower, taking deep breaths and telling himself it was getting better. Really. Only it really wasn’t, it still sucked and he wasn’t buying into the whole it gets better thing anymore. Anyone who believed that was an idiot with stomach cancer who’d lost all connection with his guts.
“Trowa?” Duo stuck his head in the door.
“Yeah, just...give me a minute.” Or ten, seriously it was not getting any easier. He hurriedly showered and got changed, excited to see Wufei and a little disappointed when he didn’t come in and join him, but when he emerged it was obvious why.
“Where’s Wufei?” The bed was empty.
“He wanted to go for a walk, so Heero’s taken him to the temple. They wanted to see the monk anyway, see if his brother’s name really is Harrison and what not.”
Trowa’s panic receded into a vague worry that Wufei would hurt himself or get tired, but being with Heero was very much like being in your own personal security bubble so he relaxed and went to lean against the bench, watching Duo get things ready for dinner. Some sort of stew apparently.
“You get up to much mischief today?”
“Got the rest of the details on the people in charge and tailed them for a bit, trying to get a feel for their daily routine but they’re so jumpy about the Origen being missing that it’s hard to tell what’s normal and what’s not. Made a few notes on it, but Heero agrees with me that we can’t take any of it as being concrete. How about you?”
“Giles and I finished some of the major parts of the replica. Just need to put the last few bits together tomorrow and we’re done. But we’re thinking of trying to build this other thing that might help us fix Frank.”
“Fix him?” Duo paused in stirring his pot and looked at him strangely. “Didn’t know he was broken.”
“I’ll explain better if we actually manage it. Really not sure it’ll work at all, we’re not exactly experts on the technology.” To put it mildly. They were both taking random guesses on a lot of things but Giles at least had some idea of what Harrison was talking about when he broke things down into their components.
“So your mechanic reported for duty this morning without you having to hunt him down?”
“Earlier than expected, with a pile of notes he’d made overnight,” Trowa rolled his eyes again. The man was far too eager to throw himself into more and more piles of work. He really needed a hobby. Or a girlfriend. Something, anyway.
“As I said, you make the strangest friends,” Duo laughed and Trowa thought of Hatty and was once again grateful Duo had no idea the idiot robot thought she had a crush on him.
He moved over to the bed and pulled out the components they had sent through, starting to assemble what he could and when Duo was finished his preparations he came down to the floor to help, a little stunned by just what Trowa had been up to the last few days. It was one thing to tell them about the technology he’d been messing with, it was another to get up close and personal. Trowa understood the awe a little too well and wished he didn’t.
It was another hour before the door opened and Heero helped Wufei inside. Trowa looked him up and down but there was no sign of injury, only sweat and a pleased turn of lips because he had managed a walk. He also looked a little surprised to walk in and find Trowa and Duo up to their elbows in grease and grime and the floor littered with parts.
“I didn’t realise how much of it there was.” So he had noticed the random things appearing under the bed. Trowa should have known he would.
Wufei went to shower and Trowa didn’t try to follow, focussing on getting as much assembled as he could without a few of the tools from the workshop. When they’d done as much as they could Heero helped them push it back under the bed and Trowa went in to the bathroom to wash his hands and help Wufei re-bandage himself.
“Where’d you walk to?”
“Just to the temple,” Wufei murmured, holding his arm out wearily while Trowa wound it tight in gauze. “Talked to Farrar for a bit. His brother’s name was Harrison.” He was at least telling them the truth, it was a good sign he could be trusted.
“Did you get what you wanted to get done?”
“Yeah. Giles has some good ideas too. He’s a great help. I think I can trust him as well.”
Wufei just nodded and when Trowa finished putting on the last bandage he was surprised when Wufei leaned in and wound his arms around his waist, hugging him tightly. Trowa didn’t protest, just pulled him in and held on, happy to do so for as long as Wufei wanted.
“I missed you.” It won a soft laugh from Trowa, because Wufei had no idea. He definitely wasn’t telling Wufei about Hatty and her strange crush, the man would laugh and then quite possibly decide the robot had to die, and he still needed her, so he would wait and tell him afterward. Maybe. It might be best just not to mention it at all. Giles could keep a secret, surely.
“I missed you too,” he admitted softly, still holding on as if someone might try to take Wufei from him and it didn’t seem such an irrational fear, all things considered. He held him so tightly that Wufei had to push away, forcing him to loosen his grip and he bit his lip to keep from protesting, reminding himself this was new and Wufei needed time. He needed to be able to breathe too, if he was going to live, but that felt minor somehow.
“You’ve been working really hard,” Wufei whispered, looking up at him with eyes like pools of darkness, sucking Trowa in and not letting him go. He could drown there, if only Wufei would let him. “It didn’t really sink in til I saw all the parts under the bed at lunchtime. It was why I wanted to go for a walk, I felt...not lazy, but inspired to do more I guess. I wanted to try as hard as you’ve been trying, to feel the effort of it I guess.” He sighed. “Does that sound stupid?”
“No,” Trowa replied immediately before his expression softened and he reached up to stroke Wufei’s cheek, wondering how in such disaster he had found such pleasure. How in such adversity his desires only thrived. “Not stupid at all.” Brave, not stupid, and they could definitely be the same thing so it really was saying something.
“Duo keeps asking me about you,” Wufei mused quietly and Trowa finally laughed, wondering where Duo got his perseverance, and if he didn’t have a death wish because asking Trowa for details of his personal life was one thing. Asking Wufei was another thing entirely.
“You don’t say...” It was obvious from his expression that Duo had been nagging him for days now and Wufei just laughed, a hand soothing a path up Trowa’s shoulder and over, wrapping around the back of his neck to draw him down and then Wufei was kissing him, lightly at first, drawing Trowa out of his weariness until the rest of the world faded and all that existed was Wufei’s mouth and the sweetness of his kiss. Then it deepened and there was heat and want and Trowa moaned into, losing himself to Wufei until it broke apart and he was left staring down into half lidded eyes, his own heavy breathing mingling with the soft pants of Wufei’s own.
“I want you.”
“Only you,” Wufei agreed. “But not in the shower cubicle of Your Room inside Frank.”
Trowa was immediately back to his senses, recalling Hatty and her incessant questions. Wanting to know why he slept in the same bed as Wufei and asking him to bring Wufei back to the Hanger so they could all sleep together. Immediately disturbed, he swallowed past the dry lump in his throat and forced a smile, nodding emphatically to Wufei. Definitely not anywhere inside of Frank.
Wufei released him and Trowa forced himself to follow him out into the main room where Duo was dishing up his stew, casting curious glances at them both but staying his tongue.
Trowa ate in silence, aware of Wufei leaning against him, content to just be together. He wondered if Hatty was watching them. He wondered if Giles was still with her, or if he had gone home. He wondered if Hatty understood why Wufei was leaning against him, if she had any comprehension of why his heart felt too large for his chest. He wondered if she knew anything of longing and if she could wait for years before someone showed they felt the same way, and if she could still love them as strongly all those years later. He wondered if No would change her mind, or if she could continue to feel the same way, despite rejection. He wondered if she understood what Yes could mean.
He hoped she understood possibility. Because without that, a thousand Hatty’s could replace the Origen and it would make no difference. Until a machine understood that the future was not concrete; that choices built a thousand bridges into the infinity of what could be...until then, a machine was just a machine, and if it held control of their fates they were doomed.
Trowa didn’t want to be doomed. He wanted the infinite possibilities he felt in Wufei’s fingertips when they caressed his skin. He wanted the many futures he saw open up to him when Wufei pressed against his side and the heat of his body mingled with his own. He wanted to drown in the vague uncertainty of what might or might not be every time Wufei’s dark gaze met his own.
The future wasn’t written in stone. It couldn’t be calculated. You could ask the Origen to tell you what to do, but nothing was concrete. Not even the Origen could make something happen. Mankind didn’t have a finite answer, and until it did Frank couldn’t be allowed to win. Frank wasn’t the answer to humanity, the people he homed were, and while he sat there eating his stew, Trowa thought Giles was right. The answer wasn’t to better themselves at all.
The answer was to accept that they were flawed, with good reason. The answer was to allow mistakes. The answer wasn’t frank, it was to be simple. Ease and error.
The answer was human. Not machine.