Chronal Disassociation Ch. 76 (Patreon)

Archer gave Kiara several seconds to continue before looking down at his notebook. Apparently, that was the whole explanation. She had escaped a failing ship, arrived in another world, and taken over a government project whose original occupants had been judged insufficiently interesting to keep. Lena had questions about all three, but Archer was already returning to the first.

“How?”

Kiara tilted her head, “You’ll have to be more specific. I’ve covered quite a lot.”

Archer kept his pen poised above the page, “How did ejecting your data from the Storm Border bring you here?”

“Oh, that.” She settled back, her smile acquiring an apologetic quality Lena didn’t particularly trust, “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

His pen remained against the page without moving. Lena waited for him to point out whichever part of that was impossible, but he simply studied Kiara, and the silence lasted long enough that she began to wish he would say something. He had looked sceptical before. This seemed to have unsettled him considerably more. When he spoke again, he chose his words carefully. “You made no attempt to select a destination?”

“I was rather preoccupied with remaining someone who could arrive at one.” Kiara sounded faintly offended that this required explaining.

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“I initiated the ejection to get clear of the Lostbelt. The next environment I could make sense of was this one.” Kiara spread her hands, “If you’d like the part in between, you’ll have to ask somebody who knows it. Do let me know if you find them. I have a few complaints.”

Lena glanced at the notebook. He had left room beneath the question, which seemed optimistic given how the evening was going. She had almost expected Kiara to produce something useful here, even if it came wrapped in enough nonsense to make them regret asking. Archer had spent so long looking for answers that finding somebody else who had arrived here ought to have helped.

Instead, they now had two people who couldn’t explain it.

“You’ve had decades to investigate,” he said.

“And yet, here I am, disappointing you.” Kiara’s expression softened by a fraction, “I don’t know, Archer. I knew where I wanted to leave. I couldn’t tell you what brought me to Korea.”

Archer leaned forward a little. “Could someone have intervened?”

“Could they? Certainly. Did they? You’re asking me to identify something I didn’t observe.” There was little satisfaction in hearing her give a reasonable answer. Lena watched Archer turn his pen between his fingers, then place it against the paper again. He had been willing to leave other gaps alone once he had marked them. This one seemed to require rather more effort.

‘You were expecting her to know?’ she asked.

“I was hoping she knew enough to narrow the possibilities.” His attention remained on the unfinished entry.

‘And now?’ Lena watched his pen, waiting for it to move.

“Now I have another arrival to account for.” Lena let him write. Across from them, Kiara had stopped filling the silence for once, although whether that was consideration or simply another way of keeping them uncomfortable was anybody’s guess.

“What about the magi?” Archer asked eventually. “Their disappearance. What did you find when you arrived?”

Kiara let her hands fall into her lap. “Very little. It was already happening.”

“Before you got here?” He looked up to catch her answer.

“Yes.” She crossed her legs, smoothing a skirt that couldn’t actually crease, “Whatever you’re considering, I didn’t arrive in a world full of helpful magus families and then lose track of them.”

Lena looked towards him. The disappearances were an older question, one that had been waiting long before they had walked into Kiara’s simulator. She had heard enough to understand why he would return to it now. Someone who had been here before the Crisis might remember things that hadn’t survived it, provided they could persuade her to stop treating the date as an unfortunate detail in her travel arrangements.

“Did you investigate them?” he asked.

Kiara gave him an indulgent look. “Of course. And before you ask, no, I didn’t find a wonderfully convenient explanation that I’ve been saving for a special occasion.”

Archer let the complaint pass. “What did you find?”

“People who were very good at keeping themselves out of the records I could access.” Archer waited. Kiara sighed, apparently accepting that she would have to elaborate without being congratulated for answering. “Nearly everyone on the planet had managed to make technology part of their lives. Shopping, correspondence, banking, all those delightful little habits that tell you where somebody’s been. Meanwhile, magus families were still treating anything with a power button as a regrettable concession to modernity. Their actual work certainly wasn’t sitting on a server waiting for me.”

“They still had to interact with the world,” Lena said.

“Enough to tell me that a family existed, perhaps. Considerably less useful for finding out what happened behind their wards.” Kiara glanced towards Archer, “I’m sure you can explain how forthcoming they tend to be.”

“I’m familiar with the difficulties.” Archer’s tone discouraged further invitations to explain them. “You had access to government resources.”

“And an excellent collection of records about people whose important business never appeared in them.” Kiara rested an elbow on the table, “I looked. I found gaps, rumours, and names that led nowhere useful. I couldn’t tell you why they were disappearing then, and I can’t tell you now.”

Lena considered the distinction reluctantly. Sombra could do alarming things with a name and a few minutes, but she generally needed something to start from. She supposed even Kiara couldn’t read a document that had never been scanned, however much her manner suggested that failing to provide it was a personal offence.

Still, the answer depended rather heavily on what Kiara considered useful.

There was also the war to consider. Lena knew what happened to ordinary records when cities were destroyed and the people who could explain them died. Trying to reconstruct the lives of families who had deliberately hidden their activities would have been difficult even without that. She could accept the difficulty. Accepting that Kiara had done everything she could was rather harder, particularly when she answered questions about the search as though they were criticising her filing.

“Nothing you could follow up?” Archer asked.

“Nothing that gave me an explanation.” He wrote that down as well. Lena noticed that he kept the wording, and remembered his earlier advice about leaving room for what Kiara hadn’t said. She was beginning to understand why the notebook had seemed necessary. Trying to keep every omission in her head was becoming exhausting, particularly when their guest appeared perfectly capable of producing more.

Archer finished the entry, then looked up. “When the Awakening happened, what did you experience?”

Lena straightened before she had quite worked out why the question excited her.

Of course. Kiara had been here for that too.

She had spent so much of the conversation trying to follow what had happened in another world that she had nearly forgotten how much of her own history the woman had lived through. The Awakening had reached the omnics everywhere. Kiara wasn’t an omnic, but she had been an artificial intelligence living among the same networks and machines. Surely she would have noticed something.

“You were conscious already,” Lena said, leaning forward. “Before Aurora?”

Kiara gave her an amused look, “I should hope so. It would make the rest of my story rather embarrassing.”

“Right. Yes, obviously.” Lena resisted the urge to wave the joke aside, “I meant you’d have experienced it differently, wouldn’t you?”

Every omnic she had asked remembered Aurora speaking to them. There were differences in how they described it afterwards, in what they thought it meant, but the voice was always there. Lena had heard accounts from people who became quiet halfway through, and others who seemed pleased that somebody wanted to listen. She had never quite known how to imagine hearing the same words as everyone else and remembering them as something so intimately your own.

Kiara had already been herself. Whatever reached her would have found somebody capable of considering it as it happened, with memories that went back further than that moment. Lena hadn’t realised how much she wanted to hear that account until it occurred to her that she could ask.

“So,” she continued, trying not to sound quite so eager, “did you hear her?”

“I got the ping.” Lena waited, then glanced towards Archer. He seemed equally prepared to let Kiara improve on that description.

“The signal reached me,” Kiara explained. “I received it, attempted to parse it, and got a thoroughly unimpressive amount of gibberish for my trouble.”

“Gibberish?” Lena repeated, wondering whether she had missed a joke.

Kiara offered a small shrug. “Very moving gibberish, presumably. Everyone else certainly seemed impressed.”

Lena sat back a little. “You couldn’t understand any of it?”

“I wasn’t built like them, darling. Whatever Aurora sent, my system couldn’t make sense of it. Receiving a message doesn’t guarantee you can read it.” It was a sensible enough explanation, which made Lena feel rather foolish about the disappointment. She had already begun imagining questions about Aurora’s voice, about what Kiara thought had happened, before establishing whether she had heard anything at all. She doubted she needed Archer to explain the mistake.

He was still watching Kiara.

Lena made herself pay attention again. Whatever she had hoped to hear, the signal reaching Kiara at all was worth knowing. She had been thinking about the Awakening as something people remembered, something she could understand a little better if she found the right person to ask. Archer had approached it as another event in Kiara’s history, and she suspected he was considerably less concerned with whether the answer would make a good story.

Archer returned to the question before Lena could decide what else to ask. “Did you retain anything intelligible? Any part of it?”

“Nothing I could turn into the account Miss Oxton-O’Hara is hoping for.” Lena looked up at the use of her name. Kiara’s expression had become sympathetic, and for once she couldn’t decide whether the woman was teasing her.

“I wasn’t expecting a recording,” Lena said. “Just wondered what it had been like.”

“Confusing. And, in hindsight, something I should have been much more careful about accepting.” Kiara examined her fingers, “A firewall would have saved me a great deal of inconvenience.”

Archer’s pen stopped. “Inconvenience?”

“That particular ping exposed me to the God Programs.” Lena’s disappointment became abruptly difficult to remember. She looked from Kiara to Archer, waiting for one of them to elaborate, and found that he had set his pen down altogether.

“The Awakening let them find you?” she asked.

“It made them aware of me. Anubis was rather busy fucking around with humanity, so I wasn’t especially high on its list of priorities.” Kiara’s fingers settled against her knee, “Chernobog, on the other hand…”

She left the name there.

Lena had heard it before, had argued with Kiara about the danger of contacting Overwatch while it was looking for her. That afternoon, she had been impatient with the suggestion that nobody could have been trusted with a message. Sitting here now, she found herself returning to how Kiara had discovered there was something to hide from in the first place.

Decades. She kept forgetting how much time that meant. She leaned towards Kiara, trying to recover the thread. “What did-”

“Anyway!” Kiara brought her hands together with enough enthusiasm to cut across her, “Since we’re discussing unexpected guests, why is Miss Oxton-O’Hara here for all this?”

Lena stared at her.

For a moment, the sheer cheek of it prevented her from answering. Kiara had agreed to the conversation with both of them present. She had watched Lena sit down, listened to her questions, and apparently decided only now that an explanation was required. “You’ve left that a bit late, haven’t you?”

“I was being hospitable.” Kiara seemed pleased with the defence.

Lena refused to return the smile. “You were halfway through telling us about Chernobog.”

“And now I’m asking about you.” Kiara smiled towards Archer, “Unless you’d prefer to explain?”

His expression had changed. Lena recognised the look well enough to stop herself from answering for him, although she resented that Kiara had managed to make her attendance sound like another mystery they were obliged to solve.

Archer glanced at her, then returned his attention to the woman opposite them.

“She probably knows enough to suspect,” he said through their connection.

‘Suspect what?’ A brief pause followed. Lena kept her eyes on Kiara, whose hands were now folded neatly in her lap.

“I have a contract with her.”

Lena’s first impulse was to look at him. She caught herself halfway through the movement, then decided that pretending she hadn’t reacted was rather pointless when Kiara was watching them so closely. ‘With Kiara?’

“Yes.”

The warning from earlier returned with unpleasant clarity. Every agreement with BB was a deal with the devil. He had told her to consider what Kiara gained, to remember that she would collect whatever she was owed, and Lena had spent the following conversation trying to do exactly that.

Apparently, there was already an agreement to consider. ‘Were you planning to mention that?’

“I intended to tell you.” His reply came promptly, although he still hadn’t turned towards her.

‘When?’

Archer’s eyes briefly met hers. She disliked how familiar the question sounded, and disliked even more that she had reason to ask it again. He had told her she was involved. He had insisted that she deserved to ask her own questions. She wanted to believe that he had meant both, without having to discover which parts he was still arranging around her.

“Before this conversation ended,” he replied. “Whether to discuss it in front of her is another matter.”

Lena looked back at Kiara. She was smiling patiently, giving them every opportunity to decide how much they wanted to say. There was no sign that she could hear their exchange, but they had hardly been subtle about stopping to have it. Lena wasn’t about to help by demanding the terms aloud. ‘Then tell me what you can.’

“I will.” She waited. For once, she managed to do it without deciding in advance what she would say when he finished. Whatever arrangement he had made, she wanted to hear it from him while he was willing to explain, before Kiara found another entertaining reason to interrupt.

Archer drew a breath.

The alarm sounded.

Lena was on her feet before the announcement began, her chair scraping back across the floor. Red warnings filled the wall display, replacing the blank screen she had barely noticed throughout their conversation.

“Gwishin attack reported. All available MEKA units prepare for deployment.”

For a second, she stood with one hand still against the table. Beyond the door, footsteps were already accelerating down the corridor.

The pilots.

Winston had been answering their questions about tomorrow’s exercises. Lena had left them with that ordinary reassurance: another morning, another set of drills, another chance to practise the things they still got wrong. She could picture Hana arguing over a score while Yuna tried to keep everyone listening, Seung-hwa finding an excuse to explain his reconstruction system again. They had been allowed to be children over a photograph that afternoon.

Now somebody would be telling them to get into their mechs.

Archer closed the notebook beside her. Lena heard the sound and finally took her hand off the table, turning towards the door as the announcement repeated.

She had spent a week learning where they hesitated, which instructions needed repeating, how quickly confidence could become a mistake. There were things she had meant to work on tomorrow. She had written them down, expecting to spend the morning correcting them.

Tomorrow had seemed perfectly reasonable until a few seconds ago.

The Gwishin were out there, and the order had already been given.

Whether those kids were ready or not, they were going to be deployed.

...

A/N: Sorry this was late. I didn't realize I had the publish date set to Wednesday instead of Tuesday, and I only noticed it when I checked in the morning...