itstopped | Re-Entry 08: Video/Spam

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Re-Entry 08: Video/Spam

Help!

[The cry goes out while the video is still turning on. The picture, when it appears, is chaotic: Felix Gaeta, ashen grey and soaked with sweat and tears of panic, but only for a second before the shaking camera turns on what looks like an empty Western ghost town, caught from a high vantage point, shingles visible at the bottom of the screen.

Not empty. There are snarls and yowls and a terrifyingly organic sound coming from below.

Felix's voice cuts in again, tight with fear. He's not a hero. He's not a fighter. He's the one at the controls, and for all that he's usually good at staying calm in a crisis, it's a lot frakking easier when there's a console between him and it. He sounds a little hysterical.]

SOS! SOS! I'm pinned down in the-- oh, gods-- [There's another furious roar from below; his voice hitches, the camera shakes.] --the CES. Something attacked us. I think Dean is dead. I--

[There's a scream from underneath, unmistakeably human. The communicator drops against the shingles--] Dean? [--and cuts out.]

[Open Spam for Level Two/Infirmary, Later]

[After it's all over, after they've done what they can with Dean's corpse and patched up whatever needs to be on the survivors, Felix is set adrift into the aftermath. He should get cleaned up and then stay with Dean, he knows, or else he should get back to work and keep something like this from happening again. But he can't seem to make himself go to the latter just yet, not with Dean dead less than an hour, and the former...

He's always known that the death toll exists here, but he's never had to really confront it before, not in a way he couldn't brush off and ignore. The truth is that it scares him more than almost anything else about the Barge, even here, even now. It's not ignorance; it's not that he's never seen anything like it before. It's that he has.

The pull to sit by Dean's side and wait is powerful, but in the end, he winds up haunting the door to the infirmary, still red-eyed and disheveled, constantly peeking inside.]

((Right after/congruent with this, obviously.))

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[He's actually gone inside for a minute or so by now, but in the end he'd wound up leaving again, retreating back beyond the door. It's irrational, he knows, on some level. Half the people here have death tolled before. Dean has death tolled before. And whatever images Felix has of how the process on his own world works, vague things he'd overheard while working for the Cylons, he knows it's different here. There are no pods, no wires, no downloads. Not even replacement bodies. It will still, somehow, be Dean who awakes.

But he's still outside the door, his own posture more or less a mimicry of the Piemaker's, looking miserable and exhausted, an unlit cigarette in one hand. He glances up at the question, slightly incredulous.]

I have no idea how to answer that.

[The Piemaker nods, grimacing and in agreement that it was, in retrospect, a very stupid question]

He'll.

He'll be all right. Death tolls are only a week long.

...I'm told that, at least. And if they aren't, he'll. It'll be all right. The Barge treats death differently.

[It was not all right, and both of them knew it. But sometimes a blatant, hopeful lie was better than bitter reality]

So I've seen.

[And he knows it's true. It's stupid to be as afraid of it as he is, except... He glances back at the infirmary door, biting his lip, arms tightening a little.]

It's not right.

[He shouldn't say this to someone who's still nearly a stranger, and a warden besides. It's not going to work. He's seen that. Other people rarely understand these things, and they're rarely inclined to take him seriously. It's infuriating, upsetting, and he already knows he's only going to walk away from this with another person thinking he's insane.

But he's tired, and he's scared, and it spills out anyway:]

It's not right to bring him back. To bring anyone back. This shouldn't be happening.

[Careful not to look at Felix - and fearing his expression might betray his own secrets - the Piemaker gave a quiet, anxious noise in the back of his throat. He too had struggled with the moral implications of bringing someone back from the dead, but here it was different. Here, no one else was dying to help Dean come alive again]

You'd...rather he stayed dead?

[He looks up at Ned, horrified, like it was an accusation.] I'd rather he not have died in the first place, but he did. That can't just be undone!

[Shrinking back, the Piemaker hugs the wall, a little startled by the look he's being given]

But it can be undone. If something horrible happens and you can reverse it with no long-term consequences...?

He's already died and it isn't. It won't do any good wishing it hadn't happened. All you - all we can do is look at how it happened and take steps to prevent it from happening again in the future.

...When Dean wakes up, we should ask him.

[Death is a learning process. Hadn't he heard one of them say something like that, once? A Six? It sounds like something a Six would say. He straightens up from the wall in contrast, pale, angry.]

He's human. He's mortal. There are supposed to be frakking consequences.

[The Piemaker too is pale, but for entirely different reasons. He refuses to look Felix in the face, staring instead through the open infirmary door]

Blood for blood, a life for a life?

It's not the human Dean that's breaking the scales. It's the Admiral. It's the Barge. The Barge can bring him back and only asks for a week in return.

And sure, there's...social consequences. Whoever did it will experience consequences. Dean will..probably be more careful.

Are you scared that it's a gift? That his life isn't being bought back, it's being given?

What--? No, no, no. [This is all wrong, just like he knew it would be. He huffs out an agitated breath, running his hands through his hair.]

There shouldn't be any coming back at all. We're supposed to be mortal. Death is supposed to be final. [He shouldn't even be here, he's maintained from the start. He was tried, sentenced, executed, and he'd accepted all of that right up until the part where he woke up.]

I mean-- gods dammit, what's the point, otherwise? Even... [Even the Cylons got rid of resurrection, but he can't say that and hope to be understood, either.]

...Mortals can come back. It's...rare. But they can come back.

It's an exit clause. A little..loophole in Death's contract.

But if you're looking for a point, then I have to say that there isn't one. There shouldn't be a point to Death, to dying in a particularly noble or noteworthy or sacrificial way.

Death - all death - does have a price. It's not something you want to do over and over again.

But you need to stop thinking of death on the Barge as the period at the end of life and start thinking of it as more of a comma, an added gasp that can continue the sentence until it eventually reaches the end of its rambling, run-on and grammatically inaccurate paragraph.

That's not what I'm saying, gods dammit, I'm saying-- frak. [He sinks back again, folding his arms again, shaking his head miserably.]

Human beings aren't supposed to have loopholes. That's what makes us human. We live because we know what death is. What the frak kind of meaning can you have in a life that doesn't end?

[And before Ned can interject, he answers it himself, because he already knows the answer.] You can't. [And maybe it's time he starts trying to explain why. It always comes down to this, for him, this burning need to be understood, to be heard. He looks up, the words coming faster, lit by that fire.] Look: do you remember what I told you happened to my world?

[For being almost always out of his depth, the one thing the Piemaker has going for him is his empathy and his willingness to listen. He slides down against the wall, dropping to sit on the floor. As much as he wants to bring personal experience in to counter Felix's argument about life without death having no meaning, he'd rather stay quiet about his secrets and let the other talk]

You told me you had died and you told me you found realism cheering.

We all died. It just took some of us longer than others. The entire godsdamn human race, wiped out by machines. Robots. But ones that looked like us, acted like us, thought and felt, created... science and art and frakking religion and everything. Just like us, except that they couldn't die, because every time they did they'd just download into a new body and keep going.

[He's intent now, voice low but impassioned. He looks almost feverish.]

[The Piemaker's head twists to look through the infirmary door over his shoulder, then back at Felix, biting his lip]

How do you tell machines from humans when they're alive?

You don't. [Which is its own giant can of worms, and one that's plagued him ever since he arrived, but that aside.] But I got to know them pretty well, what with four years of them trying to alternately eradicate and enslave us. You learn things with all that time.

And what I learned was this: they didn't understand death, not the way people do. They didn't even understand the magnitude of what they'd done to us. Fifty billion humans, wiped out, and they couldn't even begin to accept the reality of that. I mean, why would they? Death was a frakking nuisance, not an end. And they learned the same lesson, in the end, because some faction finally came around and asked us, actually offered to help us destroy their resurrection technology.

And then death became permanent for them too.

It did. And they were still frakking homicidal machines, but at least we could kill them back. Don't you get it? It was too late. There wasn't any humanity in them left to preserve. There was barely any left in us!

[He nods towards the infirmary, still full of that contained energy, but despondent, despairing.] So what the frak is going to happen in there? What's happening to him right now? He's died at least twice. I've died once. We all just-- die again and again, because the Admiral won't let it happen any other way, and every time we wake up and it means less, and we're-- we're less human every time! [Not despondent. Afraid.]

[In contrast to Felix's increased terror, the Piemaker remains quiet and hunched up, turning to look at Dean's bed from the hallway as well]

...I don't think dying makes you less human.

No. I know it doesn't. He's not going to wake up as less than anything he once was. He's going to spend a week in the infirmary, then he's going to come out and the food is going to taste better and his dreams are going to be more vivid and that's. That's it.

That's all that's going to happen aside from him going on living.

[He laughs unhappily, shaking his head. He tried, but it's still not getting through.] And then what?

And then he'll....go on living until he hits that final period.

It happens. It does...happen. That final end, when we leave the Barge and go back to wherever it is we came from. We might avoid Death once in a while but it will come back.

It always...comes back.

...

And it'll come for Dean. Because he's not a robot and we can sit with him all day and make sure he hasn't been...replicated into a new body.

He has been. He is being right now. What's the difference? Whatever we call it, whatever the technology is.

He won't be a robot. He'll be himself.

That's not the point. [Although it is, a little. It's occurred to him before that, well, like he said: if Dean was a robot, there would be no way of knowing, just as there's no way of knowing about Ned. Or anyone. Or himself.

But it's not the main point.]

Resurrection is a frakking abomination, that's the point.

[The Piemaker has been quietly debating in his head about whether or not to let Felix in on his secret; that he could raise the dead, that his powers would not work on robots, that he could prove without a doubt that the Dean in the infirmary was the same Dean walking around last week.

But the word abomination hits him hard, and for a second the Piemaker remembers a flood where he had, in fact, let his secret out and all of the terrible things that had come of it.

So instead, he says,]

I don't know if Dean sees it that way.

I know he doesn't. I do. [There's something rather bitter in it. He'd understand Ned's isolation, if nothing else; he's used to being the lone voice in the darkness.]