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

...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.]

So....

Let me ask you this.

If there was a, um. A way to stop the Dean in the infirmary from coming back...would you kill him? Even if it meant never seeing him again?

[The question cuts him to the core, even deeper than he might have expected it would. He looks up again, shocked, eyes suddenly stinging and damp again.

Would you kill him?] How can you...

[But it's a fair question, isn't it? That's the natural conclusion here: the only way to say no is to admit that things are different here, or to admit that he'd rather live in a world with resurrection than without it.

He knows what he'd choose for his own world. Dee had died in his hands, and if she had come back... he knows what she would have wanted him to do. He would have asked for the same thing. They both would have rather died than be Cylons.

But here? He wipes his eyes with an almost childish gesture, exhaling shakily.]

If I could turn it off for all of us, I would. [And then he'd be the first one to take it, not Dean.] But barring that... no. No, of course not.

[It's a terrible question to ask, but Felix gives a far better answer than the Piemaker is expecting. He nods, setting his chin down against his folded arms]

I don't know if this will...help you. It helps me, but then, I'm not you.

But what helps me to think about people dying here is that the people who are dead here can't logically die again. If someone came up and stabbed you right now, you're already dead. The Barge is just. It's rewinding your tape back to your last saved point.

Saved... [He blinks, then laughs again, only because it's been literally five years since he last played a video game and he'd honestly forgotten that term.] Right.

[He thinks of something else, quirks a brow at Ned.] Or like a computer crash.

That's right. But in less...robotic terms.

It's not creating anything new from nothing. It's pulling up the last few moments in time.

They're both software. [The irony has not escaped him, that that's the metaphor Ned himself chose to go with.] And that's the point -- look, you can either think of this like a person or like a machine. [He turns to face Ned again, and he's still upset, but back to stability now for the moment. Talking about ideas, concepts, even if they're ones that scare him, it's easier than dealing with the mental images Ned put into his head a moment ago.]

If it's a machine, then everything resets, and you move on like nothing happened. Maybe you get some kind of new programming, some new protocol that tells you how to avoid what happened before, but that's it. Nothing fundamental changes. And that's allegedly how it's supposed to work here, and that would be fine if we were machines, but we're not.

So how does it work with humans? It's like you said: we learn. And what we learn is how to cope. We have to. I learned how to cope with 50 billion people dying because I had no choice. I learned how to adapt to death. We all did. That's how it works, right? Wouldn't you say? [Gods, but he wishes he could smoke right now without feeling guilty about it.]

I wouldn't say. Per se.

[Deep breath. Count to ten]

We're not machines.

But.

Every human is going to react differently to their own death here on the Barge. Some people are going to react how you'd expect humans to react; they struggle, but they cope.

And...some, who might have more face-to-face experience with death, might treat it like a minor inconvenience with nothing fundamental changing.

It's...up to Dean, how he faces it.

One thing I do know for sure is that the Dean that comes out to face it is the same Dean here a week ago. We just can't predict his reactions. And if he acts a little like a robot because he's seen death before and it holds no consequence, we can't...treat him suspiciously because of it.

Why not? Aren't we supposed to be here to become better? How is it better to learn to stop caring about dying? It should be a fundamental frakking change! I don't just mean Dean. You, me, anyone. We die, and then we die again, and again... how does that do anything but devalue the entire thing?

I mean-- frak. You don't think anyone cared about my leg, do you? Why would they? There wasn't a single one of us who hadn't already seen worse. Do you really think it's okay that this is a place where someone can be ripped the frak apart and the group opinion is--

[It's a thing he's noticed in himself, too. A monstrous, horrible thing, but one he can't bring himself to feel all that guilty about: he just doesn't care about most of the stories he hears here. The only one that's made him sit up and take any notice was Erik Lensherr. The rest? Someone's family died, someone's angry at their father, someone betrayed a friend. Well--]

"Been there, done that."

[Closing his eyes, the Piemaker ran a hand through his hair, actually thinking on Felix's words.]

People care. No one would be here outside this infirmary if death was an inconvenient vacation away from life.

If you die - if you die - someone is going to care.

I'll care.