revivalproject | Transference

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Transference

WHO: Tony, Wesker?, OTA
WHERE: Around Temba, and the hospital
WHAT: Tony's doing his silly little task
WHEN: The week after this
WARNINGS: Tony continues to be miserable.

a. days 1-6
The first problem with Wesker's request was convincing a whole bunch of different people to reliably carry around some new thing on the off chance that they were caught off guard, far from help or shelter. Including children. Most people didn't even have a jack in their car. Building this mechanism into something they already carried, like their communications devices, would have been the best case scenario. The second problem with Wesker's request was that all electronic systems, including the communication devices and the network itself, were not reliable in these disaster scenarios. So much for small and portable.

Tony was going to do neither of those things. What Tony was going to do, was try not to be seen trundling around the city, sometimes dragging his wheeled cart behind him full of broken consoles, glass and steel. He looked terrible. A longer day did not make a week long enough to solve this fundamentally social problem, but if he didn't sleep and kept a careful balance of coffee and red fruit juice, he could buy himself a few more hours. It didn't really take that long, in the grand scheme of things, to erect a radio tower, after all.

These started to appear in a slow circle around the perimeters of the city first, wherever Tony could get the highest, even if that meant doing his best Spider-man (Link?) impression and scaling a building with long metal beams strapped to his back. The one that was hardest to ignore crowned the Whale Comb Sent Her, unavoidably in the middle of the city, assembled on site and bolted to the roof and trying vainly to stretch as tall as the structures around it. Inside, among some debris from some necessary remodelling work, a line of tiny bells hung along the wall, each with quickly scrawled co-ordinates and distances under them, directly onto the plaster.

The most difficult part, really, was the materials. This wasn't new technology, a crystal radio was something the Greeks had, Tony was pretty sure. It was never going to be a strong signal, but he could make that work in his favour--the closer the transmitting tower, the more bells it could ring. While he was scavenging for enough beams to erect his towers, he could be looking for something that would satisfy Wesker's request more closely.

b. day 7
He had one day left when he startled awake, not realizing he had been asleep, jerking up quickly enough that his back protested with a sharp pain where it had been contorted over the workbench. A day was plenty of time, he thought, when he found he still had a mouthful left of coffee in a nearby mug. He didn't even get up out of the seat, just found his loupe among the tools and went back to work.

It was hours later that he started to tell himself that maybe he had been counting wrong, and when Wesker had said a week, he meant starting from the next day, not from when he made his request. That would have been the fair thing.

It was when it was hard to see through the pain in his head, and the red-stained bottle was empty, that Tony thought Wesker might have been right, and he had never done any of this altruistically, and if he really wanted people safe and not just relying on him for safety he could have figured that out any time in the last 30 years. Hell, he'd had a whole week to dedicate to one, little problem. He'd had a few more than that to figure out how to make one rocket stable enough to break the atmosphere. He didn't even need a rocket, he could do what he had always done best; make a gun. Nothing had really stopped him from making one of those before, except now he had the perfect opportunity to use that natural impulse to help people. All of that explosive inspiration suddenly failed him.

It was when all of his scattered eyes around the city alerted that the sun had set that he was left staring down at a frustratingly small scrap, and had to accept that it wasn't getting finished. He pushed away from the workbench finally, every joint creaking in protest, struggling to straighten his back and blink through the pain behind his eyes as he stumbled away to the sink. While he washed his face, D.A.T.A. helpfully rallied to pack his meagre offering into his waiting jacket pocket. The water didn't really improve his face. Despite the hour, he slipped on his sunglasses after carefully fixing his hair in their reflection, and accepted the silk jacket from the robot with a muttered, "Thanks." He could have given a half-way convincing press conference, if the lighting was forgiving. He really only had one person to convince as he made his way to the hospital.

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"Wait, like...a real head? A giant skull?" The Exo's curiosity was instantly piqued. "Haven't seen any heads floating around out in the Reef unless they're unfortunate remains of whoever was aboard the shipwrecks, but usually space doesn't keep those intact for very long."

He stuck out a foot to let Colonel hop up onto his boot, raising his leg up so he could offer his hand to scoop her up once she fluttered from point A to B, soon nestled under his arm.

"Underwater's a pretty good place to hide evidence. I'm not much good for underwater ventures though. How deep we talking?"

Tony quickly went from nodding cursory confirmation to grimacing at the idea of more mundane death atomizing in the careless vacuum of space. It was only a subtle adjustment of scale that made it less gruesome, and he would rather postulate, "The shape might be hard to recognize even by now, for me--they're always building on it, and it takes a lot of damage, high contest area. Maybe it's just another moon in a couple of hundred years. It's the last stop before you're really out in the dark. Some of the weirdest dates I've ever had in my life, and I've got a high bar."

As for the lake and the potential hidden in that dark, Tony could only weigh a hand, briefly before he was catching a beam to rebalance it while Cayde was distracted with his chicken. "Enough that I'm curious what the pressure would do to you. Not curious enough to test it."

That gets Tony a look of amusement. Of course he'd be dating people in the assumedly carved out cavities of some ancient god's head. "Is the weirdness in part with the venue or purely the dates?" Cayde couldn't help but ask, grinning crookedly.

He instantly looked apologetic as he moved to do a better job of holding things in position. "I'm more concerned about the getting back out," he chuckled. "I know we were built to be durable though, but I don't fancy testing out if Sundance can pull me back from underwater either."

Though he had been moving with practiced confidence to assemble his tower, Tony's building slowed as he frowned and looked irritated with the construct itself, then his focus dropped. He should have done a better investigation under the water before he had dismantled the suit, he should have done it while they still had the ships, he should have done a lot of things without Wesker shaming him into it. "Would be easier to find out if there's a ship down there if we still had a ship," he grumbled. "Send you down on a fishing line, see what bites. Can you tell her not to do that?" His focus was suddenly back, steady on Cayde for maybe a moment too long before it was flitting away uncomfortably. "If you wanted to. Some day. Is it even your choice?"

"Why are we using me as bait again?" Cayde complained, although he was still smirking as he said it, so at least he wasn't terribly offended. He would have to agree, he was very tantalizing.

"Do what?" he asked, looking back at Tony before his jaw eased out of whatever trick it did to pull off a smile. He carefully shifted Colonel in his arm so he could scratch at the base of her feathery neck with a finger.

"'course it's my choice," he snorted. "But I'm attached now. To life, you know? It'd be pretty boring, being dead. And then I'd be leaving Sundance alone. Anyway, there's too much stuff to do and I got a job to handle. Place'd go to pieces without me." He chuckled a little. "Probably a good thing we don't miss out while we're here. Zavala and Ikora'd be tearing out their hair trying to keep things together. -if they had any. Do not tell Ikora I said that."

"Natural magnetism," Tony answered loftily, lending academic purpose to Cayde's self-assured smirk. In most situations, Tony would readily put Cayde where they needed to draw the most attention. Some people thought that was an admirable ability. He was probably right to distract away from Tony's dark line of questioning, too, bouncing light on it and redirecting Tony's focus back onto his tower with a small nod, not quite apologetic.

"The dates," he belatedly answered. "By a mile. Thought one of them was an eyeball in a jar for a full hour until she explained that was just her phone. She couldn't leave this special pressurized tank without exploding. I guess I'd rather not miss that."

Given the mood Tony had seemed to be in earlier and knowing it was yet lingering, Cayde wasn't about to indulge in such sobering subjects. Wasn't his style, or at least, it was way too easy to sink yourself into some rut that turned out to be a foxhole. His job was to keep the mood up, and that was something the Exo was determined to do around here, especially for his closest friends.

"An eyeball in a jar..." he mused, head tilting as he tried to imagine how any of what Tony was describing worked. "Wow, but how would you have gone kissing someone like that?"

It was a fair question, if it was coming from anyone else. From Cayde, it earned him a pause as Tony considered explaining, then a meaningful narrowing of his eyes as they flicked over the Exo, all of his natural movement not in the least convincing as long as his mouth still glowed. "How do you?" Tony pressed, more intrigued than accusatory. Clearly, he was not shy about exploring some more outlandish possibilities.

Cayde looked mildly offended at the question, not that it lasted longer than a couple seconds, and it was never intended to be taken seriously to begin with.

"Uh, I have a very identifiable face! And a mouth! -and! I don't have a nose to get in the way," he added, but by then he was laughing because it seemed an incredibly funny thing for him to have to explain.

Tony didn't quite laugh with him, looking skeptical that Cayde believed that being mostly face-shaped was all that mattered, and an Exo kiss was not significantly different from a fleshy one. His romance novels had to have been more illustrative than that. Tony didn't think Cayde was reading them for the challenging political content. With his focus back on his tower like he had to give it careful consideration, and his voice just as carefully breezy, Tony volunteered, "Had a girlfriend once who wore a mask, almost all of the time. Full face, solid metal. Most of the time we spent together, I was in the suit, so it was--You know, maybe should have been more obvious, that there was always a lot of layers between us. We still--it was kind of like a kiss. Had a very distinct noise. Incomparable, wouldn't change a thing."

"Antonio Skeptical Stark, are you suggesting that I have not kissed fleshy beings before? Or been kissed by? There were these twins- Okay, I don't know how long ago that was but they were cute." He was pretty sure he hadn't been making that one up in that particular letter he'd written. Waving a hand, Cayde had to quickly catch the piece he'd been holding in place, abandoned Colonel in a brief flurry of feathers, but the chicken alighted on the ground as though that had been the plan all along.

"I'm sure Exo kisses are a little colder. No lips, no tongue. Probably not enjoyable if you're into the latter two. -did you kiss eyeball phone girl?"

"Honestly, I was kind of hoping you were a bit of a techno-supremacist, now I know it's just me you have a problem with..." Tony interrupted, eyes rolling and mouth twisted to the side, and might have almost regretted talking over Cayde and the twins reveal. He snorted, eyebrows raised with affectionate surprise for what finally sounded to him like a very mundane hobby among all of Cayde's vague allusions to cowboying across the galaxy and the apocalypse. "I did, it was very tender with a sheet of glass between us, I've never been more in love--" he rushed through very carelessly so he could say instead, "You know, I'm always really distracted when you talk about eating, like there's something deliberately perverse about it, it makes you seem less relatable, somehow, but this is very human. Is that weird? It's probably weird."

Cayde was snickering against his sleeve as he tried to keep the section steady, but it was wavering along with his shoulders as Tony painted a picture of his fishbowl fling.

"What, why? Because I'm a former human wearing robot skin? I wouldn't know how to act if I was supposed to be robot-robot, that's not how Exos work. The former experiences kinda stuck with us, pretty hard to shake off and I think we would be a lot less fun without it, personally."

"I think you'd figure out how to blow stuff up without your human intuitions," Tony argued. He'd known plenty of robot-robots rich in personality, and they tended to feel equally compelled to do very human things, though the source of that compulsion must have been pretty different. "It's just--if I wasn't confined to this meat sack and had streamlined the design, I don't think I'd be wasting my time eating anymore. That's not something I think I'd miss. Finding out how different beings kiss, though, that could be a lifetime pursuit, that's a noble cause to both man and robot."

"Maybe," Cayde conceded the first point, "-but I wouldn't have my charm and witty repartee." He capped this with the best he could manage in an approximation to how someone with eyelids would bat their eyelashes.

"How can one not eat! There's so many interesting flavors! Okay, so not all Exos indulge in the past practices of one formerly clothed in flesh, but sitting around other people who are eating and not partaking yourself, wouldn't that be awkward? Or going out for drinks? And I can drink anyone under the table because I don't get drunk."

The variable experiences of indulgent foods were harder to argue against, maybe Tony would miss that a little bit, but he was ready to interrupt again to insist, "We don't all go to the bathroom together, we don't have to share the other end of the process--" Drinks was a very different problem, and had Tony going abruptly quiet, entire posture shifting to carefully bland detachment as he focused on a bolt like it was being particularly stubborn. He had spent plenty of time trying to remove the part of himself that could get drunk. It was an excruciatingly long time later, when he thought he had built the affectation securely enough that he was still cool and careless as he continued, "If I didn't have to go to so many family dinners, I'd have gotten into a hell of a lot less fights with my dad. And do you know how many foods make me gassy? No one wants to be around that. Net negative for the camaraderie."

A faint recollection came to mind; fancy-dressed people in an extravagant room of tinkling wine glasses and murmured conversation attempting to overshadow a poorly lit cavern strewn with scrap metal and smelling of smoke.

Cayde watched as Tony secured things, only letting his hands pull away from the piece a moment after just to make sure the other was really done. He resisted the urge to lean against it now that there was something standing vertical and not by his support.

"So are we wanting to be robots or just be without gastro-intestinal issues?" he decided upon voicing as he stooped down to scoop his chicken up again.

With the structure looking secure, Tony didn't have as much of an excuse to be so intent on it, leaving him looking like the untethered one as he leaned away from it and twisted his wrench in his hands like he might bend it in half. "It's not just the farts," should have been funnier, with a flick of his hand up his chest at the whole poorly designed system that Cayde didn't have to manage. How much Cayde did hang on to his humanity made it seem callous for Tony to admit how much he wanted to shed his, so he didn't know how to answer, and kept his gaze averted guiltily.

"I'm in control of the armor," he decided to structure. "I built it, I know how to fix it, I can program it, and I can take out the parts that--I can make it better."

It was kind of funny, at least. Cayde thought so anyway, his smile somehow almost catlike despite the fact that none of his feature really changed all that much. He sat down, stroking Colonel's feathers as it seemed they weren't going to go anywhere else just yet.

"You want to be in control of yourself down to the figurative nuts and bolts," he suggested. "Would metal Tony be the same as squishy Tony though?"

It surprised Tony that Cayde even thought he had to lay it out, that being entirely in control wasn't the logical, foregone conclusion to any micro- or macro-development and he was shocked to ask, "Don't you?" Cayde's question was only slightly less surprising, because he should have been the most capable of answering it. He had been squishy Cayde, and a few Cayde's in between, and didn't seem to be experiencing some existential fracture, so Tony looked like he was at a loss before returning, "Like in a Ship of Theseus way?"

"Sounds like a lotta work," the Exo replied breezily, perhaps not at all a surprising response to be had. "I have control over what counts. If I hadda worry about how to adjust something or another just on the basis of a 'but what if I could be a little better', then I'd probably drive myself crazy. There are other ways to be better, and so long as this body functions the way it's supposed to, I've got no real complaints. Face it, sometimes life deals you crap hands, sometimes your luck tops off. Can't always discard what you don't like, you have to play through."

He hid it well, had centuries of practice to circumvent any major slips into that void of an existential crisis, but it was always there if he let himself look. It was why he clung to two cards in particular, had a Queen and an Ace of Hearts pinned on his board back in the old clocktower.

"Theseus..?" Cayde echoed, turning his head to squint at Tony. "...sorry, not catching that reference. Don't think I found that book in the Speaker's library."

The breath caught in Tony's throat as he opened his mouth, lip raised and clearly ready to argue against the fatalistic playing it through, and he looked away again, letting his teeth click back together, not exactly conceding the point but to Cayde's undebatable experience over his own. A couple of decades of putting up with himself might look a little different in a couple of centuries. What a nightmare.

He took the easier route, explaining, "Bunch of guys limping away from a fight in mean waters. To keep the boat sailing, they're repairing it as they go, one board at a time. If they don't, they sink. If they do, by the time they reach a friendly port, every bolt and sail has been replaced, they're not even going to be recognized. Is it the same boat?"

Cayde ignored the sound, bracing for the follow-up like he'd heard a gun being loaded, half-relieved it didn't come. He ran a hand down Colonel's back, smoothing out feathers though she didn't quite pancake like a cat, but at least she seemed content.

"Hm," he considered as Tony offered the boat explanation. "Kind of like that I guess. But who knows. Maybe you'll actually perfect a metal body that doesn't need to worry about rebooting itself randomly, or clinging to strings of humanity just to keep sane. But then would you still be Tony in there, or an AI?"

At first, it sounded like the same question, except this time the 'or' made it an ultimatum. Maybe it was better to drown than to become someone that Cayde didn't know. Tony tossed a shoulder instead of answering, hands flitting over the tower to search for something else to focus on, because he thought Cayde of all people wouldn't have seen such a delineation between the mess of programming in some DNA and the neat lines of it written into code. "It's all affectation?" he asked instead. "And if you don't you'll be crazy?" Not only did that sound backwards, the commitment was definitely the insanity, Tony doubted any of Cayde's impulses were manufactured to feel more human. If they were, he made it look very natural.

"It's...complicated," Cayde finally decided upon, shrugging as though this was a trivial matter.

"Waking up from being dead, I had absolutely no idea who I was supposed to be. Coming back, the Light does weird things, pulls memories that you had, fragments that should be lost, especially in Exos. They don't tell me everything. Most of what I got was from the letters I wrote to Ace. Little secrets, farewells and adventures. I'm not even sure which version of me started them, but I don't know who I would've been without them either.

"So I wouldn't say it's all affectation. Wouldn't say it's entirely honest either. I convinced myself of something's existence, built myself around that. Kinda funny, right?" He chuckled. "Backwards, even. All the stuff on the outside's real enough, so maybe that's what counts. That's who Cayde-Six is."

Transference

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