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Jamie was tired.

The exhaustion was, almost, a welcome respite from the mind-numbing fear of SHODAN's attack on the crew, the panic barely held at bay in the cockpit of the Geno Saurer, fighting off hordes of smaller robots and, eventually, mobs of Zoids whose command systems had been overtaken by the malevolent AI. The feeling of helpless terror, of facing his own impending death had become so commonplace since the Daligig had so generously chosen him to help fight their war for them that Jamie was, when he bothered to think about it, surprised - and frustrated, and annoyed with himself - that he hadn't gotten a better handle on it. But it was the same every time, in every single battle, and this instance, as ceaseless waves of metal bodies in every shape imaginable had rushed him and his Zoid, had been no exception.

And then everything had just...stopped. The swarms of mechanized enemies had ceased their onslaught, everything had gone eerily quiet, and there was finally time to regroup, tend to injuries, figure out what the hell had happened. Time to rest.

For most people, probably. Jamie hadn't. There was work to be done, repairs to be made, damages to patch up. None of it was going to fix itself and Jamie wouldn't have tolerated any opportunity to let himself think about the newest horror the ship, or the multiverse in general, had inflicted on them. He'd welcomed the overabundance of work.

He'd gone wherever he was sent initially, and once orders had stopped being handed down, as the preliminary rush of activity had faded and things slowly resumed some semblance of normalcy, he'd gone where he thought he could be of the most use. And as time wore on and his energy reserves became stretched thin, he more often than not found himself wandering to the hangar.

The Geno Saurer lurked in an isolated corner, miraculously still upright but slumping with palpable exhaustion. Surrounding the blue tyrannosaur were the battered carcasses of several Rev Raptors, scattered in ungainly sprawls of clawed limbs and serrated tails and serpentine necks. Jamie picked his way through them, paranoia pricking alarm at dulled senses - what if the things came back to life and attacked again? SHODAN had been defeated, the threat eliminated, or so everyone believed. Believing in things didn't make them true, though. Belief, Jamie was finding, didn't mean much around here.

He reached the Geno, pausing near one hind claw, wavering slightly as he craned his neck to gaze up at her. The Zoid's wedge-shaped head was angled toward the ground, optics dimly lit with the barest hint of cognizance. The brush of her awareness of him was reassuring, something he found himself clinging to for comfort. She was tired too, Jamie could tell. She'd fought hard and needed to be taken care of as much as anyone else.

"'m sorry," he murmured, resting a hand on the edge of one claw. "I should've been here sooner, huh. Everything's just been busy. You understand that, right?"

Of course she did. He could tell. Somehow.

"...yeah." He'd let himself slump forward, leaning heavily against her talon, head drooping and hand still pressed to metal. "'m here now. I promised I'd take care of you, back on the island. I didn't forget."

He wasn't entirely sure how long he'd remained like that when some noise nearby - faint or loud, it was all the same to his rattled senses - snapped him from inaction and he jerked to attention, twisting to face the source of the noise, looking more than a little wild-eyed.

[[This can be bendytimed to any point post-SHODAN, including before/during/after Shore Leave.]]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Jamie's vaguely frantic expression faded somewhat, replaced by the briefest flicker of confusion. "...she's not a Gear," he managed, turning to face the girl more fully. "She's a Zoid. I dunno yet how badly damaged she is, I need to run a diagnostic on her.

"'s a Gear the kind of mech they have where you're from? D'you have one here?" She looked as though she'd been working on something, anyway, though maybe she'd just been pitching in to help out with the general mess in the hangar.

Maria points to the 100 meter tall blue mecha she's been working on.

"That's my Seibzehn, we've been a team since he broke me out of Solaris when I was four."

Jamie appraised the mech from his vantage point near the Geno Saurer. "'s a long time to have a machine," he noted. "You guys must be pretty close." He wasn't one to question the existence of sentient mecha; rare though they were in his universe, it was entirely possible they were commonplace in others.

"He's all I have left of father. I guess you could say he's in there somewhere."

Well, now she'd lost him. He looked from the robot back to the girl, bemusedly. "...which means what, exactly?"

"Not long ago... Before he died. Dad downloaded all of his research data, his journals, every bit of information he collected into Seibzehn. So, part of me likes to think part of him is still alive in there."

Jamie hm'd thoughtfully. It made sense, in a way; people could be said to live on posthumously through their life's work, after all. "What was he researching?"

"Neural linkage for gears and how to make the control circuits more receptive."

"Neural linkage." He looked back at Seibzehn. "Inside the mech, or between it and the pilot?"

Maria looks up as her robot nods.

"Between pilot and robot."

Jamie's brows raised a little at the robot's simple gesture. It wasn't unheard of for the mechs of his world to move independently of a pilot, but it was exceedingly rare, and though he'd accepted the idea of a truly sentient machine, seeing it in action was still a little surprising.

"So you control it with your mind?" A flash of his natural curiosity was, if only briefly, managing to penetrate the weariness of his current benumbed state. "Whatever you think of, that's what it does?"

"Most of the time. A few times Seibzehn has acted on its own accord though.... Can be a little over protective at times."

"Like when it rescued you?" Jamie regarded the machine contemplatively for another moment or two. "So when you control it, are you...connecting your consciousness to the robot's?" This struck him as both intriguing and somewhat disturbing, and Jamie wasn't sure if the potential benefits of sharing a mental link to one's mech - greater control and increased responsiveness were two he could imagine off the top of his head - would outweigh the sheer creep-out factor.

"Well, dad put me in Seibzehn's care and grandad met me outside. I just wish he could have gotten away too. I wish I could remember how it all happened."

She shakes her head a bit and looks at him.

"Oh, no, I usually just ask him to do things, but even in situations where he may not be able to hear he does it."

Jamie tactfully avoided touching on the subject of parental loss and childhood trauma. Talking about robots was easier. "So what does that suggest? Is it common for mechs on your world to obey orders they don't directly hear?" He looked back at Seibzehn. "Does it ever act on its own, like when you haven't told it to do something?"

[[No worries! Life happens!]]

"Seibzehn can't talk, and as far as I know he's the only one that thinks. I know Solaris has been trying to merge man and gear to make giant aware things... But they brainwash all the personality of the person away before even starting that."

Maria frowns heavily and shakes her head in disgust at the thought.

"I've heard about things sort of like that happening," Jamie said, sounding similarly unenthusiastic at the notion. "Not back home, but other places." Brainwashing people to make ultimate killer fighting machines was just never a good idea, no matter what universe you were in.

"So how does Seibzehn think? Anything to do with your dad's work?"

"Dad never told me. I know that they used some reaper parts to build his neural net which... Is bad, but, the brainwashing technique wasn't perfected till I had already escaped so..."

"Reaper? 's that another kind of mech? What makes it bad that they used 'em to build yours?"

Reapers were people they bioengineered into blood thirsty monsters. Solaris did a lot of horrible things.

[She just sighs and shakes her head]

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