First Entrance

[just_a_chemical]

[previously: Morning in Rapture. Contents include little girls brainwashed to drain fluids from corpses, as well as some who aren't quite dead yet; also dysfunctional family relationships, also injectables.]

Here come two more life forms, Enterprise. One you can't see: it's internal. Girls have their secrets. Don't you pay it any mind.

The one you can see is a lanky teenager, almost six feet tall, barefoot, wearing what looks like a 1940s nightgown (her little white sacrificial-victim dress), and carrying a book and a foil-wrapped pep bar.

This obviously wasn't where she expected to end up. She'd been headed into her room, where the quarantine door would lock behind her and she'd lie there pretending to read until the sickness subsided. Process all these new memories in peace, but this--

Either it's a very bad reaction to her latest treatment, or she's suffering a relapse in her mental conditioning, or... or she's suddenly in another place.

She's not sure which option is worse.

Comments

[shut_up_dammit]

Leonard blinked and narrowed his eyes at her.

"What do you mean? Why would that be a problem?"

She seems perfectly fine... okay, well maybe not perfectly but she seemed okay enough.

[just_a_chemical]

"My city's full of junkies. Well-armed ones."

With superpowers, but she's not going to volunteer that information.

"Their addiction's made them unstable, and they don't handle change or surprise well at all. If one of them ends up here, you'll know it. They'll attack, and they won't stop attacking."

[shut_up_dammit]

Leonard frowned deeply.

"I see your point." He paused. "The drugs they're on make 'em like that then? Because a withdrawal process could calm 'em down, if that's the case."

[just_a_chemical]

"It's the withdrawal that does it," she says. "They need more and more of their drug to stay sane and intact, and it's very hard to come by anymore. They'll kill to get it, and with the condition their minds are in, the killing doesn't bother them."

Which is why Eleanor and her mother live in the old city prison. It's the most secure place left.

[shut_up_dammit]

"Withdrawal eventually does end. We'll just have to quarantine them and let the drug pass through their system without anyone being in the damn room."

Though if a drug was powerful enough to knock the empathy out of someone, Leonard wondered how long that withdrawal would last.

[just_a_chemical]

"It doesn't end," she says. "The withdrawal is a progressive degeneration. You can tell how bad a person's addiction is by how mutated they've become--a friend of my mother's, a scientist, started out as human as anybody. Now he lives in a tank of water, and he's a giant... thing, somewhere between a slug and a fetus, and completely mad. He's the worst I've heard of. Most fall apart less dramatically. They end up getting killed before they can progress that far."

[shut_up_dammit]

"Jesus." If that was true, there was no telling what the hell kind of drug they were talking about here. Leonard sincerely hoped none of these people came onto the ship. They had enough to deal with without crazy withdrawals that turn people into some goddamn crazed monsters.

"I'm guessing you haven't taken this damn drug then."

[just_a_chemical]

"I'm the healthiest person in our city. My mother's a doctor, she's had big plans for me since before I was even born, and she has cameras watching me all the time. I couldn't very well sneak out, steal drugs from violent madmen, inject myself, and get back without her knowing."

Instead, her mother can send an army of little girls out to harvest the drug from corpses, and inject Eleanor with it herself. Whether Eleanor likes it or not.

[shut_up_dammit]

God, there was that word. Doctor. This is the second time he's heard of medicine being used in a poor way. Although her mother's intentions seemed a little more pure than the last girl's father. At least, that's what it seemed like. But cameras? Plans? He didn't like it.

"What the hell kind of plans did she have?"

[just_a_chemical]

"My mother believes in the greater good above all other things," she says. "That selfishness is the cause of all problems in the world, and only by renouncing the self and living for the community can a person be happy. 'Each of us has a moral duty to increase the common joy, and ease the common pain. Alone, we are nothing, mere engines of self-interest. Together, we are the Family, and through unity, we transcend the self.'"

She does a good impression of her mother's detached, soothing psychiatrist voice. Little speeches broadcast every day, all over the city.

"I'm supposed to calculate the greater good for all of humanity, without sentimentality or bias of any kind."

[shut_up_dammit]

Well. That wasn't at all what Leonard expected to hear. The greater good? Community above self? Honestly, it wasn't a terrible thought. Idealistic, however, but not terrible. Though, getting someone else to do your bidding like that? Seemingly without choice? Leonard wasn't comfortable with that.

"How are you supposed to do that? Is she giving you some kind of special abilities with these things she's doing to you?"

[just_a_chemical]

"I'm meant to be the vessel for our city," she says. "All the memories and experience of the dead, there for me to access. One person with only their own experience might be too attached to a person or thing, but several people--it's like a trial by jury. Decisionmaking by collective, housed in only one body."

It's less pleasant than it sounds, and she doesn't like the idea at all, but it is efficient in its way.

[shut_up_dammit]

Leonard is silent. That's screwed up. A collective of people in one body? It sounded crazy, that's really what it sounded like, but this whole 'being teleported onto another goddamn ship in space' thing was crazy. So he wasn't about to argue what seemed real and what didn't.

"Do you have multiple personalities that show through then, or is it just you?"

[just_a_chemical]

"Just me," she says. "Well... I suppose? They're like books on a shelf, and I can choose one and look through it. I could choose to act the way that person would act, but I'm the one in charge. They're passive, if that makes sense? Like books. Books don't take charge. They just contain information."

[shut_up_dammit]

That seemed easy enough. At least there weren't multiple personalities to keep track of. That would be one hell of a problem.

"Do you act like others a lot?"

[just_a_chemical]

"No, I like being myself."

While she still has a self to be. Her mother's ultimate goal is to reduce her to exactly the same level as all those other sets of information, just one among the many, but they're not there yet.

"I don't even really like looking at other people's experiences, using their skills. How do I know where I end and they begin? What I'm good at, and what I get from them?"

[shut_up_dammit]

Leonard's quiet for a minute.

"You seem like you have a good head on your shoulders. Did your mother instill that in you too?"

[just_a_chemical]

"I think I take after my father more," she says. "Mother's very... clinical. She observes things, she keeps files. She lives in the theoretical. My father lived in the actual. He heard about lights under the sea, ships disappearing, and he went out to investigate. They're both looking for knowledge, but he was more hands-on about it, and I'd rather take things apart for myself than just read about how they're put together."

[shut_up_dammit]

"Well, regardless, seems like this doesn't look like it'll be much of a problem for you. Though I wouldn't get in a habit of taking things apart here. Damn ship might need it." He didn't want to lose anything important because she nosed around in the wrong place.

[just_a_chemical]

"At home, I know what's essential and what isn't," she says. "Trigger an alarm, summon security robots, disable them and use them for parts--there's always more of them, so an individual one doesn't matter much. But I wouldn't take apart the climate controls, electrical system or ventilation; we need those. Here, I wouldn't know what's important and what isn't."

And she doesn't want to be responsible for breaking the ship.

[shut_up_dammit]

"Well, if we end up here too awful long, there might be some engineering personnel that might enlighten you on what is and isn't essential. I can't help you with that, unless we end up nosing around the sickbay. But even then, there might be some things I don't know."

Over one-hundred years in the future. He had to keep that in mind.

[just_a_chemical]

"I like to learn things," she says. "Not abstract things like economics, but things I can picture, things I can touch. I'm not very particular as to what."

You never know what might come in handy, after all. And she's got the basics in enough disciplines that she's a quick learner.

Really, she just doesn't want to have to read the book her mother had given her, that she's still carrying.

[shut_up_dammit]

"Well if I end up working in the sickbay you can come by and learn about things in there when it's not busy. I'd have to check with the CMO on ship, but I don't think learning is a bad thing."

For her, anyway. She didn't seem like she was a danger to anyone else.