Chapter Text
“Okay, well, see if you can do something with that. Talk to GAIA. I’ll check on you later.”
What was she thinking. What. Was. She. Thinking?!
The conversation played over and over and over in her mind like the cooling systems in the servers.
They should have had HEPHAESTUS. It was imperative to have him caught; they couldn’t face the Zeniths without the Cauldron printers.
Elisa—Aloy—was still capturing the other sub functions. The ones she could, anyway. The Zeniths had the others. And the firepower. And the frequency shifting thermo-kinetic barriers.
Beta exhaled, her shaking hands white-knuckled around her knees. She barely felt the pressure. Or her fingers. She knew she was breathing only because she was conscious.
The focus helped. But she would be suffering from the aftershocks of simulacrum withdrawal for approximately seven-point-five days…and they were already so far behind, and so much to do, if it even could be done. If the Zeniths were even defeatable.
If if if.
Aloy’s voice; her own voice, but strong and sure-sounding, struck through her again and again. Like GAIA’s sub functions would be enough without HEPHAESTUS.
Aloy…sounded sure.
Like there was only a few pieces missing.
Like there was hope.
Even as Gerard and his associates threatened to rip life from the world. From Elisabet’s world.
What would she do?
It was the question she asked herself after she saw her own face reflected back at her in the HADES proving lab. It was the question she asked herself when she fled Verbena.
What would Elisabet do?
Beta curled her fingers into the poly-flex fabric around her shins, and dropped her head into her lap. The ground swayed, and she was in her pod all over again, being tugged around by a cloud of nano-bots and fed orders through a buzzing implant. The air was sterile and cold, scrubbed of any life, barren in its cleanliness. Her head was full of sputtering wires, static scattering in the synapses.
She pulled herself up with a gasp she heard, but didn’t feel. She didn’t feel anything other than the incessant rocking of a pod she was no longer in.
She was…no longer with the Zeniths. She wasn’t free, not with the threat of them…but it was…something.
GAIA. Aloy told her to talk to GAIA. And powerful though she was…Beta doubted that the AI was capable of uploading, installing, and integrating everything needed for the terraforming system on her own.
GAIA had this base built for humans for a reason. And Beta was not wrong in her assertion that she had expertise that the others lacked. This world, and apparently this base, was full of individuals that could barely do calculus, let alone the advanced engineering required to fully realize an AI the like of GAIA.
If they were going to capture HEPHAESTUS, GAIA was going to need her. She had new mission parameters. New objectives.
Beta pulled up her Focus interface and began configuring the set-up for optimal efficiency, barely registering her own pale hands as they flitted from icon to icon. FARO Focuses were so…tactile. And this one apparently had an entire database already in its system. Probably all the data Aloy had collected, if she was correct in hypothesizing that Aloy was the only reason anyone here had a Focus, at all.
Shaking her head, Beta opened an app that posited itself as a penultimate task/life management program.
“It’s like using a clay tablet in the era of OS 15,” She huffed to herself. “But it’ll have to do.” At the bottom of the app lurked the FAS logo, and Beta scoffed before scrubbing it away from her interface and starting on her lists.
Primary Objective: Ascertain priorities for incorporating the remaining sub functions into GAIA.
-Talk to GAIA
Beta knit her brows at the wording, deleted the text, and promptly rewrote it several times.
-Consult GAIA for mission parameters.
She glared at her single objective and sub task, hands frozen in front of her. She dropped them and her interface blinked away with a swooping blip.
She would have to venture upstairs…through the people she fled from in a blind panic. Maybe Aloy would be up there…Later. She would ta- Consult GAIA when the others were…elsewhere. Asleep. Gone.
She sighed, folding in on herself and fighting to keep her eyes open. She focused on the blinking lights of the server towers, anything to keep the withdrawal at bay.
Elisabet would have marched up to GAIA without a second thought. Elisabet would have started the moment she got here. Elisabet would not have hidden in the basement like a rodent scurrying away from the light.
Aloy went hunting the sub functions without a moment to waste.
Beta pulled up the interface again, and hit the SEARCH option.
-Search: Elisabet Sobeck [images]
Several holos popped up. Portraits. Videos. Text and audio points. She flipped through a handful before pausing on a static holo of Sobeck standing before her, life sized and flickering.
Elisabet stood like she was awaiting a scan, arms at her sides and looking dead-ahead with her chin high.
Elisabet looked confident. Determined. Sure.
Beta sighed, looking back at the door Aloy left through. Her eyes trailed back to the holo of Elisabet, and she stood to face the echo of a woman long gone.
Beta almost came toe to toe with her, and found she still had to look up to meet her gaze…she seemed so much taller than Beta. But that couldn’t be…they were clones. They had the exact same genetic structure!
She wrung her hands tightly together. Her forearms itched. She flicked her fingers over her Focus and quickly scrolled through the last hour of recording (it was set to auto-record, she would have to fix that, maybe) and she pulled up a holo of Aloy taken as Beta had stood and circled the other clone.
Aloy’s purple form flickered next to Elisabet’s, her weight shifted to one side, her hands on her hips, her expression exasperated and eyes blazing. At her. She knows it was at her.
Beta sank to the cement at the spot Aloy found her in, the holos of Elisabet and Aloy buffering to face her in the configuration she had pulled them up in. Side by side, they sent a spike of bone-deep chill through Beta, and she banished the images with a desperate wave of her hand.
She dropped her face into her knees again, willing to fall into the withdrawal if it meant she could be free of the reality where she hid from her own, brighter, reflections.