Chapter Text
Elliot set his jaw and braced himself for the horrifying act of knocking on the door of someone who actually liked him. The wrapping sound his knuckles made was too loud in the nighttime quiet. He winced and glanced around, though he had defeated nearly all his enemies. At this point, paranoia was just habit.
A young blonde woman in a Radiohead T-shirt answered the door. Already, this was confusing. And Elliot hadn’t even confronted Tyrell yet. “Uh.” Did he have the wrong house? “I’m looking for Tyrell Wellick.”
Her smile was bland enough that she could be hired help, T-shirt aside. “Who should I tell him is calling?” She had a lilt like Tyrell’s, Elliot thought.
“Elliot,” he said. “It’s Elliot.”
“And you’re his …?”
“I’m his …” His what? His reluctant partner in crime, here to suggest more crime? “We know each other.”
“It’s okay, Irma,” Tyrell’s voice came from close by. “He’s almost certainly not here to kill me.”
She rolled her eyes but stepped aside.
Elliot found himself in a beige and white monstrosity of yuppie grandeur. The place smelled like vanilla and probably cost twenty times what it looked like it cost, and it already looked expensive. The white baby bed, with no other signs of a baby, was the sole clue that whoever lived there didn’t have a perfect life.
Tyrell sat on the couch, wrapped in a red blanket. It was the only spot of color in sight. “I thought you’d come earlier,” Tyrell said as he clicked away at his laptop. In the lenses of his glasses, Elliot could see what looked like an email inbox.
“I didn’t know you wore glasses,” Elliot heard himself say.
“It’s recent,” Tyrell said distractedly. “I can actually see what’s in front of me now.”
“That’s … good.” Elliot’s feet shuffled on the glossy light-brown tile. If he’d thought he was uncomfortable before he knocked, that had nothing on how he felt standing here. Tyrell hadn’t made him this nervous since the second time they’d met.
Elliot glanced around the room in search of Mr. Robot. He’d sprawled out on the upward staircase, throwing a baseball up and catching it with a periodic thwack.
But Tyrell shut his laptop and looked up at Elliot before he could seek guidance. “Would you like to take a seat?” He gestured at the couch across from him. “Can Irma get you something to eat or drink?”
Mr. Robot’s baseball thwacked again. “Uh,” Elliot said. “I’ll just have the seat.” He took up a position as far from Tyrell as possible. With the L-shaped sectional, that was pretty far. “I’m here to –”
“Talk about Whiterose’s machine,” Tyrell said. It remained uncanny how Tyrell alternated between reading Elliot’s thoughts precisely and believing he was reading Elliot’s thoughts precisely when in fact he was as wrong as a person could be.
Elliot nodded. “You said it’s an AI that runs simulations. I took it apart and I can see that’s true. I wrote a script to disable it, and it can disable any similar machines. But I wanted to hear about your experience with it before I go to upload the script.”
“You didn’t touch it,” Tyrell said. “Right?”
Elliot explained that he and Darlene had used gloves based on Tyrell’s very specific admonition in the forest.
Tyrell blew out a relieved breath. There was something off about him, Elliot decided, and it wasn’t the glasses. He hadn’t shaved and he was wearing sweatpants with his T-shirt. Of course, he had been shot a week ago. But if Tyrell was off, that might make it harder than Elliot had expected to convince the man to come with him.
“Why’s it so important I don’t touch it?” Elliot asked.
Tyrell smoothed his hair back. “Because when I touched it I went into a simulation,” he said. “I lived in it for months before I figured out what it was. She’s designed it, or her scientists designed it, so that you believe it’s real.” Nausea registered on Tyrell’s face. Elliot wondered if that was from the story, or if he was still on painkillers. “I lived for almost four months without knowing it wasn’t real.”
It wasn’t that often Tyrell was relatable. “What happened in the simulation?”
Tyrell rested his head on one hand, propped up on the arm of the couch. Another thing that was different about him, Elliot noticed, was his posture. He looked … either defeated or relaxed. It was hard to tell which. Maybe for Tyrell, the two overlapped. “It’s enough to say the program is designed to give you what you want. But it’s also designed to put up just enough of a fight that you think you’ve earned it. That fact, combined with what Whiterose said to Angela, makes me think she really believes it’s a portal to alternate universes. Either her scientists are lying to her or she’s just that delusional.” He winced at this last part.
Should Elliot ask Tyrell to come along after all? Now that he was in the room with the man again he was less sure than ever that Darlene knew what she was talking about when she said, You’ll need backup. Why had he thought she might be right? He disliked Tyrell. He disliked this conversation.
But, he reasoned, he needed every advantage he could get. He set his jaw and pressed down the memory of Krista’s face from just days earlier, informing him that he had always been infected with an unseen virus, given to him by his father and affecting his processing even though he didn’t know it was there. He pressed the memory down of Angela’s face in the E Corp tower during the riot; she’d been infected by a virus, too, and equally unaware. Whiterose was a monster just like Elliot’s father, and what mattered now was making sure she couldn’t take advantage of the vulnerable anymore. People like her tended to have backup plans to their backup plans, and he was determined to make his declawing of her permanent.
“And she might try to sell it that way to other people, like she did to Angela,” Elliot said. Angela’s watery voice from the day they’d spoken through her apartment door sounded in his head. It often did. “That’s why I have to stop her. I have to stop this.”
“Of course,” Tyrell said. He folded his hands and peered at Elliot.
Elliot cleared his throat. Mr. Robot caught his baseball again. Elliot had to suppress a startled jump. “How are you feeling, by the way?” he asked.
Humor lit Tyrell’s eyes. “That’s not a very Elliot question.”
“It is if we need to use you,” Mr. Robot put in helpfully.
“Well,” Elliot said aloud. “You got shot in front of me. Darlene and I hauled you back to the city. Then I spent three days wondering if you’d die anyway. So. It’s warranted.”
Tyrell at last did something in character. His eyes widened. “You wondered if I’d die?”
Fuck. “I –”
“No. No.” Tyrell put his hands up protectively. “Nevermind. Sorry. Just tell me this. You still have contempt and resentment for me, right?”
Finally, finally, Elliot could justify his usual attitude around Tyrell: Annoyance. “Why do you keep asking me that?”
“Just answer the question.”
“Yes, Tyrell,” Elliot said. Mr. Robot muttered, “Here we go again, ” under his breath. But Elliot went on. “I do. You killed 3,817 people based on a god complex. You made my friend think she was responsible for it. That led to her death. You’re whiny and irritating. You put your own goals above everything and everyone else. The things you value are the things I want to destroy. Happy? Can you stop asking me this?”
“How exactly,” Mr. Robot said with another thwack of the baseball, “is that going to help us get him to come?”
Tyrell let out a breath. “Yes,” he said. “I’m satisfied.”
What the fuck did that mean?
Mr. Robot threw himself to his feet and came around to sit near Tyrell before Elliot realized he’d lost control. “Great,” Mr. Robot said. “But forget about all that. I’m going to confront Whiterose. Come with me. I could really use your help on this one.”
“That’s kind of on the nose,” Elliot observed just to Mr. Robot.
Tyrell’s eyes narrowed almost laughingly. “Mmhm,” he said. “Does the other Elliot think so too?”
Mr. Robot, uncharacteristically, startled backwards. He looked up at Elliot for help.
It pained Elliot to do it, but he sat on the coffee table just inches from brushing Tyrell’s knee. “Yeah,” he said. “I do. You have insight I don’t, since you’ve been inside the machine. I want you to come.” He felt compelled to add, “I wouldn’t have said all that stuff about you if you … hadn’t asked.”
The debate that went on across Tyrell’s face could have meant anything. Elliot had never understood this man. And that meant the outcome of his private debate could be anything, too.
Tyrell stood up. “Let’s go.” He started for the closet by the door, moving pretty well for a man held together by stitches.
“I hope we don’t regret this,” Mr. Robot said.
“What’s the worst he could do?” Elliot asked. “Change sides and join up with Whiterose?”
Mr. Robot’s eyes went painfully wide. “We already have trust issues, man,” he said. “Don’t feed that fire.”
***
The plant was deserted. The only car in the parking lot, besides Tyrell’s, had a “To be towed January 11” sticker on the windshield and a nest of blankets in the backseat. No one came in or out the door in the fifteen minutes they sat watching. At one point Elliot got excited to see movement. It was a styrofoam cup, blowing in the wind across the yellow lawn.
“Should we try to get in?” Tyrell asked.
“I don’t understand this,” Elliot muttered. “My intel said she’d redirected all her backup funds to this place. There’s a nuclear reactor here. You can’t shut down and relocate an entire nuclear reactor in six days.”
“Which is why I ask,” Tyrell said, his irritability putting Elliot a little more at ease, “should we try to get in? Or should we just sit in my SUV for the rest of the day listening to XM radio of American oldies? Neither one is my idea of a good time but only going in is why we drove here.”
Elliot had driven. Tyrell, possibly still weak from his injury and surgeries, had gotten car sick. Making fun of him had really helped pass the two hour drive.
“Yeah,” Elliot said. “Let’s go in.”
The damn styrofoam cup skittered back across the lawn as they approached the glass entrance. Mr. Robot moved ahead and swung the door open. “After you,” he said to Tyrell.
Why was it that easy? This question quickly answered itself, though. The metal detection equipment stood abandoned. A guard station held no guard. Pink and white paper littered the hallway that stretched from the entrance.
Tyrell half-limped to a map on the wall just behind the metal detectors. He held his glasses in place as he scrutinized it. “I don’t want to think about how many loyal assistants it would take to wipe a place this big that quickly,” Tyrell said.
There were four levels. Three above ground, one below. The ground floor held a massive open-plan office, the second floor featured an executive corridor, and the basement level held many of the actual mechanics of the power plant, including the entrance to the reactor itself. The top floor appeared to be storage. “We split up and search,” Elliot said. “We look everywhere except here.” He tapped the reactor room. “Even if the power source is gone that place won’t be safe for a long time.”
Tyrell’s face went as green as it was in the car. But he nodded.
Mr. Robot said, “You up to this, Swede?” and clapped him on the back.
Tyrell staggered a little. “I’m obviously not in the best condition physically,” he said. “But the spirit is willing.” He took his glasses off and cleaned them with his T-shirt. “What should I call you, by the way? It’s straining credulity to call you both Elliot.”
Oh. Wow. “You don’t need to call him anything,” Elliot said.
“You don’t want to tell him what you call me?” Mr. Robot asked from a ways down the corridor. “Maybe I’ll tell him myself.”
“Okay.” Tyrell put his glasses back on. “I think I’ll call him ‘General Elliot.’ He’s like you, but confident and self aware.” He looked back at the map as if the subject was closed. “I’ll take the bottom two floors. Meet back at this spot when we’re done?”
He set off down the hallway, bracing against the wall periodically.
Self aware?
“I like the name,” Mr. Robot said. “Better than yours, that’s for sure.”
Elliot tried to lose Mr. Robot as he slipped into the elevator. Obviously, he failed.
***
By the time Elliot returned to the ground floor, his brain felt full of static. Too many thoughts overlapped and overwhelmed each other. He stepped out of the elevator and pulled out his cell phone.
“Tyrell,” he said when the other man answered. He rubbed his burning eyes. “ I’m tired after walking all over this place, and it’s been five months since the last time I was shot. Did you cover your ground?”
“I finished looking,” Tyrell said. It did not escape Elliot that he sounded breathless. “I’m just taking a rest before I … return.”
Fuck. Now guilt joined the rest of the bullshit in Elliot’s head. “Where are you?”
“Did you find anything?” Tyrell asked.
“I said, where are you.”
“Basement. There’s a suite of offices outside the entrance lock to the reactor.”
He sat, Elliot learned ten minutes later, on the floor with his back against a cheap metal desk. Elliot sank onto the floor beside him. “I didn’t find anything. Just desks and out of context paperwork. The power’s cut, though, so whenever I came across a kitchenette it smelled like garbage. That was interesting.”
Tyrell’s head rested against the desk. His face was noticeably whiter than usual, a thing Elliot would not have said was possible. “Same here,” Tyrell said.
“Fuck,” Elliot said. He knocked his head against the desk, hard enough that it hurt. The sound echoed in the big, empty room. “Fuck, how can this be happening.”
“Yeah,” Tyrell said. Which was a little cryptic. But he went on. “You didn’t think she would make her final play without at least taunting you.”
That was part of it, and Elliot hated that Tyrell was right. “I guess she still doesn’t see me as a player, even though I won.” When was the last time Elliot felt this stupid? He thought back. It would probably be the moment he’d faced off against Irving in Red Wheelbarrow. The realization that he’d fucked society had overwhelmed him. He’d confronted the fact that his own motivations were never what he thought they were. It had not been a lesson well learned. “What is wrong with me.”
Tyrell, looking out of place on the floor in his sweatpants, sat cross-legged and turned to face Elliot. “What do you mean?”
“If you’re not honest with him I will be,” Mr. Robot said from where he lounged in one of the desk chairs.
A growl of frustration broke from Elliot. “I beat her,” he said. “I won. I took almost everything from her. Darlene redistributed an unimaginable amount of money. That’s because of me. So why” – Elliot’s voice was rising – “don’t I feel that ? Why does there always need to be another fight? Why do I still feel …”
As hollow as he’d felt before 5/9.
“Why do I still feel as hollow as I felt before 5/9?” Mr. Robot said.
Shit. When did he start being able to do that?
Tyrell’s face was often embarrassingly legible. This was one of those times. The reason it was one of those times was that the pain Elliot saw there was how Elliot felt.
He could not look at that for long. He carefully examined the heavy steel door separating this office from the corridor that led to the reactor complex.
“I think you’re wrong,” Tyrell said.
“About what ?”
“What you’ve just described …” His stupid voice sounded unstable, the way it had the day he shot Elliot or when they walked the endless New Jersey woods. “It’s how I often feel. It’s how many ambitious people feel. Always looking for the next plateau or the next fight. It’s probably how Whiterose feels.”
Elliot shrugged. “So?”
“So she’s still here. And if she is, then so is her machine.”
For that, Elliot could finally look at Tyrell again. “Where?”
Tyrell’s arm braced against the desk as he rose to his feet. “The one place we didn’t look.”
Elliot’s eyes flicked back to the steel door. “We can’t go in there,” he said. “I already said we’re not –”
“What’s one way to make sure no one even tries to sneak into your top-secret R and D space?”
Elliot looked up at Tyrell. “Do you mean … tell them it’s a radioactive nuclear power project?”
“Exactly.”
"But wouldn't people be suspicious if they didn't actually sell any power?"
"It’s entirely possible to fake business records, even ones involving large sums. I've done it."
“Okay …” Mr. Robot stood up, gaze intense with interest. But Elliot stayed put and said, “Except that my father died from toxic waste from this plant.”
“There are a lot of things that produce carcinogenic waste that aren’t nuclear reactors,” Tyrell observed.
A shiver crawled down Elliot’s back. What if Tyrell was right? And Elliot hadn’t been the one to figure it out? “Okay.” He had goosebumps now. Was that hope or fear? “But what if it is a reactor?”
Tyrell held out a hand to Elliot. “Then we’ll get acute radiation poisoning,” he said. “It can sometimes be survived.”
Elliot looked at the hand and thought about how he’d felt after Tyrell disappeared into the woods and the fog. “Tyrell,” he said. “Are you okay?”
Tyrell wiggled his fingers as if to say, Get up. Elliot ignored the hand and stood. Only then did Tyrell smile and say, “Never better," retracting the rejected hand.
It wouldn’t be the first time Elliot dove headfirst into something stupid with stupid company.
***
The steel door opened without any input into the keypad mounted beside it. They found themselves in a progressively darker space. Maybe twenty feet ahead, the light died entirely.
They both turned on their phone lights and started forward.
It was … a hallway. It was just a hallway. Their feet squeaked on the same tile floor as the rest of the building. The green paint on the wall reminded Elliot of an elementary school. But there were no doors, turns, or branches. There was only this long stretch of identical hallway lit in the small pocket where they walked by the diffused beams of their cell phones.
They reached a staircase. Tyrell gripped the railing hard, unsteady on his feet. Part of Elliot wished he could reach out and brace him, keep him from tumbling headfirst into the darkness. But he couldn’t do it, and Tyrell made it anyway.
The hallway at the foot of the stairs stretched right and left. Now there were doors: Office doors, some set with massive locks but otherwise normal. “Fuck me,” Elliot said. “You might be right.”
“I guess that’s good,” Tyrell breathed. “I was nauseous enough without being poisoned.” When Elliot caught his eye in alarm, Tyrell smiled. Humor. This was dark humor. Tyrell remained a barrel of surprises.
“Right or left?” Elliot asked.
Tyrell mimed flipping a coin. “Left.”
Wow. He is not at all cool. But they went left. After a few minutes, there was a light up ahead. A single fluorescent panel flickered across a set of three doors.
“Do you think this means something?” Elliot asked.
“There’s only three ways to find out,” Tyrell said, and he tried one of the doors. “Locked.”
Elliot felt a little more reserved. “Should we … regroup or something? Do we have a plan?” He’d pictured himself just going into an office building and uploading a script into a terminal. That particular plan had derailed hours ago and he hadn’t made a new one.
Tyrell’s wrinkled nose of derision might have been more intimidating if he wasn't dressed like an engineering student. “Where was this planning guy fifteen minutes ago when we opened the door on what could have been a nuclear reactor complex?”
A headache pressed up behind Elliot’s eyes. “ God, ” Elliot said. “I’m just trying to suggest –”
Tyrell tried the second door.
“What the hell are you doing?” Elliot heard the note of panic in his own voice.
“Don’t you want this as much as I do?” Tyrell asked.
As much as Tyrell did? Was Elliot missing something here? “Want … what?”
“To stop her,” Tyrell said, gesturing at the third door with his chin as if they had any idea what was behind it. “To stop that thing from hurting anyone like the mere promise of it hurt Angela.”
This was manipulation, Elliot assumed. Tyrell didn’t care about Angela. “Was it really that bad?” Elliot asked. “Being in the machine?”
Tyrell’s talcum-white skin went translucent. Elliot could practically see veins. “Yes,” Tyrell said tightly. “It was. Can we go in now?”
“And do what? ”
The door swung open. “Mr. Alderson,” said a young woman. She wore a white suit and held a pistol in folded hands. “Mr. Wellick. Please come in.”
Elliot bet it was hard to tell who, when he and Tyrell exchanged a glance, looked more pissed at the other.
***
Whiterose perched in a leather chair in the center of the space they entered. The chair sat on a raised platform, like a dais in a TV throne room. Also like a throne room, armed guards lined the walls. There were … six in total.
But unlike a throne room, a long black lacquer table ran along one side of the dais, littered with computer pieces and hand tools. A glowing blue cube, like the one Elliot had taken apart, sat on a heavy looking marble tray.
“Welcome to my transport room,” Whiterose said. Her posture was prim and her dress was starched. The watch she wore was white leather and silver, a delicate thing to be the source of so much crazy. “I’m pleased you both made it. Part of me feared Mr. Wellick might not. Were you planning to accept your job offer, by the way?”
“No,” Tyrell said. “Who knows what I might do with that position? I certainly don’t.”
Whiterose’s confused expression had nothing on how Elliot felt about that exchange. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You won’t need to think about that anymore. You two are going to become the first two people to benefit from my latest prototype. Think of it as a thank you for the roles you played in helping me relocate my operation.”
Adrenaline shot through Elliot. It took his brain a second to catch up with his body. When it did he counted the guards again, noting their automatic weapons.
Then he looked at Tyrell. Tyrell’s wild eyes suggested he’d had the same thought Elliot had.
Somehow she had known they would come. And now they were trapped. Fuck, fuck, fuck. They really should have had a plan. How did neither of them think this might happen? Of course she wanted to put them in the machine. And Elliot hadn’t even asked Tyrell how he got out the first time.
“I disassembled another one of your prototypes,” Elliot said. “If your scientists are telling you it’s an alternate reality transport device or some bullshit, they’re lying to you. Are you gullible or are you just willing to believe this one thing?”
“Mm.” She tipped her head with a fond smile. “Desperation ages your face, Mr. Alderson, did you know that? Interestingly it does the opposite for Mr. Wellick.”
“I’ve been in your machine,” Tyrell said, limping up beside Elliot. “I’ve experienced some of its bugs. I’ve experienced the fact that it’s just a simulation. It’s not worth it, Whiterose. If you’re hoping it will be your salvation you’re in for a shock. Better to make peace with that now.”
For the first time, Whiterose’s composure showed a hairline crack. “Yes, I looked at your travel log on the cloud system before Elliot dismantled that prototype,” Whiterose said, looking like these facts displeased her. “It was a good world we found for you. It was very ungrateful of you to leave it. But then, you never were that good at seeing what you had. It’s the reason I never liked you. I lost everything because the world took it from me. You took everything from yourself.” She put a pensive finger on her chin. “But you gave me good information. Now I know there are ways back to our reality without my team’s help. Though I’m not sure precisely how you returned here.”
“If ‘here’ is planet earth, I never left,” Tyrell said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“This is not interesting.” Whiterose gestured at the guards. “Transport them. Send them in together, since they’re such great allies against me now.”
Tyrell backed toward the door. “Why would you do this?” he asked. “Just kill us if you want us out of the way.”
Elliot didn’t know about that. There had to be a way out of this. There always had been before, hadn’t there? No matter how tough a spot he got himself into, he found a way out.
"I do intend to kill your bodies after you vacate them, don't worry," Whiterose said. "We don't want you returning here again, now do we?"
"Oh." Tyrell laughed. "I'm deeply reassured."
“I think you’ll like this prototype better, Mr. Wellick,” Whiterose said. Two guards each closed in on them. “This one finds a better you , too, not just a better world for what you want.”
“That’s worse,” Tyrell said, his volume rising. “Do you not see that? You’re the worst kind of insane.” He elbowed someone in the chin. The man staggered backward like Tyrell knew what he was doing. “Get off me!”
One of the guards lunged for Elliot’s arms. He sidestepped and landed a right hook on the guy’s temple.
“Get away from me,” he heard Tyrell say. “Step back!”
Whiterose gasped, though it was the kind she might have made at an opera. Elliot managed to glance over at Tyrell. He’d backed all the way up against the door, tears in his eyes and a gun in his hand.
“Do you even know how to use that?” Whiterose asked.
“Ask him.” Tyrell jerked the barrel toward Elliot.
Hands came around Elliot’s arms, holding him in place. He struggled, then thrashed his head back to try to break a nose. But the man who held him evaded easily. Panic grew in Elliot with every failed attempt to break away. Breathe. There’s a way out of this.
“Okay, look,” one of the masked guards was saying, approaching Tyrell carefully. “Just don’t shoot anyone and we’ll let –”
Tyrell shot him in the shoulder. The bullet snapped his body back. He fell onto the tile.
But Tyrell was still one man against four. Another of the masked men lunged at him. He knocked the gun from Tyrell’s hand, pinned Tyrell against the door by the throat, and kneed him – in the right side.
Tyrell yelped.
“Oh look,” Whiterose said as Tyrell sank to the ground. Blood began to spot his T-shirt. “Now you’re bleeding out again, like you were when you checked into the hospital on Christmas night. So what could there possibly be to lose in moving to a new body that isn’t dying?”
Tyrell scrambled toward the gun.
There was no way out of this, Elliot realized. It’s like he saw the desperation of their position in Tyrell’s crazed attempts at violence. He had nothing to offer Whiterose. He had no leverage.
“Tyrell,” he said.
A guard kicked Tyrell away from the gun. Three guards pinned him down, and the man holding Elliot picked him up in a bear hug and slammed him onto the floor beside Tyrell. “Tyrell,” Elliot said again.
His glasses were cracked, gray face streaked with tears. Whiterose approached them, gloved hands holding the cube. Tyrell spoke to her, not to Elliot. “Please,” he said. “If you’re going to do this … at least let us have ourselves. Don’t make us better versions of ourselves.”
She knelt in front of them, thinking.
Tyrell was panting. The bloodstain on his shirt had reached the size of a palm. But he managed to say, “Consider it a last request.”
She depressed a panel in the cube. It made a series of soft beeps. “I’ve granted you a compromise,” she said. “Ready?”
“Tyrell!” Elliot tried one last time.
Tyrell tipped his head sideways where he lay on the floor, looking at him.
“Find me,” Elliot said. “You got out once, you can do it a –”