Date of Expiration, Chapter 11/?
Apr. 23rd, 2012 01:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jendavisTitle: Date of Expiration
Fandom/Pairing: Leverage/Global Frequency fusion, with eventual Eliot Spencer/Alec Hardison.
Rating: R (eventually)
A/N: Here's wikipedia's rundown Warren Ellis's Global Frequency. While knowledge of the story is helpful, and I heartily recommend the graphic novels, it isn't absolutely necessary.
Summary: The Global Frequency existed to save humanity from itself, and there was always another crisis coming. It was job security of a sort, if you managed to survive the bioenhanced supersoldiers, alien neuroprogramming, physicists who should know better, and the bureaucracy.
Previous chapters: AO3 // DW // LJ
Fri., April 11, 2014 02:19 CDT (GMT-5)
Alec hadn't known Eliot Spencer's name at all, the first few times he'd had to call him into play. He'd just been Agent 324, another contact on the Frequency's list, and according to Miranda, he wasn't too fond of talking about his prosthetic arm.
Then Washington had happened. There hadn't been any good reason for the North Korean Ambassador to the UN to even be stateside, let alone for him to be letting himself get caught on three different surveillance cameras, accepting a suspicious looking handoff from a man in a hooded sweatshirt, but by the time Spencer had caught up with him on Russell Subway line, the ambassador - and everyone else in the train car - was dying, blood pouring out of their ears from causes unknown.
Spencer had called it in, and within a minute of the discovery, Alec had been conferencing in their contacts with the Epidemic Intelligence Service, The World Health Organization, three intelligence analysts, and a translator, and had been too busy trying to get a secure line to their Agents in Pyongyang to realize that Spencer had initiated the camera on his phone to record the scene.
Alec remembered being derailed, momentarily, by Spencer's eyes. At first, they'd seemed very blue, and it had to have been some weird light reflecting and refracting, but Spencer had been moving and, and the startling blue had moved with him. Even though they hadn't been the strangest thing Alec wound up seeing that day, they'd been stunning. Afterwards, after the containment crews had swept through, the quarantine lifted, another crisis averted, he'd gone back to Spencer's file. Started reading up on him.
Even with everything Alec now knew about Spencer, that bright, electric blue was still startling- even brighter in person than it had been on the phone- disarming him completely when turned in Alec's direction.
The moment was past, though, and Spencer was lying down on top of the bedspread, his attention again returning to Dr. Laroque. Alec could just make out his scowl as he closed his eyes with something that looked a lot like patience as Laroque pulled a small package of latex gloves out of her bag and put them on. His only concession to annoyance, if Alec was reading it right- was the glint of metal as his left hand curled itself into a fist against his hip.
Parker and Quinn had already retreated to the window to talk quietly; on the comms, he could hear them reporting to Miranda, telling her they were getting started. For the moment, Alec was the only one in the room looking at Spencer.
If he hadn't felt like he'd been intruding already, watching Laroque's hand start carding through Spencer's hair would've done it. He wasn't ready for Laroque to turn, catching his eye immediately, and gesture for him to come closer with a humorless smirk. When he did so, he could see what had held her attention. She was showing him the series of small ports set into the scarred mess of skin behind Spencer's ear, and Alec wasn't able to do anything more than stare.
He'd gone snooping through 324's file more than once, and he'd seen the pictures taken by the army doctors when they'd first started working on him. The scarring had been worse, probably, but the closely buzzed hair hadn't left anything to the imagination; the ports had been obvious, out there for everyone to see. Spencer had grown his hair out deliberately, since then, and it wouldn't have taken an expert to guess why.
He nodded, shrugging, clueless as to what Laroque expected of him right now. He felt useless. Helpless. But this wasn't the part she needed him for, not yet.
With as much as Alec had always loved sci-fi and cyberpunk and the rest of it, he would've liked to believe that his first reaction, upon watching Dr. Laroque plug her laptop into Spencer's head, would've been something other than horror. He would've been wrong, it turned out, but that wasn't the worst of it. The pictures he'd seen, they hadn't captured Spencer's face at all. Seeing Spencer, eyes closed and calm, wincing in bored recognition when the plug was locked into place, letting this happen because of course he was used to this, it was sending Alec reeling.
"Okay, Eliot." Laroque spoke as if she were discussing something completely mundane. "You ready?"
Spencer's nod jostled the cable sickeningly, and he rolled his shoulders, easing into a more comfortable position, but not relaxing. "Yeah."
Laroque twisted to her side, picking up the laptop again, tapped something on her keyboard, and Spencer's eyes flashed wide and unseeing, blazing blue, like lightning about to strike- before dimming and settling at half-mast. Alec hadn't even noticed the small movements Spencer had been making- fingers twitching, arms settling at his sides- until they'd stopped, completely.
He looked dead.
Alec knew that he was supposed to be following Laroque's words right now, or at least following what had to be the world's most insane coding, which was starting to scroll on her screen, but all he wanted to do was shake her and point at the corpse on the bed, ordering her to do something.
"Okay," Laroque finally leaned back, catching the expression Alec hadn't managed to bury. "His vitals are good, he's... well, he's asleep, so to speak. He's still aware of us, but at this point, can only respond to commands. For anything more than our basic diagnostics, however-"
"We'll have to put him in standby mode," Alec nodded, repeating what she'd told him in the car and risking another glance at Spencer's face, finding himself drawn again instead to the cord running behind his ear. "Does it hurt?"
"He's never reported it as such. He'll be fine." Laroque stood up and settled on the edge of the bed, keeping the cord slack. Nodding him into the chair, she angled the laptop out so he could see. "Okay. Right now, I've just begun running diagnostics. It'll only take another minute or so. If it's something simple, or a hardware failure, we'll know in a moment."
Alec nodded, leaning in, finally focusing on the screen. The system was based, at least partially, off of STRIPS, with syntax that looked an awful lot like Planner, but with refinements that varied much more than the logs on Spencer's file had originally indicated. He was starting to see the patterns, though. Thankfully, even if the programmers had been light years ahead of the competition, they'd been restricted, at least, by language, and strings of C++ were holding the programming together like glue.
The report log notification came up, and he reluctantly turned the screen back to Laroque for her closer examination. The list was relatively long, and hopefully Laroque's nodding meant she was finding the problems already, but she shook her head with a sigh. Her lips were a tense line, threatening to frown.
"Nothing?"
Shaking her head, she held up one finger, meeting his eyes, than nodding meaningfully at Spencer. Wait.
He didn't have to watch her hands to know what commands she was entering next.
---
"Sorry. I just." Laroque sighed; her smirk was surprisingly self deprecating once Spencer had been put in standby. "He's okay for now, but I didn't want him to hear us."
Alec frowned, his suspicions gathering quickly. He raised his chin to look at her. "Why not?"
"Apparently it doesn't bother him," she leaned over and selected one of the cords from the pocket of her bag. "At least he's never admitted it. But I've worked with patients before who've overheard scary news when they're not completely out of sedation. Hearing about what's going on and having absolutely no control, not even to ask questions?"
Yeah, Alec nodded. Got it. He coughed, and tried not to watch her plugging the second cable in next to the first. It would've been easier if his eyes hadn't insisted on settling on Spencer's face instead. "So what're we looking at?"
"Well, the only thing I know is that whatever happened, it has nothing at all to do with the usual suspects. What I don't know is what's worrying. His logs all look completely normal," she said, "except they went offline for about three hours earlier this evening, then came back online. I think they were scrubbed."
Alec sighed. It was a hack job, then; it meant they'd have to go deeper than the basic diagnostic scans to find what was done. It also meant that there was no backing out now. She'd already control-alt-deleted Spencer, so to speak. There wasn't anything more for it to go in and fix whatever was wrong.
There was a cough from the corner, and though Parker looked content enough to be standing at attention next to the window, Quinn looked dead on his feet. "Zero's asking for an update once you've had some time," he said, stretching his arms over his head. "I'm going to get some coffee, you guys want some?"
Laroque nodded, and Alec followed suit, requesting orange soda as an afterthought.
It was going to be a long night, he figured, and they were just getting started.
---
Fri., April 11, 2014 10:55 CDT (GMT-5)
His fingers were cramped and his eyes burned, and his mind was still racing through the data, though there was no longer a need.
Laroque was curled up on the other bed, though her only real concession to the need for sleep was that she'd kicked her shoes off. She'd been shifting often, resting only fitfully since finally accepting- about two hours ago- that he'd reached a point where her help was no longer necessary. Quinn, on the other hand, had completely lost his battle, and was sprawled out in an unconscious heap in the recliner by the window.
In the background, Alec could hear cartoons playing quietly on the television set, and despite the sunlight creeping in through the windows, it reminded him so much of home- of his hub in the tunnels below Chicago- that it was surprising to actually glance up and find himself sitting in a hotel room with three near strangers at five minutes to eleven in the morning.
Parker was on the floor doing yoga, or something approximating it. Alec didn't ask, and she didn't look back at him.
He'd found it. Someone had hacked in and brought Spencer's operational directive monitor back online. It shouldn't have been possible, and wouldn't have been were it not for the fact that they'd also filled in the pathways that the army had deleted during the process of Spencer's decommissioning. Those too, of course, had been removed as the hacker had backed out of Spencer's head- the system- but the hooks on either end had been modified just enough that reconstructing the missing code had been relatively easy.
Almost too easy, Alec suspected, but now that he was out of the zone and regarding the four walls of the hotel room and the four others in it, it was nearly impossible to pinpoint why.
He sent a secondary backup of his work log to the GF system- the first had already been saved to the flash drive that looked way too small, now, for what it contained, and rolled his neck.
He nearly shut the laptop down out of habit, even reached to shut the lid before he realized what it would mean. Shutting it down, even just letting it sleep, would cut the connection to Spencer. Would cut Spencer off from everything.
He carefully- very carefully- set the computer down on his chair and moved around the bed, wincing against the pins and needles and the dizziness they brought as he limped towards Dr. Laroque.
Shaking her awake quietly, he forced himself to give her a minute. His patience, he found, was wearing suddenly thin.
Confusion shot through her eyes, and was gone just as quickly as she pushed herself up. Her voice was rough, and she looked ready to murder the sun. "You find it?"
Alec nodded. "Everything's set back the way it should be," he said, wanting to start with the good news first. "But. You know. If this is goin' where I think it is..."
He really wished she hadn't just winced so plainly before nodding. She stood up reluctantly. "Full reboot." As if that wasn't bad enough, she continued, her tone confiding. "This is the part I've been dreading."
Alec had to agree, though he had no idea whether their reasons were the same. "Why?"
For the first time since they'd arrived, Laroque looked at Spencer with undisguised worry in her eyes. She shrugged. "I'm a little concerned that he'll be changed, once he wakes up."
That hadn't occurred to him. Killing him, yeah, that had been running through his head, but this was more obvious, should've come up first. "He turned himself in," he pointed out; it felt like he was fishing. "He could've fought."
"And he very well might have, were we not identified as allies."
Alec sighed, glancing quickly again at where Spencer was lying on the bed. He hadn't moved, at all, all night. Not even his hair had fallen back into place over the plugs.
He'd wondered about that on the flight last night; it had made entering the hotel room in the first place daunting as hell. But even having gained a lot of insight into the programming, it hadn't been his focus. Now, standing here and looking everywhere but at Spencer, it seemed a massive oversight.
"How's that work, anyway?"
Laroque smirked, as if she recognized the procrastination for what it was, and picked up her computer, balancing it on her lap as she sat down. She nodded to Parker, who'd turned at some point to watch the proceedings, but her single-mindedness kept her from going off track.
"It's complicated, but essentially?" Dr. Laroque sighed and sat back more comfortably in the chair. "As part of his upgrades, in order to form a more perfect soldier, they actually managed to rewire the pleasure center of his brain. He was programmed for several years to feel, ah, happiest-" she hesitated, here, weighing her words before continuing, "when fighting. We were able to mitigate some of the technology, but the brain's a computer too, you know?"
"It had already programmed itself to work with the given parameters," Alec nodded. It made a startling amount of sense.
"Exactly. Parameters which included not only the carrot, the getting pleasure out of violence, but the stick as well. That's the Operational Directive Monitor in a nutshell. It prevented him from disobeying orders and rewarded him when he followed them. I've seen it in a half dozen or so cases. He's made significant progress in the deprogramming process, essentially reprogramming his own responses on a conscious level. He's got full autonomy, and though he doesn't need to consciously identify people as threats or allies, it has the same effect." Reaching over to grab her half-finished coffee from the nightstand, she forced down a mouthful and pulled a face. It was only when she spoke again that Alec realized it had more to do with the thoughts in her head than the taste in her mouth.
"I worry, you know? Eliot teases me about it every time he comes in, but this time?" She fixed Alec with an unhappy smile, the kind Alec suspected all doctors are trained in giving, for the days when they had to break the bad news. "I just have to wonder if these systems coming back online are going to undo all that work."
Alec nodded, wished for his own long-gone-cold coffee if only to have something else to focus on for a moment.
"So," Laroque said, bringing up the required command prompts. "Ready to bring him up?"
Alec hated himself for it a little bit, wished he could afford something resembling a vote of confidence, here, but he nodded for Parker to wake Quinn up first. It wasn't until they were in position, guarding the window and door, guns drawn, that he nodded to Laroque.
Chapter 12
Fandom/Pairing: Leverage/Global Frequency fusion, with eventual Eliot Spencer/Alec Hardison.
Rating: R (eventually)
A/N: Here's wikipedia's rundown Warren Ellis's Global Frequency. While knowledge of the story is helpful, and I heartily recommend the graphic novels, it isn't absolutely necessary.
Summary: The Global Frequency existed to save humanity from itself, and there was always another crisis coming. It was job security of a sort, if you managed to survive the bioenhanced supersoldiers, alien neuroprogramming, physicists who should know better, and the bureaucracy.
Previous chapters: AO3 // DW // LJ
Fri., April 11, 2014 02:19 CDT (GMT-5)
Alec hadn't known Eliot Spencer's name at all, the first few times he'd had to call him into play. He'd just been Agent 324, another contact on the Frequency's list, and according to Miranda, he wasn't too fond of talking about his prosthetic arm.
Then Washington had happened. There hadn't been any good reason for the North Korean Ambassador to the UN to even be stateside, let alone for him to be letting himself get caught on three different surveillance cameras, accepting a suspicious looking handoff from a man in a hooded sweatshirt, but by the time Spencer had caught up with him on Russell Subway line, the ambassador - and everyone else in the train car - was dying, blood pouring out of their ears from causes unknown.
Spencer had called it in, and within a minute of the discovery, Alec had been conferencing in their contacts with the Epidemic Intelligence Service, The World Health Organization, three intelligence analysts, and a translator, and had been too busy trying to get a secure line to their Agents in Pyongyang to realize that Spencer had initiated the camera on his phone to record the scene.
Alec remembered being derailed, momentarily, by Spencer's eyes. At first, they'd seemed very blue, and it had to have been some weird light reflecting and refracting, but Spencer had been moving and, and the startling blue had moved with him. Even though they hadn't been the strangest thing Alec wound up seeing that day, they'd been stunning. Afterwards, after the containment crews had swept through, the quarantine lifted, another crisis averted, he'd gone back to Spencer's file. Started reading up on him.
Even with everything Alec now knew about Spencer, that bright, electric blue was still startling- even brighter in person than it had been on the phone- disarming him completely when turned in Alec's direction.
The moment was past, though, and Spencer was lying down on top of the bedspread, his attention again returning to Dr. Laroque. Alec could just make out his scowl as he closed his eyes with something that looked a lot like patience as Laroque pulled a small package of latex gloves out of her bag and put them on. His only concession to annoyance, if Alec was reading it right- was the glint of metal as his left hand curled itself into a fist against his hip.
Parker and Quinn had already retreated to the window to talk quietly; on the comms, he could hear them reporting to Miranda, telling her they were getting started. For the moment, Alec was the only one in the room looking at Spencer.
If he hadn't felt like he'd been intruding already, watching Laroque's hand start carding through Spencer's hair would've done it. He wasn't ready for Laroque to turn, catching his eye immediately, and gesture for him to come closer with a humorless smirk. When he did so, he could see what had held her attention. She was showing him the series of small ports set into the scarred mess of skin behind Spencer's ear, and Alec wasn't able to do anything more than stare.
He'd gone snooping through 324's file more than once, and he'd seen the pictures taken by the army doctors when they'd first started working on him. The scarring had been worse, probably, but the closely buzzed hair hadn't left anything to the imagination; the ports had been obvious, out there for everyone to see. Spencer had grown his hair out deliberately, since then, and it wouldn't have taken an expert to guess why.
He nodded, shrugging, clueless as to what Laroque expected of him right now. He felt useless. Helpless. But this wasn't the part she needed him for, not yet.
With as much as Alec had always loved sci-fi and cyberpunk and the rest of it, he would've liked to believe that his first reaction, upon watching Dr. Laroque plug her laptop into Spencer's head, would've been something other than horror. He would've been wrong, it turned out, but that wasn't the worst of it. The pictures he'd seen, they hadn't captured Spencer's face at all. Seeing Spencer, eyes closed and calm, wincing in bored recognition when the plug was locked into place, letting this happen because of course he was used to this, it was sending Alec reeling.
"Okay, Eliot." Laroque spoke as if she were discussing something completely mundane. "You ready?"
Spencer's nod jostled the cable sickeningly, and he rolled his shoulders, easing into a more comfortable position, but not relaxing. "Yeah."
Laroque twisted to her side, picking up the laptop again, tapped something on her keyboard, and Spencer's eyes flashed wide and unseeing, blazing blue, like lightning about to strike- before dimming and settling at half-mast. Alec hadn't even noticed the small movements Spencer had been making- fingers twitching, arms settling at his sides- until they'd stopped, completely.
He looked dead.
Alec knew that he was supposed to be following Laroque's words right now, or at least following what had to be the world's most insane coding, which was starting to scroll on her screen, but all he wanted to do was shake her and point at the corpse on the bed, ordering her to do something.
"Okay," Laroque finally leaned back, catching the expression Alec hadn't managed to bury. "His vitals are good, he's... well, he's asleep, so to speak. He's still aware of us, but at this point, can only respond to commands. For anything more than our basic diagnostics, however-"
"We'll have to put him in standby mode," Alec nodded, repeating what she'd told him in the car and risking another glance at Spencer's face, finding himself drawn again instead to the cord running behind his ear. "Does it hurt?"
"He's never reported it as such. He'll be fine." Laroque stood up and settled on the edge of the bed, keeping the cord slack. Nodding him into the chair, she angled the laptop out so he could see. "Okay. Right now, I've just begun running diagnostics. It'll only take another minute or so. If it's something simple, or a hardware failure, we'll know in a moment."
Alec nodded, leaning in, finally focusing on the screen. The system was based, at least partially, off of STRIPS, with syntax that looked an awful lot like Planner, but with refinements that varied much more than the logs on Spencer's file had originally indicated. He was starting to see the patterns, though. Thankfully, even if the programmers had been light years ahead of the competition, they'd been restricted, at least, by language, and strings of C++ were holding the programming together like glue.
The report log notification came up, and he reluctantly turned the screen back to Laroque for her closer examination. The list was relatively long, and hopefully Laroque's nodding meant she was finding the problems already, but she shook her head with a sigh. Her lips were a tense line, threatening to frown.
"Nothing?"
Shaking her head, she held up one finger, meeting his eyes, than nodding meaningfully at Spencer. Wait.
He didn't have to watch her hands to know what commands she was entering next.
---
"Sorry. I just." Laroque sighed; her smirk was surprisingly self deprecating once Spencer had been put in standby. "He's okay for now, but I didn't want him to hear us."
Alec frowned, his suspicions gathering quickly. He raised his chin to look at her. "Why not?"
"Apparently it doesn't bother him," she leaned over and selected one of the cords from the pocket of her bag. "At least he's never admitted it. But I've worked with patients before who've overheard scary news when they're not completely out of sedation. Hearing about what's going on and having absolutely no control, not even to ask questions?"
Yeah, Alec nodded. Got it. He coughed, and tried not to watch her plugging the second cable in next to the first. It would've been easier if his eyes hadn't insisted on settling on Spencer's face instead. "So what're we looking at?"
"Well, the only thing I know is that whatever happened, it has nothing at all to do with the usual suspects. What I don't know is what's worrying. His logs all look completely normal," she said, "except they went offline for about three hours earlier this evening, then came back online. I think they were scrubbed."
Alec sighed. It was a hack job, then; it meant they'd have to go deeper than the basic diagnostic scans to find what was done. It also meant that there was no backing out now. She'd already control-alt-deleted Spencer, so to speak. There wasn't anything more for it to go in and fix whatever was wrong.
There was a cough from the corner, and though Parker looked content enough to be standing at attention next to the window, Quinn looked dead on his feet. "Zero's asking for an update once you've had some time," he said, stretching his arms over his head. "I'm going to get some coffee, you guys want some?"
Laroque nodded, and Alec followed suit, requesting orange soda as an afterthought.
It was going to be a long night, he figured, and they were just getting started.
---
Fri., April 11, 2014 10:55 CDT (GMT-5)
His fingers were cramped and his eyes burned, and his mind was still racing through the data, though there was no longer a need.
Laroque was curled up on the other bed, though her only real concession to the need for sleep was that she'd kicked her shoes off. She'd been shifting often, resting only fitfully since finally accepting- about two hours ago- that he'd reached a point where her help was no longer necessary. Quinn, on the other hand, had completely lost his battle, and was sprawled out in an unconscious heap in the recliner by the window.
In the background, Alec could hear cartoons playing quietly on the television set, and despite the sunlight creeping in through the windows, it reminded him so much of home- of his hub in the tunnels below Chicago- that it was surprising to actually glance up and find himself sitting in a hotel room with three near strangers at five minutes to eleven in the morning.
Parker was on the floor doing yoga, or something approximating it. Alec didn't ask, and she didn't look back at him.
He'd found it. Someone had hacked in and brought Spencer's operational directive monitor back online. It shouldn't have been possible, and wouldn't have been were it not for the fact that they'd also filled in the pathways that the army had deleted during the process of Spencer's decommissioning. Those too, of course, had been removed as the hacker had backed out of Spencer's head- the system- but the hooks on either end had been modified just enough that reconstructing the missing code had been relatively easy.
Almost too easy, Alec suspected, but now that he was out of the zone and regarding the four walls of the hotel room and the four others in it, it was nearly impossible to pinpoint why.
He sent a secondary backup of his work log to the GF system- the first had already been saved to the flash drive that looked way too small, now, for what it contained, and rolled his neck.
He nearly shut the laptop down out of habit, even reached to shut the lid before he realized what it would mean. Shutting it down, even just letting it sleep, would cut the connection to Spencer. Would cut Spencer off from everything.
He carefully- very carefully- set the computer down on his chair and moved around the bed, wincing against the pins and needles and the dizziness they brought as he limped towards Dr. Laroque.
Shaking her awake quietly, he forced himself to give her a minute. His patience, he found, was wearing suddenly thin.
Confusion shot through her eyes, and was gone just as quickly as she pushed herself up. Her voice was rough, and she looked ready to murder the sun. "You find it?"
Alec nodded. "Everything's set back the way it should be," he said, wanting to start with the good news first. "But. You know. If this is goin' where I think it is..."
He really wished she hadn't just winced so plainly before nodding. She stood up reluctantly. "Full reboot." As if that wasn't bad enough, she continued, her tone confiding. "This is the part I've been dreading."
Alec had to agree, though he had no idea whether their reasons were the same. "Why?"
For the first time since they'd arrived, Laroque looked at Spencer with undisguised worry in her eyes. She shrugged. "I'm a little concerned that he'll be changed, once he wakes up."
That hadn't occurred to him. Killing him, yeah, that had been running through his head, but this was more obvious, should've come up first. "He turned himself in," he pointed out; it felt like he was fishing. "He could've fought."
"And he very well might have, were we not identified as allies."
Alec sighed, glancing quickly again at where Spencer was lying on the bed. He hadn't moved, at all, all night. Not even his hair had fallen back into place over the plugs.
He'd wondered about that on the flight last night; it had made entering the hotel room in the first place daunting as hell. But even having gained a lot of insight into the programming, it hadn't been his focus. Now, standing here and looking everywhere but at Spencer, it seemed a massive oversight.
"How's that work, anyway?"
Laroque smirked, as if she recognized the procrastination for what it was, and picked up her computer, balancing it on her lap as she sat down. She nodded to Parker, who'd turned at some point to watch the proceedings, but her single-mindedness kept her from going off track.
"It's complicated, but essentially?" Dr. Laroque sighed and sat back more comfortably in the chair. "As part of his upgrades, in order to form a more perfect soldier, they actually managed to rewire the pleasure center of his brain. He was programmed for several years to feel, ah, happiest-" she hesitated, here, weighing her words before continuing, "when fighting. We were able to mitigate some of the technology, but the brain's a computer too, you know?"
"It had already programmed itself to work with the given parameters," Alec nodded. It made a startling amount of sense.
"Exactly. Parameters which included not only the carrot, the getting pleasure out of violence, but the stick as well. That's the Operational Directive Monitor in a nutshell. It prevented him from disobeying orders and rewarded him when he followed them. I've seen it in a half dozen or so cases. He's made significant progress in the deprogramming process, essentially reprogramming his own responses on a conscious level. He's got full autonomy, and though he doesn't need to consciously identify people as threats or allies, it has the same effect." Reaching over to grab her half-finished coffee from the nightstand, she forced down a mouthful and pulled a face. It was only when she spoke again that Alec realized it had more to do with the thoughts in her head than the taste in her mouth.
"I worry, you know? Eliot teases me about it every time he comes in, but this time?" She fixed Alec with an unhappy smile, the kind Alec suspected all doctors are trained in giving, for the days when they had to break the bad news. "I just have to wonder if these systems coming back online are going to undo all that work."
Alec nodded, wished for his own long-gone-cold coffee if only to have something else to focus on for a moment.
"So," Laroque said, bringing up the required command prompts. "Ready to bring him up?"
Alec hated himself for it a little bit, wished he could afford something resembling a vote of confidence, here, but he nodded for Parker to wake Quinn up first. It wasn't until they were in position, guarding the window and door, guns drawn, that he nodded to Laroque.
Chapter 12