Date of expiration chapter 15/? (new!)
May. 5th, 2012 02:14 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
Sat., April 12, 2014 11:25 CDT (GMT-5)
Eliot blinked awake to find that the ceiling above him hadn't changed a bit since he'd shut his eyes an hour and a half ago. There was no sunlight down here- no light at all that wasn't streaming out from the dozens of computer monitors set up in an array surrounding Hardison's chair. It was bathing the mess of comic books- Eliot had fallen asleep midway through one of them, though there was no telling now, however, which one it had been- in gleaming blue light.
Hardison himself was still around the corner, sleeping. After they'd arrived in Chicago, they'd stopped for supplies- Eliot had been needing a new change of clothes for what had felt like days- and made their way down towards Hyde Park. They'd parked on the edge of the University, and from there, he'd followed Hardison across an unremarkable parking lot and into an unremarkable building.
There'd been cameras everywhere, but it hadn't been until Hardison had gotten them past the retinal scanner at the bottom of the stairwell that Eliot had been struck by their absurdity.
"Seriously? You set up shop here?"
"Back when the GF was just setting up," Hardison had explained, "The internet had barely started coming into its own. Connectivity hadn't really hit. They needed easy access to a decent library. Hence, all this."
All this had proved to be a steam tunnel, though as dark tunnels went, it had been relatively well kept, almost bland in appearance. Most of the pipes had been painted over, and the walls were a dull off-white, either by design or by age. Caged florescent tube lights had flickered overhead, but only one or two had been burned out completely.
As he'd followed Hardison along, taking in what he'd heard he'd been struck by the location's obviousness. And he probably hadn't been the first one to ever do so. "How do you keep- I don't know- bored students out?"
"There's still plenty down here for them to go spelunking in," Hardison had shrugged. "It's just not connected. Since I've been here, there hasn't been anyone who's made it anywhere close. Well." He'd flashed a smirk at Eliot. "Except for Parker, but if she couldn't figure it out, I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have been a candidate in the first place, you know?"
He'd continued following Hardison through four intersections- left, left, straight, right- until finally another door, unimpressive except for the combination retinal/fingerprint/breath scanner, mounted on the wall immediately to the left. Even with all that, they'd made it inside in a manner of seconds. Within a few minutes, he'd gotten the tour of the entire facility.
The tour hadn't taken very long; the area was shockingly small. There was the hub itself- where Eliot was waking up, now, and Hardison's small, dark living quarters. Eliot had only gotten a glimpse of them- enough to know where the bathroom and kitchen were- and they'd reminded him so much of his room back in Kansas that he'd felt his pulse ramp up to eleven.
His old room in his old bunker, though, hadn't been plastered over with nerd. There was a Star Wars poster and something that Alec had told him was the actual, original Obi Wan Kenobi costume draped over a headless mannequin in the corner. There were Star Trek posters- even a few commemorative plates. Even the kitchen was nerdy- the fridge was mostly orange soda; the freezer mostly TV dinners. A brief scan of the cabinets had revealed lots of things that were "nacho" or "taco" flavored.
Rummaging through it now, though, Eliot managed to find a stockpile of seriously decent coffee, and was setting to brew up a pot when he heard Hardison moving around in his room, just off the edge of the kitchen.
It seemed early, maybe, though he had no real idea what Hardison's usual sleep schedule entailed. After getting his system to start tracking that Chaos guy, he'd crashed out for a while last night, until his phone went off around three in the morning. He'd been running some operation down in Florida until at least six thirty.
"Hey man," Eliot called out. "You want some coffee?"
"Yes. What?" There was a stumble on the other side of the door; Hardison opened it a moment later, eyes wide. "Oh. Hey. Forgot you were here. Yeah."
The door was shut again, quickly enough that it wasn't until Eliot was pulling another mug down from the cupboard that he realized that Hardison, apparently, slept in his underwear. It seemed the better part of valor to retreat back to the hub's couch. It was as close to a living room as there was to be found down here.
Hardison had muted the feeds before heading to sleep last night, but the remote on the desk was easy enough to understand, and Eliot was able to get the news feed monitor's audio back up on his second try. As the noise began to fill the room- lots of it, several channels all going at once- he dodged back into the kitchen and snagged himself a cup of the still-brewing coffee.
On one of the channels was a blonde reporter, walking backwards down a empty hallway that Eliot wished he didn't recognize. 'Until he ended up here." The camera picked up a thin smear of blood on the wall. Hardly any, really, but the camera stayed on it as she continued. "And while the authorities are continuing their investigations," she said ominously, "it is left to us, for the time being, to ponder the question. What really happened here last night, and how is the Global Frequency involved?"
The camera cut back to her face just long enough for her to sign off, and then the screen went suddenly blank. The walls and the elevator control panels and the men lying on the floor were all being supplied by Eliot's brain. It wasn't particularly comforting, but they were just memories.
There was another feed going, two screens over. Talking heads, this time, discussing the event from the safety of their studio in New York City.
"I'm not saying that the Global Frequency hasn't done amazing work, but nobody's elected them, nobody's voted for them- hell, nobody even really knows who they are!" The white-haired man was leaning over his side of the desk, as if the eighteen microphones in the room weren't picking up his voice. "And yet the government is content to let them be, to let them carry on without any oversight whatsoever."
His cohost nodded. "But on some level, Mike, you've got to admit that they're doing what much of the populace wishes they could be doing."
"Most people would love to save the world. These are the men and women who enlist, who become doctors and firemen and police, all of which, I might add, are professions that require very selective screening. That's how we filter out those who'd just as soon end the world as save it, and it's a good system. And as Chuck pointed out, we have no access, no way to be sure that the Global Frequency maintains the same precautions. That's all I'm saying."
The talking head called Chuck was starting to make his rebuttal when another channel went live. The same story, all over again. There was too going on all at once, too much noise. Fighting the urge to throw something heavy at the nearest monitor, Eliot closed his eyes and focused on his coffee. The steam wafting up, the smell. The heat bleeding through the mug.
"I programmed all the commercials out of everything," Hardison said from the doorway, raising his mug in salute as he crossed to the chair in the center of the monitor array.
Eliot hadn't been startled, exactly. It just hadn't occurred to him, for some reason, to pay attention to Hardison's exact location. The thought occurred to him that Hardison had just reprogrammed his head. He could've programmed anything he wanted into the tech in his head, but Eliot knew, with blinding, painful certainty, when he was being given orders. And this wasn't it.
He didn't want to think about it. He'd had enough of that over the last few days; last night the paranoia had been a loop in his brain as he'd halfheartedly flipped through his book while trying not to watch Hardison work.
Eliot replayed Hardison's words in his head. All the monitors. All the channels, all the noise.
"Why?"
"Filters out some of the distractions. If I'm gonna be distracted, it damned well better be on my own terms, and not because some deodorant company's got a new catchy jingle."
"Fair enough," Eliot supposed, sitting up against the back of the couch for lack of anything better to do. "You on another call? Didn't hear any phones or alarms going off."
"Couldn't stay asleep." He'd thrown on jeans and a baggy, shapeless hoodie. It was a little disappointing, but the furry bear claw slippers he was wearing were worse. They muffled his footsteps as he crossed the floor. "I kept wondering if my crawler's had found Chaos yet."
He sat down at his chair and swung one of the four keyboards out onto his lap. A few of the monitors changed, but new images weren't making any more sense than the old ones had, but they were holding Hardison's attention completely.
Four or five screens were still intermittently flashing onto the news. Another one seemed to be a real time web search, scouring the net for headlines. Some of them flashed red, others, green or yellow. Eliot pretended not to notice the words Prairie Island, and because they were flashing green, it seemed that Hardison was doing the same. Eliot gave him a few minutes to work before finally allowing himself to ask.
"So. You find anything on him yet?"
"Enough to pin him down to a wifi network in Boston in the hours leading up to your arrival at the plant. I swear, it's like he wanted to be found. Anyway, the network belongs to a place called John McRory's; it's a bar. He hid himself pretty well in plain sight, the cocky bastard."
"Hm?"
"It means he knew there was a chance he was going to be tracked. This way, we can access his computer, which I'm almost positive was a burner anyway, but we can't actually use it to find where he is now. He could've gotten on a plane to almost anywhere since then."
"Crap."
"Hey, none of that. Chaos is the only one gonna be worrying right now." Hardison looked over his shoulder with a confident grin; apparently Eliot had sounded more disappointed than he'd thought. Either that, or Hardison was just showing off.
The fact that he might be bother to try impressing him was bizarrely satisfying.
"See, he's not stupid enough to use the same computer again, but he is stupid enough to hack the same way he always does. Hackers are creatures of habit, myself included." Eliot thought back to the monochromatic selection of sodas in the fridge and nodded, but apparently Hardison read the gesture as a question.
"We're always looking for the easiest way around an obstacle, and when we find it, we use the hell out of it, and old habits die hard. Now, there's a very good chance he's still hanging around Boston-"
"How do you know?"
"Because he's also paranoid. He knows that someone's probably going to be looking for him. The most obvious place to start would be the air and seaports, waiting for his passport to get dinged, but the problem with that is that his picture is going to match what he actually looks like, so he's not going to risk it when the heat's on him. All I need to do is check out surveillance footage around the bar when he was there, and I'll have somewhere to start in tracking his location."
"If he's as good as you say he is-"
"I ain't saying he's good," Hardison interrupted, before allowing Eliot to wave him off.
"Wouldn't he just avoid whatever surveillance cameras are around?"
"He could try, and probably did, but there's no way he's got all of them nailed down. There's two options. One, he tried ducking them as he left the bar, or two, he actually managed to duck all of them, which only works if he hasn't yet left the bar."
"So you're going to scroll around a billion cameras and hope you catch sight of him?"
"Did I not just say that I've got my facial recognition program? It's already been working on it for like, hours."
"So how long do we have to wait?"
"We don't." Hardison laughed, tapping a key, but the smile was gone an instant later.
Four monitors, scattered throughout the array, flashed to the same grainy image: a scruffy dark-haired man smirking directly into a camera, holding up a piece of paper. Scrawled in heavy black ink were two words.
Hello, Aleph.
---
Chapter 16
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
Sat., April 12, 2014 11:25 CDT (GMT-5)
Eliot blinked awake to find that the ceiling above him hadn't changed a bit since he'd shut his eyes an hour and a half ago. There was no sunlight down here- no light at all that wasn't streaming out from the dozens of computer monitors set up in an array surrounding Hardison's chair. It was bathing the mess of comic books- Eliot had fallen asleep midway through one of them, though there was no telling now, however, which one it had been- in gleaming blue light.
Hardison himself was still around the corner, sleeping. After they'd arrived in Chicago, they'd stopped for supplies- Eliot had been needing a new change of clothes for what had felt like days- and made their way down towards Hyde Park. They'd parked on the edge of the University, and from there, he'd followed Hardison across an unremarkable parking lot and into an unremarkable building.
There'd been cameras everywhere, but it hadn't been until Hardison had gotten them past the retinal scanner at the bottom of the stairwell that Eliot had been struck by their absurdity.
"Seriously? You set up shop here?"
"Back when the GF was just setting up," Hardison had explained, "The internet had barely started coming into its own. Connectivity hadn't really hit. They needed easy access to a decent library. Hence, all this."
All this had proved to be a steam tunnel, though as dark tunnels went, it had been relatively well kept, almost bland in appearance. Most of the pipes had been painted over, and the walls were a dull off-white, either by design or by age. Caged florescent tube lights had flickered overhead, but only one or two had been burned out completely.
As he'd followed Hardison along, taking in what he'd heard he'd been struck by the location's obviousness. And he probably hadn't been the first one to ever do so. "How do you keep- I don't know- bored students out?"
"There's still plenty down here for them to go spelunking in," Hardison had shrugged. "It's just not connected. Since I've been here, there hasn't been anyone who's made it anywhere close. Well." He'd flashed a smirk at Eliot. "Except for Parker, but if she couldn't figure it out, I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have been a candidate in the first place, you know?"
He'd continued following Hardison through four intersections- left, left, straight, right- until finally another door, unimpressive except for the combination retinal/fingerprint/breath scanner, mounted on the wall immediately to the left. Even with all that, they'd made it inside in a manner of seconds. Within a few minutes, he'd gotten the tour of the entire facility.
The tour hadn't taken very long; the area was shockingly small. There was the hub itself- where Eliot was waking up, now, and Hardison's small, dark living quarters. Eliot had only gotten a glimpse of them- enough to know where the bathroom and kitchen were- and they'd reminded him so much of his room back in Kansas that he'd felt his pulse ramp up to eleven.
His old room in his old bunker, though, hadn't been plastered over with nerd. There was a Star Wars poster and something that Alec had told him was the actual, original Obi Wan Kenobi costume draped over a headless mannequin in the corner. There were Star Trek posters- even a few commemorative plates. Even the kitchen was nerdy- the fridge was mostly orange soda; the freezer mostly TV dinners. A brief scan of the cabinets had revealed lots of things that were "nacho" or "taco" flavored.
Rummaging through it now, though, Eliot managed to find a stockpile of seriously decent coffee, and was setting to brew up a pot when he heard Hardison moving around in his room, just off the edge of the kitchen.
It seemed early, maybe, though he had no real idea what Hardison's usual sleep schedule entailed. After getting his system to start tracking that Chaos guy, he'd crashed out for a while last night, until his phone went off around three in the morning. He'd been running some operation down in Florida until at least six thirty.
"Hey man," Eliot called out. "You want some coffee?"
"Yes. What?" There was a stumble on the other side of the door; Hardison opened it a moment later, eyes wide. "Oh. Hey. Forgot you were here. Yeah."
The door was shut again, quickly enough that it wasn't until Eliot was pulling another mug down from the cupboard that he realized that Hardison, apparently, slept in his underwear. It seemed the better part of valor to retreat back to the hub's couch. It was as close to a living room as there was to be found down here.
Hardison had muted the feeds before heading to sleep last night, but the remote on the desk was easy enough to understand, and Eliot was able to get the news feed monitor's audio back up on his second try. As the noise began to fill the room- lots of it, several channels all going at once- he dodged back into the kitchen and snagged himself a cup of the still-brewing coffee.
On one of the channels was a blonde reporter, walking backwards down a empty hallway that Eliot wished he didn't recognize. 'Until he ended up here." The camera picked up a thin smear of blood on the wall. Hardly any, really, but the camera stayed on it as she continued. "And while the authorities are continuing their investigations," she said ominously, "it is left to us, for the time being, to ponder the question. What really happened here last night, and how is the Global Frequency involved?"
The camera cut back to her face just long enough for her to sign off, and then the screen went suddenly blank. The walls and the elevator control panels and the men lying on the floor were all being supplied by Eliot's brain. It wasn't particularly comforting, but they were just memories.
There was another feed going, two screens over. Talking heads, this time, discussing the event from the safety of their studio in New York City.
"I'm not saying that the Global Frequency hasn't done amazing work, but nobody's elected them, nobody's voted for them- hell, nobody even really knows who they are!" The white-haired man was leaning over his side of the desk, as if the eighteen microphones in the room weren't picking up his voice. "And yet the government is content to let them be, to let them carry on without any oversight whatsoever."
His cohost nodded. "But on some level, Mike, you've got to admit that they're doing what much of the populace wishes they could be doing."
"Most people would love to save the world. These are the men and women who enlist, who become doctors and firemen and police, all of which, I might add, are professions that require very selective screening. That's how we filter out those who'd just as soon end the world as save it, and it's a good system. And as Chuck pointed out, we have no access, no way to be sure that the Global Frequency maintains the same precautions. That's all I'm saying."
The talking head called Chuck was starting to make his rebuttal when another channel went live. The same story, all over again. There was too going on all at once, too much noise. Fighting the urge to throw something heavy at the nearest monitor, Eliot closed his eyes and focused on his coffee. The steam wafting up, the smell. The heat bleeding through the mug.
"I programmed all the commercials out of everything," Hardison said from the doorway, raising his mug in salute as he crossed to the chair in the center of the monitor array.
Eliot hadn't been startled, exactly. It just hadn't occurred to him, for some reason, to pay attention to Hardison's exact location. The thought occurred to him that Hardison had just reprogrammed his head. He could've programmed anything he wanted into the tech in his head, but Eliot knew, with blinding, painful certainty, when he was being given orders. And this wasn't it.
He didn't want to think about it. He'd had enough of that over the last few days; last night the paranoia had been a loop in his brain as he'd halfheartedly flipped through his book while trying not to watch Hardison work.
Eliot replayed Hardison's words in his head. All the monitors. All the channels, all the noise.
"Why?"
"Filters out some of the distractions. If I'm gonna be distracted, it damned well better be on my own terms, and not because some deodorant company's got a new catchy jingle."
"Fair enough," Eliot supposed, sitting up against the back of the couch for lack of anything better to do. "You on another call? Didn't hear any phones or alarms going off."
"Couldn't stay asleep." He'd thrown on jeans and a baggy, shapeless hoodie. It was a little disappointing, but the furry bear claw slippers he was wearing were worse. They muffled his footsteps as he crossed the floor. "I kept wondering if my crawler's had found Chaos yet."
He sat down at his chair and swung one of the four keyboards out onto his lap. A few of the monitors changed, but new images weren't making any more sense than the old ones had, but they were holding Hardison's attention completely.
Four or five screens were still intermittently flashing onto the news. Another one seemed to be a real time web search, scouring the net for headlines. Some of them flashed red, others, green or yellow. Eliot pretended not to notice the words Prairie Island, and because they were flashing green, it seemed that Hardison was doing the same. Eliot gave him a few minutes to work before finally allowing himself to ask.
"So. You find anything on him yet?"
"Enough to pin him down to a wifi network in Boston in the hours leading up to your arrival at the plant. I swear, it's like he wanted to be found. Anyway, the network belongs to a place called John McRory's; it's a bar. He hid himself pretty well in plain sight, the cocky bastard."
"Hm?"
"It means he knew there was a chance he was going to be tracked. This way, we can access his computer, which I'm almost positive was a burner anyway, but we can't actually use it to find where he is now. He could've gotten on a plane to almost anywhere since then."
"Crap."
"Hey, none of that. Chaos is the only one gonna be worrying right now." Hardison looked over his shoulder with a confident grin; apparently Eliot had sounded more disappointed than he'd thought. Either that, or Hardison was just showing off.
The fact that he might be bother to try impressing him was bizarrely satisfying.
"See, he's not stupid enough to use the same computer again, but he is stupid enough to hack the same way he always does. Hackers are creatures of habit, myself included." Eliot thought back to the monochromatic selection of sodas in the fridge and nodded, but apparently Hardison read the gesture as a question.
"We're always looking for the easiest way around an obstacle, and when we find it, we use the hell out of it, and old habits die hard. Now, there's a very good chance he's still hanging around Boston-"
"How do you know?"
"Because he's also paranoid. He knows that someone's probably going to be looking for him. The most obvious place to start would be the air and seaports, waiting for his passport to get dinged, but the problem with that is that his picture is going to match what he actually looks like, so he's not going to risk it when the heat's on him. All I need to do is check out surveillance footage around the bar when he was there, and I'll have somewhere to start in tracking his location."
"If he's as good as you say he is-"
"I ain't saying he's good," Hardison interrupted, before allowing Eliot to wave him off.
"Wouldn't he just avoid whatever surveillance cameras are around?"
"He could try, and probably did, but there's no way he's got all of them nailed down. There's two options. One, he tried ducking them as he left the bar, or two, he actually managed to duck all of them, which only works if he hasn't yet left the bar."
"So you're going to scroll around a billion cameras and hope you catch sight of him?"
"Did I not just say that I've got my facial recognition program? It's already been working on it for like, hours."
"So how long do we have to wait?"
"We don't." Hardison laughed, tapping a key, but the smile was gone an instant later.
Four monitors, scattered throughout the array, flashed to the same grainy image: a scruffy dark-haired man smirking directly into a camera, holding up a piece of paper. Scrawled in heavy black ink were two words.
Hello, Aleph.
---
Chapter 16