The training shifts on the bridge were more and more intense as Alice and Jake raised the difficulties. Between simulations she had started reviewing the results alone, she loved the night bridge staff but it always went faster if she could sync her mechanical eye up to a computer system and review the data over a digital interface without being interrupted.
When she entered the Ready Office attached to the bridge she stopped dead in her tracks and hurriedly slapped the button to close the hatch behind her. Captain Valance was sitting on the desk in his undershorts, his vacsuit was draped over one hand while the other gently ran his fingers over it. “She's really gone, isn't she?” he asked so quietly she almost didn't hear.
Alice hesitated a moment and asked; “what's that you have there Captain?”
“Just a scarf. Ayan made it for me out of a shawl that was ruined on the First Light. ”
She glanced at it again, just to be sure he was actually holding his vacsuit in the dim light, not the scarf that had been tied around Ayan's body before she was given a space farer's burial. Her cybernetic eye compensated for the low light and focused in on his face. His glazed eyes and openly mournful expression told her one thing; he's sleep walking, or whatever counts as sleep walking where Jake is concerned. He doesn't do anything small.
“Ayan, Minh, my parents, even Alice is gone,”
She was about to contradict him then a thought occurred to her; “Jonas?”
He looked up at her, his eyes focused on her only for a moment then glazed over once more. “Who else would I be? Then again, I don't know who you are, but you're familiar. Like everything here; strange ship, strange constellations when I look outside, even the operating system for the comm is different but all somehow familiar.”
“You should get back to bed sir,” she directed quietly.
“Why? Even my ship's gone, I don't even know what happened to the First Light after it escaped.”
“She made it back, they've rebuilt her as a carrier and now you're running a new ship. You should get your rest, you don't want to be tired for your duty shift on the bridge.”
“A new ship?” he stared at her dumbly, for a moment she thought he was coming out of it, then he looked away, to something in the distance. “Doesn't matter, there's not much time left.”
Alice walked across the room to him gently and took his arm. He was larger than Jonas was, but his bearing, his manner was every bit the Jonas she remembered. Urging him to his feet was easier than expected.
“It took him a while to stop resisting the integration process, but now that he's accepted that it's the way it should be my individual imprint is integrating. We'll be inseparable soon, the same person, and I can't let him take all this grief, all this anger,” he went on. “None of this is happening the way it was supposed to, he should have woken up, seen Alice and the imprint was supposed to take over, he was supposed to remember.”
“Who was supposed to remember?” she asked, placating him more than anything. I just need to get him back to bed, he'll probably just roll over and mumble his way back to sleep.
“The copy, he was supposed to remember me then learn to use the framework technology but the trigger went off too late and he had time to become something more, someone all his own.”
She stopped half way to the small shaft that would lead him back to bed. “You mean he became Jake.”
“That's what you call him,” he looked straight into her eyes and was suddenly astonished. “ You were the trigger, but you left before he woke up.”
“So he doesn't know how to use the framework technology? How does he learn?” she asked, not knowing whether what she was hearing was real or some rant born in a dream.
“By using it, it's a natural function like breathing, only the first time it happens it might be unconscious, maybe dangerous,” he said as his manner changed completely. His vision focused in on her and he dropped his vacsuit. Automatically he stooped to pick it up then realized where he was. “How did I get here?” He was awake.
Alice hesitated for a moment, watching him to make sure that he was actually awake. “You were sleep walking,” she replied simply as she stepped away.
“Sleep walking? What was I doing? Did I leave the ready quarters?”
“Thankfully no. When I came in you were holding that as though it was the scarf Ayan made for you. You thought you were Jonas.”
The memory of a dream returned to him vaguely as he put his vacsuit on. But that's not my memory. It's one of my recollections from Jonas' past. “What did he-” he paused for a moment then corrected himself; “-I say?”
“You'd better watch the security footage,” Alice queued up the last ten minutes using her command unit and instructed the room's main player to display the time period in question. “Do you want me to leave?”
“No, stay.”
They watched it together and when it finished Jake Valance sat in silence in one of the chairs in front of the sturdy captain's desk.
Alice braced herself. She hoped she handled the situation the way he would have liked and she hadn't overstepped her bounds.
“It explains a lot, but what did he mean by using the framework technology? I've already come back from beyond the brink at least once, survived radiation poisoning, what else is there and why don't I remember it like everything else Jonas experienced?”
“I have no idea, I'm sorry,” Alice said quietly.
Jake turned to her, sitting in the seat beside him, and put his hand on her shoulder. “You shouldn't be, why would you have the answers?”
“I should have found my way back to you sooner after drawing Vindyne away from you and the Samson. The only reason why I didn't go back sooner was because I was afraid. I had a price on my head for three sectors and I didn't want to get caught. I should have waited for you to wake up, made sure you were all right before I moved on.”
“It's all right. One way or another we both came out fine. Jonas, or whoever that was talking in my sleep has another thing wrong. He wants to protect me from his pain but that's just part of who he is, without it nothing would be the same. The worst bit is that there's something in here,” he said, pointing to his temple. “telling me to do something and I have no idea how.”
Alice was relieved that he didn't blame her for leaving him alone on the Samson years ago, it was something she worried about often. “Maybe we should think about heading to Zingara station after we've met up with Oz and Jason. I know it's a couple sectors away, but there might be answers there. Until then, it's just a matter of waiting I guess. I'll tell you if you start growing extra components or giving off radio signals.”
He sighed and nodded. “Something to think about once the wormhole generator is working again. Besides, I guess it's too much to ask to get an operator's manual, no one else is born with one.”
Alice couldn't help but chuckle. “Now you know how I felt for the first few months after making the transfer.”
“Sometimes I forget. Still feels like you're the daughter I was looking for while I made my way across the outer fringes most of the time.”
“I don't mind that one bit.”
“Good, it's a hard thing to shake. Still, it makes me wonder about what I did while I was a blank slate. My, I mean Jonas' psych professor at the academy once said that the true test of a person is what they do when they think no one's looking. When I had a completely blank slate the first thing I did after getting the Samson running was land her on Radic and start bounty hunting locally. After a month I had turned in about a dozen bail jumpers, debtors and I even trapped some kid, couldn't have been more than sixteen, who was trying to avoid giving testimony. Three months later I was taking jobs from Radic City's crime lord.”
“But you moved on.”
“Only after I had enough money, that's all it was. I did it all for cash, whatever was on the board and didn't involve outright slavery I would do. One hundred and forty one crew members were killed while I was running the Samson and after a while I was just numb to it.”
“Jake, Vindyne planted a directive in your head along with the databases they gave you. It was made to compel you to find work, to be someone else's servant. The system said that it would take a serious trauma to break you out of it. Somewhere along the line that's happened, and from what I've seen since I came aboard you're free.”
“That might explain some of the jobs I never wanted in the first place but took anyway. I could have found work hauling cargo, the Samson had the hookups for it and it would have taken me just a couple days to get the engines up to par. When I was left on my own, running without a moral compass I chose the most available route and didn't want to know the details behind the jobs. Now I have all these memories and the moral code that comes with it. Jonas wouldn't have taken half the jobs I finished, so many of those people had a good reason to run and I'm the one who brought them in, right or wrong.” he leaned on the thick transparent section of hull behind his desk. The nebula outside bathed the room in dim gold.
Alice watched him from where she sat. The security recordings of him capturing bounties came to mind, she had watched at least twenty of the ones that had surfaced on the Newsnets since he made his first recruiting speech for the Aucharians. She had never thought of who his prey was, what their crimes were. Most of the recordings had been stripped of those details, and the ones that did bear the identities of his targets made them out to be hardened criminals.
“Reconciliation,” Jake said quietly. “Jonas was a good man, better than I ever was. Ever since I found his memories in my head I've felt like I've been carrying this weight around and the thing I'm most thankful for inheriting from him is his ability to just bury it. I tell you that man must have been good at just pretending nothing was wrong even if the whole place was coming apart.”
Alice couldn't help but smile a little. “He couldn't hide anything from me or Ayan. She didn't know him nearly as long as I did, but she got him pretty quickly.”
He leaned his head against the window with his arm as a cushion. “Now that's something I'd never have seen coming. Ayan. When it comes to her and everyone from the First Light I feel exactly the same. I miss Oz, Jason, and especially Minh and Ayan. Then I try and remind myself that I'm Jake Valance, this black hearted hunter and it does no good.”
Seeing him so frustrated made her wish she could just pull the right thing to say out of the air or consult a few hundred interactive psychological texts as she would have as an artificial intelligence and just guide him to resolving his own issues but she only had one answer for him. “Time. You're grieving, it takes time.”
Jake sighed and turned around, leaning on the backrest of his desk chair. “You're right, but there is no time, not here. I wouldn't give up the Triton or the crew either, this is what I want to be doing.”
“What if you could have the best of both worlds? Maybe you could take one of those Uriel Starfighters for a test flight. I can hold down the fort, we're only training anyway.”
Jake thought for a moment, looking down at the dark, blank surface of his desk. “Maybe.”
She couldn't help but be surprised. Alice was sure he'd reject the idea immediately. A smile grew on her lips. “I'll get Laura to take your shift on the bridge, she was wondering if she could take one of mine for a while now anyway.”
“Well, Oz and Jason are still out there too. I'd rather be here when they arrive so I'm pinned to the deck for at least that long.” Jake took his gun belt from the peg beside the ladder and started putting it on.
“Not going back to bed?”
“No, I'm wide awake. Think I'll go down and work on the Samson awhile,” he said as he put his long coat on.
“I'd join you but I have department training reports to go through. Laura's going to be glad you're staying close to the bridge with Oz and Jason still out there. She doesn't let on much, but she's worried.”
“So am I. I'm just wondering if this idea for me to take a ride isn't some plot of yours to take the Triton for yourself.”
Alice flashed him a broad grin and winked. “There's only one way to find out for sure.”