#I realized technically I was supposed to post this yesterday for an accurate date for me but I was too tired lol

[rh0mbus0fruin]

Thomas da killer and da killed

[benevolenterrancy]

Maybe Herawell?

I’ve never written Herawell... or Maxwell at all, so this was a fun challenge (and a good excuse to relisten to season three episodes)!  Definitely not a drabble but I had an idea and I wanted to roll with it.  I’ve also posted it up on my AO3.

By now, Maxwell knew the Hephaestus like an old friend.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that if she hadold friends, she would know them as well as the Hephaestus.

She sees the blueprints in her head, sees them shift andswim through their three dimensional mapping, the layers of crew pathways andservice corridors overlaid with technical graphs of wiring and pipes andcarefully labelled systems that blurred over top of each other until she, withbarely a thought, dissected them from one another and superimpose them over hersurroundings.  She was in engineering,but she wasn’t just inengineering.  To her right she passed acomms terminal, and snaking through that wall was a network that connected itto three other engineering terminals to create a subsystem, partitioned off themain systems for safety reasons. Immediately beneath her feet were three different branches of theHephaestus’ heating ducts, and below that was a primary power node.  Overhead, she knew there were four differentnetworks of wires, all carrying different information at impossible speeds allover the ship.  Interspersed through allof this was the grid of cameras and sensors and auditor inputs used by themother program to supervise the station and its inhabitants.  All of this hidden from sight buteffortlessly visible in her  mind’s eye.

With ease she moved  through the stuffy, complex maze ofengineering, not even looking up from the tablet in her hand and she pushed herway along.  She was trying to make senseof an error that had cropped up yesterday in the ventilation system.  It had been a strange, brief tick and shemight have overlooked it if it weren’t for the fact that it quite literally should not have happened.  As far as she could tell there was no triggerthat should have set it off, it was a completely inscrutable puzzle, and that annoyed Alana Maxwell.  So here she was, attempting to hunt it downto its root system.

She may have very well continued on her way, comfortable inthe busy silence of an unsolved dilemma (one that took her blissfully far awayfrom the unmitigated chaos of the rest of the ship since the colonel had betterthings to do than slum in engineering, Lovelace and Minkowski were bothdutifully busy with their own work, and Eiffel wasn’t likely to go somewherethat might require him needing to actually work.  Honestly Maxwell was grateful for thattoday.  Today wasn’t a day she felt muchlike being around other people.  Jacobiby now knew to leave well enough alone; he’d given her shoulder a brief pat inthe morning when they had passed in the kitchen and that had been the extent ofit.

So it was just her and the machines.  Really, if you thought about it, that wasn’tso much sad as much as it was… a tradition.

That might actually be more sad, if she let herself think aboutit too much.  Which she didn’t.  

This peace was broken though, when one of the machines spokeup.

“Doctor Maxwell, stop!”

Hera’s voice was so sudden and so filled with cracklingpanic that Maxwell didn’t even question it. That, and the sharp warning beeps that came half a second after told hervery  clearly that she needed to quitmoving now.  She scrambled to stop herself as quickly as shecould while gliding in zero-G.  Shedidn’t stop a moment too soon; immediately in front her face one of the pressurerelease values on engine systems gave an ear-piercing shriek as it released askin-burning cloud of built-up steam. Even from where she clung to the pipe that had slowed her down, Alanacould feel the sizzle of super-heated water vapour across her cheeks.

The steam died back down as quickly as it had come, leavingthe room silent besides for the plinkplink of cooling metal.  Maxwell tooka moment to compose herself and come to terms with her near death experiencebefore speaking.

“Maxwell?  Doctor Maxwell?  Are you okay? …Alana?”

Maxwell breathed carefully. The air felt all the colder passing into her lungs after that burst ofsteam.

“I am… okay, Hera. Barely, but okay.  At least Iwasn’t done up like steamed broccoli so it could have been worse.  Now, if you don’t mind me asking, what the hell was that.”

A semi-omniscient artificial intelligence that was fullyintegrated with a space stations couldn’t actually flinch, but Hera definitelytried.  

After the uncomfortable static died down, Maxwell asked, asgently as she could, “Hera are youfeeling okay?  That was a reallyunexpected pressure build up, and–”

“No no no, I’m fine! I’m fantastic!  I am – with allthe work you’ve already done for me, Doctor Maxwell, I’ve honestly never felt better. It was just…  I was doing a fewadjustments of our orbit and I guess it just put a bit more strain on theengines than I had calculated.  Sillymistake!  Must have, um, forgotten tocarry the one?”

Maxwell crossed her arms. She’d gone from being shocked and mildly concerned to down rightsuspicious.  “You’ve been spending toomuch time around Eiffel,” she said flatly.

Hera couldn’t really deny that.  She swore she used to be a better liar.

“Seriously, Hera, what’s wrong?  And can we not do the usual song and dancearound this.  Just… let me know whatneeds to be fixed, so I can fix it.  Letme help.”

“Nothing needs to be fixed – well, no, that cooling tank bythe starboard thruster is still running at a loss for some reason, and I’m notsure that reroute you patched in last week has fully settled – but what I meanto say is… this was just an accident. Honest.  And besides, youshouldn’t be overworking yourself today, right? Right!  Right, so let’s forget it.”

Maxwell squinted.

“What’s thatsupposed to mean?”

Hera seemed to realize she’d taken a misstep because shefumbled to self-correct.  “What?  Mean? Nothing!  Just… you’re a…hardworking individual and you shouldn’t work… too… hard.”

“Why is today so special?” she demanded, though she knewwhy.  “Look, whatever you think you knowabout me, Hera–”

“Look, I wasn’t snooping just to snoop!  Well, not much.  Maybe a little.  It happened while we were patching code fromthe Urania into my databanks.  It’s allbeing shoved into my head, it’s hard notto look and it was just a little date and it wasn’t exactly classified – much –anyway!  It’s not really a big deal,right?  Except… then you haven’t saidanything about it and no one else has said anything about it and now I’mthinking maybe it is a big deal and,yeah…” she trailed off.

Maxwell just sighed.

“Alright, let’s just… get this out in the open then.  Yes, it’s my birthday.  I suppose I shouldn’t have really expectedyou not to figure that out.”

“Happy birthday?” Hera offered tentatively.

��Not really,” said Maxwell pointedly.  “Look, you know and… honestly, I’msurprisingly okay with you knowing. Because it’s you.  But I don’twant to talk about it or acknowledge it or anything.  Get it? I don’t exactly have a lot of great memories about birthdays and honest,I’d rather just be busy.”

Math, numbers, machines, those had always been there, thosehad always been constant.  Growing up,nothing else really had been.  She lookedback on her time in public school mostly with resentment.  They hadn’t know what they had had.  They had left her alone and bored andstagnating.  They had left her with herfather and left her with her inscrutable classmates and left her inmotherfucking Montana.  But at the time, as a child, she had likedschool, as much as she’d liked most things. Oh, she had hated her classmates, and hated the lonely boredom of recessand lunch until she had learned to smile and charm and convince her peers totolerate her on a surface level.  She hadhated how boring the work had been and how stupid her classmates had seemed.  But school at least had been constant.  Every weekday, eight to two.  And once a year, like every other student intheir small elementary school, the principal would call her name over the morningannouncements to mention to a mostly uncaring student body that it was herbirthday and to invite her to get a birthday pencil from the office.  It had been predictable.  It had, when she was younger and more naïve,made her feel good.  Once a year, atleast one person would wish her a happy birthday.  She had heard plenty of stories about whatbirthdays were supposed to be like, heard peers talk, read it in books, seen iton TV.  Parents pampering you, presents,parties, praise.  Some years her fatherremember.  Some years she wished he didn’t.  Most it wasn’t an issue, but it wasn’tmentioned.

But she would spend the entire day on edge, wondering if,if, if, if he would remember, and if he did what would happen.  It had been an unpredictable, anxious sort ofday.  Most years she would drag herbiggest, and most interesting books into her room – whatever she’d been able tocheck out of the school’s little library or borrow from the classroom – andread.  She’d look at the grade six mathbook that was theoretically three years too advance for her and let the simpleequations solve themselves before her eyes, she’d read about space and scienceand exploration and imagine the hidden math there.  A rocket went up to space.  How? The book didn’t tell.  She wouldspend the evening on her stomach with paper and pencils in front of her as sheimagined how it worked, why it worked, if she could make it work.  The math was constant.  It kept her busy.  It was a good friend.

And yes, she realized that that sounded sad.  Childhood trauma and all that, the plight ofa child genius, everyone had heard the narrative before.  She shut it down and locked it up behindfirewalls and deleted the directories that lead back there.  It was unnecessary baggage, a glitch in herprograming, an obsolete file that slowed her down.  But command_code: “birthday” had a way ofdrawing those memories back up.  So shekept busy.

Maxwell spoke first, eager to change the subject.  “So how about we figure out what the heck hasbeen causing these weird alarms over the past few days.  At this point I’m thinking there might besomething wrong with the alarm trigger itself, with the audio, because–”

“I, uh… I know what’s wrong.”

“…Are you serious?  Sowhat, you’ve just been watching me scramble around trying to figure it out?  Hera, if this is a prank you have really been spending too much timearound Eiffel.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Hera…”

“I’m serious!  Well, Imean technically there were thingsthat were wrong for a very, very briefamount of time.  I was trying to surpriseyou and so I was… practicing.”

“By… breaking the ship? I mean, I would have beensurprised if we’d suddenly dropped into the star but I think everyone elsewould have been too.”

“Oh, so I need to keep you updated about every time I adjustany system, but you don’t even have to tell me that it’s your birthday!” snapped Hera, clearly riled.

“What does that have to do with anything?” demanded Maxwell,feeling just as frustrated.

“Because it’s your birthday!”

“So what?  Kepler’s isnext month, do you give a shit about that?”

“No!  Because that’s Kepler, and this is you. I care because it’s yourbirthday!  This is the day you started existing.  And I thought that we… I thought…”  The glitch was thick in her voice.  “I thought you would c-care if I knew.”

The action was immediately, without any sort of thought; Maxwellreached out and put a hand on the nearest pipe. It was an absolutely insane, nonsensical thing to do.  To say that Hera was the Hephaestus was agross over-simplification to begin with, but even if you did make that leap itwasn’t like there was any sensation for Hera to experience by Maxwell touchingsome arbitrary part of the station.  Shecouldn’t tell that Maxwell’s hand was soft. Apologetic.  Shocked and sincereand overwhelmed but not knowing how to feel any of that let alone voice it.

“I don’t really dobirthdays.  Not a lot of great memoriesfor me.”  Please understand.

“I get that, I just…” said Hera, with stops and starts.  “I’m sorry, I’m going to mess all this up.  I just, I wanted you to know that I’m g-gladyou exist.  And I get not liking whereyou c-came from, but I don’t care aboutthat.  Who cares if the person who madeyou was a b-bad person?  I’m glad youexist, like this, now.”

Maxwell could feel her hand tighten its grip on the pipe asher throat tightened around a lump of emotions rising up from her chest.  She didn’t know what to say, so she saidnothing.

For a moment it was silent, or as silent as engineering evergot.  Just the sound of a single humanand thousands of pounds of complex machinery co-existing.  And a single AI thinking carefully before shespoke.

Finally, Hera said, with great tentativeness, “Can I giveyou my gift now?  I… I was still working itout but I think it should be ready.”

That startled Maxwell. “Alright, Hera, you’re pretty amazing but – no, you are possibly the most amazing person I know – butthere are limits.  You don’t have hands, Hera.  We’re stuck in a tin can eight lightyearsaway from earth.”  Laughter was breakinginto her voice, a disbelieving, amazed, intrigued laughter.  She was curious.  Not just curious, but completelystumped.  You couldn’t just get someonesomething when you had next to no resources to begin with and were existing ina tiny bubble in the middle of space. And yet she was supposed to believe Hera had somehow managed it?  Just because it was Maxwell’s birthday?

Honestly, if anyone could manage it, she supposed the factthat Hera had surprised her the least. No matter what that little voice in her head might insist, Hera wascapable of so much.  Maxwell had builther life around artificial intelligence, and yet Hera was constantly,endlessly, relentlessly amazing her.  Notbecause she was a great AI, but because Hera was, unerringly, a greatperson.  A great, shocking, frustrating,wonderful person.

“I have my ways,” said Hera, with a smug pride in her voicethat was so far removed from the helplessness that she was still workingthrough that Maxwell couldn’t help but smile. ”So… do you want it?”

“Yes, I’m too curious now.”

“I know all your weaknesses,” teased Hera.  “You’re going to have to wait for just onesecond.  It’s a little tricky to getgoing.”

Maxwell floated in the middle of engineering, waiting.

Then a warning buzzer went off somewhere below her.   Maxwell was in the middle of doing afull-body twist – immediately looking for what was going wrong was such aningrained instinct at this point that she didn’t even think about it – when thebuzz cut off.  And then another alarmbeeped, its lights flashing.  Andbeeped.  Stopped.  A higher pinging, a warning bell, and soonMaxwell was listening to a choir of notification pings and alarm buzzes andalert beeps play out in what, she realized with delighted awe, was asurprisingly recognizable rendition of HappyBirthday.  And this wasn’t just Herapiping music or even noise through her speakers.  No, Maxwell realized as she floated amid a rainbowsky of flashing lights, somehow Hera was managing to choreograph an array ofsystem failures with the sole purpose of making the machines around them sing.

That should have been more terrifying than it was.  Mostly Maxwell just wanted to figure out away to hug an entire space station, because an entire space station beingsystematically broken and rebuilt in the span of microseconds that was possiblythe coolest gift she had ever been given.

When the last warning hum died down, and the bright lightswere flashing and twinkling like party poppers, Maxwell applauded.

“D-did you like it?”

“Hera, that was amazing.  How did you even manage that?”

Hera was flustered, delightfully so.  “Oh, you know.  Practice. Which, um, sorry about that.  Butit was really just like knocking over a line of dominoes.  …Dominoes that you also need to make sure youprogram to immediately rebuild themselves after they get knocked over soeveryone doesn’t die a horrible, painful death.”  Hera laughed uncertainly.  “But everything was fine, so – yay.”

Maxwell was turning on the spot, mentally trying tocalculate how many different systems had played into that, how that many couldeven be altered or tricked in such a way. “There must have been a hundred different failsafes to work around topull that off.”

“Oh, believe me, there are and none of them are happy withme right now.  But… I did it.  I really didn’t think I could but, well, thenI figured who says I can’t.  So I just,did.”

Maxwell had her face in her hands.

“Doctor Maxwell?”

Her shoulders shook.

“Alana?” called Hera, more alarmed.  “I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have doneanything; Eiffel doesn’t like his birthday either, but I’d thought–”

Finally, Maxwell laughed. Deep, gasping laughs that were almost tears, probably were tears, butwere  wrapped up enough in humour and joythat they could be safely ignored.

“I can’t believe you just completely kicked down everywarning sign built into your head that you could find.  You just… stomped right over every stopperGoddard made because you wanted to. Because you thought it would make me happy.  I can’t… I…”  Her breathing steadied alittle, and suddenly the weight of it, the weight of twenty seconds and a sillychildish song hit her fully.  “Thank you,Hera.”

“You’re welcome, Alana.” A beat, and then, as if thinking better of herself even as she said it,Hera said, “I understand why you wouldn’t like your birthday, and I definitelyget having memories you don’t want to think about, but someone really, reallywise told me that memories are what make us people.  So I was thinking, maybe, we could make somenew memories?  Together?”

Maxwell didn’t know what to say.  Her mind whizzed with every reason this was abad idea.  Birthday’s were inherentlyunreliable, so she filled them with reliability: numbers, math, work, a few ofthe constants in her life.  Thetemptation to stick with what she knew, to avoid the thoughts, to avoidconfrontation was great.  Sheoverthought, and she knew it.  So shestopped, and said the only thing that she could possibly say.

“I imagine everyone can keep us from dropping into the starwithout me there to hold their hands for a few hours, right?”

“I don’t know about that,” said Hera, fondly.  “But I’d be willing to test that hypothesisout.”

“Sounds like a date.”