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all the shattering stars
Imprisonment under threat of dissection should be a lot of things, but boring isn’t one of them. And right now, the being who may or may not be Captain Isabel Lovelace is so bored she could scream. You’d think she’d be used to boredom by now, between the countless off-hours without sleep and the endless monotony of crises on the Hephaestus. Her entire life, it turns out, has been one long crisis, which would be tragic if it weren’t so funny. A ‘tragicomedy’, to steal a word Cutter used in their last round of Scrabble. Cutter likes words, which means she’s spent more time thinking about them than she has since high school.
Words like ‘go away’, for example, that for all Pryce’s clever, clever programming, her mind-controlled minions don’t seem to understand.
“Are you sure I can’t get you anything?” Minkowski’s voice is overbright, the syllables of her words singing with an unnaturally polished perfection the real Renée Minkowski probably would have envied.
“You could leave me alone?” she suggests, lacking the motivation to sound properly venomous with someone who doesn’t deserve it. Even if that someone isn’t really here at all.
“Mr Cutter was very insistent I make you comfortable. Wasn’t that nice of him?”
Nice. It’s a word she never really thought about before. Nice is the sound of Minkowski’s words ringing from her lips like jewels into a bowl, with none of the labour that had once been behind that practiced accent. Nice is Cutter’s affable shade of evil, playing boardgames while Rome burns. Nice is a deceptive little shit of a word, which looks like ‘kind’ until you scratch its surface and find rot underneath.
Kind, though. Kind is something entirely different. Kindness had lurked in the moments where Eiffel and Lovelace slipped and became Doug and Isabel, people rather than positions (friends rather than charges). Kind is saving the lives of people who’ve tried to kill her, who’ve done nothing to earn it. Kind is scraped thin and bone-weary and seven and a half lightyears away from an Earth where she’s long dead, and still laughing at Eiffel’s attempt to relieve her of command even after Hilbert and Lovelace had done their best to break her of it. She’d never really appreciated that failure until Cutter had succeeded for her, crushing that inconvenient little virtue into sand.
“No, Renée,” she hears herself say, distantly, “it was not nice of him.” It was a form of cruelty so exquisite she wonders if he’d actually planned for this eventuality when he sent Minkowski up here after her.
Her brow furrows in innocent confusion, which doesn’t suit her. Of all the expressions in the Pryce and Cutter Human Emotion Manual, it’s not one her sharp, clever features were made for. “It’s alright, Isabel. Everything’s going to be alright, I just know it.”
Everything is the furthest it’s ever been from ‘alright’. It’s like watching Sam die all over again, except this time the stranger taking his place isn’t Minkowski but a puppet who wears her face badly. No, it’s like being back in that god-awful simulation and watching herself pick the wrong option and erase his nature over and over again. But this time, this time with the knowledge that this is exactly what she would have chosen if Eiffel hadn’t been there to snap Minkowski out of it. And maybe this has been Cutter’s plan all along, or maybe…
Maybe all this was just a bonus. Because Goddard Futuristics has sent the brilliant and the bright to the stars to die in the name of progress before, haven’t they? Renée Minkowski, with her dreams of the distant stars and her snappish temper and her aching, weary kindness was probably an easy sacrifice to Pryce and Cutter, just one more necessary casualty for Goddard’s greater goals. She was never really relevant, and using her to torment Lovelace is just an economical use of the tools at hand, the Goddard Futuristics brand of recycling their human resources. Kind doesn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things. The ache of its absence is just another toy to keep Cutter amused.
She flinches at the hand on her shoulder. “Everything’s going to be alright,” Minkowski repeats, in the voice that is not her voice, and it’s so close to something she’d say that it hurts more than it should.
She turns to look at her, searching her face for a hint, a sign, something, anything to show that she’s still there, still fighting even after they fried the resistance of out her brain. If somewhere, in the back of her head, the real Renée is screaming along with her.
“Just tell me,” she asks aloud, “what did they do to you? What did that machine cut out of your brain?” And is there any way I can put it back?
“You don’t need to worry,” she smiles, and it’s a nice smile, one that holds no kindness at all. “They didn’t hurt me. They just took the pain away. Nothing hurts anymore.”
Nothing hurts anymore. It should be a good thing. Minkowski smiling should be a good thing. (Her smiles have, in retrospect, been far too rare.) Instead, it’s just… broken. They’re both broken, and Minkowski’s hand is still on her shoulder.
“You’re not happy,” she says, with a concern that sounds almost real, “Let me help?”
It’s only then that she realises that she’s crying, and swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand.
“You- you can’t help. Not with this.”
The door slides open with a hydraulic hiss, and her hands curl into fists almost automatically.
“Isabel, Renée!” It’s Cutter. It’s always Cutter. “Sorry to leave you girls such a while, but it’s good to see you getting along so well. Like one big, happy family. Isn’t this nice?”
Her stomach churns, and she finally yanks away from the hand on her shoulder. It shouldn’t hold the weight it does, not while the stars the real Isabel Lovelace and Renée Minkowski had dreamed of shatter around them.
“Yes. Nice is exactly the word I would use.”