chiron_survivor | Hiding in plain view. ((open to anyone!))

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Hiding in plain view. ((open to anyone!))

She didn't flee to the Nexus immediately. At first, she was just in shock. The cylons were back, except this time, they were running the government. A "coalition" government, but everyone knew what that really meant.

It didn't make sense to her. They hated humans. Why not just destroy them and be done with it?

Her boyfriend assumed it was some sort of elaborate revenge plot, or a way to salvage the aspects of humanity the cylons considered worth keeping. He wanted her to agree with him, to be red-hot about it, too, but Adia was too distracted. She kept seeing Caspar's face -- the one she thought she knew -- and comparing it with the ones she kept seeing, wherever she went.

She could tell it was bothering him, that her attention was elsewhere.

Later, in the middle of the night when she knew she wouldn't be missed by any humans, and prayed she wouldn't be missed by any cylons, she PINpointed to the Nexus.

She sat at a Nexus terminal and typed out a message for anyone to read.

The cylons are on New Caprica.

Only then did she cry.

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Adia doesn't miss the subtext of his reply, listening with an apologetic expression on her face for bringing it up. She can't help but wonder what happened to them, but she knows it'd be far too rude to ask. "Must have been frustrating, watching him try," she ventures tentatively.

"For everyone other than himself, it seemed," he remarked with the vaguest of amused tones. "I tend not to talk about him. That way Helena keeps her idealised image of him. She didn't know him well. It's best."

His brow lifts as a thought occurs to him. "Ironic that I don't talk of the dead, but I'll talk to them."

"I used to talk about my parents all the time," Adia muses after another sip of brandy. "I miss them so much. But almost everyone I know has lost their families." She adds, looking regretful, "Must be crowded in our afterworld..." How foolish she was, to try to contact Caspar when the chance arose. She should have tried to reach her parents.

"Have you ever tried to contact someone you knew? Or is that too awkward?"

Despite her mentioning her parents before, Lichtenstein had never considered that their passing might still upset Adia. The more he thinks about it, the more he realises that there are a few painful things in Adia's life that she keeps close. "Does it help? Talking about them."

Her question, as her questions often do, makes him frown. There's a long silence before he replies. "No. I wouldn't hold any value in it." He sits up and takes a breath before explaining. "When I contact someone, I... it is another plane, yes, but it's not an afterlife, exactly. I don't believe it is. I don't believe there is an afterlife. Perhaps that's why I don't enter one, or don't see it as one. Perhaps there simply isn't one in my world. I contact... To the average person they might appear to be souls, but they're only the gathered remnants of one, as far as I'm concerned. Like taking many echoes and getting a voice."

He relaxes back into his seat. "I don't believe I'm doing what people pay me to do. Telling people this is very bad for business." He pauses, his frown deepening. "You must understand, I know that perhaps I should have explained this to you before, but... It's the closest anyone comes to speaking to the dead. It almost always gets the expected result."

"Sometimes." Her gaze drops, almost guiltily. "I was very close to them. They were good parents. But when you're grieving, you don't always know what will make things better and what won't."

Perhaps it's her exhaustion, or maybe the brandy, but it takes her a few seconds for what he's telling her to sink in. It makes sense, of course, considering Martel's religious views, but she can't help but feel a little hurt. "Good thing Caspar isn't dead, then," she murmurs, too tired or too insecure to chastise him further.

"Better to not know what to do, and have lost little, than to know how to cope and lost much," he mumbles, then looks up from his drink. "Unless you have a different set of values, of course."

He doesn't know why he feels concerned about telling her now that he has. She deserved to know the facts as he saw them. That's what scientists do, isn't it? Share facts. "Mm, perhaps." A moment of silence before, "How would you know it was him? If he did find you, could you tell the difference between an imposter and the real Caspar?"

"If only I had lost little," She replies with a sad smile. "Nobody else seems to know what to do with their grief, either, so at least I'm not alone."

That's a good question, one that keeps her quiet for a minute. She fills up the time with a long swallow of brandy and careful placement of her glass back on the table while she thinks. "If one of his model really wanted to deceive me -- I don't know. But I... I've passed a few of them, and when they look at me, it's like they don't even see me. There would be some recognition in his eyes." She hopes. It's a horrible feeling that he would just look right through her, like all the others.

"If nobody knows the right way to react yet, then it will be extremely difficult to deal with it in the wrong way," he points out.

Lichtenstein hums to himself and takes a sip of his drink as he thinks about this. "Perhaps their talent at imitating human emotion is an advantage to you then. After all, not all of them necessarily know how to disguise it."

"That's true," she admits. She sips her brandy and then looks at him for a moment. "If you told me this already, I'm sorry for forgetting, but how long ago was it when magic took over your world?"

She shuts her eyes, grateful that he didn't try to play devil's advocate and take away her tenuous hope. "Maybe. They certainly seem... I don't know. Like they don't quite understand us." She opens her eyes again and stares up at the ceiling. "Julia, she... she acts so naive sometimes. It's weird. Like she's genuinely surprised that no one wants to work with her."

He looks away to think for a moment, doing a little calculating before he answers. "One hundred and twenty... seven? Yes, one hundred and twenty seven years ago since it was recognised worldwide."

Lichtenstein frowns, and takes the opportunity to drink while he listens. "That's tricky. If Caspar really didn't know what he was until a certain point, then maybe some of her understanding is also blocked. That does raise the question of how much power their seniors have over them."

"Wow," Adia murmurs. It's a little encouraging to know that humanity has survived over a century past such a calamity. "Do people still grieve over what was lost?"

"I don't know if they have that kind of organization," she replies, gaze dropping. "I don't want to assume anything. But it kind of makes it obvious that they aren't human. Even if they have the same emotions we do."

"Some people do." Himself included, though he doesn't like the idea of himself grieving over anything. His grandfather, on the other hand, used to mourn that lost world quite loudly. "People are starting to forget what it used to be like. The past is becoming a series of fairy tales."

"Mm." Another minute of silence as Lichtenstein mulls over his drink. "Do they want to be seen as human at all? Do they still want to integrate, or do they want to be seen as cylon?"

"It isn't all written down somewhere? Preserved?" She sighs. "We're trying to preserve what we can but there is plenty in our distant history that is just myth and legend now."

"No, they definitely don't want to be seen as human. They want to live alongside us, but even the ones who act like they care about humans still think they're better than us." She shrugs a little. "We can't, um... I don't think we're compatible, genetically."

"It must be. Unfortunately, I'm neither rich enough or have a high enough social standing to walk into a private library and see for myself." He looks understandably sulky about this and broods behind his drink while Adia talks. "You would think that by now we would have learned to stop fact becoming myth. Humans as a whole, I mean."

He gives a vague grunt, thinking before speaking. "If they wanted to be like you then you might be able to rest on equal ground. It's hard to tell what they want with things being the way you describe them."

Adia sits up a little straighter, indignant on Martel's behalf. "What? You mean people just hoard books and don't let anyone except their rich friends see them? That's awful..." She shakes her head a little and adds, "There are wars, though, and catastrophe. Written records get destroyed. You have to have things written down exactly or better yet, photographs and videos, or facts get messed with almost as soon as they happen."

She nods somberly and drains a bit more of her glass. "I have to remind myself that they may not have the same motivations we do. All this time, I assumed they wanted revenge, but... I don't know, maybe it's more complicated than that."

"I told you my world is mad." He listens and nods as she speaks, then interrupts himself as he goes for a drink. "We do have bards. I forgot about those... I've only seen one once. They come pretty close to being record keepers. Though the idea of oral history keeping is... odd."

"You would need to understand their own form of psychology. An area in which 'anything goes' as it is," he mumbles behind his glass. "It seems strange that you would know so little about the things you created."

"Why is it odd? A lot of cultures do it... what kind of instrument did the bard play?" And why has Martel only seen one? But this question comes to her belatedly, while she takes another sip of brandy. Maybe it's too difficult to make a living singing songs about the past.

The comment irritates her a little, but she tries not to take it personally. "The cylons that humans created were most like the Centurions, the ones that still look like robots. And a rudimentary form at that... they changed, after they fled the colonies. It's not like we ever had this sort of technology. It might as well be magic to us."

"Do they?" Excuse him, history and culture are not his strong points. "It just seems... difficult to keep facts alive through word-of-mouth. He was playing a..." Lichtenstein sits back and scratches his chin as he tries to recall. "I think it was guitar. Or a violin. It had strings."

"Hm. Evolution." Well, not really. Not real evolution. It was more like redesigning, but the thought is still amusing. "I wonder whether the majority of the next generation they created felt harder done by than the first."

Edited 2012-04-06 10:42 (UTC)

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