Disaster

[slidingjennifer]

After meeting someone who could explain Milliways to her, Jennifer settled down considerably. She spent the 14th in her new room (and didn't it blow her mind to find out who was paying for it?), just letting it all sink in.

Utopia... compromised. Team Tomorrow... quite possibly, the tool of oppression so many paranoids all over the Americas call it. The Directive and the Teragen... still paranoid and megalomaniacal, respectively, but at least she could understand, now, why they objected to Project Utopia.

Her employers. Her murderers.

Now she's down in the bar, watching something Bar provided that looks like a portable TV. On the screen, a man with hair a few shades redder than hers is speaking at a podium, next to a be-wreathed coffin. A caption at the bottom of the screen says that this is the N! and CNN Televised Live Broadcast from Slider's Funeral and Wake.

"—gives me great sadness," the man is saying with a strong Leith accent (a subtype of Edinburgh), "as novas and baselines alike have lost a strong hero needlessly. Jennifer was a credit to the cause, both as a nova and as an individual, and her passing shall leave our Earth a sadder place for a brief time, although I know she would want us to move past this tragic event, hopefully finding it within ourselves to—"

He breaks off and looks up, startled by something neither the camera nor baseline senses can detect. Then he's running off to his right.

Jennifer's eyes go wide. "Oh, no. André, you fool..."

Comments

[md_donighal]

The man in the gray suit is there almost immediately. "And so it begins," he says with a sigh. "Sorry for frightening you the other day."

[slidingjennifer]

It's not okay, it's possible nothing will ever really be okay again, but at least he knows he's supposed to regret it. All she can manage to do is sigh, "Just don't do it again."

After a moment, she adds, "Oh, and thanks for the room, I guess."

[md_donighal]

"You're quite welcome. I felt guilty about startling you, among other things, and also felt it incumbent on me, as the only other current representative of our home Earth, to look out for you as best I could."

[slidingjennifer]

"As long as you don't expect either sex or me joining whatever Teragen chapter you've managed to start up here, it's all good. Then again, aren't you gay? Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course."

[md_donighal]

"I am indeed, to paraphrase the immortal words of Sir Quentin Crisp, one of the stately homos of Boston. You have nothing to fear from me on that score, and damned little on any other. As for the Teragen, it has no presence here — not even me, really. That ship has sailed, and Heinlein to the contrary, I'll be a long time paying its debts. Quite possibly the rest of my life."

[slidingjennifer]

"Divis Mal giving up on the Teragen. Yeah, right. And after that, Pax is going to give up on Utopia."

[md_donighal]

"Actually, Shelby gave up first. It seems that realizing where true power can be found, made him gravitate to the possessor of that power. — I should probably mention that I first came here from over a century after your death, and hope that at some point, the accumulated weight of corroborative detail I provide will lend substance to that bald and unconvincing statement."

[slidingjennifer]

Sigh. "Whatever. Why should I care about the future? My future is over."

[md_donighal]

"...I was going to say 'the future is the reason I care about you', but I realized that's an oversimplification. The fact that Proteus had you cut down like a dog for learning of their existence offends me greatly. But it's because of what happened to me, in what would have been your future, that I'm able to show my fumbling attempt at sympathy in a human way. It's because of what happened that I'm Michael Donighal again, as well as Divis Mal."