À la lumière de l'amour de ma mère

Otacon pried the door of the storage unit open in the early morning.
It was damn cold outside and colder between the concrete walls—he didn’t know if this cold was better for the monolith than the heat, if the monolith would start suffering from extreme temperatures, he didn’t know much.

“Hello,” he said when he stepped in. His voice cracked. The shell’s big round eye stayed its usual black and grey, reflecting from feet away Otacon’s distorted, lanky silhouette on its smooth cornea. Of course, he didn’t get a reply.

His steps were more shy than measured, he lied to himself and said he simply was being careful. He undid the straps of his backpack and shed its weight—he kept a careful, anxious eye on the great black shell, as if it could jolt alive at any moment (as far as he knew, it could). He pulled his laptop out, put the pouch he carried it in on the ground, and set it there. He shed his coat and spread it as a seat. The cold was giving him goosebumps and he prayed for the mid-morning warmth to crawl in quickly.

He had no idea where to go from there.
He had read about memory boards, control drives, mobility, sensory drives. He had read about a hatch.
He had read of data overwritten with someone else’s voice.
It made sense and didn’t. He let himself fall on his coat—it didn’t cushion his fall as much as he thought it would and he winced.

Snake’s head popped in around midday.

“How’s it going?”

Otacon didn’t actually have a response. He stared at Snake until he realized he probably looked like an idiot with his mouth open to say nothing, and closed it. Opened it again:

“Well, I, uh, haven’t done much so far. I’m going through what I know over and over. I want to be sure I can salvage whatever’s in there.”

Fear gnawed at him. Snake could hear it. His throat closed in on his words like the walls of a haunted house.

“What do you think you’ll find?” Snake asked, and immediately cursed himself for it. He watched Hal’s eyes flicker around, his jaw move as he looked for his words and tried to keep something at bay.

“I don't really know. From what I’ve read, there should be memory boards in it, I assume detachable modules.” He scrolled through his notes as if he was trying to buy himself time. “It’s just…”

Snake saw him shift his weight around, crossing and uncrossing his legs. He was visibly unnerved.

“... A lot of things can go wrong”, Hal eventually continued.

He didn’t add anything else. Snake walked to him, crossed his legs on the cold floors and, leaning forward, wordlessly asked Otacon to talk him through it—the simplest, easiest way they had both found to pull each other out of spirals and maelstroms of unwanted thoughts, which they had to deal with as often as decades of unspoken, unspeakable things were thrown in their faces.

Kept away from the darkest paths his mind could have taken (a regular occurrence) by a stoic, strangely empathetic down-to-earth David, Hal had been advised to start simple: learn about the shell. He had balanced on his heels, knees, and pulled himself up, shaking his legs around to get rid of the pins and needles that had settled in during his uncomfortable sitting reflection.

The storage unit had considerably warmed up in the hours he spent putting approaching the shell off. Taking steps towards it—her—he watched his silhouette grow, twist, turn on the smooth metal of the outside coat. Looking at himself in the opaque mirror of the monolith, at his gawky legs, at the ridiculous shape of his coat he had tied around his hips, kept his mind of what was, what could be inside. Every step he took towards her was a step his mind took back. When they came face to face, the shell radiated a biting, shocking cold. Otacon shivered through and through.

He thought it would have been scarier, being this close to it. The day prior, he hadn’t dared even coming within an arm’s reach, afraid maybe the lifeless, motionless cylinder would have grown arms and pulled him inside.
“Jesus Christ, Emmerich,” he promptly chastised himself as the particularly horrific thought ran through him, “get it together.”

There was a lot, yet not much to see at the same time. Putting his hand on the shell, it didn’t feel as textured, as skin-like as it had the day prior. That can only be good, he thought.
The pod had two sets of four neons, one encircling its crown and one encircling its base. They were a dull dark grey, a bit dirty from years of neglect, but Otacon knew they’d light up. The pod was also flanked, at the top, of a small, grey tower; on its side, of what Otacon assumed were pressure or air regulators, 6 small holes arranged twice in vertical lines on each side of the eye. A hatch on the side.

Otacon walked up to inspect it closely. The door fit with no protuberance into the flank of the shell, only noticeable by the small gaps it left on each side. A panel next to it looked to be in control of opening and closing.
A finger grazed it. Otacon stepped aside just in case it flew open, pressed the button with a certain restraint. Nothing. He pushed again, harder. Nothing still.
A sigh escaped him, torn between relief and frustration, and he examined the door further.
An unsteady line was carved in the metal close to the aperture, seemed to dig in.
Someone had tried to pry the hatch door open.
Otacon’s throat closed in, reminiscent of a mean allergic reaction. His lower jaw fell as nausea brewed in the back of his mouth. Someone had tried to pry the hatch door open, and they very well might have succeeded.

“I’m starting to think you won’t be able to do anything with this thing unless it’s powered up,” Snake’s voice hit him from the other side of the monolith, promptly pulling him out of his thoughts.

“Huh?” was all he could manage.

“There’s an outlet right there,” Snake elaborated, furthering his point by giving two kicks to the base right next to it. “This thing’s been left alone for years so I’d assume it needs a good charging-up.”

Hal found himself gently patting the smooth black shell, as if to make up for the kick it just got to the feet, and promptly interrupted himself. “I just tried to open the door and nothing happened,” he told Snake, “you’re making sense. We should try again when it’s charged.”

“I don’t think we have an electrical cord long enough to reach the power outlet, I’d need to bring the extension cable.”

Suddenly, they were back to mundanity, to the simple things. Hal noted how Snake offered to stay around and help with the pod. His lips quirked in a smile. He both hoped Snake would allow him to stay alone with this thing, close the door on the cold, grey unit, and would never leave.
He also knew Snake wouldn’t hear anything he didn’t like. Otacon decided he’d let him do whatever.

They spent some more time examining the pod. It seemed to grow bigger, and yet fall considerably less spooky with each detail Hal noticed. It didn’t look intricate or complicated from the outside, but knowing the data it ran on, Otacon knew the inside was going to be a doozy. He had no idea what the “memory boards” were going to look like, if they were removable, if they were salvageable, if there was a mechanism put in place to prevent this very act—if he truly could, if he truly wanted.
Dirt stained his hand and was brushed away, rust stayed.

“Did you see that?”

“Huh?”

“The pictures.”

Otacon circled the shell to Snake’s side. His step was unsteady. He walked on the edge of his foot and almost twisted his ankle. Snake was taking a few steps to allow him a better view. He pointed, and Hal followed his finger.

A collage. The pictures were washed out, brightened by exposure to the sun, but still legible. Hal’s heart dropped to the pit of his stomach and he felt his intestines furiously twist, wringing a choked breath out of him.
He was here.
That wasn’t the weirdest thing.
He was held.
His head was a round, pale and chubby apple stuck on tiny shoulders. His bright, if bug-like eyes stared at the camera behind flimsy glasses he remembered having, so, so long ago. A keen smile missing teeth dug into his full, rosy cheeks. He was waving with the tiniest hand, chubby baby fingers spread from his palm.
The woman holding him was mom.
There was no doubt possible, no doubt even allowed. That was mom. He tried to speak the word and it couldn’t come out.
He reached out long, bony fingers (god, how much they had changed) to touch the photograph; it was rough where the paper had flaked off, a smooth mat finish under his fingertips where it had held up. He traced the silver hair that came back to him in flashes, lost and disorganized fragments he would have to piece together (another time, another time); the arms looped around his tiny body.
Even when he tore his gaze away, he really didn’t. He followed himself with his own eyes. Mom didn’t move. He couldn’t decide if that was more or less unnerving.

“Is that…?” He asked, pointing at something, someone else in the patchwork of photographs. From the way David’s brow furrowed, his lip firmly twitching and rising on his teeth, Hal had his answer.

“Big Boss.”

“I had guessed.”

“Yeah.” Cold and sharp. Otacon dropped the subject.

Snake made the trip home and back, brought the extension cord.

“Do you want me to stay?” he asked.

Otacon weighted his answer. The pod could come alive. He could be scared shitless. He didn’t know if he preferred Snake to be there or not for his freakout.
On one hand, it felt deeply personal, almost intimate to stay alongside the silent, still monolith, and he would like to keep Snake out of this unsettlingly familiar bubble—he also really didn’t want to cry, because he felt the tears already coming, in front of him.
On the other, he didn’t know what the pod could do. It had no conscience, or at least he thought, but it still instilled in him a bones-deep, marrow-icing fear. Both because it didn’t talk, or think, or know, or so he thought, and because, maybe it could. He felt like he was standing in this room next to a ticking bomb, and Snake was a way better explosive-handler than he was.

“I’m good,” Otacon still said, the words running faster than his thoughts (which was quite a feat in itself). “I’ll just check stuff on my laptop while I’m here. You’d get bored.”

“Alright. Do you want me to bring you dinner?”

“I’d like that. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

And he was on his way.
Otacon plugged the cord in the outlet carefully crafted at the base of the shell. He expected it to jolt awake in a mechanical roar, blinding red lights bursting from it, but it didn’t: a dim, soft red glow grew from the first circle of neons on each pair and the pod awoke with the simple, low rumble Otacon knew from his older computers. A familiar, soothing purr. It vibrated with the harmless, constant background noise of a small fridge.
Hal was almost disappointed.
He adjusted himself on his coat he used as a seat and leaned towards his screen. His back was already hurting but he pretended it was fine—he didn’t want to get up, he didn’t want to turn around.

The red light had grown deeper, brighter with each neon lighting up, cradling him in a rosy hue. Despite the warm, comfortable tint of the usually grey walls, the room was growing colder.
The pod seemed to rock and tremble, agitated by a whirr that, with each passing minute, started to sound more and more like breaths. Frost seemed to seep into the self-contained microcosm of the storage unit with waves—an exhalation, an inhalation, an exhalation...
Hal was freezing. He slipped his coat back on, felt the sharp bite of air on his waist when his t-shirt bunched up.
It felt like it was breathing right into his neck. He hunched over his laptop even more, bowing down, hoping the air would roll over the curve of his back and he’d be less cold.

The last two neon rings powered up and the rumbling stopped. A second of silence held still where Otacon turned to the pod, and suddenly the room was hit with a heatwave as the shell came to life with a loud, mechanical hammering. Otacon flipped on his legs, promptly facing the shell as his heartbeat picked up, held himself on his hands behind his back as he lost his balance in his seat. He could see the pod sway ever so slightly on its base as if whatever hardware was inside moved and squirmed around. Thud-thud-thud, he could hear, and it sounded awfully like someone knocking on the inside until he realized that was his own pulse, growing louder than the roar with which the machine rocked and moved.

It seemed to convulse. It seemed to cough. It seemed to fight. It settled, suddenly straight on its base, its smooth black coat swallowing the red lights it was crowned in and regurgitating them in a deep dark crimson—monolithic, it was monolithic in its purest, rawest form, purest shape, and Hal was struck square in the chest. He crawled back, arms suddenly weak and giving in. He hit the ground on his elbow and didn’t even make a sound. Chin buried into his own chest, he watched the big round eye snap open, red and bright and staring at him, staring directly at him. He was a deer caught in headlights. The sudden sharpness of the light pierced him right through the stomach as he thought to kick his legs and crawl backward, only to find himself completely immobile, as if paralyzed.
The eye watched him, a sharp gold nestled in a vivid red nestled in burgundy nestled in black and circled by silver, a familiar, so familiar sight he couldn’t put a word, a thought on it—he couldn’t think.

Its iris tightened, widened, taking in his pathetically sprawled, terrified silhouette stuck mid-escape, observing him coldly.
He opened his mouth, wanting a word, not finding it in time and, with a flash of red, it—she spoke to him:

“Hal?”

His already-open mouth fell lower, his jaw aching with a sudden shot of horror.
There was in her single word a hint of haughtiness only dropped for the present moment, in the shape of the name as it came out of the mouth an accent he recognized.
He felt his chest dig into his ribs as he took an erratic, too deep of a breath, for a pathetic whine to make it past his tightened throat:

“Mom?”

The eye looked at him. Her eye looked for him. She found him terrified and Hal saw the shell sway on its base, as if she had tried to take a step towards him.

His body shook furiously, painfully torn between crawling away and crawling to her. He expected another word, ready to call to her, when the shell fell completely silent, her bright red crown flickering twice, and her eye closed.
Silence fell on the two of them like a crumbling building.
The red neons went dull, but not off.
The rumbling went low, but not dead.
The familiar purring came back.
The shell had entered sleep mode.

Otacon swooped his laptop, which had too, off the ground and left without locking the door.

He had accidentally barged into the bedroom, too shaken up to not ram into the door knee-first (the thin layer of his pajama pants not really muffling the sound of his kneecap slamming against the wood). Snake wasn’t asleep but Otacon still winced at all the noise he made. They exchanged a look that Hal firmly held apologetic and he limped to the bed, promptly sliding under the blanket. He pulled it a bit too hard on himself, trying to cover up his shaking limbs, and apologized again as he gave David some of the cover.

Silence settled between them, its pushy elbows making room between their bodies. Hal, curled on his side, eyes fixated on his side of the room as if it would make the red dots go away, felt David’s weight shift around. He had turned to him.

“What happened?”

Otacon opened his mouth, closed it. Opened his mouth, closed it. When he managed to collect himself enough to not look like a fish gasping in the water, he said:

“Its eye found me. She spoke to me. It was so familiar.”

He felt Snake’s weight shift around some more; he was leaning on his elbow.

“The eye? The voice?”

Otacon didn’t register his fingers moving on their own but they closed in a fist on the stuffing of the blanket, nails digging into the linen.

“Yeah,” he replied.

He didn’t see Snake raising a puzzled eyebrow, dumbfounded frown on the lips. He felt his hand land between his shoulder blades and give an earnest, sober pat.

“Can you come to the unit with me tomorrow.”

“Sure.”