À la lumière de l'amour de ma mère

Eighty-four tapes.
It took eighty-four tapes to save the magnetic tape data, and a few over a hundred files (hidden in a folder that’s hidden in a folder that’s hidden in a folder) to salvage the RAM stick-like memory boards.

Going through the cassettes from dawn to dusk—he forced himself to keep a relatively healthy sleeping schedule so he could have more time to do so—Otacon found most of them unintelligible. Raw data had been arranged efficiently in its storage modules but only translated in a warped, indiscernible audio. Ah well, he thought, at least they had been salvaged. He could always run them through an audio decrypter later.

The other modules had been easier to save: they had translated well as simple text files, the numbers on their cases allowing Hal to catalog them with ease.
Control, mobility, usage, action, thoughts, memories modules were all organized, all ready for him to scroll through for hours. So he did.
A lot of it was binary, simple and widely-used commands and lines. A lot of it, too, was more interesting.
Choices branchings, decisions trees, emotion loops, thoughts paths, incredibly detailed recounts of memories sharp to the very second were spanning some metaphorical thousands of miles. It was overwhelming, mind-blowing to read. Hal’s head hurt fiercely with the sheer size of the project, the unthinkable amounts of information, the colossus of intelligence the shell held.
Someone had tried to make a human. Someone had tried to make a god. Hal was starting to know who.
Repeating itself through the lines, sometimes carefully concealed sometimes plain as day, zero-one-zero-one zero-zero-one-one, zero-one-zero-zero one-one-zero-zero ran with the insistence of a litany. Sometimes, it spanned paragraphs. Someone had wanted to find somewhere within the code to nestle and rest. Someone had wanted to bury themselves in the artificial mind of the shell.

Scrolling he found, all /’s and |’s reminiscent of the ASCII art that populated the internet of his teenagehood, an unfamiliar visage. Eyes looked straight ahead, finding his face in the low light, like an ID picture someone had translated for artificial eyes and hidden in the core. The woman buried in the circuits was recognizable in ways Hal couldn’t explain—he realized what ticked him off was her bandana, drawn by the blank space left.
Someone had given the shell a face, her face, so she never forgot about it.
It didn't look like his mom, and that was only a poor consolation—it had been her voice he had heard, as if trapped in the pod.

He hadn’t dared to listen to the “overwritten data” tapes.
He knew they were special in some way, the singularity of the form keeping him on his toes. He still wondered how the data could have been assimilated, how it could have been imprinted over the base information. He knew from the disk about the overwriting itself, but no mention of how, when, why. He didn’t even know which came first of it and its record.
Hal was growing more and more uneasy as he thought about how this input could have left its peculiar mark on the otherwise standard (well, for what it was, which was a supercomputer apparently capable of thoughts, emotions, reactions) hardware. With the scope, the sheer power and apparent capacities of reason of the artificial brain he had spent hours raking, he thought, it wasn’t that odd to believe that it could have learned to save data by itself. Whether it had been programmed to know, programmed to learn, or learned by itself was something else Hal didn’t know, and thinking about it too much made his brain really hurt (he already had an eye strain headache).

He spun the few last tapes he hadn’t yet listened to between two fingers mindlessly. Their singularity scared him—as much of a puzzle-solver he liked to think he was, he loved when things went right, were normal, and in general didn’t shake his worldview too much.
He sorted through the cassettes, putting them back in order again and again. They all bore a string of numbers ending in “74”, which he had nervously written down with an unsteady hand, except the last one. It was the shortest of them all, a hefty length of the magnetic tape left unused. Hal could read in his own (smudged) writing another barely legible string of letters and, tailing that, “84”. So, 1984, he assumed. He didn’t recall much of the year, nor the one after that, nor the—well, so on and so forth.

He nestled the first cassette in the player, pushed the hatch closed with three fingers. He did it slowly, methodically, as if these tapes in particular needed the utmost care—and, well, maybe they did. He was going to find out. He pressed lightly until he heard the click of the tape door. Reminiscent, in its own way, of the opening pod hatch. He slowly withdrew his hand, increasingly not-ready to start the damn thing. But it had to be done, didn’t it? It had to.
He took great care not to hit anything when he connected his headphone plug to the audio jack—meticulous work, almost. He had given this much attention to pulling the modules out of the core. He found the play button, again, with excruciating slowness. Sunk it in.
The voice burst through his ears; it was calm, cool, collected. Her accent ready for savoration.

“AI stands—”

What does it stand for. What does it stand for, mom. Tell me.

He accidentally smudged the “84” some more, his fingers sticky, tacky with sweat, his palm wet where he kept wiping his face. He unceremoniously stuck the cassette in the player, his finger scratched—shit—the tape door and—shit!—a button that wasn’t “play”. It was like pulling a tooth, and he had had teeth pulled—a molar, a canine that had to be removed before he got his braces on—and it was just like it; it had to be done, and it hurt, like hell. He was used to the dental extraction forceps levering bone out of his mouth, moving his entire head with it with the force of the pull—but the pain hadn’t been a regular occurrence, of course not, they anesthetize you, of course they do, and then they pull your tooth. His jaw ached, the pain burning the side of his face with how tight he tried to keep his mouth shut. Snake was asleep. Snake was asleep, and he needed to keep quiet. He had to pull this damn tooth, listen to this damn tape, then it’d all be better, one last bite on the bullet, hopefully that wouldn’t shatter his enamel—he shoved the play button in and his knuckle sprained.

“THUD-THUD-THUD—” that was the metal of the shell, hit with a fist, a closed fist, this metaphorical rotten tooth was taking so long to be pulled and it left a gaping hole not where it should (teeth don’t grow in your chest—or do they, or do they, or do they); he thought he tasted the blood pouring but it was spit, just spit, he drooled through torrents of tears and snot. He lost his balance on his seat and fell pathetically on the floor, he curled on himself as his headphones unplugged. “OPEN THIS THING!” It wasn’t loud enough to reach any of the other rooms despite how small their apartment was, to wake up Snake; Hal dug his fingers into his own arms as he held himself for composure, failed, the tape piercing the barrier of his headphones, worming its way in his ears, down the tense, taut arc of his clenching jaw, in his gums—he had had his wisdom teeth removed and now he carried there his mother’s voice, tasted it, tasted it red, copper-like, bitter, he held her there until his throat felt too tight to breathe.

Snake barged into the room where Otacon’s full body convulsed upon hearing him, but he didn’t get up from the floor, didn’t even try to move. Snake kneeled to his side, bewildered, and put a hand on his shoulder, trying to shake him; he twitched, his body twisted to the side as if Snake’s hand hurt, and kept his position, curled on the floor, forehead to the cold vinyl, arms on either side of his sweaty, disheveled mess of a head.
Otacon’s mouth hung open, his litany of anguished, howling sobs splattering the tiles as he cried, drooled, sniffled. Snake tried to pull him up, unable to get a good grip on him. He saw his stretched arms spasm with some kind of sudden fire—from his fetal position, Hal wanted to punch, wanted to thud-thud-thud against the vinyl, he could do that, he wanted to do that, half the desperate man he once was on Shadow Moses and half the memory of his mom, stuck between his pain and hers—but there was no strength left in the piteous entanglement of limbs and hair of his body.

“Come on,” Snake insisted, managing to slip an arm under his torso—Otacon weakly protested, trying to wiggle his way out of the hold, failing miserably. “Come on. Off to bed, you go. Enough of that.”

“Tape’s over,” Otacon whimpered. “No more.”

“Yeah. No more.”

He carried Hal with arms looped under his armpits, pulling him around like he was drunk, frankly but carefully moving his legs with his own as they waddled off.

Otacon’s knees found the edge of the bed and he leaped out of Snake’s arms, resuming his previous posture, curled on his chest, back a turtle’s shell, he buried his head on the pillow. Snake promptly climbed alongside him, reached a hand that Otacon just less of batted away when his arm flung around as if he had been shocked.

David had gotten used to Hal’s emotional outbursts—he didn’t have great amounts of affective intelligence, and neither did Snake, they just dealt with it in very different ways—especially after the loss of Emma, whose name David sometimes heard him whimper out in his sleep.
However, he had never quite seen Hal that way. He had seen him throw himself to the ground in despair, claw and pull at his own clothes like they burned his skin, hit the floors with clenched fists—but this, like this, he couldn’t recall.
Hal smothered himself into his pillow, legs bent under his heaving chest, his bony, exposed knees supporting the collapsing ladder of his ribs as he took erratic, loud breaths, gasping as he was unable to inhale through his nose.
He wailed, muffled in the linens, until his voice grew hoarse and raw, and even then he didn’t stop. His agonizing yowls grew higher, keen in his throat, and soon he was sobbing with an unrecognizable, adolescent distress, soon with a childish, sharp shrill stuck in his drowning lungs.

Otacon’s voice grew low but he couldn’t yet stop. His arms once stretched around him he had looped around himself, holding in white-knuckled fists the fabric at his flanks.
David reached out a hand and put it on his shoulder, gently pushed. Hal fell on his side with no resistance. He kept his head buried in the pillowcase, drool and snot painting his anguished features. David pushed him again, and he flopped onto his back, eventually forced to pull his head up. His usually pale face was red with exhaustion and the strain of sorrow, and he was still weeping.
Snake sat up at his side, crossing his legs, and threw the blanket over him—Otacon fell silent in the moment, the weight of the covers seemingly punching all air out of him.
That was a step in the right direction, Snake supposed. He fumbled with the edge of the linen for a second. God, he was bad at this sort of thing. He had managed to pull Hal out of spiraling despair with a firm, meaningful rendition of their secret handshakes before, but this didn’t seem like the type of situation they could just hug out. Besides, Snake didn’t think Otacon had any strength left in him to even clasp a hand around his. He tucked the edge of the blanket under Hal’s numb, dog-tired bones (realized almost immediately he’d have to pull it out when he’d go to sleep and in the same thought decided he’d just sleep atop the covers and not disturb him).

Hal’s dry lips parted to speak; his tongue darted out to lick a tear first before he began:

“My dad killed my mom.”

Snake didn’t respond. He straightened his back and allowed himself to sit by Hal’s side in a respectful, attentive silence.

“My father killed my mom,” Hal repeated.

His words were inarticulate from how poorly he managed to breathe, his mouth numb, dry.

“He locked her in the pod and left her to suffocate to death.”

He pulled on the collar of his shirt, dark and drenched.

“I saw there were scratch marks near the hatch, where she tried to get out.” Snake offered a long, single nod. Yeah. He’d seen them too. “She very quickly gave up, because she knew she couldn’t.” His voice broke with a teenage, painful croak, and he used the heel of his palm to push a tear away. “She made it, after all.”

Hal sniffled a few times, ran a hand on his forehead—David wasn’t surprised if he had given himself a headache. They shared silence like they often shared meals.

“The pod recorded everything.”

“And you listened to it.”

His head bobbed up and down, wobbly, drowsy, looking like it could roll off his sharp, exhausted shoulders.
David watched him grab one of his own fingers and pull, play with it mindlessly.

“I haven’t read anything anywhere in the data about giving the pod an ability to store external elements. To save and assimilate data.” Otacon squinted, eyes on the ceiling. Snake could hear the cogs behind his heavying lids, trying to understand, to catch, to grab. “To record and to save are two different things. Surveillance cameras record and auto-delete a few days after—it was what she was programmed to do in order to optimize survival and performance.” Snake saw him hesitate. “It goes against her self-preserving algorithm, she never was taught to save. To salvage. To secure. To keep safe. She wasn’t supposed to do that.”

“And yet she did.”

David apparently sharply interrupted some deep thoughts of Hal’s because his head promptly turned to him.
They shared a long gaze. It could have been awkward. It was a bit, Otacon trying to sniffle away the tears clogging his sinuses, but it could have been worse.
Eventually, slowly, softly, he nodded.

“Yeah. And yet she did.”

“The pod,” Snake asked, thoughtlessly patting the bunched-up blanket near Otacon’s waist, “who is it? Who was it made to be?”

Otacon’s brows furrowed. He knew her name. He knew what his mother knew, or, well, what she was willing to share. The rest, clouded by fatigue and the draining, overtly physical hell of crying all the water of his body, was hazy. Even reaching out a hand, it seemed to slip away. Wanting to keep its secrets. “You’re going to think I’m kidding, but I think she’s of your family.”

Snake raised an eyebrow. As if to answer him, Otacon brought his hand to his forehead—headache? fever? brain? Snake didn’t get it. Hal pinched air between thumb and index and drew a bar across the top of his skull—oh, the bandana.

Hal wanted to share her name but, finding himself a lost idiot, he couldn’t even think of it. He moved his lips to apologize and no sound came out.

“Huh!” he heard himself say.

“Yeah,” he managed to catch Snake chuckle. “‘Huh’.”

The blanket was arranged over him. Sleep swept him away in the middle of a sob he didn’t even feel coming.

He knew it was a dream because, firstly, Snake was nowhere to be seen, and secondly, that was not their apartment. Moreover, as he hopped out of the bed, he was not wearing his usual pajamas, and had both more energy he commonly had at any given moment and no energy at all. No energy was needed. He trotted to the door and pushed it ajar. The hallway he peeked his head in was familiar, and not the kind of familiar he liked—the door a few steps away sent the cold snake of fear down his spine. He pushed his glasses closer to his eyes. The chilly, chlorine-soaked hands of hypervigilance tightened around the back of his neck and he slipped out of the room on tip-toes, making a silent trot for the stairs.

The ground floor didn’t look like anything he knew, which was mildly concerning. Despite that, he didn’t find anything outrageously dream-like: even in his lucid state, he was ready to accept some doors that lead to nowhere, some floating furniture—he could see none of that as he reached the bottom of the stairs.
There was a normal kitchen, a normal living room, a normal entrance he took a step in and out of, a normal back door that led into a garden—it had no pool, but a number of bushes of carefully tended-to roses, hydrangeas, camellias. Inside, the furniture was bright: beiges, ecrus, eggshells.
He walked past a television and was suddenly startled; they had an accent.
Liquid—!
Oh, no. My bad, he thought. They were just British.
He was starting to have an idea of whose house he was intruding—was it intrusion? Despite the absence of company, he didn’t feel unwelcome.

Something rattled upstairs. Almost instinctively, he crouched behind the kitchen table, hiding between its legs. As he crawled out, he cocked his head to a side to maybe catch a glimpse of something, or someone, on the landing. He noticed the whole floor had changed. Now it was starting to look like a dream. He trotted up the flight of stairs as all the lights went off and a tranquil, ethereal blue took hold of the building.

He was used to nightly house explorations, to pretend-sleepwalking. He wasn’t proud of it.
Upstairs, the door that made his skin crawl had disappeared, leaving the frame bare, the threshold inviting. He hesitated on the step. Peeking his head into the room, he noticed a door opened on a balcony—they’d never had balconies. He could see a few pairs of flower pots, all heartily cared for, overflowing with petals and leaves. Someone was there. She didn’t look like anyone he knew. She didn’t look like mom.
She turned to him before he dared to come closer and he instantly recognized her face.

“Hello,” she said. She was warm and unfazed.

“... Hello,” he replied. His voice hiccuped with a familiar, yet long-gone adolescent crack. He cleared his throat before realizing it probably wouldn’t help.

Joy—because that was her name, and he knew it, but he wouldn’t dare call her that, at least until she called him Hal—took a step forward, balancing her weight confidently, and Otacon recognized an invitation to come closer, which he did.
She invited him to lean on the railing of the balcony with her. The outside world didn’t make much sense, which almost comforted Hal: this was a dream, a real, normal one. The Moon, Mercury and Jupiter were improbably massive, locking lips with the horizon line.

“How was the trip?” She asked.

Otacon had no idea what she meant, yet something kept him from asking for clarifications. The answer leaped out of his mouth like an enthusiastic frog on the hydrangeas.

“A bit rocky,” he replied. “A bit rough.”

It seemed to make sense, because his host nodded sagely.
She put a hand on his shoulder and her way of it, her weight in it, was incredibly familiar. His lucid self rummaged through the memories he could grasp before realizing: oh, Snake. It was Snake’s way of patting his shoulder.

“I’m sorry you had to learn about it all this way.”

Hal’s lips twitched in a sorry pout.

“Well, whoever brought you to us said I ‘may want to know’.” He took an unsteady breath. “And I did. I always did, it’s just…” He stopped himself to nervously pull at the hem of his t-shirt. It was big on him. “It had to be done, didn’t it?”

Her blue eyes grew mourning and her mouth curved in a sad, rueful smile.
Yeah. She knew about things that had to be done.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.”

Hal tore his eyes from the horizon line. “... Huh?”

“Your mother,” she promptly continued. “She asked me to protect you.” She found Hal’s eyes. He saw her look for something in them. “You heard her.”

He swallowed thickly and a whimper was knocked out of his throat.
“Open this thing,” he had heard.
“You can hear me, can't you, Joy? I know you can.”
And Joy could hear him now.

“Yeah.” He replied. “Yeah, I did.”

Her smile grew more apologetic. “I’m sorry. I make a poor guardian angel. An even worse ghost.”

He found her eyes. She saw him look for something in it.

“I think you make a fine spirit,” he said, voice barely above a whisper.

She kept her silence while she searched for her own words. Eventually, her lips curled frankly, a warm, fond, full-mouthed smile digging into her cheeks.

“And you make a fine man, and an even finer son.”

That knocked the air out of Hal’s chest. He didn’t need to breathe in his dream state and yet he still gasped—holding back his voice so the only sound that he blurted out was a choked, pained-sounding whine, that Joy took for a demand to continue:

“You turned out great. You turned out a great guy, and a great son. Your mother would be incredibly proud. Your mother is incredibly proud.”

He leaned against the railing and pushed his weight on, needing it for balance. It dug between two steps of the ladder of his ribcage, he could feel his heart climb it up and down. He pried his lips open and his voice, high-pitched, wounded with childlike fear, fell out of him.

“How do you know?” He asked. “How could you know?”

It was sad to admit, and he knew it was but, well, he was used to being a disappointment. He was used to it.
He expected Joy to answer simply but, out of the corner of his eye, he saw her raise her hand to her collarbone. He glanced—the same insectoid, from-under-the-temple-of-glasses look he had kept all these years—at her slow, careful hands. Under his bewildered eyes, she opened out of the barrel of her chest, coated in the fabric of her fatigues, a hatch door, the very same buried in the pod’s design.
Alright, Hal thought. Well, it was a dream after all.
He couldn’t see anything in the opening carving Joy’s chest open, but she behaved as if there was.

“She’s a chatty tenant.”

Hal realized. He felt tears brew in the back of his mouth, his throat closing painfully. He brought his own hand to his chest, nestled fingers between two ribs, looking for the hatch he thought maybe he could have.

“Does she…?” He started. “Does my mom live here?”

Joy shifted on her feet, bobbing her head from one side to the other, her pout indicating she was looking for her answer: Hal understood it was not really like that, but it also was in a way. Might as well, right?

“I keep her safe. It’s not the same thing, of course, as the way she once kept you, and would have wanted to keep you—but I hold her. She kept you here…” Joy brought her hand right below her navel. “... and I keep her…” She raised her hand to her chest, to the hatch door she pushed closed—then slightly more towards her left. “... here.”

“Me, with child. Can you imagine? I wonder how you took the news. Were you jealous?”

“Well, were you?” Hal asked, and the neat thing with it being a dream is that he didn’t have to clarify.

Joy let out a hearty, powerful laugh. “I already knew you,” she replied, “so I never really got to. I knew you through your mom, and I couldn’t feel anything but love. Her love.”

As if agitated by the need to prove it more, she grabbed Hal by the shoulders, a firm, warm hand on each.

“You’re more like her than you can imagine. And I know this because I know her.” Hal’s sight grew completely blurry, tears bubbling fiercely at his lash line. “I also know that if she saw you, she’d think you’re more like me.” She firmed her grasp on his thin, sharp shoulders. “She loves you, Hal.”

He couldn’t even attempt to ask the “how do you know?” he wanted to. The tears leaped out of his eyes, stormed and streamed down his immature face; the hydrangeas looked delighted with the water pouring on them.
The world spun for a sharp, short second: he had been picked up. His feet grazed the floorboards so he couldn’t be that small and yet, he was gently moved around like he weighed nothing. Joy rocked him in a hug.

“Your mom was eaten dead by guilt from not being able to take care of you,” she spoke against his hair. “I didn’t take care of you. I didn’t take care of her. We need to take care of each other.” She let go of him, Hal struggled for balance for a second.

He furiously rubbed his eyes dry when he saw she was pointing at something across the hallway, the door to the room he had woken up in opened wide on a bed that was still full. Squinting, he noticed the auburn dye, tried to understand how Snake got here before remembering—this was a dream.

“Does he take care of you?” Joy continued.

Hal burst in a nervous, embarrassed fit of laughter because holy SHIT that was a LOADED question (even if he could answer). Seeing his uneasiness, Joy promptly dropped the subject (she bore a smile that said she had her own idea). Hal’s uneasy chuckle was washed over by a sob that he tried to swallow, finding himself stuck between that snicker and the groundswell of sorrow that scythed him at the ankles—the whole thing dawned on him, the whole thing was dawning on him. Suddenly, he realized how little time he could have left. Fear rose in his guts, he folded himself in two at the waist to try to cut it sharp, he ended up falling to his knees. His mouth fell open as the tears carved and ate their way out of him, wringing his guts out of the ability to reason, and he shrunk on himself, hoping to kill by asphyxiation the flames of sorrow—it didn’t work, it didn’t work.

“Can you tell her I love her too,” he croaked, stuttering through the growing torrents flooding his cheeks, washing over the lenses of his glasses, “can you tell her I love her?”

“Of course I can.”

“Can I see her?”

“Of course you can.”

Despite Joy’s words, he couldn’t see her—in fact, he couldn’t see anything. The world was a blurry, wet mess. He felt himself be pulled to his feet, felt one of Joy’s arms around him the other pushing him in—an embrace, a sheet of metal that bent to his gawky body before turning soft and warm, soft and alive. He could see Joy’s hands letting go of him, feel two arms looping around him. A big round eye came awake as he felt himself drift to sleep, a sharp gold nestled in a vivid red nestled in burgundy nestled in black and circled by silver watching over him, another following—he knew he had this eye, too.

He slept for another five, completely dark and dense, dreamless hours.

He was surprised to see the pod hadn’t vanished.
She still stood in the storage unit, purring and whirring in her sleep
Ah. Should have I brought flowers?
Hal stepped in, discarded bag and coat like he had gotten the habit of, and walked to the pod.

“Hi,” he said. She didn’t answer. That was the least weird thing that had happened in the past few days.

He walked to the hatch that the shell held closed. He didn’t know what to do with her now, he thought. His body burned and ached with the knowledge he needed to do something with what he had heard, learned, with whatever Joy had managed to do to find her way into his head. He wasn’t going to complain about it, really; he was thankful for it—thankful for her. He would catch himself looping arms around himself when drifting off to sleep: Snake had noted it to him. He had at first been viciously embarrassed before Snake told him he preferred to see him like that rather than bawling on the floor. All things considered, one of those was more embarrassing.

There was something he needed to do. He couldn’t just leave it at that, having emptied the pod out all her modules and saved her data for the new age—sure, that was a lot already, but there was something missing.
It wasn’t uncommon for Hal, that feeling of missing. Of a great lack. He had mentioned it to Snake when they were both too drunk to have a filter or too tired to pretend they weren’t. He knew they shared it; David just had the tendency to fill the gap with cigarette smoke and raking fingers against the barrel of his pistol like someone else filled bullet holes with packing gauze. It all ended up bloody and raw in the end.

Hal’s fingers found the hatch panel and pressed the button. The pod buzzed awake, her neon crowns coming alive, and she punched her door out of her side, opening up.
Hal took a step in and almost sprained his ankle.

Well, she was missing parts, too. The notches that once contained her modules left dark, perfectly structured cuts in the walls, in the core that Hal circled carefully. It was darker in there without the colorful boards with their light reflecting on the copper, iron, silver and gold drives.
It looked cozy, Hal thought, and without even stopping to give it a second of thought, he leaned his back against the wall and sunk to the floor.
He slowly titled his head back until it met the metal behind him and looked to the top of the weirdly comfortable, inviting metal cocoon. A saturated, dark red enveloped him, cradled him in the hum of the air and pressure regulation, the neon lights, the circuits and cables lining the walls like columns and bones.
It could have looked like epidermis, like flesh, like exposed muscle, but it didn’t.
Bringing his legs to his chest, Hal let out a sharp, sober sob, and he suddenly was crying.

As he lowered his head against his knees, the door slid on its hinges and fell shut with a simple, dry sound.

“H-huh?”

“Why didn't I stop the hatch from closing? Even if it meant losing an arm?”
Hal sprung on his feet, taking a frantic, horrified stride towards the door, and threw himself against it.
It didn’t budge. It wasn’t going to budge. Panic made the eels of his guts viciously squirm and his lungs burned with the sudden, terrified gasp he took in the copper-filled chamber.
“Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no.”
He slammed his side against the metal, his shoulder sending a mean shock of pain down his arm.
“No, wait, no no—”
His panic-struck hands found the scratches of the nails the ghost prints of the hands, and the suffocating air of the pod fell on his shoulder like a dead man’s weight. His chest convulsed as fear wrecked him in the stomach.

“Oh please,” he begged, “please open, open—”

And just like that, the hatch slid away.
Hal watched, dumbfounded, as the door opened.
“Oh.”
He let his arms fall limp at his side. He took a step away from the hatch. His back hit the core.

“Sorry.”

He took another step back, then another, he circled back around the core to find where he just was seated.

“Sorry. You just scared me, but I assume I scared you too.”

He slid to the floor and crossed his legs quietly.
The very top of the shell had another small, structured gap; probably another part of the pressure and air regulation system. Hal could see hints of the ceiling through it. He wondered what else Joy could have seen.

His mother’s words haunted him, of course they did. How could they not? He struggled to repress a shiver when he remembered the break in her voice when the hatch closed—the break in his, too.

“You’re more like her than you can imagine.”

He’d like to think he could believe that. He didn’t, that kind of was where the rubber hit the road, where the code met the files, where the lockpicks met the notches from which modules slipped. He could do a whole lot of thinking about this and not find much more. He had made a WMD (which had never gotten to kill, thankfully, but still) and a whole lineage of weapons would bear his name. His mother had made this Joy, and this Joy had, in her own dreamer-of-mechanical-sheep ways, made his mom—made room in this confined, claustrophobic egg, for her.

(Just as he thought this, the hatch slid closed again. He watched its smooth, slow, almost carefully shy glide without moving. He wasn't scared.)

Strangelove was a maker to this Joy and a mother to him; this Joy had become fortress to her, and her once a cocoon to him. He melted into the warmth of this mechanical, red chrysalis. He vaguely remembered the name on the diskette—imago, the next and last stage of the insect. A nervous chuckle agitated him: he really didn’t think he would be any kind of metamorphosed when he would step out of this pupa. He had become an expert at being the larva awaiting to become butterfly and, well, it was starting to get a bit late.
For the time being, he thought, he could indulge in this cocoon, this self-contained fortress, nest, this shell. He gracelessly flopped on his side.

This cocoon. This tomb. This, in its own way, womb. Both. Neither. What would be the difference for Strangelove’s project (Strangelove’s life), nipped in the bud, tué dans l’œuf. He was all that was left now.
Hal looped his own arms around himself.

“How did you save her?” he asked the busy, working silence around him. He would like to know, really, he would like to know how Joy pulled this feat.

No answer, of course. She wouldn’t know.

“Why did you save her?”

The silence that followed wasn’t hollow. It was heavy with the restraint of someone who thought. She didn’t respond. She didn’t need to.

Laying on his side, Hal huddled up some more.
He curled around the core and the shell curled around him; egg around the chick, chick around the vitellus.
He breathed slow, deep, steady, and maybe it was the mental exertion taking its toll on him but he thought he heard the buzzing and whizzing of the veins-like circuits around him find his rhythm, settle alongside him, and share his exhales. He also thought that wouldn’t be that weird (might as well, huh?).

The floor was warm under him. Some protruding cables and pipes crossing it were digging into the skin of his bare arms, a mild discomfort he didn’t have quite his mind on.
Thud-thud, thud-thud.
He tensed, suddenly hyperaware, stilling his whole body with effort.

“I think I hear your pulse…”

His mouth fell open as he realized—he immediately closed it. It was his own.
He sighed and chastised himself.

Thud-thud, thud-thud. Somewhere within the walls. It was a heartbeat. It was also a heartbeat. It pulsated with the same unhurried, easy tempo as his.
He brought his hand to his chest. One. The back of his hand to the cables crawling up the walls. Two.

Thud-thud, thud-thud. A third, different entirely. Vibrating with a composed nonchalance from the depths of the core.

At some point, the hatch slid open. Hal felt the cool air against his flank and bundled up on himself before he crawled out of the stunned, dazed half-sleep he had been in. He expected Snake to be standing there, having hit the button, but there was no one in the storage unit.
The cocoon had peeled apart. It would mend itself back together eventually—a constant, self-reproducing instinct of self-preservation—for now, “alright, get out,” it said. “Time to see the world for yourself.”

Hal emerged, unstable on his limbs as if groggy. Snake met his surprised, round bug eyes when he peeked through the door