Private Log- The Elusive Mirage, Part II
06 Jun 2022Lily Flemmon
Mirage sounds like someone who's half human, half machine, right? He is- She is- They are- It is- well, the genderfluid sloshes around a lot. It's really wonderful that Mirage can keep up with that, though.Where was I going with this? Where, uh...
Oh, yeah! Mirage is always incredibly, genuinely human.
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(Continued from Into The Light)
As Rory's emotions calm and her mind remains clear, she turns her head to the side to look at Mirage, as what it said finally sinks into her dome.
"Eyes you wanted to give yourself?"
Taking a moment, she soaks Mirage's body in from toe to tip. Almost nothing about it looks entirely natural or unaltered, but not particularly altered, either. But those eyes. They look incredibly normal. Delightfully organic.
"Wait... Those aren't native either, are they? Are you the geneticist? Are those wetware?"
Lily steps back a bit so she’s not so close to Rory. “Rory, this is Mirage. Mirage, this is Commander Aurora Bael.”
"A pleasure," she says with a smile. "And... Don't feel bad. seriously don't. If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be able to say that I'm pretty sure an Alliance Defense Force Intel agency hijacked that Imperial signal after I started doing shadow work for Zachary Hudson a couple months ago."
Rory smirks and looks back at Lily."Heyyy look at that! Not even a twinge of vomit this time!"
Lily’s eyes widen in excitement as she sees the complete lack of nausea. “Holy shit! Yessss!”
Mirage looks at the two of them, just starting to fathom the significance of what they just did.
"When I get out of surgery... maybe out of prison, who knows, the night is young. But when I get some time i have got some stories for you, Lil. This shit is fuckin' wild."
Lily glances at Rory’s vitals and other readouts and notices a basal cortisol level that, despite being lower than before, is still… disconcertingly high. “Yeah, I bet it is. But maybe Mal should be there too?”
Her face softens even more, wrapping her arms around herself and coming up on her side. "Poor Malcom... How is he? Is he home? I haven't seen him since I was arrested. God he must be furious with me..."
“Right now? Yeah he’s home, and sound asleep. And don’t worry, he’ll be okay once he sees that you are. Unlike you, he has a really good handle on his own problems.”
“Honestly I’m not too worried about him, because you’re in good hands, even if two of those hands are a bit small.”
Mirage shoots a look back. “I mean… you’re not wrong, but you really didn’t have to come at my tiny hands like that.”
“What are you gonna do, throw them?”
Rory snirks in spite of herself. "Goddammit, why you always gotta make me laugh when I'm going through some shit?"
L: "It helps, right?"
Rory nods, looking back up at Lily with pain in her eyes. "I'm fucked up, Lily. Things are so fucked... I murdered a Marlinist envoy to the Alliance, Lily. I don't know why. It doesn't make sense. But they made me do it."
Lily's face falls, and so does Mirage's. They look at each other, and then back at Rory.
"Beats me! I don't own this mind, I just work here, apparently!" Rory says with a defeated shrug.
"Sorry. I guess I just... I'm hiding how much I care about you, and how sometimes it hurts a bit. Little enough I can laugh it off, but... Nobody deserves to be put through what you've been put through."
"Don't worry, Lily... I'm actually... I'll handle it." She turns back to Mirage , looking back over her shoulder. "What kind of time table are we looking at until you can both finish your own eyes and grow me a set that can do everything these can?"
"Mostly just fitting them to you, so... some scans and measurements once I get your current HMI out, then you'd come back in a couple days... but I should tell you a bit about the eyes I have in me before we commit to much." Mirage points at their face before continuing. "These eyes have 32 times the angular resolution of natural human eyes, and the HMI isn't in the front at all- it's in the visual cortex itself, because there's also a very powerful visual silicon coprocessor unit there. Meaning I can see and comprehend just about every little detail in everything. But... it's a curse." Mirage's voice cracks with the last bit.
"I imagine it would be, christ. I'm always turning the gain on righty down..." Rory steadies herself with a deep breath for a moment. "... I don't want something that hardcore."
"My brain can handle the detail level. It has its benefits, but... As soon as I woke up with my new eyes, I was amazed at how much detail there was in everything... But a couple days, later, I went to an art museum. And... I really couldn't appreciate anything there. Seeing every detail means seeing every flaw, and..." They stagger and look for a chair, and, seeing how the nearest one is at the other end of the room, they just sit down on the floor where they were standing.
"Rory, I- I can't see the beauty in... in... anything..."
"Christ I think this eye is 5x and this one is 3x and I'm already so overwhelmed, I can't imagine... What are the new ones you're working on rated at? What's different about them? Because you deserve those. I can tell they're a shot at making your life less unbearable."
"Well, the new ones are 12x. But they have an entirely different coprocessor, a quantum processor that actually learns how your own brain processes visual images, and just mimics that. It'll start at 1x and gradually work its way up to 12... But it won't reveal every technical little detail the same way mine does. I made them for myself, but... before getting them put in, I did an experiment to see if I would even benefit at all from them. My eyes have a failsafe bypass, and if the coprocessor were to fail or be removed, I'd still be able to see, and the eyes would perform and behave just like normal human eyes with no HMI. So I did that. I shut down my coprocessor to see if things could look pretty again... I barely even remembered what that felt like. But... I couldn't. Even losing all that detail, I still couldn't see beauty anymore... talk about an Icarus scenario." She leans back and lays on the floor, with her eyes closed.
The room is silent for a bit except for softly humming machinery and quiet ventilation, and Mirage sobbing ever so slightly.
Just as Lily starrts to open her mouth to ask if they're okay, Mirage continues, their eyes still closed. "But.. even though I will never be able to see beauty again... I can still hear it. I can still feel it. I can still taste it and smell it, and I can still know it's there. And when I came to CTAC, and I started to lay the technological foundations here, the way so many people built on my work specifically to bring people closer together, creating an entire culture and cuisine centered on such wanton kindness... it's more beautiful than anything I'd ever experienced, and no visual beauty alone could ever compare."
Rory smiles at the sweetness of the sentiment, turning her body back around to face Mirage and propping her head up on one arm. "This place sure has some kind of magic, doesn't it? I met... Or rather I tracked Lily down out near Colonia. I guess it was Sovereign's Reach. Poor thing had to scoop my Merc ass up off the icy surface of a moon when we landed and pull me into her Phantom for a chat. I was fuckin' impossible. And I couldn't even talk about what was wrong with me without staining her conference table. Next thing I know we've both told our sad sack stories, we're having dinner, in the fanciest goddamn restaurant ship ever, and she's inviting me to come live with her." She looks wistfully back at Lily and smiles. A full, truly genuine smile. It might be the first one Lily has ever seen that wasn't driven by comedy. "She fuckin' saved me. And now you've saved me, too. I don't know if you lot have ever worked in a Merc company before but that shit? That shit runs deep. You save someone's life, you got a comrade forever." She pauses and looks down bopping her fist off the gurney mattress. "... Except that one guy. But he was uh... Let's say he's the exception that proves the rule.."
Mirage picks herself up off the floor, wiping tears from her eyes. "Fuck, I... I guess I really needed to hear that. I'm afraid I'm not much good in active conflict, so I've never been a merc. And I can't exactly say saving you was my finest work, but... I'm glad I did it. And Lily, thank you for bringing her here."
"Word of advice: if someone is telling you that you saved their life? Don't under-sell it." Rory says with a smirk. She lays back down on the gurney, looking up at the ceiling with a worried expression on her face "As soon as I walk out of here... is it going to turn back on? Like am I going to forget what this feels like?" She holds her hand up in the light and turns it over and over again. "Because... I'll be honest, I'm scared of going back in the dark."
"Unfortunately, yeah, I'll have to operate before you leave and get that sadistic junk out of your head. But before I do, I guess I should ask... What color do you want your new eyes to be?"
"The temp ones, I don't care. Default. That's steel blue I guess? It matters more that they work as eyes. For the permanent ones... I don't know. I kinda dig the one red one blue thing I have going on now. Probably the same reason I never fixed my scar..."
She reaches back for the data pad and turns on the mirror function to take a good look at herself, turning her head to the side and back, up and down.
"Hm... As close a color match as you can get to these. That probably ends up some kind of purple for one and ice blue for the other, but if you have to grow them both the same, go with the ice."
Lily cocks her head, looking at Rory. "Well, I think the one with the scar could be red, and the other one a vivid purple. Mirage, you could do a blood red iris, right? Some surface hemoglobin?"
"Nah, I want at least one to stay icy pale blue. it's..." She looks away from her reflection a moment. Some emotions are clearly still stirring up inside of her as she thinks more about it. "I'm pretty sure that was my natural eye color. You know it's been so long it's actually hard to remember? I don't exactly have photographs..."
"Well, that is a bit easier than purple. I'd say regular iron hemoglobin for the red one and... Oh hell yeah. Titanium hemoglobin is pretty neat stuff, gets a nice vivid ice blue. I can put a little bit of that in the red eye to lighten it form a pure blood red, too."
"Orangey red would work well too. Lily's eyes are absolutely stunning... I wouldn't mind a color kind of like that. I don't know. I feel like I might need to see some of the colors you can do and what they'd look like on before I can really decide." Rory blushes slightly, chewing the inside of her lip as her eyes dart back and forth between Lily and Mirage. "It's weird. I'm not used to planning out my appearance too hard. At least not in such a permanent way..."
Lily: "I don't know if I've told you about my experience with... exactly that. And, Mirage... about your finest work, I should probably tell you... I dropped the Dryad in a black hole."
Rory lets out a sigh of relief. "Fuck, I'm so glad you told them - it, sorry."
Mirage's eye twitches before she even turns to look at Lily. But once she turns her head, she gives Lily a very alarmed and confused look. "Any pronouns are fine. Them is fine, her is fine, him, is fine, and it/its... well, that one can get a bit confusing in the lab setting. But uh, Lily... Can I ask why?"
"I could manage the amount of power, but... nobody deserves to be burdened with the responsibility that goes along with it." Lily pinches the bridge of her nose, tilting her head down a bit, as she starts to get choked up. "I... I'm sorry, Mirage. I know that was your best work, and you're really proud of it... I just-"
Mirage's face softens a bit, but their voice stays intense. "I wasn't. I'm honestly not sure why I made such a weapon in the first place... People here desperately needed to feel safe, so I guess I just... I tried to give them that."
"There are a lot more ways we can tighten things up around here without even bothering taking on more weaponry," Rory says offhandedly, hands behind her head. "I found a lot of security holes in your system when I was dead-set on infiltration this morning. I don't bet you can patch all of them but..." Suddenly she gets a vibe from the room that now is totally not the time, and clears her throat. "Oh hey, look at that! Lights on the ceiling! What a great idea!"
Lily laughs nervously at Rory's awkwardness. "I still dumped your finest work in a black hole, though, and I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. And that was actually only my second-finest work."
"Wait... what's your finest...?"
"If they says anything other than the Pizza beans, they out they gottdam mind." Rory is still not quite caught up with the tenderness of the situation.
"Pizza beans actually aren't my work. But, Lily... my finest work is you."
"Wh-what?" Lily's confuson brings her train of thought to a screeching, squealing, grinding halt with enough sparks to set sand on fire.
Rory interjects, suddenly, but not entirely, fitting in with the mood of the room. "I take it back, that's a damn fine piece of work."
Hearing Rory's compliment, Lily's now visibly flustered and her breathing isn't exactly steady.
Mirage put their small hand on Lily's, well... her upper arm, not her shoulder. "Hey. Easy there, hot stuff. If I remember right, you called it the 'not-medkit' based on the warning label Domino put on it."
L: "Wait, that was... your work? I thought that was just Domino. You know, ADHD hottie, medicates with Push."
Rory interjects again. "Jeebus christ Lily you're so fucking gay."
"You haven't met Deranov. I can be straight, too. And the only things consistent about Mirage's appearance are the shape of their face, that they're short and lean, and that they're hot."
"That just makes you bi spectrum, which is still gay as fuck. I have it from a very reliable source: Me." Rory says, closing her eyes and just laying back into the moment.
"I feel like both of us qualify. But anyway, Mirage..." Lily clears her throat, but gets a bit choked up in the process. "You're the one who gave me... me? How did you know, how did... how..." Lily's mouth keeps moving, but not with distinguishable speech, and she can't seem to make a sound.
"I didn't know you were trans. Neither did you. But even if you were cis, you needed the opportunity to create yourself. To become who you are, after all those years of being bound to Silas's impossible expectations."
"I... I guess I'll have to thank you properly later, it could take a while, and you have work to do. Rory... Do you want me to stay in the lab?"
Her hand reaches out and makes grabby motions in the air while she makes an exaggerated groany noise. "NNnnnnn Lilyyyyy. Staaaay"
"I'm not qualified to help at all, but I'll stay. Although, Mirage, I take it you won't be operating on her in the security office?" Lily walks over to the head of the gurney and looks down at Rory. "You got this, friend. You're gonna be okay."
"Fuck, can you knock me out before I go? I don't want to feel that feeling again. So confused over my own damn thoughts..."
"Of course you're gonna be under for it. This kind of procedure doesn't go well on conscious patients."
"No, I mean I don't want to leave this room conscious. Is that possible? If it isn't, I'll just buckle down and get through it, but..."
"While unlikely, the processor could spool back up again, but I can put you under in here just to be safe."
Lily takes a small step back. "Rory, do you want me to stay in the room with you or can I just stay in the lab? It could take a few hours."
"Rory's eyes suddenly look pained and pleading and she nods her head rapidly.* "I can't go back to that. I really can't. I would... I need that. No, Lily, you don't have to come in the OR. You don't have to watch me get wounded. That stuff messes with you just... Hold my hand as I check out, okay?"
Lily comes around to the far side of the gurney from Mirage, and gently places her hand on Rory's face, tracing the scar over her eye. "Of course. I'm right here."
Rory's eyes stay open, and the pain hasn't left them.
Lily takes Rory's hand in hers. "Hey. You can close your eyes, I'm right here."
Rory nods and grips Lily's hand tight, pulling her mouth up into a screwed up frown.
"I ever mention that I'm terrified of surgery?" she asks, trying to chuckle. "I'm not...used...to being fully asleep for it."
"I don't think you have, but don't worry, you won't feel a thing, whether you remember or not. You're gonna be okay."
"Okay... okay..." Rory turns her head back toward Mirage. "Whew.... I'm ready."
Mirage nods, and clamps a device that appears to be some sort of EM array to the side of the gurney, and activates its holographic console. "Carrier wave, huh? Yup, there's that one... not the one I want, though. Let's see, I'm pretty sure it's these ones for you, but... there, melatonin producers, stimulating in three, two, one... and there's the cortical waveset. Here we go... augmenting in five."
L: "You're gonna be fine, Rory."
Everything is suddenly VERY heavy for Rory, and she feels instantly quite tired. "Whoa... yeah thats... pretty good..." Her eyes close and a tiny smile slips across her lips. "Mmm... Lily..." ...and off she slips.
Lily helps Mirage get Rory to the OR and get set up. "Mirage, do you think you can let Mal down here?"
"As a permanent technician he's already on the list, but for this... He's familiar with security protocols and confidentiality, right?"
"As familiar as me. Not quite on your level, but good enough."
"Then yes. I'll authorize it while you figure out if he's awake."
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