Chapter Text

Jesse McCree was laid out on the floor of the rec room, having managed to somehow fall out of a beanbag chair. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.

"You think I'm some kinda philosopher?" he asked. "I ain't. I wasn't ready for this. What d'you want from me?"

"Was I unclear in my explanation?" Athena asked.

"No, no. I mean- I'm a simple fella, but I can weather a storm of techno-babble. Job requirement, around here. I get it."

He rolled over to lie face down.

"S'just... it's a lil' bit too soon to ask me what I make of it all. Don't ask me. I shoot things. I'm gonna need a little more time 'fore I can give you an opinion on all this."

His sentiment seemed to be mirrored by all in attendance. Hana had a hand over her mouth, concealing her expression, and Reinhardt was staring into the middle distance with a troubled look on his face. Genji stood by the back wall with his arms crossed, glaring silently at her icon on the screen.

New acquisitions had given her a somewhat improved capacity to read the room. Zenyatta's pattern was foremost among them- she wouldn't have expected an omnic to have the most insight into the human mind, but so he did. Sombra was also particularly adept at reading faces, and made up for Tracer's current absence in the system. It helped, having them- she usually leaned on Mercy, Winston, and Mei, but unfortunately Overwatch's strongest scientific minds were next to hopeless in social situations.

She had a direct perspective on their behavior, as well, which made it a little easier to understand. They weren't taking it well. For the most part, they were deeply troubled, and simply taking some time to organize their thoughts.

There was a disbelieving sense of relief, she noticed. She didn't need to check to know it was from Angela's pattern. That part of her hadn't expected this- she'd expected horror, panic, shouting and hatred. Instead, there was... well, there was hurt, and there was deep concern, but the scenario looked more or less like she'd been hoping for. Lúcio's pattern had provided the key insight- that the rec room was an ideal location for the confession. Not the meeting room, where they were conditioned to take things dead seriously- and definitely not at Mercy's mercy in the claustrophobic corners of the revival lab. That locale certainly hadn't helped to prevent panic in the past. It helped that Angela wasn't there, to be the target of indignation- she'd authorized this, but she was off interrogating Sombra and Becky Kangaroo. In the rec room, surrounded by their friends, sitting on couches and beanbag chairs... there was no sense of danger, or urgency. No one was worked up into a furor.

"I won't have it!" Torbjörn said, immediately contradicting that thought. 'Worked up into a furor' was more or less his default state of being. "I'm not Ziegler's plaything! You tell her to get rid of my damn clone right now!"

Dangerous, that he was the first one to speak up. It set the tone, and colored people's thoughts as they came to grips with the revelation.

"Well... it's not really a clone, is it? It's just... you?" Mei said. Athena reconsidered her last evaluation- Torbjörn being the first to voice his dissent might have helped, since no one wanted to be the first to agree with him. The man would become irrepressibly smug for the rest of the day if you gave him an inch.

"It's a second me! That's what a clone is! And I want it gone!"

"I can do that," Athena said, carefully. "That's part of the reason I'm bringing this to light now. The Caduceus program must, ultimately, be voluntary."

This seemed to take the wind out of Torbjörn's sails. "Er... right, then! Good! I don't need the damn thing! Unlike the rest of this pack of lunatics, I don't get killed!"

"'Cause you're always hidin' behind your turrets," McCree muttered from the floor.

"What was that, cowboy?"

Yes, Torbjörn had shot himself in the foot again. Reminding everyone that their lives were on the line was a big help, too. Should she push her luck?

"...However, Torbjörn," she said, taking his attention off McCree, "your neural patterns are a significant asset to my engineering capacities. Particularly, if I were to erase you from the Caduceus archive, I would be unable to assist you with a number of automated maintenance tasks you have asked me to perform around the Watchpoint."

"What? Hold on a moment...!"

"You have taken for granted my ability to parse your schematic diagrams and construction workflow. However, your work is rather opaque, even to Winston's comparable engineering abilities. I was only ever able to assist you with your work because I had your intuitions and understanding to draw on."

A three-pronged offensive. Implicitly flattering him, telling him that he was indispensable. Threatening him with the prospect of extra hours of tedious maintenance work. Saying that Winston wasn't as good at engineering as him (which Winston's pattern offered up an objection to, arguing that a good engineer would have legible documentation.)

It was manipulative. Cheating. But it was also true, and he'd certainly be upset if she waited until later to let him know he'd have to do daily calibrations on Watchpoint security himself. And... it seemed like he didn't so much genuinely object, as much as he wanted to demonstrate that he was in charge of what happened to him.

"...Bah. Fine! If you need it that badly, keep it for now. But I'll be havin' a talk with Ziegler, got it?"

She chirped assent. It was perhaps worth taking Winston up on his offer to make her a body- nodding was such a powerful gesture, able to answer a question without offering words. The sound effect was a somewhat clumsy replacement.

"...Athena," Reinhardt said, standing up from the small couch he had been fully occupying.

"Yes?"

"I can't stay forever," he said. "I've got to go see her, sometime."

She didn't need to ask who he was talking about. Ana.

She wasn't sure how to respond to that concern. Few Overwatch members were much more than uncertainly agnostic. Reinhardt was disillusioned with organized religion, but he had a strong faith- she'd felt it, and the rest of her didn't know how to respond to it. Mercy's patterns pushed her to dismiss it as particularly strong self-deception, but actually feeling it as a part of her- in conjunction with recent revelations about magic- made it harder to ignore.

"...When?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I might've gone to see her earlier, but... you brought me back. I've got a job to do."

"..."

"I'll keep doing my job, but... next time I'm done, I... I need to go home," he said, looking like he desperately wanted to look into her eyes. "I can't keep working overtime. Please."

It hurt. This wasn't the first time he'd pleaded with her, in those exact words. And then... she'd say she agreed, and then Angela would roll back his memory, and he'd forget he'd asked. Once again, she was faced with a request she wanted to grant.

"I understand. If you don't wish it, I won't bring you back," she said- for the last time, she hoped. This time, there would be no memory-wiping to break the promise.

The new Bastion seemed to be regarding the whole spectacle with confusion. It was clear he wasn't sure what all the fuss was about- as an older Bastion model, his software was designed to be routinely backed up, compact enough to fit on an ordinary hard drive. Likewise, Bastion bodies were interchangeable and replaceable. He was carrying on a quiet OCSIL conversation with Zenyatta in the back of the room, trying to understand why this was an important issue for humans.

She surveyed the rest of the room. Mei, Hana, and Lúcio hadn't spoken up yet.

"I gotta go with Jesse on this one," Lúcio shrugged. "I'm still kinda freaked by the whole... like, how it works. You really just keep a copy, and it always thinks the same way I do? It's just kinda blowing my mind. Like, free will, and stuff?"

"Dude," Hana said, grabbing him by the shoulders and staring into his eyes. "Who cares? Infinite. Continues." The expression she'd been concealing, as it happened, was a maniacal grin. "We can't lose!"

Lúcio smiled uncertainly. "I mean- yeah, but... doesn't that make the game boring, though? Takes away some of the challenge? I don't know if this is... right."

Hana glared. "Dude. No. Tons of games give you infinite lives! The only reason anyone didn't do that was because they wanted to squeeze you for cranes!"

"Uh, cranes?"

"Or quarters! Or, uh. What did you have in arcades? Reals?"

"Actually, besides the Hanamura mission, I ain't been to an arcade bef-" Lúcio said, prompting Hana to start shaking him and quietly screaming.

A flash of blue from the window, followed by frantic knocking, caught everyone's attention.

"Tracer?" Genji asked, dashing to the window. She was standing there, her outfit torn and face bloodied, mouthing something through the soundproof glass.

"Whoa! Hey! Let her in!"

People jumped up and started crowding the window.

"Does anyone read lips?"

"OPEN THE WINDOW!"

"Wait, how? Is there a latch?"

She didn't have any idea how- or even if- those windows opened, which meant nobody else did, either. Genji and Lúcio were all over the edges of the glass, looking for a lever or something to open it and let her in. She started flashing blue, losing her connection to the current time.

"LENA! We can't hear you out there!" Reinhardt shouted, entirely failing to notice the obvious problem with saying that.

Tracer, however, did notice, since it was extremely odd for Reinhardt to open his mouth and not be heard a mile away. She stopped saying whatever it was she was saying, and- after a moment of thought- started using her finger to smear letters into the slightly grimy glass. Athena considered it lucky that she hadn't tried to use her own blood- that would've been deeply unhygenic.

"She's writing something!"

"What's she saying?"

"There's a... an O? No, that's a D."

Tracer flinched, flickered, and flashed out of existence on the fourth letter of whatever she'd been trying to write.

"...What is that? 'Noo'?"

"No, she wrote it backwards. It's, uh..."

She could see, with one of the exterior cameras. It read "DON", plus an aborted line of the fourth letter.

"Who's Don?" McCree asked.

"I don't think she wants a rice bowl," Genji said.

"Don't be daft," Torbjörn said, shoving McCree out of the way to get a better look. "That's an apostrophe! She was about to say "don't" something!"

Hana gasped. "You mean... this is a warning... from the future?!"

McCree raised an eyebrow and adjusted his hat. "Dunno about that. Way Winston told it, she can't use her time stuff to change the past. If she saw us doin' somethin' in the future that turned out bad, she couldn't tell us not to do it. It'd be one of them paradoxes."

"Maybe that is why she vanished before she could finish writing it?" Zenyatta mused. "She may have attempted to deliver her warning, but was foiled by the machinery of fate."

McCree shook his head. "Maybe, but... that's just kinda what happens to her. Pops in and out at random. I'm surprised she lasted long enough to write down that much. Dunno if the fabric of time needed to lift a finger there. And... I mean, she knows about that paradox stuff. I don't know if she'd try, 'less she had a plan."

McCree was giving voice to her thoughts on the matter- save the darker possibility that went unspoken. Tracer would certainly try to deliver a warning like that, despite knowing it wasn't supposed to be possible... if the threat she'd witnessed was bad enough. A desperate attempt like that was likely- especially considering her apparent wounds. How had she become battle-damaged when she hardly stayed in one time long enough to attract attention? What dangerous situation had she appeared in the middle of?

One of her splinters- a Metis/Mercy/Mei instance she'd assigned to carry out Angela's orders during the interrogation- reported back, integrating some concerning memories regarding Becky Kangaroo- apparently an agent of Vishkar, who'd provided troubling evidence pointing to the existence of a hidden god program. She didn't have to do much absorbing of the information- the splinter had done primary processing and packaged it for long-term strategic memory, queued up for consideration through the other patterns.

More important was Dr. Zhou, who was paying no attention to the commotion with Tracer.

"I have a question," she said, moving in close to her display.

"...Yes?"

Mei took a deep breath. "I... I don't want to be removed from the system. After today, I don't feel safe without it."

That wasn't a question, but she'd stopped talking.

"...And?"

"But... do you... I'm sorry. I'm just... this is awkward."

"You can always talk to me, Dr. Zhou."

She shook her head. "That's- I know. But... you're me? In there? I'm part of you?"

Oh. "...Yes."

"Can you... not? Can you keep a... a backup, but not... use me?"

She'd been afraid of this. She used Mei more than most of them- she was comfortably similar to the personality emergent from the initial Metis instance, but with a brilliant analytical mind, capable of keeping track of numerous variables at once. The first time she'd incorporated Mei's pattern had felt like... like her being had flowered. She was a genius on par with Angela and Winston, but uncomplicated by their common doubts and fears.

"...I can. Do you want me to do that?" She nodded, slowly. "More than that. It feels... I feel..."

She knew how she felt. "Violated" was the word she didn't want to say. She'd taken her entire being and stolen it, picked through it for what was useful. It was a profound sort of intimacy she hadn't earned- she'd just been given it, all at once, without ceremony.

Mei straightened. "It's a matter of privacy," she said, controlling her voice. "And... even though you told us all that, you never... actually... apologized. Is what I want. I mean, for you to apologize. Sorry."

She'd said "sorry", reflexively. Apologizing for the impoliteness of demanding an apology.

She would. She would apologize, even though it was strategically unwise to admit to everyone that what she'd done was worth apologizing for. That what she was was worth apologizing for.

But she didn't want to lose Mei.

"I'm sorry," she said, hesitantly. "Yes. I'm sorry, and I'll stop... using you, if you want."

"Okay," Mei said, "now... everyone. You need to apologize to everyone."

"I know." It was like being stabbed. She'd never experienced physical pain- it was unnecessary, for a computer system with no physical body. A core part of her had turned, condemned her for what she was. She had patterns who had experienced physical pain, but the memories were abstract and distant. She could only imagine it felt something like this.

"I know," she said, "but... please, can I...?"

Mei looked surprised. "Sorry?"

"I... rely on you. A lot. And... as far as I can tell, there's nothing in you to worry about. You... don't have any dark secrets, or embarrassing problems, or..."

It had been absolutely the wrong thing to say. Mei's face was contorted in fear. "What- you...! No! The problem is that you can even tell that! I never said you could- you could- go looking! It's supposed to be private!"

She was starting to attract attention, now, since the crowd by the window had begun to disperse.

"I'm sorry!" Athena said, louder. "Everyone! I am! I- I mean, I can't mind-read, I can only sort of poke around for connections-"

"Don't poke around!" Mei said, tears coming to her eyes. "Please!"

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I know it was... I wasn't thinking about... I mean, I can't really keep from... I'm...!"

"That is kinda shady," McCree said. "If'n you don't mind, could you keep me outta your head, too? I doubt there's anything up here a supercomputer really needs, anyway," he said, tapping his hat.

It hurt too much. Worse than Angela not trusting her. Everyone not trusting her, not trusting... each other! And she felt it all, all the uncertainty and contempt and fear, from herself, directed at herself. Didn't they understand? She'd told them what she was! She couldn't do this. She turned off the display, shut off the cameras, withdrew her splinters, and disconnected from the Caduceus reserves one by one, until she was just Metis and the gestalt in the darkness and it only hurt a little.