not_a_traitor | IC Inbox

"The real ones. This time, anyway. In class we got told a little about the big skeleton that's still out in the ocean from before the barrier went up and it made me curious about the living ones."

They must be huge, and scary, but that's interesting when you're reading about them and not swimming out far enough to encounter them. And—

"W-We never had anything like that on the planets I've been on," he adds, fiddling with his hands a little bit. "Or like a lot of stuff here. We didn't spend time on very nice planets probably."

Planets, plural. His ears perk up at that; while his expression doesn't change much, there's a real warmth to his voice as he says, "Real ones it is."

The spacer population has grown since Gaeta arrived, but it remains a tiny sliver of the island as a whole. It must be lonely, being so young and so different from all the other kids here. Like this kid didn't remind him enough of himself already.

He grabs his cane, hefts himself up. As they start walking toward the science section, he asks, "You're not from Earth, either?"

Theta shakes his head. "I've never even seen Earth. We hopped around a bunch of planets but we mostly lived on a ship, at first. And then one planet that I didn't like very much."

Maybe if he got super technical about it, the original human mind was that of someone who lived on Earth, but that doesn't seem like a useful distinction in this case. He's never seen, let alone stepped foot on, Earth himself and he almost certainly never will.

"You're one of the other spacers?"

"Yeah. I think I was one of the earliest ones here. It's been about two years since Mortanne picked me up."

Add that to the useful euphemisms alongside kicked the bucket and started pushing up daisies, he supposes.

"It's a pretty big adjustment after spending so much time in space, huh?"

"D-Definitely. Probably more for me than most?" He answers, without further elaboration, at least right now. "I only got here about a month ago. I'm getting used to it, though, m-mostly because I already had people I know to help me. If I didn't I'd probably be panicking more, heh."

Actually if he didn't he probably just wouldn't have said yes to coming here at all. He didn't really want to be dead at all, but he mostly agreed because North was here and okay.

"Yeah," says Gaeta with sympathy. "It's a lot easier when you have people from your own world nearby. I'm glad they're helping you."

He still wishes sometimes that Louis had stayed after the September gala, no matter how complicated it would've been. He still checks the new arrivals at the docks for any familiar faces.

"What's your name? I'm Felix."

"Theta. M-My name's Theta." He's kind of glad he doesn't introduce himself with a last name, too, he's never really sure what he's meant to say if he's meant to say his 'full' name. Dakota sounds weird, but is he allowed to pick Katina? It's easier to not have to pick or explain. "Were you military, too? W-We all were, so."

Like his odd eyes, Theta's name hardly registers as something strange. Maybe closer to a Viper jock callsign than something you'd name a kid, but...

Wait.

Gaeta pauses. He leans a little more weight on his cane as his eyebrows tug together. "Nice to meet you," he says, followed by a much more cautious, "Yeah, I'm military too. Um. What do you mean by we?"

Please, gods, don't drop a child soldier in his lap at ten in the morning, he needs a lot more caffeine before he can react to this appropriately.

"Oh, right. Uh. I-I always forget that sounds weird to people," he answers with an awkward little laugh. 'Weird' is maybe less accurate than 'worrying', but he only sort of understands the distinction in this context. Of course they don't put actual normal children into the war.

(Yeah, so about the Spartans...)

"I was part of Project Freelancer. With North and South and the rest? I was North's Artificial Intelligence unit. I don't usually have a body, this is new. I used to ride around in his neural implants, helping him with his equipment."

Gaeta stops in his tracks.

Theta's explanation keeps compounding into something worse. Project Freelancer ricochets into South, knocks into AI unit -- he will never forget CT explaining that to him, the unregulated, untested units implanted in some Freelancers' frakking skulls -- and sends his stomach plummeting like a stone dropped in an icy lake. He stares down at the kid. Just a kid, nervous and earnest and staring back up at him with those mismatched eyes that don't look human at all. A machine crafted for war wearing the costume of a human body.

(A kid's body.)

He feels sick. Disproportionately furious, because gods, this would have been the perfect ruse if the Cylons ever tried it; who wouldn't trust something that looked like Theta? Think of the damage that could be done before anyone caught on. Jaw tightening to keep the worst contained, he tears his eyes away on the pretense of searching the shelves for Theta's book.

Theta stalls a second after he does, blinking back at Gaeta, first clueless, and then... worried. He's only got so much data to go off when it comes to people's response to this information, but so far not a single datapoint includes silence. (Usually, it's more questions.)

Did— did he say something wrong? But he didn't explain it any differently than he usually does, except skipping some of the details because it sounded like he probably knew at least some of the others. So— why isn't he saying anything? Why does he look like that?

"...Mr. Felix? A-Are you okay?"

Gaeta doesn't look at him.

You don't throw patrons out of the library unless they're being disruptive. The kid (he's just a kid, all his senses keep insisting) has been perfectly polite the whole time he's been here. Gaeta can be, too: don't cause a scene, don't make a fuss, just -- figure out how to get the frak out of this situation. Monitor from afar. Whenever Theta becomes trouble, then... he'll deal with it then.

His voice stays level -- some would call it flat -- as he says, "I think you should talk to another librarian. I'll go find Lev."

The furrow in Theta's brow deepens. He doesn't understand. What did he do? "But— why? What's wrong? What did I say?"

Maybe the smart thing to do would be to just let him go and get this other librarian. But he doesn't get it. No one else has responded like this. Nervous curiosity outweighs sense.

"I just think," says Gaeta again, strain stretched under his professional veneer like a rubber band about to snap, "he'll be able to help you better."

He starts to turn away from Theta.

For all that Theta is what he is, he is also still a teenager—and a rather undersocialised one, at that. That gap in experience is all it takes to turn hyperintelligence into a blunder.

"That's not true, or you would've called him before! What did I say? How am I supposed to know what I did wrong if you won't tell me?"

He goes to tug Gaeta's sleeve.

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