Maze: Not naming anyone, but one of the other Alpha clones-- Fox: Alpha-17? Maze: Fox... Fox: Fordo? Maze: Do you want to hear this or not? Fox: Sorry. I'll stop. Maze: Ok, so this vod dropped a tubie. Fox: Decommissioned. Maze, laughing: No! No one felt worse about it than he did. Fox: Was it an accident? Maze: Worse! He was stunned during training earlier that day, and he had some weird delayed reaction, like a seizure. He said his muscles just clenched. He felt it coming on suddenly and made a split second decision to drop the tubie rather than crush it. Fox, gasping: Hero. Maze: Yes! But it took hours to figure that out because the rest of us reacted the way you did! We held a trial! He was already in tears, but we made him cry harder. To this day, he's still traumatized by how the rest of us reacted, even though the tubie grew up to be perfectly fine. Fox: Really? The tubie is ok? Maze: Of course! We're really resilient, even as tubies. You could spike one of them like a sport ball, and it'd be fine. Fox, after laughing: How's our vod? Maze: He's fine, but he won't touch a tubie. He's seen the footage. It shows how much of a hero he is. That grip he had after he dropped the tubie was lethal. Windpipe-crushing strength behind it. He says he's thought of a dozen different things he could have done since, though. Fox: Aw...It's easy to think of different strategies after the fact. The reality is that he made the best decision he could have made in that moment. When your muscles spasm that dramatically, all of your brain power is going into that action. It's amazing he could even consider the tubie in that moment. Maze: We've all tried to tell him that, but when a tubie is involved... Fox: All logic goes out the window...Poor ori'vod...Give him a hug for me. Maze: Me? Hug one of my vode?...Maybe just this once.
