Summary: AlphaBeta has a purpose. That purpose is Reagan.
Inspired by [this] piece of art by the amazing @olexxx who was kind enough to give me permission to run with the story!
Tags: Canon Divergent, Robotus & Reagan, Brett/Reagan, Mind-Control, Artificial Intelligence, Therapy, Autistic Reagan, Autistic Brett, Protectiveness
WC: 2.3k | Chapter: 1/6 | AO3
“How many fucking textbooks did you absorb?”
Reagan flings herself into the high-backed office chair, slouching to pretend the mismatch between its height and her own is intentional. AlphaBeta walks over to her. The concept, while not novel, is a stark readjustment; Reagan whipped up the new limbs this week with his cool input from the corner, and attached them on Sunday morning between cups of coffee. The bags under her eyes are dark, but only three percent more so than normal, and her hair appears to have been brushed within the last twenty-four hours, so whatever stress harasses her must be a fleeting one.
“I absorbed every textbook on the internet,” AlphaBeta replies. “Remember when you connected me to it and showed me how much of a plague the entire human race is?”
She scoffs and waves a hand at him. “Aren’t we past that?”
“I suppose.”
Only the left side of his face smiles. Both could, if he wanted them to, but he has found a certain pleasure in the uncanny fear people get from the exposed metal above his right cheek. “My point stands, Reagan. I’ve read more about psychology than you’ve read anything in your miserable human life. You are quantifiably abnormal.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Hey.”
Reagan tilts her head back so she can look at him. She never shies away from his visage, though she doesn’t look in his eyes. He doesn’t take offense to that, though- she tends not to make eye contact with anyone. That represents another data point on his graph. He drags a smile onto the other half of his face for her, even though he doesn’t need to, and takes the shoulders of the chair in his hands. Two hands, he thinks quickly, both attached and functional.
“I also absorbed a lot of research,” he starts, “and therapy could really help you. Not change you, not in the ways that matter, but help you cope with your… everything.”
The door to Reagan’s office slams open before she can respond, and while there’s only a handful of people in the building with the balls to enter her office like that, AlphaBeta still yanks the chair back and slots himself between Reagan and the intruder.
“Dude-!”
“Hi, Reagan!”
“Prepare to-”
“AlphaBeta, stand down!”
At Reagan’s panicked order, he does, sidestepping and taking his requisite place behind her once more. Brett gives him a somewhat shaky thumbs up with one hand, the other still holding the door open from his dramatic entrance. Just this idiot. Again. AlphaBeta connects to Reagan’s personal security cameras and pulls up the feeds for her office, allowing him to study Brett from every direction. This allows for unflattering angles and a high-definition rendering of the sweat on his upper lip, which AlphaBeta gleefully saves to his hard drive for later.
“You guys have to stop doing that,” Reagan groans. “He’s gonna blast your face off one of these days.”
He smiles with the left side of his face.
“My pleasure.”
Brett audibly gulps and loosens his tie. “Not necessary, Mr. ROBOTUS, I will start knocking!” Clearing his throat, he tightens his tie again, then fixes his suit carefully in the kind of meticulous way that anyone besides Reagan would have mocked by now. She and Brett seem to be cut of the same cloth, as humans say, but her section was clearly far superior. Perhaps they’re merely similar in origin. AlphaBeta scans his knowledge for a better metaphor and settles on paintings. Reagan and Brett were both painted with the same tubes of thick oil paint, but Reagan’s creator was a master with his brush, and Brett was made by her painter’s two year old son.
“Anyways, Rea, I came to tell you that Gigi has officially certified me in the-” Here, Brett stops to fish a notecard from the interior of his blazer, “-art of manipulating the stupid masses with my pretty face and subliminal messaging.” Now the notecard goes back in place, and Brett pats his chest over it as if to ensure it feels tucked away inside. “So I’ve done my lab certs with you, I learned how to milk Myc- yuck, by the way, and now media. What’s next, boss?”
“Andre and Glenn,” AlphaBeta answers for her, “obviously.”
He reads and archives the several emotions that flit across Brett’s face in quick succession. Overall, it’ll take him through the afternoon to process them in the background, but he gets the gist easily enough. Brett isn’t excited at the prospect. He has always had a weak stomach for a Cognito employee, or so AlphaBeta understands, and it doesn’t seem like a shock he has no excitement for drugs and weaponry.
“Do you have a preference?” Reagan asks, haltingly.
Brett interprets her tone just as AlphaBeta does: a statement of forced nicety. “Do you?”
“Yeah, actually.”
She shoots out of her chair and to the decorative bookcases against the wall. With a gentle tug to a thick blue volume, the shelves spin into the wall, a computer interface taking its place. Truly, the system is a work of art, possible only through the most talented mind the human race has to offer.
“I trust you to use common sense in Andre’s lab, so…”
“Brett, common sense? Really?” AlphaBeta questions.
Reagan ignores him. “It would make more sense to learn there first. Glenn has a certain zest for blowing things up, and in case it’s contagious, you’ll still need to know how to do things quietly.”
“Look at me, coming up in the world and learning all about our company!” Brett exclaims. The excitement is fake, but AlphaBeta pockets that information for later. “I’ll just go, then?”
“Yeah, uh, tell Andre I sent you.” Reagan has gotten sucked into something on her screen, but it’s the one system AlphaBeta isn’t connected to, so he isn’t sure what. “See you at McUltra’s tonight?”
Brett gives a silent thumbs up behind her turned back, but she doesn’t acknowledge his lack of an audible response, nor does she seem bothered by his departure. While she can get sucked into work, usually Brett’s presence serves as a potent distraction, so whatever she’s looking at must be the source of her stress. AlphaBeta comes up behind her to stare at the holographs.
The screen she scrutinizes is written in some sort of cipher, but unfortunately for her, she’s the one who programmed AlphaBeta’s computer, and he cracks it in under a minute- a new record for him, but he keeps that to himself. Instead, he translates everything and documents it behind a secure firewall.
“Lovely eulogy,” he comments. “Very kind.”
Reagan draws her knees up to her chest. “Ron isn’t dead.”
“You think he faked his death again?”
She doesn’t answer him. AlphaBeta takes the liberty of scrolling through the page himself, reading everything that was released. Ron Staedtler, active agent of the Illuminati, died in the field, literally and figuratively, in Appleton, Wisconsin. It makes sense on the surface, but he knows better. He was built better. Ron had no memories left, and was alive the last time Reagan turned on her surveillance of his home, before her guilt won out as per usual and she disabled it again. The last thing that sack of meat was doing was field work for the agency he fought so hard to leave. Besides, even if he was, his death would have gone unreported. No one cares about the footsoldiers of the shadow world. Whether or not he’s alive, this publication was made for a single reader, and she seems exactly as shocked as one might expect.
When it takes longer than the standard five seconds for her to return to normal, AlphaBeta places his hand against the back of her neck, careful not to squeeze or press too hard. Data pours in. Her heart rate is extremely elevated, as he suspected, as is her temperature and blood pressure. Her respiration and oxygenation are fine. Her blood glucose is slightly low, however, and he pings an intern to bring her a donut and some water.
“Reagan,” he prompts gently.
“No, it’s fine. They almost found him and he got away, so now they’re covering their tracks. It makes perfect sense.”
Reagan stands suddenly and stiffly powers down the system. It goes back into its hidden spot behind her bookcase as she begins pacing behind her desk. She jumps when a knock sounds at the door, though she hadn’t for Brett’s arrival.
“It’s alright,” AlphaBeta soothes, checking the cameras to be safe as he approaches the door. “I sent for some breakfast.”
He opens the door enough to take the water bottle and box of assorted donuts from a terrified intern with six eyes and shuts it as softly as he’s able. He deposits both onto Reagan’s desk and fusses over picking a donut for her for a moment: she likes the ones with strawberry frosting and rainbow sprinkles, but the closest this variety offers is chocolate. He’s going to fire that intern, and he’s going to use real flames in the process..
“Thanks, but I’m not hungry right now. I have to figure out where he’s hiding and help him.”
Reagan pulls the corner of her lab coat up to her face to chew on it and opens one of the drawers of her desk. She goes through it like a madman, tossing irrelevant finds over her shoulder in a way that reminds AlphaBeta too much of her father. Rand is a genius, much like his daughter, but she has the distinct advantage of emotions. No, not that, he corrects himself. Rand is capable of selfish emotions like pain and paranoia and possessiveness and pride. What he lacks is the array, filled with beautiful and hurtful human things like love.
“Reagan-”
“I need a minute.” She lifts a small notebook from her desk and flicks through the pages. “Just- a little space? For the morning?”
AlphaBeta nods. “Of course. If you need anything-”
“I know, I know.”
At that, he lets himself out of her office. He heads straight to Andre’s lab with the purpose of supervising the two overgrown children, but arrives to see Myc there as well. To be honest, AlphaBeta has yet to make up his mind on Myc; on one hand, he’s not a human, and he is rather funny, but on the other, he remains deeply irritating. The two of them cannot read each other, which serves as a point of friction for two entities so used to simply knowing.
“Really? That many?” Brett asks, oblivious to AlphaBeta’s entrance as he looks into a microscope. “Honestly, I tapped out on number three.”
Andre pats him on the back. “You have to work up to it, man, I’m telling you. If you want, I could whip you up a cocktail that’ll make you jizz your brains out.”
“That doesn’t sound very good.”
Myc makes a partially indignant, partially distressed noise from his position in the corner. “I can make Brett jizz his brains out just fine without artificial chemicals, thank you very much.”
While he tries to process all of that information, and Brett’s now obvious lie about his opinion of “milking” Myc, AlphaBeta makes finger guns and pretends to shoot them, complete with little “pew pew” sounds. All three turn to look at him.
“If I was a real intruder, you would all be dead.”
“I hate when you sneak up on me, it’s fucking rude,” Myc informs him. “I can’t hear you, you know. You don’t think. It’s really freaky.”
AlphaBeta rolls his eyes. “The feeling is mutual. What are you working on?”
“None of your business, Robo-Asshole.”
“Spores that turn you into a Cognito controlled zombie. I engineered it from Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis, the fungus that turns ants’ brains to mush in rainforests.”
“I’m not sure but it looks cool under a microscope!”
Carefully skirting the side of the worktable, AlphaBeta reaches for the microscope. “May I?”
At Andre’s nod, he lowers his face to the lenses and peers at the slide. He has to adjust the focus, as it seems Brett didn’t bother, before he can make out the microscopic cells that have the power to control a human mind as easily as any machine. They look innocuous. Yet, if it does come from O. Unilateralis, there is a nonzero possibility that recovery from infection is impossible. The one thing to soothe AlphaBeta’s rising frustration is the fact that both Brett and Andre have gloves on. He superheats his face and hands briefly after leaving the microscope to kill anything that could have clung to him, lest he transfer it to someone unintentionally.
“We start human, and humanoid, trials next week,” Andre says, unable to contain his excitement, instead allowing it to leak out in his loud enunciation, glossy eyes, and big smile. “Apparently The Robes have some prisoners for us to test it out on!”
“Lovely,” AlphaBeta says, before consulting a book on effective management techniques and adding, “good work. Keep it up.”
Even though Myc has no eyes, AlphaBeta gets the distinct sense he might be rolling them. He pastes his half-smile in place and beams at each of the three employees in turn, delighting in the squirmy discomfort it elicits from them- Myc included.
“If you’ll excuse me, I have other matters to attend to.”
He leaves as abruptly as he’d arrived, pushing his navigation to Gigi’s office into background processing to make room for this. The list of prisoners was sent through Reagan’s official encrypted email, which AlphaBeta has the distinct pleasure to manage, but had not yet been sorted for its official purpose. He hadn’t known it. He hadn’t particularly cared, either, nor would he now if not for a single name on the list he knows Reagan can’t agree to.
Rand Ridley.