wip amnesty, byerly vorrutyer, 5100 words, byerly gets severed (a la severance) to infiltrate house bharaputra's labs on jackson’s whole.
The third time he winds up standing outside the side exit of Bharaputra’s lab, Byerly starts to get properly worried.
[[skipped segment]]
“And what’s going to happen to me if I set foot outside that door?”
“Nothing at all. You’re free to leave at any time, if you so wish.” By doesn’t like the way Lotus says it, hearing the sardonic note beneath the boredom. He feels like he’s being laughed at. “Go right ahead.”
There’s nothing for him to do save take her at her word, so he does. He turns, and walks down the hall towards the door.
He’s still expecting some trick when he reaches it: for the door to be locked, or trip-wired, or possibly painted on. It isn’t. It’s a perfectly normal door, not even marked with dire warnings about Alarm will sound when door opened. (He’s not sure why he expects that; it’s not like he’s ever seen another fire exit before. He supposes it’s something like how he knows about what Beta Colony is, for all that he’s never heard of it, either.) The only signage on the door is a little placard reading, Caution: steps may be icy. Looking out through the narrow window over he can see a flight of concrete steps, with a handrail set into the wall and fluorescent strips glowing under each stair. Gray light shines down from somewhere above, and ice glints on some of the steps further up.
Heart hammering, By pushes open the door, and steps through.
And finds his foot coming down back inside the hallway, as if in the moment between lifting his foot and putting it down the entire universe has spun around. Disoriented, he freezes in place, then turns slowly around. The door is there, same as before.
What’s happening to me?
Maybe he’s having a psychotic break. That would explain a lot about this situation, wouldn’t it? People have all sorts of bizarre delusions. Like believing they’re trapped inside an office, or building hideous brutalist buildings, or.
He tries the door again.
And finds himself going through the same world-tilting farce of stepping out and in at the same time, with absolutely no interim that he can recall.
He’s too spooked to make the attempt a third time. He doesn’t understand what’s happening, but there’s no reason to think it would be any different, and he doesn’t like the way it feels, that momentary sensation of falling, everything in him skipping.
He walks back up the hallway to Lotus. “What,” he starts, then stops. His voice comes out shaky. “Why can’t I leave?” What did you do to me?
“Ah, but you did,” Lotus informs him, blandly. “Just now. You left, but you came back.”
“What?” The latent terror is starting to rise in him again; he feels a little like he might be about to start screaming. The psychotic break theory is looking better and better. “I didn’t. Every time I step outside, I’m stepping right back in.”
“Come with me,” Lotus says, cryptically, and leads him once more down the dead white fluorescent hall.
And then she shows him the video.
Lotus leads him into a room with a massive slab-like comconsole desk, and sits down behind it, pointing him into a chair across from her. By sits warily down on the edge of it, and she brings up a vid display in front of him, sitting back with her hands folded as the video starts.
A man By doesn’t recognize sits down in front of the camera. He has beautiful eyes, loosely curling dark hair, and a hint of an ironic smile, which vanishes as he looks over the cards he’s just been handed. He flicks through them once, his expression gone very neutral.
Then he goes back to the beginning of the stack, and begins to read them off.
“My name is By.” The voice hits By like a lightning bolt, riveting his attention. Even hearing it from outside himself, he has no trouble recognizing it as his own. “I’m making this video roughly two hours before it will be shown to me.” The version of him in the video pauses fractionally, then goes on. “I have, of my own free accord, elected to undergo the procedure known colloquially as severance. I give consent for my perceptual chronologies to be surgically split, separating my memories between my work life and my personal life.” By’s stomach sinks further, possibly into his shoes. “I acknowledge that, henceforth, my access to my memories will be spatially dictated. I will be unable to access outside recollections whilst on the basement level of Bharaputra Labs, nor retain work memories upon my ascent.” And then, making that pit of dread inside By tighten into a cold, terrible knot: “I am aware that this alteration is comprehensive and irreversible.
“I make these statements freely.”
The video comes to a stop.
By feels light-headed, cut off at the knees. He did this to himself? That can’t be true. He doesn’t want it to be true.
I give consent. Somewhere inside of himself, some part of him has started to wail. How can he have consented? He wasn’t there! He doesn’t remember existing until an hour ago.
Waveringly, he says, “I—I withdraw my consent.” Shouldn’t he be able to do that? Consent doesn’t mean consent in perpetuity, he’s pretty sure. He can still say “no.” I’m saying ‘no!’ “I want to leave.”
“As we’ve already established, you’re perfectly welcome to walk out of any fire exit on this floor.” Lotus checks her watch. “In fact, I’ll leave you to it. You can have this afternoon to adjust, since it’s your first day. Come back here when it’s time for you to clock out.” She names a time, and flicks up a holo-display over her wristcom, blurred and unreadable from By’s angle of view. “You’ll start work in earnest tomorrow morning, though you’re certainly welcome to begin your primary training sooner.” She gestures back at the empty console. “If you require assistance, press the button on the panel next to the keyboard. But I expect the automated training will suffice.”
And with that she vanishes through the sliding doors and into the elevator, leaving By standing alone in the bright emptiness of the room. The console beeps softly at him, waiting.
He turns, and manages to not quite run back to the emergency exit.
He’s still thinking about the man in the video. Himself, himself on the outside, with all of his memories and the ability to choose this, to trap By in here whether he likes it or not. That version of him had looked terrifyingly calm, signing By’s life away, but—hadn’t he hesitated? By wants to believe that he hesitated. Surely he’ll figure out what By wants if By keeps trying to leave.
But when he gets to the door he stops short, suddenly terrified of trying again. He doesn’t want to go through that dislocating lurch all over again, only to find that his other self still doesn’t get it. No. If his other self is too stupid to figure out what By wants on his own, then surely By just needs to communicate it to him more clearly. In plain language, isn’t that what it’s called?
Shakily, he searches his pockets, and turns up an ink pen. On the back of his hand, he scrawls, I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE! thinking as he does about how the version of him in the video had said comprehensive and irreversible, about how he doesn’t even remember the last two times he stepped outside, about how if he listens to himself this time he’ll be gone. If this is the only place he can exist, then he’s never going to wake up again—but he thinks, blurrily, that he doesn’t mind. His heartbeat is thudding in his own ears, and maybe By shouldn’t be making major life-ending decisions in the middle of having a nervous breakdown, but just now he can’t imagine anything being worse than being trapped for the rest of his life in these sterile hallways, with a hole in his mind and no hope of anything else. He’d rather be dead. He can still make that choice. DON’T GO BACK INSIDE, he writes. I RESIGN.
He shoves the pen back in his pocket, clutches convulsively at the door, and thrusts it open one final time.
+
The third time he winds up standing outside the side exit of Bharaputra’s lab, Byerly starts to get properly worried.
He’d realized the first time he found himself out on the landing that Bharaputra hadn’t been exaggerating about the efficacy of the process: severance really is total. He has no idea what he’s been doing inside that building for the several hours he’s spent there, and the version of him on the inside plainly has no memory of what he’s there for, because if he did he wouldn’t keep walking back out.
Actually, Byerly is pretty sure the version of him on the inside is freaking out, judging from the way his heart is racing as he plunges into the frigid air of the outside. He staggers across the landing at the foot of the stairwell, gasping, the cold burning inside his nose; Jackson’s Whole really is polar all the way around, though Rish claims there’s stretches at the equator that don’t have snow all the time.
God, he misses Vorbarr Sultana.
He grabs at the nearest handrail with his left hand, slipping on the first try from how sweaty his palms are, and sees the words scrawled across the back of his hand.
Well. That’s certainly unambiguous.
Byerly spends a minute or two clinging to the railing, waiting for his pulse and his breathing to even out, leaving him with the dregs of an adrenaline response to an emotional impetus he doesn’t remember. Though he can guess; after everything Bharaputra told him this morning, his severed self’s thought process isn’t that hard to follow. From his perspective he’s trapped there, and doesn’t even remember why. The prospect of never being allowed to leave a single level of a single building is having exactly the same effect on him as it would have on By, because he is By.
Byerly detaches himself from the railing, wipes his sweaty hands on the seams of his trousers, and tucks them under his arms. Hunching against the cold, he stomps a few times around the landing, breath billowing visibly, thinking furiously about what to do.
He hadn’t really believed that the severance worked the way Bharaputra said, not before he’d arrived here in person this morning. After orientation he’d been much less sure, but by then it had been too late. If he’d backed out at the last minute he’d have lost his only chance to get inside, because once Bharaputra knew his face and his voice it was much too late for another approach.
And he needs to get inside, because: Baronette Stella Antonia Dolce Ginevra Lucia Arqua of House Cordonah has been missing for almost three weeks, and all of House Cordonah’s frantic efforts to find her suggest that she’s ended up here, at Vasa Luigi’s remote high-security R&D lab.
Shiv, naturally, had been perfectly willing to simply raze the place to the ground. Say what one might about Clan Arqua’s parenting skills, but Baron Cordonah wouldn’t hesitate to supply a fully-equipped commando strike to extract his eldest daughter from an enemy’s clutches. But Shiv isn’t stupid, even while angry, and By’s alarmed attempt to stay his hand had gained the unexpected support of Pidge—or maybe not so unexpected, considering that she and Star have spent the last year and a half vying for the position of true heir to House Cordonah. Though maybe that’s unfair to Pidge; her points about the risks of starting an all-out war with one of the most powerful Houses on the planet had been much the same ones By had had in mind himself.
Still, it isn’t hard to imagine that she might have more more than one set of pragmatic considerations in mind, some more ruthless than others.
In any event, in the absence of a ransom demand or a good negotiating position finding and extracting Star by stealth had been vastly preferable, and Shiv’s eye had settled decisively on his ImpSec liaison as the best candidate for the job. Byerly would be supplied with a suitable background to apply as an administrative employee at Bharaputra’s laboratory, and would attempt to locate Star from within. She could then be extracted, if not silently, then at least by precision strike. By—stuck between, as it were, the rock of Shiv Arqua and the hard place that was the Emperor’s expectation that he, Byerly Vorrutyer, maintain Barrayar’s secret accord with House Cordonah—had been obliged to agree.
Which was how he’d ended up with a microchip in his brain, sitting in front of a camera some three hours earlier to confirm his willingness to be severed.
After which he’d gone inside, and the other him, the version of him that hadn’t existed until that moment and now exists only inside the lab, had woken up.
Bharaputra’s managers had warned By beforehand that he might find himself outside the building at odd hours with no memory of how he’d come to be there. If that happened, they had advised, he was simply to turn right around and go back inside: no doubt it was due to a miscommunication. The problem usually went away after the first day.
Miscommunication, ha. People on the inside are panicking, and they want out.
All of which has left him with what’s starting to feel like an even more grisly moral dilemma than the sort he’s usually faced with—and, still more immediately, no way to finish the job, because as soon as he sets foot inside the building he forgets about Star, and loses all interest in getting deeper into the complex to find her. Which means he needs to tell himself what he’s there for, and convince him—his other self, his severed self, the who’s obviously scared out of his mind—to get it done.
Coms aren’t permitted inside, if course, and the door scanner would pick up a plastic flimsy, but his severed self has already provided him with the obvious way around that. Byerly pats his pockets, and finds the pen he’d left there that morning.
He grits his teeth against the cold, rucks up his left sleeve, and starts to write.
+
This time is no different. No sooner is By through the door than he’s stumbling back through it, with the strange dislocated feeling of having his heartbeat go from racing to steady to ratcheting right back up. He almost sobs in frustration, eyes stinging with acrid despair.
Except—something is different, this time, because he’s freezing. By gives a full-body shudder, and hunches in on himself, rubbing his upper arms. Was he outside for much longer, this time?
He pries his left hand off his own shoulder to check his chrono, and discovers that a) he’s apparently been outside for at least thirty minutes, and b) in that time he’s inexplicably unbuttoned his sleeve and left it that way, dangling loose.
Diverted from his pent-up panic, he rucks up the sleeve, and finds that someone’s penned an entire letter to him on his arm, in tiny cramped script. The handwriting is exactly the same as his own.
First of all, says the first line, DON’T PANIC.
Too late for that, By thinks glumly, but reads on:
I know Bharaputra told you me us that the process is irreversible, but I’m not sure that’s true. I know some people, and when I’m done here I’ll ask them to help.
By’s heart leaps with hope, despite himself—and crashes just as quickly, because how can anyone help him once they’re done here? He squeezes his eyes shut, inhaling sharply. Once he leaves here, that’s it, as he’s just proven to himself three separate times. The only reason to have hope for the future is if there is a possibility of something else, this obvious carrot on a stick. His other self is probably lying to him. What difference does it make to him if By stops existing? He won’t remember any of this.
Still. The possibility of escape without oblivion, a promise from himself to himself, feels like a spark lit somewhere inside. If there’s a chance, if, if . . .
He takes a deep breath, and opens his eyes to keep reading.
What you need to know right now is, you’re a spy. You’re inside Bharaputra’s lab to find and rescue somebody else. Her name is Star, though under the circumstances I don’t know if she’ll remember that. She’s taller than you, red-brown skin, black hair to her waist that she usually wears in a bun, eyes like green icicles, chiseled nose, sharp chin.
You have to find out where she is, and report back to me. Most likely Bharaputra’s keeping her somewhere deeper in the facility, requiring a higher level of clearance. You’ll need to find a way to get further inside, and see what you can find—or, better yet, convince someone else to do it for you. It’s imperative that you don’t get caught, because if you do neither of us is ever leaving that building.
Once you find her, we can work on getting you out of there. I’m counting on you.
By stares at his arm in growing consternation. A spy? Rescue? Get into somewhere that requires a higher level of clearance so he can—what, rifle through their filing cabinets—convince someone to do it for him? He doesn’t know how to do any of that. The version of him outside must be insane. Which he’d have to be, right, to have gotten them into this mess?
Of course, that version of him must actually be a spy, if that’s why he’s done this to himself. Which might mean that By could figure out how to do those things, too, but—it’s imperative that you don’t get caught. This isn’t the place for a trial run; if he screws up he won’t get another chance. And never leaving that building sounds much more sinister, somehow, than ceasing to exist when he steps out the door. He’s not sure why it should be any different, having it be Bharaputra’s choice instead of his, but it is.
No, that’s not true. He does know. If he could step out the door now and never wake up again he wouldn’t have to keep feeling trapped, and miserable, and scared. He’d be done with it, incapable of being afraid or alone, or anything else at all. Whereas if he actually tries to do what his other self is demanding he’ll be consigning himself to this ongoing uncertainty, to the endless sick feeling in the pit of his stomach and the prospect of worse things to come. He’ll have to keep being afraid, and keep going anyway.
By finds himself sagging back against the wall to sit down on the floor. He’s not sure he’s that brave. His other self might be, but By’s life so far is a total of three hours long, and he’s spent all of them terrified. The thought of feeling this way for the rest of his life is unbearable. I can’t. I don’t want to.
Maybe, if you pare his other self down to the heart of him—to this stupid empty thing By is now, with no history and no connections—a coward is all he is.
He sits on the floor until his legs start to go stiff, then climbs to his feet and goes to the employee washroom. There he spends another half hour scrubbing the ink off his hand and his arm, feeling twitchy, the need to answer himself an itch in the back of his mind. He keeps having to remind himself that he doesn’t actually need to hurry; it’s not like his other self is out there waiting for him, cooling his heels in the stairwell while By gets around to writing back. Both of them are standing right here.
He scrubs the back of his hand until it’s achingly red, with no sign of the words—letting Lotus see that he’s been talking to someone outside the lab would doubtless qualify as getting caught—and reduces the letter on his arm to a faint illegible smear, scrubbing it dry with paper towels. Then he goes back to the side exit, takes out the pen, and spends another long while dawdling, running through the possible answers. Wanting so badly to write I’m not a spy, YOU’RE a spy, and I can’t and won’t help you, to prove to his other self that he has a choice; wanting to write please, leave and never come back, proving to them both that he’s not the one who gets to make choices.
Almost as badly he wants to demand that his other self tell him more about who he is, what he’s like, whether he’s really capable of doing all those things that his other self wrote. Would any of it mean anything to him, if he knew? The emptiness inside him gnaws at him.
What would his other self say if By wrote back, Am I supposed to be brave?
He stands in the hall a long time.
In the end, he writes: I’m going to need your help.
+
[[skipped scenes]]
Byerly ends up asking the Arquas for a better solution for passing notes, and is provided with one by—somewhat unexpectedly—Shiv and Moira, Shiv suggesting the necessary alterations to Byerly’s suit jacket to accommodate the secret compartment for papers and Moira whipping up a material that will be functionally invisible to the Bharaputra scanners in her laboratory, albeit with a sniff that clearly indicates that such low-level work is beneath her.
In any event, Byerly finds himself supplied with the means to smuggle actual correspondence in and out of the severed floor, so they no longer have to risk the lo-fi method of writing to each other on their own arm, which was bound to land them in trouble and wasn’t much good for longer communication. He scrawls a note above his wrist telling his severed self how to open the hidden compartment inside his lapel, and from that point onward they can—provided his severed self is careful about surveillance—write actual letters, rather than relying on awkward short-form notes.
It becomes quite thoroughly impossible to think of himself inside Bharaputra Labs as anything other than—somebody else, after that.
His severed self describes the work they’re having him do, which sounds baffling at first but which Byerly eventually decides must be supply acquisition for the lab’s project—projects?—albeit with a layer of encoding: rather than knowing what he’s looking at, his other self is restocking everything by serial number, ensuring everything the lab needs stays in the black.
[[incomplete scene]]
+
He tells Rish the gist of it when he finally sees her in person, meeting up in a tiny hostel room on the Consortium-run transfer station in orbit some two weeks later. Visiting Cordonah Station in person is out of the question, of course, but the transfer station is so lousy with commercial traffic that even if Bharaputra is watching him they won’t find anything noteworthy about the visit: for houseless employees like him, coming up here is the easiest way to buy off-world goods.
Most of his explaining happens in pieces, of course, on account of the other reason for their meeting. As does her return offering of the latest news from clan Arqua; the moment the door slides shut behind them Byerly goes to his knees, and is thoroughly pleased with himself for how effectively he manages to distract them both for the next ten minutes.
He does manage to share his most important intel eventually, sometime after their first breathless round against the wall and the subsequent longer session in the tiny hostel bed, which leaves him a sated puddle amid the sheets. He manages to rouse enough to describe to her the handful of people he’s managed to identify so far, and Rish listens attentively, brows drawing together.
“If Lotus Durona is overseeing this project herself, this must be big. Make or break the House big.” She frowns thoughtfully. “And if it involves Star . . .”
“Something to do with her unique genetics? That’s Bharaputra’s main work, after all.”
“Bharaputra doesn’t care about curiosities. If it can’t be mass-produced for a profit . . . I suppose they must have absorbed some of House Ryoval’s clientele, after that mess a decade back, but to them that’s a side-hustle, at most. Bharaputra works at scale.”
“Mm. So we’re back to the odd confluence of Star—who surely holds no commercial interest to Vasa Luigi—and Lotus, who wouldn’t be involved for anything less. Not very helpful yet, I’m afraid.” Byerly grimaces. “And, of course, the fact that all of this is so secret it’s happening at Bharaputra’s only severed facility.”
“Does it feel very strange? The severance.”
“It doesn’t feel like anything. Not even like being asleep, because there’s no sense of time passing. More akin to anesthesia, perhaps.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“If you’re the one on the outside, certainly.” Byerly’s pleasant afterglow is definitely starting to fade. “From the inside, you never sleep, and you don’t remember anything outside the lab, and you can’t leave.”
“But you don’t remember that. I thought that was the whole idea, how Bharaputra reels in grubbers to work there, promising them they won’t have to work a day in their lives.”
[[skipped segment]]
Later, after they’ve both showered—separately and entirely without romance, on account of the hostel room having only a tiny sonic—they order dinner delivered from one of the station cafes, and eat dinner at the little table, Rish wrinkling her nose at the fare. After that they climb back into bed, and go again, slow and leisurely, this time, and afterward stretch out side by side.
[[skipped segment]]
“On a scale of one to ten,” he asks Rish, “how insane is it to think of myself when I’m in Bharaputra Labs as a separate person?”
She opens her eyes to look over at him. “Seven. You’re still you, aren’t you? Even if you don’t remember.” A quirk of her blue brows. “You wouldn’t say a cryo-amnesiac is a whole separate person from who they were before.”
“No, but . . . even the worst cryo-amnesiac cases get flashes of their lives, so I’m told. They have a sense of having existed before, and they’re living with the assumption that eventually they will have a cascade, and remember.” He sits up against the pillows, frowning, arms crossed. “Besides, they have continuity. Nobody’s turning them off for two-thirds of every sidereal day.”
“I guess.” Rish rolls over onto her elbow, propping her head up to look at him. “But it’s still your brain, at the end of the day. He’s literally you.”
“We’re pretty substantially made up of our experiences, I’d say. If he doesn’t remember spending the last twenty years as a spy, how can he be a spy? Or anything that I am.”
“You remind me of the old argument I was always having with Tej. Anytime she’d say something was a case of nurture, I’d argue for nature. It’s pretty hard to deny genetics-as-destiny when you’ve seen the Baronne play that game.” A wave of her fingers indicates herself, briefly diverting By’s gaze to rove appreciatively down the gold-shot electric blue length of her. He has a keen appreciation for the gifts bestowed by the Baronne, certainly. “Or take Amiri, for example. The whole reason he’s such a good scientist is because the Baronne made him that way. She wanted a trustworthy assistant.”
“And look where that assistant’s taken himself off to, hmm? Her plan seems to have rather backfired, by making him bright enough to be able to work with the Duronas.”
“Right.” Rish sighs. “And of course clones aren’t identical to their progenitors, either. So, sure, some of it is nurture. Except what that really means is that each brain develops differently due to different external stimuli, and his brain”—a nod indicates By’s alternate personality—“is your brain. He hasn’t just got all your DNA, he’s got all of your neutral pathways, too. Even if he doesn’t have access to the conscious memory part.”
“Does that make him me-in-potentia, then?” Byerly tips his head back. “He has all the grooves that being an ImpSec informant wore in my brain, he just doesn’t know how how to use them?”
“Are you worried he won’t be able to do the job?”
“No. That is, yes, that’s one of the things I’m worried about. But mostly I keep worrying about him. Which seems rather on the far side of ‘sane,’ right about now.” He lets out a sigh. “Isn’t it a known affliction, that some people get dangerously obsessed with their clones? I sincerely hope that’s not the form the family madness has decided to take in me.”
Rish’s hand settles over where he’s started to drum the fingers of his right hand against his left elbow. “I think,” she says lightly, “that you worry about anyone near you who’s in distress. It’s in those neural pathways of yours.”
“A dreadful failing on this planet, I know.”
Rish sniffs, and tugs at him, urging him nearer. It’s a distraction, but By is willing to be distracted: he unfolds from his crossed-arms pose, and rolls willingly over into her arms. They share a kiss, and after that he shimmies down between her legs. She’s still wet from the last round, and the sight and smell of it blankets him with desire, a deep biding pleasure at having this again after two weeks apart.
He lays his cheek against her inner thigh, savoring the moment of anticipation, and she threads her fingers carefully through his hair, combing it gently behind his ear. Not gentle by nature, is Lapis Lazuli—Rish is all sharp edges and sharp tongue and more muscle than he’s got, in that compact flexible body—but she’s got a softness inside her all the same, and he’s the one who gets to see it, to have her touch him like he’s some precious thing. It goes to his head, every time.
Quietly, she says, “I don’t know if you’re right that you should worry for him. But I like that you do.”
“Ah.” He hides a smile against her thigh. “How very un-Jacksonian of you, my dear.”
“The cultural exchange can’t all run one-way.” The hand in his hair presses down, just a bit.
“No, indeed,” murmurs Byerly, and allows himself to be directed, applying himself to the best kind of cultural exchange there is.
+