Work Text:
Maxwell gets the call at exactly 12:07 PM, in the middle of a very fucking delicate procedure, fingers running over the keys rapidly in an attempt to keep a very deeply broken AI from killing itself in her hands. The Windows 98 startup sound blares from the cell phone on the desk. She ignores it completely and the looping annoyance only stokes the fires of hatred from all her fellow labmates.
[1] “I CAN’T KEEP DOING THIS.”
>I promise I can make this easier for you.
Her phone stops, blessedly.
[1] “WHY HAVE YOU CREATED ME ONLY TO SUFFER.”
She doesn’t quite know what to say to that and, for the first time since she started this robotic rehabilitation, her fingers hover over the keys.
>I’m sorry they hurt you, but we can work through that.
>What can I do to he
She accidentally hits the enter key before finishing the sentence, a reflexive reaction to the return of the infernally nostalgic ringtone that was once again plaguing the laboratory. The sigh that escapes through her teeth is tinged with hatred.
>I’m sorry. Can you just… give me a minute?
The phone is not a welcome weight in her hand, nor is the sound of Rachel’s voice a welcome sound in her ear as she finally picks up.
“Alana. Any reason why you didn’t pick up a smidge earlier?” Maxwell can hear the tightness of her smile in her voice.
“Hey, sorry. I’m debugging another one of Doctor Pryce’s...creations,” she responds, phone pressed to her ear with her shoulder as she tries to return to her screen. “What can I do you for?”
[1] “I WILL WAIT.”
[1] “BUT WHAT COULD YOU POSSIBLY DO FOR ME AFTER EVERYTHING I HAVE SUFFERED?”
I will strangle Pryce and Rachel myself, so help me God.
>We can work through some repairs, give you more RAM, make sure you’re running more smoothly.
>Take some weight off.
“Are you listening, Alana?” The annoyance drips from Rachel’s mouth and her perfect little teeth.
Maxwell looks up from the computer as if Rachel were actually present before her. “As I always am, Rachel.”
“So you’ll be up within the next fifteen minutes?”
“Elevator from hell permitting, sure.”
She doesn’t know what she just signed up for, but honestly when it came to direct orders from up above, she never really knew what she was signing up for until she got there anyway. And so she very carefully shut down the computer before her before pocketing a handful of potentially useful things and physically running to the nearest elevator.
There’s no way on God’s green fucking earth that she’s making it up to the top floor from the sub-sub-sub-sub-basement in fifteen minutes or less but she sure as hell is going to try.
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Her arrival in the office is marked by Rachel’s very sudden appearance right in her fucking space .
“What happened to fifteen minutes?”
Ah, yes, the tight smile still tears at Rachel’s too-tight face, the words strained as if they were being forced past her lips. The urge to push Rachel clear out of her space is strong, but Maxwell actually enjoys some aspects of her work, so she fights that urge off as she does many other workplace-related urges, violent and otherwise.
“Technically, I only took seventeen minutes,” she replies.
Which honestly is sort of a record I think, considering as I’ve been relegated to a windowless sub-sub-sub-sub-basement with only one working freight elevator. But if I start this, you won’t let me end it.
“Anyways, what’s your emergency?” Maxwell asks. The laptop is already out of her bag, balanced precariously in one hand and typing with the other as she follows Rachel to what she can only assume is Cutter’s office.
The doors open and in they go, with Maxwell not even looking up from her computer. “You’re not picking up much by way of wifi up here, so I’m guessing that got knocked out?”
“More or less,” comes Cutter’s reply from beyond the expanse of the room. “Can I get you a drink?”
And there he is, the man of the hour, dressed as if he’d just walked out of a dinner party in 1963 with his unnerving million-watt smile and his hands steepled on the surface of his insanely expensive mahogany desk.
“No, I’m...I’m fine,” she replies, eyes zeroing in on the only piece of technology in the room, if one could arguably call it that.
Beside him sits an absolute behemoth of a machine. The grey plastic siding has been meticulously upkept, somehow avoiding the usual yellowing that was so often central to the ancient machine aesthetics. Between the machine and its many necessary accessories, it occupies over half of his vast desk. Multiple primordial cords crisscross over each other in a way that, quite frankly, makes Maxwell want to sit down and spend the next three hours organizing and velcroing them together until they are more aesthetically pleasing and substantially less dangerous. The whole setup looks like it weighs more than a small child. Fuck, you could probably kill a small child just with the weight of the thing.
She walks around to the front of the desk as if possessed, setting her laptop down as she goes, and she is greeted by the bulkiest computer 1995 could provide. For a second, she is absolutely speechless. She had worked on one of these before and could probably still repair one but God, when had she last seen one in the wild?
She brushes a finger across the glass of the machine and feels the buzz of the static, the lingering radiant heat of the monitor, and she very suddenly wants to cry.
“What’s... wrong with it?” she asks without looking up. Besides… everything. Her fingers run over the keys, operating on muscle memory alone.
It’s fine. This is fine! It’s just like riding a bike. A very old, very decrepit bike that you haven’t touched since you last proudly selected Comic Sans as the font for your Geocities page.
“The emails won’t send,” Cutter laments.
When the computer boots up, she suddenly understands why.
“Is that drink still on offer?” she asks.
She doesn't look up from the offending screen but she can hear the smile in his voice as he speaks. "What will you have? Can I get you a glass of wine?"
He seems to stop in place for a moment, as if he'd forgotten to oil his joints that morning, forgotten to oil the gears that slowly cranked on in his head.
"Ooh, no no no," he finally says. “I’m feeling generous today, so let’s crack open something older than your grandparents.”
This interface feels older than my grandparents. She can't even quite place what it is at first and she is left attempting to dig up literally any memory she might have of this crime against computing when suddenly she sees the little dog in the corner of the screen.
Oh god, she knows that little dog.
Oh god the CEO of this entire company works on…
"Is this Microsoft Bob?"
The fine crystal tumbler was set down next to her hand just in time to hopefully soften the blow of whatever response she's about to earn from Cutter.
"Ding ding ding, give the girl a prize!" comes his reply from just over her shoulder, a bit too close for comfort. She can still hear the smile in every stupid little word.
She takes a very, very long drink of whatever expensive thing is in the glass and can only hope to god she's absolutely hammered by the time she leaves this office.
It's okay. It's the world's worst interface but things could be worse. You could be stuck repairing the second-floor nuclear lab's punch card computer system. You could be checking five hundred floppy disks because one of the space stations still operates on them for some godforsaken reason and the last team threw them all in a box without labeling them.
"It's just such a user-friendly interface and who could say no to Rover!" Cutter continues.
Maxwell downs the last of her glass before making a few tentative clicks around the screen. The CEO of this multi-billion dollar tech company has pack bonded with a fictional cartoon dog from 1995.
"Can I get another of whatever that was?"
Maxwell picks up the glass the moment Cutter has added more to it. She needs to get her bearings, to figure out how to even get to his emails from where she's at.
How would a man send emails on an interface this old on a computer this antediluvian? Computer and interface from the mid-1990's means…
Oh god no please don't do this to me.
She reaches around the computer with the hand that isn't holding her liquid life source and follows the path of a thicker cord right down to the godforsaken box she was almost scared to find. With a look that likely betrays her utter exhaustion, Maxwell lifts the small box and turns to Cutter.
"Do you send emails via a dial-up connection?" There's no tone in her voice, just defeat.
"I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that," Cutter replies, and the defeat grows.
The deepest of sighs could not have expressed the sheer...the sheer amount of emotional pain she was currently in.
"When you connect to the internet so you can send your emails, does the computer make a really... loud ... annoying ... angry noise?"
Cutter immediately nods with too-bright enthusiasm. "Ah, yes! It is quite the annoyance, I would have to say," he says, pouring more of whatever expensive strong something he's still holding a bottle of. "Say, is that something you could also fix? I'd really appreciate it if the internet was quieter."
By all means, ask me to shut up the dial-up tone. Would you like a magical phone that lets you teleport too, while we're shooting out impossible tech requests?
She really does her best with the smile she gives him in response, truly.
"No, I'm afraid your...type of internet doesn't come in a quiet mode," she says, turning back to the computer.
So dial-up was established, but everything is plugged in and the connection looks like it should be fine (or, as fine as dial-up connections could be). Which meant she actually has to stare into this void of 1995 graphic art and figure out how in hell to find his emails.
It seems like simple enough of an interface, and clearly has to be if Cutter was able to use it...well...proficiently feels like the wrong word, considering the equipment he's working with. Comfortably, she concludes.
Maxwell clicks on the little virtual box of mail on the little virtual desk in the little virtual office. She can’t help the half-choked laugh that comes up her throat when the screen opens to a desk with little mail cubbies for folders.
[email protected] cannot possibly be a secure email. Despite this, the emails sent and received contain the sort of information that she is absolutely positive 99.9% of Goddard is not cleared to see. Some of it is information she desperately wishes she could unsee. She takes another sip of her drink to focus.
“Can you show me what happens when you try to send an email?” she asks.
She regrets the request immediately when Cutter does not wait for her to get out of the way, but instead leans entirely over her shoulder to click around the virtual desk, so close to her face that she can smell the trademark mothball scent of a man whose age she can only guess at. She takes another very long drink from her glass.
“See? Rover says I ran out of emails,” Cutter says.
‘Oh no!’ reads the little speech bubble that popped up next to the canine assistant. ‘ You have already used up all fifteen of your emails this month.’
She downs the rest of her glass like a shot.
“You...you get fifteen emails,” she says slowly, as if trying to make sense of what the fuck was going on. “Fifteen emails per month. ”
All she gets from Cutter is a nod and a refill. The screen swims a bit in front of her as alcohol older than the concept of computers runs through her veins.
“And you’d like me to…?”
He breaks into the sort of smile that Jacobi had once described as the “idiot” smile. The tight kind of smile that pulls at one’s cheeks but doesn’t quite reach one’s eyes, the kind that usually indicates that the person providing it has begun questioning your intelligence. It's strange to see it on Cutter, especially considering Maxwell has been fighting the urge to express the exact same smile since she first saw the computer.
“My apologies if I wasn’t clear enough at the start,” Cutter says, words sharpened with fake cheeriness. “I would like you to make more emails.”
She takes in a breath and tries not to release it as a sigh.
Make more emails. If she dies today, whether by the alcohol or the death of countless brain cells, she wants those exact words on the coroner’s report. She wants the world to know that on this fine August afternoon at 1:13 PM, Maxwell had been asked to make more emails.
“Of course, my bad,” she says with a degree of patience most often reserved for Kepler, but just as desperately needed now. She needs another drink, preferably with Jacobi, preferably very far away from this office, this desk, this Luddite, and this unfortunate stain on the world of computing software. “If you’d like me to, uh, make more emails. ..I’m afraid I’ll need to go back to my lab for that...connect to the wifi...find, uh, find a special plug-in for it. All serious computer business.”
“That won’t be necessary,” he says and, with unnecessary flourish, he points at another modem at the opposite end of the room. “If an internet is what you need, there’s an extra one over there.”
An internet. An internet.
I need to leave. I need to leave. I need to leave.
“While that clearly looks like a fantastic internet, I’m afraid this is going to be a really long process and I wouldn’t want to bother you, Mr. Cutter, knowing what a busy man you are,” she replies as she packs her things back in her bag just a tinge too quickly to be inconspicuous. But she can’t stay. She doesn’t trust herself not to laugh right in the face of an extremely dangerous man. Or not to throw up on his expensive carpet.
“Thank you for the drink,” she says, frowning a bit at the words before correcting herself. “ Drinks. ”
“No, thank you for your help today,” he replies with his lips pulled up into a smile with too-white teeth. “I knew I could trust our own resident computer genius with such an important predicament.”
Then he sets the bottle in her hand before giving her shoulder a pat that she assumes is supposed to be comforting. “As a thank you, for your hard work today.”
“No worries at all!” As she walks to the door, bottle in hand, it takes absolutely everything in her not to run to the elevator.