Chapter Text
Celeste Allegri had been unwillingly working for the Office of Cosmic Naval Intelligence for... God, has it been four or five years already? Not seeing any sunlight was not too bad, he could get used to that. It was the fact that the other people around him were equally as bad with time. That completely messed with his sense of perception. If everyone was pulling twenty hour days with a couple of one hour naps here and there, did it even matter what time or what day it was?
It all blended together. Idea after idea. Research after research. Experiment after experiment. Failure, failure, success, failure. Wait, what was that second to last one? Celeste looked again, he double checked the responses to his questionnaire, and triple checked the device he had spent so long perfecting. He had gathered data for a total of twenty sophonts around the OCNI facility in Adalvallan, all with the purpose of studying biorhythms.
The idea had not originally been coined by himself, of course. It was a combination between old pseudoscience phenomenons and reports about what encounters with the Affini, a.k.a. the weeds, had been like. In basic terms, these reports explained their ability to seemingly read the mind of Terrans while, at the same time, being able to inflict a form of control upon it.
Doctor Allegri had gathered that these creatures did something akin to what old time polygraphs did. They could somehow measure physiological indicators—such as blood pressure, pulse, respiration, skin conductivity—and use them to read intent and thoughts. Even worse, it was likely that they were able to modify these factors without the need for direct involvement, like their feared drugs.
He had been studying the possibility of measuring and interpreting these signals for years before the Affini came, but the polygraph did not hold under scientific scrutiny even back when it was used and he could not further his own research without funds.
Luckily or unluckily, as fate would have it, the need for information related to his topic of study became increasingly relevant due to the context of the war. Therefore, his compliance with accepting funds from a government that could use his research to further the propaganda machine was not a factor.
Taken from his home under the jurisdiction of law 123-who-gives-a-fuck, hold, did they ever mention what dystopian bullshit were they using to legally take him to a black site? Kind of a moot point now, years later.
He shared the laboratories alongside four other engineers, biologists, chemists, physicists, or—in short—all-in-one scientists. There were four guards assigned to each of them which, most of the time, acted as impromptu lab assistants due to the clear lack of a will to escape in the now fully funded geniuses.
There was no direct project manager on site, but they had to send a weekly report detailing any progress made for funding to be given and supplies to be delivered every few months. If anyone were to try to escape, these deliveries would have been the only opportunity. Adalvallan was—like many such cases—a frozen wasteland of a moon, so the only vehicle capable of leaving it was the delivery shuttle. Which was typically guarded by half a dozen soldiers. Yeah, they had all given up on escaping pretty quickly.
Their wardens were not all too bad, soldiers were pretty good at following orders. Although you needed some patience to stop them from eating the crayons you were using to explain their instructions. Celeste chuckled to himself while his hands kept working. Where was he? Right, right, his last experiment.
When designing a device that could possibly be used as a mind reading / lie detector machine you would think that you should try to make the theory work first before actually building something, right? Wrong. If it worked but he could not make it portable then it didn't work at all. That was one of the first stipulations of his work.
Of course, he was not an idiot, and the lack of direct overview allowed him to build a stationary model in which he could realize proper testing. And said model was now showing him that one of the versions of the software he had designed had passed all tests. All of them. No partial matches or edge cases. An exact match for both the veracity and emotions shown by a subject.
While his mind was still reeling at the thought of success and how this technology could be used, his hands were busy uploading the successful software to his latest portable design: a pair of glasses, a visor, to be precise. Able to both detect the information used by the algorithm to do its predictions and to display said predictions to the user.
While that took a second to be done, he needed a test subject in his unit to make sure he wasn't having that dream in which he succeeded once more. Knowing that he would be awake Celeste used the intercom of his lab to call for his favorite crayon muncher.
"Mister Miller, can you send Mister Bennett down to my lab? Please and thank you."
"I would hope one of these days you'll stop wasting our time Miss Allegri, maybe that way we can stop playing babysitter and could all just go back to Accord space."
"It is Doctor Allegri for you, Miller. And the only reason you are here is because you can't be trusted with anything more complicated than being on your ass all day and watching a door that does not open more than once every four months. I, on the other hand, was taken against my will by people that value my intelligence!" he spat through the intercom before closing communications with a slam.
Resting his head against the wall he took a deep breath, he needed to stop getting that mouthy to his wardens. Their relationship was more often than not cordial, but if he talked back one too many times there was nothing he could do to stop a possible retaliation.
A ping caught his attention and made him smile despite the annoyance. The portable device had picked up the presence of a sophont approaching or, rather, it had picked up his biorhythm. The range was not particularly large but sophonts that were already in the database were easier to pick. It was also easier to pick up the biorhythm of sophonts that were... open, genuine, sincere.
"Hm. Happy, excited, curious, hoping? Can't quite tell for what..." Celeste thought out loud before the heavy doors to his lab were opened with a keycard. "Ah! Be welcome, my dearest lab rat!" he called out over his shoulder while writing down the information that he had gathered already.
"Hello Doctor Alegri! How are you tonight, sir? Did you just call me your...?"
"Lab rat, yes Nikki, come on, keep up. You are the smartest of my wardens for a reason!" Celeste wrote down the changes he saw through the device: a spike in happiness, excitement, and hope, before they crashed back down to the same level as before. A small spike in... lust? fondness? Interesting, interesting. A mild annoyance? Curiosity going down. He looked back up at the man before him.
Nicholas Bennett was a 6'4 wall of muscle, with the physique of someone that lifts heavy and eats even heavier. Motherfucker didn't even eat any meat but fish so only God knew where those muscles had come from. Dark brown skin, warm, as if it still remembered the sun it once felt. The man always sported a smile, framed by a long, full, black beard that he kept perfectly groomed at all times.
He wore baggy red trousers and a black tank top that barely hid half of his chest, allowing Celeste's eyes to travel upwards from his chest hair to his face once more. Beautiful brown eyes under thick eyebrows were twinkling with a bit of mirth and the scientist's device was unnecessary to tell him how much fun the guard was having at his expense. Nicholas cleared his throat to break the Doctor out of his staring.
"If you blush as red as your turban this device isn't useful to guess your emotional state Nikki," Celeste muttered while writing down more information.
"I am not blushing, sir. Must be your imagination," the man said with an even bigger smile.
"Mhm. So. You don't like when I call you 'lab rat'?" Celeste expected to see the same response as before but something was lacking.
"I can't say I love it, but I don't dislike it either," he shrugged before taking a seat on a nearby stool.
"I see, I see."
"I don't think you do, but what do I know? Please, I'm at your disposal." Nicholas made a gesture with his hand for Celeste to go on, the iron bracelet on his left wrist moving about.
"Okay! Let's start with something simple, calibration, the usual. Is your name Nicholas K. Bennett? Are you a man? Are you younger than forty? Have you ever cut your hair?"
"Yes, yes, no, no." Lie, truth, truth, truth.
Huh? That was odd, these questions were supposed to be a baseline. Even if the device had enough data to determine the truth value of these questions they should all register as truth! That was their whole purpose! Had he fucked up something so basic? Was he back at square one? This was like failing a unit test for the core part of your damn program!
"FUCK!" The notebook he was using to take notes hit the wall with an echoing slam.
"Woah! Hey! Doc, what's the matter?"
Celeste placed his head against the lab bench, trying to gain comfort from the cold surface against his forehead. He muttered something completely unintelligible to Nicholas.
"I may need your device to decipher that one, sir," the guard attempted to joke.
"Doesn't work. 'm a failure," Celeste muttered, this time he was barely audible.
"Wow. It normally takes you... a full hour or so of experimenting before giving up like this! Why are you sulking after the first four questions?"
"Well, unless Nicholas K. Bennett is not your real name then I'm a fraud!"
"Oh! I mean—well, if you put it like that—I..." Embarrassment, guilt, regret.
"You rat bastard! Do you know how much data you have poisoned by lying to me? These questions are to calibrate the device! If you gave me the wrong information then—It fucks up the whole process! Damn it!"
Celeste began throwing a fit, looking at Nicholas with rage in his eyes but simply lowering himself to the floor and covering his face with his hands to barely muffle his screams and swears.
"I'm sorry! It technically is my name and I was not lying! If anything this proves that you device is even better than before, no? Since it caught a technicality? I have been going by this name for years! But I guess I don't see it as me enough?"
The Doctor let out a pathetic combination of a whine and a groan before slowly raising to his feet.
"Explain."
"My name is not Nicholas, it's Sanjit. Changed it back when I started working for the OCNI. It was dumb, I thought it would help to have a more English sounding name. When I looked them up back then they both were related to 'victory' so, well, I tried convincing myself that it wasn't a big change." All rang true.
Embarrassment permeated his words, both for lying to himself back then and for "lying" to Celeste. Notes of happiness came through here and there, being able to speak about this felt... freeing. There was something else there, trust. A lot of it. Why? Celeste could look deeper, the trust on his device now reassured. He removed the visor.
"I'm... sorry for calling you a rat bastard. And for forcing you to explain something... personal. I guess," he muttered, looking down. "I mean, I know the device IS for prying. And you have been willingly helping me. So I should be less of a dickhead. Sorry."
Sanjit lifted his left hand to try and physically comfort the Doctor somehow. Reassure him that nothing had been irreparably damaged. He wasn't sure he was allowed to, either personally or as part of his job, to reach forward. He looked at his bracelet for a moment that felt eternal.
Finally, he reached for him. His hand began playing with the pouting man's lightly curly hair. Ashy brown in color, he seemed to keep it shorter than shoulder length in a choppy bob. Did he cut it himself? Celeste looked tired all the time, shoulders slumped and yawning constantly. The dark rings around his green eyes contrasted against his pale olive skin.
Whenever Sanjit came by to help, the plump man would typically be wearing multiple layers no matter the functioning state of the lab's AC unit. High-waisted pants, a dark hoodie, and his always present lab coat on top. He never wore any kind of shoes except for a trusty pair of slippers on top of thick socks.
The light touch seemed to have lightly calmed Celeste down, at least enough for him to finally look back up at Sanjit.
"Hi there. Careful with your neck," the guard attempted to smooth things over the one way he knew Celeste liked to use: light teasing.
"I'm not that short. Also, are you even allowed to touch me? Much less... this?"
"Celeste, you are five feet on a good day and only after you have been told to stand straight," Sanjit decided to ignore his question.
"That's rude. You are rude. You lie to me, then pet me, then belittle me—"
"I don't think that word makes sense there, sir. It doesn't have to do with actually being—"
Celeste crossed his arms in front of his chest, his cheeks getting slightly redder as he stared at his guard dead in the eye.
"I retract my statement."
"Good." He paused for a moment before whispering. "Thanks, I feel better now."
Sanjit began pulling his hand back from the man's hair just to notice that Celeste almost instinctively leaned towards it. Holding in a chuckle of bemusement he kept playing with his hair just a bit longer.
Celeste, for his part, simply closed his eyes and let most of the tension of the day escape him.
"You were more tense than usual. Miller?" Sanjit asked. They both knew that the guard in "charge" of the "door" leading to the moon's surface was rather adamant in being a huge asshole.
"Miller. He seemed to be more... sour than usual, if that makes sense."
"Oh, it's probably because he did not get picked for the scouting party."
The Doctor tilted his head to the side in question, to which Sanjit had to try very hard not to laugh. His hair made him look like a cute dog with floppy ears. Instead of insulting him, he decided to lightly scratch the area of scalp behind his ear.
"You know I can't tell you everything, Doc. There is guard stuff that I can't share."
"And I'm pretty sure you shouldn't be giving me the best massage I have had in like a decade either, so..."
Sanjit sighed and, ruffling Celeste's hair, he finally pulled his hand away.
"I'll keep myself from breaking two rules at the same time, if that's okay with you," he smiled. "Your lab is on level four so it would make sense you didn't feel it. There was a large tremor... Two-ish hours ago. Some of the others guessed it was an explosion of some kind since the chances of the thick ice to crack was zero to none."
Celeste hummed in acknowledgment—and for him to continue—before grabbing the device once more. It probably still had a lot of kinks to fix, but the fact that it had been able to detect such a lie held a lot of promise for this iteration of the software. Putting it on, he began fiddling with the settings, he didn't quite like the default font on this visor.
"Some are worried that the cause of the tremors could have been the crash landing of the supply shuttle since it is a couple of weeks late," Sanjit added.
"Is it?" Celeste tried to think back, he had not asked for any important supplies for this particular delivery, just extras of everything. Because of that, he had no idea when the shuttle was supposed to arrive.
"Not to worry. We typically have enough food, water, and fuel in storage to survive comfortably even if a shuttle is lost. We just need to confirm if that is the case and alert headquarters. Which is what this group is supposed to—"
Two loud beeps coming from Celeste's device made the pair jump in place.
"Oh, weird, not a lot of people come down here. Why would two—" Celeste began while checking for the two new biorhythms that had entered the range of his device.
His mouth quickly dried up as he began double checking the information displayed before him. Quickly rushing to grab his notebook he scribbled a series of quick numbers. He scratched them once, twice, thrice, then he underlined the last set.
"Sanjit, please don't tell me that the gates to the surface are approximately twenty five meters up?"
"Well, I have not exactly measured—"
"Sanjit, Nikki, please."
"Give or take, yes?"
"Oh. Oh no."
"You never want to hear the smartest person in the room say that. I need you to use your words, Celeste."
"I—You—Give me a second! Fuck!" The device had begun to quickly display a level of information that was quickly overwhelming him. He quickly took it off and connected it to the more bulky and stable prototype, which had an actual screen for him to point things in.
"This device can technically be used to detect sophonts through their biorhythm. The usage in that capacity is limited to simply 'knowing' when a sophont enters the range, which is of about five meters at most, and it is that far only for individuals from whom I have gathered extensive data, like you." Celeste pointed at a graph on screen, which condensed physiological indicators into a single value of "signal strength". In it there were two lines, one for himself and one for Sanjit.
"The two beeps you heard were two new sophonts entering the range, but the signal was... odd. It was at the same time too strong and too weak, sort of muffled? It looked as if the peaks of a sound wave had been cut, filed, if that makes any sense. I had to guesstimate it manually," he gestured at the notebook.
"The signal's odd behavior did not make sense for anything within five, ten, or twenty meters of the device. It only makes sense for something at least twenty five meters away but, and here is the 'oh no' part, if I consider that these two signals are at said distance..." He began zooming out on the graph, more, more, and more.
"The strength of the source. It's... orders of magnitude stronger than any Terran is capable of producing. Our biorhythms are so small in comparison that the signals we have been producing since you have arrived, for multiple minutes and through my... altered emotional state, can fit within one amplitude of theirs." Celeste began feeling sick, he needed to sit down.
"Okay, that is not normal, but I don't see why you are so... Oh. Oh no." Sanjit began connecting the dots with information that Celeste did not have. Acquaintances in the military being sent back to Terra from their posts, the radio silence from headquarters, the supposed crash landing. They had lost. They had lost and the Affini were at their doors. Two of them.
A scream from Celeste made him wield his kirpan in search of danger. His eyes looking around the still empty laboratory. Nothing. What had... The Doctor's hand on his shoulder made him look at the screen that he had been using to explain the new development to him. There, in the graph, something impossible. One of the lines that represented one of the two arrivals was moving contrary to all logic, and yet, it clearly spelled three letters, the message clear.
"I see you."
"You know what would be entertaining, Carmi?" His beloved asked him while playing with the puppet-like sophont atop their table.
"With you? It's hard to tell, what mood has taken you this time?"
"Miss Tanis, please, you can pull harder. It won't break!" spoke the little Captain.
"Well, there are only twenty little ferals down there. We can probably take that moon all by ourselves!" she spoke with a sing-songy tone before using one of her vines to pull at the cute little thing before her.
"That would be ten florets each, isn't that a bit much?" Carmi spoke after the floret's moans died out, its body bent at a wrong angle.
"Pfft. You think I'll let you keep ten of them? fourteen - six. At best."
"Okay, okay, let's not get too hasty. It is not 'much'. One per bloom makes perfect sense. You are right as per usual, my love," he chuckled while soaking his vines in mineral water.
"That's better. But I was thinking of something else, the fun part! According to the darling here this place is supposed to be trying to build weapons to use against us!"
"Oh?"
"So why don't we take a little vacation and let these dears pamper us with their attempts at weaponry?"
"Why are you so mean? They are probably working really hard!"
"Exactly! We can just sit back, relax, and then, when they are finally this close at succeeding..." Her vines pulled the marionette up once more, holding it aloft inches away from the table as it twitched over and over. "Then is when we break them. What do you say?"
"Then we would miss the capture of the little Terran vessel we are following..."
"It—Ah—Should take a couple more months to inter—Please! More!—Couple more months to intercept the Blazing Sun, sir. Master asked it to inform you of this facility since they knew Miss Tanis would grow impatient way before—Yes! YES! THERE!" The marionette's body fully locked up in place after a particular pull from the Affini's vines, its head hanging down, seemingly completely knocked out.
"Okay, okay. I guess we can skip that capture. How can we make this believable though? Oh, we could take two shuttles down, hide one, blow up the other! I was, oh so injured! And then, of course, you, my valiant savior, arrive and try to fight the terrans that come to investigate! Unfortunately, we are so, so weak in cold environments! So you fail, and the valorous cuties capture us!" Carmi built up a plan while acting out his "lines".
"I am beginning to regret asking you to help me with this," Tanis muttered while gently cuddling up the little marionette.
"Nope, too late, I'm in. Also, you love me, and you adore my Terran acting skills."
Tanis sighed, he was right.
"Let's get going then. Thanks for the information, Captain," she told the conked out little sophont before placing them in a more comfortable, Terran-sized couch within the Cafe they had been visiting. The little marionette was barely able to give them a thumbs up before going back to a complete lack of movement.
"So, you are going to follow my plan?" Carmi asked.
"I guess, but I save the right to scare the mulch out of these little cuties," she spoke with a malignant smile as the pair began making preparations for their first "vacation" in their ten blooms.