[OTA] Midas is king and he holds me so tight;

[digging]

WHO: Karen Page
WHERE: Various
WHEN: 8 January 2018, throughout the day
OPEN TO: All, with 2 locked starters
WARNINGS: Standard blanket warning for Netflix MCU spoilers

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In the Forest

OTA - 3 max threads

It was probably only a matter of time, Karen thinks. This morning she woke up to find three big boxes sitting in the middle of her chilly bedroom floor like they'd been dropped off overnight by the FedEx Fairy. She's three days out from her one-month anniversary stuck in this place, and she has officially been anointed by the gods.

As much as her instinct is still to be wary, curiosity takes only a beat to win out. Sitting cross-legged in her absconded "I'm not Daredevil" shirt and chili pepper socks, she pulls each box open and lines the contents neatly beside her on the floor. Shampoo, journals, underwear, earmuffs. When she's done, she can't shake the feeling that this is less divine intervention and more care package.

And weird as that concept may be under the circumstances, she's not looking the gift horse in the mouth.

She feeds the furnace and indulges in a longer shower than normal, then starts the process of organizing her notes in her new journals while her hair dries. Then it's out into the snow, bundled like the true Vermonter she is, pack of supplies on her back as she looks toward the horizon. There's a voice tutting in the back of her head that sounds mostly like Frank, sometimes Matt, and funnily, occasionally like Claire, but she's never really been very good at listening to people who tell her to sit still. Boots crunching with each step, she pushes into the forest's edge.

[Feel free to find her in the forest, on the way there, at the canyon wall, or on her way back.]

Canyon's Edge

for Peggy

Here's the truth: It still freaks Karen out a little bit that Peggy (and others, but mostly Peggy) are from points in time so far-flung from her own. The people who say they're from alternate realities, other planets, that doesn't get her as much — She stood in the aftermath of the alien assault on Manhattan. But the time thing she's still getting her head around.

But in the moment, it's usually an easy enough detail to forget, and Peggy makes it easier by being the sort of woman who, when Karen asks if she'd like to come with her to try and scale the canyon wall, agrees without hesitation. It's possible Peggy is mostly looking out for Karen's well-being— Because yeah, OK, it really isn't smart to go mountain climbing solo — but the fact that Peggy seems interested at all, especially when she's been here so long, is encouraging. In Karen's opinion, it's way too easy to be complacent in this place.

Home Again

for Claire

The stomp of snow-clotted boots on the porch announces Karen's return home that evening before she pushes open the door with a sigh of relief. It's warm inside, which means Claire must have been home long enough to feed the furnace. As Karen unwinds herself from her scarves, she can hear the distant sounds of another person in the house, and she smiles, grateful, almost bursting to tell what she's discovered today.

"You won't believe what happened today," she calls out, shrugging from her coat and then plopping onto the sofa to begin working off her boots. Pulling at a heel, she winces; she had a misstep earlier while climbing, and her wrist is killing her.

Comments

[digging]

Pressing her lips into a line, Karen slides a look back to the samples in question, a shadow pushing in at the edge of her thoughts at the implications of what Kira's saying.

"Do you mean that..." she begins, but it's reflexive more than needing an answer — They both know what he means. "Clones," she says aloud instead. The word should sound ridiculous, should feel flimsy and easily-dismissable, but it doesn't. It's stolid. It sits there like a third person in the room.

This isn't the first time the notion has occurred to Karen at all, although it had taken Mark's notes to suggest it. Even then, even from such a supposedly great scientific mind, it had seemed to be scribbled down more out of thoroughness than because it was any great theory. It was part of a list of possibilities, and never further expanded on. She hadn't even thought about it again until just now.

But it fits. And Karen really doesn't know if she'd capable of processing something like that in any way that's helpful.

"Fuck," she whispers, and then flips the page in her notebook, beginning to jot down everything she can think of that points that way, beginning with Kira's list.

[3ofswords]

At least a clone is something solid, something biological. Kira draws the mental line from simulation to assets and has to step back from the glass. Reach up for his glasses, pull them just far enough from his face to blur the bright lights and smooth lines.

The heel of his hand is damp; he slides the glasses back on and looks at the faint fog around a smeared hand print. Condensation, the room within warmer than the space without, but lined with coolers. It's the little things, pricking holes in every theory, making him doubt even the simplest, most straightforward answer. How do you simulate this; why do you simulate this?

Because it makes more sense than the sun refusing to set, or the direction of a river reversing at a whim. "What's easier," he reasons aloud, trying to let the realization sink in. "Hand-picking people out of infinite realities, from different times, or having a backlog of shitheads to grow in tubes? Dump them in a fountain when you're done, hook them up to the fucking Matrix. Do whatever you want, grow three of them just in case."

It's not exactly a pep talk.

[digging]

Karen doesn't want to say it, thankfully doesn't feel like she needs to say it, although it's hanging there between them: This is not the first version of Kira to be here. She hadn't know the old one so she can't speak to any differences, subtle or otherwise, anything that might give away which is the original or which is the first, if that's even a thing.

If they are in the Matrix, though, which seems scarily plausible the longer she's here, it makes as much sense that the same Kira would just be... well, rebooted. Waste not, want not. She can't decide if that's comforting.

Sighing, she scrubs a hand over her face and then just sits for a long moment, her gaze shifting idly from the control panel in the room back to the cooler.

"I can't believe I'm saying this, because— You know what I do for a living," she finally says, and lifts a knowing look to Kira. "But if people haven't come to this conclusion on their own yet, and I'm kind of thinking most of them haven't, then we don't need to be the ones telling them. Not yet." People like Mark who wouldn't be completely freaked out by the mere concept, sure. But the average person who is just trying to survive day-to-day? Having half the village emotionally comatose would probably not be helpful.

[3ofswords]

The job she did, or the job she remembers, but hasn't ever performed--none of it any more helpful to say than spreading this around the village. Kira curls his fingers into the end of his sleeve, feeling the almost suede texture of the parka. If it was already a simulation, it was never real anyway--all the easier to fake if it was only ever a memory in the first place.

"I mean, if it occurs to them, they might feel faked-out by the presentation. If it's all part of the Matrix anyway, it's here to freak us out."

Which doesn't make it feel any less true. Maybe it's just a way to gauge reactions: if the village freaks out, come up with a more placating story later. If it doesn't--up the ante? He's no closer to understanding the motive behind all of this than his last incarnation was, even with those old notes to go by. "But there's nothing we can do about it, either way, so. Agreed, sit on the existential horror until we go insane, I guess." The near petulance of his tone is offset by true frustration, his fingers digging hard into his palm, through the fabric of his sleeve.