Fandom #4
Title: Helping Jack
Fandom: Torchwood/24
Summary: Toshiko and Chloë O'Brian have a not-so chance encounter.
Notes: Contains technobabble I pulled out of my ass. Longer than I intended.
"Why do you keep staring at me?"
***
The two women had been sat in the coffee shop for nearly an hour, each of them with a cold, drink by their computers, sufficiently unfinished so as to be growing a skin. The pair of them had been typing away covertly on their laptops, apparently doing something of vital importance, and each of them gave the other a dirty look whenever the bandwidth slowed down.
Toshiko wasn't used to travelling by herself, let alone being in the company of strangers. Save the time when she left the comfort of her Japanese parentage and moved out for the first time... but that felt like a long time ago. She liked her comforts, and she liked familiarity and logic. Sponteneity... it didn't frighten her, but she wasn't used to it.
Of course. How could you be used to something that's spontaneous? If it was familiar, it wouldn't be unusual.
It had been her talking like this that led Gwen to urge Toshiko to take a good long holiday away from the Hub. Gwen had been making a concerted effort to see more of Rhys, Owen was bouncing back and forth between Cardiff and London doing whatever he did for fun, and Jack and Ianto... well, she didn't really want to know what they did for fun, but they were attached to the Hub in their own unusal ways, and she didn't really feel so comfortable being part of that same cloth.
But she didn't feel comfortable about spending a full week away from Cardiff, which was why she asked Jack's permission to take her laptop with her.
Reluctantly, he had agreed, on the condition that she promised to make herself useful whilst in Los Angeles.
And she was doing that, all right. A swarm of some type of beetle had slipped through the Rift, and were incubating in the local water supplies. Typical! She was supposed to be on her break!
"Jack, it's me," Tosh said into her earpiece. "I've got a track on the heat sources. There's two men in front of a door, and inside there are the main purification controls..."
The other woman had paused from what she was doing, and was looking over at Toshiko. Their eyes met; the American looked sulky and suspicious of the Asian client. She looked like she was about to say something, when suddenly her own phone rang.
"O'Brien."
On the other end of the line, a man was shouting hoarsely. From her seat, Toshiko was able to catch every word. "Chloë, it's me..."
"Jack, what's going on down there?"
"I've just arrived. I need the schematics now!"
"Right, I'm sending them to your PDA," the woman said, hunching her shoulders forward and typing furiously. "But the satellite is picking up twelve guards... and there's a second way out round the back. You probably should wait for backup..."
"Chloë, there's no time!" The garbled man's voice issued out of the phone. "I need to get in there now or they're going to start the strike in Washington!"
"But if Aziz escapes out the back, you'll lose him! Jack, I'm not going to be able to keep track of him for very long if that happens!"
"Well, I guess I'll just have to make sure that doesn't happen!"
"Okay, Jack.... I'll be monitoring from here. Good luck."
Toshiko's own phone crunched into life. "Tosh, we've neutralized the guards, and we're going in. Get the system overrides ready."
"Okay, Jack," Toshiko whispered. "I'll be monitoring from here. Good luck."
She became dimly aware that her choice of words mirrored what the other lady had just said. As it happened, so did she. The brown-haired woman stood up and stomped over to Toshiko.
"Y'know, if you're going to make fun of me, you could pick a better evening to do it. I don't really know who you are or what you're doing, but please," she was talking fast, and screwed her eyes up into a squint. "J-just stop, okay?"
Toshiko just looked downward for a moment before replying. "Actually, I was talking to a guy from work. But I'll just try my best not to get in your way."
She was only half-sincere with this; she needed to concentrate on the statistics, and she couldn't do that with a sulky stranger pouting in her face.
The woman just stared at her before whispering, "Fine", then stalking back to her chair. Toshiko looked at the woman for a little while, before her earpiece rang again. "Jack, what's wrong?"
"It's the swarm!" came her superior's voice through a crackling line. "They must know we're trying to get rid of them, because they're issuing some sort of electromagnetic field as a defence mechanism!"
"Yeah, I can see it on my monitor," Tosh said, watching the analysis play out in front of her, the satelleite view discharging some sort of heat-haze out of the plant. "Jack, get everyone out of there, because at this rate, they'll either infect the water supplies or explode!"
"Can you do it?"
"I'm trying to, but… damn, my connection's not strong enough! My laptop's not got enough hard drive space on it to process this stuff in real-time… if we were at the Hub, this would be fine, except… what am I doing wrong now?"
Toshiko had looked up to see the other woman staring at her, perhaps stood a little bit too close. "It sounds like you're having trouble with your processor. Would you like some help?"
Toshiko blinked, trying not to imagine the woman as the Microsoft paperclip. "Erm…."
"Never mind, allow me," said the American, putting a USB stick into the back of Tosh's computer without permission. "I've just put on an external server; this should be enough to take some of the weight off your processors."
"Are you sure?"
"Trust me, I know what I'm doing, okay? And this won't retain any information from your computer, so it's totally secure. In fact, you could probably keep it, I've got plenty."
"I… this is working," Toshiko said with a warm smile, as her laptop whirred and bleeped up completed results. "Thank you! That… that really helped."
The other woman just blinked, nodded, muttered a "Right," under her breath before plodding back to her own chair. Toshiko spoke to Jack, "I think I can use some ultrasound or something to lull the swarm back to sleep. I should be able to contain long enough for you guys to neutralise them."
"Great work, Tosh," Jack's voice said into her ear, "How are you getting on in L.A.?"
"Oh… it's fine," Toshiko said. "I'm remembering what you said about having a good time. I'll call you later."
"Don't wait up," Jack said down the line, and Toshiko smiled.
"Damn it!"
Two minutes later, the other woman cursed, and Toshiko looked up. The other lady had her nose three inches from the screen. "Jack, there's a man escaping out the back! Have you got Aziz?"
"Aziz is dead!" the other Jack bellowed down the phone, and Toshiko perked her ears up. "I've captured one, but the other hostiles are dead. Aziz shot himself before I could get a visual on him."
"OK, but the man escaping probably has the device," Chloë said, tapping her keyboard carefully. I can track only track him so far, but if I start slaving CTU satellites, someone's gonna find out."
"Can you use another division's satellite without them knowing?"
"No," said the woman. "They all doubled their security when they found out about what happened today, it's gonna take me at least thirty minutes to break into them, and even then there's no guarantee that…. I'm sorry Jack, but there's a woman looking at me."
"Route me through my PDA. Call me back when something happens."
"Okay," the woman said, hanging up, before staring at Toshiko. "What?"
They were alone in the coffee shop now, and the owner was cleaning stuff up next to a radio. Toshiko figured she'd be safe to talk. "You need a satelliete?"
"Okay, ma'am. Firstly, you shouldn't have been listening in on that, okay; it's kinda rude and none of your business. And secondly, yes, I need a satelliete of at least Class Three quality. If you've got one on you, I'd like to borrow it."
The woman shook her head and started tracking her screen, nose inches from the monitor. Toshiko smiled. She was good at hacking into things, and even the world's most secure systems couldn't pick up on some of the technologies at Torchwood's disposal. She dashed the USB stick back to the woman.
"What's this?"
"I've added a text document to the USB; it provides an algorithm that should get you into most satellites without leaving a trace," Toshiko smiled. "It's only good for one use, though, so make sure you pick the best."
Toshiko watches as Chloë warily opened the file, and realising the code to be legitimate, proceeded to catch up on the escaped terrorist. "I need to make a call; can you excuse me, please?"
Toshiko nodded and returned to her chair, as the other lady called her Jack. Funny that, how Jacks always seemed to be present in circumstances like this. She was checking her own computer screen to confirm the beetles had been purged, when the woman came over. She was nodded her head, as if reciting speech in her mind.
"Thank you," she said, forcing a small, awkward smile. "And I guess I'm sorry for being such a jerk earlier. I can do that sometimes. So yeah, sorry, okay?"
"No, that's fine," Toshiko said modestly. "Just trying to help, y'know?"
"Yeah, well… you might have saved a lot of lives today."
"So did you," Toshiko pointed out, and the ladies finally relaxed around one another.
They continued talking for a while longer, deciding they should go somewhere else where there was a little more atmosphere. They wound up in a nearby bar, and each bought the other a beer, and continued their discussion. They mostly chatted about computers, and men, and their Jacks, though each of them seemed to think their own Jack was better than the other's, though neither of them really pressed the matter. Tosh asked Chloë if she normally altered other people's computers, and Chloë retorted immediately by asking Tosh if she normally hacked into government computers. The two of them started chatting, as if intimating some deep truths about themselves, because they both knew that the other would not see her again.
Then things went a little surreal when Toshiko sprayed something in the air between them. The lights went fuzzy, and the rest of the night was a blur…
"Why do you keep looking at me like that?"
"Oh my god, you've got a drawer full of them?"
"This isn't the best time to be updating Twitter."
"It's a shame I have to go in the morning…"
"Yeah, fine. Can we go to sleep now?"
***
Chloë's head was pounding for the rest of the next day, and she had to ask Bill to give her some time off, and to save the debrief for the next day. When she got a proper nights' sleep and sat down to be debriefed, she was dumbfounded to realise she couldn't remember a single thing about that particular evening. She knew she had sat down in a coffee shop, set up her computer, that the drink tasted disgusting, but after that was a muzzy blur.
"Bill, I can't remember a thing. But I did have this USB on me. It had a weird code on it, which I couldn't understand, and there was also a mirror folder which I made, apparently."
Later testing showed that she had managed to hack into Toshiko's laptop and steal a lot of the technology. Chloë felt she should have been ashamed for doing so, but she wasn't exactly going to beat herself up for doing something she didn't remember, was she? She just shrugged and accepted the praise that Torchwood technology was going to help CTU in the future.
***
"Welcome back, Tosh," Jack said when she returned to Cardiff. "Did you bring us back some souvenirs?"
"Well, I got a bit of time to get you all a little something," Toshiko smiled. "Gwen, here's some of that perfume you were after… and Owen, got you some brandy."
"Lovely," Owen said with a tone she couldn't quite interpret, but assumed to be genuine gratitude.
"Ianto, I found a batch of really nice designer socks which I'm sure will go well with your suit."
"Socks?"
"And Jack, I've got you what you asked for!"
"You did it?" Jack looked overjoyed. "Well let's plug it in!"
Toshiko carried her laptop over to the Hub's main controls, and hooked it up to the Rift. "We needed proper intel from the American government for grassroots surveillance."
"You mean… we needed it to check out ordinary people?"
"The Americans are good at it," Jack nodded. "And they are generally chattier than the Russians."
"This woman wasn't chatty, trust me." Toshiko said, staring at the Rift.
"So it was a woman, huh?" Jack said.
"Does this have something to do with that spray you asked to borrow?" Owen asked.
"It might have done," Tosh grinned.
"Well, that's hot."
She grinned wider. "Point is, they now think they're watching us, but the truth is they're only getting the things we don't need, and we're getting quicker system responses out of the main terminals."
"What's that mean in English?" Owen asked.
"We've got a backdoor into the American government," Jack grinned. Good job, Tosh."
"There's more," she said. "By hooking this up with the Rift, we won't just see what their satellites are seeing at the moment… we'll also be able to use them to passively scan the past and the future."
"So anything the satellites can see, or ever have seen… we'll be able to see?"
Toshiko nodded like an eager child, trying not to laugh.
"Well, Torchwood's omniscient now," Ianto said, sounding disappointed. "Better hope the tabloids don’t get wind of that."
"What about the federal agent?" Gwen said. "Won't she be suspicious?"
"Retcon," Jack said simply. "Gotta love it."
The five stared at awe at the infinite information at their fingertips.
***
"Nice try, Toshiko."
Chloë shut down the connection the moment she discovered what was going on. She may not understand rifts in time, or alien software, but she understood how her own systems were supposed to work, and simply purged anything that wasn't supposed to be there. CTU had assumed that if Torchwood went through with such a bold move, they were planning to double-cross the Americans, which technically made them their enemies, but the organization were certainly experienced with dealing with double-crossers, so they had contingencies in place.
She still couldn't remember that night, but as she combed through the altered files, Chloë was confident the other woman had been good. Really good.
But she was better.
Fandom: Torchwood/24
Summary: Toshiko and Chloë O'Brian have a not-so chance encounter.
Notes: Contains technobabble I pulled out of my ass. Longer than I intended.
"Why do you keep staring at me?"
***
The two women had been sat in the coffee shop for nearly an hour, each of them with a cold, drink by their computers, sufficiently unfinished so as to be growing a skin. The pair of them had been typing away covertly on their laptops, apparently doing something of vital importance, and each of them gave the other a dirty look whenever the bandwidth slowed down.
Toshiko wasn't used to travelling by herself, let alone being in the company of strangers. Save the time when she left the comfort of her Japanese parentage and moved out for the first time... but that felt like a long time ago. She liked her comforts, and she liked familiarity and logic. Sponteneity... it didn't frighten her, but she wasn't used to it.
Of course. How could you be used to something that's spontaneous? If it was familiar, it wouldn't be unusual.
It had been her talking like this that led Gwen to urge Toshiko to take a good long holiday away from the Hub. Gwen had been making a concerted effort to see more of Rhys, Owen was bouncing back and forth between Cardiff and London doing whatever he did for fun, and Jack and Ianto... well, she didn't really want to know what they did for fun, but they were attached to the Hub in their own unusal ways, and she didn't really feel so comfortable being part of that same cloth.
But she didn't feel comfortable about spending a full week away from Cardiff, which was why she asked Jack's permission to take her laptop with her.
Reluctantly, he had agreed, on the condition that she promised to make herself useful whilst in Los Angeles.
And she was doing that, all right. A swarm of some type of beetle had slipped through the Rift, and were incubating in the local water supplies. Typical! She was supposed to be on her break!
"Jack, it's me," Tosh said into her earpiece. "I've got a track on the heat sources. There's two men in front of a door, and inside there are the main purification controls..."
The other woman had paused from what she was doing, and was looking over at Toshiko. Their eyes met; the American looked sulky and suspicious of the Asian client. She looked like she was about to say something, when suddenly her own phone rang.
"O'Brien."
On the other end of the line, a man was shouting hoarsely. From her seat, Toshiko was able to catch every word. "Chloë, it's me..."
"Jack, what's going on down there?"
"I've just arrived. I need the schematics now!"
"Right, I'm sending them to your PDA," the woman said, hunching her shoulders forward and typing furiously. "But the satellite is picking up twelve guards... and there's a second way out round the back. You probably should wait for backup..."
"Chloë, there's no time!" The garbled man's voice issued out of the phone. "I need to get in there now or they're going to start the strike in Washington!"
"But if Aziz escapes out the back, you'll lose him! Jack, I'm not going to be able to keep track of him for very long if that happens!"
"Well, I guess I'll just have to make sure that doesn't happen!"
"Okay, Jack.... I'll be monitoring from here. Good luck."
Toshiko's own phone crunched into life. "Tosh, we've neutralized the guards, and we're going in. Get the system overrides ready."
"Okay, Jack," Toshiko whispered. "I'll be monitoring from here. Good luck."
She became dimly aware that her choice of words mirrored what the other lady had just said. As it happened, so did she. The brown-haired woman stood up and stomped over to Toshiko.
"Y'know, if you're going to make fun of me, you could pick a better evening to do it. I don't really know who you are or what you're doing, but please," she was talking fast, and screwed her eyes up into a squint. "J-just stop, okay?"
Toshiko just looked downward for a moment before replying. "Actually, I was talking to a guy from work. But I'll just try my best not to get in your way."
She was only half-sincere with this; she needed to concentrate on the statistics, and she couldn't do that with a sulky stranger pouting in her face.
The woman just stared at her before whispering, "Fine", then stalking back to her chair. Toshiko looked at the woman for a little while, before her earpiece rang again. "Jack, what's wrong?"
"It's the swarm!" came her superior's voice through a crackling line. "They must know we're trying to get rid of them, because they're issuing some sort of electromagnetic field as a defence mechanism!"
"Yeah, I can see it on my monitor," Tosh said, watching the analysis play out in front of her, the satelleite view discharging some sort of heat-haze out of the plant. "Jack, get everyone out of there, because at this rate, they'll either infect the water supplies or explode!"
"Can you do it?"
"I'm trying to, but… damn, my connection's not strong enough! My laptop's not got enough hard drive space on it to process this stuff in real-time… if we were at the Hub, this would be fine, except… what am I doing wrong now?"
Toshiko had looked up to see the other woman staring at her, perhaps stood a little bit too close. "It sounds like you're having trouble with your processor. Would you like some help?"
Toshiko blinked, trying not to imagine the woman as the Microsoft paperclip. "Erm…."
"Never mind, allow me," said the American, putting a USB stick into the back of Tosh's computer without permission. "I've just put on an external server; this should be enough to take some of the weight off your processors."
"Are you sure?"
"Trust me, I know what I'm doing, okay? And this won't retain any information from your computer, so it's totally secure. In fact, you could probably keep it, I've got plenty."
"I… this is working," Toshiko said with a warm smile, as her laptop whirred and bleeped up completed results. "Thank you! That… that really helped."
The other woman just blinked, nodded, muttered a "Right," under her breath before plodding back to her own chair. Toshiko spoke to Jack, "I think I can use some ultrasound or something to lull the swarm back to sleep. I should be able to contain long enough for you guys to neutralise them."
"Great work, Tosh," Jack's voice said into her ear, "How are you getting on in L.A.?"
"Oh… it's fine," Toshiko said. "I'm remembering what you said about having a good time. I'll call you later."
"Don't wait up," Jack said down the line, and Toshiko smiled.
"Damn it!"
Two minutes later, the other woman cursed, and Toshiko looked up. The other lady had her nose three inches from the screen. "Jack, there's a man escaping out the back! Have you got Aziz?"
"Aziz is dead!" the other Jack bellowed down the phone, and Toshiko perked her ears up. "I've captured one, but the other hostiles are dead. Aziz shot himself before I could get a visual on him."
"OK, but the man escaping probably has the device," Chloë said, tapping her keyboard carefully. I can track only track him so far, but if I start slaving CTU satellites, someone's gonna find out."
"Can you use another division's satellite without them knowing?"
"No," said the woman. "They all doubled their security when they found out about what happened today, it's gonna take me at least thirty minutes to break into them, and even then there's no guarantee that…. I'm sorry Jack, but there's a woman looking at me."
"Route me through my PDA. Call me back when something happens."
"Okay," the woman said, hanging up, before staring at Toshiko. "What?"
They were alone in the coffee shop now, and the owner was cleaning stuff up next to a radio. Toshiko figured she'd be safe to talk. "You need a satelliete?"
"Okay, ma'am. Firstly, you shouldn't have been listening in on that, okay; it's kinda rude and none of your business. And secondly, yes, I need a satelliete of at least Class Three quality. If you've got one on you, I'd like to borrow it."
The woman shook her head and started tracking her screen, nose inches from the monitor. Toshiko smiled. She was good at hacking into things, and even the world's most secure systems couldn't pick up on some of the technologies at Torchwood's disposal. She dashed the USB stick back to the woman.
"What's this?"
"I've added a text document to the USB; it provides an algorithm that should get you into most satellites without leaving a trace," Toshiko smiled. "It's only good for one use, though, so make sure you pick the best."
Toshiko watches as Chloë warily opened the file, and realising the code to be legitimate, proceeded to catch up on the escaped terrorist. "I need to make a call; can you excuse me, please?"
Toshiko nodded and returned to her chair, as the other lady called her Jack. Funny that, how Jacks always seemed to be present in circumstances like this. She was checking her own computer screen to confirm the beetles had been purged, when the woman came over. She was nodded her head, as if reciting speech in her mind.
"Thank you," she said, forcing a small, awkward smile. "And I guess I'm sorry for being such a jerk earlier. I can do that sometimes. So yeah, sorry, okay?"
"No, that's fine," Toshiko said modestly. "Just trying to help, y'know?"
"Yeah, well… you might have saved a lot of lives today."
"So did you," Toshiko pointed out, and the ladies finally relaxed around one another.
They continued talking for a while longer, deciding they should go somewhere else where there was a little more atmosphere. They wound up in a nearby bar, and each bought the other a beer, and continued their discussion. They mostly chatted about computers, and men, and their Jacks, though each of them seemed to think their own Jack was better than the other's, though neither of them really pressed the matter. Tosh asked Chloë if she normally altered other people's computers, and Chloë retorted immediately by asking Tosh if she normally hacked into government computers. The two of them started chatting, as if intimating some deep truths about themselves, because they both knew that the other would not see her again.
Then things went a little surreal when Toshiko sprayed something in the air between them. The lights went fuzzy, and the rest of the night was a blur…
"Why do you keep looking at me like that?"
"Oh my god, you've got a drawer full of them?"
"This isn't the best time to be updating Twitter."
"It's a shame I have to go in the morning…"
"Yeah, fine. Can we go to sleep now?"
***
Chloë's head was pounding for the rest of the next day, and she had to ask Bill to give her some time off, and to save the debrief for the next day. When she got a proper nights' sleep and sat down to be debriefed, she was dumbfounded to realise she couldn't remember a single thing about that particular evening. She knew she had sat down in a coffee shop, set up her computer, that the drink tasted disgusting, but after that was a muzzy blur.
"Bill, I can't remember a thing. But I did have this USB on me. It had a weird code on it, which I couldn't understand, and there was also a mirror folder which I made, apparently."
Later testing showed that she had managed to hack into Toshiko's laptop and steal a lot of the technology. Chloë felt she should have been ashamed for doing so, but she wasn't exactly going to beat herself up for doing something she didn't remember, was she? She just shrugged and accepted the praise that Torchwood technology was going to help CTU in the future.
***
"Welcome back, Tosh," Jack said when she returned to Cardiff. "Did you bring us back some souvenirs?"
"Well, I got a bit of time to get you all a little something," Toshiko smiled. "Gwen, here's some of that perfume you were after… and Owen, got you some brandy."
"Lovely," Owen said with a tone she couldn't quite interpret, but assumed to be genuine gratitude.
"Ianto, I found a batch of really nice designer socks which I'm sure will go well with your suit."
"Socks?"
"And Jack, I've got you what you asked for!"
"You did it?" Jack looked overjoyed. "Well let's plug it in!"
Toshiko carried her laptop over to the Hub's main controls, and hooked it up to the Rift. "We needed proper intel from the American government for grassroots surveillance."
"You mean… we needed it to check out ordinary people?"
"The Americans are good at it," Jack nodded. "And they are generally chattier than the Russians."
"This woman wasn't chatty, trust me." Toshiko said, staring at the Rift.
"So it was a woman, huh?" Jack said.
"Does this have something to do with that spray you asked to borrow?" Owen asked.
"It might have done," Tosh grinned.
"Well, that's hot."
She grinned wider. "Point is, they now think they're watching us, but the truth is they're only getting the things we don't need, and we're getting quicker system responses out of the main terminals."
"What's that mean in English?" Owen asked.
"We've got a backdoor into the American government," Jack grinned. Good job, Tosh."
"There's more," she said. "By hooking this up with the Rift, we won't just see what their satellites are seeing at the moment… we'll also be able to use them to passively scan the past and the future."
"So anything the satellites can see, or ever have seen… we'll be able to see?"
Toshiko nodded like an eager child, trying not to laugh.
"Well, Torchwood's omniscient now," Ianto said, sounding disappointed. "Better hope the tabloids don’t get wind of that."
"What about the federal agent?" Gwen said. "Won't she be suspicious?"
"Retcon," Jack said simply. "Gotta love it."
The five stared at awe at the infinite information at their fingertips.
***
"Nice try, Toshiko."
Chloë shut down the connection the moment she discovered what was going on. She may not understand rifts in time, or alien software, but she understood how her own systems were supposed to work, and simply purged anything that wasn't supposed to be there. CTU had assumed that if Torchwood went through with such a bold move, they were planning to double-cross the Americans, which technically made them their enemies, but the organization were certainly experienced with dealing with double-crossers, so they had contingencies in place.
She still couldn't remember that night, but as she combed through the altered files, Chloë was confident the other woman had been good. Really good.
But she was better.