the electrical approach to a human
the electrical approach to a human
lu han/minseok, pg-13, general
can you remove the heart from a human?
au inspired by oblivion, artificial intelligence and wall·e
a jillion thanks to ang who pulled me through this using various methods of ...encouragement, jannah who puts up with my shit 200% of the time and esp sam who refused to let me junk this ♥
On the metal tabletop of Genexis lab three, Lu Han breathes.
His directive: investigate human presence detected in the Det by satellite intelligence, suspected to be the officers sent to the Det fifty years ago, rescue if alive. Bring them back.
Complete previous step to proceed. If unsuccessful, repeat step.
Lu Han suits up.
---
Minseok wakes up in the hands of Lu Han.
“My name is Lu Han, I’m here to rescue you,” is the first thing he hears. He doesn’t recognize this person, or the team with him, but he does recognize the seal on his uniform; he’s from Base Zero. Minseok has to take a few moments to orientate himself - his eyelids are sticky and heavy, his mind fuzzy: he’s in his flight caisson, red sand and rock. The guy jams a gas mask over Minseok’s face, helps Minseok out of his caisson. The rock is hard and unyielding. It makes Minseok’s knees buckle a little.
Minseok has no idea where the hell he is.
Confusion; panic, even, is flooding Minseok’s instincts as he gets helped to his feet by this team from Base Zero. Minseok catches Lu Han’s eyes.
“This way, please,” Lu Han says quietly. There’s something chillingly simple about Lu Han’s eyes that Minseok cannot place, but - “hurry, the radiation levels are still a danger.”
Much too late, Minseok remembers their directive. It feels many years ago, foggy and vague, but that makes no sense to Minseok. It’s sudden, the memory, after the jog Lu Han gave: radiation. Land in the Det. Test radiation levels, procure samples. Map terrain for analysis on containment. Return.
Minseok was in his flight caisson, but he can see none of the standard aircrafts that hold caissons; the debris around his caisson looks charred beyond recognition. Their team had been preparing for mission; Minseok remembers the gruelling circuit trainings they’d had daily to build aerobic capacity, but nothing beyond that. They must have had embarked on mission to suit up in the flight caissons, but Minseok’s mind draws a blank.
“Kris,” Minseok says, his voice cracking on the single syllable to nothing at all, like a voice after years of unuse. He tries again, but it comes out a lot more like a hoarse whisper, a question. “Kris? Chanyeol?”
Lu Han looks puzzled. “There’s no one else we found.”
Kris and Chanyeol are the rest of Minseok’s team, and if they are nowhere in sight - Lu Han’s confusion at his question is real enough for Minseok to believe it. Kris and Chanyeol never made it on mission with him. But how the hell did he get in his flight caisson, on the flight craft? It was a small mission, already, and three is the bare minimum to complete their directive.
“This way, please,” another member of Lu Han’s team, that hadn’t identified himself, ushers them towards another sleek aircraft, a solid steel capsule without wings. Completely unlike standard aircraft Base Zero has, but Minseok can see Base Zero’s seal on the side.
“Where are we headed?” Minseok blurts, shuffling forward. His legs feel like lead.
“Base,” Lu Han answers simply, and directs Minseok into a seat to buckle him up. Minseok lets himself get strapped up, Lu Han do the same to himself across Minseok. Base will mean answers, so Minseok settles back in his seat and sees Lu Han give him a small, genial smile. It’s oddly comforting, despite all the questions stuffing Minseok’s brain full to bursting.
---
The speed at which they land is so startling that Minseok wonders if they’d even taken off at all, barely having time to sift through any of the jumble in his head, until Lu Han explains that the craft goes at the speed of Mach 10. Nothing makes sense to Minseok. Technology isn’t anywhere near flight at Mach 5, let alone 10, but the speed calculations Minseok runs through the confusion make sense. Perhaps Base made breakthroughs in the time they took to embark on mission, through Minseok’s sure something this big would have made it to memory.
The hangar they alight in is different, too; bigger, the walls made of a material that looks a lot more sturdy than standard Base hangars. Minseok’s caught for a moment wondering if this isn’t Base at all, if Lu Han’s something he hasn’t considered, but he catches the seal again, stamped large on the side of the hangar, and all of the staff in the hangar in standard Base uniform. Base is surprisingly secret and secure for such a large organization, so Minseok will take his chances.
There are no answers, though, not when Lu Han leads them through Base, which looks much, much more advanced and different from the Base Minseok knows. Minseok wonders how many weeks, or perhaps months, even, it has been since mission. The hologram interfaces on every workstation and the DNA fingerprint scans are strangely foreign, like Minseok’s stepping into a world he doesn’t belong in.
Lu Han reports to someone on B3, a weary-looking man pulled thin.
“Just one?”
Lu Han nods shortly, the bare necessities of a reaction, and salutes. The man dismisses him with a nod, and Lu Han heads outside to stand by the door.
“Officer Kim,” the man says, handing him a file, motioning for him to sit. Minseok sees the rank insignia on his shoulder; three sharp arrows downwards and two upwards. That makes him Minseok’s superior, whoever he is. Minseok sits.
“My name is Commander Kim.” He gestures to Minseok’s report. “You were an officer at Base, correct?”
Were is the start of Minseok’s goosebumps. Commander Kim seems to pick up on his disorientation and smiles tightly, carefully.
“We received intelligence two days ago, from Satellite gamma-45, that a flight craft had veered off course and crash landed in the Det; and picked up on human presence. So we ran a little search on the flight craft and nothing turned up -” the commander takes a breath and Minseok’s heart trips over itself in panic - “until we opened up our default search time frame and one hit registered, for a mission fifty years ago.”
It’s like a punch to the face, an explosion of senselessness right in front of Minseok - nothing makes any fucking sense, except, when it all slows down and his ears ring from shock, it all does. All the changes to Base. The flight caisson - he’d been wrong. Kris and Chanyeol had joined him on mission; the second sheet in the file, beyond a report for the alert Base received two days ago for Minseok’s offcourse craft, is a summary of the takeoff report they sent to Base. Kris Wu; Park Chanyeol in muted black ink stares back at him. When Minseok lifts his head for confirmation, anything - the commander’s head is bowed.
“Intelligence picked up only the external unit your flight craft carried, the one you must have been in?”
Minseok nods numbly. Cockpit is a two-person team; the report details Chanyeol and Kris as copilots, which must mean Minseok had been in his caisson in the external unit, under epsilon sleep - standard protocol for passengers besides pilots. Something must have happened for the external unit to be ejected and sent into orbit, which, Minseok realises with the feeling of his blood slowly draining, eventually went off course and crash landed, tipping him and his caisson into the Det.
He’d been spending the last fifty years asleep.
“It must be a lot to take in,” the commander smiles again, more encouragingly. “Your contract with Base expired thirty years ago, so you don’t have an obligation to stay here, if…. you wish. We will, of course, welcome you if you would like to stay on. Lu Han will show you where you can stay while you make a decision to find a place…. or stay indefinitely. Your choice.”
Minseok nods again, dazedly.
"My condolences, Officer Kim," the commander says this time, eyes soft with sympathy. It hasn't occurred to Minseok what must have happened to his mission teammates -
"I understand if you would like some time alone. No rush for your decision. Lu Han will take you to your apartment."
There is one question that occurs in his head, stark against the rest of the jumble. The very point of their mission - any mission - that Base had lined up as Code Red.
"And - the war?"
The commander's smile is a relief, or perhaps a thunderbolt. "It's over, Officer."
---
The first few memories are difficult: the flight simulator exercises leading up to mission, the fitting of their gear is clear as Minseok sits in Lu Han’s car, almost too sharp a memory when it hits. Laughing with Chanyeol about Kris’ drool because he’d fallen asleep on their meeting table. Skipping rope in the gym twice a day for endurance training.
Lu Han helps. He takes Minseok to one of the civilian apartments Base has offsite, says he’ll leave Minseok to have some time alone.
“Call me anytime, if you need help?” Lu Han says as he hands a phone to Minseok, a slim flat rectangle that fits into the palm of Minseok’s hand. Lu Han’s fingertips are a stark warmth against it. Stark against Minseok’s, even.
Minseok nods, taking it. Lu Han’s presence is nice, heartfelt but not overpowering.
“Ah.” The word is almost like an afterthought, as Lu Han looks to the sparse bed, the empty closet in Minseok’s new room. “Would you like me to pick up some bedding and clothes, for you?”
Minseok hadn’t even thought of this, but it feels nice, that someone’s got his back even though it feels like the world’s been pulled out under his feet, that he finds himself smiling. “Thanks,” Minseok says, returning Lu Han’s smile more brightly, “maybe you could show me to the supermarket, or something? I couldn’t let you run errands for me…”
Lu Han seems to take a second, registering confusion, then sincerity. “It’s no problem,” and the smile on his face is so warm and easy that it makes Minseok realise this is what he’s been missing for fifty years, the lack of human interaction. “I could help you pick out stuff. Maybe after you’ve taken a rest, or something?”
“Yeah,” Minseok nods, sinking down on the couch in the living room. “That would be great. I can…. call you?”
“Please,” Lu Han says, and leaves with the same quiet smile, shutting Minseok’s door carefully for him.
It comes as a little chilling, when it parses. Minseok is fifty years older, except mentally and physically the same; epsilon sleep essentially decelerates bodily functions to a speed so slow time on the cellular level passes at a hundredth of real time. He’s no longer an officer with Base, though he could stay on, if he wanted. His teammates are missing, at best. The war is over. Minseok has, essentially, nothing at all. Nothing to fight for; nothing in forward stride, and nothing to hold on to, nothing backing up the present.
It’s a while - Minseok doesn’t even realise he’s been staring into space - before he jerks awake, looking at his clock and realises he’s simply hungry and tired, and should probably take Lu Han up on that offer. Start a semblance of life, then work from there. Minseok can hardly see another choice for himself, so this step already laid out in front of him is the easy one to take.
The phone Lu Han passed him is completely stone cold, without any sign of a power button, and it takes Minseok a good ten minutes to figure out that it’s voice activated. Another blast from the future, a reminder of his unaccustomedness, but Minseok tries not to dwell on that. Lu Han’s voice is thankfully familiar, something raw and true, when it comes through the line.
“I’m here, outside,” Lu Han says when Minseok asks if he can hitch a ride to town. “You can hop right in.”
If Lu Han’s timing is a little too impeccable, Minseok doesn’t mention it. Like this it’s easy to focus on the next step with Lu Han rounding up the rest. “Thanks,” Minseok says when he gets in. Lu Han smiles again, a comfortable smile Minseok’s getting used to, already.
The shopping is easy; Minseok is distracted by the things that’s changed and Lu Han is fascinated by Minseok’s descriptions of what he was used to. They learn small things about each other - they’re the same age, or would have been fifty years ago. But Minseok suggests they pretend the fifty years didn’t happen, so they can speak comfortably. Lu Han agrees with a sparkling grin.
“That’s a good deal for me, then,” Lu Han picks up their trolley of groceries they’d picked out from the catalogue at the door. Minseok’s laugh is short, but a true one from inside. It’s easy, laughing with Lu Han, keeping up a volley of conversation cues. Lu Han smooths around the things Minseok isn’t ready to think about yet.
“Shit,” Minseok realises when they’re running their trolley through the payment scanner. “My bank account -”
“Base has already linked it to the phone I handed you,” Lu Han smiles, “along with the rest of the payout from your previous contract’s insurance, and you’ll get a monthly pension.”
“A pension at twenty-three,” Minseok says, vaguely amused, as Lu Han demonstrates scanning his phone for payment, “guess I could get used to that.”
They have dinner - Minseok still makes a mean seafood stew - and Lu Han helps Minseok set up his new house. Home.
---
sort query, by need
if query=lifestyle, use{datastrings1938:4245}
\expand\
if query=base, use{datastrings122:1508, refer:directive;superior}
\expand\
if query=emotion, use{adapt}
---
Minseok remembers, over the course of the next month. It comes slowly, bit by bit. War breaking, the android invasion. Receiving directive, preparing for mission. Poring over the Det’s geographical coordinates, figuring out a route that steers clear from enemy lines, from warring states. Checking and rechecking the fit of their masks and gear against radiation. Prepping craft.
Getting into his flight caisson to be put under epsilon sleep, joking that Chanyeol had better wake him up only when they were a third of the way there to take over, he hadn’t slept too well last night from Kris’ snoring.
And, of course, Minseok wasn’t conscious to witness whatever it was that made the external craft unit eject to go into orbit - it could have been anything. Minseok remembers their route: high enough over Base’s neighbouring states to keep out of the androids’ radar, engaging bulletproof cover, routing over android camp states. They were strictly a non-combat mission; Base could not lose more officers, but Minseok cannot help wondering, as he pores over their route in the map they’d drew out even if he can remember it now as if it were yesterday, if one particular android state, Axiom, had been the reason for ejection, usually done only under emergencies. They’d been told to keep the fuck out of the way, but -
It makes a thorn grow inside of Minseok, twisting his insides up and cutting them raw, a thorn of hate at the androids. Humanity may have won the war, but old habits die hard, especially something as visceral and acerbic as anger and rancour.
---
Distractions make it easier for Minseok to bottleneck the memories so they come slower, less stirringly, so Minseok asks if Lu Han can show him around Base, reorientate himself in the place he still thinks as home. The smile in Lu Han’s eye is strangely buoyant, a reminder to Minseok that sometimes you don’t have to have anything in particular to smile for.
“Sure,” the corners of Lu Han’s eyes are crinkled and it makes, for some reason, Minseok want to smile too. Not only Lu Han's yawns are infectious.
Base is just as large as Minseok remembers, sitting on the same site, but a lot of buildings have been changed, including the training centre his team spent a good half of their time in, and Minseok’s old office. In its place is a glass dome housing the satellite intelligence centre that Lu Han explains was his first posting.
“So it was you…. who found my craft?” Minseok asks, watching the computers through the tinted glass beep and flash. Lu Han nods, pushing the corner of his mouth in.
“I reported it, and they changed my directive to the retrieval mission.”
It sounds casual, but put it like this Minseok realises it’s the man in front of him who saved his life.
“I don’t think I’ve thanked you yet,” Minseok finds the words dancing on his tongue eager to escape, “for saving me.”
Lu Han’s smile that follows is a little awkward, like he’s embarrassed to be granted credit. “I’m happy to.” It’s quiet, but Minseok can hear all of the sincerity in the small space between them. It feels like a soft scarf on a chilly day.
“The pantry has really good coffee machine coffee,” Lu Han says after a while - strangely, for someone Minseok has barely just met, the silence seems chock full of warmth and the change of subject so natural it feels like Minseok has known Lu Han forever. “I could sneak in and grab us two cups.”
When Lu Han does, laughing at Minseok’s admission that it is pretty good coffee, the clink of his styrofoam cup against Lu Han’s feels like a first spark of concord.
---
It’s easier to make friends, when you see someone day in day out. Lu Han makes that twice as easy - Minseok couldn’t have asked for anyone better to help him ease into this new life. Lu Han is helpful almost to a fault - he’d said that his current directive was to help Minseok to the best of his ability. Minseok thinks it a little excessive, and a little flattering, to be awarded such high priority by Base in this way, but he’s not complaining. Lu Han also makes for good conversation, a good comfort zone for when Minseok has a question, good company. A good friend.
So it’s not so bad. Shoving yourself in complete unfamiliarity is the quickest way to force acclimatization. Lu Han teaches him how to solve a Rubik’s cube to pass the time, and on one weekend they discovered a mutual passion for football. Lu Han finds them a small futsal pitch to kick a ball around. Lu Han scores goals with an almost robotic accuracy, Minseok gripes on their second soccer outing.
Lu Han’s eyes crinkle into nothing as he laughs. “You’re pretty good, too.”
“Aren’t I?” Minseok grins as he lifts his chin in a cheeky nod - somehow running some of the frustration out of himself and the blue above him is buoyant enough - and sends the ball into the net behind Lu Han.
“Hey,” Lu Han yells, tackling him from behind so they tumble, over each other’s limbs, to land firmly, softly on raw earth. A tumble to end up safe.
Minseok’s never really thought about it this way, but perhaps the calm is steadier than the firestorm before. He’d been fueled and heated fifty years ago, burning with drive to help end the war, quell the androids behind enemy lines and wrestle control of human states back, but now that the war is over and life is a routine sort of mellow, maybe he could get used to this, too.
---
Minseok manages to fail spectacularly at using one electrical appliance after another, which makes Lu Han a common fixture in his house, too.
“Thanks,” Minseok grins when Lu Han helps him with his new toaster.
“Why do you keep saying thanks,” Lu Han helps himself to a drink in Minseok’s fridge with a smile to match his. “I thought we were friends.”
“We are,” Minseok says, and catches the can Lu Han tosses at him to clink it against Lu Han’s in a cheers.
“You know,” Minseok takes a gulp of his drink, “I’ve been thinking about heading back for work.”
Lu Han stops drinking, looks at Minseok expectantly. Minseok shrugs.
“Spend my time, I mean. I’m not really sure what else to do here, and I like working, keeping myself occupied.” Lu Han nods, biting his lip a little. He looks almost adorable, the way he thinks. A textbook description of the word ponder. It makes Minseok chuckle.
“I can arrange for Commander Kim to meet you,” Lu Han tells him. “He’ll be able to find something for you.”
“What happens to your directive, then?”
Lu Han shrugs at this, taking another sip of his drink somewhat regretfully. “They’ll assign me to another mission, probably, if you don’t need my help anymore.”
“But I do,” Minseok blurts, and he realises he does only when the words leave his mouth. Lu Han’s presence has weaved itself so smoothly into Minseok's days that a big part of his adaption, his easing into a world an age into the future is, essentially, Lu Han himself. Lu Han's grin is happy, mischievous, even.
"Glad to hear that," Lu Han says, and comes over to sling his arm over Minseok's shoulder fluidly, an action natural and instinctive. "I'm not going anywhere, what would you do with your piles and piles of laundry?"
"True,” Minseok says, kicking his washing machine cheerfully and sends it into a frighteningly frenzied whirl.
---
Minseok rejoins Base as an architect building and designing new flight craft. Lu Han’s new directive is, by a stroke of luck, the same - Minseok hears that a tsunami has wrecked the holding hangar at the edge of the country that houses a good number of Base assets. There’s a lot that Minseok has to pick up on the job; new technologies he never knew he could tap, but Lu Han’s expertise helps. They have dinner together often after work, and somewhere along the way Minseok started placing another cup in the bathroom for Lu Han’s toothbrush for when he sleeps over. Minseok’s starting to find something within himself when he’s with Lu Han, a vague warmth that Minseok’s stumped to describe - the word is scrambling around in his throat too flighty to land.
They’re sitting in Minseok’s apartment after Minseok’s gotten his ass trampled at a football video game - Minseok is convinced Lu Han’s rigged the game to scan his body movements more accurately, sprawled over the sofa with Lu Han’s pinky just close enough to tickle Minseok’s.
“Next time we can pick a game you’re better at,” Lu Han says, and Minseok closes that distance to punch Lu Han in the forearm. Lu Han just laughs and kicks in the direction of Minseok’s shin, like he always does.
Attachment; there it is melting on his tongue.
“I’m hungry,” Lu Han announces, and pokes the tip of his foot in Minseok’s calf.
“We just had dinner...”
“Winning makes me hungry,” Lu Han grins, and rolls off to appropriate Minseok’s kitchen to cook up some ramyeon and an associated mess.
---
run: {diagnostic: heart}
run report
\expand\
def outcome: report for maintenance
---
A year and Minseok still finds himself getting lost in Base, though to be fair Base itself is a sprawling 9 storeys over 18 hectares. Minseok takes a wrong left turn after a meeting, a confused right and several more to end up near the edge of Base, passing a glass window where he sees Lu Han lying on a metal tabletop in a lab.
Strange place to take a nap in, he muses, and is ready to head in to shake Lu Han awake when two people round the benchtop in the lab - Minseok vaguely remembers them as two of the head scientists in Base; their team’s achievements had been lauded by the Secretary-General as pivotal to Base operations. One scientist’s scalpel is gleaming under the light.
Several flicks of the wrist; it’s faster, less intricate than Minseok would have imagined, and Lu Han’s chest is open. Red is everywhere Minseok looks. The tips of the scientist’s fingers dip inside Lu Han’s chest; pick out a thick motherboard chip drive, the ones that go in the autopilot console, in the left side of the cockpit of a flight craft. Blood drips off the edge of the drive; the scientist puts it in a chamber on the table behind Lu Han.
The other siphons a clear liquid out of Lu Han’s chest cavity with a long tube - Minseok realises he’s not breathing anymore - and replaces it with liquid from another bottle; Minseok watches as the meniscus in the tube falls lower, lower into the hole in Lu Han’s chest, and, inadvertently, trails his eyes upwards, like on instinct, to Lu Han’s face. There is not one hint of difference - he could very well have been asleep.
Minseok can just about make out, from his side of the window, the diagnostic test the scientist runs, the output hooked up to one of the electric signal relay ends from Lu Han’s heart with crocodile clips. There is a ringing in Minseok’s ears, a deafening one that sounds like nothing at all.
Android
Version 25.3.12
© Genexis Laboratories, 2103
Maintenance complete. Request to exit and reboot.
/
Restore directive?
/
Restoring directive.
/
Reboot.
Lu Han is an android. Minseok remembers, this time, that plunging emptiness, like the world pulled out beneath your feet, that he had felt that day in Commander Kim’s office. A firework in his ears; the vibrating silence after an explosion. Blood rushing; leaving his hands trembling and numb, a scattered flock of geese in his head. The flight or fight after a revelation:
Minseok runs, before the enemy can wake up.
---
In the 2030s, robot technology experienced a breakthrough. Artificial Intelligence Corp. developed a new coding system that allowed the inclusion of memory and adaptation: cognitive analysis and learning. Computers with the ability to think, on their own.
Two decades of mass android - metal bodied - production followed to reduce workloads, take on jobs that humans did not want to do, like building heavy equipment and mining metals for military equipment, until they had amassed enough numbers to build an army. Then they wrestled control of two states near the border and ignited an explosion in the nuclear plant of the country’s artillery fort, or the area now known as Detonation - the Det.
The war broke. Base sent half of their officer troop to the frontline; the other half into support missions. Minseok’s team: to investigate the Det, report the extent of destruction and assess the emergency containment of radiation. If under attack by the enemy, open fire.
Minseok had assumed, in the harsh glare of Commander Kim’s office and the truth of his existence in the past fifty years, that they’d won the war; he’d wanted to assume. That they’d overcome the androids and wrestled their peace back. He’d been wrong.
The androids had won, instead, and hijacked the human race; assembled themselves with human cells and infiltrated human presence. Minseok’s been handing his life over to the enemy for the past year.
It’s a dangerous feeling, the first rush of rage from betrayal. It feels enough to negate all the traces of Lu Han in Minseok’s apartment, from the toothbrush in the bathroom to the mud stain on the soccer jersey in Minseok’s laundry pile.
---
Minseok doesn’t move anything. He’s a creature of habit. The fear kicks in after the anger crystallizes, over a sleepless night, to a sharpness beneath the surface. He’s been wrenched out of what he thought was the truth, twice over, to find himself within unfamiliarity. People he thought he knew.
Minseok almost jumps, when his phone rings in the dead silence of his apartment. There’s only really one person it could be, and he doesn’t touch it. It looks just as foreign as it had, in his hand the first time he brushed Lu Han’s hand to take it.
“Base-issued,” Lu Han had said. It jolts Minseok into a sense of awareness so chilling it raises goosebumps on the back of his neck. Lu Han - perhaps even Commander Kim - are part of Base, which means even the very definition of safety and defence has been broken. Minseok has nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Lu Han sends a message to Minseok that afternoon, one that beams a hologram hovering above Minseok’s phone. It has just three words: where are you, and somehow with the knowledge of the revelation Minseok hears these pixel-composed letters in Lu Han’s voice easily, and wonders how he never caught on. All of the hints: the way Lu Han does things with a robotic precision, reacts to things with a set intensity - there is no continuum, no scale with Lu Han, and the fact that Minseok has never seen Lu Han get any more than a little breathless or flushed, even during the most intense of their soccer sessions.
Perhaps they’d been staring at him in the eye and he hadn’t wanted to see them - his undoing, as a human. You see what you want to see. Lu Han had been a shoulder to call home, and human instinct craves comfort and shelter.
The hologram doesn’t go away even after an hour of Minseok staring into the blackness of the sky outside his window, so he turns his phone over and gets into bed. Sleep doesn’t come easily that night, not when Minseok remembers the fifty years he missed.
---
Minseok jack-knives up the next day, jolted awake by scalpels and operating lights featuring strongly in his nightmares. The realization that comes on the heels of his slumber tastes acrid on his tongue: everything he was told about himself may have been a farce. Kim Minseok, previous officer from Base, sent into mission and epsilon sleep for fifty years, rescued. None of the above may apply. He may very well be a hostage of the androids; a memory-altered shell, a source of cells and organs.
Minseok turns his hologram laptop on so quickly the neon blue light quite hurts his eyes in the darkness of his bedroom. He doesn’t realise his fingers are trembling a little till they take a few tries to spell: the android war. The first link is a brief history and Minseok clicks to read the truth about his life.
The androids decimated the Det, taking most of the artillery the human race had left, after the androids orchestrated the larceny of twenty mortars, five cannon tanks and almost a thousand shell-firing guns. The war broke.
It took a year, before both sides burned themselves out and compromised to call a truce. The androids required human intelligence and expertise to build new androids, and the war and poor sanitation conditions had led to superbug influenza outbreaks throughout the country, reducing the human population to a level below replaceable possibility. The human race would have been extinct by the turn of the century.
An exchange was made: the androids would provide the hearts and brains - the only organs military scientists found impossible to crack the code on self-regeneration within in Petri dishes - for hybrid androids, which would be composed almost entirely of human cells. Besides the nervous system, which are wires carrying electrical signals sent to and from the brain or heart drives, the rest of the bodies of these hybrid androids are essentially human, put together from organs and skin grown in a cryo-caisson. This is what Minseok has been befriending, trusting, for a year.
Not quite the enemy, but not quite something else, entirely.
The knot in his chest that had tangled up the day before seems a little looser, but Minseok’s not sure. Unsettlement, perhaps, a simmering sense of uneasiness he cannot shake. He’s not sure if he’s ready to see the other side as a friend; a symbiotic entity yet after the years of solid belief that they are the enemy to be overcome.
When his phone rings again, Minseok watches the blinking icon on the hologram beam, Lu Han’s face on the live video feed. Immediately apparent is the concern on his face, which shakes Minseok, stirs him up a little more inside. It’s still there, the attachment and emotional dependence he’d had with Lu Han - not even the anger changes something as human, as raw as this running through his veins.
Still, Minseok has no answer to the question: can you put heart into an android, by building a human around it? Or, can you remove the heart from a human, if you put a chip in place of it?
---
Minseok puts on his running shoes when the rainclouds clear - sometimes a good run sweats all the frustration out of himself. He ensures the music he plays in his ears is loud enough so it cuts over the boiling questions in his mind; focuses on counting the steps he takes.
After five thousand steps the focus on catching his breath takes over and it takes less effort to shove the things he doesn’t want to think about yet to the back of his mind. Minseok doesn’t miss the notice, though, that the traffic is similarly busy, the store around the corner is still having a sale, the stretch of pavement in the next block has the same number of cracks. Nothing’s changed, despite Minseok’s entire world being turned inside out for the second time in his life.
He doesn't miss the difference, either, between the first time and the second. It makes him start sprinting, pounding down the concrete with his eyes closed.
When eventually, his heart is ready to give and he's so flushed his body is screaming for rest, he slows and passes a newsstand, headlines yelling about a new metal alloy lighter but sturdier than aluminium in bold font.
He's finding the words to ask Lu Han about whether he thinks this will affect flight craft design in his throat before he can catch himself, and this makes him inexplicably empty inside, a missing piece that means a lot more to him than he'd thought.
---
There are exactly ten messages blinking on his phone the next morning Minseok wakes, three days after the wrong turn in the Centurion building in Base, three days of absence at the flight design laboratory. He’s not sure he’s ready to jump back into the world he’s only just managed to ease in before being turned inside out, tumbling around to land on a different side of the cube.
The messages are all from Lu Han, sent exactly two hours apart. They are all a variation of where are you, and Minseok doesn’t have to click to listen to the voice recordings Lu Han made transcribed by the phone into text messages to hear the concern in his voice. Lu Han’s always been bad at finding the words to put his heart in, but, as Minseok hears the hurry, the slight frustration in Lu Han’s voice, Lu Han makes up for that by putting all of his heart into his words.
The same way Minseok finds it out of second nature to physically show affection, but the words slip out of his throat easily, in contrast. Minseok wonders if this is why they have grown to fit around each other so smoothly - in the ways that they are alike, and yet different.
Another simplest of questions he is unable to answer weaves between his dreams tonight: what if he simply misses Lu Han?
---
if response absent, def outcome: face-to-face communication
\expand\
if response absent, repeat
---
Minseok wakes to the usual traffic sounds outside his window, noise that he’s grown to treat as his personal alarm clock. Filing another request for leave of absence today, Minseok pulls himself through the same motions he’s already been used to: loading news sites for the day’s news, setting the coffee machine into action the way Lu Han taught him, moving the pile of laundry just dry into the living room to be folded.
He’d promised himself, sometime last night, to make a decision today about heading back to work. He’s well aware that the rational point of view is to reject his previous mindset, but it’s a big leap of faith to take, and Minseok’s always been cautious about where to fall.
It starts raining, the water falling in heavy sheets that turns the outside street into a stormy disquiet, and Minseok turns absently out of the window to see Lu Han standing there drenched in the rain.
It jerks him right out of his train of thought, and, remembering that Lu Han is a friend - his very best one - before he remembers anything else, he hurries out of the house to let Lu Han in.
“Why didn’t you -” Minseok yells over the rain and tugs Lu Han inside, before he remembers that he’d turned his phone off to put off decisions, even as he runs out his door and catches sight of the missed alerts Lu Han had sent his intercom that he’d put on silent. Lu Han’s teeth are chattering, and Minseok’s tearing through his clean laundry pile to find a towel for Lu Han and his now soaked phone.
There’s a quiet, strangely comfortable silence that beats between them when Minseok catches Lu Han’s eyes, Lu Han smiling just a little, and then Lu Han shrugs. “It was sunny when I walked over.”
Only one of Minseok’s questions, answered, yet he’s still grateful that he didn’t need to voice it for Lu Han to understand. Probably one of the things he’s come to associate with that most comfortable understanding they have.
“Why,” he asks, anyway, knowing that somehow, Lu Han will know.
Lu Han’s smile is tiny and dents the side of his mouth, but warm and toasty in comparison to the sheeting rain outside. “I like you.”
Minseok knows there's nothing less or more to that; that is all he means. Lu Han likes being with him, hanging out, watching Minseok complete the equation. And he finds the simplicity of this so endearing and warm in his heart beating fleshly in his chest that, when he searches for a reply, he lands on something that seems precisely right on his tongue.
“Me too.” And he does, Minseok realises when the words are hanging between them like a spark of fire.
Lu Han’s eyes are bright with a grin that he’s trying to keep secret on his lips, like he’s pleasantly surprised to hear the answer. Minseok likes that it’s so easy to read Lu Han’s face, no matter how subtle he thinks he is.
“How do you know, though?” It’s a childish question, but Minseok can hardly stop it. All that he’s acutely aware of, now, is his unconscious decision to follow his heart. The leap of faith to trust. Perhaps it might be a little alarming to someone else, that Lu Han has a pull on him, but Minseok thinks it's exactly the way they interact, the way they gel together. He can’t explain why he’s sure this feels like the right decision, but he doesn’t think there’s any other road he would want to pick.
Lu Han shrugs again, holding the towel around himself. “It’s like an electric buzz inside, I don’t know. Like I have live wires inside.”
And you know what, Minseok thinks as he watches Lu Han rub the wet out of his hair, even if their hearts are different, the things they say and mean, the things they feel are the same. Minseok finds this is something he'd never have thought of to describe what “like” means, but, feeling his veins electrify themselves as he shifts closer to they’re touching, yet not quite, so apt.
And who cares if maybe, the screws in Lu Han need tightening sometimes? Life and rain and nature are cold enough, but the press of Lu Han’s skin in his side is raw and real, as raw and real as it gets. To trust is human - Lu Han deserves no less.
You see what you want to see, Minseok thinks, and gets up to look for another towel. Turn a cube around and it’s still the same thing you’re holding, but something else you’re looking at. Minseok can’t quite think of any negative emotion he’d felt in the last few days that matches up to the Goliath of Lu Han’s presence in his life.
He does owe Lu Han an explanation, though, and an apology, so after Lu Han’s changed out of his wet clothes and is sitting warm with a cup of Minseok’s (or the coffee machine’s) best coffee, Minseok clears his throat and tells him exactly how he’s missed him.
---
(They live for a very long time, until Lu Han thinks, when Minseok is old and can't see straight, that this much is more than enough for him, wonders if it is possible to be this happy for this long? Minseok says of course it is, and that's all there is needed to be said.)
lu han/minseok, pg-13, general
can you remove the heart from a human?
au inspired by oblivion, artificial intelligence and wall·e
a jillion thanks to ang who pulled me through this using various methods of ...encouragement, jannah who puts up with my shit 200% of the time and esp sam who refused to let me junk this ♥
On the metal tabletop of Genexis lab three, Lu Han breathes.
His directive: investigate human presence detected in the Det by satellite intelligence, suspected to be the officers sent to the Det fifty years ago, rescue if alive. Bring them back.
Complete previous step to proceed. If unsuccessful, repeat step.
Lu Han suits up.
---
Minseok wakes up in the hands of Lu Han.
“My name is Lu Han, I’m here to rescue you,” is the first thing he hears. He doesn’t recognize this person, or the team with him, but he does recognize the seal on his uniform; he’s from Base Zero. Minseok has to take a few moments to orientate himself - his eyelids are sticky and heavy, his mind fuzzy: he’s in his flight caisson, red sand and rock. The guy jams a gas mask over Minseok’s face, helps Minseok out of his caisson. The rock is hard and unyielding. It makes Minseok’s knees buckle a little.
Minseok has no idea where the hell he is.
Confusion; panic, even, is flooding Minseok’s instincts as he gets helped to his feet by this team from Base Zero. Minseok catches Lu Han’s eyes.
“This way, please,” Lu Han says quietly. There’s something chillingly simple about Lu Han’s eyes that Minseok cannot place, but - “hurry, the radiation levels are still a danger.”
Much too late, Minseok remembers their directive. It feels many years ago, foggy and vague, but that makes no sense to Minseok. It’s sudden, the memory, after the jog Lu Han gave: radiation. Land in the Det. Test radiation levels, procure samples. Map terrain for analysis on containment. Return.
Minseok was in his flight caisson, but he can see none of the standard aircrafts that hold caissons; the debris around his caisson looks charred beyond recognition. Their team had been preparing for mission; Minseok remembers the gruelling circuit trainings they’d had daily to build aerobic capacity, but nothing beyond that. They must have had embarked on mission to suit up in the flight caissons, but Minseok’s mind draws a blank.
“Kris,” Minseok says, his voice cracking on the single syllable to nothing at all, like a voice after years of unuse. He tries again, but it comes out a lot more like a hoarse whisper, a question. “Kris? Chanyeol?”
Lu Han looks puzzled. “There’s no one else we found.”
Kris and Chanyeol are the rest of Minseok’s team, and if they are nowhere in sight - Lu Han’s confusion at his question is real enough for Minseok to believe it. Kris and Chanyeol never made it on mission with him. But how the hell did he get in his flight caisson, on the flight craft? It was a small mission, already, and three is the bare minimum to complete their directive.
“This way, please,” another member of Lu Han’s team, that hadn’t identified himself, ushers them towards another sleek aircraft, a solid steel capsule without wings. Completely unlike standard aircraft Base Zero has, but Minseok can see Base Zero’s seal on the side.
“Where are we headed?” Minseok blurts, shuffling forward. His legs feel like lead.
“Base,” Lu Han answers simply, and directs Minseok into a seat to buckle him up. Minseok lets himself get strapped up, Lu Han do the same to himself across Minseok. Base will mean answers, so Minseok settles back in his seat and sees Lu Han give him a small, genial smile. It’s oddly comforting, despite all the questions stuffing Minseok’s brain full to bursting.
---
The speed at which they land is so startling that Minseok wonders if they’d even taken off at all, barely having time to sift through any of the jumble in his head, until Lu Han explains that the craft goes at the speed of Mach 10. Nothing makes sense to Minseok. Technology isn’t anywhere near flight at Mach 5, let alone 10, but the speed calculations Minseok runs through the confusion make sense. Perhaps Base made breakthroughs in the time they took to embark on mission, through Minseok’s sure something this big would have made it to memory.
The hangar they alight in is different, too; bigger, the walls made of a material that looks a lot more sturdy than standard Base hangars. Minseok’s caught for a moment wondering if this isn’t Base at all, if Lu Han’s something he hasn’t considered, but he catches the seal again, stamped large on the side of the hangar, and all of the staff in the hangar in standard Base uniform. Base is surprisingly secret and secure for such a large organization, so Minseok will take his chances.
There are no answers, though, not when Lu Han leads them through Base, which looks much, much more advanced and different from the Base Minseok knows. Minseok wonders how many weeks, or perhaps months, even, it has been since mission. The hologram interfaces on every workstation and the DNA fingerprint scans are strangely foreign, like Minseok’s stepping into a world he doesn’t belong in.
Lu Han reports to someone on B3, a weary-looking man pulled thin.
“Just one?”
Lu Han nods shortly, the bare necessities of a reaction, and salutes. The man dismisses him with a nod, and Lu Han heads outside to stand by the door.
“Officer Kim,” the man says, handing him a file, motioning for him to sit. Minseok sees the rank insignia on his shoulder; three sharp arrows downwards and two upwards. That makes him Minseok’s superior, whoever he is. Minseok sits.
“My name is Commander Kim.” He gestures to Minseok’s report. “You were an officer at Base, correct?”
Were is the start of Minseok’s goosebumps. Commander Kim seems to pick up on his disorientation and smiles tightly, carefully.
“We received intelligence two days ago, from Satellite gamma-45, that a flight craft had veered off course and crash landed in the Det; and picked up on human presence. So we ran a little search on the flight craft and nothing turned up -” the commander takes a breath and Minseok’s heart trips over itself in panic - “until we opened up our default search time frame and one hit registered, for a mission fifty years ago.”
It’s like a punch to the face, an explosion of senselessness right in front of Minseok - nothing makes any fucking sense, except, when it all slows down and his ears ring from shock, it all does. All the changes to Base. The flight caisson - he’d been wrong. Kris and Chanyeol had joined him on mission; the second sheet in the file, beyond a report for the alert Base received two days ago for Minseok’s offcourse craft, is a summary of the takeoff report they sent to Base. Kris Wu; Park Chanyeol in muted black ink stares back at him. When Minseok lifts his head for confirmation, anything - the commander’s head is bowed.
“Intelligence picked up only the external unit your flight craft carried, the one you must have been in?”
Minseok nods numbly. Cockpit is a two-person team; the report details Chanyeol and Kris as copilots, which must mean Minseok had been in his caisson in the external unit, under epsilon sleep - standard protocol for passengers besides pilots. Something must have happened for the external unit to be ejected and sent into orbit, which, Minseok realises with the feeling of his blood slowly draining, eventually went off course and crash landed, tipping him and his caisson into the Det.
He’d been spending the last fifty years asleep.
“It must be a lot to take in,” the commander smiles again, more encouragingly. “Your contract with Base expired thirty years ago, so you don’t have an obligation to stay here, if…. you wish. We will, of course, welcome you if you would like to stay on. Lu Han will show you where you can stay while you make a decision to find a place…. or stay indefinitely. Your choice.”
Minseok nods again, dazedly.
"My condolences, Officer Kim," the commander says this time, eyes soft with sympathy. It hasn't occurred to Minseok what must have happened to his mission teammates -
"I understand if you would like some time alone. No rush for your decision. Lu Han will take you to your apartment."
There is one question that occurs in his head, stark against the rest of the jumble. The very point of their mission - any mission - that Base had lined up as Code Red.
"And - the war?"
The commander's smile is a relief, or perhaps a thunderbolt. "It's over, Officer."
---
The first few memories are difficult: the flight simulator exercises leading up to mission, the fitting of their gear is clear as Minseok sits in Lu Han’s car, almost too sharp a memory when it hits. Laughing with Chanyeol about Kris’ drool because he’d fallen asleep on their meeting table. Skipping rope in the gym twice a day for endurance training.
Lu Han helps. He takes Minseok to one of the civilian apartments Base has offsite, says he’ll leave Minseok to have some time alone.
“Call me anytime, if you need help?” Lu Han says as he hands a phone to Minseok, a slim flat rectangle that fits into the palm of Minseok’s hand. Lu Han’s fingertips are a stark warmth against it. Stark against Minseok’s, even.
Minseok nods, taking it. Lu Han’s presence is nice, heartfelt but not overpowering.
“Ah.” The word is almost like an afterthought, as Lu Han looks to the sparse bed, the empty closet in Minseok’s new room. “Would you like me to pick up some bedding and clothes, for you?”
Minseok hadn’t even thought of this, but it feels nice, that someone’s got his back even though it feels like the world’s been pulled out under his feet, that he finds himself smiling. “Thanks,” Minseok says, returning Lu Han’s smile more brightly, “maybe you could show me to the supermarket, or something? I couldn’t let you run errands for me…”
Lu Han seems to take a second, registering confusion, then sincerity. “It’s no problem,” and the smile on his face is so warm and easy that it makes Minseok realise this is what he’s been missing for fifty years, the lack of human interaction. “I could help you pick out stuff. Maybe after you’ve taken a rest, or something?”
“Yeah,” Minseok nods, sinking down on the couch in the living room. “That would be great. I can…. call you?”
“Please,” Lu Han says, and leaves with the same quiet smile, shutting Minseok’s door carefully for him.
It comes as a little chilling, when it parses. Minseok is fifty years older, except mentally and physically the same; epsilon sleep essentially decelerates bodily functions to a speed so slow time on the cellular level passes at a hundredth of real time. He’s no longer an officer with Base, though he could stay on, if he wanted. His teammates are missing, at best. The war is over. Minseok has, essentially, nothing at all. Nothing to fight for; nothing in forward stride, and nothing to hold on to, nothing backing up the present.
It’s a while - Minseok doesn’t even realise he’s been staring into space - before he jerks awake, looking at his clock and realises he’s simply hungry and tired, and should probably take Lu Han up on that offer. Start a semblance of life, then work from there. Minseok can hardly see another choice for himself, so this step already laid out in front of him is the easy one to take.
The phone Lu Han passed him is completely stone cold, without any sign of a power button, and it takes Minseok a good ten minutes to figure out that it’s voice activated. Another blast from the future, a reminder of his unaccustomedness, but Minseok tries not to dwell on that. Lu Han’s voice is thankfully familiar, something raw and true, when it comes through the line.
“I’m here, outside,” Lu Han says when Minseok asks if he can hitch a ride to town. “You can hop right in.”
If Lu Han’s timing is a little too impeccable, Minseok doesn’t mention it. Like this it’s easy to focus on the next step with Lu Han rounding up the rest. “Thanks,” Minseok says when he gets in. Lu Han smiles again, a comfortable smile Minseok’s getting used to, already.
The shopping is easy; Minseok is distracted by the things that’s changed and Lu Han is fascinated by Minseok’s descriptions of what he was used to. They learn small things about each other - they’re the same age, or would have been fifty years ago. But Minseok suggests they pretend the fifty years didn’t happen, so they can speak comfortably. Lu Han agrees with a sparkling grin.
“That’s a good deal for me, then,” Lu Han picks up their trolley of groceries they’d picked out from the catalogue at the door. Minseok’s laugh is short, but a true one from inside. It’s easy, laughing with Lu Han, keeping up a volley of conversation cues. Lu Han smooths around the things Minseok isn’t ready to think about yet.
“Shit,” Minseok realises when they’re running their trolley through the payment scanner. “My bank account -”
“Base has already linked it to the phone I handed you,” Lu Han smiles, “along with the rest of the payout from your previous contract’s insurance, and you’ll get a monthly pension.”
“A pension at twenty-three,” Minseok says, vaguely amused, as Lu Han demonstrates scanning his phone for payment, “guess I could get used to that.”
They have dinner - Minseok still makes a mean seafood stew - and Lu Han helps Minseok set up his new house. Home.
---
sort query, by need
if query=lifestyle, use{datastrings1938:4245}
\expand\
if query=base, use{datastrings122:1508, refer:directive;superior}
\expand\
if query=emotion, use{adapt}
---
Minseok remembers, over the course of the next month. It comes slowly, bit by bit. War breaking, the android invasion. Receiving directive, preparing for mission. Poring over the Det’s geographical coordinates, figuring out a route that steers clear from enemy lines, from warring states. Checking and rechecking the fit of their masks and gear against radiation. Prepping craft.
Getting into his flight caisson to be put under epsilon sleep, joking that Chanyeol had better wake him up only when they were a third of the way there to take over, he hadn’t slept too well last night from Kris’ snoring.
And, of course, Minseok wasn’t conscious to witness whatever it was that made the external craft unit eject to go into orbit - it could have been anything. Minseok remembers their route: high enough over Base’s neighbouring states to keep out of the androids’ radar, engaging bulletproof cover, routing over android camp states. They were strictly a non-combat mission; Base could not lose more officers, but Minseok cannot help wondering, as he pores over their route in the map they’d drew out even if he can remember it now as if it were yesterday, if one particular android state, Axiom, had been the reason for ejection, usually done only under emergencies. They’d been told to keep the fuck out of the way, but -
It makes a thorn grow inside of Minseok, twisting his insides up and cutting them raw, a thorn of hate at the androids. Humanity may have won the war, but old habits die hard, especially something as visceral and acerbic as anger and rancour.
---
Distractions make it easier for Minseok to bottleneck the memories so they come slower, less stirringly, so Minseok asks if Lu Han can show him around Base, reorientate himself in the place he still thinks as home. The smile in Lu Han’s eye is strangely buoyant, a reminder to Minseok that sometimes you don’t have to have anything in particular to smile for.
“Sure,” the corners of Lu Han’s eyes are crinkled and it makes, for some reason, Minseok want to smile too. Not only Lu Han's yawns are infectious.
Base is just as large as Minseok remembers, sitting on the same site, but a lot of buildings have been changed, including the training centre his team spent a good half of their time in, and Minseok’s old office. In its place is a glass dome housing the satellite intelligence centre that Lu Han explains was his first posting.
“So it was you…. who found my craft?” Minseok asks, watching the computers through the tinted glass beep and flash. Lu Han nods, pushing the corner of his mouth in.
“I reported it, and they changed my directive to the retrieval mission.”
It sounds casual, but put it like this Minseok realises it’s the man in front of him who saved his life.
“I don’t think I’ve thanked you yet,” Minseok finds the words dancing on his tongue eager to escape, “for saving me.”
Lu Han’s smile that follows is a little awkward, like he’s embarrassed to be granted credit. “I’m happy to.” It’s quiet, but Minseok can hear all of the sincerity in the small space between them. It feels like a soft scarf on a chilly day.
“The pantry has really good coffee machine coffee,” Lu Han says after a while - strangely, for someone Minseok has barely just met, the silence seems chock full of warmth and the change of subject so natural it feels like Minseok has known Lu Han forever. “I could sneak in and grab us two cups.”
When Lu Han does, laughing at Minseok’s admission that it is pretty good coffee, the clink of his styrofoam cup against Lu Han’s feels like a first spark of concord.
---
It’s easier to make friends, when you see someone day in day out. Lu Han makes that twice as easy - Minseok couldn’t have asked for anyone better to help him ease into this new life. Lu Han is helpful almost to a fault - he’d said that his current directive was to help Minseok to the best of his ability. Minseok thinks it a little excessive, and a little flattering, to be awarded such high priority by Base in this way, but he’s not complaining. Lu Han also makes for good conversation, a good comfort zone for when Minseok has a question, good company. A good friend.
So it’s not so bad. Shoving yourself in complete unfamiliarity is the quickest way to force acclimatization. Lu Han teaches him how to solve a Rubik’s cube to pass the time, and on one weekend they discovered a mutual passion for football. Lu Han finds them a small futsal pitch to kick a ball around. Lu Han scores goals with an almost robotic accuracy, Minseok gripes on their second soccer outing.
Lu Han’s eyes crinkle into nothing as he laughs. “You’re pretty good, too.”
“Aren’t I?” Minseok grins as he lifts his chin in a cheeky nod - somehow running some of the frustration out of himself and the blue above him is buoyant enough - and sends the ball into the net behind Lu Han.
“Hey,” Lu Han yells, tackling him from behind so they tumble, over each other’s limbs, to land firmly, softly on raw earth. A tumble to end up safe.
Minseok’s never really thought about it this way, but perhaps the calm is steadier than the firestorm before. He’d been fueled and heated fifty years ago, burning with drive to help end the war, quell the androids behind enemy lines and wrestle control of human states back, but now that the war is over and life is a routine sort of mellow, maybe he could get used to this, too.
---
Minseok manages to fail spectacularly at using one electrical appliance after another, which makes Lu Han a common fixture in his house, too.
“Thanks,” Minseok grins when Lu Han helps him with his new toaster.
“Why do you keep saying thanks,” Lu Han helps himself to a drink in Minseok’s fridge with a smile to match his. “I thought we were friends.”
“We are,” Minseok says, and catches the can Lu Han tosses at him to clink it against Lu Han’s in a cheers.
“You know,” Minseok takes a gulp of his drink, “I’ve been thinking about heading back for work.”
Lu Han stops drinking, looks at Minseok expectantly. Minseok shrugs.
“Spend my time, I mean. I’m not really sure what else to do here, and I like working, keeping myself occupied.” Lu Han nods, biting his lip a little. He looks almost adorable, the way he thinks. A textbook description of the word ponder. It makes Minseok chuckle.
“I can arrange for Commander Kim to meet you,” Lu Han tells him. “He’ll be able to find something for you.”
“What happens to your directive, then?”
Lu Han shrugs at this, taking another sip of his drink somewhat regretfully. “They’ll assign me to another mission, probably, if you don’t need my help anymore.”
“But I do,” Minseok blurts, and he realises he does only when the words leave his mouth. Lu Han’s presence has weaved itself so smoothly into Minseok's days that a big part of his adaption, his easing into a world an age into the future is, essentially, Lu Han himself. Lu Han's grin is happy, mischievous, even.
"Glad to hear that," Lu Han says, and comes over to sling his arm over Minseok's shoulder fluidly, an action natural and instinctive. "I'm not going anywhere, what would you do with your piles and piles of laundry?"
"True,” Minseok says, kicking his washing machine cheerfully and sends it into a frighteningly frenzied whirl.
---
Minseok rejoins Base as an architect building and designing new flight craft. Lu Han’s new directive is, by a stroke of luck, the same - Minseok hears that a tsunami has wrecked the holding hangar at the edge of the country that houses a good number of Base assets. There’s a lot that Minseok has to pick up on the job; new technologies he never knew he could tap, but Lu Han’s expertise helps. They have dinner together often after work, and somewhere along the way Minseok started placing another cup in the bathroom for Lu Han’s toothbrush for when he sleeps over. Minseok’s starting to find something within himself when he’s with Lu Han, a vague warmth that Minseok’s stumped to describe - the word is scrambling around in his throat too flighty to land.
They’re sitting in Minseok’s apartment after Minseok’s gotten his ass trampled at a football video game - Minseok is convinced Lu Han’s rigged the game to scan his body movements more accurately, sprawled over the sofa with Lu Han’s pinky just close enough to tickle Minseok’s.
“Next time we can pick a game you’re better at,” Lu Han says, and Minseok closes that distance to punch Lu Han in the forearm. Lu Han just laughs and kicks in the direction of Minseok’s shin, like he always does.
Attachment; there it is melting on his tongue.
“I’m hungry,” Lu Han announces, and pokes the tip of his foot in Minseok’s calf.
“We just had dinner...”
“Winning makes me hungry,” Lu Han grins, and rolls off to appropriate Minseok’s kitchen to cook up some ramyeon and an associated mess.
---
run: {diagnostic: heart}
run report
\expand\
def outcome: report for maintenance
---
A year and Minseok still finds himself getting lost in Base, though to be fair Base itself is a sprawling 9 storeys over 18 hectares. Minseok takes a wrong left turn after a meeting, a confused right and several more to end up near the edge of Base, passing a glass window where he sees Lu Han lying on a metal tabletop in a lab.
Strange place to take a nap in, he muses, and is ready to head in to shake Lu Han awake when two people round the benchtop in the lab - Minseok vaguely remembers them as two of the head scientists in Base; their team’s achievements had been lauded by the Secretary-General as pivotal to Base operations. One scientist’s scalpel is gleaming under the light.
Several flicks of the wrist; it’s faster, less intricate than Minseok would have imagined, and Lu Han’s chest is open. Red is everywhere Minseok looks. The tips of the scientist’s fingers dip inside Lu Han’s chest; pick out a thick motherboard chip drive, the ones that go in the autopilot console, in the left side of the cockpit of a flight craft. Blood drips off the edge of the drive; the scientist puts it in a chamber on the table behind Lu Han.
The other siphons a clear liquid out of Lu Han’s chest cavity with a long tube - Minseok realises he’s not breathing anymore - and replaces it with liquid from another bottle; Minseok watches as the meniscus in the tube falls lower, lower into the hole in Lu Han’s chest, and, inadvertently, trails his eyes upwards, like on instinct, to Lu Han’s face. There is not one hint of difference - he could very well have been asleep.
Minseok can just about make out, from his side of the window, the diagnostic test the scientist runs, the output hooked up to one of the electric signal relay ends from Lu Han’s heart with crocodile clips. There is a ringing in Minseok’s ears, a deafening one that sounds like nothing at all.
Android
Version 25.3.12
© Genexis Laboratories, 2103
Maintenance complete. Request to exit and reboot.
/
Restore directive?
/
Restoring directive.
/
Reboot.
Lu Han is an android. Minseok remembers, this time, that plunging emptiness, like the world pulled out beneath your feet, that he had felt that day in Commander Kim’s office. A firework in his ears; the vibrating silence after an explosion. Blood rushing; leaving his hands trembling and numb, a scattered flock of geese in his head. The flight or fight after a revelation:
Minseok runs, before the enemy can wake up.
---
In the 2030s, robot technology experienced a breakthrough. Artificial Intelligence Corp. developed a new coding system that allowed the inclusion of memory and adaptation: cognitive analysis and learning. Computers with the ability to think, on their own.
Two decades of mass android - metal bodied - production followed to reduce workloads, take on jobs that humans did not want to do, like building heavy equipment and mining metals for military equipment, until they had amassed enough numbers to build an army. Then they wrestled control of two states near the border and ignited an explosion in the nuclear plant of the country’s artillery fort, or the area now known as Detonation - the Det.
The war broke. Base sent half of their officer troop to the frontline; the other half into support missions. Minseok’s team: to investigate the Det, report the extent of destruction and assess the emergency containment of radiation. If under attack by the enemy, open fire.
Minseok had assumed, in the harsh glare of Commander Kim’s office and the truth of his existence in the past fifty years, that they’d won the war; he’d wanted to assume. That they’d overcome the androids and wrestled their peace back. He’d been wrong.
The androids had won, instead, and hijacked the human race; assembled themselves with human cells and infiltrated human presence. Minseok’s been handing his life over to the enemy for the past year.
It’s a dangerous feeling, the first rush of rage from betrayal. It feels enough to negate all the traces of Lu Han in Minseok’s apartment, from the toothbrush in the bathroom to the mud stain on the soccer jersey in Minseok’s laundry pile.
---
Minseok doesn’t move anything. He’s a creature of habit. The fear kicks in after the anger crystallizes, over a sleepless night, to a sharpness beneath the surface. He’s been wrenched out of what he thought was the truth, twice over, to find himself within unfamiliarity. People he thought he knew.
Minseok almost jumps, when his phone rings in the dead silence of his apartment. There’s only really one person it could be, and he doesn’t touch it. It looks just as foreign as it had, in his hand the first time he brushed Lu Han’s hand to take it.
“Base-issued,” Lu Han had said. It jolts Minseok into a sense of awareness so chilling it raises goosebumps on the back of his neck. Lu Han - perhaps even Commander Kim - are part of Base, which means even the very definition of safety and defence has been broken. Minseok has nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Lu Han sends a message to Minseok that afternoon, one that beams a hologram hovering above Minseok’s phone. It has just three words: where are you, and somehow with the knowledge of the revelation Minseok hears these pixel-composed letters in Lu Han’s voice easily, and wonders how he never caught on. All of the hints: the way Lu Han does things with a robotic precision, reacts to things with a set intensity - there is no continuum, no scale with Lu Han, and the fact that Minseok has never seen Lu Han get any more than a little breathless or flushed, even during the most intense of their soccer sessions.
Perhaps they’d been staring at him in the eye and he hadn’t wanted to see them - his undoing, as a human. You see what you want to see. Lu Han had been a shoulder to call home, and human instinct craves comfort and shelter.
The hologram doesn’t go away even after an hour of Minseok staring into the blackness of the sky outside his window, so he turns his phone over and gets into bed. Sleep doesn’t come easily that night, not when Minseok remembers the fifty years he missed.
---
Minseok jack-knives up the next day, jolted awake by scalpels and operating lights featuring strongly in his nightmares. The realization that comes on the heels of his slumber tastes acrid on his tongue: everything he was told about himself may have been a farce. Kim Minseok, previous officer from Base, sent into mission and epsilon sleep for fifty years, rescued. None of the above may apply. He may very well be a hostage of the androids; a memory-altered shell, a source of cells and organs.
Minseok turns his hologram laptop on so quickly the neon blue light quite hurts his eyes in the darkness of his bedroom. He doesn’t realise his fingers are trembling a little till they take a few tries to spell: the android war. The first link is a brief history and Minseok clicks to read the truth about his life.
The androids decimated the Det, taking most of the artillery the human race had left, after the androids orchestrated the larceny of twenty mortars, five cannon tanks and almost a thousand shell-firing guns. The war broke.
It took a year, before both sides burned themselves out and compromised to call a truce. The androids required human intelligence and expertise to build new androids, and the war and poor sanitation conditions had led to superbug influenza outbreaks throughout the country, reducing the human population to a level below replaceable possibility. The human race would have been extinct by the turn of the century.
An exchange was made: the androids would provide the hearts and brains - the only organs military scientists found impossible to crack the code on self-regeneration within in Petri dishes - for hybrid androids, which would be composed almost entirely of human cells. Besides the nervous system, which are wires carrying electrical signals sent to and from the brain or heart drives, the rest of the bodies of these hybrid androids are essentially human, put together from organs and skin grown in a cryo-caisson. This is what Minseok has been befriending, trusting, for a year.
Not quite the enemy, but not quite something else, entirely.
The knot in his chest that had tangled up the day before seems a little looser, but Minseok’s not sure. Unsettlement, perhaps, a simmering sense of uneasiness he cannot shake. He’s not sure if he’s ready to see the other side as a friend; a symbiotic entity yet after the years of solid belief that they are the enemy to be overcome.
When his phone rings again, Minseok watches the blinking icon on the hologram beam, Lu Han’s face on the live video feed. Immediately apparent is the concern on his face, which shakes Minseok, stirs him up a little more inside. It’s still there, the attachment and emotional dependence he’d had with Lu Han - not even the anger changes something as human, as raw as this running through his veins.
Still, Minseok has no answer to the question: can you put heart into an android, by building a human around it? Or, can you remove the heart from a human, if you put a chip in place of it?
---
Minseok puts on his running shoes when the rainclouds clear - sometimes a good run sweats all the frustration out of himself. He ensures the music he plays in his ears is loud enough so it cuts over the boiling questions in his mind; focuses on counting the steps he takes.
After five thousand steps the focus on catching his breath takes over and it takes less effort to shove the things he doesn’t want to think about yet to the back of his mind. Minseok doesn’t miss the notice, though, that the traffic is similarly busy, the store around the corner is still having a sale, the stretch of pavement in the next block has the same number of cracks. Nothing’s changed, despite Minseok’s entire world being turned inside out for the second time in his life.
He doesn't miss the difference, either, between the first time and the second. It makes him start sprinting, pounding down the concrete with his eyes closed.
When eventually, his heart is ready to give and he's so flushed his body is screaming for rest, he slows and passes a newsstand, headlines yelling about a new metal alloy lighter but sturdier than aluminium in bold font.
He's finding the words to ask Lu Han about whether he thinks this will affect flight craft design in his throat before he can catch himself, and this makes him inexplicably empty inside, a missing piece that means a lot more to him than he'd thought.
---
There are exactly ten messages blinking on his phone the next morning Minseok wakes, three days after the wrong turn in the Centurion building in Base, three days of absence at the flight design laboratory. He’s not sure he’s ready to jump back into the world he’s only just managed to ease in before being turned inside out, tumbling around to land on a different side of the cube.
The messages are all from Lu Han, sent exactly two hours apart. They are all a variation of where are you, and Minseok doesn’t have to click to listen to the voice recordings Lu Han made transcribed by the phone into text messages to hear the concern in his voice. Lu Han’s always been bad at finding the words to put his heart in, but, as Minseok hears the hurry, the slight frustration in Lu Han’s voice, Lu Han makes up for that by putting all of his heart into his words.
The same way Minseok finds it out of second nature to physically show affection, but the words slip out of his throat easily, in contrast. Minseok wonders if this is why they have grown to fit around each other so smoothly - in the ways that they are alike, and yet different.
Another simplest of questions he is unable to answer weaves between his dreams tonight: what if he simply misses Lu Han?
---
if response absent, def outcome: face-to-face communication
\expand\
if response absent, repeat
---
Minseok wakes to the usual traffic sounds outside his window, noise that he’s grown to treat as his personal alarm clock. Filing another request for leave of absence today, Minseok pulls himself through the same motions he’s already been used to: loading news sites for the day’s news, setting the coffee machine into action the way Lu Han taught him, moving the pile of laundry just dry into the living room to be folded.
He’d promised himself, sometime last night, to make a decision today about heading back to work. He’s well aware that the rational point of view is to reject his previous mindset, but it’s a big leap of faith to take, and Minseok’s always been cautious about where to fall.
It starts raining, the water falling in heavy sheets that turns the outside street into a stormy disquiet, and Minseok turns absently out of the window to see Lu Han standing there drenched in the rain.
It jerks him right out of his train of thought, and, remembering that Lu Han is a friend - his very best one - before he remembers anything else, he hurries out of the house to let Lu Han in.
“Why didn’t you -” Minseok yells over the rain and tugs Lu Han inside, before he remembers that he’d turned his phone off to put off decisions, even as he runs out his door and catches sight of the missed alerts Lu Han had sent his intercom that he’d put on silent. Lu Han’s teeth are chattering, and Minseok’s tearing through his clean laundry pile to find a towel for Lu Han and his now soaked phone.
There’s a quiet, strangely comfortable silence that beats between them when Minseok catches Lu Han’s eyes, Lu Han smiling just a little, and then Lu Han shrugs. “It was sunny when I walked over.”
Only one of Minseok’s questions, answered, yet he’s still grateful that he didn’t need to voice it for Lu Han to understand. Probably one of the things he’s come to associate with that most comfortable understanding they have.
“Why,” he asks, anyway, knowing that somehow, Lu Han will know.
Lu Han’s smile is tiny and dents the side of his mouth, but warm and toasty in comparison to the sheeting rain outside. “I like you.”
Minseok knows there's nothing less or more to that; that is all he means. Lu Han likes being with him, hanging out, watching Minseok complete the equation. And he finds the simplicity of this so endearing and warm in his heart beating fleshly in his chest that, when he searches for a reply, he lands on something that seems precisely right on his tongue.
“Me too.” And he does, Minseok realises when the words are hanging between them like a spark of fire.
Lu Han’s eyes are bright with a grin that he’s trying to keep secret on his lips, like he’s pleasantly surprised to hear the answer. Minseok likes that it’s so easy to read Lu Han’s face, no matter how subtle he thinks he is.
“How do you know, though?” It’s a childish question, but Minseok can hardly stop it. All that he’s acutely aware of, now, is his unconscious decision to follow his heart. The leap of faith to trust. Perhaps it might be a little alarming to someone else, that Lu Han has a pull on him, but Minseok thinks it's exactly the way they interact, the way they gel together. He can’t explain why he’s sure this feels like the right decision, but he doesn’t think there’s any other road he would want to pick.
Lu Han shrugs again, holding the towel around himself. “It’s like an electric buzz inside, I don’t know. Like I have live wires inside.”
And you know what, Minseok thinks as he watches Lu Han rub the wet out of his hair, even if their hearts are different, the things they say and mean, the things they feel are the same. Minseok finds this is something he'd never have thought of to describe what “like” means, but, feeling his veins electrify themselves as he shifts closer to they’re touching, yet not quite, so apt.
And who cares if maybe, the screws in Lu Han need tightening sometimes? Life and rain and nature are cold enough, but the press of Lu Han’s skin in his side is raw and real, as raw and real as it gets. To trust is human - Lu Han deserves no less.
You see what you want to see, Minseok thinks, and gets up to look for another towel. Turn a cube around and it’s still the same thing you’re holding, but something else you’re looking at. Minseok can’t quite think of any negative emotion he’d felt in the last few days that matches up to the Goliath of Lu Han’s presence in his life.
He does owe Lu Han an explanation, though, and an apology, so after Lu Han’s changed out of his wet clothes and is sitting warm with a cup of Minseok’s (or the coffee machine’s) best coffee, Minseok clears his throat and tells him exactly how he’s missed him.
---
(They live for a very long time, until Lu Han thinks, when Minseok is old and can't see straight, that this much is more than enough for him, wonders if it is possible to be this happy for this long? Minseok says of course it is, and that's all there is needed to be said.)