[Fateverse Side Story: NC Bundle] Sysadmin
Stephanie Rogers goes to pull some strings and see if she can get a better handle on what's going on. meet her mad-scientist fiancé.
warnings: AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. technobabble. a little Rule 63 for flavor. rampant bad 616 references. het, sort of (if it were Earth-616, it'd be slash XD). language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s*** and g**damn).
pairing: Steph/Tony.
timeline: a few minutes after Stephanie tells Nat and the gang what's up with the Traveler.
disclaimer: i doesn't owns the movies or the characters. or the assorted objects of pop culture reference.
notes: 1) of course, you know by now that Analyst 043 (Stephanie Rogers) is a fem!Cap. Anthony is a little more unhinged than most multiverse incarnations of Tony Stark, but certainly no less brilliant. Pietro gets to be Head Analyst because he's speedy. and a badass. 2) i think it's pretty funny that Steph dismisses most of what Anthony says as conspiracy-theory-nonsense. she's got a heavy case of reality-denial. XD 3) the Core monitoring room is probably not lit (or only dimly lit), so that the analysts can see every tiny detail of the sims (which are made of three-dimensional light projections). not a big problem for them, since their keyboards/menus/etc. exist virtually.
visit The Fateverse Glossary for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.
Sysadmin
In her younger days, Analyst 043 thought she loved her work.
She tested very high in chronometric resonance and pattern recognition, was placed in Data Analysis the day after she finished secondary schooling, and swiftly rose in the ranks. She had an unrivalled record for identification and resolution of stability issues.
It was something she was good at, something that made a difference, something that made the multiverse a better and safer place. They promoted her to Senior Analyst, gave her the coveted job of watching over the MP bundle-a bundle absolutely critical to the stability of the timestream, but in almost constant flux. It required careful attention and swift reaction. The only position more prestigious and demanding in the department was that of Head Analyst (there were two, working in alternating six-hour shifts with relief by an understudy), and that invariably went to individuals with speed-enhancing mutations.
It was in her role as a Senior Analyst that she met her fiancé, Anthony (Programmer 006), and discovered that her love for her work was nothing compared to his.
Anthony lives and breathes his work. No matter what his body is doing at the time, part of his mind is always working. He wakes in the night to write snippets of code. He scribbles blueprints in the air during conversations. He has been designing, updating, and maintaining Nodes for most of his life. He is a genius, a prodigy, a phenom. The simple act of writing a recycling process brings him enough joy and satisfaction to keep him ebullient for weeks.
And his joy distracted her.
Her thoughts at work began to stray, her attention focused on the timeclock and how soon she would get to see him again.
And Analyst 043, Stephanie Rogers, the most distinguished, decorated, and admired Data Analyst in the entire Network, was caught asleep at the wheel.
Wars have a distinct shape in the threads of the timestream, and while that shape may form at different rates, it should be instantly recognizable to any Analyst worthy of the job. But it was not until branches with resonant similarity manifested the event that she noticed it in the primary bundle, and by then it was too late-an absurd superhero civil war had nearly sent the entire timestream crashing down.
At least three other primary bundles suffered a catastrophic influx of chronometric entropy. It took fifteen Network Agents more than a month to stabilize them, and the Auditor himself had to pull multiple subjects into her primary bundle to replace critical loci. The cost in man-hours was nothing compared to the cost of replacing those high-resonance subjects without arousing the suspicion of the timeline’s native inhabitants.
Disgraced, Stephanie was brought before the Network Operations Concordat and the Sysadmin. She was stripped of the rank of Senior Analyst and charged with unforgivable negligence. They gave her back her old segment, returning Earth-616 to its previous caretaker (who had to be pulled out of retirement). Further such incidents would result in her exile from the Network Core and its environs.
Since that day, Stephanie has forced herself to develop the ability to split her life in halves. One half of her life is her work, and she obsessively traces every anomaly, flooding the Core with a million tiny pieces of bureaucratic nonsense (permission slips, report forms, trace requests, datareads, missing subject designations, agent traces, node traces, on and on and on). The other half of her life is Anthony, because he is far too amazing for her to ever even try to give him up.
Because she wants to keep the first half from falling apart, she is willing to risk coming across as a cold workaholic in parts of the second. Anthony hardly even notices, but she still hates doing it.
“Tony.”
“Mm-hm?” he says, still engrossed in whatever he’s working on.
“You’re aware we’re under alert status?”
“Mm-hm.”
“You’ve heard Nat discovered that we had sixteen Nodes missing?”
He flicked something with his left hand, and a list flashed into existence before her eyes. “Makes the total twenty-three. But I found Oracle, and we’re already regrowing her Keeper.”
Stephanie waves the list away (the room’s projector accepts her dismissal with a brief flicker of something like offense). “How long have you known?”
He pauses, looks at the ceiling, makes calculations under his breath. “A wwwweek? I think? What day is it?”
Impatiently, Stephanie looks at her chron. “Friday. Core Standard Eight-Oh-Eight-Five-One.”
Anthony pauses again. “Five One?”
How he could have lost track of the year, she will never understand, but she huffs and answers. “Yes, Tony, Network Operations thirty-six-fifty-one, the same as it’s been since January.”
He shrugs the information away and returns to his puttering. “A week, then. The pattern on the feeds is distinct, it’s got the minor carrier byte on the end that tells you the transmission is being made by an unauthorized physical-contact user. I added that more than a decade back, thought you data-bunnies knew what to look for by now.”
She resists the urge to throw something at him (after all, he is an inventor of sorts, and there really is no telling what brilliant new object she might break). “We are not ‘data-bunnies.’ And we don’t view the feeds directly, you know that. We view the simulations.”
That seems to surprise him. He fumbles a tool and juggles it from hand to hand for a moment to keep it from hitting the ground. Slowly, he turns to face her. “Steph. When’d you get here?”
“Tony, I’ve been standing here talking to you for five minutes. My shift’s been up for fifteen, and so has yours.”
“That was you? Huh.” He reaches out and scribbles something in midair with his datapen. “They don’t view the feeds directly anymore… Definitely have to amplify that little checksum so you data-bunnies can see it on the sims.”
“Tony, for the last time…We. Are. Not. Data-bunnies. The word is analyst. I am an analyst, and I am a consummate professional, and I take offense at the grotesquely outdated objectification of my gender.”
“That’s ageist,” he snorts. “Some of us are old enough to remember a time when the objectification of women wasn’t outdated. And not all analysts are female, so I think it’s pretty sexist of you to assume the term ‘data-bunny’ is sexually objectifying rather than occupationally objectifying.”
“I don’t have time for this,” she growls.
“Oh?” he says blithely. “Wasn’t your shift up?”
“I want to find out what’s causing all this trouble, so that I can make sure nothing happens to my segment.”
Anthony stands and tucks his datapen into his pocket. “You’re still bent out of shape over missing that little war?”
“Tony, that ‘little war’ almost leveled three bundles. The Concordat took it pretty seriously, so of course I’m going to take it seriously myself.”
He led the way out of his lab, locked it with a quick thumb-scan. “The Concordat’s full of idiots, Steph. You’d be surprised what kinda shit the stream can recover from. How the hell do you think it managed to survive this long with all the meta-humans and super-whatsits flying around doing whatever the hell they want? It’s pretty damn naïve to think a civil war’s any worse than the day-to-day good-guys-versus-bad-guys scraps they get into. Like I keep saying, that’s gotta be why we have Wades. The timestream grew them as some weird self-defense mechanism.”
Stephanie objects to his rough language, but she knows better than to waste her time trying to scold him when he is walking quickly and purposefully-he will lose his train of thought, and they will inevitably end up lost. “Tony, don’t start again on your sentient-timestream theory. I could’ve lost my job. They almost exiled me.”
“Morons!” Anthony mutters. He scans them onto a restricted lift, where he hits coordinates she vaguely recognizes.
“Look, Tony, the Sysadmin signed off on-”
“The Sysadmin?” he cries, grabbing her arms and shaking her. “Steph, has anyone actually seen the Sysadmin in-in fifty years?”
“O-of course they have,” she stammers, startled. “He was at my hearing-”
“But did he speak? Did anyone touch him?”
“Well, no, it’s the Sysadmin, of course no one touched him.”
Anthony lets her go and stalks around the lift. “How do we know it’s even him? How do we know they haven’t replaced him with a-a puppet? How do we know he ever existed in the first place?”
“Because the Network Core didn’t make itself,” Stephanie replies sharply.
“Didn’t it?”
She gapes. Her technical knowledge of timestream theory is not complete enough to let her answer with certainty. At length, she shakes her head. “Another part of your sentient-timestream stuff, huh? What does it even matter? The Network is here, and it operates.”
“And if it ever stops operating? What then?”
Stephanie draws a deep breath. “Anthony, what on earth are you saying? You’re a Programmer; it’s your job to make sure the Network doesn’t stop operating. And where are you taking me?”
When the lift hums to a stop, he seizes her wrist and drags her along a familiar corridor. “We’re going to the Core monitoring center,” he says. “We’re going to stare at the synergistic feed until we find the cause of this little hiccup, and then we’ll send it to the Keepers to get it all sorted out.”
He scans them through a huge black door and into a room shaped like a gigantic cylinder.
The center holds an enormous projection of a timestream monitoring simulation. In a ring around the base of the simulation, the shift’s Senior Analysts are tapped into their own, smaller-scale simulations.
The sight of it brings tears of shame and awe to her eyes. She had this. The ebb and flow of probability and possibility was at her fingertips, and she chose-
Stephanie watches her fiancé scamper to one of the hover-platforms that are used to ascend the Core Tower. He waves her over, so she steps onto it with him, and they rise together to the upper heights.
On a mobile control rig, the Head Analyst cruises sedately around and through the main projection a few meters below the point-oh.
“Pietro, need a big favor,” Anthony calls.
The white-haired man marks a branch of the projection and sighs. “Anthony, your ‘big favors’ invariably cost me exhaustive amounts of man-hours.”
“Great. Pull up the Nodes.”
“Since you can never make my job easy, I’m going to assume you mean all of them.” He waves a hand, and blue threads glow brightly all around the projection; he points to a thick rope of them. “There’s our trouble, right there.”
Stephanie stares at the knot as it lashes out this way and that, pushing and pulling at the bundles it touches.
“Send those coordinates to Forecaster,” Anthony says.
The Head Analyst sighs again. “You know it hasn’t been cleared with the Concordat yet-”
Anthony just pulls the datapen back out of his pocket. “Okay, I’ll do it.” And he starts to scribble away on the air.
Red text flashes warnings across the central projection, but he silences all of it with an absent flick.
“God damn you, Anthony Stark,” growls the Head Analyst.
“I sure hope so.”
“They’ll hang you out to dry for this one!”
“Oh, but then they’d have to replace me.”
“Tony,” Stephanie says urgently.
“You know, while we’re here, let’s ask for the Central Database entry on Keeper 001.”
The motion of the datapen is hypnotic, like a conductor’s baton and a calligrapher’s brush rolled into one. Stephanie just knows that something awful is about to happen, but she cannot look away. “Tony,” she hisses again.
Several things happen at once.
An alarm goes off, people start shouting, huge blast doors clang into place.
Stephanie cannot hear over the pounding of her own pulse in her ears.
The central projection traces a ribbon of bright blue near the densely packed middle, where the primary bundles reside. Then the simulation vanishes, and projected words replace it in the darkness.
you found me.
Stephanie just clutches Anthony’s sleeve and stares.
“Huh,” says Anthony, in a tone of aloof bemusement.
And sound rushes back into the world as more alarms sound and the Senior Analysts start shrieking that they have lost all monitoring simulations and all central processes.
“Uh. Hi.”
hello. =)
“We, uh,” Anthony tries, and has to clear his throat to continue. “We didn’t mean to interrupt.”
that’s okay, i was bored. is it your turn to hide now?
“Nnnno. We kind of need you to go back to what you were doing.”
oh. =(
“Carry on.”
thanks, i guess. bye?
“Yeah. Bye.”
The text flickers out, and the simulation retraces itself, lighting the room once more.
“What just happened?” Stephanie mumbles, still clutching Anthony’s sleeve.
“Unless I’m very much mistaken, my dear, I think we just met both Keeper 001 and Node 001. The real Sysadmin.”
“You’re both under arrest,” says the Head Analyst.
.End.
merianmoriarty has my formal permission to pimp my fics on various comms (if/when i ever abandon deviantART, i'll go ahead and join the comms myself and take care of getting things posted in the right places). no one has permission to re-post this ANYWHERE, but feel free to share or link.
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