Fic, Title: Nonstandard Deviation (5.5/?), Fandom: Primeval
Title: Nonstandard Deviation
Chapter Five-and-a-half: Revelations part 2
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Becker tilted his head back as he considered where to start. He’d spent a long time pretending that the events of six years ago had never happened-it was painful to remember. But he trusted Connor almost as much as he trusted Quinn, as much as he could trust anyone who wasn’t Quinn. If he couldn’t trust Connor with this secret, how could he expect Connor to trust him with his?
“It started a little after I was moved into Special Forces,” he said at last. “I started getting a lot of funny questions from this guy in my unit. Things about how I looked at time, and whether I’d ever thought about where the predators came from. For some reason I couldn’t work out, I answered him. All his questions, no matter how personal or outright dangerous they were, I answered them. It was a while after that when I figured out why… No. That’s not the beginning. Let me back up further.
“When I was a kid, my best friend and I-that didn’t cover it. We were two halves of the same whole. You ever seen twins who just think together? That was us. Only we really did. When I was about ten we figured out how to talk to each other without talking-how to communicate just in our heads. We thought it was a game until we decided to test it. We each wrote down the entire conversation as we heard it, on a piece of paper. Then we showed it to the other one. It was identical. Every time. We did that ten times without getting a single word different. Then we got bored and started making the other one say stupid things.
“It wasn’t just the talking, though-that was actually one of the last things. The thing is, this guy and I-Quinn. His name’s Danny Quinn, but he never went by Danny. Just Quinn. The first time we met, I swore I felt like I was about to get jolted out of my skin. And next thing we knew, there was something in front of us. This-doorway, as it turned out. A doorway in time. It looked like golden fire, only it rippled like water when we touched it.”
Becker.
“How did it happen?” Connor asked when Becker stopped talking.
“Just a minute.” Becker closed his eyes. What is it, Quinn?
I went to the bomb site like you asked. There was someone from the AEP there.
“Fuck!”
“Alex?”
Becker looked at Connor, who looked concerned. Do you know who the target was?
No, which brings us to my other point. There was a doorway there. And I don’t know any other Makers, but there is one, because it definitely wasn’t ours. Quinn sent Becker an image of the anomaly. Any idea whose it might be?
None. Hang on a minute, Quinn. “I told you Quinn and I can talk to each other,” Becker said to Connor. “I asked him to check out the bomb site, and he found a doorway like the ones we make-only it’s not ours. It’s complicated-” Quinn, can you come over here?
Already on my way.
Good. How long?
Somewhere between fifteen minutes and half an hour; I need to make sure no one’s following me.
“Sorry,” Becker said to Connor. “Where was I?”
“The doorway,” Connor said, but he looked uncertain.
“Right. That. It went to the old days, hunter-gatherer times, which isn’t that long ago in the scheme of things, but is still a pretty damn long time to suddenly collapse into a step through a weird-looking doorway.
“It took us a while to figure out that we’d not only made the thing, we could Unmake it-that’s what we called it anyway, and it’s really my job. It looked like a fire, so I just sort of… put it out. And it went away.”
“That wasn’t the end of it,” Connor inferred.
“Not even close. We worked out how the doorways worked through trial and error, which sucked, because even back then we would have listened to a teacher who could have explained this. We worked out that I made the doorways and Quinn decided where they went, based on whatever he was thinking. We sort of got the terms from there, and we sort of knew them, like they were already in our heads and just waiting to be applied to something. I’m the Maker; he’s the Director; the doorways are called anomalies, lowercase ‘a,’ and Quinn and I together are an Anomaly, uppercase ‘a.’ Couldn’t tell you how we worked all that out.
“I was around fifteen-and keep in mind I’m saying my age because Quinn’s around ten years older than me-when Quinn figured out how to Watch things. It basically means he can see all of a thing’s timeline, from the beginning to the end. I can’t do it, because I can only access the timestream when I’m Making or Unmaking an anomaly, but I’m the access point, so Quinn just sort of kept it with him when I closed the way out, if that makes any sense.
“And then I joined the military. God damn it, I wish I’d never joined the military.
“I’m going to skip past all that to the point where the man handed me over to the Anomaly Elimination Project.”
“The what?” Connor clearly understood, though, because he sounded horrified.
Becker laughed humorlessly. “At that stage it was just a research project, but now they’ve progressed to full-on elimination. The predators-” he hesitated, and then admitted, “the predators originally came through an anomaly, Connor.”
“What? But how?”
“They’re much more advanced physically than they should be, based on when they first show up in the fossil record. It didn’t take long for me and Quinn to work out what had happened, and then Quinn just sort of… Looked. And we were right. It wasn’t our anomaly, or we don’t think it was-we wouldn’t try something like that, and when we’re not trying to direct it ours usually hit human history, and the predators were here way before that-but it was an anomaly.”
“But-then they can’t eliminate Anomalies,” Connor said. “If they eliminated Anomalies, there’d be no predators. And if there were no predators, there’d be no AEP. And if there were no AEP-”
“Believe me, we’ve thought that through, even if they haven’t. The thing is, at this point in the story it was just research. Not professional, ethical or legal research, but research.”
“What do you mean?”
Becker looked away. “They faked a transfer order, or got one handed down, and locked me up. Tried a load of materials until they found one that cut off my connection with Quinn and put me in a room made out of it. The air recycling system was totally self-contained and locked up in a chamber of the stuff. Except when they went in and out to ask questions and run tests, I was alone.
“Have you ever actually been alone, Connor? Had someone you love, who loves you, the most important person in your world, die, and felt completely and utterly alone?”
“Mum,” Connor whispered. “For a year we didn’t know if she’d come back or come back different, or if we’d have to psycho-graft her. And then it wasn’t the same.”
Becker nodded. “Multiply that by about ten. That’s what it feels like to lose your Director. And they kept that up for what felt like centuries, trying to work out what made the doorways open, how to predict them, what made me and Quinn different from everyone else. The scars are from there. Emotional response can make me open a doorway; pain works almost as well. So that’s what they used, for however long it lasted. I lost count.
“A couple of times, someone actually came in to talk. Once it was a Special Forces lieutenant who wanted to know what it was ‘like’ being an Anomaly. And I-” Becker choked out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob “-I answered his questions, as long as he kept the door open. That’s all it took, by then. I just needed the other half of me back.
“Later-I didn’t know how long it had been-it was a soldier who’d been trying to find a way out. He said he’d seen a request on a general’s desk for information about a transfer, and seen that the general didn’t have clearance to know about the project, and tracked down the headquarters. I’m still waiting for him to tell me how he really found out about it, but I’m not holding my breath. He wasn’t an Anomaly, just a human soldier. And he left the facility that day before anyone saw him and got the information to a data save point of some kind on the Web, with delayed instructions to email it in a week to a news station if he didn’t stop it. I was his ticket out of the military; he was my ticket out of the Project. And once we were out, he made damn sure our discharge was too visible for us to suddenly die.”
Suddenly Becker had an armful of Connor, and Connor was crying and not caring anymore.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I asked and I’m sorry that happened and I’m so sorry.”
Becker held Connor close. “Hey, it’s okay. You didn’t know. And it feels good to talk about it, actually. I’ve never talked about it out loud before-just in my head with Quinn.”
Connor nodded, but he didn’t look at Becker.
After a few moments Becker asked, “What do you want to know?” Connor looked at Becker with wide eyes, clearly surprised. “Something unsettled you in all that. I’d be surprised if something hadn’t. So just ask and I’ll see if I can put your worries to rest.”
Connor hesitated. “It’s stupid.”
“I promise you it’s not.”
Connor shrugged. “It’s just… just… you and Quinn were never…”
“Together?” Connor nodded, and Becker was torn between laughing in relief that that was all and gagging at the idea. “No, never. That would be like-God. I don’t know. You’re an only child, but-imagine being with your mum or dad. Or with a friend you’ve had since you were two. Or looking in the mirror and thinking you’d like to shag the person looking back at you. Being with Quinn would be slightly more disgusting than that.” He shook his head. “We fit together. Two halves of the Anomaly. We’re not quite the same, personality-wise, but we’re the same in some other way that I can’t really explain. It’s not brothers, not lovers, just-the same. So no.” He kissed Connor’s forehead. “Don’t worry, Connor. You’ll have to try to get rid of me.”
Connor grinned. “Never doing that.” Then his smile faded. “How’d they know? When they had the right material?”
It was Becker’s turn to hide his face against Connor’s hair. “I couldn’t hide it. The room was lined with it, the door was made of it-I still don’t know what it was-and the connection was there until the moment the last exit was sealed. And then Quinn was gone. I screamed. I started screaming and I didn’t stop even when there was no breath in my lungs. I just kept trying to force more sound out of my mouth. The woman who ran the project just watched and said ‘I guess we have a winner.’” He shuddered.
Connor wrapped his arms around Becker and held on like he was afraid one or both of them was about to vanish.
The doorbell rang.
Becker tensed. Quinn?
It’s not me, Quinn said immediately. I’ve got a tail. I’ll be a bit longer than I was expecting.
Shit. Becker slowly eased Connor back down to the sofa. “Hang on. I don’t know who this is. I need to take care of it.”
“If you don’t know who it is, should you get it?” Connor asked.
“If I don’t and it’s someone I don’t want coming in, they’ll break in anyway. If I go to the door first, I’ll have time to find out who it is and maybe Make a way out.”
He went over to the door and looked out the peephole. Cursing, he put the chain on and opened the door as far as it would go.
“I thought I was pretty explicit this time,” he said.
“You were,” said Stephen Hart. “Unfortunately, I really need to deal with this and I don’t know who else to ask.”
---
Abby was getting very frustrated. She’d called Christine to report her progress, but the line had been busy-presumably with Jenny, ordering some new hit or getting a report on the pet project, since Jenny was also unavailable. She’d tried Ditzy, but the man was probably living up to his name and had forgotten his tele-tact somewhere. She’d even tried the new girl-Christine had given them all her call ID the day before in case they needed it. No one was picking up.
In desperation, she’d tried Stephen. The man knew nothing about the AEP, but maybe she could change that and fix the damage done to their relationship with the bomb thing.
Of course, he wasn’t answering his phone either.
Finally she called Leek. She hated the slimy little man, but it was her last chance before she had to call off the hunt for someone reachable.
Leek picked up on the third ring.
“Leek, is Johnson there?” Abby asked.
“Miss Johnson is in a meeting at the moment. A rather urgent matter came up,” Leek said smoothly, with just a hint of venom in his voice.
“What about it, Leek?” Abby snapped.
“You missed,” Leek hissed. “You had three targets there, unwarned and completely helpless and already RPG, and you missed. You let someone get close and he warned everyone out. Why didn’t you shoot him?”
“Didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to interfere,” Abby said flippantly. “What’s the big deal? Like you said, they’re already RPG, they’ve only got one life each. They have to get lucky every time to survive. We just need one good shot.”
“The big deal is that Johnson is currently occupied spinning your failure into an opportunity for success-no mean feat, I can assure you.”
“Easier for her than it is for you, I can assure you,” Abby retorted. “Get off my arse, Leek. I’ve got things to do.” As though she hadn’t been the one to start the call, she hung up.
God, she needed a drink. And to talk to Stephen. And maybe a shag with Stephen if he was up for it.
---
“I’ve got one idea,” Ditzy said after a while, taking out his tele-tact. He had a missed call from Abby. Whoops. She was probably pissed.
Sarah shrugged. “Can’t be any worse than the ones we’ve had so far. Oh wait, that’s because we haven’t had any.”
Ditzy laughed. “Yeah, well. I know one person who might be able to tell me more about what’s wrong with him. If he doesn’t hang up as soon as he notices who’s calling.”
Without explaining further, he looked up the phone book, found the listing for Alexander Becker, and hit SEND.