Fic: phantom/culture [The Social Network/Pacific Rim][2/2]
<-- return to previous part
march 2016, cont.
Phantom Culture is a Mark-I jaeger with plasma vents built vertically into its chest, giving it the look of a creature whose wailing mouth is dripping off of it. Each jaeger is built to smash, punch, annihilate, and shred through a kaiju's thick plated skin, but each jaeger also has its own unique advantage coded specifically for it, because no kaiju comes out of the breach exactly the same, either.
"Phantom Culture" is its official, sanctioned PPDC name, but scuttlebutt calls it Facemash, because everyone knows it's going to be Erica and Mark's jaeger when it's complete, and Erica's made sure everyone knows that story, because Erica is a wonderful human being who's going to guarantee that Mark makes absolutely no friends of the female persuasion. ("You dug that grave by comparing them to farm animals, you lie in it," is her cheerful response to his complaints.)
"It's designed to go for the gills -- that's what this is for, this button here -- here, right where I'm pointing. Go for the gills, incapacitate them, and cut off one method of the kaiju's retreat. It'll stick near the surface if it can't breathe underwater, Noble Vindicator taught us that. It'll be your signature move!"
Dustin pinwheels his hands around excitedly as he talks. His hair is trimmed short, dusky-colored and receding ever-so-slightly, but Mark's not about to tell him that. He's wearing service blues, and he doesn't eat in the same mess as Mark anymore. They both have their own quarters here now, and somedays, Mark stands out in the bitter, early-spring cold and closes his eyes to the ice-white sunlight on the backs of his eyelids and imagines that he's back in Sue's bright attic bedroom. The memory's changed, of course; he's pretty sure the pillows at Sue's didn't have little teddy bears on them. Erica's grandmother's did.
Mark, not for the first time, is glad that Dustin washed out of the Jaeger program. What he's doing now is a much, much larger version of app-making.
"What'll the signature move be called?" he asks.
"We," Dustin gestures to the other technicians in the room, "are calling it a sense of humor. Since you don't have one, we figured we better build you one."
Behind him, Erica barks laughter.
may 2016.
In Japan, Tamsin Sevier has a seizure and collapses in the drift and Stacker Pentecost is left to pilot Coyote Tango alone. A single girl survives.
After, Tamsin is bloodless, grey and pulled in tight, her hair thinning into chunks, and they keep Stacker in her hospital room as his burns heal into scars, and their proximity to each other helps them sleep. She cannot come to Sasha and Aleksis's wedding, so they all come to her, instead, wheeling her out into the hospital garden so that they can be married there. The Kaidanovskys, instead of kissing each other when prompted, both fold on down from their considerable height to kiss Tamsin on each cheek, and she laughs, the sound as broken and soaring as a jaybird.
Nobody needs to ask what's going on. Nobody talks about it. Radiation poisoning is something they're all becoming very familiar with, after the contamination in California and Manilla.
They all used the same equipment. They all strapped into the same testing gear. They've all been exposed to uncontained nuclear power.
It wasn't supposed to happen this quickly.
november 2016.
The new Alaska Shatterdome sits squat and square on the coast of the Gulf of Alaska, 400 miles northeast of Kodiak Island, where Mark has lived for the past two years. Mark and Erica relocate there when Phantom Culture does, along with almost everybody else they know. Stacker Pentecost stays behind at the Academy, and so does Marilyn Delpy, who has a whole generation of future pilots to select.
In the Shatterdome, everybody wears the same uniform -- technician, engineer, custodial, or pilot, it doesn't matter, they're all doing the same vital work -- but it becomes common practice to wear one's country's flag as a patch on their sleeves, right underneath the standard PPDC emblem. It's a good reminder that, even as the Pan-Pacific Alliance begins to blur at the borders and workers are shuttled from Shatterdome to Shatterdome, wherever they're most needed, you can't forget the country that raised you, the countries you've come to defend. At the Academy, Mark learned Chinese and Tagalog just to get by, and never quite picked up Japanese, but he did learn all the good curse words and how to cast aspirations on someone else's dick size, which is all you need to know, really.
The first time Phantom Culture is deployed against a kaiju, Mark finds himself in the cockpit, feeling almost like he wound up there by accident, focusing on the strangest things.
The tech who's finishing strapping him into his suit wears the Brazilian flag, and his eyes keep on snagging on it every time he turns.
His brain feels like it's made of static, a panicked mess of greyscale.
"You're a long way from home," he hears himself say, and taps the end of a glove against the patch. In five minutes, he's going to be fighting for his life and Erica's life and the lives of millions of people.
The tech stills for a beat, then he turns and shoves his goggles up his forehead, exposing upturned, foxlike eyes and features that scatter inside Mark's memory like they're looking for a place to settle. Then he grins at Mark, and it's that, the sight of his teeth and the way every part of his face crinkles with the joy of it, that sends recognition careening into Mark with the force of a fist.
"You --"
"I volunteered," says Eduardo Saverin.
"-- how did you --" He hasn't seen Eduardo in twelve years; he remembers a grey suit, a grey carry-on bag, and an equally grey good-bye, delivered the day before Eduardo left for a summer internship in New York that turned him into somebody Mark didn't really care to know anymore. They saw each other after that, of course, but that's the last encounter that felt like it meant anything. Friendships deteriorate, they fall apart. They're organic. They rot. "How did you -- here -- in my jaeger?"
"I volunteered for that, too," says Eduardo. "Marilyn said it'd be good for you to have someone you know here." LOCCENT crackles over the comms, Narendra's voice sharp and urgent and competent, and Erica replies, and Eduardo speaks very quickly into the gap between their voices, "So you better hurry back, got it? You know it takes twice as long to get you guys out of these things as it does to get you into them."
"I'll try not to inconvenience you," Mark says faintly.
"Good." And then for no reason, he says, "Mark."
(Up close, the kaiju's eyes are blue
blue
blue
and horrible and real and so very
cold.)
august 2017.
"Yeah, this is going to be the part they skip when they make that movie about your life," Eduardo's voice scrapes dryly against his ears. Other voices come and go, but Mark listens to this one.
Something burns hot against the bare skin of his back, and the tracks in Mark's brain leap, cross, and trip, leaving him convinced that those are claws sinking into Phantom's vertebral column and that heat is something vital combusting, but it isn't, of course -- it's only antiseptic and Mark cannot distinguish between metal and skin. His spine in ridged in bite marks from being thrown against the spinal clamp, bleeding sluggishly.
"They're not going to make a movie on my life, Wardo, don't be stupid," he says. "I'm not hero material. They'll make a movie about the Winklevosses. They're better suited for it. They're handsome. That's all anybody cares about."
He doesn't have a shirt. Why doesn't he have a shirt?
Erica's too far away. It's uncomfortable and it pulls, the distance, like being made to do the splits when you're not very flexible. You cannot take a brain and separate it, that's not good for it. He is the left hemisphere and she is the right, and she is too far away.
A shirt presses itself into his hands. It's Eduardo's.
"You still wear shirts like this?" seems like a relevant thing to ask, somehow. His fingers find the buttons, tracing the contours of them, the little bumps of thread. Sense memory confuses him; buttons in the console, bumps in the scales of kaiju flesh, and he quickly curls his fingers up against his palm.
Jaegers feel pain.
Why did you code me with that? he'd asked Dustin, sitting high up in the scaffolding and watching Christy's crew scale up and down and around the bent, broken hydraulics of Phantom's left arm, courtesy of a Category II named Blackwing who got as far as Puget Sound before Mark and Erica and the Canadians got to it. In the infirmary bay, Phantom actually looks her proper size -- lately, she's been sharing a bay with a brand-new Mark III jaeger named Gipsy Danger, who dwarfs her so much it's comical.
Self-preservation, Dustin answered, apologetic.
Like a sense of humor, I don't have any?
Oh, no, bro, you got plenty of self-preservation. You're like a cockroach. You never came out with me to midnight releases of things, remember? If that's not interest in the survival of the species, I don't have a better example. But a jaeger isn't a robot -- it's, okay, quoting Iron Man here, it's high-tech prosthesis, it's body armor, and we need you to make sure it doesn't get injured. So we have to train you with pain.
august 2018.
"What was in the box?"
"Hmm?" he goes, and the vibration of it shudders all the way through to his chest, which makes her squirm and shake her hair back, ticklish.
She settles back down against his sternum, snaking her arms underneath his ribs, and they both exhale in tandem. "Didn't you get a box from your parents today?"
He did. He shifts around, careful not to dislodge her, and pulls the little box out from where it got trapped between his pillow and the wall. From it, he extracts a small, greyish figurine, which he then marches across her arm up to her shoulder and the heavy cloth of her coat. It's a miniature Phantom Culture figurine, and Erica laughs as he proceeds to bend its arms back and forth against her cheek, complete with subvocal sound effects.
"Apparently," he says, when she wrestles it from him and returns the assault; he shields his face from the fake plasma emission. "It was given to my youngest cousin at the doctor's office, as a treat for being so brave about getting her vaccinations."
"What good taste," Erica says with great dignity.
Her phone buzzes against his hip, and she closes her eyes for a long beat, letting them do nothing but breathe in easy synchrony, before she fishes it out to check.
"Anything important?" he wants to know.
"Just a Tweet," she replies. "Apparently the Winklevosses will be making an appearance in Seoul on Monday, so we should come check them out if we feel like being reminded just how short we are."
"Good for them."
If there's one thing Mark does not like about being a jaeger pilot, it's probably the publicity. He sucks at it. He's always awful and awkward in interviews.
They've worked out a system, he and Erica, where Erica will do the on-camera appearances that the Pan-Pacific Alliance demands of them if Mark protects her while they're in the Shatterdome, because it's easier to put on a face for people who don't know them than it is to hide from people who do. Mark is very good at dodging nosy people -- Cameron and Tyler haven't caught him once, though there was that week involving swimsuits stolen from their lockers, when they literally tried to hunt him down every time they saw him -- and equally good at making people ask the wrong questions ("did you really break the Internet with a misogynistic meme when you were in college?" and not, "Hey, is Erica feeling better?")
"This sucks," she complains, drawing her legs up and curling the toes of her orange socks against the bed. "I wish they'd put you back in charge of the official Twitter. Unlike you, this person's actually funny."
"Hey!"
"And there's no point in parodying something that's already funny."
He contemplates shoving her to the floor. Sensing that thought become a plan to action, she braces herself before he can get any kind of leverage.
"Don't even think about it," she says, and he grins.
Instead, they wrap each other up in a cocoon's hold, closing their arms and elbows around each other's heads, and each fall of her eyelashes against his cheek is code, is poetry, and Mark Zuckerberg could write Erica Albright from the inside out.
october 2020.
When Mark makes it down to the mess, it's already so late that the lights are the barest hovering specter, dark and dim, and there's nobody left except for several of the custodians clustered around a table, playing cards while the youngest of them shoves a mop at the floor despondently behind them, clearly having drawn some kind of short straw. He crosses over to the window, dismayed to see freshly-cleaned, shining steel surfaces -- that'd probably be a no on dinner, then.
One of them spots him and trudges over. Her face lights up with recognition when she gets close enough.
"Hey, Ranger!" says Amy Ritter. She's a thin, compact girl and her hair color might be blonde, although Mark's really just judging by her eyebrows, because he's only ever seen her when she's on duty and it's all crammed up under her hairnet. "I'm about to get my meal, do you want to sit with me?"
"I actually," he holds up his ration card. "Want to know if there's enough on here for … anything," he waves a hand at what's visible in the kitchens, which is a good lot of nothing. He should probably go to the C-store, but all they have there is stale dry goods that were probably packaged before K-Day.
Amy hooks her handheld off her belt and swipes his card. "I didn't see your wife today," she says.
"She's not my wife," Mark answers automatically, even though it's an old tease. Co-ed jaeger pilots who aren't related to each other? There's always a betting pool on whether or not they're sexually involved, or dating, or whatever. The track record leans kind of heavily in that direction, anyway. The drift will do that to you. "She's my co-pilot. There's a lot less implied ownership involved. And no, she's …" He can't come up with a lie fast enough. "She's asleep."
"Still?"
Mark licks his lips, lizard-like, and says nothing.
"Well," goes Amy. "Use your psychic powers and ask her if she wants a condom or three Advil, because that's all your ration card's good for until rollover. Which is on Friday for you guys, right?"
Mark nods. "That's okay, that's what I thought." He doesn't usually run down on rations, not even when the budget cuts at the start of the year had them all tightening their belts. Mark got through college on Red Bull and tuna in a pop-top can, rationing was not a hardship.
Silence quivers between them, trying to draw their attention to it. Mark doesn't know how to retreat. Could he ask Eduardo? Eduardo's the kind of person you ask for things. Mark had never needed to before.
Amy's mouth tips in the corner. "Grab a chair, Ranger, I'll be right back."
They take inventory of their trays and swap what needs to be swapped -- Amy scrapes his mashed potatoes onto her tray because they come with freeze-dried bacon bits and Mark keeps kosher only when he notices, and she forfeits her chocolate milk box in exchange. ("If anybody asks why food's still charging out of Raleigh Becket's ration card," she informs him when she plunks a second tray down in front of him with an air of great solemnity, "I trust you'll do the honorable thing," and the joke flattens itself along the tabletop, because neither of them want to laugh at it. Yancy Becket's ration card would have been cut up after his death, but Raleigh would have been issued a civilian card upon his discharge. Mark doesn't ask questions, but he's pretty sure somebody told him once that Amy was the first friend Raleigh made here.) Food sustainability crashed in the wake of the crumbling economy, though a lot of it also had to do with the sudden population boom of all those people moving to the flyover states and pushing out the farmers who couldn't afford to fight them. You can't tell rich people that, though, that it's their fault everyone's starving. No, blame the economy.
They eat in silence, and then Amy says, "Have I told you that I'm leaving?"
Mark's fork stills.
"I am," she tells her tray, and a smile fights its way across her mouth, and she continues excitedly, "I got a position working on the Wall. You know, the Anti-Kaiju Wall."
"I know what Wall," Mark says flatly, and nothing else.
Her shoulders straighten and even out, bearing the weight of his incredulity upon them. "I know you're a pilot, but you do understand how important this project is, don't you? To people like me? Mark, I lost everyone when Trespasser came. That carcass lay there, not even ten miles from my parents' house, for three days. I can still smell --"
She cuts herself off.
He puts her chocolate milk back on her tray. She stabs it open with the little straw and sips at it, eyes closed.
"The Jaeger Program is amazing," she says quietly, when she's done. "I know that, I've been here, but it's so … remote. It's so … private. The livelihoods of millions rely on the power of just a few men and women, and that -- that sits well with nobody, not anymore. But the Wall? The Anti-Kaiju Wall? Mark, anyone can build a wall. It's giving the average person on the Pacific Rim the chance to protect themselves."
"And do you think that the kaiju are just going to … see the Wall, and, like, give up?"
Amy doesn't say a word. The answer, of course, is no, but she can't say it. That's what hope does.
december 2021.
"Hold on, something's not --"
"Shit!"
"Ranger Albright! Ranger Zuckerberg! Do you copy?"
"Shit!"
"They're out of sync, sir. They're out of sync!"
"Kill the launch! Cut it now! You, scramble whoever's next on the roster, use the launch tube in Bay Two. Call up Los Angeles if you need to, just get a jaeger out there!"
"What the hell --"
(the corridor is a white-sand beach. he doesn't recognize the room numbers. kaiju blue turns to rivulets in the sand beneath his feet, a burning hiss, a growl. it's not sand
it's the maw of a kaiju and it's coming to swallow him and mark opens his mouth into the blue of the drift it's blue it's kaiju blue
and screams
and)
"It's Albright, sir, she's --"
"Contact the med bay."
"Yes, sir."
(a RABIT a RABIT have you seen little peter cottontail? it's a RABIT and)
(two eighteen-year-old children sit at a postage-stamp table in a crowded bar. she is dressed in layers like each day she adds another stretch of the world to her body. he is dressed without any defenses at all, because he doesn't believe in them. they are frightening each other. they are frightening. they are frightening and angry and then
she is
gone)
(gone)
(and mark
is alone)
One man in LOCCENT to another: "What do you mean, not again?"
"This is what happened to the Winklevosses, remember? No? Weren't you there? I thought you were."
"No. What happened?"
"This, pretty much, only it happened during patrol, not during a breach. We had to cut the patrol because they wouldn't sync, but when we tried again the next day, it worked just fine. We didn't think anything of it after that. And then they died, so it didn't happen again."
"Shit, man." A beat. "You know it's these Mark Is, right?"
"Yeah, I know. Why didn't they work on containment sooner?"
"If anything, their martyrdom is useful."
"Sshh, fuck, don't say that!"
(Here is something everybody knows but him: Mark Zuckerberg is not made to be left alone.)
january 2022.
After the honorable discharge of his co-pilot, Mark Zuckerberg is sent back to the Jaeger Academy. The implication is that he will stay there to teach, but since Phantom Culture isn't sent back with him, he doesn't know how he's supposed to do that. He piloted that jaeger for six years -- that's longer than he's ever been anything. He'll wake up in the morning forgetting that he's not circuitry. He'll take a step and forget that Erica isn't there to take the next. Someone will ask Erica a question and she will nod and he will answer, even though there's hundreds of miles of distance between them.
What do you do, after that?
Marilyn goes through applications with him. He fights in the kwoon, and fights, and fights some more. The cadets these days are all younger than he is, and a shameful number of them disarm him in a very short time.
"Let them," Marilyn tells him, doing a good job of schooling her grin, hiding it behind her hand. "We crush their souls pretty regularly, let this be their one claim to fame. You're a veteran, Mark, and you've set the bar very high."
"I don't want to be something they'll brag about at parties over, like, cake and watermelon. I want a co-pilot."
She studies him for a long moment. She tucks her suit jacket over her arm and folds her hands.
"You know who you have to ask," she says.
He does.
february 2022.
PHANTOM CULTURE PILOT MARK ZUCKERBERG DISCHARGED FROM PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS
PPDC.gov - 21 minutes ago
june 2022.
White tents cluster together on the baked-bright green of a place called Tecumseh Park. It is summer in Oklahoma, and the children position themselves strategically around the stalls, playing instruments out of their cases and holding out jars that say college fund :) :) A woman stands in the middle of all this, surrounded by patrons and artisans alike. She is small and mousey brown, and when she smiles, it doesn't matter so much that her irises are haloed in blood.
Out of the crowd, a man approaches her.
"Aren't you a jaeger pilot?" he goes, without inflection.
Kneejerk, Erica Albright smiles at him, because it is summer in Oklahoma and it is a beautiful day. The air smells like roasted almonds and a seven-year-old girl in hand-me-down clothes is butchering Hedwig's Theme on a little violin nearby.
"I was, yes," she says, with gentle emphasis on the past tense.
"And it doesn't bother you, how much of the money poured into that project was taken from people like us? What do you think happens to the people who depend on government aid when the government decides it's going to build giant toys instead?" He bares his teeth. His coat is too heavy for the current weather. "People with disabilities, people with special needs, people like us? We become expendable. And I'm telling you, there's a lot more of us than there are civilians in coastal cities. But you've already told us what you think we're worth."
His voice rises.
"If the kaiju want the coast, let them have it!"
And then, from the inside of his coat --
A gun.
Erica sees it level at her, and everything goes hollow and slow.
Someone grabs her arm.
Someone yells.
His eyes bore into hers, triumph and terror weighing together there.
She sees the hammer trip.
She doesn't hear a sound.
Two thousand miles away, all the hairs on Mark's arms stand on end all at once, and he half-rises out of his seat.
"Uncle Mark?"
It comes from close by, but it's just syllables, tossed at the side of his head. They make no sense. It's just noise. Everything is noise and grey and, strangely, sunlight.
Mark turns, hands pressing down hard into his stomach, and then he pitches forward.
june 2022, cont.
When Erica wakes, she finds Eduardo Saverin asleep at her bedside, his head pillowed on his arms on her blanket. She inspects what she can see: the mint green of a privacy curtain, an IV, tape on her wrist. Her toes wriggle when she tells them to. She touches her chest, feeling for the port where they administer the drugs during chemotherapy. Why didn't they hook the IV into that?
She combs her fingers through Eduardo's hair, and he startles awake.
His eyes are a dark swell, wide and frightening and fathomless, and then he focuses on her.
"Hey," he says, offering her a sleepy smile. "Welcome back."
Half of Erica's fondness for this man comes from years of drifting with Mark and watching the relief on his face every time he peeled Mark's helmet off and Mark said, hey Wardo, she knows that, and she doesn't care. She knows what must have happened.
"Did he try to drift with you, that stupid boy?"
There's no other reason he'd be here, if she hadn't ricocheted like a bullet from Mark's mind into his.
Eduardo says, "I volunteered."
"You do that, I've noticed," she says, and combs through his hair again. Mark's in the building. Somewhere. She hasn't drifted with him in months, but the connection's still there, faint and atrophied, like the awareness of a buzzing light at the end of a long corridor. She'll find herself reaching for a drink can that isn't there sometimes -- that's him.
"How far are you going to go to get away from him?"
He's dressed in civilian clothes. He catches her hand, pinning it underneath his cheek as he folds his arms on her bedspread again, nestling in like he's going to go right back to sleep.
"We're never going to be far away from him," he murmurs. "Not really."
"No. I suppose not."
Drift with someone, and you write them in ink into your subconsciousness.
december 2022.
Mark rages, "That's stupid! They can't just -- after everything you've done? Without you, they wouldn't have had the Winklevosses! Or the Kaurs! Or the Beckets! You're the one that told them to let Chuck Hansen drift with his father to see what happened! You told them that I should pilot a jaeger and I did, I killed kaiju for them for six years and that's because of you! They can't just -- how dare they!"
Marilyn smiles sideways at him, soft and sympathetic.
"The Jaeger Program is failing," she says, and there's a funeral in her voice. "And I'm no longer necessary."
august 2023.
It's the ten-year anniversary of K-Day, and Dustin says, "Hey, man, I've got a new assignment."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," he lifts his shoulders up around his ears, almost apologetically. "I'm shipping out to Hong Kong next week. They want me to code for the Mark III restoration project."
"Oh," says Mark, a sound squeezed out of him around the sudden blooming of dismay that expands painfully underneath his ribs. "Do I know anybody else on that?"
"Stacker Pentecost's name is attached," Dustin confirms. "Christy's working on it, and so's one of her students -- do you remember Mako Mori? The girl from the Tokyo attack?"
january, 2025.
On the day that Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori float to the surface of the Pacific Ocean and Hercules Hansen announces that they've done it, they've destroyed the breach for good, Mark Zuckerberg is sitting in a glass-walled room in a glass-walled building.
He is almost forty years old. The fog's rolling in over the browned tops of the Junipero Serra hills, brought in from the San Francisco Bay. He can see the haggard ruins of the Stanford bell tower below, the yellow tape marking reconstruction sites. He can't see the Anti-Kaiju Wall from here, can't see Oblivion Bay and the remains of Phantom Culture interred there, but he imagines he can. He swivels his chair around entirely, looking out the window while behind him, everyone stays riveted to Ranger Hansen's delivery.
He thinks, strangely, of the view from Caitlin Lightcap's office that day he was recruited out of PR, watching the Kaurs perform open-heart surgery on another jaeger out on the proving grounds, laid out among the Alaskan summer wildflowers.
They died. The Kaurs, the mother-daughter pair from Fiji, who liked loud music (if not necessarily the same kind of loud music,) and would whistle at the handsome techs they passed in the hallway, although so subtly you could never be sure which one had whistled at you. They died in the coastal waters of Indonesia, sunk and entombed.
They're in your ears. You hear them go, Divya Narendra tells anyone who asks why he left the PPDC. Cameron and Tyler were in the drift with each other, they didn't need to say a thing, but they yelled each other's names when they died and you don't -- you don't -- you don't forget that.
Almost everyone Mark knows is dead.
Payback, he supposes, for having lost nobody when all of this began.
"Well," he says quietly to himself, and when he looks back, he finds Marilyn watching him.
He smiles instinctively, because Marilyn is and always has been the kind of woman who deserves your best smile, and she frowns back.
She holds out the napkin from her ration tray.
"Your nose is bleeding," she says.
-
fin