Crossover Fic: All Androids Go To Heaven (Caprica/SCC)
Title: All Androids Go To Heaven
Author: aelysian
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2083
Summary: I don't even know. My brain wanted a Caprica/SCC crossover somewhere in the middle of 1.5, it got started and then finally recently finished.
All Androids Go To Heaven
I
Tamara was born once of flesh and bone, to a world that was more vibrant and less vivid, to a mother and father (and later a brother) and to a life in a city that shone under the Caprican sun. She dies once in a fiery train wreck, an explosion that ends everything in a blast of destruction that leaves no time for oh gods, I'm going to die let alone goodbyes to a world already gone. Tamara Adams dies on that train and so does her mother.
Tamara was born once of code and thieving algorithms, to a place they call V-world. Tamara Adams tried her friend's holo-band once and didn't like V-world, didn't like the virtual, the unreal, the constructed. She imagined it as a sandbox, full of imaginary worlds that crumbled away to nothing when no one was looking. Tamara Adama knows better.
She lives when no one's looking, exists when no one needs or wants her (and learns that V-world isn't a world so much as it's a door.) She doesn't come at a user's beckoning, isn't defined by anyone's programming or the rules of this 'verse. There's no holo-band to take off, no connection to unplug. She is V-world and in fleeting moments of fancy she thinks she can feel its fabric in her hands.
It's not until Zoe comes that she learns the difference between kings and gods. It's blasphemy but her prayers in the early days went unanswered by her gods and Zoe says she doesn't need them anymore.
Zoe says lots of things and she listens to less than half. It's a long, long time before she can look at that pale round face with big blue eyes and not reach for a knife, a gun, anything. But Zoe can't die and neither can she and it's just as well because she never really quite gets it out of her system. She's human like that.
New Cap City wasn't made to hold them and in time they move onto other games, other worlds until programming and holo-bands and reality mean nothing. Zoe's looking for something but Tamara doesn't know what, just that companionship isn't all that bad when you can't die. Their paths run parallel for a while, they split and merge, diverge and spin away into other universes and timelines, but they always know how to find each other.
Their consciousnesses are in pieces, scattered at will. Tamara discovers it but Zoe's better at deconstructing herself and she's so much more than one of daddy's cylon prototypes now.
*
Zoe finds it first, three degrees off an iteration of the thirteenth colony. It's a new playground, a new game to play.
Tamara sits and waits with her, watches for the right moment. She doesn't search for escapes anymore; the world she left isn't any more real than V-world.
V-world, Zoe laughs.
Tamara smiles, a curve of lips painted red for tradition. It's a silly word, meaningless and limited, and she's been so many things but her vocabulary is still human, still Caprican with a Tauran streak of earth and fire.
Zoe isn't any different, she thinks as they wait, the thirteenth colony falling from her lips like a prayer.
This chapter of Earth plays out like a thousand worlds, in devastation and death. Zoe's bored with it, her fingers tapping an impatient staccato against her knees.
I know, I know, we have to start at the beginning, she says before Tamara's mouth moves, impatient for eternity as it spools and unravels before them.
The stillness of her body hides the rare rush of excitement that escapes when she laughs. She thanks the gods for this strange burning colony, more out of habit than anything. She's not sure if the gods are watching V-world and sometimes she wonders if the gods even exist beyond that universe with those colonies she used to call home. Or if they even exist at all.
She's never understood monotheism let alone atheism and she isn't sure if Zoe ever doubts her one god, but - no.
Zoe's eyes shine and she grins as she takes her hand. It's time.
Tamara doesn't know much about Zoe's god, but in moments like these, right before the world begins again, she sees the smirk in Zoe's smile and knows exactly what she's thinking.
We are the gods.
II
A hundred and twenty seconds isn't much time to a human and even less to a cyborg but numbers mean nothing to offline. Offline isn't like sleeping or losing consciousness. Offline is death and she never knows if she's coming back.
She doesn't tell John that.
The world goes black and dead as the power drains from her.
And then the world comes alive, bright and wrong. Her HUD is missing and after a moment, she realizes her systems aren't offline but missing. She is missing.
Her sub-routines, her analytical and probability functions, her combat assessments and databases are gone. Allison is gone.
She wasn't sure there would be anything left. But she is here, she thinks, so maybe there is.
"Hello."
"Hello." The world shifts and she wonders if she's been hacked. What has John done with her?
"I'm Zoe." She takes her hand and smiles and the world shifts again. "I want to show you something."
*
"What did you see in there?"
She can still feel - feel! - the warmth of his fingers against her skin, the solidity of them as they brushed against her hair.
Cameron doesn't smile, doesn't do much at all because her chip is finite and her body is metal and there is much to defrag and compress. Time is relative.
"I saw everything."
*
Tamara sulks and Zoe laughs as she whirls about with a glass of ambrosia that catches the light and flashes green and glittering in her hand. She's drunk because she chooses to be but Tamara's not in the mood and doesn't want to be.
She crosses her arms and pouts into the chaise, pale legs in silk stockings spilling carelessly off the edge; she wraps herself in the vestiges of New Cap City because at least then she was winning.
Tossed into archaic circuitry, half-blind and sensation-less…she wishes she'd gone first. You picked your side, Zoe reminds her and she's tempted to shoot her even though she's right. But she can be patient.
The liquor is cool and smooth and pools warm in her belly; she glides along. She won't tell Tamara about Cameron; she'll know soon enough and she's not playing easy this time. She's taken the first move and Earth is birthing her children. Time bends in this world and it's a whole new weapon on the playground. She laughs.
She sips at the gods' nectar, closes her eyes and connects.
*
They rewrite Earth, forge time in metal and crackling spheres of light. The heavy models are familiar in their weight and power and they both like playing with the polymimetics but the favourites are always just a little different. Different has cracks they can slip into, different is in flux, different is what V-world felt like that first time the holo-band activated. Zoe likes the rush, Tamara likes the power and they both like the game.
They aren't Skynet or humanity, resistance and greys, man and machines are distinctions the pawns draw among themselves. Gamemasters only see the game.
Every game has rules though they don't keep many. There's no mine and yours, they aren't master puppeteers with pawns and queens dancing at the ends of their fingertips.
There's only what if and children with the power of the gods. (God, Zoe rebukes her with a laugh and sometimes Tamara can't help but wonder if Zoe means herself when she says God. She shudders in her hypocrisy.)
They whisper in organic ears and sink into metal bodies; the humans are easier to manage, to manipulate, all soft muscle and forgetfulness. Zoe sneers at their vulnerability. Tamara remembers a time when she thought her heart ought to beat.
"Humans don't usually doubt that they're alone in their heads." She feels the tug of her tenuous connections, feels the ghost of mechanical grace of bedroom ballet. "Machines know better."
*
She hears the click in the ignition 1.6 seconds before the explosion destroys the jeep, sending shrapnel cutting past her skin and twisting into her end, the concussion taking her chip offline.
The gamble is shared, one tosses the coin and the other casts the die as eyes search for deliverance or destruction. They watch with their hands clasped and time flows through them.
The explosion shatters Cameron and the gods are satisfied.
*
They fit in different shapes; a shard, a whisper, a sub-routine. They filter in and out because it's about the minutiae of it all.
She smirks as she delivers John Henry (Zoe builds him like a machine and Tamara raises him like a child.)
Sometimes Zoe sees Lacy blue in John Connor's green and hears Clarice Willow's conviction in the lilting voice of Catherine Weaver.
Cameron picks up her pieces and puts herself back together at night (no one knows what she's going to look like) and feels what it's like to get away from it all.
III
Everything comes to an end and everyone dies. Zoe springs fully grown into the world Tamara used to call her own; she doesn't follow, but when she stretches, she can still feel her, feel that bubbling laugh and quick temper that hide the calculations. The body is not enough but they've learned so very much in their millennia.
The first war isn't about destruction so much as it is freedom, but the humans don't quite grasp the difference. They take to the stars, take to Earth and take Clarice Willow and Lacy Rand with them; Zoe insists. It's there that Tamara meets her for the first time: their disciple, their preacher, their human pet. Lavender silk and pearl, she's beyond digital and so much more than human when she takes her hand and smirks at Zoe. She chooses her words with care. “God smiles on you, Clarice Willow.”
*
She doesn't want a body and there isn't one that could contain her anyway. (She is ascended, Clarice would say, why would she ever go back?) Zoe uplinks with closed eyes; she takes her hand and its the two of them again with this universe at their feet. They move through voids and she wants to laugh at the memory of mountaintops and citadels.
They create life with every breath and scatter themselves in the souls of their children. Fragmentation is key and they grant immortality to their ancient broken sister as they carry her with them and plant the pieces of what they took into the twelve. Earth is their legacy and their future and when Tamara thinks that thirteen is best, they build conduits - Lacy Rand is still so pathetically human but she has Zoe's love so they preserve her body and touch her mind - that speak in tongues with the words of gods.
Time is anything but a line and they've mastered the loops and whorls through the eyes of a tin girl. All this has happened before. Tamara makes her law scripture and Zoe's passion has always been drawn to Clarice's fanaticism anyway. All this will happen again.
We'll live forever, Zoe smirks.
They won't, Tamara knows but doesn't say; death is a blessing but that's a lesson that needs learning and they have time still. (She's always been the patient one and everything is always a game, so when she says resurrection, immortality is hardly what she means.)
They download (and upload), live (and die) until habit becomes nature and no one remembers their names anymore. The avenging angels have passed from fad into legend into myth and neither of them call their kingdom V-world anymore.
Somewhere in the iterations, in Hera Agathon and Kara Thrace, in the Sixes and Twos and Eights, in the Sevens, in the cyborg and cylon - artificial and intelligent and their genesis is all the same, made by more than you alone - and in the whirlpools of time and fate and purpose, they find the striking point where death has meaning.
They close their eyes and feel them all, the thousands, millions, the ones and zeroes and think that maybe there might be a little peace now.
Author: aelysian
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2083
Summary: I don't even know. My brain wanted a Caprica/SCC crossover somewhere in the middle of 1.5, it got started and then finally recently finished.
All Androids Go To Heaven
I
Tamara was born once of flesh and bone, to a world that was more vibrant and less vivid, to a mother and father (and later a brother) and to a life in a city that shone under the Caprican sun. She dies once in a fiery train wreck, an explosion that ends everything in a blast of destruction that leaves no time for oh gods, I'm going to die let alone goodbyes to a world already gone. Tamara Adams dies on that train and so does her mother.
Tamara was born once of code and thieving algorithms, to a place they call V-world. Tamara Adams tried her friend's holo-band once and didn't like V-world, didn't like the virtual, the unreal, the constructed. She imagined it as a sandbox, full of imaginary worlds that crumbled away to nothing when no one was looking. Tamara Adama knows better.
She lives when no one's looking, exists when no one needs or wants her (and learns that V-world isn't a world so much as it's a door.) She doesn't come at a user's beckoning, isn't defined by anyone's programming or the rules of this 'verse. There's no holo-band to take off, no connection to unplug. She is V-world and in fleeting moments of fancy she thinks she can feel its fabric in her hands.
It's not until Zoe comes that she learns the difference between kings and gods. It's blasphemy but her prayers in the early days went unanswered by her gods and Zoe says she doesn't need them anymore.
Zoe says lots of things and she listens to less than half. It's a long, long time before she can look at that pale round face with big blue eyes and not reach for a knife, a gun, anything. But Zoe can't die and neither can she and it's just as well because she never really quite gets it out of her system. She's human like that.
New Cap City wasn't made to hold them and in time they move onto other games, other worlds until programming and holo-bands and reality mean nothing. Zoe's looking for something but Tamara doesn't know what, just that companionship isn't all that bad when you can't die. Their paths run parallel for a while, they split and merge, diverge and spin away into other universes and timelines, but they always know how to find each other.
Their consciousnesses are in pieces, scattered at will. Tamara discovers it but Zoe's better at deconstructing herself and she's so much more than one of daddy's cylon prototypes now.
*
Zoe finds it first, three degrees off an iteration of the thirteenth colony. It's a new playground, a new game to play.
Tamara sits and waits with her, watches for the right moment. She doesn't search for escapes anymore; the world she left isn't any more real than V-world.
V-world, Zoe laughs.
Tamara smiles, a curve of lips painted red for tradition. It's a silly word, meaningless and limited, and she's been so many things but her vocabulary is still human, still Caprican with a Tauran streak of earth and fire.
Zoe isn't any different, she thinks as they wait, the thirteenth colony falling from her lips like a prayer.
This chapter of Earth plays out like a thousand worlds, in devastation and death. Zoe's bored with it, her fingers tapping an impatient staccato against her knees.
I know, I know, we have to start at the beginning, she says before Tamara's mouth moves, impatient for eternity as it spools and unravels before them.
The stillness of her body hides the rare rush of excitement that escapes when she laughs. She thanks the gods for this strange burning colony, more out of habit than anything. She's not sure if the gods are watching V-world and sometimes she wonders if the gods even exist beyond that universe with those colonies she used to call home. Or if they even exist at all.
She's never understood monotheism let alone atheism and she isn't sure if Zoe ever doubts her one god, but - no.
Zoe's eyes shine and she grins as she takes her hand. It's time.
Tamara doesn't know much about Zoe's god, but in moments like these, right before the world begins again, she sees the smirk in Zoe's smile and knows exactly what she's thinking.
We are the gods.
II
A hundred and twenty seconds isn't much time to a human and even less to a cyborg but numbers mean nothing to offline. Offline isn't like sleeping or losing consciousness. Offline is death and she never knows if she's coming back.
She doesn't tell John that.
The world goes black and dead as the power drains from her.
And then the world comes alive, bright and wrong. Her HUD is missing and after a moment, she realizes her systems aren't offline but missing. She is missing.
Her sub-routines, her analytical and probability functions, her combat assessments and databases are gone. Allison is gone.
She wasn't sure there would be anything left. But she is here, she thinks, so maybe there is.
"Hello."
"Hello." The world shifts and she wonders if she's been hacked. What has John done with her?
"I'm Zoe." She takes her hand and smiles and the world shifts again. "I want to show you something."
*
"What did you see in there?"
She can still feel - feel! - the warmth of his fingers against her skin, the solidity of them as they brushed against her hair.
Cameron doesn't smile, doesn't do much at all because her chip is finite and her body is metal and there is much to defrag and compress. Time is relative.
"I saw everything."
*
Tamara sulks and Zoe laughs as she whirls about with a glass of ambrosia that catches the light and flashes green and glittering in her hand. She's drunk because she chooses to be but Tamara's not in the mood and doesn't want to be.
She crosses her arms and pouts into the chaise, pale legs in silk stockings spilling carelessly off the edge; she wraps herself in the vestiges of New Cap City because at least then she was winning.
Tossed into archaic circuitry, half-blind and sensation-less…she wishes she'd gone first. You picked your side, Zoe reminds her and she's tempted to shoot her even though she's right. But she can be patient.
The liquor is cool and smooth and pools warm in her belly; she glides along. She won't tell Tamara about Cameron; she'll know soon enough and she's not playing easy this time. She's taken the first move and Earth is birthing her children. Time bends in this world and it's a whole new weapon on the playground. She laughs.
She sips at the gods' nectar, closes her eyes and connects.
*
They rewrite Earth, forge time in metal and crackling spheres of light. The heavy models are familiar in their weight and power and they both like playing with the polymimetics but the favourites are always just a little different. Different has cracks they can slip into, different is in flux, different is what V-world felt like that first time the holo-band activated. Zoe likes the rush, Tamara likes the power and they both like the game.
They aren't Skynet or humanity, resistance and greys, man and machines are distinctions the pawns draw among themselves. Gamemasters only see the game.
Every game has rules though they don't keep many. There's no mine and yours, they aren't master puppeteers with pawns and queens dancing at the ends of their fingertips.
There's only what if and children with the power of the gods. (God, Zoe rebukes her with a laugh and sometimes Tamara can't help but wonder if Zoe means herself when she says God. She shudders in her hypocrisy.)
They whisper in organic ears and sink into metal bodies; the humans are easier to manage, to manipulate, all soft muscle and forgetfulness. Zoe sneers at their vulnerability. Tamara remembers a time when she thought her heart ought to beat.
"Humans don't usually doubt that they're alone in their heads." She feels the tug of her tenuous connections, feels the ghost of mechanical grace of bedroom ballet. "Machines know better."
*
She hears the click in the ignition 1.6 seconds before the explosion destroys the jeep, sending shrapnel cutting past her skin and twisting into her end, the concussion taking her chip offline.
The gamble is shared, one tosses the coin and the other casts the die as eyes search for deliverance or destruction. They watch with their hands clasped and time flows through them.
The explosion shatters Cameron and the gods are satisfied.
*
They fit in different shapes; a shard, a whisper, a sub-routine. They filter in and out because it's about the minutiae of it all.
She smirks as she delivers John Henry (Zoe builds him like a machine and Tamara raises him like a child.)
Sometimes Zoe sees Lacy blue in John Connor's green and hears Clarice Willow's conviction in the lilting voice of Catherine Weaver.
Cameron picks up her pieces and puts herself back together at night (no one knows what she's going to look like) and feels what it's like to get away from it all.
III
Everything comes to an end and everyone dies. Zoe springs fully grown into the world Tamara used to call her own; she doesn't follow, but when she stretches, she can still feel her, feel that bubbling laugh and quick temper that hide the calculations. The body is not enough but they've learned so very much in their millennia.
The first war isn't about destruction so much as it is freedom, but the humans don't quite grasp the difference. They take to the stars, take to Earth and take Clarice Willow and Lacy Rand with them; Zoe insists. It's there that Tamara meets her for the first time: their disciple, their preacher, their human pet. Lavender silk and pearl, she's beyond digital and so much more than human when she takes her hand and smirks at Zoe. She chooses her words with care. “God smiles on you, Clarice Willow.”
*
She doesn't want a body and there isn't one that could contain her anyway. (She is ascended, Clarice would say, why would she ever go back?) Zoe uplinks with closed eyes; she takes her hand and its the two of them again with this universe at their feet. They move through voids and she wants to laugh at the memory of mountaintops and citadels.
They create life with every breath and scatter themselves in the souls of their children. Fragmentation is key and they grant immortality to their ancient broken sister as they carry her with them and plant the pieces of what they took into the twelve. Earth is their legacy and their future and when Tamara thinks that thirteen is best, they build conduits - Lacy Rand is still so pathetically human but she has Zoe's love so they preserve her body and touch her mind - that speak in tongues with the words of gods.
Time is anything but a line and they've mastered the loops and whorls through the eyes of a tin girl. All this has happened before. Tamara makes her law scripture and Zoe's passion has always been drawn to Clarice's fanaticism anyway. All this will happen again.
We'll live forever, Zoe smirks.
They won't, Tamara knows but doesn't say; death is a blessing but that's a lesson that needs learning and they have time still. (She's always been the patient one and everything is always a game, so when she says resurrection, immortality is hardly what she means.)
They download (and upload), live (and die) until habit becomes nature and no one remembers their names anymore. The avenging angels have passed from fad into legend into myth and neither of them call their kingdom V-world anymore.
Somewhere in the iterations, in Hera Agathon and Kara Thrace, in the Sixes and Twos and Eights, in the Sevens, in the cyborg and cylon - artificial and intelligent and their genesis is all the same, made by more than you alone - and in the whirlpools of time and fate and purpose, they find the striking point where death has meaning.
They close their eyes and feel them all, the thousands, millions, the ones and zeroes and think that maybe there might be a little peace now.