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English
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Femslash Exchange 2016
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Published:
2016-10-29
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1,645
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1/1
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20
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98
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She Moves in Mysterious Ways

Summary:

Shaw's starting to see a future where she does more than survive.

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Work Text:

It took a few months, but Shaw is happy for the voice in her ear now, for the way the Machine has preserved Root’s particular drawling cadence. She hasn’t told the Machine yet--prefers to keep open the option of reminding her (Her?) that from most angles, the whole thing is creepy as fuck--but privately, Shaw likes the constant reminder of what Root sounded like. People slip away so easily when they’re gone. Memories alone don’t preserve your link to someone very effectively, and maybe that’s more true for Shaw than for most people, but more and more Shaw has begun to suspect that forgetting the dead for longer and longer periods of time is actually a fairly typical human experience. Harold is doing it, she knows from the Machine’s updates, with John.

So. Shaw appreciates the approximation of Root in her earpiece, most of the time. That doesn’t mean it can’t be almost as annoying as the real thing.

“Not to alarm you, sweetie,” says the Machine, “but we might have a couple more guests than I anticipated.”

“Sounds like a party.” Shaw continues loading her guns, one then the other. Beside her, their latest number shivers in her weather-inappropriate sweatshirt, grabbed, Shaw assumes, as she was fleeing her apartment. Tanisha Jones, 22, underemployed liberal arts graduate whose real trouble started when she took a job as a content moderator for an anonymous confession website and saw a submission she would have been better off forgetting all about.

Shaw peeks out the window, and sure enough there are five people approaching the Brooklyn AirBnB Tanisha has been ineffectively hiding out in: two women and three men, at least two of them ex-military. “Boy, you really know how to piss people off,” says Shaw. Tanisha takes a minute to realize Shaw is talking to her, which Shaw attributes to how much time she spends chatting with her late girlfriend’s higher power.

“I’m glad you didn’t call the police, but are you sure we’ll be able to deal with them all? If-if one of those is for me, you’ll have to give me a lesson. I’ve never touched one in my life.” Tanisha gestures to the guns.

“Don’t worry, I got this,” says Shaw, moving her attentions on to her sniper rifle. She’s gotten sentimental about the two handgun thing, but rationally she knows she and Tanisha will be better off if she doesn’t let their attackers close enough to necessitate using close-range weapons.

“I guess I shouldn’t have posted in that forum, but I just couldn’t let it go, and when I tried to report it officially no one was listening,” says Tanisha.

“I get it. You saw someone say they beat their wife daily. Not your fault that person turned out to have ties to the Russian mob.” This is still Shaw’s least favourite part of the job--talking to the numbers--but today she gets to shoot people at the same time, which more than makes up for it.

“I just keep wondering--I saw so many terrible confessions before that. I mean, my whole job was to just read every post that came in before it was made public on the app, and flag ones that violated the terms of service. You know how many suicidal confessions people make on an app like that? You know how many people post revenge porn, and dead animals, and confessions about how they want to rape their coworkers? How did I work there for three months and this guy was the first thing I did anything about?”

Shaw shrugs. “Because you needed the job?” Judging by Tanisha’s expression, this was not the right thing to say, but the hit squad outside has gotten into formation, ready to surround the apartment, so Shaw thinks she’s allowed to abandon social niceties for a moment. “Now shut up and let me save you.”

She takes two people down with shots to their kneecaps before anyone sees her, and another before any of the remaining ones can react to her presence. The fourth hides behind a telephone pole, but Shaw shoots her gun hand when she tries to sneak a shot at Shaw, and then gets her thigh when she twists in surprise at the hole through her hand. The fifth guy makes it almost to the door before Shaw catches him in the shoulder, and then in the back of his calf when he goes down.

Shaw turns to Tanisha. “Get out of here.”

“What if they come after me again?”

“I’m going to pay a visit to your friend Ivan, the guy who’s behind all this,” says Shaw. “Just lay low until tonight and you should be fine. And, you know, maybe get a new job.”

“Thanks,” says Tanisha. “I think I’ll go back to school, actually. This job gave me the best idea for a master’s thesis. I suddenly have so many thoughts about informational and affective labour under late capitalism, you know?”

“OK,” says Shaw. She does know, kind of.

When Shaw gets home she unloads her weapons into the fridge. She notices she’s running low on milk and she takes Bear out with her to go get some, and to grab some beer for good measure. The bodega on the corner has started selling tacos, and she orders three in Spanish, figuring that’s not such an unusual talent in her neighbourhood to make it unwise and attention-drawing to practice. She’s still working on keeping a reasonably low profile--there’s no telling how many people want her dead by now--but it doesn’t have the same urgency as it did when Samaritan was active, which is nice. Makes for a much more manageable level of paranoia.

Shaw puts the milk beside a stack of grenades and shoves the 6-pack into her crisper drawer. Sometimes quiet evenings like this make her restless, bored and jumpy and itching for a fight. But today feels OK. She sits down on the couch.

“Hey, Sameen,” says the Machine. Her voice is coming from Shaw’s phone speaker because she’s removed her earpiece. Shaw quickly puts the earpiece back on again and gets up, grabbing her coat in case she needs to run out the door.

“What is it?”

“Nothing that requires you to leave the apartment. Unless you’re feeling really adventurous tonight. I just thought we could have some fun, if you want.”

Shaw asked the Machine, the second time they did this, why the Machine would want to play sex games with Shaw. It’s not like the Machine felt sorry for her, as far as Shaw could tell, and it’s not like Shaw hadn’t made it perfectly clear to the Machine’s ever-watchful eyes that Shaw could find someone to fuck most of the time she felt like it.

“I want to see my analog interface happy,” said the Machine, and Shaw sensed more behind those words than she was totally able to interpret, enough that she only made the most token of protests at the “analog interface” designation.

Tonight, Shaw considers it. “Yeah, OK.” She heads to her bedroom, closing the door before Bear can bound after her. She removes her clothes with military efficiency, and stands beside her bed, waiting for instructions.

“Lie down and put your hand between your legs, Sameen. But don’t come until I say so.”

Shaw doesn’t let herself believe the voice in her ear is Root, not exactly, not even in these moments. She’s had enough of simulated Root to last her several lifetimes. Sometimes she lets herself imagine she is Root, hearing the voice of God telling her to touch herself. Root and the Machine definitely used to do this too, all those nights Root was alone in anonymous motel rooms, trying to stop what was coming. Shaw knows because both Root and the Machine seemed strangely eager to tell her.

(“She helps me ground myself sometimes, get back into my body,” Root explained to Shaw once when Root revealed that she and the Machine went vibrator shopping together, and Shaw added dissociation to her mental list of Root’s symptoms. Unlike Shaw, Root never seemed to want a diagnosis, but Shaw couldn’t help wondering sometimes.)

Mostly, however, Shaw lets them both be themselves in her bed, and that’s what she does tonight, letting her hand go exactly where the voice in her ear tells her to. Her orgasm, when it is finally allowed, feels like one more building block to a future where she does more than survive, a future that infuses her present a bit more every day.

The next morning, Shaw is halfway through her and Bear’s daily Central Park adventure when she hears the ring of a payphone. She picks it up.

“We have a new number, sweetie. Check your phone.”

Shaw glances at the screen in her pocket: 1 new message. Unknown number.

“Why did you call me on a payphone if you just sent me the info?”

“I thought it was romantic. It’s kind of like the first time we really talked.”

Shaw’s mind flashes to a hotel room, an iron, the too-broad grin of a woman who wasn’t who she said she was and instead was someone so much better than Shaw ever could have imagined. It takes her a minute to realize it’s the Machine she’s hearing, and the first talk She’s referring to is that first call after everything was over, when Shaw picked Bear up from Lionel and walked out onto a busy New York street, revelling in the feeling of a world without Samaritan’s eyes. Shaw feels herself hollow out for a moment, and then she is back again, hanging up, unlocking her phone (code: 4242), letting Bear pull her ahead on the path as she reads the files the Machine sent her.

Putting one foot in front of the other.