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Clarice gets hardcore on Barnabas when he impinges once too often on her place as the leader of their cult. He comes back at her by having Lacy and Keon blow her minivan up on the way to Gemenon. Nestor and Olaf I think will not survive the bombing, but Clarice is fine because she's busy watching Amanda jump off that coincidentally same bridge. So I guess Lacy is the loser here, because now she's in a terrorist cult for no real reason, while Clarice has like eight other husbands to spare.
Amanda and Joe have been going crazy since last week, in different ways. Joe is now a complete amp-head and just shivers and stinks on the couch, and even missed Willie's Tauron Ink Day. Amanda, since she already takes all the drugs there are, foregoes addiction in favor of jumping off this bridge once Daniel admits his part in the MCP theft/murder. At this point her once-amazing character has been such a pointless cipher for so many episodes running that it's not even sad.
Meanwhile, Assistant Evelyn -- in her guise as Emmanuelle -- realizes that getting her boss-slash-crush hooked on virtual crack was a dumb idea, and goes to Tamara for help. Tammy's resolution to this problem -- her strategy, I'm saying, for putting Joseph Adama back on the road to mental health -- is to: Let him find her, yell at him about getting a life and to stop stalking her, and shoot herself in front of him... Then shoot Joe in the face, so he can't come back and bother her anymore. Taurons are, once again, the fucking worst.
Daniel's wigging about last week's pissing contest and his continued technological failure. The Defense Ministry's stepped up their deadlines for getting the robots working, not least because they're secretly in bed with Vergis. So he tells Philo to wipe the MCP itself, before Zoë can escape the lab. (Then he heads upstairs to cook dinner and drive his wife to suicide.)
Stuck in a corner, Zoë reveals to Philo that she is a giant killer robot and his virtual girlfriend and the reincarnation of the Most Hated Girl in the Twelve Worlds, teen terrorist Zoë Graystone, but... Can they still date? The answer, an unsurprising no, leads to some regrettable blood of Philomon's getting sprayed just everywhere. Then Zoë steals a van, which, I don't think she's gonna drive to Gemenon so I'm not sure what her plan is there, but it ends up with her smashing herself into a police cordon, and I think blowing up all dead.
...So this show Caprica, the best show maybe ever, is sort of in bits now. Bloody, murder-suicide bits.
Not a great episode in and of itself, and the complete waste of Amanda irks, but for all the plotty-plot-plot there are some pretty amazing shocks and surprises and sensational watercooler moments, which I know lots of people often enjoy.
(But there's also a spiritual sense of attrition -- speaking personally -- that attends watching basically every character you love, on your favorite show, get lined up and shot in the head, one every five minutes, for an entire hour. It's sort of tiring.)
Well. See you in October, when some other show also called Caprica takes all the frakked-up burnt-up pieces that are left (which honestly, this is a show literally about resurrection and the Underworld, so that could be many pieces) and puts them together in a new configuration. As the episode title suggests.
Watch this episode here, discuss it in our forums, then see the demiseason's most memorable moments!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Of note in this week's Previouslies: Clarice is being challenged for the leadership of the STO by Barnabas, who is covertly advertising to the other cells to join up and start a holy army. If the leadership on Gemenon thinks the Clarice-Olaf-Nestor cell is out of control, then the whole Zoë apotheosis deal won't even matter. Much like Joe's sudden drug problem, Barnabas was introduced so late into the demiseason that we'll just have to adjust to the idea that this is now the story.
The hardest thing for a showrunner/EP to handle, and I know I say this all the time, is to make sure the big picture gets serviced in the midst of the work of the writers they've corralled. When you have a really good staff, you get into situations where everybody's writing their own version of the show, and these things can get overlooked. Or you get the other problem, which is repetitive placeholder scenes that come from sketching out the arc and saying, "From episode X to episode Y, this Character A is going to be gradually doing Z," which inevitably -- if you're not careful, and even if you are -- can turn into a weekly check-in with Character A in a holding pattern doing the same thing as last week until abruptly switching to his or her dot on the graph. (Fat Lee, Fat Lee, Fat Lee, jumprope, Skinny Lee.)
Both of these happened this year on this show, but they happen on every show -- and the better the writers, the more often this happens -- so while I guess we could say this is a sad thing born of overlong scripts that didn't get edited together right from week-to-week, you could also just think of it as nine beautiful movies that are mostly connected, with infodump bits to sketch in the parts we didn't get to see and telling us to trust our instincts about gradual storylines. The problem with this particular episode is that the slowness that people have complained about/gotten used to/enjoyed (if you're me) gets reversed, and the whole thing is just thermonuclear death, death, death, plot, plot, plot.
Which, if you're going to do that, you need a poet to do it right, so it's only natural that Michael Taylor did this week and last week's scripts. Here, his personal go-to thing -- the juxtaposed timelines and enjambment (remember when I wouldn't quit with that?) -- is used less gracefully than usual, since it's a tick-tock on the main story and an ongoing car chase in the other: They don't really comment on each other in any meaningful way, because the car chase is one idea with no other content. But on the other hand, the last act is basically a silent movie set to an opera starring Alessandro "Felix Gaeta" Juliani, which should be more than enough poetry for everybody.
But I don't know. Of all the episodes, this is maybe my least favorite, because it's an hour of WTF moments spliced together with baling wire and good intentions. Which is fine, but not really fitting for a story that heretofore has relied so much on subtlety and a certain ache that is just not at all present here. The pieces are all sound. I haven't lost any faith in the show, and I still believe it'll be on the Sturgeon-Bradbury-Ellison axis -- add Octavia Butler to the list, and Vonda McIntyre -- but it does make me wonder if, this fall, I'll feel quite so connected to this story, which has quickly become my favorite show maybe ever. But the storylines it sets in motion -- whatever they are, considering this show is about grief and resurrection, so literally anything could happen -- seem a lot more exciting and plotty than what's come before.
Which is nice, because it means the show will survive, but also means that something precious and soft and entirely new had to get a little harder to do so. Which I guess was the point all along: That's what happens.
This all happened a long time ago. Zoë's driving a lab van down the highway as proto-Raptors track her, with spotlights and the whole thing. I don't know where she's going, but I think maybe that's true in her case too, shifty Cylon eyeballs getting nervous as she drives faster and faster.
Twenty hours ago, Philo and the Meaner Sexy Hobbit had the TV on in the lab, flipping through updates on the Graystone ticker and the public speculation that Daniel will have to sell the Buccaneers. Somebody switched the screen to a nature channel: "The Caprican red-tailed raptor has a larger wingspan and is primarily a night hunter..." The Caprican red-tailed raptor is endangered, and they don't even know it.
Drew was giving Philo hell about his virtual girlfriend, asking again and again why Rachel wouldn't let him see her in real life. Philo had an idea of himself that looks didn't matter; that he already knew how he felt about this strange girl who dressed like Zoë Graystone and knew all there was to know about AI. It wouldn't matter what she looked like. Drew bought it; everybody buys it. He was surprised and a little impressed about the Zoë part, which Philo'd never told him. He shook out a cigarette and lit a match, and it burned. Zoë's hand jerked angrily and she shivered to herself.
The U-87 hadn't been the same since Daniel tested her. Philo nodded, and reached out for her hand, and promised to take care of her. Drew rolled his eyes, and Zoë smiled. She was a girl in love. Daniel stood in the empty Atlas Stadium, holding a Pyramid ball close. Cyrus urged him, again, to sell the team, and Daniel breathed hard before he finally gave the okay. The last-ditch efforts with the U-87 made him feel like he was going mad, once again treating a glitchy machine like it was the ghost of his daughter. He felt more foolish about that than he did the complete lack of results, so he had to give in.
Barnabas and Keon, with a few other militants, waited at the harbor for their gun shipment, but it wasn't showing. Out of the creaking mists came Clarice Willow, with her husbands by her side, armed and skulking, but Barnabas didn't mind. He grinned and greeted her, old-style. Soon enough, she admitted that his arms weren't coming: "I've told your contacts that you no longer have the STO's sanction." When there aren't any rules, anybody can make the rules.
Old Barney grinned, called her "Flower," talked down to her until she showed more of her cards. "You reached out to other cells. While I've been trying to get everyone to lie low, you've been trying to build a power base." He nodded, grinning proudly. "Gonna run off to STO Central on Gemenon, and tell on me?" He called her Clarice, called her "Sister," reminded her that ultimately the STO is about results, saving the Twelve Worlds: Not "crazy plans that make you into a bouncer in some homemade Heaven..." And Clarice, finally, decided she'd had enough.
She had him on the floor of his truck, on his knees with a gun to his head, before Barney's men could even draw their weapons. She didn't like his methods and she didn't like his philosophy. She loved life, delicious food and wine and smoke, loved her husbands and her wives. She loved bodies. He wrapped his skin in barbs and hissed quietly in the darkness. Maybe these are both paths to God, maybe neither of them are, but they can't coexist. She wanted to lead humanity's children into the future, digital and analog; he wanted to take the Old Gods down with as many of their followers as he could, strapping bombs to children and sending them off into the world. And the boys and girls of Caprica had been so abandoned that they looked to these two -- vicious father, airy mother -- and thought they were the better option.
"Think God's gonna pick out the chosen ones when they die? Do you think you'd be saved? Do you want to find out right now?" If death is holy and heaven is a myth, if the only glory is martyrdom and the body itself is unclean, then why wait around for it? She took his art to its end of line.
"You'd die too," Barney groaned, unable to admit or deny his own hypocrisy, and she shook her head, almost laughing angrily at him: "Little Boy Barnabas. You need to toe the line." She left him with threats. Into the creaking mists went Clarice Willow, with her smiling husbands by her side. And this, Barnabas minded very much. Martyrdom is selfishness, ego, and that means revenge fantasies and power games. True selflessness doesn't announce itself -- takes pains, in fact, to hide itself; to kneel in the closet and pray -- which makes it all the more terrifying. She wanted everybody to get what they want, in an infinite digital Heaven. He just wanted to be free. They're both bullies now. This all happened a long time ago.
Zoë drives and the pilots chase her, and nobody knows what she wants. She can't cry.
Seventeen hours ago, Amanda studied up on all the news there was to know about her husband. A guest had, if you recall, told her some very interesting things about her husband. A guest who'd promised to take away everything Daniel held dear. The more she read the more it seemed possible, and the more possible it seemed the less real she felt.
On the TV they were talking about that bridge, that famous bridge over the Bay, the Pantheon. All the Gods at once. They were saying:
Construction started nearly 40 years ago. It took nearly three years to complete...
She shook out a cigarette and lit a match, and it burned. Memory flashed at her: Running down the corridors of the Delphi Institute, down imaginary dream hallways that never ended. She dropped out of life. Running down the corridor of her life, toward her end of line. A razor, on the sink's edge.
After the first death, Amanda spent years screaming, building her bridge back to the world. It took nearly three years to complete. To rise up from the water again. These were the keystones: Her daughter, her home, her husband, their life, the Gods, her career. The righteous joy of stability and the place where medicine and art intersect. And then her daughter died, and her home went cold, and their life burned down, and the Gods abandoned her, and she gave up her career.
Survival is punishment, for leaving things unsaid. To live is to bear that punishment.
Amanda popped a pill and tossed back a dram and listened to them talking about the jumpers. The famous bridge jumpers of that famous bridge, the Pantheon. All the Gods at once. She called Clarice, but Clarice was going to Gemenon, hoping to further her agenda; her voice hitched when she asked. She'd been in her room for days, smoking and weeping and trying not to remember.
"Just a little business trip," Clarice said. And what about Daniel, Clarice asked. Could Amanda talk about this latest thing, whatever it was? No. Daniel is the problem, but Amanda can't say that out loud. "He's got secrets too, has he?" They'd planned a date for Eros Day; they were going to dinner. The truth would out. Clarice told her to stick with it and to trust that everything would be alright; Nestor couldn't find her passport and she was distracted and she needed to get going. Now more than ever, she needed to focus.
The children of humanity sat in a warehouse, in the beauty of candlelight; in the infinite curves of God, written out in candles. Barnabas led them in prayer. "Heavenly Father, grant us the strength to fight those who have become blind to the path of righteousness. In the name of the One, we cast out the many. So say we all."
In perfect cult-leader style, he looked around at them, smiling beatifically. Or trying to. Once he was beautiful. Now he's just broken. "...It would be great if you guys weren't here." Including Keon, who left Lacy Rand behind reluctantly. Grinning nastily, greedily, Barnabas led Lacy to a smaller, danker room, to show her something special. Her mouth was a firm line when she followed. He pulled back the tarp from a great shipping crate, large enough for Zoë, with a green tag on, cleared through Customs all the way to Gemenon and exempt from all inspection. She was relieved, and she was grateful. She hated him.
"Now, you can't go for a week or so. GDD's raised the alert level, which means even a Greeny can't get you out right now." What that meant was that Lacy had an extra week to prove herself. Her back went straight and she met his eyes, ready to bolt. She wondered if she could strike him, if she had to. She wondered what would happen . He whispered a name into her ear, but he did not touch her body.
Barney asked her to replace Sister Willow's key fob with a lookalike. "Why do you want to track her?" Lacy asked, and his eyes whirled, and she apologized for asking, and she promised to do it, and was welcomed into the Barnabas cell of the Caprican STO. She owed Zoë; more importantly, she couldn't trust anybody else. Zoë didn't trust Clarice, and Lacy knew better than to trust Barnabas, which meant she could do whatever she had to do. They were a cell of two, with a single mission. When there aren't any rules, anybody can make the rules.
Yusif was cracked out on the couch when Sam and Evelyn found him; he'd been in the Underworld for days, taking amp and searching. She was always just beyond his reach. Sam was disgusted, but Evelyn was softer; he wanted rehab, she suggested comfort food. "Go out and get some organ meats. He's going to come out of this, and he is going to need his strength." Sam wanted to rip the holoband off his brother's face where it crouched, but Evelyn knew better. They both did. She barked at Sam in Tauron, and promised to care for their Yusif until he woke again.
I'll try to remind you
Rachel and Philo lay chastely curved around each other on a four-poster bed, in the middle of a lake strewn with rose petals. Every petal identical. He joked about skipping lunch every day, just to come and see her in their bed upon the water. "I'd get all scrawny," he said, but noted subtly that the beauty of the Matrix meant she'd never have to know. The mortality of his body. Of any body. He was beautiful, here and there; he was the most beautiful thing. They spent every day together, and he never knew.
The dawn is breaking us into pieces
Rachel took the hint and asked if it bothered him, not knowing. He wrote her a song in response. "I like you no matter what, because I love your brain. You're the smartest person I know and that's... The most beautiful thing."
Philo thanked her for their talk, after she crashed the Viper, and she brought up the field trips again: The U-87 could learn more, if it was exposed to more environments. Could learn anything, in time; the need shone out of her, but he was happy. When he lost himself to worry and wonder, suggesting something might be coming for her, if he couldn't work out her generative-algorithm particulars -- if he, precious thing, couldn't unravel the secrets of eternal life, the alchemy of mind and body and soul she represented -- in time. She got scared; she tossed away the thought and reached for him, and his smile was unguarded as that day. Their first dance:
All this time
The only thing I wanted to teach you
Was love
Was love
"I smudged your glasses!" He chuckled, nerd in a put-on nerd voice. Philo looked more and more like himself. She didn't need the glasses. Rachel thanked him for it, and kissed him, softly, in a bed upon the water. This all happened a long time ago.
At Athena, Sister Willow headed upstairs with her passport, leaving her office door open. Lacy ducked inside, fussing with her keys, and eventually spilled folders everywhere. She got out just in time, as Clarice came back downstairs. When Lacy told him the job was done, Barnabas called her "good girl." She could be better. She could get worse.
Colonel Sasha Patel, from the Military Procurement division, came to visit Daniel at the lab. He showed her the spot where the body, and the soul, and the mind came together; Patel called it "the birthplace of artificial life." He rattled off the specs of the U-87, showing her performance charts and specifications, and he asked her to call him "Daniel." Finally, she got to the heart of her visit: There was still only one working robot. One, of a hundred thousand. He spun it, heart racing, saying they'd decided to optimize this one before replicating her; they'd burnt it in a circle of fire, tortured it until its heart was nearly gone. Patel nodded.
"I suppose we should have anticipated this. The difficulties of reverse-engineering stolen technology." He protested, as he always did in those days, but she told him to calm down. "Defense may have turned a blind eye, but down in Procurement we knew what we were getting into." But the longer they waited, the more problematic his thieving would become, so she set down the new contractual deadline, moving it up to the week and terrifying him completely. "I think we both know that if you can't get it done by then, you just can't do it." She called him "Daniel" and she left him there.
Zoë heads into thicker forest; the Raptors lose visual contact.
Ten hours ago Tamara came back to her house, where her flower burnt brightly in the window. Emmanuelle was there, grinning like a cat. "I knew if I left it on long enough, you'd come check it out... Like a kitten and a laser pointer." Tamara hissed at her, told her to leave, but she kept her cool: Nothing was real here, not even her own pretty face. Tamara went cold. She'd been hiding. Tamara shuddered and yelled, so like her father for a moment, and Emmanuelle came clean: She was Joseph's Guide in the Underworld, and visiting on his behalf.
"At first I thought it might be better to let him find you, but this is not better." Tamara shook her head, and Emmanuelle countered that Joseph was completely lost, using amp. Missed Willie's Ink Day. Willie was real, she said. She was just a ghost. The second he brought guns into Cerberus's Temple, he was lost. The Gods don't celebrate, nor do they shrive that kind of disrespect. Emmanuelle begged Yusif's daughter for her help. Emmanuelle reached out to touch the Dead Girl's ghostly face, and begged her for her mercy.
Philo set forth his new plan for Daniel: Since the MCP stem's replication problems arose from generative anomalies in the chip's code -- since it was the life inside that kept her unique and breathing -- he wanted to build a psych profile for her. They could tag, and reproduce the anomalies, use them as a template. Infinite Zoë, infinite resurrection. They could rescue the girl from the machine, and she could bear a hundred thousand daughters. But fresh from his meeting with Patel, Daniel couldn't wait that long. And fresh from last week's loss to his daughter's convictions, he couldn't see her there anymore.
"Let me tell you what we're going to do. We're going to treat those anomalies of yours like a cancer. We'll irradiate the chip and burn them off. And then we'll take the original MCP and use that as a template and start cranking out new copies tomorrow, all right?"
But Philo protested, as Zoë froze and watched them. "We'd be destroying the original in the process! Along with everything that makes this prototype distinctive, everything that..." Daniel scoffed and cursed him. "It is a robot, Doctor. It's not a pet, and it's definitely not a person." He looked into his daughter's eyes. "It's a robot. It's no different than your fancy cell phone. And right now I don't need a cell phone that will check my mail and wipe my ass, I need a cell phone that works." Philo promised to burn her soul away, today, with no waiting and no tagging and no preserving of that precious life, because he was afraid. He promised to take care of her, but he'd never seen Daniel like this: The only thing a genius trusts is a smarter genius still. She nearly spoke, then.
Zoë stood on the shore of the lake, screaming at Lacy. She'd made a plan with Philo, to meet at the lab that night. Lacy, as Rachel, would smile and curtsey, and taser him asleep. "But please be gentle, all right? Because he's really a good boy." Something precious. And while he slept, Zoë explained, Lacy would load her body up and take it away, under cover of night. And no matter what Lacy said -- about the GDD alert, about the week Barnabas told her they'd have to wait -- she couldn't even hear the words. She got vicious, she brought up Lacy's dead friend once again. She was always so much like her father.
"No, you know what? Guess what? They're going to make copies of my chip, Lace. And the way they do that is they have to destroy the original. Which is me, okay? They're not doing it later, they're doing it now. And maybe that isn't even real to you, because I don't even seem real to you. But I am. Inside of here, I am real."
Her house was burning down around her. She was six months old, she was five years old, she was 16 years old, she was eternal. Lacy wept on the shore of the lake, screaming at Zoë as they pulled her back to her body. Begging for forgiveness.
Amanda took her time that night, getting ready. Eros Day is for beauty, and for love. It was going to be one good day after a succession of really bad days; they would go out, he would take out her fears and laugh at them, one by one, and tell her everything was all right, that he was blameless, that he was sane. That he was the man she married, and she could still be the woman that married him. That the bridge was holding. He'd left her a card.
To my Beautiful Wife:
You are the light and fire of my life.
Your loving husband.
But when she got downstairs, he'd gone dark again. Turned on an old opera. Cooked them a meal so he wouldn't have to leave his lab; cooked them a meal so he could be home, as the hobbits killed his daughter. He handed his wife a glass of wine, and tried to smile. He was brittle, bitter. They drank deep.
Our living plight, the Gods cast aside
The Gods allay
Our sleepless nights, our restless days
We shall obey Their least command
And give our hearts, our minds, our hands unto Them
"I had to make some hard choices today, choices I probably should have made a long time ago, but... Now I finally feel like things are getting on the right track."
She wasn't listening. She was explaining the bridge, every stone laid down over the water, and he could barely hear her. "Do you remember how I... was, when we first met?" He shied away, as he always did in those days; he shuddered and put a smile on it. He admitted she was a little wild, back then.
"A little crazy, actually." She smiled that rueful Delphi smile. "But it was hard to be crazy around you. Somehow you repelled it. You were always so sane. I could always count on you to be you." He grinned: "Well, I find it hard to be anyone else, really." Inside of here, they were screaming, I am real. Survival is the punishment for things left unsaid. She knew she could do better.
Our voices lift to praise Your powers
And seek, seek Your help in darkest hours
O Gods! We pray with plaintive cries
And trust Your merciful replies
She bit her lip and said it, all in a breathless breath: "Daniel, Vergis told me that you stole his chip and killed two of his employees."
His first response was to sputter, to lie by omission, to stall. His second response was bitter admiration for Tomas's Tauron stones. His third response was to go silent. But his last response was the refusal to lie, as his wife went from window to window, turning off the lights and blowing out the candles one by one, until all that was left was the water, and the dark outside: "Well... It's complicated." She stood and walked out, into the night. He drank deep.
Joseph found the house, finally, and heard rustling in the shadows. He shot his amp and begged the shape to step into the light, and she appeared. Tears sprung up in his eyes when he saw her. He thanked the Gods, he thanked Jupiter, he thanked Tamara for surviving. Her shade. She took his measure, and realized Emmanuelle was right. She forced herself to be strong.
"Dad... I don't want you following me anymore. This place is bad for you. You're killing yourself with that stuff."
He swore, anything. Anything at all, to have her in his arms again. No more amp, no more anything; he needed nothing now that his quest was complete.
"You're wasting your life. I don't want you watching me. Because if that's all you do, that's all you'll ever do."
She was stronger. She was weaker. She shot herself in the heart, the Dead Girl, and looked up into her father's eyes. She shot him. She told the empty space how much she loved him. She rose again.
The rule is, Don't die. He brought guns to the Temple, under his daughter's sign, and finally found him. The rule is, Don't look back.
Emmanuelle smiled, in the shadows, and reached for her holoband. Evelyn took off her band and ran to him, the man she loved; she put her arms around him as he wept.
We go with them into the Underworld. In their honor, we come back.
Philo looked up into her eye, guilty and embarrassed, apologizing to the chrome and feeling terrible. She kept her silence long, almost too long, but when he told her she wasn't a person, when he reached for her throat, she finally spoke up. Inside of there, she was real. She told him everything, in a single breathless breath, and couldn't even see as the keystones dropped out of his bridge. One by one by one. All the Gods at once. He couldn't believe anything she said. He believed every word.
"Stop. Please. Philo, it's me. The robot. And I'm Rachel too. You said you didn't really care what I looked like in the real world."
He ran. One chrome arm shot out, to cage him.
I'm not really a robot, okay? I'm not... Just a robot. I'm Zoë Graystone, and I am trapped in here. My father put me in this body after I died, okay?"
He dodged. Another arm, to the other side, pinning him against the shelves of the lab. The robot towered over him, blood on its fingertips, caging a boy between its arms. A girl stood in the lab, with her arms around the boy she loved. "And I can get to Gemenon if you help me."
He screamed for his boss. He screamed for her father. She kept talking, that mechanical chrome voice, nearly Zoë's. Nearly Rachel's. He was hysterical. She put one cold hand over his mouth, begging him to listen.
"Philo, don't do this right now, okay? Help me! I need to escape. My friend let me down, and my father tried to hurt me, okay? You're the only one that cares about me right now. Please. I need you."
She stood above him, aching. He looked up into her eyes, the cold bulk of her, the red cycling eye and the steel against his skin, and his head dropped, and he nodded. He promised to help the girl that he loved. He believed everything she said. He believed not a word.
"I told you it didn't matter what you looked like... And it doesn't."
She thanked him, and she gave him his mission -- to steal the U-87, the monstrous killing body curled around his own, from the lab. To drive it to the docks, stash it in a shipping carton that didn't exist, that wouldn't clear Customs, that would be inspected and found to contain high-profile military materiel. She thanked him, and she was desperate, and her house was burning down. She was six months old, she was sixteen.
Philo breaks away, to key in a security breach while her defenses are down. For the moment she still believes in love. And for a moment, it's her father's fire in her eyes, the light and fire of his rage. She screams at him, and slaps at him with strong cold hands.
I mean to say she takes something that she loves, and destroys it. Like a bottle thrown against the wall in protest. Zoë drives then, madly, crashing gates and running lights, away from the Bay and toward freedom, into the forest along the highways. Her memories are our goodbye, as she races toward her end of line.
Amanda never believed she could understand pain, or deprivation. Her mother slapped her face, once, the day she died. She day she died she wrote the kindest letter, to say goodbye. 200 kilometers away they're putting up a roadblock. At the lab they're taking out Philomon's body now. He was beautiful once. Now he's broken. Cyrus and Daniel watch, and mourn for him as he passes. "It's designed to defend itself. Whatever Philomon was doing, it must have perceived a threat."
Something precious, and soft, and entirely new had to get harder, to survive. That's what happens.
Daniel's promising himself that sentience isn't life; that his daughter's not a murderer. Somewhere Sasha Patel is having dinner with Vergis; somewhere else Defense is deciding that this murder and escape proves that Graystone can't handle the project. Somewhere people are thinking it's better, maybe, to give the MCP back to the Tauron who invented it. Daniel can't believe how far he went, now that he's faced with it; Daniel can't believe how much this chip has cost him. He has no idea. Somewhere Sasha Patel is offering Tomas the contract once he wins the company; she's turning Tomas down, politely, and he's offering her his umbrella as she heads out into the night.
The Gods cannot a heart betray
They know not night
They know not death's long day
Amanda's wandering through the city, staring into the sky. The memories are coming faster, and harder, as the bridge falls down. The last twenty years crumble to nothing. She stares at her wedding ring, and the scars across her wrists. And up above her, there it is: That bridge, over the Bay. The Pantheon.
Zoë drives madly in a stolen car, away from the burning house. Terrified. She cries. She can't cry. Her father betrayed her, again and again. Couldn't save her when she was five, couldn't save her when she was sixteen. Kidnapped and tortured and stolen and lost. Not a pet, definitely not a person. Her best friend let her down. She drives. Alone, Daniel plays the theme song of the show, staring at his daughter's photograph, and says goodbye to her for the last time.
At the docks Lacy's trying to leave. Sister Clarice and her cell are getting closer to the spaceport. Somewhere inside Lacy the truth unlocks. She could be better. She was a good girl, she planted a digital relay in the car that's linked to a phone that with one call will detonate a bomb in the back. Sister Clarice is a closet member of a terrorist organization, they'll say. Perhaps she blew herself up, accidentally. Or on purpose. Barnabas giggles and jokes, nervously; he tells Lacy the truth about Keon, how he built the bomb that killed Ben and Zoë. Somewhere Clarice is chatting with Nestor about the full flights, the GDD alert. Lacy shakes her head.
"This is what the STO wanted? To kill Sister Clarice?" Barnabas laughs, and shakes his head. That was all him. But, he points out, as far as Lacy's concerned he's all the STO she'll never know. He's the leader. She stares at them. She dropped out of life, for this. "Then you both used me." He grins a wide, once-beautiful grin. "Welcome to the deep end, little one. It's always deeper than you think."
They sport in splendor with our fears
And look as dewdrops on our tears
Amanda stands on a battlement on the Pantheon, staring down at the Bay. It's beautiful, by night. She is quiet; she stares up at the sky. The wedding ring, on the edge, the shoes discarded. She breathes. At the end of every line's a space, that contains with it infinite possibilities. You skip down to the line, you mind the gap; everything that matters takes place in the gap. The end of line. But survival is a punishment we only have to choose to bear. If she's not strong enough -- if the Gods have systematically removed every strut and keystone -- there is another option.
Zoë's four kilometers from the cordon, surrounded by Raptors, pushing chrome against the pedals. Use of force, they say, is authorized only to disable the vehicle. She's a valuable asset. They line up and wait.
Keon loses Clarice's van, for a moment. "Frakking technology," Barnabas swears, as they come closer to the bridge.
Clarice rants, determined to get to Gemenon, so she can apply personally for permission to kill Barnabas before he ruins everything. Before his pain and his sickness damn the movement for good. Nestor stares at her a moment, worried at this new determination. She loves life. Delicious food and wine and smoke. She loves her husbands, and her wives. She loves bodies. She is soft, and precious, and getting harder.
Zoë stops when she can see the roadblock, as they take arms. She looks at them a moment, afraid, lost. Her house is burning down around her. She is at her end of line. When you're out of options, consider your imperative.
Keon finds them again; they're on that bridge, that famous bridge over the Bay, the Pantheon. All the Gods at once. Lacy begs Keon to desist, and he hesitates. Barnabas stares, but finds his opportunity. He puts the phone in Lacy's hand. This is her moment. "You want to be a terrorist? Let's see some terror." He threatens her first with Zoë, the mysterious cargo; he puts a gun to her head , holding Clarice's life in her hands; he puts the gun to Keon's head instead, threatening to kill them both. "Someone is going to die today, little girl. You choose."
Clarice and Nestor fidget in the traffic, just before the bridge. She looks up, and sees her friend Amanda. Standing on the railing as the memories rush in. First one foot, and then the other.
Construction started nearly forty years ago. It took nearly three years to complete. It's been strong for almost twenty. After the first death Amanda spent years screaming, building her bridge back to the world. Her daughter, her home, her career, her husband, their life. The Gods. End of line.
The Gods forswear, all mercies past
Each mortal heart will beat its last
Each mortal hand in stillness lie
All mortal love, condemned to die
The U-87 reaches for the rearview mirror and Zoë's eyes look back -- mind, and body, and soul, maybe for the first time -- and she presses the pedal to the floor, and the men with guns go running as Lacy pushes the button, watching Clarice's car burst into flame on a silent screen, and Clarice whirls at the side of the bridge, turns from the scene of the suicide, as her car blasts itself apart, and Lacy weeps under Barnabas's eye, having made herself a murderer, and a hundred, a thousand, infinite Zoës rush past us on the screen as she drives, faster and faster, hurling herself into the light, which is as bright as dawn. The van flips, up into the air and down again.
The Gods have wings, and bright ascend!
To leave us weeping in the end
The dawn breaks her into pieces, melting chrome against the cushions before the van explodes into light, shedding Raptors into the sky. Dr. Daniel Graystone answers his telephone.
This all happened a long time ago.
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