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43 – Cake
In a way, the rest of the day was familiar. After the accident, she hadn’t been in a coma – which was apparently Ryan and the others were referring to “being dead for nearly a month”. No coma, but a long stretch without many memories. A long sleep, like a princess in a castle. After she finally had a longer period of wakefulness, the days had been filled with tests. Blood draws and tentative appointments with specialists to address what hadn’t been sorted in the major surgeries. A lot of her doctors had been hesitant to give her details – assuming that either she wouldn’t understand what was going on…
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41 – The Colour Spectrum
There were a lot of questions that an agent had to ask over the course of their life that a human didn’t have to. Most of those questions had answers in protocol or precedent. All of that aside, Ryan wasn’t sure what level of celebration was appropriate for a birthday when the guest of honour could best be described as “dead”. It apparently didn’t give Merlin the same level of quandary as he had spent most of the morning decorating the lab. A hand-drawn birthday card sat on the rolling drawers beside Stef’s bed, and a banner along the wall had joined it. Whatever he did, he knew he was…
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26 – The Greater Good
She wasn’t sure she’d ever expected to be a mother. Andrea slowly sipped her coffee, pecked at a couple of keys, starting the next round of scans, then dutifully began to sort through the latest crop of crayon drawings. Agents who became parents tended to be a lot older than she was, for a start – early 30s was a perfectly normal age for a human to have a family. However, for agents, it was still very much on the “Newborn” side of life. There were exceptions, of course – some agents came to their emotional maturity – or at least their emotional selves – fairly early in life, flipping…
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06 – Last Requests
Every tiny detail seemed blown out of proportion. The sensation of his own breath. The brightness of the lab lights. The touch of fabric against his skin. Every pinpoint of information that was never otherwise considered. Ryan wiped his cheeks, aware of every line on his palm touching the skin. Every unnoticed detail of hands he’d had for over a century. Hands he’d always feared shared too many details with Rhys. So much – too much – of his early life had been in the shadow of a man simultaneously gone and not gone – as was probably the way with other templated agents. Other templates though, he knew, were…
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31 – Recovery.exe
Ryan’s body hit the blue like a corpse. Despite himself, despite the numerous windows – both in his HUD and on the screens around him – telling him that the Director was still alive, Jones held his breath. The recovery tank was large – seven feet on each side and seven feet tall. Large enough for every standard agent to lay horizontal and spread their arms, taking in the peace and fulfilment that always came when fully submerged in blue. Blood spiralled away from Ryan’s body, riding the eddies towards the surface, before disappearing as the cleaning systems filtered it out. Unique amongst the agents in Queen Street, he was…
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03 – The Oracle
Sometimes, juggling everything she needed to do was hard. Sometimes, it was just fun. Magnolia tried to set her face into a frown, but the grin on Merlin’s little face made it near impossible. His goggles sat on his forehead, a sign that he was willing to interact with the world without a filter – which for him was the first and most obvious sign that he was having a good day. With Merlin, the bad days could really bad, so every good day had to be cherished. It was such a good day that she was having to explain to him exactly why riding a bike around the lobby…
