Page 13 of Secrets of the Void
She'd been listening to what he and the droid said, and that was all she could gather from this situation. Maybe they were even still within Tau, although the sounds of burbling from the outside made her think maybe they weren't. She'd been so certain that her training had been for a purpose, so this must be it.
Listening to them bicker, however, had given her very crucial details for this situation. She'd always been good at picking up those details.
Malcolm's breath smelled funny when he was going to be overly aggressive with her. If his eyes were red, it meant he wasgoing to leave the lab for a while and she could sneak through his drawers to peek at what it was like to live in the real world. If Steve was the only person in the room, then she was actually going to work that day, and likely work hard because he was the only one who actually challenged her.
Noticing things like that had kept her alive for a lot longer than she was likely meant to be alive for. The other clones of herself were still in their tubes, after all, and she was out here. Experiencing the world like few of them ever would.
She snuck a glance over to the shadowy corner where the monster currently reclined. He was so big. She had no idea what he was, though, because she had seen countless undines in her life and he wasn't one of them.
The undine were delicate, or at least, that's how they looked. While their species was extremely hardy, it wasn't difficult to see the beauty in them. Their thin fins moved in the water so prettily, and the framing of their features had always caught her attention. They had pretty faces, flat noses that were almost royal in appearance. They were everything she had dreamt of being. Ethereal. Otherworldly. Creatures that made people think up sonnets and tell stories about their bravery in the depths.
He was nothing like them.
His tail was thick and blocky. The fins on the end were ragged and had holes in them from years of misuse. Not to mention the ever glowing skeleton that dotted up his tail to a torso that was equally roped with muscle, but hollow with hunger. He looked like a creature that could eat for centuries and never satiate himself.
Massive hands rested beside his tail on the floor, too big for her to give them a look without becoming uncomfortable. There were extra joints in them, so his fingers were eerily long. They were the first thing she had seen when she'd woken. Thoseinhuman, dark hands lifted up to her face like some creature from the old classics that she'd read in the simulation.
Nosferatu, she thought. His hands belonged to a vampire.
And then there was his face. Eerily beautiful and yet wrong in the same sense. Looking at him was almost like looking at a human, but the more she looked, the more wrong he appeared. There were lines on his cheeks, as though someone had once split his mouth open, and they glowed along with his ribs and the bones in his tail. She could follow the glowing lines of his mouth down his cheeks to his neck, and that alone made her shudder with fear.
Long, dark hair pooled down at his waist, so impossibly long she was shocked it wasn't a tangled mess. But a creature like this, one who had lived in the sea for as long as he had, surely didn't need to brush his hair. He was a creature of legend. A comb didn't exist in stories like that.
Although it was hard to even see him now. Once he had gotten comfortable in that corner, he'd broken the light in the ceiling above him to plunge himself into darkness.
"Girl," the droid next to her said, summoning her attention back to the task at hand. "Read this line."
She looked over the binary code, her mind snapping back to translating. It was her favorite thing to do, really. There was an immediate feeling of accomplishment when she managed to figure out what a string of code meant. "They shut down all external power to maintain the data storage transfer."
"It doesn't say where they put it?"
"No."
The droid let out a little, angry grumble, and then the numbers were scrolling so fast there was no way she could keep up reading. It appeared to be angry that others of its own kind had tried to hide information from it. She supposed she would have been upset as well.
"Droids can express anger?" she asked before she could think about what she was saying.
"I can express anger."
"That's... odd. Isn't it?"
A dark chuckle erupted from the back of the room. "Yes, it is odd. That droid has been a menace since I picked it up. Clearly, it has a malfunction that has yet to be addressed. Are you good with droids, little human?"
"I have never been trained in droid functionality." She took a deep breath, realizing that might be the one thing to get her killed. "But I do learn fast. I suppose I could research droids and see what can be done."
The little crab droid spun around on the console, suddenly stopping what it was doing to stare up at her with eyes that should have had working screens. Instead, just one blinked on and off. "You will not experiment on me, human."
"Ellie."
"What?"
"My name is Ellie." She squared her shoulders, trying very hard not to look like she was going to faint. "My Original was Eleanor Lovelace. She was a renowned inventor throughout her life, and most of her clones were capable of the same logical processes. I was awoken by Malcolm Maximus Cornwall and continued my training throughout state of the art artificial simulation that allowed my brain, thoughts, and development to grow much faster than many of the other clones."
"You were grown in a test tube like all the others," the droid snorted.
"Pilot." Again, that dark voice threatened from the other side of the room. "Aren't you at least a little curious about her?"
"No. I am not." The droid turned back to the console and seemed to almost hiccup its annoyance before the binary code started floating across the screen again.
