Jim nodded. "Fair enough. I'll explain from the beginning. I'm sure you remember how, shortly after we touched down, Bishop and I discovered some audio files. I volunteered to listen to them alone. The third one was the alien; it infected me then, and also apparently infected Steve when we sent the transmission up to him. I'm not sure how they purged him of it. Regardless, after that I started seeing things. Faces in monitors, things hiding behind doors, reanimated corpses. As Bishop noted, of the five of us, only I ever saw them... and I'll add here that, on the way down to the mission, I jokingly suggested we might run into those kinds of things.
I believe the alien was confused by my partially organic, mostly synthetic physiology. It didn't know whether to treat me as human or machine, and couldn't completely take control of me because of that. At most it could give me hallucinations or suggestions, and wrest control of this platform for a few moments. These delusions made me... paranoid. Eventually we found the disc at the bottom; the portal back to the alien's home, well, dimension I suppose is the term. I was able to resist the alien's control at this point and made my way back to the observation room, where there was only you and Charro." He sighed, his emoticon suddenly coming back and forming a :\.
"You trusted me, so you saw nothing wrong when the alien took control and moved this platform over to you... and I'm sorry I betrayed your trust, even though I didn't mean to. From there it opened a private audio channel and transferred itself to a body it could better understand - yours. Since it could control you more efficiently, it was able to make you manipulate the machine in such a manner that it could escape back through the disc. So it could go home." Jim was silent for a moment as he thought. "That puzzled me. When it was in me, it gave me horrific visions and turned me violent. When it was in you, it only guided you to the disc so it could go home."
He turned his head to her again. "I've thought for a bit about that, and as far as I can tell there are a few explanations. One is physiology. My brain is basically male insofar as a brain alone can have a gender, and yours is female; this could account for the different behavior. The next is personality. You are a good, gentle person who just wants to make sure the whole team gets home safely. Frankly, I'm a constructed soldier only concerned with my own survival. That makes it the most likely explanation, to my eyes. The third is mere timing. It didn't think getting out was a possibility while I was infected, until I saw the disc. Then it knew it was possible, and when it infected you, it made a beeline straight home. You can take some comfort in the idea that you carried it there. We'll never knows its thought processes; maybe it was scared and the whole reason it affected me in such a manner was self-defense." He shrugged.
"As for the other... I didn't realize I was infected until late in the mission. I had suspected something was up far earlier, of course, but I thought it was the four of you who were infected. The exact moment I realized was when I attempted to use a secondary camera mode on this platform and received the error message that they were already in use - a terrifying message to get. I knew I was compromised then, so I volunteered to go down to the disc, thinking it would be dangerous and that if one of us had to go, it should be me. Just in case." His emoticon turned :|.
"And I didn't tell anyone because I knew they would try to shut me down a second time. They shut me down previously, and it was not an experience I would like to repeat. Imagine being divorced from existence, but you're not in a safe location like a sensory deprivation chamber. I was alone in a what I thought at the time - due to the alien - was an extremely dangerous place, and I was left wondering which would be first: whether the undead would destroy this platform in an attempt to get to my brain, or the recycled oxygen would run out and I would suffocate to death. There was nothing I could do about either, just wait and think in an endless void as I basically waited to die." He sighed.
"I apologize for being so long-winded, but I thought perhaps you needed to hear the whole thing from my perspective. Bishop has all the technical details of the mission, but honestly I don't believe they're very important. Or at least of no importance to soldiers like you and I; let the scientists and generals worry about them."
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Topic: Einsteinian Roulette On ship Thread: Maurice's One Night Stand (Read 6002078 times)