Despite Everything
Afton has a gift for Sydney, but some things were best left forgotten.
POV: Sydney Herrera
Time Frame: Early days at the Pizzaplex, before Gregory's escape
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The dimly lit room had Sydney’s nerves on edge the moment he crossed the doorway to enter. Ever since he and Vanessa had been moved into the Pizzaplex, pressure had been ramped up to keep him under Elizabeth Afton’s control. Seemed she was starting to catch on that he’d been working to help Vanessa keep aspects of her personality, poking and prodding to be sure she kept reacting to him in ways that he knew were truly her.
That was the point of Afton’s ‘training days’ for him, reasserting her power and control over him to remind him of his own helplessness. Master File would fiddle with his head through the damned implant, messing with what he could see, could hear, could feel, creating visions more real than his memories to taunt and terrorize. Afton was more physical, slicing shallow cuts over his body when his senses were dialed up by the Master File, turning once stinging injuries into excruciating wounds that left him hoarse from screaming. Then she’d bandage him up with a smile and send him back to Vanessa, fully aware he’d hide it from her to keep her from asking the sort of questions that would trigger her own implant’s defenses. The more Vanessa questioned, the more the implant would forcefully herd her down a path of compliance that would make it easier for Afton’s plans.
Was that what she was planning to do today? More playtime with her damned scalpels and stupid smug looks?
Sydney tensed at the thought, gritting his teeth in frustration that he couldn’t do anything but just take the abuse and swallow it down. Afton smiled at him from her desk, leaning against it as her computer screen behind her pulsed, a sickly purple glow that let him know who else was in the room. Not that it mattered if Master File was in that machine, since he had the whole of the Pizzaplex network to move in and could just as easily connect to the implants. Hell, he might even have done it already.
“You called?” Sydney bit out through his teeth, glancing around the room quickly to take stock of what else she had going on in here. If he had an idea of what kind of torture she was in the mood for then he’d have a chance to prepare himself to not break under it.
“It’s come to my attention that you haven’t been as skilled in carrying out your.. special duties.. as our records say you had been in your prime,” Afton began thoughtfully, tapping painted nails on the surface of her desk. “The skills you have currently do seem to indicate a reliance on muscle memory, but you hesitate and hold yourself back quite often.”
“Too bad. You only have me, no one else,” Sydney replied curtly. He kept the urge to shift nervously tightly under control, some trained technique to hide his feelings learned from a source he’d long forgotten. He already gave so much of himself to the madwoman, he was going to do his best to make her fight to scrape any more of him away.
Afton made some small sound, a breathy little sigh that sounded equally amused and disappointed with him. “I’m well aware of that, but you promised me a Panther and instead I got a kitten,” she pointed out, lifting her arms to fold them over her chest, “so I’m within rights to seek.. an alternate solution.”
That didn’t sound good. Sydney tensed again, doing another sweep of the room furtively. The woman laughed lightly, pulling his attention back to her with a wary expression. She made a gesture with one hand, and a familiar ‘chair’ descended from its bay in the ceiling, shaped much like the one in Parts and Service for doing maintenance on the animatronics. The only difference between the two were the leather straps affixed to this particular chair.
Sydney immediately stepped back, gritting his teeth as a filing cabinet he’d initially dismissed as just background furnishings rippled away to reveal an endoskeleton bare of any casing. Once again the Master File had tampered with his vision, annoying technology that riddled the Pizzaplex to help Afton manipulate the crowds in her search for Remnant sources. It moved with unnatural fluidity, stepping forward to his retreat and grabbing his arms.
“You always do this on our special times together,” Afton sighed in false dismay, “Really, don’t you know that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity?”
“Speaking from experience?” Sydney spat out, struggling to push back against the endoskeleton as it forced him to take steps towards the chair. His heels dug into the tile, squeaking as the soles of his shoes scraped over the polished surface in attempts to grip the floor. Stress skyrocketed from the proximity to the endo, and Sydney twisting every way he could to get free was more from the rising panic of being in the machine’s clutches than it moving him to the chair.
Master File’s derisive laughter rang through the speaker system as Afton pouted, eyes narrowed in an offended glare. “He has you there, Darling,” the artificial spirit pointed out.
“I’ll have you know that I was close to getting the results I wanted,” the woman declared haughtily. “It’s all these blasted cretins interfering where they’re not wanted for whatever reason! Like they live to get in my way.. whatever did we do to deserve such nuisances?!”
“You got my past self killed, you rancid bitch!” Sydney yelled furiously, shoving backwards one last time against the endo before it successfully shoved him down into the chair. A second one stepped out of the illusion of a tall office plant to assist with turning him over, unfazed by him kicking at whatever part of the endo he could reach.
“Death is just an inconvenience to us at this point, Mr. Michaels,” Afton replied flatly, pulling away from her desk to approach him. The straps cinched tight against his wrists and ankles, pressed his chest and waist flush to the chair so any thrashing was minimized to near immobility. “I mean, look at you,” she went on as the endos stepped away, returning to their stations now that their tasks were done. “According to the police reports documenting your.. remains.. you died at the age of 43, ripped apart by the very animatronics my former husband hired you and your partner to collect for us. Not that old, but certainly your body must have been riddled with damage from life as a mercenary.”
“Mercenaries don’t exactly have a reputation for ending up in a retirement home most times,” Sydney grumbled between strained huffs, still struggling to force the straps to loosen in some way.
“And you somehow managed to slip out of your one way trip to hell and come back in the body of a healthy young man,” Afton continued as if he hadn’t spoken, a smile on her face as she gestured to the screen. “Yet unlike the Remnant transfer processes that allows me to live on in new bodies, and will be used to restore my dear daughter and Dr. Afton, you lost so many memories.” She reached down, cupped his chin in her hand to make him face her directly. “You lost yourself, Mr. Michaels.. Panther, and that’s the real tragedy of your past demise,” Afton told him, looking at him with the fakest expression of sympathy Sydney had seen since his mother weaseled her way out of being at his high school graduation to drag-.
He jerked his head out of Afton’s grip, shoving the memory down and casting it into obscurity with a grimace as he felt Master File’s tingling touch dance over his mind.
“Oh my, my, you can win that round, Darling,” Master File purred, files blooming to life on the screen at Afton’s gesture, “The next one is mine, though.”
Images and documents littered the screen as Sydney’s gaze was drawn to them almost magnetically. The face on display.. it was that of a stranger, but not quite. That older man with the wide grin in the scanned photo had the same eyes Sydney did, that ice blue color that seemed so much colder and more malicious in that older face.
Was that...?
“You don’t even recognize yourself, such a shame,” Afton murmured, reaching out and tidying up the collar of his shirt, “I suppose that explains your lacking skills. But that’s where having me as your employer is a boon.” She smiled wider when he looked at her in confusion. “One of the things my husband did, while trying in his own way to bring Emelia back to life, was create a learning artificial intelligence to make up for her degrading memories. A mimic of sorts,” she explained with a flippant little gesture of her hand. “It was to study all our home videos of Emelia, learning her mannerisms from them, learn to be Emelia from them, and then her Remnant would be fused with it to create a fully digitized version of herself rather than a copy like the Master File.” Her eyes gleamed with excitement as Sydney stared at her in faint horror. “Then that would be uploaded to a paired mimic animatronic that would be able to adapt and adjust itself to let Emelia ‘grow up’ under the illusion of her looks with his special discs. A novel idea, but I wish my daughter to have a body of flesh and blood.”
“Yeah, you’re all fucking insane,” Sydney said slowly, pushing himself away from Afton as much as he could under the restraints.
“Now, Dr. Afton is someone who doesn’t seem to care what kind of body he has as long as he’s alive to continue his research, to defy Death and bring it under heel,” she went on with the same maddened glee, “But I wanted to be sure the Mimic program could accurately ‘bring back’ a dead personality through study of historical records, and Panther had a lot of records that his partner hadn’t thought to destroy.”
A chill ran through Sydney as he swallowed, trying to dislodge a sudden lump in his throat. “Wh-what the fuck...?” he murmured as Afton leaned closer, filling his vision with her maddened smile.
“I’m going to give you back your memories, Panther, be thankful to me,” she said, giggling at the end of her words. “Upload the Mimic!”
A sudden splitting headache pulled a cry from Sydney’s mouth as he jerked in place. Reality faded as he sank into darkness, Afton’s painted smile still looming over him as he drifted away.
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Hazy walls of concrete gray meshed and connected awkwardly with walls of creamy beige. The cheap furnishings of his and [REDACTED]’s apartment phased in and out with the battered furnishings of a long ago time, a cooler set in front of a reclining chair like a footrest. Pockets of void took up space where there was nothing familiar or unfamiliar, the emptiness cast by amnesia with only faint feelings or sensations leaking out.
Sydney stood in open space, standing on a clash of wood paneling and concrete floor. He held still, glancing around cautiously as he felt a new presence encroaching in his mindspace. What was happening? What did Afton do to him this time? What did she mean by giving him back his memories?
Could she actually do that? Could she fill in those blanks he’d had to live with for so long? He swallowed again, uncertain of what to feel about that. He had been dangerous in the past, that was something he’d been told over and over, by someone who had been proud of that for him. Sydney had leaned into that at first, used the skills that had carried over with him against a bully that continuously went after that someone. But then what? He didn’t know what to do after breaking the kid’s personality so he’d left them be after, only to see them day after day at that school when he went for a pick up, a broken kid with a lost and confused expression. The same expression Sydney caught himself wearing if he glanced at his own reflection.
He couldn’t bring himself to use those skills again after that. There was no reason to make more people like himself. ..But....
If he had his memories back.. if he knew why he had these skills and what he did with them....
“So this is the punk who took over for me?” a rough voice asked in amused skepticism, the words echoing through the hollow building of the mindscape. Sydney jumped a bit, caught off guard by the sound as he spun to track the origin of it. It was easy enough to do; the man from the photo stood not far from him, imposing and broad, dressed in heavy black clothing. He smirked in a way that looked a hair’s breadth away from breaking into that wide, wide smile, ice blue eyes bright compared to the shadows he stood in. “Well, hello there, Shadow Mine,” the man greeted in a low tone, stepping forward and closer to Sydney, looming over him through the sheer strength of his presence, “Now there’s a Panther here.”
“You.. you’re who I used to be? With all the memories I lost?” Sydney asked warily. Now Panther smiled widely before letting it dim down to something less crazed, a smirk like he had before.
“Well, more than what you have at least,” the man returned, stepping to one side to look around at their surroundings, “So this is what you built up for my mind? Could barely picture our base in Florida, huh?”
“Is that where this is?” Sydney asked, looking around in wonder at the concrete walls. A sudden spike of tension ran up his spine and he whipped his head around to track where Panther was, furrowing his brow as he watched the man just slowly circle around him. “What are you doing?”
“Every time you speak you just prove more and more that I’d be doing you a favor, Shadow Mine,” Panther replied, watching him back with a calculating look. “I can see why Router hasn’t made much effort to get you back.”
What?
“He hasn’t made the effort because I made sure he doesn’t try,” Sydney growled, clenching his hands into fists as he turned in place to keep the older man in his sights. Panther chuckled into one hand.
“Is that what you tell yourself as cold comfort? Funny, but it’s more sad,” he replied with a shrug. He tilted his head, his gaze lidded as he continued circling Sydney. “You’ve been holding yourself back on the skills I worked hard to gain, not because you have this fantasy of being ‘good’,” Panther purred, “but because you fear what Router’s reaction would be to see you get halfway through my M.O. and then fail to follow through. The disappointment would be soul-crushing for him, and you’d be the one to blame.”
His blood chilled as his eyes widened. Router had given up a clean slate, a true second chance at life, to bring him back too. And he came back missing so many memories, so many of those moments between them that Router cared most about. A failed revival? His breath caught in his throat. Did Router.. was that why he kept making references to their past lives? Testing to see how much of him was actually Panther?
“Oh, you’re getting it, aren’t you, Shadow Mine?” Panther remarked with a dark laugh, “A pale imitation of me getting himself kidnapped so easily? Caving to a few razor cuts that I would have dismissed as just a hazard of shaving? You’ve fallen so far it’s a wonder Router didn’t just put a bullet through you at first chance to spare you and him any further embarrassment of your existence.”
Sydney lifted a hand to his head, heart pounding as blood rushed through his ears. “N-no,” he stammered out breathlessly and shook his head, trying to clear it of the words circling around, whispers echoing them in the space around him, “No, I.. I know what you’re doing…”
“And? So what?” Panther asked mockingly, “It’s not like you have the skill to do anything about it. You’ll hem and haw and worry over someone else’s feelings, and in a merc’s line of work that’ll just get you dead first. Or in the case of this life now, you’ll just get Router killed. Is that what you want? To fail to the point of getting him killed?”
“No!” Sydney blurted, burying his hands in his hair as he staggered back, away from Panther pressing down on him through his sheer imposing aura. “S-stop.. stop! Those are my memories!”
“You stand there sniveling and sobbing and dare call yourself Panther?” the older man declared in offense, “Shrinking in on yourself like so many of my marks before they broke in my hands and you dare claim that, despite everything, you’re still me?!”
“My name is Sydney Herrera, not Sydney Michaels!” Sydney snapped back, pressing forward in a fury to force the intruder out of his mind, one way or another. His hands flew up in surprise when Panther grabbed him by the throat and slammed him back against a wall, holding him in place.
“You’re no Panther, either,” the mercenary growled darkly, “But that’s what I’m here for, Shadow Mine.” Sydney stared up at him in equal parts frustration and fear, fingers digging into the hand gripping him in feeble attempts to pry him off. “You can be the meek little civilian playing house with that woman, but I get this body when the real work needs to be done.”
“Y-you’re just software that b-bitch put in my head!” Sydney hissed, mustering up every ounce of anger to glare defiantly up at the recreation of his past self.
“And yet I’m more true to the memory of Panther than you could ever hope to be,” Panther countered coldly, “A mimic that succeeds where you failed. You could wither away to nothing in here and nothing of substance would be lost. I doubt Router would even miss you when you’re not the one he wanted to begin with.”
A sharp gasp, a numbness crashing over him, and Sydney could only look helplessly up at the face he once wore in the past, his hands loosening and going still around Panther’s wrist. A wetness on his face as tears welled unbidden and spilled down his cheeks.
“Afton may act like she’s got you on a leash, but make no mistake. You belong to me, Shadow Mine,” Panther crooned, “This body was meant for me, but I’m a considerate kind of guy. I’ll let you be in the driver’s seat when dealing with the tedium of playing nice with the blondie, and when the real fun stuff happens, I’ll take over and handle things. Maybe I’ll be snoozing, then that Master File asshole can drive for me until I’m up. You can just enjoy a nice quiet existence with Blondie, and when we’re all done with her, you can sleep and leave everything to me.”
“L-leave it.. to you?” Sydney murmured with a shudder. A dangerous person, unleashed on a world that wouldn’t have any idea what was coming....
“Sure~,” Panther laughed condescendingly, “I can’t wait to use that voice; won’t take me long to train it to work for me like mine did.”
“My voice is mine. W-won’t let you..,” Sydney struggled to say before clacking his teeth together to bite off his words. Panther blinked a few times before laughing again in mild disbelief.
“You’re seriously going to pull that with me? Alright, this could be fun. Let’s see how long you last,” he murmured and lowered his head to press their foreheads together, until all Sydney could see was his own eyes looking back at him in malicious glee. “Keep existing, Shadow Mine, and I’ll be here, watching, waiting. And you can live with the knowledge that any time you open your mouth to talk, the words that come out might not be yours. Maybe it’ll be the moment I speak through you.. and break whoever you’re facing.”
It took everything Sydney had to glare back through his tears, refuse to show his fear on his face, lips pressed together to hold in any sounds out of defiance. Panther just smiled at him knowingly, amused by whatever he saw. He reached up with his other hand and lightly patted Sydney on the cheek with mock affection.
“Back to the land of the living you go, Shadow Mine, but know that from now on.. I’m here, waiting for you to let your guard slip. Keep that driver’s seat warm for me,” he quipped and laughed as even this world began fading from Sydney’s sight.
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Sydney groaned softly as he blinked back to wakefulness, a heavy fog still clouding his senses. Afton was undoing the straps holding him to the chair, humming cheerfully to herself and looking pleased. Right, she made that software version of Panther and shoved him into his head as a ‘gift’.
He already didn’t talk very much out of worry that he could accidentally ruin someone’s mental state, now he had to be especially cautious with speaking with that mimic mercenary squatting in his mind. What could he do to protect Vanessa from himself? Maybe he could convince her to use some of their breaks as time for him to teach her self-defense, and then carefully increase that until she could have the strength to take him down in an emergency.
“Now you’re all set to be even more useful to me now, and when Emelia is back, you’ll be perfect for taking care of any issues for her as her personal guard,” Afton remarked with a happy clap of her hands once the last strap was undone. “Off you go now, Mr. Michaels,” she added with a cruel smile, “I’m sure you’ll keep this visit between us, as usual.”
“It’s Herrera,” Sydney hissed, pushing himself up. He swayed from the motion of getting to his feet, a wave of disorientation passing over him that made him dry heave and grip the chair to steady himself.
“Not for long~,” Afton sang out, stepping up to him to drag a nail down his spine and make him cringe at the contact, “Back to your room now. Appreciate your gift.”
He flipped her off as he staggered to the door to get out and away from her, and she only laughed, the sound following him even once he shut the door on her and made his way back to Parts and Service.
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Genio 510: Redefining the Future of Smart Retail Experiences
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