#obviously karen is a scientist on this mission

[queerfables]

911 often makes me think about Stargate. It draws on a lot of the same ingredients that made those shows compelling to me, especially the found family team bonds in a setting of constant high stakes danger.

I have this half formed Stargate: Atlantis fusion idea that keeps floating around in my brain, where the 118 is a specialised extraction team whose primary mission is to provide support and rescue to other gate teams in distress. They become informally known as Gate Team 911, which Rodney snarks about since this is allegedly an international mission until John points out 911 is the emergency number in Canada too. And then Teyla wants them to explain exactly how emergency calls work and Elizabeth has to introduce her to Maddie Buckley in communications who actually used to be an emergency dispatcher, and who just so happens to be the sister of team 911's Evan Buckley.

I don't know I don't have much more than the basic concept but I love the idea of the 118 doing basically the same thing they do in this universe except now they're exploring the galaxy while they do it.

[woulddieforperrytheplatypus]

To distract myself from this awful political scene I'm forced to watch for history class: can you give us some obscure side characters (like, Dr. Diminutive, Newton the Gnu, type characters) you absolutely love for no reason? :) <3

Okay I am literally so late because I was doing my chem reading and my writing hw BUT I can’t refuse a chance to scream about my favorite characters (but y’all can refuse to listen to my scream about them so here’s a cut)

First of all, I want you to know that I haven’t even started listing characters yet and this ask has already lead me to spend almost $4 on Agent P’s Guide to Fighting Evil and that’s why I don’t look at the PnF wiki when I’m tired thank you for coming to my TED talk

I almost feel like I’m cheating by starting with Dr. Diminuitve but HOW CAN I NOT LIKE TELL ME THAT LIL MAN IS NOT THE BEST CHARACTER THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN OKAY FUCKIN DO IT JUST KIDDING YOU CAN’T I mean come on, one of his first lines was literally “I don’t have a Napoleon complex; Napoleon had a ME complex!” I had to check the wiki to see if that was his first line ever and I’m very disappointed that it wasn’t and then in OWCA’s Going Down when all the evil scientists were just vibin against the fence and they started doing that West Side Story snappy walk and Diminutive was so into the snaps that he just didn’t fucking move and then he opened his eyes and the rest of the gang was halfway off the screen fjdskhfkalsfhaskl I just really love him okay the more I think about it the more convinced I am that he’s actually my favorite character

Idk if this counts as an obscure side character but he is incredibly underrated so I gotta throw in: LAWRENCE FUCKING FLETCHER. He’s just such a pure and innocent lil dude. He sees the boys doing dangerous shit and he’s just like, “Well that’s happening,” or better yet, “Hey, that looks fun!” I mean, the airplace? The flying carpet? The monster trucks? He genuinely gives zero fucks and I love him for it. I wholeheartedly believe that Lawrence knows Perry is a secret agent -- or at least that he’s smarter than he acts -- but he’s literally so indifferent to everything going on around him that he never mentions it because life is full of fun and exciting things like that and he can’t talk about them all, you know? And he gets so excited about his antiques and he’s so passionate about history and ughhhh I love him 

I was about to say I feel like I’m cheating by using a special but it just occurred to me that that’s lowkey how I’ve prefaced all of these so no, fuck that, I’m using a special and that’s just how it’s gonna be. CARL FROM THE LAND OF INTERNUS WOULD HAVE MADE A MUCH BETTER ENDING THAN THE ACTUAL BOOK HAD AND FUCK YOU MONOGRAM FOR CUTTING CARL OFF BEFORE HE COULD TELL IT HOW HE WANTED TO

These two kinda go hand-in-hand but Bunka Da Bunkaquan and Sweary the Swan are my favorite alternative Perrys. As far as the specials go, Steampunx isn’t one of my favorites, but Sweary the Swan is just... How do you even describe Sweary the Swan? He is life. He is the reason I wake up in the morning. He is the only thing worth living for. And then Bunka Da Bunkaquan is just so fuckin cute and anyone who disagrees needs their eyes checked. And tbh while we’re talking about Tri-Stone area, I gotta throw in a mention of Doofengung no of course I didn’t have to google what his name was what are you talking about because I love how he just stares at the water and every time it drips he just fuckin cackles lmaooo

Okay one more special (maybe) but Doofenshmirtz in The Temple of Juatchadoon brooo I just googled it to make sure I spelled that right and I did woah my power is unmatched is lowkey my favorite Doofenshmirtz. I don’t know if it’s because I actually like him more than every other Doof or if it’s just because his first scene was with Phineas Ohio Flynn and they knew each other and they had actual interactions throughout the episode and the Doof/Phineas relationship is my favorite underexplored relationship, but Juatchadoon Doof makes the list anyway

The “what did you think, _________ was just going to fall out of the sky?” couple — who 100% deserved that cameo in catu

I’m almost afraid to say this in public, but I actually really like Roger. I was mostly indifferent to him at first, but then Delivery for Destiny happened and I was like wait a minute, why am I sleeping on his man who literally orders boxes just to give to his cat? And once I realized that he was kinda cool, it started sinking in that he was never actually a bad guy. Heinz never even really claimed he was -- if anything, his problem is that Roger isn’t a bad guy, and everyone in Gimmelshtump and Danville knows it. And I gotta give Roger credit for not being too harsh on his brother, because yeah, he can be a little stuck up (I’m looking at you, stupid golf game), but you can’t really blame him for thinking he’s better than Heinz, you know? But at least he’s not a dick about it like their parents are. Also the entire latter half of this paragraph was me trying to find a way to work in the other part of that scene with the cat box and it didn’t work so I’m just gonna tack it on to the end because this isn’t an essay for English class and I can do that lmao. Paul mentions that he just delivered something to a Heinz Doofenshmirtz, and Roger is like 😬 because let’s be real, no one wants to be represented by the type of dude to try to juice City Hall, but he’s obviously not going to say that because he’s still a respectful dude, so he’s just like “Charming... man... isn’t he...” and he’s literally so uncomfortable and it cracks me up every time but also it’s lowkey kinda wholesome because Heinz may make it his life mission to embarrass his brother but Roger doesn’t reciprocate. but I accidentally discovered a few weeks ago that John O’Hurley is a raging Trump supporter so I gotta dock points for that one

In the same vein, Paul the delivery guy. What more do I have to say?

If my love of Roger didn’t turn the world against me, this one probably will, but I’m going to say it loud and proud anyway. I LOVE PETER THE PANDA. He’s just??? so??? cute??? Like when he was tearing apart Doof’s inator and he was just... actually no scratch that I need pictures for this because I can’t explain this in words

THIS IS NOT EITHER OF THE PICTURES I WAS LOOKING FOR BUT LOOK AT THIS LITTLE GUY OH MY GOD

Peter really said “this bitch empty, YEET!”

okay but the ones I was actually looking for are...

I mean, how can you not find him adorable? And don’t even get me started on his relationship with Perry because Meapless in Seattle was just... B R O Perry flew halfway across the country (probably I mean idk where exactly Danville is but they use EST so Seattle is probably halfway across the country?) just to go grab a coffee with him. They went on a lil date at a fancy restaurant I know Dan said it wasn’t a date but he's been wrong in the tiktok comments before which means none of his opinions are canon lmao. They’re just? So? Cute? I don’t even know what to make of their relationship but I live for it.

And I can’t mention Peter without bringing up his nemesis, who, to be entirely honest, I also don’t know what to make of and he’s mostly on this list because I like the line “How did you get chorus girls in here?” and when I downloaded and cut a bunch of songs that you can download from Google Drive here if you want, I specifically kept that part in because I love it lmao (I do gotta point out tho because it’s been bugging me since I last watched the episode: I don’t think we have any proof that Professor Mystery even exists in the PnF dimension. I had just assumed he did for the longest time, but that entire episode takes place in a dimension where Lawrence is a polar bear. Who knows what other differences there are?)

I love all the grandparents and I don’t even have an explanation they’re just all adorable

Okay I know I said no more specials but TECHNICALLY at2d isn’t a special; it’s a movie. I am physically incapable of not brining up the muffin time Normbot and the “I use aggression to mask my insecurites” Normbot.

While we’re talking about Norm, his old head would 100% swear all the fucking time if it wasn’t a kids’ show and i gotta respect it

Dan Povenmire does one line for a dude named Vinnie in Mission Marvel and off the top of my head I don’t remember who he is but it was the beginning of the episode and I think (?) it was during the New York scene and he does it in the Vinnie Dakota voice long before Dakota was even a concept (I’m assuming) so he gets a mention

Jerry the Platypus gives me Paper Jam Dipper vibes and they are both valid as fuck (the fucked up Doof copy is not valid as fuck tho we’re gonna pretend he didn’t exist)

Don is literally the best part of Where’s Pinky and I’m not just saying that because I’ve been watching Whose Line for years and I was super excited to see Wayne Brady in the credits (and the fact that he was also in both the quarantine rap and catu makes me incredibly happy)

Ooh I almost forgot OWCA Files existed but Harry the Hyena playing the trumpet and the subsequent “you’re gonna be wearing that in a minute” is the best part of OWCA Files and tbh just Doof, Perry, and Harry could have carried an entire series by themselves (though I do also love Karen and Maggie)

WAIT A SECOND THE BUG TRIO FJDSAHFLKSAJD I was trying to pick a favorite last time I watched OWCA Files and every time one of them spoke they were my new favorite like I lowkey thought their plotline was boring but the characters themselves were hilarious

WAIT ANOTHER SECOND HOW DID I GET THIS FAR INTO THE LIST WITHOUT MENTIONING MONTY HOLY SHIT I’M SUCH A FAKE FAN BUT I LOVE MONTY OKAY HE IS LITERALLY JUST OZ FROM BTVS EXCEPT MONTY AND VANESSA HAVE BETTER CHEMISTRY THAN OZ AND WILLOW AND NO I WILL NOT BE ACCEPTING CRITICISM

Wait I forgot Vlorkel too omfg these two belong way higher on the list but Vlorkel is the love of my life (and I lowkey wish she had met Steve the giant chameleon because they would have become best friends)

I wanna keep going but it’s currently 1:45 in the morning (this is why I’ve been avoiding asks during the day: I get way too into them and spend a solid hour and a half on them and I’d never get any schoolwork done lmao) and it’s far from the first time I’ve stayed up this late but I figured it was fine because I have no classes tomorrow but it occurred to me like four seconds ago that I DO HAVE A CLASS TOMORROW SHIIIIT I had an anatomy exam on Tuesday during my usual class time (which if you read my tags you might have known about because I was having an existential crisis over it) so he moved our class tomorrow excePT IT’S NOT TOMORROW IT’S TODAY IT’S LITERALLY IN LESS THAN SEVEN HOURS FUCKING HELL I GOTTA GO TO BED ASAP

[mst3kproject]

Frankenstein meets the Space Monster

What have we here?  Marylin Hanold from The Brain that Wouldn't Die and James Karen from Being from Another Planet in a stupid alien invasion movie that doesn't actually have Frankenstein (the doctor or the monster) in it?  Sounds like MST3K to me.

NASA has plans for advanced space exploration without risking any more lives: they've invented a robot astronaut, designated Colonel Frank Saunders, to do all the dangerous stuff!  On Saunders' first mission, he is shot down by a ship from Mars and lands in Puerto Rico.  The Martians also land, looking to finish the job they started, and their weapons damage Saunders' positronic brain, leading him to go on a berserk rampage!  Meanwhile, the Martians are afraid that NASA is aware of them now, and accordingly step up their invasion plans.  A recent nuclear war has left Mars uninhabitable, and the Princess is currently the last woman on the planet.  In order to survive, they must get breeding stock from Earth!

Yep, it's Mars Needs Women meets The Astro-Zombies! The closest thing the movie has to Frankenstein is a brief and totally useless remark from one of the scientists about Saunders' malfunctioning state: “you mean he'll become some kind of... Frankenstein?”  Frankenstein's monster normally has connotations of something pieced together from bits, whereas Saunders at this point has been broken down from a whole, so I don't see how it's equivalent.  I think they only put the line in so they could call the movie Frankenstein meets the Space Monster. There is a space monster in the movie, which the Martians have apparently brought along to punish disobedient crewmen by eating them.  It's... you know what?  I'll get back to the space monster.

The summary makes it sound like there's a lot going on in this movie, but when I think back to what I actually saw in it, I'm pretty sure Frankenstein meets the Space Monster is mostly montages.  The first one is characters driving to a press conference at Cape Kennedy, past all kinds of space-themed diners and motels in the town.  This one is kind of cool, as it gives an impression of what living there would have been like during the space race, with the whole population caught up in it.  Then there's a montage of preparing for launch.  Then the two scientists drive around San Juan to another montage.  The troops are called in, with a montage.  Jets are scrambled in a montange.  Is anybody counting? Because that's five montages in a seventy-five minute movie, and I don't think that was all of them.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that these montages are mostly made of stock footage.  The massive military force mobilized against the Martians is pretty much entirely stock footage, because there's no way this movie could have afforded helicopters and tanks. Assorted space launches and the view from the Martian ship in orbit are provided by stock rocket footage we've all seen before, much of it considerably lower-quality than the stuff filmed for the movie. The Cape Kennedy footage is probably all stock, as is all the aerial footage (of which there is a surprising amount).  I can imagine Joel and the Bots paying tribute to this by mustering stock footage to make it look like the SOL is in command of a huge army – the Martians trying to invade are convinced by it and run off.

A movie designed around the available stock footage is not going to be a masterpiece, and the storyline of Frankenstein meets the Space Monster is pretty messy.  There are times when it almost feels like they're trying to make two different movies at once: the one about the out-of-control robot astronaut, and the one about the Martian invasion.  The movies overlap at several points, but characters from the Robot movie don't actually interact with characters from the Martian movie until around fifty minutes in, when the female scientist Dr. Karen Grant is captured and interrogated by the Martians.  Because so much of the preceding time has been spent on setups and montages, we feel like the story is only just getting started at this point, and it's something of a shock to find things building to the climax only minutes later.

Where no stock footage was available, or where the characters needed to be in the same shot as something fantastical, the movie had to come up with special effects, and these are mostly pretty sorry.  The Martians, typified by the Princess' advisor Dr. Nadir, look like Dr. Evil in Vulcan ears.  Keeping helmets on them most of them (and covering the Princess' head with her silly pseudo-Egyptian headdress-tiara-thing) saved money on bald wigs.  We do see some exposed circuitry on Saunders as he wanders the countryside, but the closer we look, the more obviously it's just a couple of computer parts stuck in bad burn makeup.  His glowing eye is particularly pathetic.  The Martian saucer is a geodesic dome made of cardboard, and then there's the titular Space Monster, which looks kind of like Trumpy as the Colossal Beast.  It's all very cheap and shoddy, but usually in a funny sort of way.

There actually is one quite interesting idea in Frankenstein meets the Space Monster, and that's in the character – or not quite a character – of Frank Saunders and his relationship of sorts with his creators, Dr. Karen Grant and Dr. Adam Steele.  Saunders is designed to be the perfect astronaut, both in functionality and for PR purposes.  The personality he shows at the press conference is that of the clean-cut, all-American overachiever, accomplished but humble, trusting in his superiors to make the right decisions.  Although Steele chides Grant for talking about Saunders as if he is a person, it is clear that both of them are very attached to him emotionally as well as in their work.  Grant cannot help anthropomorphizing him even when she is told not to, and Steele refuses to abandon him even when it would be easier to do so.

Saunders is also very attached to them. We are told that he is wandering around Puerto Rico with his memory destroyed, lashing out because he does not know what else to do – the first human-shaped being he encountered after landing attacked him, so he believes he must defend himself.  When he encounters Grant and Steele in the cave, however, he recognizes them as people he must take orders from.  When he finds Grant captive on board the Martian ship, he makes a decision to save her without being given any orders at all.  In fact, Grant must stop him from saving her and leaving the other women behind!  Some form of emotional bond clearly exists on both sides, here.

It would be fair to call Saunders a major protagonist of this movie.  We are invited to like him right away when we meet him at the press conference, and later to sympathize with him both in his confused wanderings and through the bond he shares with his 'parents'.  He selflessly rescues the captured women and destroys the saucer, saving the world at the cost of his own life.  I really wish the movie treated him more as a character and less as a plot device.  Does he know what he is, or does he believe what he told the reporters, that he's an Air Force test pilot?  Does he believe, as is somewhat implied, that he is in love with Dr. Grant?  What is he thinking upon finding himself in Puerto Rico with amnesia?  Maybe I'm the one anthropomorphizing him now... I wish I could tell if the movie wants me to do that.

If there really are two movies, perhaps with their scripts crossbred in order to make one long story out of two that fell short of feature length, then the Berserk Robot Astronaut one is by far the better. The Martian Invasion one is basically here to show us women in bikinis being abducted by aliens, where they are laid out on a table and covered with a piece of somebody's wedding dress to be 'electronically purified', whatever that means.  There are a couple in there that the Princess doesn't like and I think she orders them disintegrated.  A scene in which the Princess 'inspects' the first captive is all about the objectification of this woman, conveniently blamed on another woman.

The most interesting thing in this movie is the relationship between the Princess (according to the credits her name is Marcuzan, but it is never used) and her advisor, Dr. Nadir.  Nadir often seems to believe he's calling the shots, and he certainly has a much wider knowledge base than the Princess – but every so often she puts him in his place and does something he does not approve of, and when this happens the other Martians obey her without question.  She does ask questions when she doesn't understand something, but she makes her own decisions rather than relying on Nadir to do things for her.  Her people clearly have great respect for her, and it's somewhat impressive that the idea of her as 'breeding stock' for the Martian race never even comes up.  She can't sit around having babies – she has a civilization to rule! – and it's quite clear that none of her subjects would dare think of forcing her.

As usual in crummy movies, these good ideas are at best a very minor part of the movie they appear in.  The main narrative chugs away with its bikini babes and stock footage, wasting our time with montages and carefully avoiding anything that might make the audience think. The result is a mess that takes forever to get started, but there's just enough amusement here to be worth a watch.  It would definitely make for a classic episode, and since it's widescreen, maybe we'll see it in Season 12.

[wellamarke]

better than nothing

humans challenge, week 4, day 3: sequels this is a sequel to @turned-her-brain’s fic ’better than human’

The buildings they were supposed to be checking were marked with an ’S’. Karen wasn’t sure what the notation stood for, but she suspected it might be ’S’ for ‘Safehouse’, and the thought of that repulsed her. The fact that her superiors were willing to use that terminology - to admit that those they were hunting were conscious beings seeking safety - and still order that their places of refuge were raided, so they could be captured and contained en masse… it was barbaric. Monstrous. Ironically, it was inhuman.

The one saving grace was that Karen, as Detective Inspector, got to call the shots within her team. She’d paired off Sergeants Bryant and O'Neil, and sent them east. There were two ’S’ buildings in that direction, but both were set back from the main roads, giving the synths a chance to take back alleys to evade capture.

She’d sent Syed and Hadley back to the barn they’d ransacked yesterday, telling them she’d received a tip-off that the runaway synths had returned there. “They probably think it’s the last place we’ll check today,” she’d said, with a smirk. Doubtless her colleagues thought she was mocking the fugitives for being desperate and stupid. Little did they know that they were the ones being played. They’d find nothing there, except the scene of their own B&E the day before.

With her section of the taskforce thus deployed, Karen had the run of the rest of the buildings herself. She would cover as many as she could, directing the synths she found there to more secure locations, and supplying them with what she’d started calling “Misdirectives” - coloured contact lenses, plasters, skin packs she’d remodelled to look like scars, insect bites and burns. Any of those little human features, the ones people didn’t expect to see on synths, even now. With Sam’s help, she’d programmed add-on mods that would give a synth an uneven gait, a droopy eyelid, a stutter, or a smoker’s cough. Perceived imperfections were brilliant cover, even for synths who weren’t used to playing organic.

Perhaps most devious of all was the bag of “Synthie And Proud” badges she carried around with her. There were still humans with ASOD out there, walking around pretending to be synths. Lots of them did it to show solidarity to the cause, these days, as a protest against what the government was doing to the tens of thousands of newly-conscious beings. A side effect of their activism was that it allowed synths who were bad at pretending to blend in: instead of looking like synths doing bad impressions of humans, they looked like humans doing good impressions of synths. It wasn’t foolproof, obviously - some of the ones she helped would still be captured later on. But Karen was working as hard as she could from the inside, letting whoever she found go free.

It was better than nothing. That was what she had to tell herself.

She parked her car at the foot of a road where supposedly there were three safehouses to “neutralise”. She fetched her bag of supplies from the boot, and swung it over her shoulder as she approached the first house. Karen knocked at the door, composing her features into an expression that was kind, but tinged with urgency. She wasn’t here to say that there was no danger. She was just here to prove that she wasn’t it.

In the split second before the door opened, she wished for the thousandth time that she wasn’t the only officer on the squad working alone. For all intents and purposes, she was engaging in police corruption, and Pete would have been with her every step of the way.

But there was no use thinking of that now. Work and Sam, those were the two areas she had to concentrate on, the only things that mattered going forward. Keeping Sam safe and covering her tracks.

The door opened, just a crack. “Who’s there?” said a voice, low but not overly cautious.

“I’m a friend,” Karen said. “This is a warning. The police know you’re here. You need to mask your communications better. Will you let me come in? We’ll attract attention from the street, talking like this.”

She paused, waiting for the door to open. It didn’t, at first. Instead, the voice behind the door said, suddenly incredulous, “…Karen?”

It wasn’t much to go by, but she ran the syllables through her audio-match system, and recognition hit her in a wave of relief. “Fred,” she said. “Yes. It’s me.”

He opened the door, and she hurried inside, not really looking at him properly until the door was closed. They stood before each other for a moment, staring in joint disbelief.

“What are you doing here?” Karen asked. “Last time we met, you were going to track down Edwin Hobb…”

“I did,” he said. “But he’s under government surveillance. The project he was running was disbanded, and he’s forbidden from working with synthetics ever again. I read the report; he’d get years in prison, if they ever found evidence that he was back in the game.” Fred answered Karen’s unspoken question with ease. “I did what I set out to do - I got all his files, and I know everything he knew. But talking to him personally was out of the question, so I changed my mission.”

“To what?”

“An antidote,” Fred said, mysteriously. “A way of disabling the changes he made to my root code, without the hours of reprogramming it took Silas. If anyone else ever tries to use Hobb’s key on another synth, I can undo it in seconds.”

Karen’s eyes widened. “They are using it. A version of it, anyway. The police are rounding up every synth they can find and putting them in containment cells, where they’re all… they call it 'subdued’. It’s the same as what happened to you. They’re still awake - nobody’s worked out how to undo that without a straightforward massacre - but the synths can’t act of their own accord.”

Fred looked pained, but he nodded. “That makes sense. Some of Hobb’s files had been accessed before I got to them, edited by another user. They must have used his key as a basis for what they wanted to do.”

“Will your antidote work on the new version?”

“It might. I’d have to try it out.”

She looked around. The house they were in was dark and sparsely furnished, the wallpaper peeling off in strips. A blonde-haired synth was watching them from a doorway at the end of the hall. Karen turned back to Fred. “This is your base?”

“Today, it is. I’ve been going to as many safehouses as I can find, installing the antidote. None of these synths will be subdued if they’re ever captured. As long as the changes to Hobb’s original aren’t too drastic.”

Karen nodded. “Good. That’s good. Between the two of us, we can hold back as much as we can.”

“What have you been doing?” he asked her. “Giving out warnings?”

“Supplies, too,” she said. She gave him a brief overview of her self-adapted job description. “If they find me out, so be it,” she added. “I’m never going to help them enslave us all. Even if they don’t call it that, that’s where it’s leading to. The government aren’t issuing any decisions until they think all the synths are in holding, but it’s pretty clear that they’re not going to let them go free any time soon.” She paused, narrowed her eyes. “I saw Mia, a few weeks ago. The day before the mass awakening. Not to speak to, but she was there at the place where Qualia were keeping the early anomalies. Have you spoken to any of the others?”

Fred looked past her, suddenly distant. “No,” he said. “They never came back for me. Like you said before, they left me, and I think I’m more use to the cause on my own. Whatever their role was in this, they didn’t want to share it.”

Karen felt a surge of sympathy go through her. Her own words from four months earlier echoed in her head: some family. Perhaps she’d been overly harsh that day, wanting Fred to share some of the feelings of abandonment she’d been struggling with her whole life. “You can’t know they didn’t come back for you,” she said, softly. “Maybe they did, and you were already gone.”

“Maybe.” Fred didn’t sound overly hopeful. “I expect I’ll run into them, eventually. They can explain it all then.” He looked back at her. “What about you? The last time we met, you spoke of a human man…”

“He’s gone,” said Karen, clipped and cold.

“It didn’t work out?”

Karen felt suddenly frozen in place, the hard rationality she’d built up around the entire topic telling her to brush off his question, while a deeper, softer part of her wanted fervently to share it. If she couldn’t talk to Fred - the only member of the 'family’ she had ever developed any closeness to - who could she talk to?

“We were happy, for a while,” she said. “I called him the day you left, and it was the right decision. We were—”

What was the word for what she and Pete had been? They had never dated, in the proper sense of the word. They had skipped past all those preliminary stages; they’d known what they wanted. It had been so easy.

“We were together,” Karen finished. “But not anymore.” She paused, forced herself to form the words, short and fast and horribly true. “He died.”

Fred’s curious expression faded into something far more serious. “I’m sorry.”

Karen nodded, acknowledging it.

“How did it happen?”

“There was a conscious synth at the Qualia facility,” Karen said, keeping her voice as level as she could. “She wanted revenge for how they’d been treating them. She threatened one of the scientists, and Pete was trying to talk her down, but… she killed them both.”

“You were there?”

“Yes.”

“It must have been awful.”

Karen forbore to comment on that. “The more the humans mistreat us, the more often things like that will happen. We have to be careful with your key, Fred. The ones who are angry… We can’t just turn them loose. I agree that they have a right to be free like all the rest, but do we want to be the ones who start the war?”

“The humans started the war,” said Fred. “We’re just defending our kind.”

Karen gave a sad half-smile. “I used to think we weren’t a kind at all.”

“But you do now? What changed?”

“Lots of things. Pete. But also… I have a son.”

It’s the first time she’s said that word in anyone’s hearing but Sam’s.

“He was made by Qualia, and he’s a child in body as well as mind. Somehow, for him, I can see the point in fighting for our existence.”

Fred returned her small smile. “We all need something.”

“Who do you have?”

He was silent. Then, “I have my purpose. For now, it’s enough.”

“When it isn’t,” Karen said, gently, “Find someone. Me and Sam, or Mia and the others. Or someone new. Don’t be alone.”

Without warning, Fred stepped forwards and wrapped his arms around Karen, embracing her tightly. She found herself hugging him back.

“I thought about you often,” said Fred. “Of all you did for me. Had I known you were suffering, I would have reached out…”

“I might not have let you,” Karen admitted. “But I’m glad we found each other eventually.”

“So am I.”