Chapter Text
Three years ago, he’d asked his girlfriend, “Do you believe in destiny?”
The sky had been a bright, wispy blue, the breeze a mere flutter of motion that rustled the autumn leaves scattering the ground. A perfect day... at least to him. Maybe most people would have preferred summer, with the heat and the sun and all that, but if it had been summer, the small park where they always met would have been crowded with screaming kids and obnoxious teenagers. Autumn was perfect—the weather was nice (but not too nice), the infants had been imprisoned in schoolrooms and homework, and, because of those two facts, the park had been empty. That day, the park had been theirs.
Sprawled lazily on their backs in the leafy grass, he’d heard her laugh. “Destiny? I didn’t take my boyfriend for the philosophic type. Fate, God, free will, all that shit—” he’d felt, more than seen, the casual wave of her hand through the sky, sweeping any sort of metaphysical debate off the metaphorical table— “Who cares? You ask, ‘Why are we here?’ Well, I got one answer for ya—why the fuck not?”
“Gosh, I guess that’s one way to put it,” he’d chuckled, reaching out to clasp her flung hand in his own, only to be swatted away.
“Nope, I’m holding hands with your beloved destiny right now, I’ll hold hands with you later.” She’d continued swiping her open hand through the empty space above them. “It wants in on our relationship, but I think more than one partner would be too much for you to handle—”
“I was being serious,” he’d demurred, sitting up. A determined beetle had crawled up his arm like it was a mountain, and he hadn’t had the heart to flick it off. “I didn’t mean destiny in a philosophical sense—”
“When is destiny not philosophical?”
He’d shrugged, chewing self-consciously on a lip. “I guess… I always thought of destiny as like, your destination, if life is a journey. I mean—”
“So… you’re basically saying that death is your destiny? ‘Cause I’m sorry to break it to you, babe, but I think that’s everyone’s destination in the end…”
A laugh, half-choked, had managed to find its way past the lump in his throat. “No, I—will you please stop interrupting?”
Her white-toothed smile could’ve belonged to a shark. “I’ll be good now, I promise. Go ahead, gentle sir, educate me on this not-philosophical destiny that you speak of.”
How could I have gotten so lucky as to have ended up with you? He’d cleared his throat, shoving away the laughter, trying to remember what he’d been saying, the whole speech he’d rehearsed in front of the bathroom mirror that morning. “Right. Destiny. So, I usually think of it as… your end goal, the life you’re striving to achieve, the person you’re trying to become. Or… not even that. Not trying to become—the person you’re meant to be.”
“So, like, basically how I’m meant to be an asshole,” she’d said with a straight face. “And you’re meant to have no joy in life ‘cause you’re allergic to the idea of fun.”
“I… guess?” This was not going the way he’d meant it to.
A light punch to the shoulder. “Sorry. I interrupted again. Go on.”
He’d continued, “And I—I’m meant to help people, that’s my destiny. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I want to make a difference, even if it’s a small one. It’s like you always say…” That time, he’d trailed off, waiting for her to complete the sentence. Not as an interruption, but a continuation.
“’You’re not worth a shit if you stand by without helping your fellow man,’” she’d finished softly, catching on, and her eyes had been so sad, gazing up at him like she somehow knew what he was going to say, what he had to tell her. And that, more than anything, broke him, shattering the prepared speech into a million glass shards that spilled out of his mouth in a single, sparse confession.
“I’ve enlisted. In the UNSC. I ship out next month.”
Those eyes had been glossy with unshed tears, for once without a quip or a comeback… and yet she’d seemed also so unsurprised, like it was a punch that she’d known was coming, had braced for, and yet still hurt, despite everything. “…that’s your destiny, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“What if I told destiny to go fuck itself?”
“It’d be heartbroken. Don’t talk about our new partner like that.” He’d let loose a long, low sigh, a weight settling on his shoulders. “And I’m still going.”
A cool wind had brushed the autumn leaves around them. A loose lock of blond hair had slipped free from her bun, drifting behind her face like a mourning flag. “You’ve always been too selfless.”
“Gosh, I—I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Fuck you,” she’d snapped. “I’m not gonna stand in the way of your destiny… it’s your choice, after all… but you gotta make me a promise, ‘kay?”
She’d stared at him, face carved from marble, eyes as determined as the beetle still on his arm, holding within them resolve to climb mountains. “Whatever this promise is,” he’d said, “I’ll make that my destiny too.”
No smile, no humor. She’d gripped his chin with a hand, eyes locked and fierce. “Come home.”
Come home. A promise so simple, yet as expansive as the star systems he’d soon be defending from the aliens. Come home. He had so little control over that, but he’d said that he’d make her promise his destiny, so—
“I promise.” He’d come home. He’d see her again. The universe had to allow them that, right? “You… don’t have to wait for me, you know. You can find someone else—”
“Shut the fuck up,” she’d ordered, leaning in for a swift kiss. “It’s gonna be you, me, and destiny, the best power throuple the galaxy has ever seen. I’m not giving that away for anything, so get that through your stupid head now, before I have to beat it into you.”
“I love you, Jaunna,” he’d said, because what else could he say to capture the light inside his chest at the sight of her, at her words? “I’ll come home. I promise.
“But I gotta take care of destiny first.”
—
That had been three years ago. He’d been too far from his birth star system to visit her on shore leave without spending a veritable fortune (a fortune that he didn’t have) on a slipspace-capable shuttle home. He hadn’t seen her in three years, but he’d kept his promise—his destiny—in his chest like a talisman, and it had kept him alive through war and hell and an ocean of the Covenant’s dark blue blood.
Sometimes, on the bad days, he wondered if the aliens he and the other soldiers shot had also made promises to their loved ones back home. If their blood was the color of their broken promises. If he didn’t come home, his promise would be red, not blue, but he had to come home because his beloved Jaunna had pronounced it his destiny, and so blue was the color of a broken promise. Scarlet was just the dark fear pulsing through his veins, and had nothing to do with destiny at all.
No, destiny was the new mission he’d been assigned. The Pelican dropship was coming in for a landing on the planet, graceful as the bird it had been named for, no turbulence to blame the butterflies in his stomach on. Excitement and apprehension intertwined; he didn’t know much about this new assignment—classified had been stamped on the message a few thousand times over—but it had promised that he could make a difference, help people. The very destiny that he’d come out here to fulfill. You’re not worth a sh—darn, he mentally corrected; it wasn’t polite to swear, even if Jaunna thought otherwise—if you stand by without helping your fellow man.
The entirety of the last week had been filled to the brim with interviews, tests, and video sessions with a man who called himself the Counselor and spoke in a smooth, hypnotic voice—he knew Jaunna would love to punch him the face, despite how nice as the man had seemed, if she’d been there, and a spark of homesickness had bloomed in his chest at the thought—but this was the final step, the mission briefing. Apparently, the briefing was so secret that it needed to be in the middle of gosh darn nowhere, because they’d been in slipspace for almost a day before reentering normal space and beginning descent to the planet.
He'd at least had time to think, and speculate. A special strike against the heart of the Covenant, was his current guess of the mission’s details. Or potentially against this elite and evil “Red” force he’d seen briefly and un-specifically mentioned in the invitation, which was further backed by the fact that the new armor he was currently wearing was a pale, frosty blue. The document had mentioned some sort of special counterforce called the “Blue” team…
The Pelican landed without a hitch, the back of the ship opening up into a ramp that led down onto, well… he assumed it was supposed to be the ground—small slivers of visible concrete supported that assumption—but the rest of the landing pad was covered in drifts of powdery white snow.
Two soldiers were standing outside in unassuming, simple gray armor, unsuccessfully attempting to shovel the thick snow aside with heavy plows. “God damn, we scraped this thing clear an hour ago,” one of them complained heartily to the other. “I swear it’s half-covered over again by the time we’re done.”
“Yes, that’s what snow does, you moron,” his companion muttered, mostly to herself. “It’s really fucking cold here, god.”
“If I have to hear you complain one more time—” Both of the soldiers simultaneously noticed that the Pelican door was open, and, seeing him standing there, snapped into picture-perfect salutes.
“Good god, Privates, I told you yesterday that you didn’t have to do that!” Behind the two saluting soldiers, a third strode into view, emerging from a heavy door set into the cliff face before them. Unlike the other two, his armor was a bright aqua, and his helmet was off despite the cold, revealing a warm smiling face with a neat blond undercut—Jaunna would be jealous—and pink peace sign gauges in his ears. Bright blue eyes, twinkling with good humor, landed on the man standing on the Pelican ramp. “It’s so good to meet you, Private Pyrr! As I was just going to remind Private Smithander and Private Banana Peel—”
“It’s Banapeel, sir,” the soldier in question corrected softly.
“—and Private Banapeel, we don’t need the chain of command in an outpost as remote as this.” The aqua soldier clasped his hands behind his back with a broad smile. “I want all of you to feel comfortable around me, like our team is a second family. We’re all in this together, aren’t we, Privates?”
“Yes, sir,” the two soldiers chanted dutifully.
The aqua soldier fell into a trained prowl that might have been intimidating if it weren’t for the disarming openness of his face. “I’m Captain Flowers, but you can call me Cappy. If you need anything, Private Pyrr, let me know.” Reaching the man on the Pelican, he patted his armored arm consolingly. “Nerves are always understandable, but this is one of the most important missions that our branch of the UNSC has undertaken. If I can do anything to make you more comfortable, don’t hesitate to ask.”
Captain Flowers was completely unlike any commanding officer he’d ever met, and maybe it was that, or his friendly demeanor, that made him speak up where otherwise he might have held his tongue. “Gosh, I appreciate the offer. I… actually, if it’s not too much to ask, I’d prefer to be called by my first name, rather than my last.”
“Of course, of course.” Flowers gave him a genial nod. “Private Jimmy, if you’d come with me, we can get this mission briefing underway. But first, it’s protocol that every new member of Blue Team undergoes a quick examination by our medical team… right this way…”
—
One thing Private Jimmy Pyrr quickly learned about Flowers was that he liked to talk. Like, a lot. From the moment they’d stepped through the heavy metal door into the high-tech base built into the cliffside, through several automated security checkpoints—Jimmy hadn’t seen any other people yet aside from Flowers and the two soldiers outside—and down several staircases that clanked under their armored footfalls, he’d talked. Well, under Jimmy’s footfalls—somehow, impossibly, Flowers didn’t seem to make a sound as he walked, despite being in almost a hundred pounds of armor and seeming completely engaged in a one-sided conversation with Jimmy. He didn’t really need to participate at all, just nodding and smiling as the captain went on and on about the planet (called Sidewinder, very cold), about the weather (snow, completely and always), about the war (the aliens wouldn’t know what hit them, with such good soldiers in the UNSC), about the two other soldiers at the base (incompetent, not their fault, except that it was), and about Jimmy himself (an unsung hero for even volunteering for this mission at all). At first it was impressive, and then it was tiring, and then it was aggravating, loud and boisterous enough that he could barely hear himself think over not-witty anecdotes and even more complaints about the cold.
Jimmy had always considered himself a rather patient person—he had to be, it was basically a requirement to be Jaunna’s boyfriend—but Captain Flowers had whittled it down to the thinnest thread by the time they stopped at an unmarked door. The one-sided small talk trailed off, and he couldn’t stop his shoulders from slumping in immediate relief. Any sort of medical examination would be heaven compared to hearing another uncomfortable rendition of “I Found Snow in my Boot One Morning and I’m Pretty Sure it was Banana Peel’s Fault”. Private Banapeel had seemed perfectly nice to Jimmy during the thirty seconds he’d spent in her presence, and listening to his superior officer passively-aggressively complain about her like a distraught kindergartener, and especially having to laugh along with said superior officer, made him want to disappear on the spot.
Jaunna could be mean, but at least she wasn’t a petty gossip. It was so unlike his first impression of Flowers (friendly, approachable, unoffensively nice) that part of him couldn’t help but wonder if his new captain was doing it on purpose.
“But I know you’re going to be a lot more useful than Private Banana Peel—excuse me, Banapeel,” Flowers concluded, patting Jimmy on the shoulder. “I made sure to handpick the best soldiers in all of the UNSC for Blue Team, and I’m sure you’ll make me proud.”
“Yes, sir,” Jimmy responded, the words clipped. What else could he say?
Flowers pushed open the door with one hand and stepped inside, gesturing Jimmy to follow. He obeyed; the metal door swinging shut behind him with a soft click. That couldn’t have been the door locking, could it? No. They were still inside, why would the door lock behind them? They weren’t even at the mission briefing yet, so it wasn’t like they had to worry about anyone walking in and interrupting them, or someone walking out carrying sensitive documents, or anything. I’m just being paranoid.
The medical room was a rather large square cut into the rock, same as the rest of the base. Harsh white light panels dangled from the ceiling, gazing down at the mostly empty room, everything packed away in neat cabinets and shelves labeled with incomprehensible doctor jargon. Two figures in pale blue scrubs the same shade as Jimmy’s armor fussed over a tray of medical implements on a cart in the corner, glancing up at Flowers and tugging on latex gloves at his arrival.
“Go on and have a seat, Private Jimmy,” Flowers said, patting his shoulder a second time, gesturing toward the dentist-style chair in the center of the room. “This won’t take long.”
“Uh… okay?” Flowers hadn’t removed his hand from Jimmy’s shoulder, his fingers digging in slightly between the gaps of the armor plates. The aqua captain was still smiling. But something behind his eyes was as tense and expectant as a clenched fist.
Pulling himself from Flowers’ grip, Jimmy walked to the ready chair, a bit uncomfortable under the waiting stares of the three other people in the room. This was getting weird. But Jimmy had made a promise to help people, to fulfill his destiny as a member of the UNSC, and he’d be darned if a little awkward social pressure veered him from his course.
Private Jimmy Pyrr was not a quitter. Destiny was destiny, and he’d chase it until the ends of the galaxy or until his Jaunna called him home.
At least the padded chair was comfortable.
The two doctors wheeled the cart of supplies over, which had been neatly covered with a white towel. One of them had a syringe clasped in his hands, and quick as a biting insect, he darted forward and injected it into Jimmy’s neck.
“Ouch!” Clapping a hand to his neck, he could feel the tiniest droplet of warm blood on his neck. “What the fffu—gosh darn heck was that for?!”
“Muscle relaxant,” the doctor replied absentmindedly, sliding the now-empty syringe into a biowaste disposal container on a lower shelf of the cart.
“Why didn’t you warn me? Or, you know, you could have asked first?” Jimmy took a deep breath, swallowing several other choice words and comments. They’re just doing their jobs. They do not deserve to be yelled at. Another part of him that sounded a bit like Jaunna replied, But it wouldn’t have taken them more than a second or two to ask for consent first, either. Assholes.
On the other side of the room, Flowers relaxed, the creases at the corners of his eyes fading. Approaching with an easy, soundless grace, he said, “Don’t you worry your pretty little head, Private Jimmy; we’re just following the procedure.”
“…don’t you mean protocol?”
“Yes, exactly.” Flowers beamed at him, hands clasped neatly behind his back. “I can’t wait to introduce you to the other members of Blue Team. You’ll fit right in! In fact, you’ll be meeting one of them in just a few minutes…”
“Gosh, really?” Hopefully they would be easy to work with. “Who?”
Flowers tutted patronizingly. “That’s classified, Private.”
“Oh.” There was an itch on his leg but when he moved to scratch it, his arm didn’t quite work right, flopping lazily across his body like his bones had liquified. “Uhm. I can’t move?” His legs and toes weren’t responding at all, or else he might have stood up and bolted across the room. He was in his early twenties, far too early to catch the paranoia that his grandfather had always (possibly erroneously) told him came with age. So why were all of his instincts nonsensically screaming at him to run?
One of the doctors hummed noncommittally under their breath. “Can you feel this?” they asked, pressing the pad of their gloved thumb into his arm.
“Yes.” Nothing was numb, he could feel everything perfectly fine. His muscles just weren’t moving right when he ordered them too. “But I can’t move—”
With a sigh, Flowers set his helmet on one of the countertops along the wall and dragged over a metal stool, perching on it beside Jimmy’s chair. He reached out and clasped one of the frightened soldier’s hands in his cold fingers. When Jimmy tried to pull away, his fingers barely twitched. Conscious motor control had been severed from him; he couldn’t move, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t move—
“I want you to know how brave you are for volunteering for this mission,” Flowers said softly, his soothing voice breaking through the waves of Jimmy’s rising panic. “You certainly have more guts than most of your peers, my good sir.”
Brave? Was he brave? He didn’t quite feel like it, especially right at this moment. To be honest, the adjectives terrified and completely terrified were a better fit, snug and squeezing around his pounding heart.
Jaunna had called him brave, once, he was pretty sure. The exact circumstances fluttered in the void beyond his reach, but he could remember her laughing, kissing him on the forehead. “You’re so fucking brave.”
But he’d never been as brave as her. Jaunna was the wild one, the brave one—or was she fearless? Because you had to be brave to be afraid, and she’d never been afraid of anything, except that he might not come home from the war.
I’m not going to break my promise, Jaunna. Jimmy was scared, but he could be brave. It was just a quick medical examination. Not the end of the world.
But then why couldn’t he move? What had that doctor injected him with?
“You’re the final piece in a very complicated little operation. In fact, you’re the most important part, I’d say.” Flowers was still talking, and squeezed Jimmy’s hand with a reassuring smile. He tried to reign in his breathing. Everything would be okay. Maybe after this mission, he’d have done enough, helped enough people. Maybe after this mission, destiny would be satisfied, and he could go home.
“When the history of these important events is written, you’ll go down as the unsung hero,” the captain continued. One of the doctors swept the white towel off the tray beside Jimmy, and he inched his eyeballs over to get a better view of the contents. Most of it didn’t make sense to him, a bunch of little pliers and metal sticks and medical doodads, but there were also several scarily sharp scalpels laid flat on the tray, silver flanks gleaming, along with what looked like a handheld drill. There was also a small, strange metal disk that looked a bit like a jellyfish; one side had a small rectangular port with a tiny red light beside it, and the other side was covered in loose strands of wire of varying thickness, some strong and inflexible, other longer ones finer than a hair. What the heck is that thing?
“The soldier who sacrificed so much for his fellow man; it brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it.”
Sacrificed?
There was another object sitting on the cart as well, not quite on the tray, though the towel had draped enough to cover it. A silver object a bit smaller than a football, engraved with lines glowing a frozen bluish white. A loose cord had been plugged into one end of the object, the cable wrapped around like a cat’s tail, the spare end waiting expectantly. A small screen on the side of the football read in blocky letters, PROGRAM ALPHA READY FOR TRANSFER.
“The world will never forget Private Jimmy.”
I don’t need the world to remember me. I don’t need to be a hero. I just want to help people.
I just want to go home.
His words a mushy whisper, rolled about his in mouth by an uncooperative tongue, Jimmy said, “Gosh.” Because what else was there to say to a speech like that? Maybe he didn’t want to be a hero, but he also didn’t want to make Captain Flowers feel like he’d wasted his breath. Jimmy appreciated the sentiment, at least. And having someone talking had helped him calm down. “I-I just want to help out in any way I can.” It’s my destiny to help people, that’s what I want to do. I want everyone else to be able to live and be happy and for the war to just be over so we can all go home. “My girl back home always said, ‘you’re not worth a darn if you just stand by without helping your fellow man.’” Jaunna had always pushed him to see the light in the world, to help those around him, to be better. I miss you, Jaunna.
“Well, you’re most certainly doing that,” Flowers said, his smile unwavering as he brushed aside a strand of black hair that had fallen onto Jimmy’s face. If his mouth and limbs were more cooperative, he wasn’t sure if he’d thank the captain for moving the stray hair or push him away at the imposition.
The two doctors were behind him now, out of his line of sight. Jimmy couldn’t move at all, stranded in his own body. Latex fingers touched the back of his neck, probed the base of his skull, and he would have flinched away, if he could. “Wha.. what arrre you… doin?”
“Don’t worry about them, Private.” Flowers’s hand clenched around his. “Focus on me. I’m not going anywhere; I’ll be with you the whole time.”
Something was wrong. The door had locked when he’d stepped in, and then the doctors had injected him with something and now he couldn’t move, and Captain Flowers was saying supposed-to-be-reassuring-but-actually-ominous things, that gentle smile still fixed to his face, but now it seemed more sinister than soft, though nothing about it had really changed except Jimmy’s perspective. Something was wrong. Something had always been wrong, and he’d just been too stupid, too blinded by naivety and his empathetic heart, to see it.
Jaunna? I promised I’d come home. I made a promise. Jimmy tried to flail, to flee, even to flinch, but was nothing more than a ghost: tethered to the world, yet unable to affect it. What are they doing? It was a classified mission; no one knew where he’d gone. Did the UNSC really authorize this, or was that a lie?
What’s going to happen to me?
He got his answer soon enough.
There was the high-pitched squeal of a drill, the white whine rending his eardrums, and then pain seared through him like burning lightning, annihilating all thought and feeling, scorching the edges of the world with dimming darkness. Someone was screaming, screaming worse than he’d ever heard in his three years of blood and war, and the few remaining rational slivers of his brain tried to inform him that it was his voice doing the screaming, and that Flowers was still smiling at him, and that the doctors were probably drilling through the skin and flesh and skull at the base of his head, based on the location of the pain. But those fragments of him seemed small and silly, because the only thing that mattered in the universe was this pain, so why were they trying to focus on something else? Stupid brain.
Finally, after what might have been a few seconds or the entire lifespan of the universe, the blinding pain faded slightly into something that Jimmy might usually have called “unrelenting agony”, but now felt like a splash of invigorating water. Tears prickled at the corners of his eyes at the relief. The whining of the drill had died out, but a dense knot of ringing silence had nested deep in his ears, pounding with the dread of his heartbeat. Small beads of something warm and wet were trickling down his spine, seeping below his armor.
Flowers was speaking, though his words were a nonsensical puzzle that Jimmy didn’t have the energy to interpret. Everything was getting kinda dark and fuzzy around the edges of his eyes, so he closed them, wet, salty drops sliding from the corners as he did. Maybe he’d just go to sleep right here. That didn’t seem too bad, did it?
The doctors were touching his neck again, each fingertip sending a sharp knife of pain through his head. Stop, he wanted to mumble, but the words wouldn’t form. Go away. I wanna sleep.
Something else brushed the burning spot at the base of his skull; not fingers but metal, hard and unyielding, impossibly cold against hot, bloody skin. Then the metal was sliding into the wound, cruel and implacable, and he would have started screaming again at the frozen touch had his throat not felt so broken and raw. There was a voice again, but it didn’t matter. They were putting something inside his skull, sliding it through the wound, and it was unnatural and icy and horrible and he wished it would go away; it didn’t belong there. More alien than the Covenant’s dark blue blood that was a broken promise to their loved ones. He’d thought that if he broke his promise, it would be red, but all he could feel now was a cold, pale blue. That sort of cold should have made the wound numb, but it didn’t. It just burned like bitter frostbite in midwinter.
The metal thing stopped moving. At least, it stopped sliding any further. But then there was something squirming, something metal, but it almost felt alive. He couldn’t see the metal thing, shouldn’t have nerves that deep to be able to sense what was happening, but he swore he could feel it as the metal thing reached out inside his skull with wires, some thick, some thin, every single one crawling like centipedes through the gray matter and squishy folds of his brain.
This doesn’t seem physically possible, some part of him thought, detached and dissociating, and maybe in the distant real world he was screaming it, he wasn’t sure. The same small part of him added, that is the worst last thought ever. Of all time.
The centipedes snaked deeper, wires curling possessively around neurons and nesting in the hollow spaces between his thoughts. Maybe he was in a nightmare; maybe none of this was real. He’d made a promise to someone—a woman with fierce eyes, who laughed and smiled and wanted to help people. She swore too much and had kissed him on the forehead and called him brave. He’d made a promise to come home.
A nightmare.
The wires stopped moving, motionless but still present at the corners of every shattered sense he had left. He wasn’t foolish enough to think it was over. He had centipedes in his brain now, and they weren’t real but a nightmare made of frosty metal, but that wouldn’t stop them from laying eggs that would hatch to devour him from the inside out. A walking corpse for parasites; that’s what he was now, what he would be.
“Status?”
“The procedure was successful, Agent Florida. Neural implant active.”
“Agent Fl—No, no. I told you to call me Captain, or Cappy…”
“Sorry, sir. I mean. Cappy.”
Is this really my destiny?
“Private Jimmy? Can you hear me?”
I just wanted to help people.
“If you can hear me, Private, I just wanted to say that I appreciate your sacrifice. We’ll make up something grand and heroic to tell your family back home; don’t worry a bit about them, good sir.”
Jaunna?
A sigh reached his distant ears. Someone was stroking his hair, but he was floating too far from the ground to care. “Prepare him for AI implantation.”
“Yes, sir. Terminating higher cognitive functions in three.”
Jaunna, I love you.
“Two.”
I’m sorry I broke my promise.
“One.”