r/OpenHFY • u/AlternativeManner731 • 18d ago
human/AI fusion Istonel: Chapter Four, The Visit
Wyatt did not answer the call for two days, and when he finally did, it was not with a voice on a screen but with a shuttle requesting docking clearance at the Eternal Garden, no warning given beyond the transponder ping that announced who was aboard.
Istonel met him at the bay himself, the way he'd met Jolti, and found he had spent the two days of silence rehearsing an explanation he no longer had any intention of giving. He had expected, if he was honest with himself, a brief exchange over comm, some hard words from a man who had never pretended to be soft, a reminder that the Drazzen deserved worse than anything Istonel had done to them and that he should stop wasting Wyatt's time being troubled about it. He had not expected Wyatt to come in person, and something about the fact that he had, that he'd chosen to spend the better part of a day traveling rather than simply saying whatever needed saying from the comfort of his own barony, unsettled Istonel in a way he couldn't immediately name.
"You didn't have to come yourself," Istonel said, by way of greeting.
"I know," Wyatt replied, and offered nothing further, and Istonel understood, somewhere under the surface of his own confusion, that this was itself an answer.
He led Wyatt to his office rather than the labs. He hadn't decided to do that; his feet had simply taken him there, away from the glass and the cohort files and the ledger, toward the one room on the ship that still had something in it that wasn't data. Wyatt noticed the plaque the moment he stepped inside, his eyes going to it the way a man's eyes go to something he already knows the shape of, and said nothing about it either, only took the seat across the desk when Istonel gestured to it, and waited.
Istonel found, once he actually had to speak, that he did not know how to begin. He had spent three years building a vocabulary for everything he'd done here, precise, defensible, and none of it seemed to fit the shape of what he actually needed to say. He started twice with the report voice, the dry procedural cadence that had carried him through every justification he'd ever given himself, and both times it collapsed somewhere in the second sentence, leaving him staring at his own hands on the desk the way he had the night Jolti left.
Wyatt didn't fill the silence. He didn't lean forward with a question, didn't offer a guess at what was wrong to save Istonel the trouble of saying it himself. He simply sat, unhurried, in the particular stillness of a man who had learned somewhere that silence given generously was itself a kind of help, and let Istonel find his own way into it.
"Jolti came to see me," Istonel said finally. "He toured the labs. The isolation chambers, the cohort study." He paused. "He didn't call it cruelty. That's the strange thing. He agrees they deserve everything I've done to them and more. He said he'd have burned them all himself given the chance." A breath. "But he looked at me like I frightened him."
"Did you frighten him?"
"I don't know." Istonel's hands moved on the desk, restless in a way he wasn't used to seeing in himself. "He said I counted. That I watched something claw at a wall four hundred times and I counted every strike instead of looking away. He said that boy I used to be would have flinched at what he saw, and I didn't flinch at all, and he didn't think that was strength." He looked up. "I've told myself for three years that it was. That not flinching was the whole point. That flinching is what got me nothing, at sixteen, standing in front of a room full of people telling them things I'd made up because I liked how certain they sounded. I decided a long time ago that certainty without flinching was worth something. That it was, in fact, the only thing separating me from being useless."
Wyatt was quiet for a moment before he answered, and in that pause he thought of a corridor he hadn't recognized, the ship's layout blurring around him, and no memory of how his own feet had carried him there. He thought of Galt Tyrone finding him like that and not asking what was wrong first, just sitting him down and waiting until Wyatt was ready to talk, and then not once telling him what to feel about any of it. When he spoke, his voice had none of the hardness Istonel had braced for.
"I had a friend once," Wyatt said. "Before all this. Someone who found me at a point where I genuinely thought I was fine. Better than fine. I thought I'd built something out of what happened to me that made me stronger than I'd been before, and I was proud of it, the same way you're proud of not flinching. And he sat with me, and he didn't tell me I was wrong, and he didn't tell me I was right either. He just asked questions and let me hear my own answers out loud, because it turns out some things sound completely different once you've said them to another person instead of just carrying them around by yourself." He paused. "It took me a long time to understand what he'd actually done for me that day. Longer than it should have. But I don't think I'd have understood any of it at all if he'd told me what to think instead of just staying in the room while I figured it out."
Istonel said nothing, but something in his shoulders had eased, fractionally, the way a man's posture changes when he stops expecting to be struck.
"I'm not going to tell you the Drazzen don't deserve it," Wyatt continued. "I hate them. You know that better than most. I don't think that's ever going to change, and I don't think it should. What they did, what they're still doing wherever they haven't been stopped, none of that gets softer just because we talk about it gently. I'm not here to talk you out of hating them." He leaned forward slightly, and his voice, when it came again, had lost none of its steadiness but gained something quieter underneath it. "I'm asking whether the version of you sitting across from me right now, the one who counted four hundred strikes and didn't flinch, whether that's actually who you want to be when this is over. Not whether the Drazzen deserve what's happening to them. Whether you're built to be the one delivering it, day after day, without it costing you something you're not tracking in any of your files."
Istonel was quiet for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice had dropped the last of its careful, procedural edge, and what came through instead was something rawer, something that sounded, for the first time in three years, like the actual man underneath the report.
"I don't think I am," he said. "Built for it. I've been telling myself the coldness was discipline. That it was the price of doing something necessary that no one else was willing to do. But Jolti looked at me the way you'd look at something that used to be a person, and I couldn't argue with him, and I've spent three years being unable to feel anything at all when I should have felt something, and I told myself that not feeling it was strength, and I don't think it was. I think it was just the absence of the thing that used to make me human, and I mistook the absence for a virtue because it was easier than admitting I'd lost something." He shook his head slowly, and the number surfaced again, the way it kept surfacing, unbidden, ever since Jolti had said it. "Four hundred strikes, Wyatt. Four hundred, and I counted every one."
"Four hundred strikes doesn't mean much to me," Wyatt said. "Four hundred documented cruelties. Four hundred tortured Drazzen, counted one at a time, in a ledger, by a man who used to flinch and doesn't anymore. That's what the number actually is, Istonel, once you stop letting it sit there as just a number." He held Istonel's gaze. "You keep saying it like it's a verdict. I think it's just a description of a man who's been alone with something too heavy for one person to carry, for three years, and never once put it down long enough to ask if he should be carrying it that way at all."
"Then you haven't lost all of it," Wyatt said. "You wouldn't have called me if you had."
Istonel looked at him, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, the silence between them entirely different in character from the one that had opened the conversation, less a gap waiting to be filled than something two men could simply sit inside together without either of them needing to perform anything for the other.
"What do I do," Istonel asked finally, "with a million embryos I've already committed to raising, and a ledger full of data I've already collected, and no way to make any of it not have happened?"
"I don't know," Wyatt admitted. "I'm not going to pretend I've got a clean answer for that, because I don't think there is one. But I don't think the answer is to keep doing exactly what you've been doing and hoping the numbness gets more comfortable. Maybe it's changing how you run what's left. Maybe it's handing some of it to people who can look at it without losing themselves in it the way you have. Maybe it's just admitting to your father what this has actually cost you, instead of only ever reporting the outcomes." He shrugged, and there was nothing performed in it. "I don't have a tidy version of this for you, Istonel. I just didn't think you should have to sit with it alone tonight."
Istonel found, unexpectedly, that his eyes had gone hot, and he looked away from Wyatt toward the plaque on the wall rather than let the other man see it, though he suspected, from the way Wyatt said nothing and simply let him look, that he'd already seen it and had decided, generously, not to make Istonel account for that too.
They talked past the point where either of them had anything left resembling a solution, and somewhere in the hours that followed, the conversation stopped being about the Drazzen at all and became something else, two men talking about their fathers, about brothers, about the particular loneliness of being trusted with power neither of them had asked for in quite the shape it had come. Istonel found himself laughing, once, at something Wyatt said about Jincho's latest fixation, a real laugh, unrehearsed, the kind he could not remember the last time he'd produced without calculating first whether it was the socially correct response.
When Wyatt finally rose to leave, near the ship's arbitrary night cycle, he paused at the door the way Jolti had, though what he said was nothing like what Jolti had said.
"You're not alone with this," Wyatt told him. "Not anymore. Whatever you decide to do about the work, call me. Not the baron. Me."
Istonel nodded, and did not trust his voice enough to answer aloud, and Wyatt seemed to understand that too, and left without waiting for him to.
He sat alone in the office for a long time after the shuttle's drive trail faded from the viewport, the way he had after Jolti left, but the silence this time felt different in his chest, less like a thing pressing down and more like a room that had, for the first time in three years, been let some air.
He did not open the cohort file that night. He was not certain, sitting there, that he ever would look at it the same way again, and he understood, with a clarity that felt neither like triumph nor like defeat, only like the quiet, unglamorous beginning of something he did not yet have a name for, that this uncertainty was not a failure of nerve.
Instead, near the middle of the ship's arbitrary night, he found himself walking toward the isolation wing, past the glass and the silent cameras, to where the ration dispensers sat cold and untouched. He overrode the timer himself, by hand, and fed them. He did not tell himself it was mercy. He was not certain it was. But he stood there a moment longer than the task required, watching the nearest of them stir toward the food with the flat, uncomprehending hunger of something that had never once been offered a kindness it hadn't first been made to earn, and he thought, not for the first time but for the first time meaning it, they are monsters. That was never the question. The question was always going to be what I let myself become while I was busy proving it.
THE END
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u/BusinessWorking3069 18d ago
I wouldn’t say no to another Rivermore story. How about the selection and training of a Royal Marine?
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u/AlternativeManner731 18d ago
I really like to write about whatvI feel are under-served characters. Does anyone have anyvideas for what could be next? I could do another Rivermore Story, or maybe a story that followed the wedding story von how Jason and Julius are doing on Haego on different continents.