FicWad

Silver was worried. In the co-pilot's seat of her shuttle, George was quiet. She hadn't really expected much conversation from him, but the expression on his face was blank. She was getting the distinct impression that the lights were on, but nobody was at home. His face remained immobile. There was no glimmer of thought in his eyes, no blink, not so much as a twitch of an eyelid. He was hardly even breathing.



She was afraid that the separation had damaged him. She was afraid that all of his persona had been so heavily bound up with the other three that he had no actual personality. That when they had been so forcibly separated, when the other three had retreated to their own shells, there had been nothing left. Hopefully, her fears would turn out to be unfounded. Hopefully, he had simply retreated into his shell, and that he would emerge in time. She was afraid, however, that there was nothing there to emerge. She knew that, in real life, the Quiet One had had hidden depths. If this George didn't have depths - a very real possibility, given his origins - then she would have to rebuild him. Recreate his personality, his very mind, from scratch.



Setting the shuttle to automatic pilot, she felt her customary twinge of irritation at her sister. In a place like this, where lightsabres really worked and magicians and wizards really could turn you into a frog, given the excuse, something as simple as an automatic pilot was not a problem. She only wished that Mistress would install direct links between her castle and the lands of her three sisters. The procedure was dead easy. However, Mistress disliked being so easily reached. Her only link to the rest of cyberspace was the one she had to have - the link to her sponsoring web page.



Turning to George, she took his head between her hands, and started to examine what lay within. It wasn't good. While he did, indeed, have a mind, it had been very firmly locked down. And there was an awful lot of empty air between it and the outside world. He had retreated into himself, and she was going to have to bring him out again. At least, here in cyberspace, she had more options than Estrelda would have done had she been confronted with this. Out in the real world, without the tricks, links and magics that were available in cyberspace, Estrelda would have been able to do nothing more than feed him and attempt to stimulate him. Ultimately, she would have had to lock him away.



The flight computer bleeped at her, and moments later, they slid into the shuttle bay of Silver's space station. They were home. She undid her harness, and slid over to where George sat, still buckled in and unmoving. She undid his harness, took his hand, and pulled him out of the chair. Fortunately, they were in a weightless environment, and he floated out of his chair, still in a sitting position. Silver frowned. This wasn't going to be easy.



"Computer," she called as she went into the landing bay, towing the unresponsive George behind her. "Full antigrav between here and George's room."



"Working," said the impersonal, multi-toned voice of the computer. Silver had long since rejected the notion of having a computer voice of a specific gender. Having a computer speak with simultaneous male and female voices suited her much better. After all, computers were not supposed to have a genuine intelligence (although in cyberspace plenty did. Telling the difference between something intelligent and something that was simply a part of the scenery was not always an easy task.).



"Full antigrav achieved," the computer said, and opened the doors nearest to her. Silver went through, and soon had George within the room she had had the computer set up for her.



It was responsive to him, and to him alone. It would configure itself to the conditions he found most comfortable, decorate itself in the style that best reflected his personality. All the sisters had rooms like that. They were very useful in situations like this. It would tell her better than anything else she could think of what the state of his mind was like, and whether or not she would have to take action of some sort. She straightened George out from his still-seated position, and lowered him to the bed. Soon, the room should change, adapt to him.



The walls faded to black. So did the carpet and the ceiling. In fact, the entire room changed. The blackness of void. Silver looked at George. His clothes and hair faded to black as well, leaving his face as the only light spot in the entire room. This was not good. Still, it could have been worse. Had his face faded to black as well, she would have been truly worried. However, he seemed to be stable.



She had to snap him out of it. Leaving the room, she went to her control room and settled down. Perhaps if she had the computer recite things at him, it would help him to bridge the void. Frowning thoughtfully, she had the computer call up his biography. None of it was particularly helpful - unlike her sister Gardener, she did not have access to reams and reams of information. However, her information did mention an interest in transcendental meditation. Perhaps the Bhagavad-gita would be a good place to start. Or the Tibetan book of the dead. She at least had those on file. It had been one of the author's passing whims. Still, she was glad of it now.



She instructed the computer to start reciting, and to maintain George's existence as stably as it could. The only other path she could take was to step inside his mind and to lead him out again. However, that was so dangerous and so potentially destructive that no decent person had ever been willing to try it. Silver shrank away from very notion of it. No. Better that he be erased and replaced with a simulacrum, or a copy from a different source, than to have his mind invaded in that way.



Instructing the computer to show her the interior of George's room, she grabbed a cup of coffee and settled down into one of her superbly comfortable moulded chairs. The room was still black. However, it was the blackness of night, rather than the blackness of void. Stars were visible in the distance, pinpricks against the velvet. Somehow, the words were having an impact on him.



He was awfully good looking, she thought, lying there on nothing at all, floating in the gravity free environment. His hair had changed back to its normal brown and had thus become visible in the dark room. The light of distant suns reflected off it, revealing the bronze highlights that were never visible in those old movies. Those, more than anything, reflected his point of origin within the realm of fanfic. Writers bothered to notice things like highlights, and the highlights showed up in a way that could not be replicated by movies of the sixties.



George had come from a movie transcript. It had to have been written by a woman. Men didn't often notice things like highlights in another man's hair, much less take note of them when they wrote a transcript. It was probably written by a Beatles fan, possibly even by one of those original, screaming girls who had pursued the boys through city after city, all over the world. Silver had never really understood them.



But now, he made her catch her breath. The angles of his face, the softness of his lips, all made her want to caress him. He looked like a beautiful piece of artwork created by somebody who really understood how to use the empty blackness of space.



The writer of this particular transcript was starting to make Silver angry. She could have really made something of the character. She could have noticed elements of George's personality, and written her transcript in such a way that he could have had depth. But no. All she'd noticed was his appearance. His beautiful face. John and Paul had forceful enough personalities that they tended to overwhelm even those sets of female hormones interested only in tumbling beautiful boys into bed. Ringo had also come out rather well, since he'd been the film's main character. George, on the other hand, was the quiet one. He tended to blend in with the background at the best of times.



Silver finished her coffee, tossed the mug into the recycling tube, and stalked out of the room. Fortunately, like Mistress' castle, the space station came with as many corridors as she needed. She strode angrily around the station, eventually deciding that killing fascist scum in a total immersion video game would be a good way of settling herself down again. The room appeared before her, and she was soon settled in a chair and deep in a virtual jungle.



When she emerged several hours later, feeling tired but much happier, she headed back to see how George was getting on. Upon entering his room, she stopped in surprise. A field of star-studded blackness had had many more elements added to it. A nebula spread colour across one corner of the room by George's feet, and a supernova added what looked rather like a halo to his features. The most startling change was to his clothes. They were not supposed to be included in the package of items which reacted to his state of mind, but evidently they had been.



Instead of the slacks and shirt he had been wearing, he was simply an outline. Within the outline was a soundless mass of black and white screaming female fans at a concert. Silver knew that she had absolutely no desire to actually hear the noise they were generating. Judging by the expressions on the faces of the band in the centre of all the noise, they didn't really want to be hearing it either.



Peering more closely at them, Silver realised that she was seeing the Beatles. She also realised that this had never appeared in the movie. She started to smile. This was the best thing she could have seen. George was regaining his past. He was starting to recover his connection with the outside world. His personality beyond that which had been represented in the movies. He was still comatose and unresponsive. He still had a long, long way to go. But his journey had started.