These are all canonical, like side scenes that would be cut for time in a regular work. The timing on all of these is intentionally nebulous.
The MIA team, clad warmly except for the android John Black and the pyrokinetic Emma Agney, are sitting together and looking out across the wasteland of Antarctica. They’ve inherited a base from Pyrrhus, who in turn built the base in the ruins of an ancient alien city.
Jason Quill, only recently joined, looks around at the others. Each person is silently staring across the snowy landscape.
“Why are we doing this, anyway?” he finally asks.
The others sit up and turn to look at him curiously, then at each other more curiously. From what he can tell, they haven’t really thought about this question until he asked it just now.
“It’s the only live entertainment within a thousand miles?” quips Alex, as usual first with the joke.
“It’s really… uh, majestic, I guess?” Nono ventures.
“It’s honest.” This is from Alycia, who hasn’t stopped looking at the sight.
The others, including Jason, now turn to her in curiosity. Sensing their attention, she explains.
“Anywhere in the world, safety is an illusion. Human beings are minutes away from death from asphyxiation, days away via dehydration, weeks away via starvation. Places like America, the so-called ‘Western world’, pretend to care about their citizens’ needs. You have the necessities of life if you can afford them, and provided that a gun or preventable disease or something else doesn’t end your life. Elsewhere, like in China or in many indigenous cultures, the elderly and vulnerable are cared for, but the individual might be called on to sacrifice for society. And everywhere, the wrong skin color or sexuality can prove dangerous.”
Only now does she turn back to look at her teammates. “Here? There’s no deception. If we don’t care for ourselves and for each other, we die. Plain and simple.”
She shrugs slightly. “I… respect that.”
Emma smirks. “Then we’re winning. MIA 6, Antarctica zip.”
John speaks quietly, with uncharacteristic humility. “MIA 5, Antarctica 1. I died here. Folks dug me out, and I’m alive and kicking again. But yeah. I get that. Staring death in the face is… it’s kinda liberating. Scary. But you finally can stare your enemy in the face. You don’t have to guess where it’s gonna sneak up on you.”
Jason nods along. “I get that too. I had my adventures, of course, but… facing it on my own? And making it out? Life altering stuff.”
It’s John’s turn to look at his friends. “Feels like most of us have had some kinda stare-down with death at some point. Not just danger an’ shit, but like, that moment of reckoning. You were all there for mine. So who else wants to talk about theirs?”
Alycia and Jason glance at each other. In the moment they do, Nono speaks up. The words come out in a confessional torrent.
“There was one time I was gonna, uh, stop. Like, you know. End. Things were bad at home. I got some of the prescriptions from my parents’ medicine cabinet.”
She pauses, and almost starts to giggle. “Medicine cabinet. I never really thought about it before, but… a whole cabinet, just for drugs, hidden behind a mirror… wow, that’s dystopian, isn’t it? Like how many drugs do we need to keep us going? This many.”
She mimes the size of a bathroom mirror with her hands. But she goes on.
“So, like, I had all these pills spread across my desk, like a buffet almost. And I was trying to figure out, like, should I take them all, should I try to calculate an overdose, and… like, in the moment, it was all very serious, it was important that I get this right, like this one particular question…”
She chokes out a laugh. “And what stopped me was so silly. I had my Tumblr drafts up on my screen. There was one story, one thing that had been nagging at me, and… I just… I just… I was like, I have to get this fucking story done because it had a really neat premise…”
Tears are flowing down her cheeks. “There’s even an ironic epilogue here. I never published that story.”
While Emma moves to wipe the tears away, Alex chimes in. “Guess you gotta publish that story now.”
Nono turns in blank incomprehension, and Alycia leans forward, sensing perhaps an inappropriate comment. But Alex goes on.
“It saved your life. Sounds like the most important story in the universe to me.”
Nono’s grateful smile immediately calms down Emma, who was starting to react badly to what she thought was just teasing from Alex.
But reality returns, and Nono begins to panic. “Uh, no. No can do. That was ah, uh, an Agent R and JQ story.” She won’t look at anyone, but Jason most of all.
“I could hack your Tumblr,” Alex offers casually.
Everyone’s surprised when Jason speaks up. “You don’t have to post it if you don’t want. But I agree with Alex. It sounds like it was a really important story. I’m glad it kept you going.”
Alex speaks next, but not in reply. They seem like they want to pull some of the embarrassing scrutiny off of Nono, and they do that by telling their story. “I never faced death by posting embarrassing things on Tumblr, but… when I was younger and more foolish, but still talented, I was hacking whoever I could. I’d run away from my family. I’d got myself an apartment, paid for online, with a fake identity. I was drunk on my own colossal talent and my newfound freedom.”
“So one day I get this call, out of the blue. To be clear, that shouldn’t have happened. Nobody should have known about me, or how to find me, or anything. Or so I thought. To this day, AEGIS never told me how they found me. But it was this voice, this calm collected voice, saying, get out, they’re coming for you, we sent a van. And I was sitting there, going, who the fuck are you, and they just said, it doesn’t matter, right now you are what matters.”
Alex’s perpetual grin twists in weird ways. “Nobody’d ever told me anything like that before. And that voice.. geez, there was just no saying no to it, it was so confident. So I was closing my laptop, thinking about what I’d take outta here with me - there was no furniture, just a fold-out cot and every bottle of Red Bull ever and my computers - and they just said, ‘leave it’, like they knew me, they could see me, but there was no camera…”
The hacker shrugs. “Anyway. I was on the ground floor, the elevator door was just opening, when the RPG hit the apartment I’d just been in. Rocket-Propelled Grenade that is, not Role-Playing Game. I guess around a bunch of black ops nerds, I need to be specific.”
“The whole building shook. Chunks of concrete come loose, come raining down on me. I scream and run. Things are getting super duper real. Like the world turns fuzzy and staticky, like an old movie on VHS with maximum jitter-cam. I hear these sounds, which I’m told later are sniper bullets.”
“Then there’s uh, this SUV that pulls up. Black Escalade. Door opens. I hear the most incongruous fucking thing come out of it. Someone’s playing Underworld’s ‘Cowgirl’ at maximum blast. For those who aren’t clued in, it’s part of the ‘Hackers’ soundtrack. 1995. Something I’d definitely have seen. Someone fucking knows me. This is a siren song for hackers and I head over there.”
“I get inside and the Escalade pull away. Some middle aged dude in a black suit with an M-4 is out of the sunroof, spraying bullets somewhere. Somebody else, same suit, is driving like a maniac. The person in the back is dressed real casual. Not like a hacker, but definitely someone plugged into, uh ‘youth culture’ as they say. They were the one playing the music. And they just say, ‘put your seatbelt on’, like my mother might say. And I just do it, because I’m so disconnected from everything that’s going on.”
Alex smiles wryly at their friends, going from face to face. “For all I play at being in control of everything, I always feel a little helpless, always have. So I arch my back and bristle my fur like a scaredy-cat, you know? My whole personality is a fear response. For the first time, on that day, I really felt like it was gonna be over, like everything I knew was gone, like I might really die. I was right next to this abyss and I coulda fallen into it, so so easily. I couldn’t even do that much.”
The members of the group look at each other. Emma, perhaps feeling self-conscious, speaks up. “I told y’all about my experience. Too may times. Jerk jocks, car wreck, flaming inferno, utter terror, blah blah blah. There’s some assholes who are real lucky to still be alive.”
She does spare a glance at Nono. “I guess I’m lucky too.”
Jason leans back and smiles. “That’s two of you who had an experience where you were living. Your home. I guess that’s how it was for me.”
“I faced death around the world. But it was when I would come home that I felt that terror you’re talking about. The abyss. The helplessness. Because home is where you’re supposed to feel secure, right? Not my home.”
“When we’d come back from some kind of mission, my dad and Rusty would go about their business. Dad would tell me what we were doing next. Rusty would train me. I’d be implanted with weird, experimental, life-threatening nanobots. You know. Whatever.”
He looks around. “I don’t know if my dad felt safe. I never did. I think I realized, subconsciously, that what he was doing was wrong. The house turned into a prison. And I, genius that I am, master thinker that I am, subconsciously put my vast intellect to work justifying this. It was all very scientific. What conclusions do the observed facts support? If I’m in a prison, if I’m in danger, I must deserve it. I must have done something wrong.”
“I couldn’t blame my dad. Who ever can, really?”
John Black snorts, but says nothing. Alycia visibly bites off a comment. Jason smiles wanly, and keeps speaking.
“I loved my dad. I missed him, when I thought he was dead. I grieved. But I was still in that prison my intellect had built for myself, and my jailer was no longer around to release me. And with those damn defective nanobots, he’d passed sentence on me. All I could do was wait for the end.”
He looks around again, with that lopsided smile. “When people came to pull me out of that prison, and walked straight through a door I was convinced was locked, it didn’t make sense. My brain said to fight it, because it didn’t make sense. I did such a good job convincing myself I deserved this, and this new thing didn’t make sense. But thankfully they didn’t give up on me. So, in spite of my best efforts, I lived.”
He smiles back at Nono. “So there you go. A Jason Quill story with a happy ending.”
Nono beams.