Work Text:
There’s a gear, and it’s spinning free on an axle. It’s delicate, and expensive, and the rest of the mechanism waits still and dead for the last gear to slot in and animate the clockwork, and it’s terribly important for reasons that feel as incoherent as they are urgent. Maggie can almost wrap her mind around the specifications of the missing gear, its thickness and diameter and the depth of its teeth but just as she almost has it black smoke occludes the equations and the parameters, and every time she grasps frantically for one term, another one slips away, and the clock ticks closer to the 8:00 AM board meeting…
McGinnis tosses restlessly in her bed. She veers close enough to waking to break the flow of the dream.
It’s 7:55 AM and she’s just dashing through the front doors of Fairfax Tower. She’s late, but she can still make it, she just has to hurry. As she rushes through the crowded lobby, she angles to weave through the milling businesspeople, but at every turn she’s stymied. She tries to squeeze through a gap to her left only to find a towering man in a suit implacably blocking her way. She jostles her way to the right but two women close in. Everyone around her is improbably tall, and the more she struggles to push her way through, the tighter the bodies weave around her, till their button-up suits and pressed trousers and manicured hands merge into a jostling wall, she can’t see where one man begins and another ends, and then suddenly she realizes that none of them have a face—
McGinnis jolts awake. She can feel sweat clammy at the nape of her neck. Dreading what she’ll find, she rolls over and pushes the button to light up her bedside clock just long enough. 1:45. Still enough time to go back to sleep.
The last day of school was yesterday. Her first day of work is today. She’s nervous, in the elevator on her way to her very first meeting as a junior employee of Fairfax Industries.
“Shouldn’t you put some clothes on?”
She’s just passed the sixth floor and she panics. How could she have walked straight through the lobby stark naked? But nobody said a thing till that husky voice out of nowhere; maybe she got lucky and no-one has noticed. There’s still time to duck into a bathroom and dress.
Then she realizes the elevator is made of glass, and she’s ten floors up and nobody SHOULD be able to see, but she looks out and sees that she’s just passing the knees of a giant female figure. If she can’t find a way to stop the elevator, she’ll reach its eye level in no time and then she’ll be seen, she’ll be found out, she’ll be standing naked at the top of the Fairfax building and what will she do then?
McGinnis is an engineer, she surely can figure out how to halt her ascent. She reaches for the buttons, but they telescope away, always just out of her grasp. Tantalizingly close. Infuriatingly far.
Now she’s flying past the giantess’ thighs, rising inexorably past wide-hipped pants and corseted waist. She scrabbles for the emergency access panel, but it’s something else now, it’s the circuit board on one of her mobile turrets. That’s ok, it’s ok, she knows these machines like the back of her own hand. If she just disrupts the power supply to the primary—
The power supply to the—
Supply to the secondary—
A scream tries to escape but dies in her paralyzed throat as the circuits blur before her eyes. She’s trying, she’s trying, but her fingers won’t move and she’s still shooting up higher and higher. She’s rocketing up the gargantuan form of a pressed blouse wreathed in hazy tendrils, smoke rolling off the embers of a dying fire. She’s powerless, frozen with terror, and she’s convinced in her heart that when those glinting yellow eyes see her, it’s all over. In a surge of desperation she finally sees one last way out, and the moment she thinks it the glass shatters at her feet and she plunges down, crashing down to the sidewalk, smashing down towards the boots of the massive woman whose searchlight eyes never stop looking for her—
This time her heart is racing when McGinnis jerks awake. She lies there a moment, taking stock of her body. Yep. Definitely all the way awake.
With a grimace, she rolls out of her soaked sheets. Doesn’t matter what time it is now. She’s up. Might as well go fiddle with that circuit board. Maybe put an emergency shutdown switch in there.
By the time she’s downed a cup of coffee and settled in with a soldering iron, the dreams have slipped away. She’s forgotten them before sunrise.
But somewhere far away, Haze remembers everything. Every image. Every fear. And every detail of the circuit board that powers Fairfax Industries’ most deadly weapons.