Simulacrum

After the rest of the cadets had had their go in the simulator, Iverson dismissed them. Rather than meet up with the others of their class for dinner, or go to the small study areas with a book, or whatever else any of them did in their free time, Pidge (she was Pidge now, had been for months, trained herself so well to respond to it that it was easy, now) made her way back to the dorms, and closed the door to her rabbit-hutch of a room. It wasn't much, just enough space for a cot, a shelf with two drawers, and a chair, but it was hers. She curled up on the bed, wrapping the blanket she'd brought from home tightly around her shoulders, and ordered herself not to cry.

She'd gotten good at not crying in the last six and a half months, trying to be angry instead, or better, to feel nothing. That hadn't worked as well, but all the same, she'd gotten better at what her mom had called bottling. She couldn't afford to cry. The older cadets, the bigger ones, would see it as weakness, blood in the water, and she couldn't lose any more time because an instructor or bully was keeping too close an eye on her.

"It was only a simulation, it was only a simulation, it was only—" She cut herself off. She'd known, of course, they there would be sims. Matt and her dad had both talked about them, training missions. She'd thought she could handle them, she was logical, wasn't she? She knew, going in, that it was just a computer program, preset, so she could learn how to behave in the field without being at risk of actual death. It was fake. No reason to panic—and a lot of people did, treating it like it was real, getting into character, but that had seemed dumb. The point of sims was to learn with a safety net, no panic, so that the actions would be second nature.

She'd thought she'd had it in the bag, even if her crew were –well, they weren't family, didn't know how to work together. But then Iverson had announced that the Sim was a rescue mission, not the typical scouting or patrolling or anything like that. It had taken everything in her not to shut down when the location on the computer screen made to look like a windshield read "Kerberos." For a paralyzing heartbeat, as Lance made some cocky quip and Hunk dithered, checking his seatbelt seven times, Pidge had wanted to cry, but by now the tears had all dried up in her head, and it was anger she had to shove down, keep off her face. But that wouldn't help anyone or anything. It would only draw attention to her, and as it was there was enough risk, her sneaking out every other night to listen to the stars and radio chatter beyond them.

So she'd quashed down the anger—the sooner they solved the simulator, the sooner she could get out and go back to her real work here, trying to find proof of the cover up, trying to find any hint as to what had really happened. Even as they had approached the surface of Fake Kerberos in their Fake rescue ship on this Fake mission, she repeated it to herself—just a simulation.

Just a simulation. Not real. They'd land, and the doors would open, and it wouldn't be Matt, and Dad and their pilot, Shiro, waiting for her. Her family wouldn't run for her, ask what she was doing there, her family wouldn't be back together. She wouldn't have saved them, it wasn't them calling for help, it wasn't real, it wasn't. They'd land and the door would open on the man who had lied to her mother, and the classmates waiting for their turn to win some fake, stupid-

Lance and Hunk bickered, but she'd tuned it out, focusing only on her job. On the screen in front of her, an alarm chirped. A signal, a call for help—did Matt and Dad sent one out? Did they wait and wait and wait for someone to answer? Did anyone ever respond? Stop it, not real, fake—but her voice crept just a touch higher as she alerted her teammates. She had to be objective, she had to remember. Lance wanted to land, Hunk was about to throw up, and it was all fake. Just a simulator. Just a game. The boys weren't even taking it seriously. She tried to focus: solve the mission, end the test. Still, When Lance ordered her to hail the lunar vessel—she knew it wasn't real, but she wanted it to be so badly.

They crashed. Pidge hardly cared about that. Sometimes sims were meant to make you fail. Sometimes, you just got stuck with a crew that couldn't work together. It wasn't as if she actually wanted to be part of Garrison, after what they'd done, and really, failing would give her more time here. But then Iverson brought up the mission they'd meant to rescue. Her father's ship, and it was too much.

So after Lance had drawn the attention on himself, away from her outburst, she slunk back to her bunk, hugging Matt's old quilt around her, and tried not to cry. It wasn't right, it wasn't fair! Not that she'd failed, but everything that had happened in the last year, everything that had happened to the Holt family.

Commander Iverson and his superiors and underlings hadn't bothered to actually go rescue her family, to even see if they could find out what had happened. They hadn't bothered to send out more than basic probes and they'd lied about what they'd found. They hadn't even tried to recover bodies or belongings, but here they were, here Garrison was, turning her family's tragedy into a goddamn computer game. Into something the other Cadets would talk about in passing like it was a joke, or worse, a replaceable, interchangeable module for training. Nothing more than something to brag about beating, check off a training mission list, nothing more than a pass/fail assessment.

Wasn't it bad enough that they used it as an example in class all the time, beating it into the cadets heads that they always had to be aware of what could go wrong, or they'd end up like the Kerberos Crew? Never their names, never an indication that people had died, it felt almost like Garrison was more upset at losing the ship or not getting the ice samples than having lost three people. Her phone rang, but she ignored it. Her mother would be calling, but just now, she didn't want to talk. She knew if she did, she might not be able to hold back her emotions, and she had to. For Matt, for her dad, for Shiro, for who knew how many others that Garrison had let lie forgotten, hiding too many secrets. She had to be strong, and find out the truth.

(Some part of her, distant, wondered, before she could crush the train of thought like a tear under her palm, if her team had managed to beat the sim, would they have played voices of her father and brother? Projected an image on the screen before everything going dark and victory music? Maybe it was better that they'd failed, preferable to that hope, that lie.)

Her fingers pulled the worn fabric a bit closer before she shrugged it off, smelling of Garrison's laundry soap, not her mother's detergent, or Matt's brand of shampoo. A simulated rescue mission would never bring her family home, but she could learn the truth, and lay it out for everyone to see. Closure was all that was left, something that would last longer than a flickering hologram.

She tucked her laptop into a shoulder bag, already prepared, and slipped through the door. She had work to do.

I was talking/sad gaming about the simulator a bit ago with my friend and started planning this and then Life happened but I finally finished.