Happy New Year, here's some COG-shaped confetti for you: **\o/**

Keep commenting, faithful readers. Your support makes me want to finish this story, even in spite of the awful writer's block!

Also, after much deliberation I've decided not to try and make GOW4 fit in my story, since [SPOILERS!] I would have to kill off both Anya and Sharon to make it work. Sorry, GOW4 fans! (Weren't old Baird and old Sam the cutest thing, tho'?)

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E-DAY plus 15 YEARS, 4 WEEKS

[VNB, 2315 hours]

To the casual observer, Baird was just sitting there having a beer with Cole and Anya.

He was not.

In reality, as soon as he had seen her hanging the mirror mosaic behind the bar, her presence had boosted his thought processes in to high gear, like a nitrous-oxide injected racecar:

'Damn, she looks good – shit, I just walked into the back of a chair, hope she didn't see that – here's Cole and Anya – Marcus looks like he's going to have a stroke – so would I if I were him – I need a beer – note to self: don't get drunk tonight – gotta prove I'm not dangerous – well, not dangerous to her – can't do that if I'm acting on instinct, because instinct wants to incapacitate every man in here, throw her over my shoulder and find the nearest bed – definitely not going to win her over that way, she'd zap my ass with a stun baton before I got finished clobbering Clayton – you just stay way over there in the corner, Clayton, and keep your eyes off my woman – at least I hope she's my woman – God, I hate this not-knowing – Hey, Dom, Hey, Maria, glad you could make it, you make me seem like I am friends with nice people – sit here with us – oh God, here she comes – sit next to me, sit next to me, sit next to – YES!'

Baird's right leg started bouncing on its toes like a jackhammer, forcing him to brace his right fist against the underside of the table and leverage his forearm across his thigh to keep his leg still. If Sharon noticed his involuntary spasms, she would almost certainly put a hand on his arm and ask him what was wrong, and there was a better-than-50% chance he would kiss her if she did that right now.

"Yo, Baird," Cole said loudly, mercifully derailing Baird's racing train of thought. "How's it coming with that lie detector for the Chimera?"

"Agitation detector," Baird corrected him. "It's not going to tell me if the Chimera is lying, it's going to tell me what irritates it. I'll spam the thing with a bunch of hypotheses and see which ones get a reaction. Then it's just a matter of yes-no questions, and I start piecing together information simply from the way the Chimera involuntarily reacts to what I say."

Dom looked like he was struggling mightily to suppress a smart-ass comment. Returning with Maria's apple juice, the youngest Carmine blurted out, "Well, how are you going to test it? I mean, you couldn't be in the room, because you always irritate people, so that would mess with the baseline."

Sharon stifled a giggle with the back of her hand. Baird simultaneously felt his stomach turn icy and his face flame red-hot.

"Naw, Danny Boy," Cole boomed out before Baird could decide on a course of action, "Baird can turn the irritation on and off like that." He snapped his fingers. "He just chooses not to turn it off for ninety-nine percent of people." He shook his head sadly. "Sorry, kid, if Baird's irritating you, it means you didn't make the cut."

"I think that pretty much sums it up," Sharon said, grinning at Baird and nudging him with her elbow. The roaring of blood in Baird's ears dropped suddenly back down to a confused whisper. Cole was making it sound like Baird was selectively nice, instead of an asshole.

Baird decided that if this worked, he would allow Cole's pursuit of Sam.

Daniel Carmine, in that impulsive, stream-of-consciousness way that many teenage boys have because the corpus callosum in their brains isn't fully developed yet, blurted out, "Why did you have to build a whole new machine? Why didn't you rig one of the robots with the irritation-sensor thingies?"

"DENIS was mostly built to hack things ..." Baird turned to Sharon to explain the other bots.

"KEDAR and SEPDI have limited processing power, already taxed to capacity by their weapons functions." Sharon omitted JEEB from her list, and the tension in her back -probably only noticeable to Baird- said that she still wasn't ready to talk about the dearly departed bot. "It would be like trying to run a fancy new video game on a computer without enough random access memory."

Daniel took a sip of the quarter-strength beer Hoffman allowed to be served to teenaged Gears. "Never played a video game."

All the adults made mildly sympathetic noises. Video games had simply been a part of their entertainment culture, but these days all technology was being tasked to help the human race survive by keeping machines running, databases functioning, or laser weapons targeting. Using a computer for entertainment would be seen in the same light as hoarding food or medical supplies.

"What did DENIS do when you were out nomad-ing?" Daniel continued, relentlessly curious.

"He was primarily a recon unit," Sharon said. "He would go out cloaked and make sure our path was clear. Sometimes he would hack computers to see where the COG was going to be bombing, so we could stay away, or where the Stranded would be scavenging. Also so we could stay away."

"Why did you want to stay away from the COG?" Daniel asked innocently.

Sharon paused for a long moment. Baird's thoughts started revving up again, grinding together like a glass-crusher, making sharper and sharper fragments of thought that cut him in a hundred tiny places. The only one that didn't get ground into brittle shards was: 'Please don't say there was no reason to.'

She started slowly. "We knew there were others out there who needed our help. Others who didn't agree with the Stranded's warring-tribes mentality. Families just trying to survive without joining what amounts to an ongoing gang war, who couldn't get to the safety of Jacinto for one reason or another."

Maria was paying no attention to the conversation at all, smiling beatifically and people-watching the other full tables. Dom pulled his arm around her a little tighter, and beamed at Sharon. She nodded, her eyes crinkling happily at the corners.

Damn, but Baird wanted to be able to put his arm around Sharon in the exact same way. The hairs on the nape of his neck stood up, and he knew without turning to look that Bernie was sending him Take it easy, it'll happen vibes from several tables away. Friggin' sergeants and their friggin' sergeant-telepathy. Was it something mystical that happened at their promotion ceremony, or some future-tech installed in their sergeant's stripes? Either way, it was hella creepy that she could tell what he was thinking by looking at his back, from twenty feet away, in a crowded bar made even noisier by all the arm-wrestling contests, "navy chess" and drinking songs happening simultaneously.

"So if you hacked the COG, did you have access to the personnel records?" Daniel went on. "I would have looked up everybody I knew. I hate not knowing."

'Oh God, please stop talking, Daniel!'

Sharon got a little more still, a little more quiet. "I didn't really want to do that."

"Why not?"

Baird's racing thoughts came to a screeching halt. Daniel didn't realize it, but he was asking her why she hadn't looked up Baird.

Baird's leg stopped its jackhammering. His heartbeat slowed to a crawl as he held his breath. Cole's eyes flicked a very brief glance at Baird. He recognized this moment for what it was, too.

"Quantum superposition," Sharon answered.

Cole, Dom and Daniel raised their eyebrows in a shared What does that mean? gesture. Baird's vision went out of focus. He didn't need a quantum physics lesson to understand what she meant, and it changed everything about the last 15 years of his life in one instant.

"Um," Sharon searched for an example. "Ever heard of Schrödinger's Cat?"

"Oh," Anya said in understanding, practically the first noise she'd made all evening.

"What?" Daniel looked between them. "Whose cat? What do pets have to do with quintum super-whatsit?"

Baird stared dumbstruck into the amber liquid in his mug, hearing Sharon's voice as if through a long tunnel while she explained the concept of Schrödinger's Cat to a kid who'd obviously never taken a physics class.

Daniel screwed up his face in deep thought, trying to comprehend the idea: "The cat is half dead?"

"Remember that the 'cat' isn't a real cat, it's an idea that represents a particle that could be in one state or the other, but you won't know which state until you open the 'box' and look. The 'cat' particle exists in both states at the same time, but you force it into one state or another by the act of observing it."

Daniel was clearly having a hard time with the quantum-state idea. "The cat can be both alive and dead, as long as you don't look at it?"

"Yeah."

"That makes no sense. Things are either alive or dead." Daniel's youthful enthusiasm drained out of his face like sand leaving a broken hourglass. "Most things are dead now."

Dom shifted uneasily, watching Maria out of the corner of his eye. Fortunately she was watching the prisms of light thrown by the glass mosaic behind the bar, and not listening to their conversation about dead people.

Cole, true to form, boomed out: "That just means more food for me, baby!" and patted his stomach with both hands. "Gotta keep the Cole Train furnace burnin' hot!" Baird thought he heard Sam made a soft, amused noise from a table somewhere over his shoulder.

Sharon laughed, but wasn't giving up on Daniel yet: "Schrödinger himself invented this example to show how incomprehensible quantum superposition is. In real life, quantum superposition isn't even proven or disproven yet. But that's not the point. In your mind, it works just fine."

"So you didn't look, because as long as you didn't know for sure ..."

"... they were all still alive to me," Sharon concluded quietly. "I didn't look because ... not because I didn't want to know. I didn't look because if I found out for sure, and they were all dead ... well. That would have been the end."

Baird stood up suddenly, almost rocking the table. "Excuse me," he said, addressing the air over their heads, since making eye contact with any one of the people at the table would reveal much more than he was willing to share. "I have to go speak to Engineer Parry."

"Um, OK, goodbye..." he heard Sharon say to his back as he strode briskly to the exit. The others made mumbling comments about his abrupt departure, and he could almost sense Bernie half-standing from her seat, but who the hell cared?

He was suddenly full of purpose: he needed some titanium from Parry, stat. Daniel may not have understood quantum superposition, but Baird sure did, and enough to know what Sharon actually meant but couldn't say in front of all those people: she would not have been able to live in a world where she knew for certain that Baird was dead.

He couldn't have sat there one second longer without taking her in his arms, which would startle the bar patrons more than an exploding grenade. And besides, he had a necklace to make.