Chapter 48: Ones and Zeros
Elina accepted the journal with both hands and grabbed a quill from the table. She flipped through to find a fresh page, trying to put on Mack’s clinical detachment like she’d downloaded the manual but hadn’t run the program before.
“Name, rank, date,” she began. She used a neutral tone, probably somewhere between Intro to Clinical Psychology and their first real patient telling them to fuck off.
Cole, obviously, had no plans to make it any harder for her. He provided the basics while watching her work.
She wrote down the answers, and honestly, her handwriting belonged in a manuscript – each letter beautiful enough to make font designers jealous. Noble education showing through, he supposed. Meanwhile, Mack’s notes looked like he’d written them during an earthquake. While drunk. In the dark.
They breezed through psychiatric history – not that there was much of it to speak of, since most of their records were an entire dimension away – and moved on to a simple mental status exam and a brief rundown of the mission. That, too, was a piece of cake.
“Now then.” Elina consulted Mack’s previous entries like a cheat sheet. She recited the questions in her soft, lyrical accent. It sounded weird, hearing her take on modern shrink-talk, but also oddly fitting. “On a scale of zero to four, how much have you been bothered by repeated, disturbing memories of today’s events?”
Cole paused briefly. As fucked up as it was, what happened to Gerrick wasn’t a ‘four’ on his list – that would probably be more applicable to Mack. Personally, he’d already compartmentalized; filed the whole thing away under ‘necessary violence’. But how would it seem to Mack if he blurted a ‘zero’ or a ‘one’?
It wasn’t completely honest, but he factored in the impact to his team, convinced himself it was a ‘two,’ and moved on.
“Disturbing dreams?”
Crickets. Mack actually coughed. Cole kept his expression neutral while Elina processed her mistake – asking about dreams when they hadn’t even attempted sleep yet.
Her ears went pink. “Ah, pardon me. We’ve not yet retired for the evening,” she said, breaking into an awkward laugh. “Moving on, what of ‘feeling very upset when reminded of the stressful experience?’”
“One.” Mostly because Cole wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger – and because he didn’t have a history of piling trauma to contend with. The kid getting possessed was a tragic variable, yes, but still within predicted parameters for demon-tainted cargo. At least, that’s what he managed to convince himself with.
They worked through the symptom clusters next: avoidance, negative alterations in cognition and mood, alterations in arousal and reactivity, the usual. Boiled down, it was really just academic language for ‘are you fucked up, and if so, how, and to what extent?’
Cole kept his responses consistent. He provided mostly ones, with a couple of zeros for startles and outbursts.
Elina paused at the score tallies, giving a small smile. “Well, it seems the incident has imposed little psychological strain on you – at least, none that manifests in your present affect.”
Cole nodded. “Experience helps. Compartmentalization.”
Elina squinted at her notes. “When last you spoke of Gerrick’s passing, I observed a certain hesitancy – a note unresolved. Was it the loss itself that pressed so heavily upon you, or did the conduct of others render it more bitter still? If you’ve discerned the cause, or have theories, I would hear them.”
It was a sharp question, Cole had to hand it to her. She’d caught the dissonance between his delivery and whatever leaked through underneath – the singular ‘two’ that stood out, elevated from the sea of ‘ones’ and ‘zeros.’
Conduct of others… Now that was diplomatic phrasing, nuanced enough to avoid Mack’s likely fragility yet get the point across. It could mean the cultists who’d brought the poison, the system that let kids work hungry in warehouses, or it was Elina fishing for his thoughts on Mack without naming him.
Cole glanced at Mack, seeking a quick check for permission or warning. He got a small nod in return, weary but clear. He couldn’t imagine the struggle going on in the background, but he could deeply respect the fact that Mack strived for professionalism and honesty.
With a sigh, Cole began, “The kid had already crossed a threshold we couldn’t pull him back from. Unlike the situation with K’hinnum, we didn’t have the time to locate and hunt down the possessor. Mathematically speaking,” he paused. He thought about the wording for a bit before forcing it out, “saving Gerrick from that nightmare was the best option. As opposed to, y’know, the kid getting trapped in his own mind. Or the Kingdom losing a Hero and then the demons wiping out mankind sometime down the line because of that.”
Maybe there was a better option, but Cole had found no other – not at the time, and not in the moments of contemplation since then. “Every catastrophe starts somewhere. Patient zero. First breach in the dam. Initial point of failure. Gerrick became that point the moment he opened the can. One death to prevent hundreds down the line, through the people we save. Butterfly effect.”
He stopped himself; he was overexplaining, wasn’t he? Damn, that itself was telling.
Cole got back on track.
Elina studied him for a good few seconds, quill hovering. It was the same stretched out silence that all evaluators did when they’d caught something but weren’t sure whether to pursue it. It was clear to Cole that she’d already connected the dots between his philosophical dissertation and the careful glances to Mack. She must’ve been weighing the math: therapeutic benefit versus opening the can of worms – both for himself and for Mack.
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“You expend no small measure of reasoning upon something you yourself deemed unremarkable. That alone suggests the wound may not be yours.”
Cole had seen enough shrinks to recognize the technique – acknowledge the elephant, let the patient decide whether to discuss it. Except the elephant in this case was sitting three feet away, white-knuckling a teacup.
He took a sip from his own teacup, just to buy some thinking time. “Some wounds you witness rather than receive.”
It was truth adjacent to the actual truth - he needed Mack to hear those words, needed him to understand that what he'd done was necessary, optimal, and morally uncomplicated despite being fucking awful. But Elina had already named that dynamic and made it visible in the room. Now he had to navigate acknowledging her insight without turning Mack into the explicit subject of his evaluation.
“Team cohesion means, well, shared psychological burden. When one of us carries weight, um, we all feel the load shift.” It was still general enough to be professional, but specific enough to be honest. “My processing remains… functional. If I had to say, the concern isn’t really about impact on my performance.”
There. He’d admitted it without admitting it. Yes, the wound wasn’t just his. Yes, he was worried about someone else. No, they weren’t going to dissect Mack’s trauma during Cole’s eval. Boundaries still mattered, even when everyone could see through them.
Elina would understand the limits he’d just established. Smart as she was, the question was whether she’d recognize those boundaries for what they were. Elina had the intelligence to spot subtext but maybe not the experience to know when pushing became counterproductive. First-time evaluators sometimes chased clarity past the point of therapeutic benefit, not yet understanding that some stones were better left unturned during formal assessments.
She chose the right answer. “Should anything from today remain with you, however slightly, I remain at your disposal to hear it.”
Cole shook his head. “Thanks. I think we’ve covered everything relevant.”
Elina was professional as hell, especially for her first real eval. Mack had trained her well, even while sitting there looking like he was ready to lock himself in his room.
Next up was Ethan. He settled down into the evaluator chair with the steady composure that earned him his callsign. They called him ‘Chappie’ for a reason – short for ‘Chaplain.’ But it wasn’t just because he kept a field Bible in his kit or could quote Scripture for any occasion; no, it was because he actually embodied what a chaplain was supposed to be.
Ethan was the man who’d hold someone’s hand while he bled out, give last rites if he needed to, then pick up his rifle and send the enemy to meet their maker. He’d done the spiritual math years ago, somewhere between Romans 13 and his third deployment, and made peace with the work.
Naturally, his evaluation proceeded smoothly. When Elina asked about the operation, Ethan gave his honest assessment: the ship was clean work, using necessary force.
Cole recognized the certainty. He’d found his own version of it, even if he didn’t carry a field Bible like Ethan. Something about knowing he was on the right side made the violence easier to file. Not easy – easier.
Unlike Cole, Ethan had built his whole identity around being an instrument of divine justice, never losing sight of Christ even when he’d been whisked away from his family. It made the job… simpler.
His scores came back predictable. His hypervigilance remained at functional levels, and he wasn’t too stressed about having to put down a couple dozen cultists – most people wouldn’t, in any case. His anger held steady at ‘two’, but that was factory settings. To Ethan, it was more like the righteous kind that flipped tables in temples but stayed ice-cold when it mattered. All in all, his eval took maybe fifteen minutes, efficient as morning PT.
Miles on the other hand dropped into the chair like he was settling in at his favorite bar, minus the beer. No performance anxiety here – the ship operation had been his kind of party. Flashy spells and body-popping cultists, technical excellence without the messy complications.
To him, the operation was smooth as butter – the easiest breach he’d ever run. After his ones and zeros, he dove into the recap.
“Chappie threw up that ice ramp on starboard, and we just strolled up like ghosts,” he summarized, genuine appreciation in his voice. “Flashbangs hit harder’n anythang, and them concussive fireballs knocked everybody’s ass over ‘fore they even knew what hit ‘em. Them boys ain’t stand no chance in hell.”
It felt a little too curated for Miles, and Cole saw it for what it was – a performance; something to distract Mack, and pull him ever so slightly away from the edge. Unorthodox, perhaps, but it worked. Mack seemed to be invested, nodding along at the storytelling.
Miles kept going until finally, he reached his first point of upset: the fact that they’d burned through the last of their ammo. That ship operation, he reminded, was essentially the last time they’d ever get to use the guns they were isekai’d with. It stung, even if the operation had gone flawlessly; even if the Celdornian guns did, admittedly, pack quite the punch.
Elina made a few final notes, avoiding the topic of Gerrick. She’d learned not to go fishing for pathology where none existed. To Ethan and Miles, it happened off-screen. Dragging Gerrick into the assessments would be like asking a surgeon about a procedure happening three floors away – irrelevant, and at worst, detrimental to Mack.
She wrapped up, asking for any other concerns. Miles had none.
With Elina’s confirmation of the session’s end, Miles stood and stretched like a cat finding sunlight. He passed by Mack’s chair, pausing just long enough to drop a hand on his shoulder. It served as a reminder that he was next, but more importantly, it served as a reminder of their support. They were there for him.
Mack nodded once, briefly placing his hand on Miles as an acknowledgement of the gesture. He stood and moved to the evaluation chair, but did so with all the grace of a robot. The way he sat down even reminded Cole of those old westerns where the gunslinger knew he was walking into an ambush but went anyway, down to the reluctant finality of it all.
Some part of Mack had checked out the moment he’d pulled that trigger, leaving behind just enough presence to satisfy protocol, to get the most basic of shit done. It was the difference between existing and truly living. Or more like the difference between speaking to someone and speaking to an AI imitation of them – all the right words in the right order, but nobody’s actually home.
Ethan shifted in his chair. There was something brewing there, maybe, but it was hard to tell with Ethan sometimes. The man could sit through a six-hour sermon or a firefight with the same expression. But the shift meant he was tracking Mack’s state, probably running his own calculations about when to intervene.
If he intervened. Ethan had good instincts about timing, usually.
Mack set his cup down with extreme care, like the china might shatter if he acknowledged what came next. He sighed with the resignation of someone approaching their own execution, professional enough to follow protocol but broken enough that everyone could see the cracks. He faced Elina. “Ready when you are.”