What's keeping you awake at night ...

[netrunnerzero]

There's a man sitting in bench in the nexus with medium length length sliver hair and hard eyes of a blue-gray hue.  He leans forward in the seat with his hands clasped together in front of him.  He looks as though he's trying to crack his knuckles, but they won't crack.  His fingers are the right shape.  Joints in all in the right place, at a glance, but the hands are entirely formed of stain resistant metal.

Zero looks as if he's not looking at his surroundings, but through them and through you too, if you're approaching him.  He feels a question like an inch in the back of his mind and it's apparently one that he can't help, but to scratch.

"What's keeping you awake at night?"

Comments

[netrunnerzero]

Zero, who had given up smoking decades ago, finds himself wishing for a cigarette. He hadn't pictured the conversation getting so political, though, he supposed it didn't bother him that it did. It just wasn't something he found himself overly thinking about in everyday life.

No, what was getting troubling was the thought that perhaps their governments weren't as far off as he wanted to believe they were. How easily his phrasing fit into their propaganda.

"Maybe the big difference between your government and mine is that mine just isn't big enough to do the things yours could. Otherwise, it may have."

Zero tilted his head to the left and the right, stretching out his neck until that did crack. The other nice thing about mechanical hands is that the joints within them never got stiff.

"So you're up at night because of habit, but do you actually want to be?"

[ministryproject5]

Dominic nodded in agreement. He could see this man's assumption about the government being true. "There are four versions of ours and they rule most of the planet."

Big was maybe an understatement. He could see how smaller government wouldn't be able to get such a foot hold the way the Ministry had over time.

"I don't know." Dominic admitted. "I had no wants before I started deprogramming. The doctor helping me is focusing on the more dangerous parts of my programming. Sleep cycles, sexual programming, social programming are not priorities."

Dominic could only shrug. He had never even considered his sleep cycles other than how it made him off other people's sleeping time. "Do you want to be awake at night?"

[netrunnerzero]

Zero makes a face at the mention of sexual programming. It's not an exaggerated response by any means, but it might give off the vague impression that he has some opinions about the subject. He had already eluded to some of them already, after all, but there was no reason to go on and on about it.

"No, I don't." The ever present rasp in his voice is a little less prominent when he speaks softly. "But I can, at least, use the time to think."

[ministryproject5]

Dominic had seen that expression more than once since being freed and while he didn't feel it himself, he did understand. He knew not to ask as well.

"I have helped people sleep before." He said it and then realized it might not sound the way he intented. It was still a genuine offer. "I spend the nights working now. I appreciate not being alone, usually."

[netrunnerzero]

His instinct was to say no. He wasnt the kind of person that appreciated anyone doing something to him that he didn't understand.

He also didn't really know this man. The impression he had was that this was nice enough, but Zero wasn't quite ready to extend that level of trust.

"And how would you go about doing that?"

[ministryproject5]

Most around Dominic were wary. He was an agent of the government and it was hard for people to trust anyone who had been in that position. He understood even if he didn't have the instincts to distrust people himself.

"I can do pressure therapy for relaxation." Before he went on his posture turned nervous. "I am learning other techniques now that I am being weaned off of the Ministry drugs."

[netrunnerzero]

"From warrior to healer, hrm? That's aspirational."

Does he sound like he means that? Perhaps. It doesn't sound overly cynical, but he doesn't exactly sound convinced either.

To some degree he's projecting. At one point in his life, Zero had been living his own version of whatever qualified as a peaceful existence in Night City and he'd ended up being pushed into violence. Now it feels like all he knows anymore.

He had found his was to do some good, now and then, but he was under no pretense that it made up for the wrong that he'd done. He was just ... surviving. As everyone had to find their way to do.

"I appreciate the offer, but I don't think it will address the problem."

[ministryproject5]

Dominic thought on that assumption for a moment, slowly shaking his head no. "I was trained to be a warrior but when I turned ten and would have been taken out to make my first kill I was diverted to the Ministry of Love because my intellegence. I was 15 when I took the lead on improving the breeding project that created me." Dominic thought of himself as a doctor or a scientist far more than an enforcer like some of the others had been. That however, didn't make him any less deadly than the rest that had been bred. "My siblings were not so lucky."

He can't resist asking. "What is the problem?"

The longer he spent around others and off the medication the more Dominic genuinely wanted to help others. In some world, less apocalyptic than his, he might have been a compassionate doctor or found disease cures rather than what the Ministry had instructed him to undertake.

[netrunnerzero]

Zero shrugged.

The problem was that when he didn't have a task to accomplish or looking after Marcus to distract him, he ultimately didn't like where his mind settled. Didn't like the person he spent the last six or so decades becoming. There was no amount of acupressure that was going to change any of that. Even mental health therapy wasn't expansive enough for anyone but the most rich to indulge in.

"I've been through a lot of things I'd rather forget and when I settle down for the night it feels like it all comes back to me." He paused and then added, "I'm sure I'm not the only one."

[ministryproject5]

"I don't have that experience but my partner has nightmares and worries." People had told him he might eventually start having nightmares but, as of yet, he hadn't had any. Dominic wondered if that was part of his mind that was still silent or mostly so."I have skills that I use to help but I've been told most people aren't comfortable with those skills."

The Ministry feared them enough to subdue his to the point he had no knowledge. Realizing others might fear his Empathy was easy to understand, even more so why he shouldn't reveal that to everyone. "I have done things that have fixed the few pieces of my past that I didn't like."