but it could have been right {OPEN

[TOPHER BRINK]

The bigger picture. That's what he had been looking at. If anyone dared to tell him that looking at the bigger picture was wrong in some way they'd get a mouthful of something not entirely nice. Of course he had been looking at the bigger picture. It was distracting. It was big. it was violent and full of oranges and yellows and all manner of colours. It was tthe buildings going boom and your consciousness slipping away, stored as energy, and signals and all little electrical impulses before being dumped back into another. Or overwritten. People overwritten by other people. Did they exist anymore? Did they just go poof! into the great unknown. If that was true the big question was then...what happened when you ran out of people?

Topher was fowning. he was gettting off track. He seemed to do that annoyingly a lot these days. Off track, a tangent, veering onto something that wasn't particularly related anymore yet he'd continue with it. Like would there just be dull empty bodies littering the streets? Would civilisation (collapsed and devastated as it was) just be a bunch of Actives unable to fend for themselves? What about the Butchers? The Sleepers? The little insidious Rossum members that slithered through the cracks. What about them? They weren't really people though were they? They were programmes just like everyone else. Actives could be described as skeleton programmes missing a whole lot of content that they really do need. Simple constructs with basic protocols in place; sleep, eat, move, swim, finger paint, yoga, be polite. There were a few who evolved due to Echo - not nearly as much - but a ltitle. Topher believed they were saying 'friends help each other out'. Pack. It was nice to see that spark of hope in a place that sucked it out of even the happiest and brightest of things. That was just his opinion. A very private, very concealed opinion one which most would scoff at. Topher Brink and that? yeah right. However true it was that Actives could learn from scratch just like filling in the parameters of a programme the rest of the world, the butchers and the sleepers had fully fledged personas heavily intertwined with trigger codes/scenarios and semi-automatic responses. He guessed if they knew they were doll though could break the programming. Echo did. Claire was trying to and it was working just a bit. She had been nice before now even if she didn't like him at all. He suppoed that was his fault. The dislike was programmed to evolve upon discovering her true self...or discovering her self...isn't...herself.

Easily easily distracted Topher. He huffed in frustration scrabbling at the pieces, the fraying thoughts that were flowing so nicely. There! Big picture. Wrong. Bad. Just not right. The ltitle picture was what he needed just like he always did. Little picture. His own little world, with his office and his cot and his fridge and his little Actives and Boyd and Ballard and Echo. inside the brain. The answer was inside inside. Not trying to block incoming attacks but blocking them when they were already there? No not blocking. A different signal...they probably wouldn't like that. A kind of natural blend of electrical impulses and chemical releases and signals to block any incoming waves. OOoo. Would that prevent radiation sickness? Never mind. First things first and that's the important stuff. Topher scribbled it down in English first and began with equations all neatly marked. perhaps someone else could understand it at some point....maybe Ivy. He had no idea what Ivy knew. Not enough. But that was the point.

"You're more obssessed about being yourself than you think.. To understand the now you have to look back to find out what brought you here. You're all over the place because you know that the majority of your memories are constucts or real ones of another life, one which you didn't lead. Knowing who you were might not help but knowing why you are might," Topher replied to Claire's terse question in a language that could be understood. The numbers were soothing him. They liked equations and he was suddenly calmer thinking he might make progress even just a little. Progress was good in any form. He was going to move forward with this and undo it somehow. He didn't want praise, he didn't deserve it. He didn't deserve sanity or any other precious lovely little thing that the rest of the people here had. He had always been a lonely person, now more so than ever in many ways. What friends did he have? They all just felt obliged to look after him. That wasn't friendship, that was duty. no one ever wanted to speak to him about anything other than work. Topher often wondered if they noticed.

“Sometimes it’s better to remain in ignorance than have your whole world crash down around your ears.”

"Yes. It is," Topher replied thinking how he'd have preferred not knowing that his best friend and long time crush would become an empty shell only to be disfigured and then permanently imprinted and basically misused. Not knowing that was in store was easier. It wasn't nice. It was just easier. "But better how? Is it better just because you want it to be? Or because it is?"

[CLAIRE SAUNDERS !]

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This wasn’t how Claire had planned to spend her day. She’d not had plans for it at all, besides keeping up with the actives’ check-ups, so that eventually, she would have seen all of them in a non-emergency situation (and in this place, even a cut finger counted as an emergency), but she knew for a fact that if she had made a list of what she was going to do today, seeing Topher would not have been on it. She might have checked that he’d been taking his medication regularly, but Claire wouldn’t have let it be more than that; a conversation with him was certainly not what she wanted, especially not in her space. If she had to talk to the programmer at all, she preferred that it was out of her office somewhere, where she could wander in and out as she chose. Here, she couldn’t leave, because this was where she worked. Perhaps she could go and find out what was for lunch, or check the first aid kits situated around the House, but that would make her feel like she’d been forced out of her own office, and Claire didn’t want that. Not by Topher. Ms Dewitt could make her leave with a sharp word, and Alpha probably (definitely) could too – not that he was ever going to set foot in the Dollhouse again – but Topher Brink could not, however much it made her skin crawl to try and have a conversation with him. It was bad when he was lucid and at least vaguely comprehensible, even if she was no neuroscientist. When he was like this, it was damned near impossible; part of her wanted to be angry at him for being such a pain, while another part, the doctor part, wanted to alleviate his symptoms and try and make his mind whole again. That wasn’t her job; he had always been the one to fix people’s minds, to remove past traumas or eradicate some kind of mental illness. Not her trauma, though; Claire was keeping that. Another part of her entirely didn’t care either way; he was Topher, and she didn’t care about him. He was probably the one who was going to save them all, but that still wasn’t enough to make her care in anything other than a purely professional way. Her hate of him was too deeply programmed for that.

You're all over the place because you know that the majority of your memories are constucts or real ones of another life, one which you didn't lead.

She hated to admit it, but Topher might have had a point; Claire wouldn’t have considered herself all over the place, but sometimes, she found herself saying, ‘When I was seven...’, only to remember that she hadn’t been seven. This body had, but Claire herself hadn’t, and she’d had to stop herself finishing the sentences. The past always influenced the future, in who you were and how you acted, but Claire hadn’t always wanted to be a doctor. She hadn’t always been afraid of open spaces because she’d once gone to the desert with her father and suddenly found herself alone without anyone in sight, and had had to walk all the way to the nearest house on her own. She hadn’t always been anti-social—she hadn’t always been. She had a hold on it, though; Claire was as real to herself as she’d ever be, and that was what mattered. She didn’t care if Topher thought she should find out who she’d been, once upon a time, because he didn’t get it—it wasn’t who she’d been. Whoever the girl who’d brought this body to the Dollhouse had been, it wasn’t Claire. Nothing of her personality would be in Claire, unless Topher was even sicker than she’d first imagined. Knowing who she’d been wouldn’t change anything, because it wasn’t her who had been that. She had, on the other hand, been Whiskey. She remembered being Whiskey, at least in part, whereas she had no memory of any of the assignments she’d been sent on, or her life before the Dollhouse. It was better that way; Claire didn’t want to know. She was a real person, and nothing anybody said could make her believe otherwise. “I don’t know why I’m listening to this,” she said, because however much Topher thought he was talking in plain English, it still sounded like a madman’s ramblings to her. She pulled a file from her shelf at random, aware that the action, which might have been pointed in anyone else’s company, was unlikely to even register with him, and peered out from behind it, watching him scribble. If he got it out of his system, maybe he’d go. She certainly hoped so.

"But better how? Is it better just because you want it to be? Or because it is?"

This was the first time that anybody had really spoken to Claire about the conflict within her of being a person and a doll at the same time, and knowing that somewhere along the line, there had been another person before that, another girl whose life had been too terrible for her to handle. How old had she been? Claire had only become Claire after Alpha’s attack, but how long had Whiskey been in the Dollhouse before that? She wasn’t going to ask – it was one of those things that was best left unknown. She didn’t want someone else’s past life haunting her; she already had enough ghosts in her own head as it was. It had to be Topher, though; it couldn’t have been Boyd, or Echo. Echo would understand, more so than anybody else, but Claire found she didn’t wish to talk about it to her. She didn’t want to talk about it to anybody; she was happy being herself, without needing to know things about her past. She’d endured years of their pity; she could endure their confusion and wariness too. It was a good thing she’d never been a social creature, even before the attack. “It’s better,” she said slowly, still hiding behind the file she’d picked up—no, not hiding, just reading it closely, “because it has no impact on my life now. I have no need to learn things which are not relevant.”

[TOPHER BRINK]

It was common knowledge that Claire Saunders and Christopher Brink didn't get along. There had been a time once when she was more genial, more willing to put up with his grating antics but that was quite some time ago now. His true lucid moments were farther and farther between as he descended down a dark and dismal path, one which was his own making but the paving laid down by someone else. But no matter. The only one he blamed was himself. He was the only one who deserved it. Claire made it perfectly clear who she thought was responsible too having gone as far as attacking him once. They all dealt with the realities of the Dollhouse in different ways and he was the most logical and easiest of targets. AFter all he had made her. But how much? That was maddening was it not? That was not a question he could ask of Saunders. For one he feared the results and his own skimpy sanity wouldn't allow it. It simply never occurred to him during those times. Paranoid Topher stayed paranoid with a strange trusting streak which left him completely vulnerable and open. He hardly noticed. He only noticed that Saunders had that look upon her face again and that usually meant he was going to get scolded and womanhandled out the door but he wasn't alone in here and the Dollhouse was a big place. Lots of open spaces and he was pretty sure the power generated went fuzzy earlier but that could have been his eyes from sleeping funny. Adelle kept telling him not to sleep like that but it was so comfy.

Topher glared at the page before him. Claire Saunders had put him off his train of thought. He had to get it back. It was important. Very important that he knew what he was thinking about because if he didn't who new when he would again? Clearly Saunders was not good for such thinking. He should try and remember that. She was all distracty and different thoughts and memories of Ellie. He missed Ellie. Ellie was nice and she liked him and he more than liked her which was obvious but Saunders...Saunders was a strange in a bessie's body. It was confusing and he didn't like it much when he was like this but he accepted it because it wasn't going to change. He knew Saunders didnt' like hm but it didn't much matter in this state of mind. Saunders knew he didn't like er so they were pretty much even. She knew he knew she knew? Or did he know she knew he knew she knew he knew she knew? What? Who knew what now? How? Topher's brow screwed up in frustration. He glared at the equations again. Why weren't they speaking to him? Numbers always spoke to him! He could speak to them, know them, tell them what he wanted and they'd try to fix it! Why weren't they helping? Didn't make sense! Topher became distessed and let out a whine. Stupid paper. Stupid office. STupid Saunders. Stupid Dollhouse.

“because it has no impact on my life now. I have no need to learn things which are not relevant.”

"No, no," Topher protested. "Imprints...supposed to stay oblivious, not to know, better not to know because what happens when you do? This! Determined not to be, not to know, not to care but drives onwards, forces, reality isn't reality so you must make reality reality but reality isn't what you want you want blissful ignorance it's easier. not to know not to care. Not better. Worse. Much worse," Topher rambled. she was breaking the imprint in his opinion. Sure she was programed to hate him but this? He was pretty sure that this was more extreme than he intended. She was doing things she never would have thought of before. It never had been his intention to make her cruel but now she was just a little. she was all impatience and hard lines and strange things. It was important. She kept going on about it. She was so mad, so mad at Topher. Topher wanted her to be mad. She had to be. Ellie had to be. "What if it is? You asked before that answer is backwards but perhaps not you. Perhaps you find out about you by proxy but finding out what it is you wanted ot know." Topher said. "Not everyone wanted the 'five minute break'" Ooops. Topher suddenly became very quiet.