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Nov. 22nd, 2013 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sidewaysI’ve always headcanon’d that you can tell just how invested Tex is in anything by the outcome of her efforts.
Agent Texas was the best in Project Freelancer because she just was. That’s how she was cast, that’s the role she was given to play when that glitch in Alpha’s coding twisted in on itself to create a cognisant extra. She didn't try hard to beat Carolina, any more than she tried hard to beat Maine, Wyoming, and York. She’s calm, she’s confident, and she’s doing it simply because she can. She doesn’t question why the Director picks her to get things done. Of course he picks her. She’s the best.
Her rivalry with Carolina was largely one-sided. There’s not nearly as much malice in “better luck next time” as Carolina seems to read, and the “that’s a gutsy move” statement is downright warm. Tex doesn’t go out of her way to belittle or subvert the other woman, but she’s not going to compromise either. I don’t think she would have been offended had Carolina beaten her to the briefcase; that doesn’t mean she was going to let her have it.
Of course, once Tex’s humanity starts to develop and she begins to have questions and desires, we find there’s a further glitch to her existence: the moment she dares want to accomplish anything—the moment she dares try—she dooms herself to failure. She can’t get to Alpha in time. She can’t save Carolina. She can’t protect York. She shows up at Blood Gulch and is taken captive by the Reds, and there’s no way a Tex at full indifferent strength would fall to them (twice, no less). But they had hurt Alpha and she wanted to hurt them in return…
The more human Tex becomes, and the more she cares about those around her, the less capable she is of helping them. By the time she shows up in the BG Chronicles she’s less a superhuman destroyer and more an above average soldier. It must be like some strange, sick, looping nightmare; feeling herself suddenly so much clumsier than she should be, feeling her aim drift when it has no reason to, seeing a threat coming but being physically unable to act on it because something in her programming is just wrong. There are psychological blanks and physiological consequences and everything’s she trusted in is steadily hollowed out.
But perhaps that’s where the true tragedy lies. Epsilon claims Tex’s fate was to always fail, but Epsilon isn’t our most reliable narrator. If she had turned her back on her responsibility to fix what the Project had done wrong, if she had fled entirely and headed for civilian territory…if she had embraced the human trappings she had grown into, would she really have been doomed to sabotage that too? The Director remembered Allison as having died on the battlefield so maybe, just maybe, if she had abandoned that environment entirely, shed the path of Allison’s shadow entirely, she could have found a place where she could be a human who only tried and failed as humans do.
She didn’t turn her back, though. Because she wanted to do the right thing.
Agent Texas was the best in Project Freelancer because she just was. That’s how she was cast, that’s the role she was given to play when that glitch in Alpha’s coding twisted in on itself to create a cognisant extra. She didn't try hard to beat Carolina, any more than she tried hard to beat Maine, Wyoming, and York. She’s calm, she’s confident, and she’s doing it simply because she can. She doesn’t question why the Director picks her to get things done. Of course he picks her. She’s the best.
Her rivalry with Carolina was largely one-sided. There’s not nearly as much malice in “better luck next time” as Carolina seems to read, and the “that’s a gutsy move” statement is downright warm. Tex doesn’t go out of her way to belittle or subvert the other woman, but she’s not going to compromise either. I don’t think she would have been offended had Carolina beaten her to the briefcase; that doesn’t mean she was going to let her have it.
Of course, once Tex’s humanity starts to develop and she begins to have questions and desires, we find there’s a further glitch to her existence: the moment she dares want to accomplish anything—the moment she dares try—she dooms herself to failure. She can’t get to Alpha in time. She can’t save Carolina. She can’t protect York. She shows up at Blood Gulch and is taken captive by the Reds, and there’s no way a Tex at full indifferent strength would fall to them (twice, no less). But they had hurt Alpha and she wanted to hurt them in return…
The more human Tex becomes, and the more she cares about those around her, the less capable she is of helping them. By the time she shows up in the BG Chronicles she’s less a superhuman destroyer and more an above average soldier. It must be like some strange, sick, looping nightmare; feeling herself suddenly so much clumsier than she should be, feeling her aim drift when it has no reason to, seeing a threat coming but being physically unable to act on it because something in her programming is just wrong. There are psychological blanks and physiological consequences and everything’s she trusted in is steadily hollowed out.
But perhaps that’s where the true tragedy lies. Epsilon claims Tex’s fate was to always fail, but Epsilon isn’t our most reliable narrator. If she had turned her back on her responsibility to fix what the Project had done wrong, if she had fled entirely and headed for civilian territory…if she had embraced the human trappings she had grown into, would she really have been doomed to sabotage that too? The Director remembered Allison as having died on the battlefield so maybe, just maybe, if she had abandoned that environment entirely, shed the path of Allison’s shadow entirely, she could have found a place where she could be a human who only tried and failed as humans do.
She didn’t turn her back, though. Because she wanted to do the right thing.
