Her heart started hurting. It squeezed in her chest, thundering harder and then rapidly slowing down, making it hard for her to even breathe without worrying what was wrong with her. But being in here? It wasn't helping. Of that much she was certain.
Ellie headed back out into the antechamber, looking for the only person in this room who would always talk to her, no matter what Proteus was doing.
Pilot was on top of one of the computers, plugged into the mainframe as he did some other task asked by a person who shouldn't have mattered as much as her. Or at least... No, her thoughts were all scrambled.
They mattered. They mattered a great deal. Every single person here was doing work that she never could have done on her own, and it wasn't fair of her to even suggest that they weren’t. To even think of them as anything other than the intelligent people they were was cruel.
"Sorry," she muttered as she grabbed Pilot and unhooked him from the computer. "I need to borrow him for a few minutes."
"Hey!" the woman who was seated below him complained, but Ellie didn't have it in her to care right now. Tonight she would worry about whether or not they all hated her. Right now, she needed a friend.
Even if that friend was a droid who was programmed to agree with her.
She headed out into the other room that Proteus had revealed. She was lucky it wasn't hailing. At least today, a storm only loomed on the horizon, ominous clouds overhead making it seem like being out here was a bad idea, but there wasn't any rain just yet.
"Unhand me!" Pilot grumbled, his legs moving so quickly that he almost sliced her skin until she put him down. "I have work to do."
"I know. I only..." She started pacing in front of him. "I think everyone in there dislikes being around me."
"They don't have any opinion of you whatsoever. They are afraid of Proteus. Is that what you want to hear?" Pilot inched toward the door, wanting to open it and return to his work.
"Pilot, please." Ellie dropped onto her knees, so tired she could barely stand. "I just need a friend."
The droid waffled between what he wanted to do and what was the right thing to do. Heaving a mechanical sigh, he folded his legs beneath him and settled onto the sand to look at her. "What is it that you're afraid of? Does it matter if they like you?"
"Well, a bit. I'm living with them now, aren't I?"
"You are. But that doesn't mean they have any right to your time. If you don't like them, then who cares if they like you? You’ve won." He seemed a little proud of himself for that statement.
"Liking and not liking someone isn't about winning."
"Isn't it? Most of life is about winning."
"Pilot..." She should talk to a person about this and not a droid. "I want them to like me. I want to talk to them, and speak with other people like me."
The door hissed open, and a woman walked through. The engineer who had been looking at her, in fact. "Droid, go back to your work."
Ellie wanted to protest that he was supposed to stay with her. She needed him, even if this conversation wasn't going as well as she had hoped. But Pilot ran out the door so fast, she didn't get a moment to say a word.
She sighed, looking down at her hands in her lap. "I suppose I should head back in as well."
"They don't see you as a person," the engineer blurted.
The words hung between them. Not a person. Never had been. That was the issue, not Proteus. The problem with all the other people here was that she wasn't an actual human, and they could tell.
"Oh," she murmured. "I suppose that makes sense."
"It doesn't, actually. A clone isn't anything like the Original. I know that because I work with a lot of them." The woman crouched in the sand. "My name is Quinn. Nice to meet you, Ellie."
Quinn. She remembered the name now that it was said. When they'd all introduced themselves, Ellie had said it was a pretty name. One of the other engineers had snorted and said people in their roles didn't need pretty names, they just needed to be good at their jobs.
Licking her lips, she tried to start a conversation that she hoped might go somewhere. "You work with clones like me?"
"Not the same kind, obviously. Whoever your Original was, I haven't seen a clone that looks like you. But that could have all sorts of reasons. I helped wake up the first crew that came to Beta." Quinn shrugged. "The whole ordeal was traumatizing. For them, for me, for everyone involved and probably generations to come. We were told that your people would be like children. You wouldn't know what was happening when you woke, and that you'd have to be taught how to speak, how to eat, maybe even how to breathe."
Ellie winced. "No one knew that the Originals were waking us up?"
"The only person left alive from Tau was Alexia. I believe you met her when the others first arrived."
