Absolute Redux
i kept thinking about this and it would kind of WORK tho.
here’s a good page to read Terminal Redux, since i dont think i can to it justice with a quick summary. it’s basically a short story, length-wise?
and i’m amused by how much sense it makes if you just cast Tessa as Isolation Subject #5, JCJenson (or EarthGov) as Cygnus, and AbsoluteSolver as Alshain.
and alright i lied, i didn’t spend “a bit” thinking about this, i ended up writing a whole outline for an villain!tessa fic based on this premise
so if you made this into an AU, the setup could be like: at some point, Tessa’s disobedience finally crossed the line for her parents. (maybe she’d tried to save Cyn from being decommissioned?) so as punishment, they enroll her in the isolation project. Iso subjects are sent alone into the depths of the galaxy, (ship autopilot functions overidden, any choice of destination forbidden), which usually drives them to madness
but Tessa crash-lands on a planet infected with the AbsoluteSolver. it infects her, integrates with her body, and it speaks to her. offering her immortality and telling her to go back to earth and seize power. and like, she’s spent years isolation in the depths of space, why wouldn’t she latch onto this n̷̢͎͑̏e̶͈̭̾͛̇w̷̙̩̋̂̀͜ ̶͇̐͜f̵̯̥̀́̚r̸͔̣͒͘͠ḭ̴̳͕̆̀͠ȅ̶̫̑ṅ̵̞̒ď̶͚̩͆?
Solver integration would also turns her into a badass robo-cyborg, bc i know who follows me :3 (this actually isnt even a departure from canon; the enocules inflicting body horror on iso sub 5 is literally just the text)
anyway, a lot of the character work in the songs transfers over without much change, i think, thought the context of Solver influence changes the tone of the story entirely.
one seemingly trivial worldbuilding detail is that in the album, the enocules are something stargazers have theorized about, nothing known for sure until iso sub 5 discovers them. but i think it’ll be different here: JCJ isn’t just vaguely aware of AbsoluteSolver, they’ve tried to control it and failed spectacularly. cabin fever labs and all that. it’s probably top secret.
except Tessa does that they failed to do. the Solver integrated into her body, and she has influence over it. this is a power JCJ is hungry for, enough that if Tessa plays her cards right, there’s no way her parents can keep her locked up.
first thing she does is use the Solver to bring Cyn back. (i kind of like the image of Tessa finally returning to her childhood room, and once again hugging Cyn, squeezing away the trauma of the isolation project and her first meeting the Solver and needing to plead her case the JCJ board). Cyn being the first drone she brings back, it’s probably how she cuts her teeth and learns more about how the Solver works.
and maybe she devises on a longterm plan of using the AS to ‘uplift’ humanity into a a race of robo-immortals, and by maintain personal control of the Solver, she’ll shape every world into a utopia. (basically what happens in the album). but to do this, the first step of her plan — and the big difference between this AU and Terminal Redux is that well, a pivotal development in that story was iso sub #5 conquering Epsilon by inflicting LCD on the population. what’s the equivalent here?
Epsilon is a planet where Cygnus has always struggled for control. sound familiar? in this AU, JCJenson struggles to regain control of Copper-9 after the core collapse, so Tessa and the Cyn would decide that reigning in the rogue workers would be the perfect step in her ascent to power. stabilizing their greatest mistake would prove to JCJ once and for all the indispensable utility of the Solver and cement Tessa’s political influence.
so instead of Liquid Crystal Disease, Tessa designs the disassembly drones — and like this, she revives all the drones her family had decommissioned (hi J/N/V). finally, they’re all united — new terminals for the grand Solver network.
anyway, maybe Tessa reopens Cabin Fever Labs with the intent of infecting worker drones and bringing them into Solver’s embrace
between the disassemblers and infected worker drones, Copper-9 becomes awfully dystopian. the Solver collective would be brutal in subjugating the workers (and maybe by now, Tessa’s having second thoughts about her path, but she’s got the Solver whispering in her ear. with it so intimately wired into her body and that of her drones, she’s utterly locked in)
now, probably at this point Uzi et al. mount a rebellion against Tessa and the squad — maybe it’s even effective resistance. all the better if it is, because if Uzi and the WDF are a threat, then that’s actually great for the Solver! because it justifies Tessa pushing for EarthGov to give Tessa more and more power to put an end to the chaos.
basically paving the road for her to become a absolute tyrant :3
in the end, Uzi probably just loses. Tessa assimilates her and everyone else into the Solver collective. after all, the climax of the album isn’t a grand battle. iso subject #5 simply wins everything, and so will tessa. but i think this setup allows for the true climax be even more impactful.
the final turning point of the album was seeing the pillars of sand falling, the natural beauty of stellar skies frozen still under tyrannical strangulation, the realization that when all the dissenting voices are quieted, all you can hear is the inevitable, ever-growing roar of entropy. every. thing. falls.
and what do you think the Solver wants to do, once it’s seized total control of Copper-9?
if Uzi is a part of the solver collective now, imagine what she feels now, seeing her home destroyed? and through the collective, Tessa can feel it, too
i think if there’s a thematic note this fic might end on, something that distinguishes it from the source material (because truth be told, i never liked the anti-immortality message of Terminal Redux), it would be a lonely bookend. the story ends where it begins.
the album was a story of the paroxysms of desire, of hunger and ambition gorged to a tipping point of metastatic, self-negating, tragedy.
and if this story began with Tessa isolated in the depths of the universe, only to finally return to the comforting embrace of her favorite robot, then i think once Copper-9 is gone, Tessa would go to hug Cyn again, only to find this feels… different. through the Solver, they’re so interconnected that it doesn’t really feel like a hug anymore. it just feels like she’s holding a part of herself.
after uniting everything with the AbsoluteSolver, Tessa doesn’t feel any less alone.
maybe tessa spends a long time staring into the night sky. she recalls the image of copper-9 in pieces, then imagines every planet around every star she can see.
and, with every last dregs of independent will left, she gathers up all her robots and flies back to where it all began, bound in the metaphorical chains of a isolation project ship (autopilot functions overridden, choice of destination forbidden — so her will can’t falter), intent to do to the Solver’s home planet what it had done to Copper-9, ending it all in a blaze of absolving light