-------------
Abort, Retry, Fail
By Tallulah Wolf
tallulahw@bayarea.com
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Silicon Valley, California
February 12, 1997
 

It was only a twenty-minute ride from the airport to the motel, but
Scully had still drifted off into a light slumber filled with hazy
nightmares. The car's sudden stop woke her, though, and stunned, she
blinked twice. Her second look confirmed what she hadn't comprehended
with the first.

Mulder was parking next to a fairy tale castle.

She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and took a better look at the gray
paint, the gracefully sweeping roof, the two spindly turrets, the bright
neon spelling out the motel's name: The Glass Slipper Inn.

She almost smiled. She would have smiled, had it not been for the anger
with which Mulder put the car in park and slammed the car door on his way
outside. He was still mad at her, so the world had to suffer as a result.
Too much a gentleman to hate a dying woman.

Through the window of the lobby, she could see him checking them in,
drumming his fingers furiously on the counter. He was too painful to
watch for long, though, and she turned her head to the side, taking in
their surroundings.

This surreal motel was wedged into a long row of buildings lining the
busy street, surrounded by booming franchises and failing small
businesses. The other side of the street, six lanes of traffic away, was
almost identical - except for the castle.

Mulder stalked back to the car, opening up the trunk and removing their
bags. He picked up his and began walking inside, leaving hers on the
sidewalk.

She sighed and got out of the car, using the automatic lock to secure the
doors.

Mulder was walking just slowly enough for her to catch up, but the
tapping of her heels sped up to quite a tempo before she made it to his
side.

When she thought of California and fairy tale castles, she assumed wide
blue skies and romantic adventures with happy endings. Instead, the
thick, gray sky hung low to the ground, and the closest thing she had to
a prince was being anything but charming..

False promises, she thought to herself. So much for assuming.

-------------

As they rode the elevator to the seventh floor of the monolithic
Interlink Technologies building, Mulder realized that he had
unconsciously positioned himself as far away as he could from her within
the cramped space. He stayed where he was, however, and deliberately did
not look across at her, or at her smeared reflection wavering on the
polished metal wall.

He didn't want to hate her. But after four years, he would have
thought...

There should be more than this. More than finding out she had started
chemo only after she had to have him pull over the car so she could throw
up on the shoulder of the highway on the way to Dulles. More than this
subtle betrayal. It might have looked to the casual observer as if she
was still there, he mused bitterly, but he knew the truth - she was
already leaving him. Untangling herself because she thought it would hurt
less that way.

The elevator announced their arrival with a cheerful ping and she stalked
out, heels clicking like bones on the polished hallway floor. He followed
two paces behind, more out of habit than politeness.

Yellow and black police ribbon hung across a set of glass double doors at
the end of the hall. They ducked under it, emerging into a huge office
that apparently took up the whole floor of the building. A maze of
cubicles stretched out in front of them, forming a monotone landscape of
oyster-gray hardboard and the pale, sickly gray of computer monitors. He
fingered the leaves of one impossibly glossy green desk plant as he
followed Scully towards the back of the office, and found that it looked
so perfect because it was fake. A bored, pudgy man with thinning hair
stood at the far end of the office, raising one hand in a wave and the
other to show them his police badge.

Nitin Patel's body had been removed, of course, but his blood still
spattered the immaculate surfaces of his cube, dried to a dull rusty
brown. The computer monitor that Shelley Hope had allegedly used to
bludgeon him to death sat on the floor where it had been dropped, cables
taut and stretching back behind a nearby desk. Scully knelt and peered
into the gaping hole where the screen had been.

"She actually picked this up and smashed it over his head? While it was
still switched on?" she asked incredulously.

"Uh-huh," Detective Weisel answered, snapping his gum. He indicated the
monitor Scully was examining. "That one wasn't hers, though. That
belonged to the guy who sat directly behind the victim. Hers is there,"
he said, pointing to a computer sitting in a cubicle to the right of
Nitin's. "It was still on when we arrived, but it looks like she'd had a
virus or maybe a current surge fried her machine or something - the
screen was just covered in these crazy error messages."

Scully stood and went to a cube across the way. She placed both hands
experimentally under a monitor and heaved. "Mulder, I can barely lift
this off the desk," she said. "I can't imagine being able to pick it up,
raise it and bring it down on someone's head with enough force to kill."

He shook back thoughts of her slowly weakening muscles, and shrugged.
"Maybe she works out. I don't care *how* she did it. I'm interested in
why." He turned to the detective. "Has she said anything else since her
arrest?"

Weisel shrugged and snapped his gum again. "Nope. Just the same thing,
over and over, whatever we say to her. 'Execute the monster.'"

He turned to look at Scully, who had crossed back to peer at the contents
of Nitin and Shelley's neighboring cubes. He caught her eye, and mouthed
the word "Monster?" at her, lifting his eyebrows and feeling his mouth
twist itself, almost against his will, into a smug little smile.

When she shrugged with elaborate indifference and turned back to the Far
Side desk calendar propped beside Shelley's keyboard, he felt an urge to
slap her so strong it scared him. When the hell had she stopped caring?

He turned to stare at the photo tacked to Nitin's bulletin board, a
bright spot of color in the grayness.  Some sort of company picnic in the
background, he thought.  In the foreground...  He recognized the people
from their pictures in the file, but Nitin and Shelley looked much
different - happy and cheerful, posing together with light hearts.  In
another life, they had clearly been friends.

His thoughts, as ever, turned back to Scully, though, as if pulled by a
force like gravity. He might not have known when, but as for the why, his
best guess was that she had stopped caring to keep herself sane.
Meanwhile he - and the sight of her small body heaving and retching at
the roadside as cars screamed by rushed back to him unbidden - he
couldn't stop caring. No matter how hard he tried.

------------

They were going to the police station next, but Scully asked for a minute
of air first, and when Mulder said nothing in response she simply walked
outside. It was still cloudy out. The wind ripping bitterly at her skin
was not much warmer than DC's biting breezes.

The officer inside had said this building was on El Camino Real - just a
few miles down the road from their motel, also on El Camino Real. This
goddamn road seemed to go everywhere.

They'd only been there five hours, but already she was sick of the sight
of it.

She looked across the street, watching the day workers mingle on the
opposite corner, burrowing into their denim jackets and staying close
together. For the body heat, she assumed.

Mulder's hand had been warm on her back, she remembered - a single source
of heat radiating through her coat, blazer, blouse and camisole. He had
rubbed gently, such concern in his eyes as she wiped her mouth off and
wished mournfully for a bottle of water to rinse with.

When his look of concern had become too insistent and she was forced to
explain, she had shivered when his hand dropped away and he got back into
the car, his features carved with anger.

She had just wanted to give him the denial he craved - wanted it for
herself as well. She only felt sick when he treated her like an invalid.
Only felt healthy and alive when it was just him and her, equal partners
on the same journey. But if he wanted to behave like a spoiled child,
pouting because she didn't tell him all her intimate secrets, then let
him. It was a waste of her time, but since he refused to believe she'd
die, why did it really matter?

It was early afternoon now, but she still hoped it would get warmer later
on. She hated to think of those men across the street, out all day on a
day like this. Did they too think California meant sunshine? Or did they
know gray skies loomed on the horizon?

God knows she hadn't expected them today.

---------------------

Mulder stared into Shelley Hope's calm gray eyes and felt it, the tingle
behind his own eyes that said that here was a puzzle to be pieced
together. Somewhere was a lock that he might be able to pick that would
open up the box of secrets so that he could look inside and understand
how it worked. There was something here, he knew it, something more than
simple workplace stress.

Still holding her gaze, he mentally reviewed what they had been told by
Weisel on the way down to the station. Forty-one, two grade-school age
kids, one apparently happy marriage about to hit the fifteen-year mark,
and one house in a fairly affluent area of Los Altos that was mortgaged
to the hilt. She had been Nitin's colleague, had in fact supervised the
team of Interlink coders to which they both belonged since a year after
her return to the workplace.

Behind him, interrupting his mental recitation of the known facts, he
heard Scully click her tongue impatiently. He didn't have to look - he
could visualize her, propped against a wall with her arms folded neatly
below her breasts. She would be wearing her blandest saintly face as she
waited for him to start assembling his latest whacked-out theory.

Beneath the table, he clenched his hands into fists for a moment before
relaxing them and placing them flat on the table between himself and
Shelley.

"Hi, Shelley," he said with a calm he did not feel. "My name is Fox
Mulder, this is my partner Dana Scully and we're with the FBI. We're
investigating the murder of Nitin Patel." He paused, looking into those
perfectly serene eyes with their huge black pupils. "Do you understand
me, Shelley?"

Shelley's gaze flicked to Scully, quick as a switchblade coming out, and
then back to him. She licked her slightly chapped lips, and replied in a
level voice, "Execute the monster."

He considered a moment, and then leaned forward over the table. The weak
sunlight filtering in through the closed shades imbued the claustrophobic
little interview room with its sludge-green walls the feel of an
aquarium. He fought the urge to loosen his tie and take a few deep
breaths.

"Was Nitin the monster, Shelley? Did you kill him because he was some
kind of monster?"

At his back he could *feel* Scully purse her lips and turn her face away
in disgust.

The seconds ticked by. Shelley looked down and fiddled with her wedding
ring, sliding it with difficulty over the knuckle, twisting it around and
then pushing it back down again.

"No," she said suddenly. "He wasn't the monster. I didn't want to do it,
but I had to."

He felt the tingle in his skull intensify, smelled blood and gave chase.
"Why did you have to?" he asked gently.

The woman looked down at the table again, and when she looked back at him
her eyes were large and brilliant with tears. "The monster made me do it.
I just executed the command."

Execute the monster. Execute as in...as in carry out, not as in kill,
then? If she had been following orders, then that begged the question of
whose orders she had been carrying out, and why.

Mulder sat back, worrying absently at his lower lip and the dry skin
there, looking at the teary-eyed woman over the table but not really
seeing her. His theory was forming, sure enough, and he knew already that
Scully wasn't going to like it one bit. The way things stood between them
at the moment, the silent anger humming like high- tension cables, he was
sure she wouldn't like anything he came up with one bit.

--------------------

Sometimes, there was nothing Scully enjoyed more than an autopsy,
especially a fairly mundane one that consumed her attention but left her
subconscious free to drift. It was fairly simple, cataloging the damage
done to the light brown skin and gleaming white bones of Mr. Patel -
Shelley had been imaginative in her use of office supplies, but the
stapler marks and welts from a power cord whip were easy to identify. And
the crushed skull left no doubt as to cause of death.

She let herself dwell a bit on the tense, quick dinner she and Mulder had
eaten in the car an hour ago, the earliness of the meal a minor
concession to their jetlagged bodies. The only words spoken were
necessary ones, deciding the fast food drive-thru of choice and
confirming her order - she hadn't wanted to talk about the case, and
somehow he got the hint. So instead of talking, they parked the car and
watched the beginnings of rush hour traffic stop-and-go down El Camino
Real, him devouring his burger while she only picked at her chef salad.

He became even surlier when he looked at her leftovers, but kept his
mouth shut. She  wanted to say something about how it was the most she'd
been able to eat in the past 48 hours and he should just consider himself
damn lucky that she was even there, but that would have involved talking
about what was troubling him, and she knew that wasn't going to happen
for a while yet.

And despite how much this morning had disrupted things, she knew he had a
theory already. It probably managed to ignore the fact that Shelley Hope
simply snapped due to an extreme case of workplace stress, and
undoubtedly made sense to nobody but him...

A flash of color caught her eye - there was blood on her fingers. Oh, no,
fresh blood, her blood... When she raised her hand to her nose though,
checking for yet another nosebleed, she instead felt a sharp, stinging
pain in her fingertip. She must have been so preoccupied that the scalpel
slipped. Clearly, a sign for her to start paying attention.

Banishing thoughts of Mulder from her mind, she began to wash her hands.

-----------

Mulder lay on his lumpy, musty bed and contemplated undressing, maybe
even showering, but couldn't summon the energy. He had intended to go for
a run, but the combination of jet lag and his reluctance to pound up and
down El Camino Real past endless strip malls and brightly lit fast-food
joints put him off.

He heard Scully returning from the morgue, her heels clicking up the
concrete walkway past his room, and her key rattling in the stiff,
unyielding lock as she struggled with it. Her door creaked open and then
slammed shut, and he winced as the impact shook the thin walls.

In the room on the other side of his, a couple had been arguing for ten
minutes now. The woman's voice was steadily increasing in volume and
shrillness as she berated the man for some misdemeanor. It sounded as if
she was standing right by the wall behind Mulder's head, leaning down and
trying to yell *through* the wall.

"I swear to God, Vin, I shoulda listened to Momma when she said you'd be
no good for me. You wanna spoil this whole goddamn trip for me? Is that
what you want? This whole trip was such a fucking mistake."

Vin's response was inaudible. "Your Bronx is showing, honey," Mulder
muttered wearily and levered himself off the bed, pacing aimlessly about
the small room. He switched the TV on, settled on CNN as providing the
least irritating white noise, and wandered over to the window. The blue-
white glare of the TV set illuminated the room behind him as he stared
out between the drapes.

The woman on the other side of the wall was right, whether she knew it or
not, he thought bleakly. This whole trip had been a goddamn mistake. Oh,
there was an X-File here, he could practically taste it in the air, but
he was beginning to wonder if this was how it would feel on every case he
and Scully worked together while she was well enough to stay in the
field.

Outside the window, traffic hummed ceaselessly up and down under the
darkening sky along the glowing ribbon of El Camino Real. The lights of a
mammoth Blockbuster store radiated a sickly glow across the street. He
was really starting to hate the damn road, after a whole afternoon spent
driving up and down it. America, this is your brain on the twentieth
century consumer trip, he mused, peering left and right out the window
and trying to count the number of brilliantly illuminated business signs
he could see from here. He remembered enough high-school Spanish to know
that El Camino Real translated as the King's Road. Had the Spaniards who
came here naming cities after saints and angels envisaged a day when the
King's Road would be lined by the corporate kings, cookie-cutter
companies like Interlink, The Gap, McDonalds?

He hated California, he decided. Hated it with a passion. It was all
about faking it, faking the perfect tan, the perfect pair of breasts, the
indispensable and ultimately useless perfect piece of software, the
perfect celluloid dream that you could rent by the night at Blockbuster.
The motel said it all. They were staying in a goddamn fairy tale castle,
maybe the kitschiest thing he'd seen short of Graceland, but all it was
under the turrets and the paint-job was another crummy, cheap motel,
somewhere to stay when you were too far from home and on Uncle Sam's
dollar.

There had been a time when he would have pulled up outside the motel and
delighted in seeing her try not to smile and lose the struggle with
herself. A time when he would have enticed her into a debate on the fin-
de-siecle zeitgeist of California, spun all this out for her over a cup
of coffee and waited contentedly for her to come up with the perfect
rejoinder. Now she was no further away from him in body than ever, but he
felt a distance between them, getting bigger all the time. It was a chasm
between them that he wasn't sure he could cross. Not without coming face
to face with her cancer and her determination to keep this most terrible,
huge thing walled away within her.

He wandered back to the bed and flopped bonelessly down onto it,
oblivious now to the CNN anchors droning on or Vin and the nameless woman
on the other side of the wall screaming at each other. He was not ready
to cross that chasm, and he didn't know whether he was angrier at her or
at himself for that.
 
 

End Part 1 of 3
 

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