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In a lecture hall somewhere in the universe, people with more degrees than practical skills argue about what makes a soul.
In a cramped gunner station on a ship shaped like a hotdog, a clone and an android play cards.
Clones are exact copies so the question naturally is can you truly copy a soul? If everything about them is decided in their DNA does it matter? If you can’t experience the world in a unique way are your experiences valid? If you’re just another copy do you even count as a person?
Barry knows that each Barry had a different ice cream order. Eleven perfect clones shared the exact same taste buds but each preferred a different flavor.
When Sidney decides she wants ice cream the two of them try to figure out what her favorite flavor is. Sid doesn’t experience ice-cream the way a non android would, but that doesn’t mean she can’t have preferences. It takes them a while to gather the supplies but eventually they get enough options. Loaded down with everything an ice cream parlor could need, they climb up to the gunner station.
They start with popsicles. They get creamsicles (Barry Eight’s favorite) and the ones that come with two sticks and are made to split with a friend (Barry Two’s favorite) as well as the ones that claim to be three different flavors stacked on top of each other but end up tasting like a sickly sweet mess (Barry Fyve liked those. He always claimed he could taste the different flavors but all the other Barry’s called bullshit). The popsicles end up mostly just a sticky mess that takes forever to clean off of Sidney’s gun arm.
Next they try real ice cream. They had gotten a collection of cartons and even spent a full hour looking for a place in Baustin that does soft serve in a cone. Sid tries the rapidly melting soft serve first, a chocolate and vanilla swirl with rainbow sprinkles that Sid loves despite her lack of color vision. (Barry’s Four and Tyn both liked vanilla soft serve, but Barry Four insisted on chocolate sprinkles while Barry Tyn doused his in caramel syrup) They try cookie dough, neapolitan, rocky road, mint chocolate chip, and fancy gelato worth too many credits with salted caramel because Margret suggested it. Eventually they find The One. It’s bubblegum flavored with some sort of popping candy that causes actual sparks to form on Sidney’s synthetic tongue. Sid declares it her favorite leaving Barry to finish up all of the leftovers and promising to make sure he doubles his normal workout the next day.
After they clean up and are significantly less sticky, they decide to play cards. It’s something they used to do together before they started working on The Wurst on the nights that Barry would wake up screaming his own name and looking for any type of distraction. They play a variety of games, from the few Sid has programmed to the rowdy and sometimes slightly violent ones the Barry’s used to play. It’s nice, just the two of them in the gunner station surrounded by empty cartons of ice cream and playing cards.
Can programming really count as feelings? They can imitate emotions for sure but are they deep enough to affect actions? How do you quantify what is real and what is code?
Sidney likes winning. It’s satisfying even when it makes Barry groan and throw his remaining cards down in defeat. In the past someone else losing made her feel bad as her programming said it should but she’s never felt that with Barry. She only feels slightly bad when his abandoned cards land in the melted ice cream.
The frustrated “Fuck!” he yells when Sidney slaps the stack of cards a fraction of a second before he does makes her smile instead of filling her with guilt. Part of it is probably because even when Barry is losing and cursing his luck he’s still smiling and having a good time.
She likes that. Likes when he’s happy and it makes her want to make him happy but not in a way that strictly fits her programming. According to how she was built she should make Barry happy and then receive joy as reward. Instead she wants to make Barry happy both because she likes him happy and because Barry being happy makes her happy. And Sidney wants to be happy. It’s close but not the same.
It’s almost selfish and she likes that. Being selfish, it’s a new feeling, one she’s not familiar with and one that’s very hard to feel. But Barry is a good start. She likes Barry, she wants him around because he makes her happy. It’s a small act of selfishness, some wouldn’t even consider it selfish at all, but it’s new and it’s hers and she likes it.
What makes us human is love, a humanities professor says and half his colleagues roll their eyes. You can program devotion, loyalty, even obsession, but the true feelings of love cannot be coded into a being through technological or even biological means.
Barry says “I love you” as easily as breathing. He doesn’t have to think about, doesn’t need to dissect his feelings and think about the how and the why he just does. The Barry’s told each other this all the time and it was true. They were his brothers and he loved them.
Maybe for someone else it would be hard to say it after losing the Barrys but he never even considers it. He meets Sidney who is so cool and strong and understands how he sometimes feels a bit lost without direction and he loves her.
He loves her when she's throwing grenades and when she’s coming up with ideas that he thinks are brilliant even if the other crewmates disagree, and when she’s riding giant ‘dogs’ onto the ship, and also when she’s absolutely kicking his ass at cards. Part of loving her is picking up on her moods and he’s pretty good at it, almost as good as he was with the Barrys. He can tell when she wants to speak and he always loves listening.
“Hey Bar, do you ever think about souls?”
This is something he loves too. The questions she asks even when he often doesn’t have good answers. Sid always listens to them anyway so he tries.
“Not really,” he admits. “It never really came up.” Barry isn’t really introspective. Wasn’t really built that way and honestly for most of his life the concept of thinking about the details of existence seemed unimportant. Even now it’s easier not to think about that sort of thing, but Sid asked and he tries to always support her.
“Well,” Sidney says “Android souls are shared throughout your line.” Barry nods because that makes sense to him. He can see himself sharing a soul with the other Barry's, the battalion being a single self instead of its individuals. But then he remembers Barry Nyne meaning that some part of that shared soul is twisted like that and does that make him infected too. He pushes that thought aside though because Sidney is still talking and he doesn’t want to miss what she’s saying.
“I thought maybe if I fixed myself, if I was good enough I could convince someone to create a line so that I wouldn’t have to be the keeper of the soul anymore but then I saw Warfare Whitney and…”
It’s not often that Sidney trails off. It’s not in her nature when she starts something she completes it whether it’s a task given, a personal quest, or just a sentence. There’s significance to it and Barry doesn’t miss that. He gives her a moment, watches her as she shuffles the deck with surprising dexterity despite one of her hands being a giant gun.
“I don’t want to share a soul with the Whitneys, but I don’t want to be alone either.'' She says her voice is small the way it has rarely been since the days of Old Skip’s loud insults. Barry isn’t smart, he was always ruled by either instruction or gut feeling, but at this moment he wishes he was more like Margret or Gunnie. He wishes he was smart enough to know the right thing to say, the best way to cheer Sidney up. He doesn’t know so instead, like he’s always done, he relies on gut feeling and says the first thing that comes to mind.
“I’ll share a soul with you, Sid.”
Part of what makes a sentient being sentient is the ability to ask questions, to seek out knowledge for the sake of it. An android by design already has all the information it needs to function for its purpose; it has no reason to look for more.
“Can we do that?” Sid asks. Surprised, she stops shuffling so abruptly that half the cards fly out of her hand. More casualties to the ice cream puddles.
Barry shrugs. He’s being casual, the way he often is, something Sidney can’t figure out if it’s learned or built into him, but she can pick up some caution in his tone.
“I mean who decides whether we can or not?” And that question alone makes Sidney’s choice easy because she gets to decide. She’s making her own choices and decides what she wants and she wants to share a soul and she wants to share it with Barry.
“I don’t know if you want to share a soul with the person who shares a soul with Barry Nyne though,” he adds, his shoulders slumping the way they often do when the topic of his remaining brother comes up. Sidney needs her hand to hold the remaining cards but she extends her gun arm to comfort him and Barry takes and holds it.
“I think that if I can choose to share a soul with you and not with Warfare Whitney then you can choose not to share a soul with Barry Nyne.”
He smiles at her and she knows that she wants to be a part of this. A part of him and she wants him to be a part of her too.
“Alright, in that case if you’ll have me I’ll be part of your line? Or part of your soul I guess?” Souls are shared through a line and they are in no way the same but they are partners. The Gunners are a team that has always worked together so easily the way neither of them have worked with another that seamlessly in a long time. So when she thinks about sharing a soul with Barry, it feels right.
“Yeah, I like that. Let’s share a soul,” she smiles at him and when he smiles back it just feels right and maybe they weren’t made to fit together like this but they still do and that somehow matters more.
In a university lecture hall an expert in androids confidently tells a bored class that android’s souls are tied only to those of their line and within a line is the only way an android can have a soul.
At a fancy dinner party a woman laughs while her wife plays devil's advocate in a pointless debate about if clones have souls. Her wife is arguing yes, but she smiles while she does it clearly not believing her own argument at all.
In a cramped gunner station on a ship shaped like a hotdog two parts of the same soul play cards.