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Douglas Eiffel has a Gift.
Not a gift as in a present, but a Gift with a capital G. Something different, something special .
His father doesn’t know, neither does his mother, but they realize that something about him is different when the police arrive at their door.
Douglas is fiddling with his first make-your-own ham radio kit when it connects him directly to the dispatch desk at the local police station. Then to a nearby convoy of truckers. Then to the flight control deck of the West Houston Airport.
By the time anyone figures out where the curious and cheerful little boy who’s monopolizing their airtime lives, Douglas has spoken to four EMT’s, three police dispatchers, seven air traffic controllers, and one group of really, really bored long haul truckers.
While an officer from the local force takes away Douglas’s radio, another gives his parents a stern lecture about respecting private channels and not obstructing vital services, and a third leaves a homemade pamphlet on the table with a phone number scrawled on the front.
‘I know what happened. Call me and I’ll explain’ it reads.
His parents wait until they think Douglas is asleep to call, and he sits at the top of the stairs, listening in and taking notes as the officer comes back to explain what was going on.
He’s Gifted, he’s a Whale, and they need to keep this a secret.
The officer leaves his parents with a sheet of names and numbers to call, before turning and waving up at him before they leave. His mother clambers up the stairs to usher him back to bed, but the officer stops her.
“Doug,” they say with a grin, “Next time you make a radio, call me. I’ll try to help you tune your Gift, if the others can’t help.”
He nods to them and they nod back before he’s swiftly tucked into bed.
He dreams of whales that night, swimming through the water, the air, space. He swims with them too, air no longer a necessity, while a kindly face watches.
The next morning he wakes up and asks two things of his parents: A whale and a new radio kit.
Doug’s Gift isn’t just limited to his homemade radios, he learns. He plays with the dials in the car and his mother’s classical music becomes an Indian news station. His father’s country turns into Brazilian pop. Cobbled together walkie-talkies work across the city and, when his best friend Karl moves to Seattle, across the country.
He pumps his head full of music alongside movies, television, comics, and books, and by the time he’s 14 he knows what he wants to do and what he’s really going to do.
He might want to talk to aliens, make himself a radio and speak out into the great beyond, but instead he joins the Air Force JROTC and throws himself in to communications. Doug’s passable at everything else, but his real passion is radios. his cohorts laugh and call him ‘Good Morning Texas’ instead of Vietnam.
Doug’s fine with the implication that he’s the Robin Williams of his troop.
He meets Kate when he’s in basic training and things are…ok for a time. They have their ups and downs, and then mostly downs. Doug goes from one cigarette a day to a pack, from one drink after work to twelve.
After Anne is born, though, he does the proper thing. He goes cold turkey and stops drinking, stops smoking. He changes jobs, and visits his little girl on the regular.
Then one of his old squadmates dies, Kate tells him she’s dating again, and Doug turns off his unrestricted access to Turkish dance music, courtesy of the pocket radio he won in high school, and opens a beer. He shows up at her house angry and smelling like alcohol, and she drags him to court.
He’s dangerous, she says. A monster. Not to be trusted.
He can’t see Anne anymore.
She still loves him though, she tells him as much through her half of the walkie-talkies, and Doug is hit with an idea.
He and Johnathan had been close, closer than the military may have wanted before Doug left, so when he died Doug takes time off work to grieve. He still has four days left when he walkies Anne, tells her that he’s going to take her on a trip. He waits until Anne tells him that Kate is asleep before breaking in, scooping Anne and her packed bag up and getting her into the car. Before they leave he makes sure she’s secured into her car seat, that she has everything she wants to bring with her. She’s clutching the patchwork whale he gave her the last time he saw her, and she gives him a gap tooth smile.
The plan is to go to his parents house, inherited after they died, and spend some time with his daughter before bringing her back home.
The plan doesn’t go to plan.
Laying in his cell, Doug tries to think of everything he learned about his Gift. No one ever said if nearly killing a bunch of kids, if deafening your daughter, putting a high schooler in a wheelchair, and putting said high schooler’s brother in physio for who knows how long is enough for a Benefactor to take away a Gift but he wouldn’t be surprised if it was.
He could contact his old Gift support group, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t want their judgment.
He already knows what he’s done.
He avoids radios, even after being offered a chance to run the prison station. He begrudgingly agrees to make an appeal even though he doesn’t believe he deserves it. He spends a month in solitary for a fight he didn’t start. He doesn’t dream of whales. He gets hired by Goddard Futuristics.
He’s sent to space.
There’s no drinking in space, which Eiffel appreciates. There’s also no smoking, which he doesn’t. And his radio only plays one song- the sweet sweet sound of interplanetary static.
He’s in good company, at least. There’s Hera, a complete sweetheart and auto-pilot-slash-AI. There’s Minkowski, a hard-ass and his commanding officer. There’s Hilbert, a probably evil scientist and medical officer. Hera might scare the shit out of him when he’s talking to himself at night, and Minkowski might hunt down his contraband smokes like a woman out for blood, and Hilbert might be a sociopathic creep when it comes to medical tests, but they’re good people.
Better than him, at least.
He does his work, mostly, and enjoys it, sometimes until one day it isn’t static coming out of the Hephaestus radio relays. It’s music .
It takes him longer than it should have l to realize that the transmissions directly correlated to days where Minkowski was singing and humming under her breath or Hilbert was whistling.
Maybe he wasn’t Giftless after all.
Maybe his Benefactor thought he still needs his Gift.
Eiffel starts encouraging Minkowski to sing, and, even if he has ‘I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’ stuck in his head for a week and a half, the transmissions get clearer and clearer.
Then Hilbert flips on them. Eiffel uses his Gift to temporarily hijack the Pulse Beacon Relay, distracting Hilbert while Hera runs technically allowed interference. In the end Minkowski is nearly killed, he’s nearly reduced to a presumably short life as a human test subject, and Hera’s practically lobotomized but Hilbert is contained.
It takes time, they nearly die half a dozen times in the interim, but they get Hera back. And then they get the previous commander of the Hephaestus, Captain Lovelace, back.
She’s got a bomb on her ship and their lives in her hands and she’s ready to blast off when a Decima accident leaves him barely alive and hanging onto life. She donates her blood and Eiffel continues to live.
Then Wolf 359 turns blue .
Then the transmissions talk back .
The bomb goes off, and he doesn’t know what to do.
Eiffel finds himself in another form of solitary confinement. Trapped on the USS Piece of Shit/Deathtrap/Unending Nightmare, he floats towards what he hopes is rescue, confining himself to cryo-sleep with breaks to eat something, broadcast a cry for help, and to shift his trajectory ever-so slightly..
He has the voices in his head to comfort him when he’s awake- Lovelace and Minkowski keeping his brain active, quizzing him on the deep space survival guide while Hilbert sniffs distrustfully at how he’s keeping himself healthy.
He doesn’t hear Anne. He doesn’t hear Hera.
He doesn’t know what that means.
By the time Hera finally speaks to him, Eiffel is nearly dead. He’s floating amongst the stars, humpbacks and blue whales buffeting him as he drifts, and she snaps him out of his dying dream in time to answer his radio.
In time for a rescue.
The ship that answers his SOS and picks him up is huge, almost bigger than the Hephaestus, and one of the three crew members has to carry him out of the USS Unending Nightmare and into their medical bay once he’s docked.
He spends the entire trip back to the Hephaestus in there, on IV fluids and foods, with Dr. Maxwell or Mr. Jacobi watching over him while he sleeps in fits, whale song echoing in his ears.
They said they were taking him home. He just didn’t realize what home that was.
On the Urania, Minkowski barely lets go of him as they listen to Kepler threaten them, scowling the entire time as they’re told that they aren’t getting rescued but their terms of employment has changed.
Maxwell attaches herself to Hera’s metaphysical hip and Eiffel pretends that he isn’t jealous. Kepler threatens Hilbert in front of him and Eiffel pretends that it doesn’t freak him out more than the whiskey speech. Jacobi spaces the plant monster and Eiffel pretends that he isn’t watching the other man with more than just suspicion.
Weeks before their mutiny but months after the three SI-5 members joined the crew, Jacobi is telling a grand story of explosions and theoretically terrifying acts of murder and illegal activity while on work detail with Eiffel. There is a burning building and explosives going off too close for human safety, so Eiffel asks if Jacobi is Gifted as well.
It’s the first time he’s asked anyone if they also have a Gift. He hopes it doesn’t bite him in the ass.
He isn’t, doesn’t know a damn thing about what Eiffel is asking him and waves off Eiffel’s offer of an explanation. Jacobi does, however, know about a supply closet that Hera doesn’t get readings from, though, and shows off a couple of his non-Gifted gifts to Eiffel in there.
He’s never been more happy to know all the simple tips and tricks for hiding hickeys than he is at that point in his life, with Lovelace and Hilbert out for blood.
They mutiny.
Kepler shoots Lovelace. Jacobi blows up Hilbert. Minkowski shoots Maxwell.
Two prisoners are added to the brig-slash-observation deck and Eiffel can barely look at Jacobi.
There is a flash-funeral, because Eiffel couldn’t attend his parents because of jail and space, and he’ll be damned if he can’t do something for the dead this time.
The wine is his first drop of liquor in years .
He wishes it didn’t taste like home, like sanctuary. Hera makes concerned noises as he drinks, and eventually the sensible part of him wins out and he hides the bottle in Hilbert’s lab, behind a jar that used to contain a giant mutated spider so he isn’t tempted to dig it out again.
Lovelace returns from the dead, coughing and sputtering and glowing as she speaks for the aliens.
Jacobi stares at Maxwell’s body bag, but it doesn’t twitch. He was the only other one to be lucky enough to have his own pod person…not that his double lived long.
Later, Eiffel and Minkowski listen in as Jacobi reams out Kepler, and she adds him to Eiffel’s work detail-slash-prisoner watch.
They talk about repairs, about passing each other pliers or screwdrivers or wrenches. They don’t talk about Maxwell, they don’t talk about supply closets, they don’t talk about guilt or prison or regrets.
No one sings, hums, whistles anymore so Eiffel finds himself doing some drastic workarounds to try and get an inkling of a transmission. Yes, the talking to from Lovelace and Minkowski and Hera hurts, but he doesn’t dispute it. He needed to hear it, needs to be held more accountable for what he does, says, acts. They think his feelings are hurt, and that’s why he’s avoiding them and MacGyvering up comms improvements. He lets them think that. It’s easier than explaining.
Hera’s in the middle of an internal reset and he goes drifting away. He thinks back to the U.S.S Neverending Nightmare and shudders, but it’s also enough to jog his brain, give him a boost to let him figure out what the aliens want from him.
He goes into the star with Hera and Minkowski and Lovelace yelling at him, panicked, and is spit out with all of Bob’s knowledge floating around in his brain.
Music.
All the aliens wanted was music .
He’s waiting in a supply closet, again, for Jacobi.
This time it’s with the hopes that the bit of Lovelace’s blood he injected him with snaps him out of the crazy-ass mind control everyone is under so they can get away from Cutter and Pryce and finally go home.
The first thing he does is yell at Eiffel. The second thing he does is kiss him. The third is dash off to plant explosives for blowing up the Hephaestus.
He sticks Minkowski with some of Lovelace’s blood and follows her puppeted body around the station and into an airlock before she finally shakes Pryce’s control. Nearly everyone important is free from Pryce, and they begin to plan.
Entering the Sol is desasterous, Eiffel and Minkowski stuck in an escape pod with Kepler and Pryce herself, and it’s only because of Jacobi that they don’t end up passing into deep space. A tense negotiation between Kepler-as-Minkowski and Lovelace-as-Cutter leaves them with their escape. Hera on the Sol, the Sol under Minkowski’s command, all of them free to leave.
Or, they would be until Rachel Young spills Cutter and Pryce’s big plans.
The Decima Virus, to be unleashed on Earth if Bob and the rest of the aliens don’t comply with whatever nutso plot Cutter and co have.
It doesn’t take them long to realize that they can’t just leave, they can’t let Cutter and Pryce destroy the Earth if they don’t get their way.
And then Minkowski does the stupidest thing in her entire goddamned career and tries to send Eiffel home.
Tries being the optimal word because Eiffel isn’t going. He’s not going to just leave, let the people he cares about, loves, die just because Minkowski obviously overheard him recording his message to Anne.
It takes time, but he manages to turn the ship around and, with a madcap grin, barrels straight into the Hephaestus.
He’s standing, cradling his broken wrist or arm or whatever to his chest, as Bob says eight words. Eight simple words he’d rather Bob hadn’t said.
He has a Gift. He is a Whale.
Of course this leads to Cutter and Pryce giving him appraising looks. Cutter asks what a Gift is and, because Bob went digging into his mind in order to learn more English, Bob knows. Bob tells.
Bob dies, and Eiffel is dragged into the next room, Pryce strapping him into another monstrous chair. Her and Cutter are already discussing Gifts, discussing methods of finding Gifted people and using them for their own means.
Eiffel feels sick.
A blast of pain hits, and suddenly they aren’t on the Hephaestus anymore. It’s him and Pryce in the middle of the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade warehouse, his memories all boxed up in neat little breakable packages.
Whale song echos around them, and Pryce grins, sharp and brittle as she reaches into his mind.
Then it isn’t just Pryce in his head. It’s Pryce and Hera , who’s here to save the day, to save him.
It’s not enough, though. Despite everything, Pryce is winning, is smashing memories and stealing them, so Eiffel makes an executive decision.
Clean slate. Wipe everything.
There is a man. He’s holding onto a bed while two women talk to him. One is named Rénee, and she’s bleeding. One is named Isabel, and she’s faint. They tell him his name is Doug, and that he’s their friend.
Before they explain what’s going on, to him, to them, to the woman in the corner, Isabel faints and Rénee passes out. The woman in the corner rushes over to help, and they hold a shirt over Rénee’s stomach when another man enters the room.
He’s bloody and injured, clothing charred and blackened, and he snaps at them both before the voice in the ceiling, Hera, tells him that they don’t remember.
That they have no memories.
The man curses and takes Rénee, leaves Isabel to Doug and the woman, and they follow him out of the room, past bodies floating and into a new area.
Isabel wakes up and laughs when she sees the man, sobers up when she sees Doug and the woman, rolls up her sleeves when she sees Rénee.
The man tells Doug that his name is Daniel, to go along with the ‘ first name thing we’ve got going on’ and helps Hera get all of Doug’s old audio logs.
Doug decides that he doesn’t really like Eiffel.
He’s rude and touchy and kind of an asshole. But he listens because he is Eiffel and Eiffel is Doug and he was something to these people, once.
He doesn’t touch the radio equipment, instead sitting with Rénee or Daniel on their way home. He has scars he doesn’t know, habits he can’t remember. He holds pens like they’re cigarettes, watches Daniel as he moves around the ship, feels like he should have a response when Rénee or Isabel or Hera says something and look to him for a reaction. He listens for a song that doesn’t play.
He’s incomplete. He’s frustrated. He’s alone without being alone.
Four months back on Earth, four months spent in seedy motels and Dominik Koudelka’s basement and hiding from the press while Rénee or Isabel handle questions and dreaming of whales when something…clicks.
Daniel is around, for once, scrolling through the tv guide, looking for something when Doug offhandedly mentions how Anne loved Dora the Explorer.
Isabel drops the plate she’s holding and Dominik sighs as he goes for the broom. Daniel yells for Rénee to get downstairs and Hera starts crunching numbers.
That wasn’t in his logs, not in letters or information any of the crew knew.
Doug is remembering.
It takes time, bits and pieces coming back to him. Hera determines that nothing that was broken in his mind will come back and sets him up with the Harry Potter books to read while he waits for his life to return to him in spurts.
Some days he’s Doug, agreeable and soft and still confused, frowning as he tries to wrap his head around a reference Dominik makes or a joke Daniel tells. Others he’s Eiffel, the entire day spent in bed or on the couch, clutching his head as memories return in painful flashes.
But he heals.
He meets with Kate and they have a cautious conversation, the pair of them trying to ignore Rénee and the others sitting a few tables away like they’re worried something terrible is about to happen.
He meets with Anne who still loves him, who runs up to him and excitedly signs story after story to him as Kate translates.
He goes from Doug, who doesn’t remember, to Doug Eiffel, who does, although it takes years.
He builds his radios again, flexes his Gift and sends music out into space, hoping that it reaches his Dear Listeners. He gets mail from space-bound soldiers, thanking him for his dedication to his radio, for allowing them to hear music again, and he keeps every single one.
He still calls Minkowski ‘Rénee’ and Lovelace’ Isabel’. Dominik was always Dominik.
And Daniel…Daniel is only ‘Jacobi’ when he breaks something.
Or when he spur of the moment announces that he’s about to become a foster parent three hours before a six-year-old named Alanna is dropped off at the house.
Or when he takes a newly-adopted nine-year-old Alanna out into a field to set off illegal fireworks in the middle of a fire ban.
Years later, Alanna is going off to Chorus to get her residency under her belt when Doug presses something soft into her hands, winking as he backs away to let Daniel smother his daughter with affection and laughing as he jumps away at the sight of the plush duck in her hands.
There is half a set of walkie-talkies engraved with a whale and a heavily edited and annotated copy of Pryce and Carter in her bag, a small vial of blood around her neck, and letters in her pocket, one for each of her five years in residency.