The following are true about Anna Sheridan:

She is an archaeologist, and she's good at her job. She's intelligent. She wouldn't be here if she wasn't; it's a given.

Her hands are rough. The sharp, uneven calluses always became more noticeable when John held her hand. The texture seemed to melt over her dinner with Liz. This is inherently connected to the fact that she is an adept archaeologist--her work formed these calluses over her palms, sanding down over anyone who dared to cast a gaze of judgment. She feels her digs make marks on each of her fingers, uncovered artifacts lining the shelves of her mind's interior. 

This is her purpose. She is more than archaeology, more than tough flesh and dirt caked underneath fingernails, more than a hand to hold, but this is an inextricable part of her.

She likes to think she is dedicated. This is not necessarily the case.

Rewind - she is dedicated, and overflows with more dedication than the average person can bear. She’s simply drenched in it.

Rewind - she hasn't seen her husband in a year, and now she's elected to tack another several months onto this already-vast gap. 

She cannot discern. It's difficult to manage priorities. John is staunchly a soldier, and she finds little comfort in Earthforce. To dissect and immortalize what was once lost to time, ancient and hidden — this is a blessing, this is divine. She sorts through her work and his work and their love with obsessive repetition, like building sandcastles just to knock them down with force, like flipping through the pages of a book trying desperately to find a message that just isn't there.

She loves and cares and aches for the wounded. When she finds a civilization that has crumbled in its entirety, with craters of dust where the heart should be, she mourns. She thinks of each little life that once existed in these realms, however long ago, and she talks to herself as she unearths the knowledge. Stories, theories, little bubbles of comfort. It's a rarity, these days, to be listened to.

She goes to Station Prime, and there is a man from New Technologies who both fascinates and unsettles her. There's something wrong with him; a wicked presence sleeps within him, a callus like the ones on her palm has formed over his soul and encased it in dead skin from the inside-out, his corpse preserved there as if in amber. He cannot connect to her.

She wants to fix him anyway. 

They're going to be on the Icarus together for a while. They'll have time.

She wants to fix him, to see him resurrect, to save something valuable before it too decays into ruin, but this is a facade, a glamour to hide the truth from view. The truth: she really just wants to fix herself. If Dr. Morden can be rebuilt, even with makeshift, shoddy parts that don't fit in there quite right, she can find her way back to stability in the dark. She won't be feeling around the room anymore, reaching out into the darkness and praying that she can find her way through this labyrinthine dilemma solely by touch.

She'll have something to show for it. The Psi Corps want whatever they suspect the Icarus will find once they explore the planet, but they'd walk out of it together, polished now, changed entirely by this mission. She'll have helped someone, and that impact still lingers when everything else is taken away.

She is more than this. Compassion and fascination are the forces that maneuver her into action. She became an archaeologist because she loves. She became this curious thing she is now, a thing dedicated to unraveling the hidden, because she loves. She loves all of it, enamored by each drop of existence. Linear time. Life is shorter than anyone can conceptualize, and disasters spread like vicious wildfires when you aren't looking; Earth could become a flattened world within moments under the wrong circumstances, indistinguishable from the worlds she visits on her digs. 

There isn't enough time.

She expects to lose consciousness when she is merged with it, thanks divinity for that mercy. They put her under, she wakes up with a chunk of machinery at the base of her skull---they don't even bother influencing her actions, she isn't important enough for that---and then Morden escorts her by arm to the vessel. It's simple, too simple, but at least she won't have to suffer through it. At least she will get a break. She will break her mind away from Morden's betrayal, and the fact that she will never see her husband again, and the fact that Liz is still taking care of her cat, and she will be lulled into deep sleep by the cacophonous screeches of the creatures.

It isn't, apparently, that easy.

She feels the machine infect her immediately upon merging. They wire her in, her vital signs monitored on a constant basis, the back of her neck positioned stiff against a cool piece of metal. It's dark in here, so dark. Anna is immobilized in stasis, stuck in a limbo of consciousness between consciousness. Anna is the ship, and the ship is Anna, and Anna belongs to the creatures now, Anna---

Anna stops being Anna a few months in. It happens gradually; she is kept mostly on the ground for a while, her mind left to its own devices, left to roam like a slaughterhouse animal. She tries several things while she is grounded, while Morden and Justin and the creatures flutter around outside of her. She:

-Astral projects, or tries to. Liz told her about this in college. The Psi Corps are experimenting with this, she'd said. They're making some real progress, too. She melts in the darkness. If she could move any part of her body, her eyes would be closed. Anna imagines a ball of light surrounding her, penetrating the shadows and ascending her out of the ship, up into the skies, back to Earth. She imagines her soul separating from her body, floating back into control. Safety. There was supposed to be safety. There is always an inherent risk to archaeological digs - especially on planets near the Rim - but she was supposed to go home. It wasn't supposed to end up this way. Still, the ball of light seeps into her skin, absorbed by each layer of the integument. She feels herself almost escape, almost break free from the shell her body is now, but she is always pushed back down just before the ascension, eternally tethered.

-Daydreaming. She thinks about what her life would be like if she had been able to return from the dig. She dreams of her husband; it is an unrealistic dream, forbidden sustenance. The dream involves John being able to be with her - to truly, meaningfully, wholly love her - and he simply just doesn't have time for that. Her daydreams always end here: John will never be able to truly commit. Anna will always, always need more than what he can give. She shouldn't be thinking in present tense.

-Meditation. She tries to clear her mind, to throw every thought overboard, to give in to the lull of the vessel, but every attempt is futile. She tries to clear the shelves and gets you cannot erase me in response, bellowed throughout her mindscape.

The voice dies when she allows her mind to cloud back up again. She floods in every possible thought, a river stream of her own consciousness. She fills herself up with words, poetry from other cultures, her doctoral thesis on Anfran culture, translations, songs from her childhood, scripture. The whispers only get stronger, louder, with each imagining. The whispers shred and haunt and eviscerate.

Mostly they say things like I love you. Or Anna herself is saying I love you. Or there are multiple people saying I love you. Or the creatures are saying I love you. Regardless of the source, it is never genuine. The tone is always one of cruelty---not a declaration of adoration, but a study of her weaknesses. Each and every I love you translates to you are weak. Each and every I love you translates only to an inhuman screeching wail that shatters her innards and fragments her mind. There's so much noise here.

It always sounds like her own voice. She supposes that is because herself is all that she has left, but even that isn't right; the voice grows increasingly monotone every time it talks to her, and Anna has always been full of life. The voice is blank, and dark, and firm. Loud and fast, like she's back at one of those artifact auctions where private collectors would bid on the past as if they had any right to own it. Empty.

She doesn't even think to talk back to it for - too long, probably. She doesn't even consider that she can. She doesn't have a voice here, but she has a mind, she has an inner world. She isn't going to go anywhere. Anna Sheridan has always been strong, and she is strong enough to make it through this.

Anna concentrates---meditates, even. She imagines her words disappearing from her mouth and hanging visible in the air, written out by magic. She imagines her words permeating throughout the entirety of the vessel, picked up by every sensor, every code, every presence. I'm not letting you do this to me. She imagines the Other Self hearing her and floating inward, but when she thinks the statement she feels a million eyes on her, more than just the Other Self; every creature on the planet, every human, every telepath, everyone these aliens have captured and altered, like the Other Self is wired into the entire planet. She "says" the statement, and the statement strips her down into a naked, vulnerable thing. No longer flesh and bone, just bone, a brain and nervous system clattering wet onto the floor. It invades. Vivisects. 

Divides.

"Do you think you have a choice?" says the Other Self. "It is already occurring. You cannot stop it."

I won't let you hurt me.

In the eternal darkness, she sees a flash of shoulder-length auburn hair, a sage dress, a weaponized smile--her own frame, her own image, but not. This isn't her. This could never be her.

"I do not need to," whispers the Other Self. "You are not for hurting. You are for utilization." She looks away for a moment, and the smile widens. "You are actually very lucky. The Machine is a comfort unlike anything else I have ever known."

What else have you known? Have you ever kissed someone, or held someone, or had ice cream, or zipped through the stars, or discovered something from a civilization long-dead?

"I do not need to do those things," she replies. "The Machine is all that I require."

Don't you ever want more?

"Well," says the Other Self, considering this. "For a while, I will have you."