Chapter Text
It was self preservation.
Becoming the “CEO” of Hyperion was pretty much everyone’s pipe dream. When Rhys, quite literally, plugged his way up the corporate ladder into his neural port, there was very little he wouldn’t do for the position.
He lied to his best friend, to the two con artists he’d befriended. He’d promised this “Jack” that he would get him back to Helios and that he would restore him to power and, in return, Jack assured him that he would have a very important role to play.
Which, apparently, was to be his meat suit.
A meat suit is, in fact, as horrifying as it sounded.
Just as Rhys thought he was getting the promotion he deserved, Jack told him that he would be testing Nakayama’s prototype out on him.
The prototype was a metal endoskeleton that would have Jack’s AI. But, with an endoskeleton came the issue of Rhys’s innards. Like, his heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, etc. The essentials. This endoskeleton would give Jack a vessel to come back and rule Hyperion and Pandora with an iron fist, probably literally given Rhys’s right arm.
But what Rhys didn’t understand was why it had to be him? Sure, he was there, he was attractive, Jack already knew how to take control of his body. It made perfect sense! But why would Jack not value the loyalty that Rhys had given him?
After all I’ve done for you? You can’t do this for me? Jack insisted, even after straight up telling Rhys that he would die. When Rhys said that he didn’t want to do that, that there were better candidates, that he could help him, please for the love of god do not kill me, it hardly mattered. That just seemed to piss off the AI more. Rhys, when trying to stand from The Executive Chair, was pinned down and cuffed.
From the desk had emerged a machine with spinning blades and sharp tools that were definitely supposed to help in forcing the endoskeleton into Rhys’s body.
He tried to use the blades on Jack’s… scary thing to cut the restraints, but they were not quite sharp enough to cut through Rhys could only push back the chair so far until he was pressed against the window. His soon to be corpse cast a lovely silhouette over Elpis.
That’s when Rhys did what he enjoyed the most. Talking.
He talked a lot. Said a lot of words that he didn’t really remember, since he was in such a blind panic. But somewhere between the struggling, the sobs, and the begging, he convinced Jack that his life was more valuable to him as an ally than a meat suit. Or, the psychopathic AI took mercy on him, since at this point Rhys had taken a couple cuts and was having a full blown panic attack.
That’s how he became Jack’s personal assistant of sorts. Jack was, for all intents and purposes, in charge of Helios. He made all of the decisions, listened in on everything that was happening, worked on his eridium projects and his leads on the vaults. The only difference is, this time, it wasn’t really Jack.
You couldn’t kill him, because Helios had infinite copies of his code.
You couldn’t as much say a negative thing about him, because he literally had ears everywhere.
You couldn’t so much as blink the wrong way in Rhys’s direction, since Rhys was Jack’s.
Which left Rhys with the tasks that the AI, frankly, didn’t feel like dealing with. Going to meetings, filling out paperwork, hiring people for positions, etc. But when Rhys showed up to an accounting meeting, people didn’t really take him seriously. Yeah, he was in charge, and yeah, Jack killed a lot of people who looked at his pet the wrong way, but that wasn’t any way to run a company.
Eventually, they realized that the only way for Jack and Rhys to maintain their unsteady hold on the largest corporation in the galaxy, they needed Jack to actually be back. Not just appearing on monitors and ordering people around and threatening them over the loudspeakers.
Jack was dead. Nakiyama did successfully finish a prototype that could contain Jack’s intelligence, but it still looked like a golden skeleton and they did not have the organic material to recreate Jack’s flesh and make it look real. Not yet, at least.
By the time that they were able to finish the suit, it would be too late. AI Jack would be flushed out of Helios’s system and Rhys would be demoted, best case scenario.
Jack, to Rhys’s silent dismay, had a solution. He had a doppelganger. One he’d hired years ago, before he was the CEO, before he was anything more than a simple programmer with an attitude.
Which lead to Rhys being ordered to hunt down Timothy Lawrence and get him to Helios as soon as possible.
Jack hadn’t lost contact with Lawrence because of the contract. If Jack ever needed him, Tim would be legally obligated to come running to him, or Jack would send every vault hunter on Pandora after him.
Tim was good, but he wasn’t that good.
When soft Jack fell off his rocker some and became Handsome Jack, Timothy didn’t like the shit he pulled with both his own safety and the safety of others in mind. He started to say as much to Jack, which caused tension between them.
Long story short, Jack threw him off Helios. That didn’t void him of his contract, mind you. Now, instead of having a safe base of operations on Helios, he spent his time on the hot, sandy shithole that was Pandora.
Then, in an absurd turn of events, Jack died! So Tim was finally off the hook.
Or, so he thought. He got an email from this Rhys fellow, saying that Jack was back, that Tim needed to be on Helios as soon as possible, and that he was looking forward to meeting him.
Looking forward to meeting him. As if the Hyperion douchebags in the sky cared about Tim beyond how much money they invested into his permanent and inconvenient surgery. Regardless of what Tim desired, he had to head back up to the big glowing “H” and do as his boss instructed. The only question was, how in God’s name did Jack survive?
He’d heard from other vault hunters that one of the vault hunters that was there killed him. The story differed from who actually landed the final blow, whether it was a siren power, a punch, or a gun, but it didn’t matter. All parties involved agreed that yeah, Jack was dead. And dead was supposed to be dead, but apparently not.
So now Timothy Lawrence was back up on Helios, wearing the mask, and reporting to… an artificial intelligence that claimed he was Jack. If he knew, way back in the day, that signing up for this gig would be so morally grey and exhausting, he probably wouldn’t have done it in the first place.
Fucking college loans.
Of course, he hadn’t been required to be Jack in quite some time, so to get back into the swing of things was bound to be difficult. This guy was an asshole.
After being on Helios for a few weeks in, essentially, total isolation to get back into character, hearing Jack’s rants over the loudspeaker, and catching up with Rhys about what has happened since Jack came back.
Rhys seemed almost out of place here. Yeah, he has the coiffed hair, the clothes, the intelligence… but something told Tim that he didn’t want to be here as much as he did.