Agent Washington (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
notthesecondworstfighter) wrote2014-02-06 05:41 pm
notthesecondworstfighter) wrote2014-02-06 05:41 pm
Entry tags:
Character History (because RvB wikis suck)
[Not the most detailed, but it gets the gist of his history and hits all the important parts up to the end of season 10.]
Wash has a bad past, to put it lightly, not to mention one that's quite complicated.
Enlisted in the UNSC, he was once part of a specialized and highly experimental military program by the name of Project Freelancer. The Project's intentions were essentially to create highly trained, almost super-soldiers in order to win the war at any cost. There were fifty soldiers chosen to join the program overall, each given a state name as a designation. The were then put under rigorous training, sent on dangerous missions, all that you'd expect of a program such as this. They were told to work together, told they were a team, and they worked as such. Friendships were forged, understandings made, and they all grew to work with each other quite well. At least, until a leaderboard was installed in order to put rank on them. It was brought to create an aspect of competition to an already rather competitive group, to give them more reason to be the best, to want to get their name up on the board, to be in the top six. It was also used a a filtering process, to determine who among all the agents were the best, and who deserved to go on to become better.
Washington, while not exactly the best of all his teammates, was far from being the worst. He wasn't at the top of the board, not once, but he was consistently placed on it. Generally, he found his name either on or around the number six position, and while the others often fluctuated, he remained rather steadily in place, and he was content with that. He didn't want to be the best. Sure, being on the board was nice, he was certainly proud of it, but he had no intention of pushing himself in an effort to be number one.
Speaking of Wash at this time, it should be noted that he was rather naive, and almost innocent, in a way. Strange to say that about someone involved in a program the likes of Project Freelancer, of a soldier, but it's quite the way he was. He followed obeyed orders without question, never believing the Director of Project Freelancer to lie to them or use them for purposes other than what they'd been told they were there to do--help win the war. His belief was that the Director had given them everything, that he wouldn't filter them for some unexplained purpose, he wouldn't want to instil conflict and competition, he wanted them to work together, to be a team.
Paired with the naivete, he was all in all a kind young man. He always wanted to help his friends, make them feel better after a failed mission, make a joke or sarcastic comment where appropriate, and filled with a sense of optimism. He was a bit of a worrier though, occasionally letting fears get the better of him, and he could become fairly easily frustrated under a stressful situation where improvisation was necessary. We could go more in depth, but hopefully you get the general idea.
Now we get to the explanation as to why Project Freelancer was an experimental program, aside from just giving each of its soldiers a suit of knock-off MJOLNIR armor, much like that used by the SPARTAN program, though not quite as high-tech or, heavy, or strong, as well as giving these armor suits enhancements--one agent had a healing unit, another cloaking, etc. The Director wanted to experiment, to pair each agent with an artificial intelligence program to assist in battle. He wanted to implant the soldiers with the A.I.s, essentially connecting the minds of both of them, allowing them to work very closely, to get the full assistance that a computer program could offer. While the UNSC found the idea an interesting one, they only granted the Director the funding and clearance to create one A.I. Instead of simply carrying out the experimental implants with just the one program, however, he decided that it was necessary to have more, and the next best way to do that was to copy it. Copying an A.I., who was given the name Alpha, being impossible however, fragmentation was the only way to get more--essentially to torture the A.I. psychologically until it isolated and split part of itself off to make things more bearable. The fragments were part of the Alpha's personality, pure, compartmentalized emotion... One was Alpha's logic, one rage, one creativity, etc.
The leaderboard, as it turned out, was used as a selection process to see which agents would get the A.I. fragments over others, giving all the more reason for competition between agents when the ones at the top began to receive their 'rewards.' Things went fairly well for most of the soldiers who got an A.I., though there were complications along the way that began to make some of the others wonder. Not believing that the Director would do anything bad to them, Washington was not among those that started to grow worried about what was really going on.
When the time came around for him to have his own implantation surgery, Wash just had the bad luck of being paired up with Epsilon, who was the fragment containing all of Alpha's memories. The memories of the fragmentation, of what had been done to it, of the torture, not to mention a few lingering memories from the mind that Alpha himself had been based on, who it should be noted, was the Director.
With the A.I. sharing his head, their minds so closely twined, things got particularly bad. Epsilon didn't last long before it began to lose it's mind. With everything that Alpha had been too, driven mad by the torture, how could one expect him to not come to rather the same fate? The biggest problem was, as Epsilon began to shed its lingering thoughts, emotions, and memories, Wash got them all; he saw and experienced everything, had memories that weren't his crammed into his head, and naturally...he lost it, as well.
Epsilon ended up unable to deal with it all and self-terminated, committed suicide while still in Washington's head, only adding further trauma to the Freelancer. Epsilon was removed, supposedly to be deleted, and Wash was certified as unfit for duty, locked up and put into isolation for recovery, though it wasn't really expected that he'd ever really be himself again.
While this was going on, poor Wash out of the loop and out of his mind, the Director called for all other AI to be removed in an effort to keep anyone from finding out the truth. The other Freelancers, however, had learned of what had been done to Alpha--or at least, some of it. Essentially, they knew what was going on in the program was wrong, and those that still had their A.I. wished to keep them, so they left. They broke out, separated, and hid from the Project for their own safety.
Cut to a long span of time later, Washington has recovered. ...Mostly. He's not exactly completely sane, but he's within acceptable deviations, and Project Freelancer needs his help. Something was killing off agents, hunting them down and murdering them in order to take their equipment, particularly their A.I.s, and naturally, the Director didn't want them to fall into the wrong hands, lest the UNSC find out what had been done to the single A.I. he'd been given. At this point, Washington was the only Freelancer left, and the only one they could truly trust with the job to follow distress beacons of fallen agents in order to recover their equipment before something else did. This was because, after what had happened with Epsilon, he was not looking to ever have another program sharing his mind, thus, he wouldn't steal and use any that he recovered. That, and...well, all the secrets he'd learned from Epsilon about what had been done to Alpha had to be kept secret. He'd had to hide what he knew from everyone, because if they found out what he knew, they'd surely kill him. Thus, he also couldn't risk another A.I. finding out, either.
At this point though, knowing everything he did, and knowing that the Project had been lying to all of them the entire time, using them and manipulating them, Washington was no longer the same old goody-two shoes. He took on a very new personality. The essentials are still there, perhaps, buried under piles of anger and betrayal, but most likely still there. Regardless of what may or may not have still been there, he was now a very bitter, very jaded individual with far less patience, and caring far less for following orders.
Working as a recovery agent, he wanted the Project to believe they could still trust him. That would make his ultimate goal of taking down what was left of the program far easier. So, he did the job; he scavenged deceased agents' bodies for their equipment, and destroyed what remained. he only ever managed to recover one A.I. before it was stolen by the person trying to collect them all, and this was simply because the A.I.'s host was killed in an unrelated firefight.
The A.I., Delta, was used as bait, in a way. Wash knew that with Delta in his possession, the one seeking all the A.I. would come to him, and he could attempt to take it down and end the whole thing. As it was, however, he ran into a fellow agent first. How? Well, he followed a recovery beacon leading him directly to her twin brother, who was killed for his A.I. Big surprise. South (short for South Dakota)was only left alive, it was thought, because she had no A.I. of her own. She'd been in the implant group behind Wash, and thus never got her own. Not after what happened to him. She was jealous, too, that much was easy to see.
Though given orders by Command to kill the remaining Dakota, as everything had to remain absolutely quiet and nothing about any of this mess could get out, Wash refused to do it. He played it off that he did, had Delta update the Projects information to list her and her brother North as K.I.A., and decided to use her to assist him in taking down the enemy, as he could use all the help he could get. Their current enemy had killed agents with a higher battle rating than Wash himself with what seemed like no effort. So yeah, some help would have been nice.
Things...didn't go as planned, though. He probably shouldn't have been surprised. Giving Delta to South so she could implant, to use the program to their advantage and keep it safe, it seemed she'd gotten what she wanted. Instead of helping Wash as a firefight broke out, she shot him in the back, and left him for the enemy so she could escape with Delta. Turned out, that had more or less been the plan all along. South had also been working for Command; Wash had been set up by the people he was working for just so they could get a glimpse of what they were up against, of who was stealing their precious equipment. Again, he'd been used, and South had left him to die as his equipment was scavenged. She'd done it all so she could get her own A.I., an agreement made with Command, though instead of going back to get one of her own, she held onto Delta.
Now, thankfully Washington didn't actually die. He survived, was brought back and healed, and again he had to go through a recovery process, though this one physical rather than mental. At this point, however, he only gets further from his old self--the bitterness only increased after being completely betrayed by a former teammate, by someone he'd always considered a friend, he harboured more anger, and found himself no longer able to trust anyone, the little bit of him that still could, despite everything the Project had done, had been completely eliminated and wiped out.
Where we pick up again, there have been more attacks, more A.I. stolen, all by what has been given the name of the Meta. The Meta, being another former Freelancer, who had previously been under the codename of Agent Maine. Wash is sent to gather more information on the most recent attack, one suspected to have been the capture of the A.I. named Omega, and found himself in need of some assistance from people who had dealt with the aggressive intelligence program before.
Unfortunately, those with the experience are essentially a band of idiots, sim troopers, "soldiers" that are placed into fake bases in a fake war between each other to be used as practice for Freelancers in training. Not that the idiots are exactly aware of any of this. They're almost impossible to deal with for Washington, as they're horribly immature, constantly arguing, and not exactly much assistance in battle.
It's basically one giant wild goose chase in an effort to track the Meta down and defeat him, to eliminate the threat and get all the A.I. back, full of nothing but frustrations and failures. To cut a long story short, after a cryptic clue is left by Delta (who was retrieved when the group ran into South while she was being attacked by the Meta, who they managed to fend off for the time being, though he got away. It should be noted that South is killed by Wash personally, in part for revenge, and in part to keep her, injured and not opposed to throwing someone else under the bus in the opportunity of self-preservation, from hampering their progress), Washington takes them all to Command, to Project Freelancer's headquarters to end this thing once and for all. Taking one certain sim trooper with him, leaving the others to keep watch while he's busy, Washington leads the trooper by the name of Church down into the A.I. storage room, where all the fragments not in use are stored. As it turns out (and this is a horribly brief summary), Church is actually the Alpha; he'd been disguised in a robot body and sent out under the belief that he was a human soldier, to live in a backwater canyon with a bunch of idiots, where no one could find him, where no one would think to look for the fabled Alpha. Wash tries to explain this all to Church, after finding the one A.I. that can actually help end what was left of the Project, that can be used as proof of what horrible things the Director had done--Epsilon. Turned out, it was cheaper to store an A.I. than it was to delete it, despite what they'd told Washington about what they did with the unstable fragment.
Of course, Church doesn't believe the story at first, about him being the Alpha, but after some serious convincing, he at least agrees to help Washington in the final stand (again this is all very hurried as this whole plot is extremely complex and long). Thus, the Freelancer sends Epsilon with the rest of the sim troopers to be taken to safety and then be delivered to the UNSC so the Director would be charged for everything he'd done, knowing that the Meta wouldn't go after them when he could get into the building that held so many more A.I.
Washington leads the Meta down into the lab, himself with Alpha implanted for the time being. Now, he knew full well that this was essentially a suicide mission. He wasn't expecting to get out alive, but that was perfectly okay with him. All Wash wanted to do was get his revenge on the Director, on the Project, for what was done to him, for what was done to his team and his friends. If he died taking down the remainder of the Project, then he died as happily as he could. He had nothing else to live for, at this point anyway.
The Meta was drawn down after him, and another long story short, Alpha distracts the Meta and the several A.I. housed within while Washington enters the codes for the building's failsafe--an electromagnetic pulse. The E.M.P. ends up going off successfully, destroying all electronic equipment in the building, each and every single A.I. included.
He thinks that it's finally over.
Somehow managing to find himself alive after it all, Washington also finds himself in prison for crimes he didn't commit, with the exception of destroying military intel. and evidence against the Director and the Project. It's not exactly the end he'd envisioned, and things only get more complicated again when he gets a call one day from one of the sim troopers who'd assisted him. Turns out, they didn't actually turn in Epsilon like they were supposed to, and Wash sees an opportunity in that. He gets a meeting with the Chairman, the one in charge of the investigating the Director, the one who locked him up in the first place, and explains the situation--he can get the guy what he wants, and all he wants in exchange is a way out of all this. He just wants to get out of prison, to get out of this mess he calls a life, to get as far away from it all as possible. In the end, he's granted the opportunity, sent to hunt down the sim troopers in order to get Epsilon and bring it back to the Chairman. The only twist is that he finds himself having to work with the Meta, who had also found himself locked up, and still intent on getting another A.I.
It's basically a whole new wild goose chase, but this ones different. This time, Washington's the bad guy, and the sim troopers are running away from him. This time, he's desperate, willing to do absolutely anything that it takes to just get Epsilon, deliver it to the Chairman, and get the hell out. He has to betray the people that helped him, fine, kill a few people, so be it. He'd rather not, sure, but at this point, he doesn't care. At this point, he's doing something purely for himself, because he's got nothing else. He's done--he's just got this one obstacle left to overcome, and he can finally just be done with it all.
But since when do things really work out for him? Chasing the simulation troopers around proves more difficult than previously thought, and they get away, just slipping through his grip, and it gets only more frustrating every time.
But then something weird happens.
He receives an incoming recovery beacon from Epsilon himself.
Naturally, he and the Meta follow it, though it's rather uneasily. It doesn't make sense, that they'd out of nowhere get exactly what they need to find the A.I., a trail leading right to him. As they arrive on the scene, it's easy to see the whole thing's a setup--one created by Agent Texas, who wants answers about the Director--but in not falling for what they believe is a trap, they...fall into the actual trap. It was elaborate, fooling them out of falling into what seemed like an obvious trap only to have them to do exactly as expected and fall into the real one. There's an explosion, and Washington finds himself knocked unconscious.
He's not out for long, and a fight ensues. It's two on one, Agent Texas versus Washington and the Meta, but still Texas, as the top agent back in Freelancer, takes the lead. However, after almost succeeding to take the both Wash and Meta out, she ends up in the Meta's grip, and he uses the A.I. capture unit they rigged up to finish her off (it's a looooong story, but basically Texas is actually an A.I. in a robotic body), and suddenly, with an A.I. right in his hands, he seems to have a change of heart. He turns on Washington with plans to kill him, and leave with not a care for the mission, just pleased to have an A.I. in his grasp again, one that he can use to run all the armor enhancements he still has. However, putting it very briefly, the simulation soldiers come to the rescue. Another battle goes down, this time the odds seem more in their favour, though Washington is down for the count. Injured from the battle with Texas, and the beginning of the one with the Meta, he's done. He sees that he's failed, he's seriously injured, and he's simply given up. He doesn't believe that the sim troopers, of all people, can defeat the Meta, except...in the end, they do. The Meta gets dropped off a cliff, and that's the end of that.
Meanwhile, Epsilon goes into the capture unit in order to save Texas, except that the unit is already malfunctioning, and ends up shutting down completely just after he goes in, essentially trapping him.
Here, Wash assumes he's going back to prison. He's failed his objective, and no doubt feeling some guilt, considering he completely turned his back on the sim troopers who'd helped him before, only to have them come in and save his life anyway. He's given up. However, despite the fact that they could easily turn him in and go back to their (mostly) peaceful lives, the sim troopers decide to help Wash again, and he doesn't understand why. Not that he stops them. In order to keep him from getting taken back to jail, they swap his armor out with Epsilon's (who, it should be noted, was in a robotic body like Tex's), switching the steel with yellow accents to cobalt blue with the same yellow accents. Not only that, but they take him with them, accept him onto the Blue Team, and bring him home with them. He's more appreciative of all of this than he really knows how to let on, not to mention holding on to a serious amount of gratitude toward them.
The UNSC at this point believes him to be dead.
Time passes (canon isn't clear on how much, or whether the teams even make it back to their bases after this whole crazy adventure), and the next time we see Washington, he's with the sim soldiers still, with the addition of one Agent Carolina, another former freelancer, and one that was believed to be dead up until she showed herself to them after presumably hunting Washington down. She wants revenge on the Director, she wants to kill him, and she wants his help. So, with him and the sim troopers in tow, they head off on another adventure in order to rescue Epsilon, as it's believed, given that he's Alpha's memories, and Alpha was based on the Director's mind, he'll know where the man is hiding.
They break into the facility Epsilon is being stored in, manage to get the unit working again, and get him out. Turns out he doesn't actually remember anything of use to them, sending them on a wild goose chase through areas they'd been before on previous missions in search of clues as to where the Director is hiding.
It should be noted that through all of this, Washington has gone through obvious changes in personality again, this time for the better. He's slowly beginning to relax, and it seems the sim troopers are the ones helping him to do so. He's sort of slipping a bit back more into who he was before, the kinder, less tightly-wound character. He's losing the bitterness, the anger, and coming to terms with things. He's accepting that what happened in the past happened, and there's nothing he can do but to get past it. He's moving on. Or, starting to, at least.
It's on this wild goose chase, this mission Carolina brings them along on, that he realizes he's found friends again. That he's actually started to trust again, despite the number done on him by the events in his past. He's healing, he's found himself a new team, a new group of friends, and he actually cares about them, as they do him. A pretty big development for him, and he shows this at one point when he puts a gun to Carolina's head, despite his having been quite the obvious subordinate to her before, obeying all of her orders, as he'd done in the past, when she threatens one of the sim troopers with her own weapon, and wants to use them as canon fodder in her plan.
It is, go figure, another loooong story that I can easily go more in depth into, but long story made short, despite their fighting and disagreeing, everyone works together in the end to fight their way to the Director. Washington doesn't go in with Carolina and Epsilon in order to kill him, though. Despite all the anger toward the man he'd held in the past, the revenge he'd so desperately wanted, he really has started to just let things go, and no longer feels the need for that revenge. But he does think it'll help Carolina to move on as well, and that's why he went along with her--because he wanted her to find the same sort of peace he himself was starting to find.
When it's all said and done, Washington and the simulation troopers find themselves in a canyon much like the one the latter were from originally, and he's much more part of the team, still finding his way out, back into some of the better aspects of his past self. He's starting to be happy again.
Wash has a bad past, to put it lightly, not to mention one that's quite complicated.
Enlisted in the UNSC, he was once part of a specialized and highly experimental military program by the name of Project Freelancer. The Project's intentions were essentially to create highly trained, almost super-soldiers in order to win the war at any cost. There were fifty soldiers chosen to join the program overall, each given a state name as a designation. The were then put under rigorous training, sent on dangerous missions, all that you'd expect of a program such as this. They were told to work together, told they were a team, and they worked as such. Friendships were forged, understandings made, and they all grew to work with each other quite well. At least, until a leaderboard was installed in order to put rank on them. It was brought to create an aspect of competition to an already rather competitive group, to give them more reason to be the best, to want to get their name up on the board, to be in the top six. It was also used a a filtering process, to determine who among all the agents were the best, and who deserved to go on to become better.
Washington, while not exactly the best of all his teammates, was far from being the worst. He wasn't at the top of the board, not once, but he was consistently placed on it. Generally, he found his name either on or around the number six position, and while the others often fluctuated, he remained rather steadily in place, and he was content with that. He didn't want to be the best. Sure, being on the board was nice, he was certainly proud of it, but he had no intention of pushing himself in an effort to be number one.
Speaking of Wash at this time, it should be noted that he was rather naive, and almost innocent, in a way. Strange to say that about someone involved in a program the likes of Project Freelancer, of a soldier, but it's quite the way he was. He followed obeyed orders without question, never believing the Director of Project Freelancer to lie to them or use them for purposes other than what they'd been told they were there to do--help win the war. His belief was that the Director had given them everything, that he wouldn't filter them for some unexplained purpose, he wouldn't want to instil conflict and competition, he wanted them to work together, to be a team.
Paired with the naivete, he was all in all a kind young man. He always wanted to help his friends, make them feel better after a failed mission, make a joke or sarcastic comment where appropriate, and filled with a sense of optimism. He was a bit of a worrier though, occasionally letting fears get the better of him, and he could become fairly easily frustrated under a stressful situation where improvisation was necessary. We could go more in depth, but hopefully you get the general idea.
Now we get to the explanation as to why Project Freelancer was an experimental program, aside from just giving each of its soldiers a suit of knock-off MJOLNIR armor, much like that used by the SPARTAN program, though not quite as high-tech or, heavy, or strong, as well as giving these armor suits enhancements--one agent had a healing unit, another cloaking, etc. The Director wanted to experiment, to pair each agent with an artificial intelligence program to assist in battle. He wanted to implant the soldiers with the A.I.s, essentially connecting the minds of both of them, allowing them to work very closely, to get the full assistance that a computer program could offer. While the UNSC found the idea an interesting one, they only granted the Director the funding and clearance to create one A.I. Instead of simply carrying out the experimental implants with just the one program, however, he decided that it was necessary to have more, and the next best way to do that was to copy it. Copying an A.I., who was given the name Alpha, being impossible however, fragmentation was the only way to get more--essentially to torture the A.I. psychologically until it isolated and split part of itself off to make things more bearable. The fragments were part of the Alpha's personality, pure, compartmentalized emotion... One was Alpha's logic, one rage, one creativity, etc.
The leaderboard, as it turned out, was used as a selection process to see which agents would get the A.I. fragments over others, giving all the more reason for competition between agents when the ones at the top began to receive their 'rewards.' Things went fairly well for most of the soldiers who got an A.I., though there were complications along the way that began to make some of the others wonder. Not believing that the Director would do anything bad to them, Washington was not among those that started to grow worried about what was really going on.
When the time came around for him to have his own implantation surgery, Wash just had the bad luck of being paired up with Epsilon, who was the fragment containing all of Alpha's memories. The memories of the fragmentation, of what had been done to it, of the torture, not to mention a few lingering memories from the mind that Alpha himself had been based on, who it should be noted, was the Director.
With the A.I. sharing his head, their minds so closely twined, things got particularly bad. Epsilon didn't last long before it began to lose it's mind. With everything that Alpha had been too, driven mad by the torture, how could one expect him to not come to rather the same fate? The biggest problem was, as Epsilon began to shed its lingering thoughts, emotions, and memories, Wash got them all; he saw and experienced everything, had memories that weren't his crammed into his head, and naturally...he lost it, as well.
Epsilon ended up unable to deal with it all and self-terminated, committed suicide while still in Washington's head, only adding further trauma to the Freelancer. Epsilon was removed, supposedly to be deleted, and Wash was certified as unfit for duty, locked up and put into isolation for recovery, though it wasn't really expected that he'd ever really be himself again.
While this was going on, poor Wash out of the loop and out of his mind, the Director called for all other AI to be removed in an effort to keep anyone from finding out the truth. The other Freelancers, however, had learned of what had been done to Alpha--or at least, some of it. Essentially, they knew what was going on in the program was wrong, and those that still had their A.I. wished to keep them, so they left. They broke out, separated, and hid from the Project for their own safety.
Cut to a long span of time later, Washington has recovered. ...Mostly. He's not exactly completely sane, but he's within acceptable deviations, and Project Freelancer needs his help. Something was killing off agents, hunting them down and murdering them in order to take their equipment, particularly their A.I.s, and naturally, the Director didn't want them to fall into the wrong hands, lest the UNSC find out what had been done to the single A.I. he'd been given. At this point, Washington was the only Freelancer left, and the only one they could truly trust with the job to follow distress beacons of fallen agents in order to recover their equipment before something else did. This was because, after what had happened with Epsilon, he was not looking to ever have another program sharing his mind, thus, he wouldn't steal and use any that he recovered. That, and...well, all the secrets he'd learned from Epsilon about what had been done to Alpha had to be kept secret. He'd had to hide what he knew from everyone, because if they found out what he knew, they'd surely kill him. Thus, he also couldn't risk another A.I. finding out, either.
At this point though, knowing everything he did, and knowing that the Project had been lying to all of them the entire time, using them and manipulating them, Washington was no longer the same old goody-two shoes. He took on a very new personality. The essentials are still there, perhaps, buried under piles of anger and betrayal, but most likely still there. Regardless of what may or may not have still been there, he was now a very bitter, very jaded individual with far less patience, and caring far less for following orders.
Working as a recovery agent, he wanted the Project to believe they could still trust him. That would make his ultimate goal of taking down what was left of the program far easier. So, he did the job; he scavenged deceased agents' bodies for their equipment, and destroyed what remained. he only ever managed to recover one A.I. before it was stolen by the person trying to collect them all, and this was simply because the A.I.'s host was killed in an unrelated firefight.
The A.I., Delta, was used as bait, in a way. Wash knew that with Delta in his possession, the one seeking all the A.I. would come to him, and he could attempt to take it down and end the whole thing. As it was, however, he ran into a fellow agent first. How? Well, he followed a recovery beacon leading him directly to her twin brother, who was killed for his A.I. Big surprise. South (short for South Dakota)was only left alive, it was thought, because she had no A.I. of her own. She'd been in the implant group behind Wash, and thus never got her own. Not after what happened to him. She was jealous, too, that much was easy to see.
Though given orders by Command to kill the remaining Dakota, as everything had to remain absolutely quiet and nothing about any of this mess could get out, Wash refused to do it. He played it off that he did, had Delta update the Projects information to list her and her brother North as K.I.A., and decided to use her to assist him in taking down the enemy, as he could use all the help he could get. Their current enemy had killed agents with a higher battle rating than Wash himself with what seemed like no effort. So yeah, some help would have been nice.
Things...didn't go as planned, though. He probably shouldn't have been surprised. Giving Delta to South so she could implant, to use the program to their advantage and keep it safe, it seemed she'd gotten what she wanted. Instead of helping Wash as a firefight broke out, she shot him in the back, and left him for the enemy so she could escape with Delta. Turned out, that had more or less been the plan all along. South had also been working for Command; Wash had been set up by the people he was working for just so they could get a glimpse of what they were up against, of who was stealing their precious equipment. Again, he'd been used, and South had left him to die as his equipment was scavenged. She'd done it all so she could get her own A.I., an agreement made with Command, though instead of going back to get one of her own, she held onto Delta.
Now, thankfully Washington didn't actually die. He survived, was brought back and healed, and again he had to go through a recovery process, though this one physical rather than mental. At this point, however, he only gets further from his old self--the bitterness only increased after being completely betrayed by a former teammate, by someone he'd always considered a friend, he harboured more anger, and found himself no longer able to trust anyone, the little bit of him that still could, despite everything the Project had done, had been completely eliminated and wiped out.
Where we pick up again, there have been more attacks, more A.I. stolen, all by what has been given the name of the Meta. The Meta, being another former Freelancer, who had previously been under the codename of Agent Maine. Wash is sent to gather more information on the most recent attack, one suspected to have been the capture of the A.I. named Omega, and found himself in need of some assistance from people who had dealt with the aggressive intelligence program before.
Unfortunately, those with the experience are essentially a band of idiots, sim troopers, "soldiers" that are placed into fake bases in a fake war between each other to be used as practice for Freelancers in training. Not that the idiots are exactly aware of any of this. They're almost impossible to deal with for Washington, as they're horribly immature, constantly arguing, and not exactly much assistance in battle.
It's basically one giant wild goose chase in an effort to track the Meta down and defeat him, to eliminate the threat and get all the A.I. back, full of nothing but frustrations and failures. To cut a long story short, after a cryptic clue is left by Delta (who was retrieved when the group ran into South while she was being attacked by the Meta, who they managed to fend off for the time being, though he got away. It should be noted that South is killed by Wash personally, in part for revenge, and in part to keep her, injured and not opposed to throwing someone else under the bus in the opportunity of self-preservation, from hampering their progress), Washington takes them all to Command, to Project Freelancer's headquarters to end this thing once and for all. Taking one certain sim trooper with him, leaving the others to keep watch while he's busy, Washington leads the trooper by the name of Church down into the A.I. storage room, where all the fragments not in use are stored. As it turns out (and this is a horribly brief summary), Church is actually the Alpha; he'd been disguised in a robot body and sent out under the belief that he was a human soldier, to live in a backwater canyon with a bunch of idiots, where no one could find him, where no one would think to look for the fabled Alpha. Wash tries to explain this all to Church, after finding the one A.I. that can actually help end what was left of the Project, that can be used as proof of what horrible things the Director had done--Epsilon. Turned out, it was cheaper to store an A.I. than it was to delete it, despite what they'd told Washington about what they did with the unstable fragment.
Of course, Church doesn't believe the story at first, about him being the Alpha, but after some serious convincing, he at least agrees to help Washington in the final stand (again this is all very hurried as this whole plot is extremely complex and long). Thus, the Freelancer sends Epsilon with the rest of the sim troopers to be taken to safety and then be delivered to the UNSC so the Director would be charged for everything he'd done, knowing that the Meta wouldn't go after them when he could get into the building that held so many more A.I.
Washington leads the Meta down into the lab, himself with Alpha implanted for the time being. Now, he knew full well that this was essentially a suicide mission. He wasn't expecting to get out alive, but that was perfectly okay with him. All Wash wanted to do was get his revenge on the Director, on the Project, for what was done to him, for what was done to his team and his friends. If he died taking down the remainder of the Project, then he died as happily as he could. He had nothing else to live for, at this point anyway.
The Meta was drawn down after him, and another long story short, Alpha distracts the Meta and the several A.I. housed within while Washington enters the codes for the building's failsafe--an electromagnetic pulse. The E.M.P. ends up going off successfully, destroying all electronic equipment in the building, each and every single A.I. included.
He thinks that it's finally over.
Somehow managing to find himself alive after it all, Washington also finds himself in prison for crimes he didn't commit, with the exception of destroying military intel. and evidence against the Director and the Project. It's not exactly the end he'd envisioned, and things only get more complicated again when he gets a call one day from one of the sim troopers who'd assisted him. Turns out, they didn't actually turn in Epsilon like they were supposed to, and Wash sees an opportunity in that. He gets a meeting with the Chairman, the one in charge of the investigating the Director, the one who locked him up in the first place, and explains the situation--he can get the guy what he wants, and all he wants in exchange is a way out of all this. He just wants to get out of prison, to get out of this mess he calls a life, to get as far away from it all as possible. In the end, he's granted the opportunity, sent to hunt down the sim troopers in order to get Epsilon and bring it back to the Chairman. The only twist is that he finds himself having to work with the Meta, who had also found himself locked up, and still intent on getting another A.I.
It's basically a whole new wild goose chase, but this ones different. This time, Washington's the bad guy, and the sim troopers are running away from him. This time, he's desperate, willing to do absolutely anything that it takes to just get Epsilon, deliver it to the Chairman, and get the hell out. He has to betray the people that helped him, fine, kill a few people, so be it. He'd rather not, sure, but at this point, he doesn't care. At this point, he's doing something purely for himself, because he's got nothing else. He's done--he's just got this one obstacle left to overcome, and he can finally just be done with it all.
But since when do things really work out for him? Chasing the simulation troopers around proves more difficult than previously thought, and they get away, just slipping through his grip, and it gets only more frustrating every time.
But then something weird happens.
He receives an incoming recovery beacon from Epsilon himself.
Naturally, he and the Meta follow it, though it's rather uneasily. It doesn't make sense, that they'd out of nowhere get exactly what they need to find the A.I., a trail leading right to him. As they arrive on the scene, it's easy to see the whole thing's a setup--one created by Agent Texas, who wants answers about the Director--but in not falling for what they believe is a trap, they...fall into the actual trap. It was elaborate, fooling them out of falling into what seemed like an obvious trap only to have them to do exactly as expected and fall into the real one. There's an explosion, and Washington finds himself knocked unconscious.
He's not out for long, and a fight ensues. It's two on one, Agent Texas versus Washington and the Meta, but still Texas, as the top agent back in Freelancer, takes the lead. However, after almost succeeding to take the both Wash and Meta out, she ends up in the Meta's grip, and he uses the A.I. capture unit they rigged up to finish her off (it's a looooong story, but basically Texas is actually an A.I. in a robotic body), and suddenly, with an A.I. right in his hands, he seems to have a change of heart. He turns on Washington with plans to kill him, and leave with not a care for the mission, just pleased to have an A.I. in his grasp again, one that he can use to run all the armor enhancements he still has. However, putting it very briefly, the simulation soldiers come to the rescue. Another battle goes down, this time the odds seem more in their favour, though Washington is down for the count. Injured from the battle with Texas, and the beginning of the one with the Meta, he's done. He sees that he's failed, he's seriously injured, and he's simply given up. He doesn't believe that the sim troopers, of all people, can defeat the Meta, except...in the end, they do. The Meta gets dropped off a cliff, and that's the end of that.
Meanwhile, Epsilon goes into the capture unit in order to save Texas, except that the unit is already malfunctioning, and ends up shutting down completely just after he goes in, essentially trapping him.
Here, Wash assumes he's going back to prison. He's failed his objective, and no doubt feeling some guilt, considering he completely turned his back on the sim troopers who'd helped him before, only to have them come in and save his life anyway. He's given up. However, despite the fact that they could easily turn him in and go back to their (mostly) peaceful lives, the sim troopers decide to help Wash again, and he doesn't understand why. Not that he stops them. In order to keep him from getting taken back to jail, they swap his armor out with Epsilon's (who, it should be noted, was in a robotic body like Tex's), switching the steel with yellow accents to cobalt blue with the same yellow accents. Not only that, but they take him with them, accept him onto the Blue Team, and bring him home with them. He's more appreciative of all of this than he really knows how to let on, not to mention holding on to a serious amount of gratitude toward them.
The UNSC at this point believes him to be dead.
Time passes (canon isn't clear on how much, or whether the teams even make it back to their bases after this whole crazy adventure), and the next time we see Washington, he's with the sim soldiers still, with the addition of one Agent Carolina, another former freelancer, and one that was believed to be dead up until she showed herself to them after presumably hunting Washington down. She wants revenge on the Director, she wants to kill him, and she wants his help. So, with him and the sim troopers in tow, they head off on another adventure in order to rescue Epsilon, as it's believed, given that he's Alpha's memories, and Alpha was based on the Director's mind, he'll know where the man is hiding.
They break into the facility Epsilon is being stored in, manage to get the unit working again, and get him out. Turns out he doesn't actually remember anything of use to them, sending them on a wild goose chase through areas they'd been before on previous missions in search of clues as to where the Director is hiding.
It should be noted that through all of this, Washington has gone through obvious changes in personality again, this time for the better. He's slowly beginning to relax, and it seems the sim troopers are the ones helping him to do so. He's sort of slipping a bit back more into who he was before, the kinder, less tightly-wound character. He's losing the bitterness, the anger, and coming to terms with things. He's accepting that what happened in the past happened, and there's nothing he can do but to get past it. He's moving on. Or, starting to, at least.
It's on this wild goose chase, this mission Carolina brings them along on, that he realizes he's found friends again. That he's actually started to trust again, despite the number done on him by the events in his past. He's healing, he's found himself a new team, a new group of friends, and he actually cares about them, as they do him. A pretty big development for him, and he shows this at one point when he puts a gun to Carolina's head, despite his having been quite the obvious subordinate to her before, obeying all of her orders, as he'd done in the past, when she threatens one of the sim troopers with her own weapon, and wants to use them as canon fodder in her plan.
It is, go figure, another loooong story that I can easily go more in depth into, but long story made short, despite their fighting and disagreeing, everyone works together in the end to fight their way to the Director. Washington doesn't go in with Carolina and Epsilon in order to kill him, though. Despite all the anger toward the man he'd held in the past, the revenge he'd so desperately wanted, he really has started to just let things go, and no longer feels the need for that revenge. But he does think it'll help Carolina to move on as well, and that's why he went along with her--because he wanted her to find the same sort of peace he himself was starting to find.
When it's all said and done, Washington and the simulation troopers find themselves in a canyon much like the one the latter were from originally, and he's much more part of the team, still finding his way out, back into some of the better aspects of his past self. He's starting to be happy again.