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Alyx Vance is back in the Bar, sipping a milkshake and tinkering with her Lego robot. This is nothing unusual, for her.

The "I ♥ NY" T-shirt, on the other hand, is a new addition.

[tinytag: Alyx Vance, Captain Viscen, Gordon Freeman, Jennifer Landers]

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"I didn't do anything bad," says Alyx. "I just wanted to see what was up on the floors they don't let people go to."

A beat. "What's the Space Needle?"

"It's a tower they built in Seattle a good ten years before I was born," says Gordon. "Six hundred feet high. Big tourist attraction, but frankly, the thing was always overrated. People'd stand in line for hours just to get up to the top."

"I dunno, there was a hell of a view from the observation deck..."

"I can imagine." Gordon smiles. "I'm glad you got to see that. Did you get any pictures before they made you leave?"

"Dr. Stantz took some on his phone. I've got 'em on the laptop, hang on..."

It only takes a few moments to call up a slideshow of the grainy cell-phone photos.

Gordon leans over to examine them thoughtfully. "Interesting, I-" He frowns a little. "Wait. This one."

It's a shot taken from the south side of the building.

"There's buildings missing. I wonder if his world ever had the Twin Towers."

"Hm. I dunno, he never mentioned anything like that. What's missing, exactly?"

"A pair of buildings a hundred and ten stories tall, one of them with a massive red and white radio antenna on it," Gordon says. "They were called the Twin Towers or the World Trade Center in our world. Any picture of New York City had them in it." He shakes his head. "Ask him next time you see him. Now I'm curious."

She nods. "I'll do that."

A beat.

"...okay, I know this is kind of random, but there's something I want to ask you about..."

Up go the eyebrows, but Gordon nods; he's listening, albeit warily.

Random goes to peculiar places these days, he's noticed.

"When I last talked to Annabelle Newfield, she said that women were considered property in her world for most of human history. Is that something unique to her world, or...?"

Ah.

"No," Gordon says. "No, it's not. It was like that in ours too. And probably a lot of others as well."

Alyx stares blankly at Gordon for several seconds.

.

.

.

"Why?"

"Because any one man is capable of siring multiple children by multiple women at any given time, but any one woman can only bear one man's child at a time, and it was the simplest way for a man to ensure that the children born in his household and raised with his resources were his genetic offspring."

Gordon's closest academic contacts with people outside the physics department at MIT were with the anthropologists.

"B--what??" she almost shrieks.

Gordon shrugs. "That's what the social science types at MIT used to say about it," he says. "A lot of social justifications got tacked onto it along the way. But basically, that's probably why. Don't look at me, I didn't come up with it."

"But why is it his household??" Alyx protests. "She lives there too!"

"Because during most of human evolution and societal development, the male was physically more capable of fending off competitors for resources than the female," Gordon says.

"Since when?!"

"The Stone Age," Gordon says. "It made a lot of difference, back when a sharp piece of flint on a stick was the height of human technology."

Then he pauses, considering Alyx's situation. A little more carefully he says, "How much do you know about human evolution, anyway? Has that ever come up?"

"Um... I know the basic progression, I think," she says after a few seconds' thought. She's dusting off some very little-used memories. "You have the early hominids, then Homo habilis, then Homo erectus, then Neanderthals, then Cro-Magnons. Right?"

"About right. Although the Neanderthals were a side branch, not part of the main progression." Gordon rubs at his face with one hand. "Our early ancestors were very sexually dimorphic. It wasn't until intelligence became a primary factor in human survival, as opposed to physical prowess, that the tendency towards larger, stronger males and smaller, slighter females started to decrease. And even after most of that difference was gone, humanity as a species still had its old habits. Males had always been the fighters and defenders, so of course they were supposed to be that way."

He places both hands palm-down on the table.

"It's crap, you understand. If evolutionary history was the sole arbiter of right and wrong, humans wouldn't be living in groups of more than about two hundred, and nobody would particularly care about the welfare of anybody outside their immediate genetic relatives. But people had a lot of emotional and psychological investment in the old power and property structures, so they spent their time and effort reinforcing and justifying them rather than give up and admit that things that favored them personally weren't necessarily right."

Alyx is silent as she processes this.

( "I find it helpful at times like these to remind myself that our true enemy is Instinct. Instinct was our mother when we were an infant species. Instinct coddled us and kept us safe in those hardscrabble years when we hardened our sticks and cooked our first meals above a meager fire and started at the shadows that leapt upon the cavern's walls..." )

It's more than a little unnerving to think that Dr. Breen might be right about something.

Gordon knows a thoughtful silence when he hears one; he's had plenty of them himself. He'll let this one go on a while.

Eventually, though, he notes, "When it's all over, and the Combine are gone, the human race is going to have to put itself together again. Not everything in the past is worth throwing out, just like not everything is worth keeping. But people have to understand where we've come from if we're ever going to be able to move forward again."

Alyx nods. "That makes sense. I think."