The first time she stepped foot in it, the entrance lobby of the Apple Valley, Minnesota Frinet facility looked exactly like Silicia had expected it would. The modest minimalism of smooth off-white walls and a carpet so unobtrusively patterned that your eyes just slid right past if you weren't looking directly at it created an almost eerily familiar effect, like she should have known her way around already, because the picture before her was made up of individual elements she'd seen a million times before in too many tech jobs.

Silicia walked confidently up to the floor plan overview map next to the elevator to study it. The eyes of the security guards followed her. That would take some getting used to.

She pressed the button for floor 8, overthinking how shady tapping her foot would make her look. Silicia didn't typically consider herself a nervous person, but this job was the opportunity of a lifetime.

The music in the elevator was better than the lobby, but not good, and the thing was carpeted. It rumbled to life under her feet and Silicia wondered how old the building was, anyway. She knew that Frinet was a rather old company; she'd read up on it when Mira got a position here a few years ago. During her meteoric rise through the company's ranks she'd trodden on quite a few feet and smugly shared with her girlfriend quite a few details of its internal conflicts, but that had never included architectural fun facts.

That had always been the thing with Mira; she was zoomed out and good at holding the larger picture in her mind, and so she became a professional in focussing on large goals and ignoring the small inconveniences. A good chunk of the decor they'd bought for her newest office still sat untouched in a box under her desk at home. The only thing that had made it into her workspace was a framed photo of the two of them at Mira's graduation.

Silicia figured she might change that, now that she'd have access to the building for most of the week. She'd been daydreaming about buying stupid little holiday ornaments to put up ever since she'd gotten the formal confirmation they would hire her. Improving Mira's image via strategically placed humanizing thingamabobs was a long standing conversation topic between the two of them, and Mira always called her 'such a psych student' when she tried to argue for anything but success via cold hard merit.

Not that she could really claim it hadn't worked for Mira - after all, it was her promotion which finally rescued Silicia from the twenty-something-trying-to-make-it-in-the-big-city hamster wheel. Like any good morally driven idealist, she'd had doubts about being pushed into a wall and having 'I got you a job, babe' whispered in her ear seductively. She'd argued, lied about liking her previous pencil-pusher job, even.
Mira had run a hand through her hair and told her she'd have gotten the job without her help had she'd just applied, and that had been that.

The elevator announced her floor in a hollowly cheerful female voice, and Silicia checked her watch to see that she was almost 20 minutes early.

The senior employee waiting for her arrival in the small 8th floor lobby was a soft spoken beanstalk of a man named Frederick who kept wringing his hands and smoothing down the front of his thick wool jumper like he didn't know what to do with his spindly limbs while he wasn't gesturing at things around them. Her initial impression of him was positive; he didn't comment on her choice of haircut or attire, nor on how she'd gotten the position. Fred led her through multiple ecru corridors, pointing out rooms to either side.

Up here, the flooring was linoleum, and the rooms were labelled with little hand written slips of paper in transparent plastic casings on the wall like they did in hospitals. Overall it was quite charming, and the elevation meant a lot more sunlight reached floor 8 than did the ground floor.

Fred's tour ended on what was to be her office, although at the moment it was still cluttered with the remnants of its previous occupant. He apologized - they were in the process of clearing the place out but scheduling conflicts had intervened. For now, she put down her bag on the broad office chair and pinned the fancy name tag he handed her to the front of her shirt, then she followed him two doors down to his first appointment of the day.

---

She could smell Mira was home and cooking from the stairway. The flat they shared was technically hers, but in reality Mira slept and spent most of her free time there. It was wonderful, not living alone after college, especially when she occasionally enjoyed the truly decadent luxury of coming home and having someone there already waiting for her with food.

She cracked the door open and it smelled even better inside.

In the kitchen Mira was lazily stirring a pot, her eyes glued to the little hedgehog shaped timer that sat on the counter. Silicia came up to her to wrap her arms around Mira's waist and she sank back against her like she'd been born to do it, turning down the stove absent-mindedly.

"How was it?"

"Oh, terrible," Silicia said with a grin. "Madhouse up in there. I'm not the kind of psychologist they need."

Mira huffed a laugh, jostling her. "I suppose you do have to be a little bit sick in the head to voluntarily work with children."

"How's it going four floors above me, then?"

"Oh, terrible! Half the floor is gaudy luxury furnishings we're invited to use, the other is so tightly packed with machinery and research equipment you can't walk over to the coffee machine without stepping on a cable-" Mira laughed and tapped the wooden spoon she was still holding against the rim of the pot.

"Where am I going to put down my coffee!"

---

Frinet had only recently started venturing into the field of education more seriously, a direction they'd been considering for a while, and from the way Mira talked about it one she had been personally encouraging. The company had been offering a selection of individual courses for adults for years, but more recently this facility's middle floors had been torn out and rebuilt to create a sort of in-house boarding school.

Their first group of students had arrived less than a month ago, bringing life to brand new corridors and classrooms full of chairs that didn't creak yet. It was only about 30 children, the exact number to hit that middle ground between a surely uncountable amount of overlapping business calculations. "Lest they risk having children breach containment and wreak havoc in the main lab above them," she'd joked, and Fred had grimaced like he was imagining 30 children set loose in his office.

All this to say, the psychologists' offices on floor eight were numbered one through fifteen and all practically identical, though most were not in use. Fred had hauled one of the chairs from the copious small seating areas that were strewn about the building's halls to make it seem less clinical over for her, so she sat at the back of the room, smiled at the children, and listened.

Fred's method was very by the book, and she surmised that like her he was likely pretty green as well. The questions and encouragement were rehearsed, but not met with much pushback from the children. It was clear they were used to things like this. Aside from the standard evaluation questions he knew off the top of his head, Fred kept referencing a stapled together document; it was just a few pages, formatted very plainly from what she could spy.

After all the children had completed the mandated half hour of personal evaluation and support (of which there was conveniently very little needed), he finally addressed the way she'd been subtly trying to lean over to catch a closer look at the print out. Apparently the document was the real crux of their jobs: it contained both very specific as well as rather intentionally vague sounding instructions on what information he should collect for his weekly reports.
It stuck out to her how normal most of the questions were, but maybe they just didn't trust them enough to live up to the company's standards without hand holding yet.

Chapter 2

Silicia sat in on Fred's sessions for a bit over a week, gaining an understanding of her job and doing her best to make a good impression on the children. Once or twice the schedule on the wall of the 8th floor lobby said that she would be helping out with serving at meal time, which she took as the chance to ingratiate herself that it was likely meant to be.

For the most part the children were surprisingly subdued, quietly reading or studying at meal time and politely answering questions with only the occasional rude joke or prank. When Fred had told her they'd been specifically selected by the project heads, she'd thought he'd meant for their grades.
Although it made little sense to her, as she started having unsupervised one-on-ones with them it became clear to her that they had been selected for their personalities.

---

"Would you say you feel like you've been negatively affected by the move into the facility?" She asked, peering at a young boy over her clipboard.

It was only a two year program, so the students were young and would be young still when they left them. In many ways, it was the perfect trial run, cleverly maximizing the good publicity while keeping costs comparatively low. If the gamble turned out well, the company would doubtlessly launch a more extensive program, and Silicia was hoping to prove herself worthy of being kept on for it.

"It's scary to not know the place yet, I guess," the boy answered hesitantly, his hands fidgeting in his lap. 'Nervous disposition', Silicia noted down.

As the weather turned, Silicia settled in. Her desk was still sparsely decorated, mostly because of how long she wavered on picking a colour scheme for the office. Eventually she went with warm fall colours, but first she'd dragged Mira around an Ikea for almost two hours looking exclusively at the different throw blankets they offered. It was important to her to create a coherent space with positive associations.

The children eyed each new piece of decor that appeared with mute interest, but rarely commented on anything, with the exception of the box of fidget toys that found a home on the corner of her desk and which was very well received.

The scope of what was asked of her in her weekly reports gradually expanded, which was to say it got more and more abstract. While to begin with she was collecting standard questionnaire answers, enumerating hobbies and friends, soon she was reporting about fears, about character and deeply held insecurities. In short, she was building a profile. Or, many profiles. Evaluating a whole person was a scary power to exercise - though Silicia supposed that really, she held it over anyone she knew. Here it was made all the more daunting by the monotony of it.

She honestly got the sense it was less the effectiveness of their own learning programs, and more the dynamics of the human mind itself that Frinet was studying. Luckily, that was what she'd studied too.

---

"Miss Dale?"

The girl had stayed in her seat even after their session officially concluded, clearly working up to something. Her mousy brown hair fell in front of her eyes with her head lowered as it was, hiding her expression from Silicia. She could hear her swallow nervously in the small quiet room.

"What is it, Celia?"

"I'm sorry if this is mean, but why is your hair so short?"

Silicia cocked her head to the side, weighing her answer.

"Because I like it that way."

"But aren't you a girl like me? Doesn't anyone stop you cutting it?"

The girl looked up finally, and Silicia froze under the earnest look in her wide eyes.

"You don't have to have long hair to be a girl, you know," she said very lamely, leaning her chin on her hand and smiling at Celia like she felt at all qualified to explain the societal nuances of gender expression to a preteen.

The girl's eyebrows drew together like she was thinking very hard about this. Silicia made a note to talk to whomever was responsible for maintaining the children's hair cuts, and then added a less empathetic note to Celia's report sheet.

---

"See," Mira started, in a tone that meant she'd been thinking about this for weeks, "If I perfectly copied the connections in your brain and ran that file on an emulator- would that be you or just an AI do you think?"

"I think that would matter very little to anyone but said emulation," Silicia quipped, spearing a piece of bell pepper with her fork.

Across the table Mira grinned, wide and showing all her teeth.
She'd been talking a lot about constructing consciousness recently, and that had been the answer she was looking for, judging by her expression.

"I really think if one wanted to create an intelligent program, it is just the most effective option to take what we already have," she'd said on a different occasion, while they were stopped at the side of the road to reorganize the groceries in Silicia's bag.

"There is just no need to go bottom up on this - besides. You know the complexity of a human brain? It takes so much to even make basic decisions. Starting from nothing by running algorithms of increasing complexity is just an absurd waste of power, let alone time."

She was clearly just wanting to get validation about an argument she'd had at work. Silicia had gingerly placed a lightly bruised mango on a packet of dried pasta and did not ask why Mira would be attempting to simulate consciousness in the first place.

"Is that even possible?" she'd asked instead, and Mira had frowned.

"Well, theoretically it should be."

Chapter 3

Silicia's breath was visible in the early December air as she struggled to balance the pine wreath on one knee while digging around her bag for the keys.

The days were short and dark now, which she'd always liked, although it was a pain to spend every hour of daylight inside and return home only to see the sun was already disappearing behind the horizon. Somehow it made the world feel smaller, and Silicia always made an effort to be cheery for the people around her this time of year.
Neither of them cared all that much about christmas, but they marked the occasion anyway.
She had tracked down a rare book about cultural conceptions of the human mind for Mira, and rushed home the earliest she could for nearly a week so her girlfriend wouldn't be the one to receive the package when it arrived.
Fortunately, this worked out as she'd hoped: earlier when she'd left to buy the wreath, the wrapped book had been sitting on her doormat, waiting for her.

Snow blanketed the city and she wore the nice cashmere scarf Mira had gotten her last year to work daily. It was possibly the closest to a perfect christmas she could get, as an atheist.

---

The next few months went by as months rarely did: predictably. For once she felt neither like time was crawling to a stop, nor that she was endlessly chasing impossible deadlines as the days sped by. In fact, everything really seemed very within reach. This was new but of course not unwelcome. She found the children cooperative, her coworkers friendly, and her sleep restful. Her desk had been slowly accumulating piles of notes, trinkets, and personality. Reports got easier and quicker to write the more she'd finished, and for possibly the first time in her life Silicia felt like she was getting a snatch of the motivating upwind that had carried Mira into an overseer position for one of the top research teams of what was possibly to be the biggest company in the country.

Something had to go wrong eventually, of course, because Silicia was just a very unlucky person like that. Still, it took her a good two weeks to actually notice.

---

Silicia frowned as she crossed out yet another week's time block in her pocket calendar labeled 'Claire'. When the girl hadn't shown up to the first one, she'd gone out to check the large roster on the pin board in the lobby and found their session that week canceled.
Silicia had left her quiet office to get a coffee from the machine, and on her way out spotted Anne dozing in one of the nicer chairs in a seating area at the end of the corridor.

Having to wait had soured her mood enough to make her stride over to rudely wake her fellow psychologist. Anne groggily told her that Claire was sick, and that someone had probably just forgotten to tell her in time.

The following week she used her free hour to sit in the 12th floor seating area and drink bad vending machine coffee with Mira. When on Monday she found the next session with Claire not canceled but missing from the schedule entirely, she did a terrible thing: she wrote an email.
The 8th floor's manager told her the same thing Anne had, only now the story was that she'd gotten so sick she'd been pulled from the program altogether.

This, at first, was aggravating but not suspicious. It became suspicious when Kate, one of Claire's closest friends, asked after her. Silicia repeated the little hand me down story. Kate frowned in confusion as though she were hearing of Claire's illness for the first time, and Silicia felt suddenly like there was a chunk of ice sitting in her stomach.

---

She'd arrived earlier than normal, and her calculation had worked out. She was loitering by the coffee machine just in time for Fred to arrive, which made the two of them the only people on the floor this early. He looked surprised to see her there but didn't comment, just nodded good morning and stalked towards his office to stow his bag. Silicia pointedly pressed down the button for a latte, producing a definite click.

"One for you too?"

"Please," said Fred gratefully, and she hid her smile as he disappeared down the corridor. Step one successful.

She stirred a packet of sugar into her own coffee and started the program for his, then sank down into one of the chairs to wait. The sun rising in the window behind her painted stripes on the ceiling and walls.

"What has you up so early?"

Fred took his coffee, emptied two milk packets into it and then, to Silicia's relief, took a seat by her instead of excusing himself immediately.

"Couldn't sleep, so I figured it wouldn't really matter where I drank my coffee," she started, feeling like she was speaking too fast but unable to stop herself.
"If I turn out to be coming down with something I really hope I didn't catch it from Claire."

Fred twitched minutely at her mentioning the girl, and she knew it, she'd known there was something. She took a scalding gulp from her cup instead of blurting out a question to let him work out a reply.

"Yeah. Poor thing," Fred said weakly.

"Wonder where she caught it, though. None of the other kids have anything I don't think, although I suppose Allan is newly out with a cold too."

Allan- who hadn't been removed from public life without a trace. He'd almost definitely caught it from Anne, who'd told Fred over the phone she'd got it from her father when she called in sick, and then he had told Silicia that yesterday. She was counting on him putting together that she'd connected the dots there.

"Well," Fred said vaguely, gesturing with his paper cup like he was alluding to some universal truth. "Children. Disease magnets, they are."

In this case disease magnets with extremely limited contact to the outside world and no pre-existing illnesses more severe than a cat allergy, according to their medical records. It would seem that she'd need to push.

Silicia turned to him fully, not quite dropping her nonchalant act but deliberately leaving the metaphorical door open.

"What do you think it is?"

He met her eyes but only briefly, using the cup in his hands as a pretense to look away. When he replied she wasn't sure he himself knew what question he was answering.

"I really don't know, Silicia. They told me the same thing they told everyone."

---

That entire week, she was the first one home, and it only contributed to her somber mood. She didn't really know what to make of Claire's disappearance (as she'd begun to call it in her head), and so she made stew instead.

Everything continued on as normal. Perfect, really. Silicia liked her job.

It was beginning to eat at her how little attention she'd payed the girl before this.

---

"The biggest issue with replicating a brain," Mira opened, talking in full swing even before she'd sat down, "is actually accessing that original data, as it turns out."

Silicia rested her chin on one hand and nodded to the cooling cup of coffee already sitting on Mira's side of the table, prepared to her exact specifications.

"You can't just hook it up to a voice box and have it tell you about what you want to know?"

Mira's expression made her laugh. Her girlfriend looked at her like she was missing the point so completely it was hard for her to even grasp what to explain first, so in the end she just continued on.

"We've gathered our base data, in multiple formats of course. We thought it would kind of work like a rosetta stone if we matched up our map of neural connections with the protein clusters and so on, but, well."

She took her first sip of the coffee and shot Silicia a brief smile of approval before barrelling on. Silicia wondered if rubber ducking for a classified project could get her, or worse, both of them, sacked.

"We can simulate things in their totality, but that's useless; we'll still need to construct a whole new complex system to actually read specific parts, see."

"You're not wanting to lean into mind uploading? Could be profitable," Silicia teased.

"Oh no, no, definitely not. That's a whole other can of worms and they could not pay me enough to open it. I'm just here to pick apart the human brain and sell the bits."
Saying this, Mira laughed, genuinely, happily, and Silicia was genuinely happy for her, getting to do what she'd always wanted. Nevertheless she spent the rest of the day imagining what Mira would do with the ability to fully de-mystify someone's thoughts.

---

The weather was still drearily wet, but shameful as it may have been, Silicia's mood was lifting again. The open question of Claire's whereabouts was still weighing on her, but as the world seemed to move on seamlessly it almost became hard to hold onto the fact that she had been real in the first place. Silicia was working off of very limited information, even if the official story actually was untrue - for all she knew what they were hiding could have been as innocent as Claire's parents pulling her from the program. It would have looked bad, and she knew well that a pioneer project's spotless record was always more important than reality.

Passing the security guards at the front entrance had stopped bothering her, seeing as she'd walked by them every day for a good year now, and they, too, didn't pay much attention to her anymore. She'd started to actually notice who worked what days, and intended to make an effort to memorize their names, although that idea died a slow death as she struggled to find excuses to come close enough to read the name tags.

Soon, summer swept over the facility's grounds and the days already grew longer again, and then the children would be leaving them soon. It all came far too quickly, as endings always do. She'd gotten so used to her little life here that when she turned the page on her calendar to find the enddate marked right there at the end of the new month, she scrambled for the newspaper to confirm what day it was.

But it was true, and if she was unlucky, the leaving children would be taking her job with them.

Silicia found herself in a state of restlessness for the remainder of the month from which her concentration suffered. Her relief was immeasurable when they finally deigned to send her a summons to discuss her (hopefully) continued employment with the department's manager.

She walked into the room and back out not fifteen minutes later, quite unable to recall most of it. Her job was safe however, thanks to the next batch of students - larger this time, and she'd been assured that wouldn't mean more work for her, just more colleagues.
The day after she received an email containing a summary of the coming years - information which she found easier to absorb and retain now that she knew she wouldn't be cut loose. Their new wards would naturally be subjected to a much improved learning regime, and intimately involved in the company's research on the human brain. Thus, she would now actually be told who her reports were going to, which would change as the research project progressed.

They were looking to use the children in a number of non-invasive studies that were suited to the controlled environment the facility provided, and she would be instrumental in recommending the right children to the researchers - essentially the same job she already held.

This all sounded quite exciting to her, and even more than that it sounded like Mira would be overjoyed at the path the company was taking. When she arrived at the flat that night, Mira grinned at her proudly and declared that she looked forward to having Silicia under her.

---

"It's so quiet here, now," said Anne, her head laid limply over the back of a lobby chair next to Silicia.

The children were leaving, one by one. They all went home to different places, and so the facility's middle floors had been clearing out gradually as cleaning crews moved into the vacated space. The floors' former occupants had left marks all over - chips in the tables and skirting boards, stains on the carpets and spots where small bored fingers had picked at the wallpaper.

Her office hadn't felt quite right in the quiet afternoon, or maybe she was just feeling a little wistful. Either way, Silicia had taken her papers out into the 8th floor lobby to escape it. Her coworker had already been there, maybe for a similar reason. While Silicia was still making an effort to not let the late summer heat slow her brain down, Anne had already sunken into her seat, abandoned stacks of paper and binders strewn around her.
Silicia couldn't blame her, and in fact was planning on following her example once she'd read through the paragraph she was currently struggling to keep her eyes on.

After re-reading the second to last sentence for the fourth or fifth time without processing any of it, she gave up and leaned her cheek against the chair's sun warmed back. Silicia closed her eyes to feel her thoughts dissolve for a moment, drifting in the unreality of a warm summer's day. She thought vaguely of Mira and her hands that were always warmer than hers.

Then Anne shifted, and the slight rustle of fabric snapped Silicia back into her body.

"Lucky them, imagine having to sit in a classroom all day in this weather," she said quietly, and Anne's answering laugh matched her volume. Outside a bus pulled up, loud in the languid silence.

Chapter 4

An explosion on the turned-down tv woke Silicia, and she blinked awake on the couch, half spread over Mira's lap. Her girlfriend was just hanging up the phone - it was one of those modern hand helds, provided by Frinet to important people. Of course, Mira was important. She cut the person on the other end of the line off with a definite good night, smiling down fondly at Silicia all the while.

She didn't really feel like speaking yet, so she just hummed inquisitively.

"I've just gotten something approved," Mira said with the confidence of someone who'd known they'd get their way from the start.
"You wanna go back to sleep here or move to the bedroom?"

Silicia made a non-committal sound and closed her eyes again, smiling when Mira wound gentle arms around her middle and started lifting her.

---

The next day Silicia came into her office to find a document sitting primly in the middle of her desk, and wondered for a split second if she'd forgotten to lock the door the day before, despite the key she'd just used to get in still being in her hand.

It was an offer of a promotion, more or less. She would be moved a rung up inside the department, gaining some coordination responsibilities in exchange for an amount of money that was hard to turn down. Underneath that was an invitation to an administrative meeting.

---

"Obviously you take that," Fred said, gesturing at her with a french fry before he bit into it.

"I didn't earn it though, did I?" She strode over to the nearest trash bin to drop her cleared paper plate inside before he could swallow and answer. When she returned he was frowning at her.

"Watever, sure, why does that matter so much? I wouldn't say you exactly don't deserve it either."

Silicia grimaced, and shrugged. It felt like being gifted something she would never be able to afford to give in return.

"Si, you can't not - Besides, you could abuse your position of privilege to make some of those surely huge benefits trickle down to the rest of us."
She watched him wink and stuff another fry into his mouth and tried to imagine what Mira's expression would be like if she told her she'd turned the promotion down. She so rarely did things that Mira would be taken aback by.

---

The few months inbetween classes she had very little to do, though still more than the others, who were officially her team now. They'd been doomed to endless workshops and meetings about didactic methods and the like, while Silicia sat in her office and wrote templates for them to help coax the information the evaluation team wanted out of the children. By far the worst part was that they had her writing reports on her fellow psychiatrists, but she managed even this without losing her ability to look them in the eye somehow.

While she didn't answer directly to Mira, her girlfriend did now oversee the greater research project and would occasionally slip Silicia ideas on how to charm her underlings or what questions to put emphasis on. It all felt very important, and sort of exciting, like things Mira was involved in often did.

Every time they talked about it, it seemed more clear to her that Mira was looking for something specific in the children. Silicia couldn't guess at more than the vaguest shape of it, until one Saturday night when they were walking home from the cinema and Mira straight up told her.

"You give me too much power, first at work and now outside it too," Silicia teased, stowing Mira's clutch in her backpack when she'd gotten tired of carrying it.

"You always say that, but I'm telling you, it's me who's got too much. It's giving me a big head, I'm starting to scheme!"

Silicia laughed, and hooked her arm through Mira's, who was shivering a bit in the quickly cooling evening air. The skin of her own arms was pebbled with gooseflesh, and close as they were Mira's hair tickled her exposed shoulder.

"Whose murder are you planning, then?"

"Oh no one's, no one's - but," she leaned in conspiratorily and almost overbalanced in her spindly heels on the cobble stone.
"I do have a target in mind."

"If you get arrested for manslaughter maybe they'll give me your job," Silicia suggested cheerfully.

"No, no - I just need someone to base my AI off," Mira confided easily, grinning at her with infectious enthusiasm.

"One of the children?"

"Ten points to Gryffindor! And next you can guess who will find them for me!"

---

The entire 8th floor was conscripted to help with getting the new children moved in, probably to make the staff seem approachable on first impression. It was immediately obvious that for this batch of fresh meat a much wider net had been cast vis à vis personality.

Over the next month Silicia would be very busy, as it had been revealed to her recently that the evaluations of her team she'd been made to pen had not actually been intended for performance reviews as she'd feared, but to make this next task easier for her: Silicia was to personally meet every student to assess which counselor would suit them best.

Since they'd hired enough new ones to bring their number up to eight and Silicia didn't know anything about the new arrivals, her evaluations would go to an impromptu council (on which Mira served) to settle the final match-ups.

Most of the children were quite average- or, all of them were, because they were dreadfully young teens. She could only note down 'struggles with self worth' so many times before she already spotted it in their mannerisms before they'd even closed the door behind themselves.
The real issue was the sheer volume: she felt that this really ought to be at least a two person job. Nevertheless, she went to work every morning with an extra granola bar in her pocket as a mood lifter, and went home every day with a headache, and made it through the month.

---

A shy boy with sandy blonde hair trotted into her office and Silicia almost groaned and let slip her annoyance.

His fringe shadowed his eyes, but after he'd sat he looked up and hesitantly smiled at her. She returned it without really thinking and launched into her little introductory speech. By now it was well rehearsed.

At the top of her note pad it said 'Tump' in large block letters, underlined twice so it would draw her eye when she'd inevitably be rifling through a whole pile of practically identical files to retrieve this one.

The boy was suggestible and insecure, but possessed an innate kindness that she'd rarely seen in children. He had a funny, slightly pinched expression on his face as she made him go through the hypothetical scenarios and exercises on her sheet that she couldn't quite decipher.

---

The kid greeted her with a formality more befitting a business meeting. Alec had almost unnervingly light eyes and windswept dark hair, and he chatted to her happily about his home life and personal opinions. There was a certain incongruousness about him that she observed, because he was very clearly just as busy observing her as she was him.

He was a charming kid, if one was willing to look past every word out of his mouth being a lie.

Silicia crossed out the entire paragraph of notes she'd begun writing and started fresh. He was telling her what he thought he should - generally fairly normal behavior - only he was crafting a whole personality for himself with impressive precision, especially for a thirteen year old. It was only his occasional minute expressions of displeasure at what he was saying that gave him away.

She let him do it. This was not a therapy session, it was an evaluation, but she did include her own speculation on the things he did not say - topics he noticeably glossed over, the little twitch his nose did whenever he said something she thought likely to be entirely fictional, the way he sat ramrod straight with serious eyes yet his clothes and hair looked like he'd just come in from the playground.

---

She kept meeting Mira over break, but was far too distracted to make intelligent conversation. Instead, she drank her caffeine in desperate gulps and listened to her girlfriend recount office gossip.
Mira was not the person people gossipped with, with her general air of authority, but she had something of a talent for eavesdropping and persuading people to tell her their secrets. That was how she'd gotten Silicia's trust in the first place.

---

The next child was a very short girl, who performed a little leap to get the door to properly close.

She strode up to Silicia's desk confidently, stepped half onto the chair, and held her hand out to introduce herself as Rin. Silicia shook it, amused, and waited wordlessly as the girl folded her legs under her with great care before launching into her usual opening monologue.

Rin was confident to a fault and had a strong sense of what was right and wrong, although some of the trickier questions baffled her completely. That was alright; 'no idea' was also an acceptable answer. She was one of the slightly younger children, and it showed. Nevertheless, she was very sweet in the way that children who had realized how to leverage the power they had over adults were, and a few times Silicia got the suspicion that the girl was playing it up for her.

She left with one of Silicia's fidget toys in her pocket and waved to her before closing the door.

---

"Cris," said the child, nodding to her before sitting. His prim and proper demeanor was sort of cute, like a little highborn gentleman.

He was undeniably also sort of worrisome. Cris watched her with attentive eyes, and was always very careful to consider his words before he spoke, even about little things. The way he would cock his head made her think of a bird evaluating whether she was more likely to feed it or shoo it away.

The boy had an unwavering self assurance about him nevertheless, thrown into stark relief against the unguarded confusion on his face that some of her questions produced. It was almost like he'd never thought about himself within the context of others' perception - he was a refreshing exception in that.

---

Anne sometimes brought her a cup of the flavoured hot water the coffee machine in the lobby called tea in the evenings, and listened to Silicia lament how exhausting her job was. She herself was busy still with various crash courses about pedagogy and the like, and sharing them with the other 8th floor staff made her a handy source on them. She even let Silicia talk through a few of the cases she struggled to definitively assign to someone, and about halfway through Silicia found herself stopping in the tea isle of the grocery store considering buying Anne a fancy Oolong as a thank you.

Her entire life she'd made friends easily and then lost them when she moved on, to a new school, to uni, to a new job. She was under no illusion that this friendship would be any sturdier, but it was wonderful to have Anne while she did anyway.

---

The kid carried himself like someone trying their hardest to appear as small as they could. Erik shuffled meekly into her office and kept his eyes downcast for the entire half hour. Silicia got the sense that he was making as little noise as possible, and without really thinking about it she lowered her voice too, trying to put him at ease as though he were a frightened animal.
Out of what she'd optimistically call curiosity, she mispronunced his last name, waiting to see if he would speak up to correct her. He did, but had she not already known better she would not have been able to make out the correct pronunciation, so quiet was his complaint.

She really hoped he would open up a bit after he'd had time to settle in, because if not whoever was assigned to him would have their hands full trying to get through even the basic forms with him.

---

The more she wrote, the more diligent her note taking got, because she knew that otherwise the children would start blending with each other in her mind. Her impulsive notes in the margins became invaluable, as she trusted the judgement of her in-the-moment self more than her poring-over-stacks-of-notes self.
People were all different, but they were fundamentally also all the same. Although that fact was arguably the basis of her job it did start stressing her out a bit. Silicia started wondering if she shouldn't start sorting the children into personality archetypes to standardize the process, then suffered a moment of dreadful clarity in which she realized that would be an insane thing to do.

Mira was in very high spirits - or maybe it was just the contrast to Silicia's own mood that made it seem that way? - and interestedly read Silicia's finished reports, often in front of her, and often delightedly remarking on details. Silicia hadn't the heart to tell her she only vaguely remembered most of what she'd written once it was edited and sent off.

Chapter 5

It seemed that Mira had taken the week before Silicia's deadline off work to sit in their (Silicia's) apartment and cover the dinner table completely in methodically annotated and colour-coded print outs of Silicia's work. Every time she walked past, Mira seemed to have arranged them into different piles.

Finally, one night as Silicia was dozing off with her chin resting on the back of the sofa, her face turned towards Mira at the table but her attention steadily slipping, Mira slapped her hands on the table top so loudly it startled Silicia fully awake all at once.

"I've got it!" she exclaimed, pointing at her dazedly blinking girlfriend, triumph lighting up her face. Silicia frowned, eyes flicking between her and the reports on the table, unable to put together what the breakthrough could be. She had to take a few deep breaths to calm her still frantically beating heart before she could ask:
"Got what?"

"My lynchpin!"

This did not clear up her confusion, and it must have shown on her face because Mira's expression softened and she came around the couch to settle next to her.

"I know who is going to be the base for my program. Remember I told you I wanted to make an intelligent computer program?"

"Oh," Silicia said dumbly, finding herself unable to fathom what remarkable quality of the children she'd missed that would have stood out to Mira. She laid her cheek back against the cushion and closed her eyes, humming happily when Mira slid a warm hand up her neck and began gently combing her fingers through the short hair at the back of her head.

"I need a teen for this because I'm looking to minimize the amount of data I'll have to wrangle, but I don't want to lose out on too much complexity. My test data was very helpful for improving our foundational grasp of brains, but wasn't quite enough to actually build what I really want to create, see."

Something about that rang a long forgotten bell in the back of her head, but trying to connect the dots was too much work right now, so she just focussed on Mira's low voice as she went on until Silicia had fallen asleep again.

---

She finally finished the last of the reports and delivered a heavy stack of freshly printed paper and microfiche to the head office, a note declaring she would be taking the rest of the week off at the very top. Then she went home and slept for thirteen hours.

---

When Silicia came back in the next Monday, the building was abuzz with chatter. The ground floor lobby was packed with boxes, equipment, and people, and one of the security guards who saw her apprehensively watching the crowd she'd have to fight on her way up informed her that they were redoing something in the sub-basement. She really hoped that would mean the construction would happen mostly out of her way.

Getting to the elevator wasn't as bad as it looked after all, but then she stepped out of it and was greeted with yet another unplanned gathering.

Silicia pushed her way through the gawking crowd of possibly every 8th floor employee come to see the new announcement pinned to the board. A hand written table proclaimed who had been asigned what students, and the rest of her team were hurriedly scribbling down the dates for the first sessions listed behind their names. It reminded her terribly of high school.

Silicia squinted, trying to determine if what she was looking at was a one or a seven. There would probably be a printed plan available in the next few days, luckily.

A hand landed on her shoulder and she started, but it was just Fred.

"Well, have a nice vacation, boss?"

"I mostly slept to be honest. And I've asked you not to call me that, Freddy."

Fred laughed, and started needling her with questions about the children she mostly couldn't answer in any sort of detail. The two of them naturally gravitated towards the coffee machine, and lingered there until they eventually both had to get to work in their own separate offices.

---

Out of interest she cross referenced the new schedule with her notes, and it stuck out to her how it seemed the board had listened to her recommendations on matchups for the entire 8th floor team except Silicia herself.

She'd been assigned six children, four boys and two girls, and was strongly encouraged to 'help them along' in becoming friends. She didn't really think that was part of her job description, but when Tump forgot a worksheet on her desk that first week, instead of heading out herself she took the golden opportunity to have Alec bring it to him.

This worked shockingly well. She surmised it really was easier to make friends as a child, especially with their necessarily shared circumstances to bond over. It worked so well, in fact, that she did it again, having Alec bring Cris something she'd 'forgotten' to give him. He hesitated to take the papers from her outstretched hand, looking up at her with transparent suspicion. Finally he took them, with his eyes still comically narrowed.

Silicia just smiled at him.

---

One of the children she'd been assigned she had to look up in her notes, because she'd left practically no impression on Silicia. Lia had been one of the older students, intelligent but almost unwilling to reveal it. At the time she hadn't really considered whether that stemmed from her naturally inexpressive face or was an actual decision on the girl's part, but it took her only a few minutes now to determine that it was most certainly both.

Lia seemed to be able to tell when Silicia was deviating from lines she'd prepared in advance or been instructed to say with surprising ease, and responded much better to off the script questions. It made Silicia feel like she was being trained like a dog, having a certain behavior rewarded like that, but she couldn't deny she sort of enjoyed talking to the girl, in the way that she enjoyed working on a puzzle. While it had unnerved her when Alec did it, Lia's shrewd evaluation of her was amusing, if not downright charming.

---

She saw Mira very little over the next few weeks, as she seemed to always be busy with something, which made her stay late and come home when Silicia was already asleep. She only rarely woke her coming into the bedroom at night, and both of them naturally were too tired for proper conversation then. When she did come home at a reasonable time or even earlier, it was to collapse in bed because she'd spent the preceding night in her office or lab, working.

It worried Silicia, but Mira waved her concerns off every time that she did get an opportunity to voice them, saying she was doing this because she wanted to, and that she would return to a healthier schedule as soon as she'd cracked this most recent project. For lack of any measures she could actually take beyond setting out food for her, Silicia left her to it.

A lot of the time that was freed up by her girlfriend being busy, she spent with her coworkers. She was getting closer with Fred and Anne (who frequently regailed her with tales of her toddler stirring up trouble in kindergarten) and was also in the early stages of work friendships with multiple of the new staff.

---

Lia and Erik were next on her to-do list. She wondered if Alec would tell on her if she used the same trick a third time - then she decided it would be pretty funny if he did, and went for it. Of course she'd carefully selected the children with the most compatible personalities for her meddling, but she was still surprised at how quickly the friendships took. Erik and Rin were the only ones who'd actually made friends worth mentioning outside of the group assigned to Silicia, and maybe that played a part in it. Either way, soon when she asked her weekly questions under the header 'social environment', they actually had anecdotes to tell of what they'd gotten up to with the others.

Rin proved an incalculably valuable asset in both keeping Silicia's spirits high and progressing her social manipulation side quest as she quickly, and without needing any encouragement from Silicia, befriended Tump. Even better, she found out that Rin and Cris had already known each other before they'd arrived. By extension this all folded Alec and Lia into the growing friend group, which earned her a kind of email she'd never gotten: curt praise with no new furher instructions.

---

Instead of finishing up and returning to normal quickly as she'd promised she would, Mira seemed only more and more exhausted. There were bags under her eyes the size of Alaska and Silicia now frequently found her asleep on the couch with her laptop open next to her when she came home. Despite it all, whenever she did catch her awake, there was that spark in her eyes.
It was unduly enthralling. It made Silicia suspect it was only the inconsequential matter of her physical body holding Mira back from achieving the impossible, because she was filled to the brim with almost divine inspiration. She was working on something important, and though her nervous leg bouncing and constant tiredness weighed her down, she would succeed come hell or highwater. Silicia hoped she would not burst out of her body to become a being of pure energy any time soon, because she rather preferred Mira remaining embodied. Further, she also preferred her awake enough to make use of said body.

That month they got word the company's internal system would get a complete overhaul, and so they were all instructed to back up their data and take two days off while they laid new cables and hooked up the offices to the brand new main computer. It seemed that had been what they'd been installing in the basement.

Silicia used her free time to walk around the snowed-in city, waking up barely early enough to see off Mira, whose excitement at having had a hand in the new system now being plugged into the facility was palpable.
She wondered how the children were doing. She wondered what Mira even had to do with any of it. The small supermarket around the corner from them was offering her favourite jam for half off, and when she found the display stand empty, she wondered how many other people's favourite jam it was.

---

"You hear about the brain chip thing?"

Anne, casually making her way through a cafeteria meal-deal sized bag of chips, startled at the speed with which Silicia's head jerked up.

"I'm sorry, the what?"

"The uh... the lower research guys were talking about it at lunch yesterday. Think they're making a little brain implant to like... actually I don't really remember what they said," she trailed off, twirling a finger by her temple. When Silicia just stared at her silently, she eventually continued.

"I think it was something about monitoring brain functioning?"

"That's..."
Unhappily, Silicia shut her mouth again. She didn't really have a conclusion to that thought yet. It was scary, but also logical, which honestly had implications she didn't really want to think about too hard.

"So what, are they chipping the children like property or is it just research?"

The sentence slipped out barbed and without her input, and she almost wanted to cram it back in. It contained the seed of an idea that she hadn't yet consciously acknowledged, and voicing ideas as they came to her was really not Silicia's style. Luckily for her, Anne hadn't picked up on it. She was making a show of shrugging to give herself time to swallow the mass of chips she'd stuffed in her mouth during Silicia's brief stunned silence.
She watched her coworker take a sip of water and worked to relax her shoulders.

"Yeah I mean, it sounded something like that. I don't know, you probably have a higher chance of getting the details than I do here."

That was undeniably true, and she resolved to ask the next time she caught Mira awake. It now made a little bit more sense how busy her girlfriend had been, if she'd not only been working on parsing brain scans but also on a new method of acquiring them.

---

It took her another day and a half to actually speak to Mira properly again, and it was on one of the now rare occasions that she could spare enough time to invite Silicia up to the 12th floor so they could spend a lunch break together.

She spotted Mira as soon as she stepped out of the elevator, loitering by the corner where the transparent patterned wall to the relaxation area met the solid (and very thick) wall of the lab, waiting for Silicia's arrival. She looked much like she had the past months, jittery and with the same bruises under her eyes, but some part of the project had clearly taken a turn for the better. Despite the visible sleep deprivation, she radiated the refreshed energy of someone who'd just had their first restful sleep in weeks.

"You look like you've just won the lottery."

"Ha, no news that good sadly. But you're close, I've finally had the breakthrough I was waiting for!"

Grinning, she led the way to a table and they sat. That was definitely not going to be the last thing Silicia would hear about it. It was oddly lucky that none of the other people on Mira's floor ever seemed to be there when they were. She wondered if Mira had been eating.

"I've finally got it, Si. My problem was decoding data that's written in neurons, right? And it's easy, it turns out: you build a second program to read it out to you!"

"I thought you were a neurobiologist, not a programmer," Silicia interjected cheekily.

"Hey now, what do I have a whole team for? Okay, so it's not exactly easy to build, but," Mira tapped her finger to her own temple and smiled conspiratorily, "what is easy is to instruct other people to make a program for me."

"Fair enough. Then that's not the breakthrough?"

"Oh, no. We managed to get that passably working two months ago. We also built a network on the principle, actually, sort of interweaving multiple simulated brains to create an intelligent system. They're working on that down there as we speak! But I'm getting off track."
She got up to head for the coffee machine, barely pausing her explanation for Silicia to take the hint and follow.

"Of course the next challenge is to create something truly new from that - to make use of what we've decoded we need a way to actually test our assumptions about our data sets first. And we've - well, actually, I have - worked out how we can do that!"

"Pray tell?" Silicia watched distractedly as the machine poured her a watery hot chocolate. She'd had too much caffeine this week already.

"We're going to gather dynamic data, so we can watch the brain's responses in real time."

"Don't they already do that in hospitals and stuff?"

"Aha, but they do it only in explicitly experimental conditions. That's a necessarily selective data collection method."

That's when it dawned on her that she was not going to have to awkwardly inquire about a rumor she wasn't even sure had any basis. Silicia took her searing hot paper cup out of the machine and met Mira's eye seriously.

"The rumors about brain chips are true, aren't they?" It was a statement until the very last word, when she remembered that she should probably phrase this as a question.

Mira's eyebrows shot up, but she didn't look that put out beyond the grand reveal of her genius not landing quite as intended.

"Yeah. They're not that sophisticated yet," she admitted, "mostly just a small scanner in the back of the head so we can go through the foramen magnum and avoid too much bone in the picture. They're admittedly kind of basic in what they can really capture and they're not actually brain chips yet."

"...not brain chips yet?"

"Well," Mira looked kind of awkward now, like now Silicia was undermining her great plan by asking after the particulars.
"Okay they aren't actually implanted. They're going to be! But for now since they need to record, store and transmit data, they have to be able to be charged. So, uh. We're kind of just gonna glue them on for now."

Mira busied herself stirring multiple capsules of milk into her coffee, embarrassed like she expected her to laugh.

Silicia had to admit that it was kind of funny. It was also much less sinister than it had seemed when she'd not had the full picture. It struck her as kind of clever, actually.

"That sounds like a pretty impressive bit of technology either way. How are you going to solve the power problem long term though?"

Mira took a sip of coffee, her eyes narrowing, and Silicia had to bite her lip to poorly hide a smile as they wandered back to their table.

"We're delegating it to lower research, to be honest. I haven't gotten their finished project report yet, but I think they're either going to try to work out wireless charging or try to power it like," she made a vague hand gesture, "biologically."

There was definitely something concerningly parasitic there, but Silicia wasn't sure she had the qualifications required to really grasp the implications. So instead, she remarked on the other option.

"Wireless charging would have the entire tech industry on our doorstep begging you for just a hint, wouldn't it?"

Mira laughed, and it sounded only slightly relieved.

---

The thought of her unfavourable first response to the idea of chipping the children sat untouched in the back of her mind until three weeks later, when Tump was waiting in her office the afternoon after the finished prototypes had been fitted to the students.

It was only a note on the staff calendar to her until she spotted it for the first time. As per protocol, she started all her regularly scheduled sessions by asking the children to wait a bit as she finished up something on her bulky desktop computer. The thing she was 'finishing up', of course, was a cursory assessment of the children's mental state based on how they behaved during the wait time. This helped her approach them with the right tone during the session and made it easier to later fill out the full weekly report.

Tump was looking out the window behind her as he often did, before he turned to idly sweep his gaze over her shelves of books and assorted knicknacks, and then there it was. She was just glancing up as the turn of his head revealed it to her, sitting right below the soft junction where his spine met his skull like a metal barnacle; a small assortment of boxes and wires woven into a plaster that looked like it almost seemlessly melded with the skin around it.

A shiver of revulsion ran down Silicia's back, and then he looked back at her, hiding the ghastly device from her sight, and met her eyes. Silicia worked very hard to swallow down the unexplained feeling that had risen up like bile. It was a device for research, she told herself, and he was only here now because he'd agreed to take part in experiments like this. It helped, but only a little bit, because fundamentally, it was a feeling she was fighting, and not a thought.

She forced herself to smile at the boy and began the session as she always did. She would do him no favours by making him uneasy about this.

(Tump's brow furrowed slightly. Silicia was sure she was not doing a great job of hiding her thought process, but he said nothing about it, either.)

---

The eerie stickers only stayed on the children's necks for a month or so, before Silicia received a sheet of questions about the finished trial to put them through. The responses were about as expected; they mostly found it sort of fascinating, and had seen no ill effects from the proto-chips beyond a bit of itching from the glue.

The students' response put Silicia at ease, although she knew that the project's next stage might tickle even more body horror out of her.

Chapter 6

It took them over three months to work out the chips' power supply, and she found out sooner than everyone else because Mira accosted her in the kitchen and started excitedly reading out passages from the report. They'd gone the biological route. Silicia did her best not to think about the particulars of a tiny computer in someone's head being artifically hooked up to their central nervous system and blood stream, and she felt better for not really understanding most of what Mira read out to her.
When she started explaining how this technological marvel would be achieved, Silicia had to stop her before she got too graphic. She wasn't usually squeamish, but something about the position of the things really wigged her out.

The freakiest part turned out to be the low red light which blinked its relentless slow rythm from all the students' necks once their bandages came off in another two weeks' time. It somehow permeated through the skin in a near unobscured rectangle, and dimmed and grew in intensity like a visual heartbeat.

She hated it, but again that human superpower of getting used to strange things wore the sharp edges off her revulsion, until eventually the idea of the chips became just day to day routine to her. It felt less normal again when it was announced that the staff would be chipped too.

She spent the rest of that day feeling feverishly weightless, and when she came home and heard Mira humming along to the radio in the kitchen she could not for the life of her parse whether she was relieved to have someone to talk to or whether she wanted to turn right back around and run until her legs gave out instead.

She dropped her bag by the door, hung her jacket up like she did every day, walked into the kitchen on quiet soles. Mira turned around with a bright smile.

'You want to chip me like cattle?' Silicia thought, but she couldn't say that, and so she said nothing. Mira must have noticed her mood but danced over to her anyway with that smile of hers never faltering, and wrapped her arms around Silicia to spin her in a happy little pirouette.

Silicia suddenly found it hard to breathe with all the feelings crowding up in her ribcage like they were trying to escape, her lungs being outcompeted for space by the incisive thought that she really loved this woman, despite everything, and it fucking hurt. Mira grinned at her, oblivious, or intentionally ignorant.

---

She walked around all week like she was in a trance, althought she thought maybe she'd been feeling that way for a while now, just less acutely. It was all so hard to tell from where she stood now. Time crawled on, and the day Mira had enthusiastically marked in Silicia's calendar approached. She couldn't actually articulate what she was so afraid of - she knew the project's goals were benign,knew her own girlfriend was heading it. If she couldn't trust Mira, then who could she trust? None of the students had had any problems with the chips. By all accounts she was just overreacting to this.

She still hadn't managed to calm herself by the time she sat down heavily in the lobby waiting area on the day of. Mira had come with and was standing at her side, rubbing her back encouragingly as Silicia turned over an info leaflet on the chips without really managing to read any of it. Medical benefits, improved memory, remote activation, ID, it went on and on and none of it meant anything to her.

They'd torn out an unused side office and turned it into a small infirmary. The clear glass walls had been swapped for frosted glass, so it all remained somewhat see-through. She was not looking.

Finally, Silicia was called in. She passed an employee she didn't recognize on their way out, their neck bandaged and hiding the wound from her intent gaze. Mira was allowed in with her, because of course she was. Really they were very nice to her, although she could remember very few details of what had been said clearly, later. What she remembered was mostly the applicator they'd shown her.
It was something like a cross between a syringe and a scalpel, and she stared at it as the nurse explained to her that the blade was there to make a precise incision for the rest of the apparatus to slip the chip inside the correct way around. He demonstrated how the applicator would move once triggered, unfolding like a praying mantis' arms, or a bass' jaw. Then, finally, he showed her the thing itself, presented in a sterile square plastic bag on the flat palm of his gloved hand.

It was tiny, smaller than her phone's SD card, an unsettling amalgam of technology and biology. Its tissue was bloodless and thus a tender whispy white, almost more reflective under the harsh artificial light than the smooth metal that framed the unpowered red LED. She looked over her shoulder at Mira, also transfixed by it - only she was looking at it with barely contained pride.

Silicia turned back to the nurse and nodded her acknowledgement. A metal arm was swung out in front of her from the nearest machine and a hand between her shoulder blades guided her to put her head on the curved chin rest and press her shoulders up against the pads. The construction somewhat resembled a really weird massage table.

She watched Mira pull up a chair opposite to her, smiling warmly at her. It did nothing to make Silicia feel less trapped.

A gloved hand was run up the side of her neck before the nurse deemed her ok to start.

"Alright. This will sting, so try not to flinch."

She considered nodding, but didn't. Only when Mira took hold of her clenched hands and lifted them out of her lap did she notice that she'd closed her eyes.

The pain itself was manageable - the sting he'd warned of was barely there, the blade must have been very sharp - but the sensation of the chip going into her skin was as indescribable as it was viscerally alarming.

The wound burned as he pulled her upright and wrapped gauze around her neck, and then she was free to go.

---

They'd both taken the day off, and although the tension in her body had started dissolving the moment she left the infirmary, Mira watched her like a hawk the entire time. She had definitely seen it on Silicia's face all week, but hadn't commented - thankfully. They had an exceedingly regular dinner and settled in for the evening like they often had before all this.

That night Silicia had a nightmare. It started off murky and indistinct; she was standing in an unlit room, or floating, or falling. Out of the darkness a warm hand appeared which wound itself around her wrist and tugged lightly upwards - then there was another, grabbing at her elbow, and another that laid itself around her neck. More and more hands appeared, until there were enough to begin lifting her. Silicia struggled, but couldn't get loose even as the dark space around her was illuminated by rhythmic flashes of red light. An unshakeable feeling of dread permeated the entire experience.

She startled awake in bed, her legs tangled in the covers and sweat running down her back. Mira sat up too, calmly, innocently coaxing her to lay back down and go back to sleep. She went to get her a glass of water and Silicia lay in the darkness, listening to her walk around in the dark flat and pressing a shaking hand against her bandaged neck where a small parasite was drinking her blood and unnaturally heating her skin from underneath.

---

She called in sick the day after, but woke early enough to see Mira off to work, mostly because she had trouble sleeping for more than an hour or so at a time after that nightmare.

Silicia spent the day on the couch dozing through reruns of a tv show she'd liked when she was in school until around noon when she was jolted awake by the ringing of her cell phone. At first she hoped it would just stop, but eventually she gave in and dragged herself into the hallway to dig it out of her coat pocket.

It was Anne, who was on lunch break and asking how she was holding up. She'd gotten her own chip the Friday before, and had had the weekend to recover.

"So, Si, feeling the effects of the mind control yet?"

Silicia laughed weakly and muted the tv as she dropped back into her vacated seat.

"Just feeling really tired honestly. Mira said that was normal; I guess the integration of artificial blood vessels does weird things to a person. Interferes with normal tissue repair processes or something."

"Woah, I do not want to hear about what's going on in there. I guess she would know best what to expect though."

Silicia ran a hand over her face, yearning to fall back asleep. Mira was not a medical doctor. Though when she didn't reply, Anna just went on.

"Damn thing knocked me out all of Saturday morning, but come nightfall I was completely fine. But by then of course I'd spent like, the entire day sleeping, and couldn't get a wink... awful Sunday, worst of all for the kid, naturally."

She laughed in commiseration, and it took less effort this time.

---

Having Tuesday off turned out to be enough, although she didn't magically feel alright again like Anne had suggested she might. She just woke on Wednesday morning, tired and with a slight ache in her neck, and went back to work. Fred clapped her on the back and made a bad joke about bird migration that he had to explain to her after, and just like that her life was back to normal. That night she fell into bed early and slept almost 10 hours, uninterrupted by nightmares.

Chapter 7

In the end, getting Cris to be comfortable with her was much easier than she'd feared it would be. Silicia gave herself two weeks to linger in places around the facility where she would occasionally be able to observe the children, studying how they talked to each other. They noticed her a few times, Rin smiling at her in passing and Alec throwing her calculating looks every time that he caught sight of her outside her office. It was sort of endearing, because it made her think of how it was seemingly unfathomable to elementary school students that their teachers might have lives outside the classroom.

All it really took was subtly mirroring the kid - cutting down on the mannerisms she'd developed to make herself seem approachable to children, shutting down a line of questioning when he started to express disinterest in it and instead circling back around to it until she'd gotten her form filled in. She couldn't quite disabuse him of his superiority complex, but she knew she'd have years with him, so she wasn't overly concerned.

---

At the beginning of the next month, Mira would be gone for three days while the company flew her out to New York for an interview with a fancy newspaper. It put an odd sinking feeling in Silicia's stomach, but she smiled through it so as not to dim the brilliant smile on her girlfriend's face when she told her. She was proud of Mira, so much that she was kind of out of breath. So much that she was feeling left behind.
Then again, Silicia was beginning to have trouble telling new anxieties from the constant air of disquiet that hung around her shoulders like a heavy blanket already - a form of emotional unrest she hadn't struggled with since her teenage years.

She worried about what it was about Mira's increasing fame that upset her, and so she simply chose to think on it as little as possible.

Instead, Silicia hunkered down and focussed on building relationships with her charges that would make Mira proud. She dreaded ever having them all in one room, because the way she talked to each of them became more disparate as the days went on.

Talking to Tump, Rin and Erik came fairly naturally to her; they were trusting and happy to have open conversations even about emotions. Cris, Lia and Alec on the other hand sometimes looked like they might reach across the table and hit her if she got too sappy on them. With them, Silicia had to stick to neutral statements, offering kindness in the form of silences the kids were welcome to fill. She enjoyed getting to really use all she knew about how people's brains worked - figuring them all out one by one was almost like a game.

---

"Towels?"

"Hotel; won't need any," Mira called from the hall where she was rifling through the coat rack. Silicia struck out 'towels' on the packing list and looked up. She was leaning against the back of the sofa while Mira was throwing things into a big pile next to her open suitcase. Tomorrow morning, early as sin, she'd be leaving for the rest of the week.

"Okay uh, sun screen?"

Mira stuck her head in through the door, looking thoughtful.

"I'm not sure if I'll be spending all that much time outside. But I guess I'll take it just in case; one tube won't be that much additional weight."

Silicia fished a half empty tube of sunscreen out of a box already sitting on the table and tossed it on the pile.

"Doing okay?", Mira asked suddenly, and she realized her hand had gone up to her neck again, laying over the bandaged skin like had happened in her dream.

"Yeah, just... itchy."

"Worry not dear; I suppose if you just can't handle my genius in your bloodstream, as a very last resort we can always take it out rather than letting you die," Mira said, voice comically arrogant, and disappeared back into the entry way.

Silicia stared at the spot where she'd been, her lowering hand halted in mid air.

"You can remove them?"

"Who do you take me for, of course I can, Si," Mira answered, her voice muffled but clearly a tad annoyed by the question.

Silicia sagged against the back of the couch, crinkling the pack list in her hands as they twitched.

"You don't brew a poison without its antidote, silly," Mira elaborated more humorously.

Silicia didn't feel like joking at all.

---

Tump leant his face on his elbow and made a 'thinking hard' expression. Silicia's mood soured.

"Hmm, no, I really couldn't say."

She knew he knew, but just like the others, he wouldn't spill. Maybe pack-bonding them had worked a little too well. Alec had stared at her until she'd changed the subject, the fresh bruise on his left cheek only adding to the glare. Cris had laughed at her and then started babbling about having been worried about the math class he'd had earlier in the day. Rin had mutely shook her head and mimed zipping her lips. Lia had closed her eyes and solemnly said "It's none of your business."
Erik, finally, had admitted outright that they'd agreed not to tell. Now Tump was pretending to not even know what she was talking about, like she hadn't witnessed him bodily pull a flailing Alec off of Cris.

She ripped out the page of her note book, a bit too much anger apparent in the movement.
The fight had broken out in the hallway just a few meters down from her office, and she'd run out when she heard yelling only to find Cris and Alec on each other on the floor. Tump and Rin had been hastily trying to grab a hold of the boys to separate them as Lia stood by with wide eyes. Silicia hadn't even seen Erik at first, because he'd stood silent and still against a wall, watching and biting his lip bloody.

Tump's eyes followed her hands, before they flicked up to meet Silicia's. She wouldn't be getting anything out of him if he had his way. It was kind of above her paygrade to disentangle the petty squabbles of teenagers, but she was beginning to find this personally frustrating.

On top of the obvious, she was struggling to reconcile the rambunctious prankster Rin was fast growing into with the quiet girl who gently held Cris' hand and asked him if he could flex his bruised fingers for her while they waited for their teacher in Silicia's office.

"How about we devote a few sessions to conflict resolution," she said as calmly as she could make herself sound. She would wheedle it out of him, even if it took her weeks.

---

The elevator door slid open and her gaze was drawn immediately to Fred, sitting with a coffee in the 8th floor lobby. The moment he spotted her he started enthusiastically waving to her with the magazine in his hand, one finger stuck between the pages to mark his spot.

Resignedly, she trotted over to him and took the other seat. The magazine was shoved in front of her face with no preamble. The front page bore Mira's photo, accompanied by the headline 'rising stars: Mira Weaver on building the future'. She was sitting on a black leather couch, back straight and a dazzlingly polite smile on her lips. In her blazer jacket and classy dress, she was playing her character perfectly.

"Have you read it yet?", Fred asked cheerfully, taking the magazine back and flipping to the article he'd been looking at when she arrived.

Silicia had read it, in fact she'd been up early waiting for opening time outside their local shop this morning. She didn't think very highly of the interviewer, but had to admit the contrast of their intelligences only made Mira seem all the more brilliant.

"'Course. I thought she handled it well. I didn't know she could do things like that, to be honest."

Fred looked up in surprise.

"Didn't they coach her for this or anything?"

"If they did, she hasn't told me about it. So I don't think so, no," she said, squirming in her seat a bit. She needed a coffee and a pain killer. Fred hummed in acknowledgement and started idly flicking through the pages.

"So, a mother program huh?"

"Yeah, 'huh'," Silicia repeated.

At the end of the interview Mira had been asked what kinds of news one could expect out of Frinet in the next few years, and of course she'd given him the usual platitudes, but she'd also hinted at something tangible: an autonomous system that could remotely manage a whole database's worth of cybernetic implants.

"Maybe being her girlfriend will grant you a command position in her upcoming robot army," Fred suggested with a quirked eyebrow when she didn't elaborate any further.

"Don't even joke about that."

"Aw come on. We both know realistically they'll use that kind of technology to serve more accurate ads and lock people into using only Frinet tech with limited compatibility. Allow yourself to dream a little!"

"You'll have to pardon me for choosing the predictable evil over the exciting one, here," Silicia said, trying for a lopsided grin, and Fred laughed and stood.

"Alright. Off to work then, boss. They won't beam ads into our brains while it might distract us from doing their bidding, ey?"

She sighed and turned her attention to the coffee machine. He was right of course, although the whole thing did make her wonder why almost none of Mira's technology was actually commercially available yet. What was the big idea there?

---

Silicia was beginning to catch herself playing favourites - not that she was supposed to develop personal bonds in the first place, but inconveniently she wasn't the kind of person who could avoid it alltogether at will.

Erik had wriggled his way into her heart - without even knowing it, if she was doing her job well enough. Out of all of them, he seemed to be the only one who actually wanted to take advantage of her psych degree, and he was a pleasure to work with. Increasingly she was taken in by the lively way he told stories, his shy honesty, his genuine enthusiasm for learning.
He had been hurt before but was deeply trusting by nature, which had made him adapt to life in the facility with admirable ease. Erik seemed to have deemed her a trustworthy adult, and damn her, she would do her best to live up to his expectations.

Unlike the others, who were all either aloof, themselves detatched from their emotions, or entirely focussed in on themselves, he could often just tell her how he felt about things and talk it out without making her force it out of him with continued interrogation over multiple appointments. It was a breath of fresh air.

Chapter 8

Mira returned, and brought normalcy home with her. She was clearly still riding the high of her success in the public eye, and glowing like she always did when she'd completed a project on top of it, and in the wake of everything, she made time for Silicia again. And so, while fall rolled in with the rain, a weight finally lifted off her chest. She could almost convince herself the small, condensed ball of anxiety that had sat in the pit of her stomach since last spring had disappeared wholly.

She came home one day to Mira sitting at the dinner table, pouring over stacks and stacks of loose paper. Silicia went straight for the bathroom to attempt to dry her sodden hair, and Mira hadn't moved a muscle by the time she'd grabbed the plastic bag of takeout from the entryway. She held it up like she was going to deposit it right on all her documents, still dripping with rain water, and raised an expectant eyebrow at her girlfriend.

Mira grumbled something about her work flow and bent to retrieve one of the binders she'd completely emptied onto the table. While she started pulling papers together seemingly at random, Silicia glanced over what it was she'd been reading. To her surprise, it was her own reports.

"Looking to keep reading until you find a flaw you can fire me over?", she prompted, and went to get them plates when Mira had finally cleared enough space that she could set the food down. Mira cringed looking at the wet spot left on the wooden table top.

"You know I would never. Naturally I would have your death faked before bringing the dishonour of being fired upon you, love."

She laughed, and waited for Mira to give in and answer her honestly. As much as she enjoyed joking with her, she was very curious to see what she was doing with her notes.

"I'm just looking them over to see what your charges will be most suited for."

"Oh, the control system for the chips, is it?"

She couldn't fully keep her slight bitterness about finding out with everyone else out of her tone, but like always, if Mira noticed, she didn't let on.

"Don't be crude, it's not a control system. Think of it as an interface, maybe," Mira corrected, and Silicia started lifting the food containers out of the bag, smiling wryly.

"And of course that too has to be built from the copies of real people, makes sense."

"Ha," Mira said, "yep."

---

The kid was sitting crouched against the stone border of a flower bed as she was heading out on her lunch break, and she stopped a few steps from him without even thinking about it. The expression on Erik's face was glum, and there was mud caked on his shoes. It would soon be too cold for them to be out all day.

She followed his gaze to where his friends were standing, looking to be play acting. Right at that moment, Alec sunk into a curtsy in front of Lia, who rolled her eyes but dutifully pretended to knight him with a stick. Her attention wandered from Tump's scowl to Rin next to him, wringing her hands as she stared intently at the back of Cris' head. She'd been right in assuming, it seemed.

"They're at it again?", she asked, and Erik startled slightly, looking up at her. She wasn't sure if he'd just not been expecting her to say anything, since there was no way he hadn't noticed her.

"I don't get what's fun about it," he said, sounding like he had said it many times before.

"Different people like different things," Silicia said optimistically. "They could take more care to not exclude you, however."

"They're not excluding me," he mumbled into his collar.

"Aren't they?"

"They didn't tell me to beat it or anything."

"But they know it's not fun for you, don't they?"

Erik looked away, and Silicia left.

---

Mira was already waiting for her when the elevator arrived on the 12th floor, and she was vibrating with excitement.

She pulled Silicia into the lobby and spun her in circles, and it was all she could do not to trip and send them both crashing down.

"Woah, woah there, calm down-"

"Si, they're such fools! Eating out of my hand!", Mira hollered, and didn't give Silicia a chance to confusedly congratulate her before she crushed their lips together.

As she learned once her girlfriend had exhausted herself, Mira had been promoted into a position somewhere between head of research and CEO, which to her just sounded like they made it up to justify giving her more money. Because they were doing that - as Mira was very excited to tell her. Apparently the few higher ups left above Mira had high hopes for her chips and she was taking them for all they were worth.

Her previous spot would be filled by a grumpy old man who'd once been her superior, and was not taking this development well. Mira had many disparaging things to say about his character, although she was personally considering him as a project lead for when she finally got to restructure Frinet's research department, for politics reasons. Silicia absorbed all this information and stored it away just in case she was ever asked about it in polite conversation.

---

As was routine, she checked a box on her report sheet and looked up at the boy with a bland smile.

"How in control of your emotions have you felt this week?"

Tump's head tilted to the side like he hadn't thought about it. She'd been asking all of them about their emotional states at every session for over a year now, so he really ought to have.

"Better than last," he finally said, a corner of his mouth turning downwards.

"Was it that upsetting to you?", fell out of Silicia's mouth without her permission.

The eagerness in her voice was breaking protocol and they both knew it, but she was still driven by that hungry curiosity to pry people open until she could understand their every action that had driven her to psychology in the first place. She'd make it look like he'd been the one who wanted to talk about it in the report, of course. Silicia wasn't actually sure how it would reflect on her to reveal that the children sometimes lied to her.

"It made me feel like I was going to lose them," he said after a while, and stopped himself there, frowning like he didn't like how the words had felt passing his lips.

"But," Silicia said gently, "You didn't. They made up."

Tump nodded mutely, and she heard him swallow before he spoke again.

"I'm not sure- I mean I didn't even notice."

"That was scary?"

"Yeah. I just looked over and they were fighting."

Silicia bit her lip and said nothing. Their session would end all too soon and the bell would call him to lunch, and then the moment would be broken- but she'd have to let him decide to tell her on his own.

"You can't tell anyone this, okay?", he said suddenly, volume rising, his eyes sharpening with determination. Silicia nodded solemnly.

"Not the others but also not the company okay? I don't want him to get in trouble."

Silicia nodded again and put her pen down, watching his shoulders relax.

"They fought because Cris caught Alec stealing."

Silicia raised an eyebrow, but didn't interrupt. Tump was fidgetting with a loose thread in the hem of his shirt.

"I think he threatened to tell on him? But really it was probably because one of them said something again."

"Said something?"

"Something hurtful. Probably about Lia."

"Do they often say hurtful things about Lia?", she asked, feeling a bit ridiculous, like she was being made to play along in their children's games.

"No," he said quickly, then looked away and am ended: "Yes. But never to her."

---

The clouds had already been darkening when she'd hurried home, but the rain she hadn't believed the weather report about this morning hadn't broken quite yet. The first rumble of thunder in the distance now summoned her to the cracked living room window, the largest in the flat. Her half revised tax form sat abandoned on the desk in the bedroom where she'd been all too happy to leave it. She hadn't even turned off the light.

Now, Silicia watched in awe as the clouds unfurled, dropping rain on the city in a thick sheet which gave way to a steady noise as it beat against the rooftops. A few drops snuck through the gap in the window and landed on the bared skin of her arms and face, flung sideways by their impact against the glass. It was wonderful.

"Oh," Mira said softly behind her, "if I'd waited a bit longer we could have saved on the water bill."

She wandered into the living room only clad in a towel, leaving a trail of wet footsteps on the carpet. Like Silicia, she'd left the light on behind her. In the dark room, backlit and bathed in the dim glow of the storm, she looked formidable.

Mira joined her by the window, her smile highlighted dramatically by the occasional flashes of lightning, and Silicia smiled back. Together they watched as outside people cowered in house entrances and autumn leaves gathered up in neat piles were swept out into the road by the downpour.

"What are you thinking about?" Mira asked after a while.

"Work," Silicia replied with a self-depricating little laugh.

Mira cocked her head to the side, waiting. She wasn't sure if it wouldn't make her seem terribly immature to admit to thinking about literal teenage drama. Then she remembered that time in college Mira had snuck a microphone under a professor's desk in an attempt to verify a completely baseless rumor, and figured she would understand the itching need to snoop.

"The kids fought, recently. And it took me over a week to needle it out of them what actually happened. Somehow in the time between dragging them into my office and a teacher arriving - and I had my eyes on them the entire time! - they worked out a whole official story."

Mira's eyebrows rose, and instead of judging her for caring, she slung her arms around herself and leant in in a cheeky 'I'm listening' pose. Silicia went on, abandoning her own official story.

Outside the sound of the rain warred with a ringing church bell.

---

"I don't think Cris likes me much."

"What makes you say that?"

"Just... the way he looks at me sometimes is like he wishes I would just disappear? And," Erik nervously scratched the back of his neck, looking like he thought he was doing something wrong by telling her, "not in the way he dislikes Alec and Tump."

"How are they different?", Silicia asked interestedly, sketching a little relationship diagram on her notepad, waiting for him to tell her what to write above the arrows.

"I think he sees them as rivals, but I'm- actually, it's ridiculous. You'll think I'm making it up."

"Would you say it anyway?", she prompted gently, and Erik sighed, conceding.

"I think he's scared I'll usurp his place in the group because I'm close with Rin."

Silicia nodded and wrote 'intimidated by' above 'Cris -> Erik', and 'usurper' next to it, underlining it twice.

"I think you're a very good friend to her," she said tentatively, "but the relationship she has with Cris is very different. You shouldn't worry too much about it, because I think he is going to realize that soon."

Chapter 9

On the morning that the first night frost of the year had left brilliant ice crystals on the greenery out front, Silicia opened her office door and spotted a sealed envelope on her desk. She leaned back into the hallway as though she might still be able to catch a glimpse of whoever had left it, then chastized herself for it. The mature thing to do was to get it over with and find out instead of fretting. So, she ripped the thing open resolutely with the corner of a ruler and began to read.

To her great relief, she was not being booted without explanation. The message the envelope really conveyed was much more puzzling: firstly, that in the coming months the company would rebrand and change its name - news only a PR team would be enthusiastic about, but lest she think it was courtesy to inform her early, the letter also contained the reason she was being notified. Silicia read the line multiple times, not really understanding. It said there, black on white, that they were to do all in their power to stop the students finding out.

She turned the letter over, but the underside was blank. They hadn't told her what the new name would be.

Footsteps and talking in the hall startled her out of her thoughts, and she rushed to the door, suddenly craving another cup of coffee.

Fred and Anne, on their way to the lobby, paused when her door opened behind them. They were both frowning like whatever they'd been discussing had not been too pleasant a topic. Based on this, she made a gamble.

"Did you get one too?", Silicia asked, and they nodded. Anne waved her over and she followed them into the lobby.

---

"And what emotion would you say has dominated this week," Silicia rattled off, tapping her pen against the edge of the table. Cris sneered like he always did and gave his typical rehearsed answer. That was no trouble: she'd already come to her own conclusions.

Silicia looked up in genuine surprise when he didn't spring up and out of his seat the second their scheduled time had run out. Instead, Cris was grinding his teeth, his eyes glued to the corner of her desk. Then Silicia dared to do something she would have considered a fireable offense just a few months ago.

"What can I do for you, Cris?"

"Rin's birthday is coming up," he bit out, like it was costing an immense amount of self control to work up to what he was going to ask. She hummed encouragingly.

"There's a plushie I want to get for her that-" he broke off mid-sentence to pull a slightly torn leaflet out of his school bag. When he put it down on the desk between them, she could make out that it was an advertisement from a nearby zoo's gift shop.

"But even if they let me out on my own, she would ask where I'd gone. So I thought maybe I'd ask you..."

Silicia looked at the toy his finger had landed on, a small brown horse, and decided she wouldn't force him to finish his sentence just this once.

"You want me to go buy one and sneak it in for you?"

"I would pay you. Of course."

"Sure," she said, although she was pretty sure he was trying to emotionally manipulate her right now by seeming vulnerable. She saw no harm in giving in.

"Really?", he asked, nakedly surprised.

"Really."

---

When the next day she saw Lia clutching the same leaflet, she had to fake a cough lest she start laughing and make the girl walk right back out the door. Utterly unsurprisingly, Lia was much less nervous about her request.

"If I give you back the money," she started, laying the leaflet out on the table top as Cris had done and folding her arms behind her back innocently, "will you buy me this?"

"For Rin?", Silicia asked, and Lia just looked at her expectantly.

"Why the sturgeon?"

It was a stout green and brown plush, the shapes of individual scutes demarcated with rows of green stitching.

"I've seen Rin looking at it again and again. I think she's a little afraid to admit she likes it in front of the boys, but I want to get it for her birthday."

Silicia smiled indulgently.

"Consider it done."

---

She had the two gifts packed in separate bags for her at the zoo, and the following week she lifted one up from where it had sat hidden behind her desk and watched Cris' eyes light up. Lia came in only a few minutes after he'd left, knocking on her door with shifty eyes to retrieve such dangerous contraband. The whole illicit affair felt so deeply silly.

---

It seemed to have become a habit for all of them to stay after their sessions when they wanted something. Alec ignored her dismissal and leaned back in the chair.

"So. You did it."

"Did what?", she asked with a polite smile, knowing full well what he meant, but not knowing why he was asking.

"I knew we could trust you," he said instead of answering, and Silicia's expression sobered. She felt suddenly quite torn - encouraging their trust might end up hurting them in the end; she could not guarantee that she would always be on their side, especially if the company put the pressure on. On the other hand she really, really wanted them to trust her, if for no other reason than that she liked them.

She settled on the most non-answer she could come up with on the spot: a veiled plea for caution.

"It was hardly a dangerous thing to smuggle."

"You should know I gave them the idea," Alec said, trying to look cool but his face betraying how happy he was with himself. This conversation was giving her whiplash.

Silicia had wondered where they'd gotten it. The shelf in the main lobby that held countless leaflets no one ever read was of course the most parsimonous answer, but that had still left open why they'd been messing around with those in the first place. It would seem that she had been quite intentionally tested, and had passed.

"That's very clever of you," she said, meaning it. Alec preened under the praise.

---

Silicia was beside herself with joy at how much solid information about the kids this one event had given her. She really ought to be thankful to Alec for the gift he'd dropped in her lap.

Tump had gotten Rin a box of her favourite tea, a fruit tea with vanilla, which he'd emphasised was the important part. Erik had bought her her favourite sweets, which he explained were only intermittently in stock at the little store on level one. From how he made it sound he'd gotten her enough to last a year.

Alec, finally, had divulged that he'd also bought her chocolate, but secretly his gift had been letting her help him with a school assignment. 'Rin loves to feel useful', he'd said, his head swelling with self importance until it bumped against the ceiling.

The message hadn't gotten through to Rin, but that was alright, because she liked the chocolate.

---

"The force truly holding back technology is the human mind, see," Mira was saying, bouncing her leg like she just couldn't stand to wait until she'd get to get up and walk again. Silicia, leaning against the bus window, decided to humor her. This time she'd been the one who'd asked, after all.

"How do you figure?"

"I mean think about how you use your computer - even if you've got all your folders perfectly organized, the computer still doesn't actually understand the filing system. It couldn't replicate or explain it to another user, no matter how simplistic."

"Isn't that the machine's weakness, not mine?", asked Silicia, who had not previously perceived that as an issue.

"Nooo," Mira whined, sounding already frustrated. Silicia suspected she'd had this same discussion with someone else (or more likely, multiple someones) before, who hadn't followed her logic either.

"No, you're not getting it. That means without you the user, the computer is useless."

"And why does it need to be useful, without a user?"

"Because products that allow the user to form a bond with them sell better," Mira quoted with gritted teeth. Her restless feet were straying dangerously close the the boxed up lamp they were transporting home.

Silicia had no idea what that had to do with filing systems or independently operating computers, but the bitter undertone she was quite familiar with.

"I was wondering when they'd force you to actually make a viable product out of your groundbreaking research. Promotion not all you'd hoped it would be?"

Mira groaned, slumping against Silicia's shoulder.

"They gave me responsibilities, Si."

The petulence in her voice made her smile.

"And a whole lot of money."

"Money that comes with an orchestra's worth of strings attached..."

"They're forcing you to care about the details of execution while you're pursuing your dream project in the lap of luxury? Oh, woe is you," she said with a laugh.

"One of the shareholders said he'd veto my funding if I didn't finish up the digital assistant project first. I just want to get back to my brain scans, Si," Mira lamented. At least she'd stopped kicking her feet, laying limp with self pity.

"You're making a digital assistant? How is that supposed to work?"

"Well," she started, straightening a bit, "on paper it's sort of the perfect product for a tech giant, right? Top priority is convenience, and no one's done it before so we'll start out on a completely new market..."

"Only it's not the perfect project for you."

"It's so boring - it'll be fun building the skeleton of it, but actually making it useable is going to be such a drag!"

"So you already know how it'll work?", Silicia inquired, and Mira's eyes brightened a bit.

"Of course I do, and it's going to be brilliant, you can bet on that-"

As Mira pitched her vision of the perfect digital assistant to her, Silicia couldn't help but wonder which of the children would serve as her base. A huge selling point would naturally be the customizability of the digital assistant's personality, but Mira also let slip that the program's core would be its own intelligence - here she babbled something about the ultimate convenience of an assistant that understood you like a person but didn't have opinions like one. That felt a bit pointed, but beyond that she still couldn't claim to really get it.

Silicia thought it would likely be more of a hassle to have a whole system essentially constructed as a black box, which unlike a human would not respond to psychiatric help. But the expert here was Mira, not her, so she held her tongue.

---

Rin stepped into her office on Tuesday with a pep in her step and that cute new bracelet of hers noticably missing. Silicia quirked an eyebrow at her bare wrist. She'd bought the thing just last week, after telling Silicia she'd been considering spending her meagre pocket money on it for weeks. Rin saw her looking and winked.

The girl dropped herself into the chair with a mischievous grin.

"What did you do?", Silicia asked suspiciously, feeling like a character in a sitcom. Rin leaned forward, resting her elbows on the edge of the desk very smugly.

"I made a deal with Lia - I was in need of her talents."

Silicia's eyes widened. Over the weekend someone had clearly hacked into the facility's system, because on Monday the entirety of the floors used for schooling had found that someone had set their computers' system language to wingdings and somehow randomized all system sounds.

Rin laughed so hard at the expression on her face that she hit her elbow on the armrest of her chair.

---

In only another month and a half, Silicia found out why they weren't allowed to talk about the company name change to the kids.

'Tump Inc.' it said in the letterhead at the top of the document. With a thump, her balled up fist landed on the table hard enough to make the pens on it rattle. A second time and the little open container of paper clips spilled all over her work surface.

So furious she couldn't have even articulated why she was this angry if anyone had bothered to ask, Silicia stood and looked around for something to throw. She yanked the detatchable cushion off her office chair and hurled it at the wall. When that wasn't enough, she grabbed an empty folder out of the shelf and threw that after the pillow - then another, and another, until the shelf was empty. She cast around for another projectile, and her eyes landed on the hole punch.
It impacted with the wall with a much more satisfying sound than the folders had and left a small indent where the corner of it had cracked the plaster. Silicia still felt like screaming, like raging, like hurling her chair through the window. Instead she sat back down, now a good inch lower without the cushion, and finished reading the letter, before she tore it into tiny pieces with shaking hands.

After she'd finished with that, she stood again and assessed her desk. Then she swept everything but the computer monitor and keyboard off of it in one angry motion, and when the clatter and rustle of it still weren't enough, she hit the flat palms of her hands against the cleared table top until they stung.

The door opened and Fred peeked in, noting the dent in the wall, the office supplies strewn around, and Silicia in the middle of the chaos, head bowed over her desk and shaking. Quietly, he shut the door again.

---

After she'd calmed herself down somewhat, the first thing that really hit her was an irrational sense of betrayal. Somehow, she'd gone along with Mira at every incremental step and still not seen where she was being led, and now it was too late to turn tail.
When Mira had suggested her for this job, she knew this was where it would go. Silicia had been the one laying the groundwork for this project the whole time, for years now, just like she'd always been the one who worked out the details in Mira's grand plans.
Only she'd somehow never put it together, never looked up and seen that the way Mira was heading lay a teleological nightmare of human rights violations.
And its architect had let Silicia go on deluding herself while they laughed together and cooked dinner in her little yellow kitchen.

Now it was Tump on the chopping block, and she'd been the one who'd led him there. There was no contract in the world that could be signed by a ten year old's parents to make it justifiable to patent and sell his personality.

Silicia made her way up to the fire stairs that clung close to the side of the building barely noticing that's where she was headed. The metal creaked hauntingly in the wind, and the emergency exit doors were all a little stuck because no one ever used them, making the fire stairs the ideal place for a private mental breakdown.
She sat down on a step halfway up to the 9th floor, not dressed warm enough to sit out here in the middle of winter at all, with the wind biting at her with icy teeth. It didn't really matter. She sunk down further, then thought 'to hell with it', and leant back until the back of her neck rested on another stair.

The cold slowed her thoughts, but did not calm them.

She was in too deep to get out - she tried to imagine it, and failed. She would quit, would have her belongings in boxes before Mira came home. Settle in another city, another state even, find a new job - boring, but not this.
But she was deluding herself. She had to stay, had to do her best to be the one remaining force for good in these kids lives. Or maybe that was arrogant. Maybe deep down, the thing keeping her was just that she didn't hate Mira, that she couldn't. That she maybe never really would no matter what she did.
What had she done, really? Exactly what she said she would, and probably what she would have always done, with or without Silicia. She couldn't leave and pretend she was just an innocent victim here.

Mira was - she loved her, far, far too much, had for years and would for years to come. But she knew at that moment that she would betray her.

Chapter 10

Tump seemed to pick up on her unsettled state of mind almost immediately. Silicia had been dreading his session all week. She'd got through the half hour leaning on established protocol as a crutch, even though her tongue felt like lead in her mouth. The entire time he looked at her like he knew. Had he always been this perceptive? Maybe she was just a bad actor. Maybe she was just imagining it.

Of course, because she was just lucky like that, he stayed after to fix her with a concerned look.

"Miss Dale, is everything alright?"

Silicia swallowed heavily and opened her mouth to say 'they forbade me from telling you', or 'you need to run', or even 'they're going to take you and strip you for parts'.
But she couldn't make herself say any of that.

"I'm sorry," she said instead, breathlessly. Tump looked at her like she'd said something funny.

"For what?"

Her mouth opened, closed. What could she actually tell him? She had nothing, neither proof nor really even the shape of the impending doom hanging invisibly over his head.

He waited for her to answer until the bell rang outside. Then Tump stood, looking shaken at seeing her like this.
When she finally managed to force the words out her throat he already had a hand on the doorknob. Still he met her eyes eagerly.

"I don't think I can protect you," Silicia said quietly, and Tump looked away.

---

She would do it for them. She would collect evidence against the company, she would be a thorn in their side. If no one else would, she would have to be the one to stand up for the kids.

As long as Mira trusted her, she had power in this horrible game.
And so, although it made her sick to think it, she would have to play at normalcy a little bit longer.

---

It was easier than she'd feared it would be, and that felt like a betrayal too.

Mira had gotten an invitation to an exhibition opening which presented an opportunity to network that she couldn't refuse. Silicia was just here to hang off her arm and drive her home at the end of the evening. Which wouldn't have been a problem - the anthropological collection on show was actually very interesting - if it hadn't been for the dress.

It was a cascading monstrosity of bronze and black, somehow simultaneously too short on Silicia and too long on Mira, although the height difference between them was negligible. Mira had dug it up from the depths of her closet in her seldom used own flat, originally as a last resort, but they'd quickly learned that Silicia looked even more ridiculous in everything else.
In truth, having to wear a dress at all made her feel like a little girl dolled up by her parents for her first formal event, but Mira had insisted. Something about being taken seriously - Silicia had barely listened because she'd already known it wasn't something Mira would budge on anyways.
Mira herself wore pants and a blazer, to add insult to injury.

And so here she was, incongruent with her hair shorn short, with no jewelry, but wearing a dress and shoes that she probably couldn't have afforded and didn't want to. Mira had practically cut her loose at the door and few people wanted to chat to her, so she busied herself wandering around the part of the exhibition that was already open.
Seemingly every time she threw a glance back at Mira, her back was turned. There was a little seed of bitterness in her chest these days, just behind her lungs, and it was making its presence known. Maybe it had still not really sunk in that Mira was untrustworthy. Perhaps irrationally, she feared that if it did, Mira would take one look at her face and know.

She leant down to read a plaque under an incomplete bust of a person. It was bent out of metal and mapped their back from the ears down to the shoulders, one continuous band of metal representing a curved spine. Silicia stared at it for a long time, trying to rid herself of the image of a young boy with a red light blinking slowly at the base of his neck.

---

Cris and Rin were fighting. Even if Rin hadn't started complaining about his insensitive flights of fancy the moment she'd entered her office, the cagey way the rest of the kids were eyeing the two of them would have been enough to tip her off.

"It's stupid!", Rin said, agitatedly flicking the bright red plastic latch on one of Silicia's fidget toys open and shut with such force she worried the girl would break it off.

"Idiotic!"

The angry clicking was giving Silicia a headache.

"Pointlessly pessimistic!"

Apparently they were having a disagreement over a book of Cris'. From what Silicia had put together, he'd had it for years and reread it frequently. It seemed obvious then what had likely happened: Rin would have asked to read it in an attempt to get closer to him, only to come away with an opinion that would be offensive to him.

"Doesn't he have friends or advisors?"

Even having the shape of it, Silicia had barely a clue what the kid was talking about.

"I'm sure the story would be less interesting if he had listened to counsel," she said cautiously, and Rin's jaw dropped open in indignation.

As she launched into another rant Silicia let the fond smile she'd been trying to suppress take over her face. It must be nice to have normal problems. She would have done anything for her top concern to be a disagreement over a story right then.

---

"This is a job for a whole creative team," Mira complained, shutting the notebook she'd been writing in and pushing it away from herself.

"Why don't you hire one?", Silicia asked, only half listening. She flipped another page of her magazine, a monthly psychology newsletter.

"Explaining our limitations would be too complicated - not to mention risky."

Silicia clenched her teeth.

"And what are those risky limitations?"

"Well, for one the human mind isn't endlessly flexible. We've got to see where we can expand on aspects of Tump, getting a whole new person for every personality module would be absurdly expensive. That sort of technology leaking would ruin us."

Silicia hoped to all the gods listening that Mira wouldn't say anything more and glued her eyes resolutely to a mediocre article on eating disorders.

---

Cris was in a bad mood all week, barely willing to say anything beyond what was absolutely necessary to allow him to leave, and Silicia was hardly in a mood to fight him on it either. She was not sleeping well, recently.

When she asked to borrow his book he barely reacted. His mouth twisted in displeasure, then he bent to open his bag - was he always carrying it on him? - and slapped it on the table between them. It wasn't very loud, because the book was slim.

"Take it," he intoned, and she thanked him. He was out the door before she had finished reading the blurb on the back.

---

A week later, Silicia was shuffling her way into the facility inhumanely early and barely conscious. She'd just so managed to scrape together an uninterrupted hour or two of sleep, and having tossed and turned all night and eventually decided that she might as well be overly early and enjoy a quiet morning.
Somehow, the second she sat down at her desk, the exhaustion hit her all at once. Since she figured she'd not be able to sleep longer than maybe ten minutes anyway, she folded her arms on the table and passed out right there.

She'd been very wrong, but it hardly mattered because at 8am sharp she was startled awake by Peppy, the announcement system for the children's classes.

"Good morning students!", Peppy's voice rang out through the building, and Silicia shot up, hit her knee against the underside of the desk, and sunk back down, groaning in pain.
"It is now 8am! Please head to the cantine for breakfast and be ready for classes at 9!"

Being a teacher must be awful, she reflected, her cheek pressed against her mouse pad. Being without the natural advantages of youth yet forced to strictly adhere to their schedule, and worse yet, to set an example for them. It must take an amount of dedication she didn't think herself capable of.
She realized then that she was highly unlikely to be the only person in the building who cared about these kids.

She'd think about that more later. For right now, she dragged herself to the coffee machine and then struggled the rest of the morning to get through Cris' book so she could hand it back at their next session.

---

It seemed that these days Mira was always preparing for an event, a business trip, an interview, or something of the sort. She was headed to Atlanta tomorrow for some sort of meeting, although this time she'd be home within the week.

Silicia leant back against the dinner table, watching Mira rush from room to room gathering god knows what. Her briefcase lay open on the table amidst loosely gathered documents where she'd thought of something more urgent to pack, and it wasn't the only half done thing cluttering the living room at the moment. It was sort or funny how much easier it was to pack for a whole week than for a three day trip.

Almost casually, and she was very proud of the performance, Silicia reached for one of the pages spread on the table top. It was the opening page of a progress report on a project called 'ARIAS', which had its own symbol next to it in the header: a black stylized mustache. She regonized that acronym from her recent instruction sheets. Silicia thought it was an odd choice of logo, but turned her attention to the content of the document. 'For your consideration' it read, 'an overview of the work so far achieved under the project name...' and so on. None of it seemed to have any substance, and the tables of raw data below were labelled in abbreviations she couldn't parse. Of course Mira wouldn't be this careless with anything actually important.

"Hey," she said the next time Mira passed by her, halting her girlfriend in her tracks, "what does 'ARIAS' stand for?"

Mira peered at the document in her hands and then up at her face, and Silicia realized that she was doing a risk assessment. Before that realization could make her freeze in horror, Mira's posture relaxed.

"Oh, it's the damned assistant program, stands for ar-tificially i-ntelligent a-ssistant s-ystem. Creative, isn't it?"

Silicia forced out a small laugh and put the paper back down, and Mira nodded and disappeared back into the bedroom.

'More like art-in-ass', she thought, and flipped the page around so the mustache logo wouldn't be staring at her like a fused pair of freakish little black eyes.

---

Cris' book was a commentary on freedom versus control, and neither of the kids had understood that.
In essence, the story went like this: the prince of a magical kingdom was cursed from birth to be incomplete. His missing heart was a classically waifish woman, coloured a brilliant aquamarine in the illustrations. To keep her safe he locked her in a tower, but the longer she was shut up there, the colder and more paranoid he became, turning into a warmongering tyrant and not even visiting his heart for years on end. It was told through the woman's caretakers bringing her news of the prince and the outside world.

Silicia thought it was a fairly straight forward story, almost like a fairytale with a simple message, and not even very clever. But from the way they talked about it, it was clear Rin and Cris disagreed. She could only conclude that they each saw themselves in a character a little too much, and that made it a deeply personal issue.

Whatever the case may be, Rin wasn't talking to Cris because Cris was cruel and wouldn't just admit that the prince was evil, and Cris wasn't talking to Rin because Rin was short sighted and wouldn't just admit that with a more rigid visitation schedule everything would have been just fine.
Ironically, the part about valuing the input of the people around you had sailed right over both their heads. Silicia privately thought it was a little bit funny how they really did reflect these controversial cardboard cutouts of characters.

"It's so annoying how they won't just see both of their readings suck," Alec surmised, and Silicia cringed in agreement.

---

Mira would be returning in the early hours of the morning, and Silicia had put her shameful task off until the last day. Finding the documents that her girlfriend had left behind in her apartment was easy enough, but working up the courage to look through them was something else entirely.

Skimming the stack of tables and calculations left behind on the counter revealed that none of it concerned things she'd consider dangerous or even out of the ordinary. Next on her agenda were the folders on the shelf in the bedroom, and here she found a few things that she clandestinely removed and brought to the photocopy machine set up in the living room. Silicia didn't have the time let alone nerve to go through everything right now, and she would need physical copies sooner or later anyway. The machine belonged to Mira, but had more or less been permanently stationed there. Over months she'd taken it home less and less, but they both still lived with the illusion that it would not become part of the regular furniture.

She hid her illegal copies, planning to take them to her office tomorrow. Mira would not go through her work bag when she arrived while Silicia was asleep, but she was taking no risks.

She was about to finish up with sneaking around her own flat when her eyes fell on the waste paper bin. Suddenly eager like a child, she sat down next to it on the floor and began unfolding crumpled up letters and first drafts with careful excitement. A lot of these took a trip to the copy machine, and she marvelled at the trust Mira apparently had in her. It summoned up the bitter bite of guilt.

Even though it was her home and her bin, and just taking the originals and tossing the rest of the trash would have been perfectly normal and unsuspicious, she did not. Instead, she painstakingly smoothed out every retrieved document of interest, printed herself a copy, and then re-crumpled it. When she was done, she put those copies with the others, and then she opened a bottle of wine.

---

Mira worked through christmas, and amid the mess the past month had made of her emotions, Silicia was honestly a bit relieved.
She did her best to mentally separate Mira the girlfriend from Mira the candidate for CEO, but struggled to. Mira barely noticed the new distance, owing to the fact that most of her attention was monopolized by her work already, which did not make Silicia feel significantly better.

---

Something was going on with Erik, even though he was doing his best to keep up the illusion of normalcy. Silicia could tell- the day he came into her office with his wrists bruised blue and black, she'd known immediately what had changed; a casual comment Mira had made about restructuring the research department suddenly pulled to the front of her mind, clear as day.
The evidence of 'physical research' blossomed out from under the smooth white plaster patches over his arteries, and when he rolled his sleeves up in the stuffy heat of her office she could see that there were plasters on the insides of his elbows as well.

It was just gone new years and cold outside, too cold for the children to be let out to play, but Silicia had turned the heating all the way up in the morning when she'd been shivering in here, and now the air was dusty and uncomfortably dry.
Erik seemed to be shivering anyway - it took her embarrassingly long to realize that in truth, he was just shaking.
The entire time they talked, his pale hand laid on the edge of her desk, trembling like every muscle in his body had been strained to breaking point.

"Are you okay?", she asked instead of 'how have you been feeling this week compared to last', surprising both of them.

Erik stared at her blankly for so long she was beginning to wonder why she was still even looking at him. Then he nodded.

To make matters worse, "What is your new project head like," fell unbidden out of her mouth next. It seemed she just couldn't stop herself today. The words were jagged and upfront in a way that betrayed her unfortunate emotional investment.

"Like a dog tamer," he said with a bitter finality.

---

She was not the only one who had noticed what being signed up to a new research project was doing to Erik. The other kids were irritable and morose, which matched up well with Silicia's own mood.

Erik himself was jumpy, and increasingly withdrawn. She tried a few times to press him for information on what happened on floor 7, and every time he mumbled something vague and clammed up. She had to stop doing it eventually because her reports would be noticeably shorter whenever she asked.

His friends clearly came up against the same barriers as she did, and Rin especially took it even harder than Silicia, who felt partly responsible for all of it.
One of the wait staff who she sometimes chatted to when their lunch hours coincided told her Rin had taken to sitting with Erik in whatever secluded corner he'd chosen that day, stoically silent and looking rather like she was performing some important rite.
She sort of was, Silicia reflected. It was a show of solidarity, perhaps even of a first spark of visible resistence.

Quickly, the grim mix of emotions resolved into anger in most of them - she could see it in Lia's perpetually balled fists, in the way even Tump would grit his teeth and stay mum on the topic. It seemed they'd concluded that drawing attention would only do harm - something Silicia empathised with.

One cool morning in spring, Alec told her that he wanted nothing more than to leave. The session report she filled out that afternoon was completely fictional for the first time in her career.

Chapter 11

"What is it today?", Fred asked, toasting her with a paper cup from his spot beside the coffee machine as she stepped out of the elevator.

Silicia shuffled over, dropping into one of the lobby chairs.

"Got up inhumanely early to see Mira off again."

"Huh," he said neutrally, starting the machine again to make her a cup, "she's gone a lot these days, isn't she?"

"Doing PR in hopes of snatching up the CEO position when the current bastard kicks it."

Fred let out a surprised laugh at the blunt assessment, and Silicia smiled, letting her head fall back against the back of the chair tiredly. Her eyes closed of their own accord - she was beginning to worry the slight static buzz of sleep deprivation was becoming a malignant coping mechanism for her.

"So what's she doing now, another interview? I think she'll have been on the cover of every notable paper in the country before the year is out at this rate."

"She's speaking in favour of a charity tomorrow, actually. Some sort of medical research." She knew exactly what it was for, but bent to the bizarre need to sound like she didn't. The second she said it, she felt silly, but she didn't take it back either.

Fred hummed, and took another swig of coffee. Either she was more out of it than she thought, or he was getting at something.

"Do you reckon she'll get it?"

"Get what?"

"The CEO position."

"I do."

Fred handed her her finished cup of coffee, and she smiled at him thankfully. She really needed the caffeine today, possibly on top of her established habit.

"And what about you?", he inquired almost too nonchalantly, taking a seat in the lobby chair next to hers. Silicia took a sip and relished the way it nearly burned her tongue off.

"What about me?"

"Any lofty aspirations? Department head maybe, assistant to our glorious leader?"

She hadn't honestly thought about it. The day to day minutiae of an outwardly ordinary professional life had somehow become part of the creeping horror of what she knew was going on inside this building.

"I don't think I can leave this place."

Fred nodded seriously, and they finished their coffees in silence, before they both had to get to work in their respective offices.

---

"I'm not jealous," Tump clarified, and Silicia believed him, although he sounded very much like he was saying it in an attempt to convince himself more than her.

"I just don't know what she sees in him," he continued, and then paused. She cocked her head to the side in a friendly gesture of encouragement.

"He's so..."

"Maybe he's different with her, when you aren't looking," Silicia suggested with a smile, once it became clear he wasn't going to finish the sentence.

"But he's so mean to her! You remember when they fought about the stupid book. They never really got over that."

"People don't have to agree on everything to date, you know?", she teased, and his eyebrows drew together in displeasure.

"Whose side are you even on?"

Silicia laughed.

After months of her expecting them to, Rin and Cris had finally sorted themselves out and started dating. She did agree it would probably make them fight more and not less, but she also thought they would grow from the experience. Silicia was glad that among everything, they could explore their youth even trapped as they were.

---

By all accounts, it was a very normal early April day when she finally sat down to read the discarded documents that had waited for her patiently in the back of the highest shelf in her office for weeks. She'd locked her door and chosen a time where she could usually expect to not be bothered, which made it almost feel like a fun secret.

She found her worst fears realized in neat black print on the second page of a longer report. Being thrown out had naturally torn it from its context - the scan she'd made still showed the thin lines of damage where the paper had been crumpled originally - and so it took her a few minutes to make sense of it. The few clinical paragraphs described the results of a series of tests Mira had ordered concerning the chips' ability to link up with their hosts' nervous and circulatory systems.
That wasn't the concerning part.

The part that really made her stomach drop, was the last sentence of the second paragraph on the page. Although the shadow of a fold ran through most of it, she could clearly make out that it said "We were surprised to conclude that the resistence put up by subject 344 during the neural model's initial creation process did not negatively impact the completed program's ability or willingness to interact with the internal neural interfaces' users."
After a moment of sitting absolutely stock still, Silicia stumbled out of her chair, nearly knocking it over in her haste, and fell to her knees in front of the shelf where she kept her patient records.
She knew already who that subject number belonged to, but she had to confirm.

There was a suffocating tightness in her chest as she began pulling folders out of their tidy indexed arrangement, and by the time she'd found Claire's release form, her vision was already mostly obscured by tears.
She had just enough mental fortitude left to shut the folder before she hunched over it, her body shaking with ugly, guttoral sobs.

---

The feeling of derealization was only getting worse, and that was unlikely to change, Silicia noted with detatched objectivity as she stood over the pot of pasta sauce and stared blankly at Mira's little hedgehog timer.

There was a burn in the side of her neck that was certainly in her head, but knowing that didn't stop her wanting to claw the grotesque fragment of Claire out of her. She waved her spaceiness off as exhaustion to Mira, who miraculously seemed to believe it. Constantly, her fingers were itching with the imagined sensation of parting skin and muscle and tearing the chip out of her. That would damage essential nerves, she knew. It was a risk she would have happily taken, only- what would come after?
Although she thought about it again and again, Silicia couldn't run, that decision had long been made.
That was when she remembered something Mira had said to her almost a year earlier: her girlfriend had already figured out how to remove the horrid things when she had them made.

She went to bed early, and in the morning she felt feverishly hot, but almost human again. The dawn mocked her with its ordinary beauty as she despondently watched the light creep up her bedroom walls.
Before Mira woke, she snuck quietly over to her closet to dig around the boxes at the bottom for a scarf. The thought of accidentally catching a glimpse of her reflection, and thus the glowing parasite in her neck, in a mirror made her sick to her stomach.

---

"New look?", Mira asked, looking up from her breakfast. Silicia stopped mid-step to nervously tug at the scarf around her neck.
It was a ghastly thing, truth be told, finely patterned with gold chains and flowers on a background of crassly bright reds and blues. She'd taken it home from her grandmother's closet after she'd died when Silicia was 16, because she had loved it. The fabric's nostalgic associations were disappointingly little comfort, but she had to take what she could get.

"My throat is a bit scratchy and it's not really warm enough yet to ignore it I think. But actually, the longer I wear it the more I like it on me."

She did a little spin for Mira, trying to sell it as a fashion choice. Her girlfriend laughed at her, though not unkindly.

"It makes you look all fancy, like a proper lady."

"Like a CEO's wife?", she asked teasingly.

"Exactly like that, darling."

---

Tump sat on his hands and swung his legs, and Silicia smiled at how comical the affected nonchalance looked on him.

"I think I'm going to ask Lia out," he finally confided.

She beamed at him, and Tump went on.

"I've been thinking about it for a while. Alec said I should just go for it."

Silicia nearly gasped, scandalized like the gossip-mongering old lady whose scarf she was wearing. Alec couldn't have know who Tump was thinking of, or else she'd read him very wrong. Nevertheless, it was good advice - she suspected Lia might agree.

---

Her coworkers' reactions to the scarf turned out to be interesting, if nothing else. But really, even more interesting was who didn't ask.

As was becoming a frequent occurence now since she was chronically unable to get a good night's sleep, she passed Fred in the lobby having his first coffee of the day. She'd already had a cup, because Mira was working on something that had her up early enough to make them both breakfast. Silicia usually would have stopped to chat. Today though, she stepped into the lobby and greeted him, and watched his eyes immediately lock onto the gaudy cloth around her neck. The tight expression on his face made her keep walking. He understood - she'd have to think it over to determine if that was a good thing.

Over lunch she kept the scarf on, although it was getting a bit warm, and so Anne, Samuel and Naomi got their chance to comment. Anne raised an eyebrow, but before she could say anything, Naomi leant forward on the food truck's dingy table and playfully tugged on one end of the scarf.

"Have you spontaneously aged 40 years, boss?", he teased, and Silicia struggled to not scowl at him.

"I'm just developing a cold," she lied.

"Hiding a hickey, I bet," jeered Anne.

Across the table she caught it when Samuel uncomfortably averted his eyes and brought another plastic fork's worth of junk food to his mouth, chewing until the topic of conversation had passed.

---

On Monday, Silicia learned that something entirely predictable had happened over the weekend. Alec walked in the door with a pinched expression, and filled most of their alotted time with a rant about how he deserved Lia much more than Tump did. She did her best to argue for the girl's right to self-determination, but none of it got through to him. She was already dreading the next few weeks.

---

The man who knocked on her door later that month was someone she'd never seen before, which happened very rarely these days.

He introduced himself as Mike Lakerson from lower research, here to ask about a subject she handled in her position as counselor. His word choice made her frown, but there was honest concern in his affect, so Silicia bade him to sit down.

"I'm worried that 603-"

"Erik," Silicia interrupted sternly, "his name is Erik."

Lakerson looked pained, but acquiesced.

"I'm worried that Erik is not handling the testing well, or rather," he cringed, and Silicia leaned forward intently, "I'm worried he's not handling Oscar Cooper well."

"He certainly is not."

Lakerson nodded, looking with feigned interest at her book case. She couldn't quite work out what about this conversation had him so on edge until it occurred to her that which counselors were assigned to individual children ought not to be information accessible to anyone outside of floor 8. She probably could get him fired for this - if there was one thing Tump Inc. took seriously, it was stemming the flow of information.

"Listen. I cannot do anything about this if I don't want to have my desk cleared out by evening - but you could put in a formal statement of concern."

"What makes you think I haven't already?", she asked neutrally.

The chair clattered with how fast he got up, balled fists braced on her desk.

"You understand that I have to try," he said imploringly.

She did understand.

"I'm sorry," she said, as she watched him leave.

Silicia hadn't filed a complaint, of course. Directly confronted with the option, she could not deny that the reason she hadn't even thought of it was that deep down, she was a coward - scared of upsetting the deceptive peace, and even moreso of facing Mira's certain disappointment.

---

Through the sound of her own heartbeat in her ears, Silicia tried to concentrate on how her every breath lifted Mira's hand on her chest and not on thinking 'there is a part of Claire implanted in my neck'.

She'd clung onto the futile hope that having a good cry about spilled milk would finally allow her to at least somewhat make peace with the horrible things that must have happened to Claire. It had not, and in fact the crushing guilt of it lay curled in the back of her head like a wolf, waiting to pounce on her under the cover of night. These days she was having to make a conscious decision not to scrutinize her thought patterns and coping mechanisms too closely.

---

On her 35th birthday Silicia woke alone. When she dragged herself into the living room to eat one slice of under-toasted white bread, she discovered that this was because her girlfriend had gone to work already.

With all the PR work she was now doing ontop of her already extensive job in research, Mira was absent in mind, body or both more often than not now. It seemed that Silicia just wasn't part of the big picture, and it had been a miracle that Mira had ever had enough time in her day to devote attention to her largely unimportant self.

The day didn't get much better from there, although at least Fred had remembered. Around noon, Naomi burst into her office, startling her so badly she spilled a bit of tea on her note pad. He hurried her down to floor 5, where apparently Erik had picked a fight.

The teen was sat on the floor of the hallway with his arms crossed and his head slumped down so far it looked like his chin almost touched his collarbone.
One of the teaching staff approached them when they arrived, explaining further that he'd not just picked a fight, he'd kicked a teacher. Silicia glanced down at him, small against the endless blank wall, then past their welcoming party into a class room where a few people were gathered around someone holding a cold pad to their shin.
It felt like a bizarre joke - a situation straight out of a teen drama. For lack of anything more helpful to do, she left Naomi to strike up a hushed conversation with the teaching staff, and squatted down next to her charge.

"Hey," she said, and was not graced with a reaction.

"Did he at least deserve it?", she tried, attempting to inject a little levity into the situation.

"No," Erik said quietly, and the hopeful half smile fell from her face. Maybe she'd misread the kid once again. He didn't resist when she pulled him into a hug.

---

It actually wasn't terribly hard to get a hold of classified information in this company if one just knew how to look, as it turned out. She was able to learn quite a bit just by talking to the right people in the elevator, even though it took a while until she could compile these rather disparate data points into something useful.
Her biggest coup was no more complex than lying to a receptionist - once she knew enough about how the research departments worked, she knew what document to ask for. A bit of friendly chitchat and flattery later, and she had all that she needed to poke through the files available in the facility's main system, too. Maybe Mira had a point about humans being a system's weak spots.

She'd finally come to terms with the fact that her workplace had become a battlefield. Erik's weekly reports were now the only ones she didn't regularly and gratuitously lie on - in her wildest dreams Silicia fantasized that someone might pull the plug on the project if she just described his suffering graphically enough.

---

The evening had begun with the both of them on the couch planning on a regular movie night like they used to have in college, but less than an hour passed as intended before Mira dozed off. At first she'd done her best to keep her focus on the tv screen, but in the end it had lost Silicia's attention too as she stared down at Mira instead.
Worry lines and light bruises under her eyes notwithstanding, she was beautiful still. It was a problem. If they'd met now, she would have seen her clearly for the morally bankrupt puppeteer she was, but even knowing that for certain now, Silicia struggled to detangle this Mira from the Mira who still lived in her head, charismatic and funny and sweet.

She knew she would have to let go eventually - there was no telling how soon, but she knew they were approaching a precipice. And then without Mira, Silicia would have to learn to be herself all over again.

---

"Please Anne, at least keep your voice down. This is really not something you should gossip about," Fred was arguing weakly.

"What is?", Silicia asked, coming up behind them. She'd seen them speaking agitatedly at the end of the hallway in front of Fred's office - the whole floor seemed to be humming with something today, an underlying restlessness.

Anne spun on her heel and grabbed her by the upper arms. Embarrassingly, Silicia yelped in surprise.

"The kids are all talking about it, rumor has it one of them saw someone get dragged away. I can't believe you haven't heard!"

"Dragged away?", she repeated dumbly. Behind Anne, she saw Fred pinch the bridge of his nose. He looked like he was getting about as much sleep recently as Silicia was; it made her almost wonder what was going on with his assigned charges, but she shut that thought down as soon as it emerged. She had too much to worry about already.

"The gossip mill is running wild with the 4th floor people. I don't actually know who it was, but it sounds pretty dramatic, doesn't it?"

Despite prodding, she couldn't get much more out of Anne, so she resolved to do some more snooping in the facility's lobbies and corridors. No one but her own team actively came to her to gossip, but she'd become a familiar face to quite a few people from other departments. This was useful both for talking her way into classified information and for satisfying her curiosity.

Chapter 12

Silicia had to be the unluckiest person in the whole of Minnesota, maybe even the whole of North America or the planet or even the whole universe, depending on whether or not aliens existed and/or had a concept like luck.

Right after leaving that horribly foreboding conversation she had sunk against the inside of her locked door, when her eyes zeroed in on a letter sitting primly and innocently on her desk.
She staggered over to it, dizzy with a sudden fear which was immediately worsened when she opened it to find a formal notice informing her that one of her kids had been released from her care. It was Erik - of course it was Erik.

In all likelyhood, they'd taken him just the way they had Claire, and in a few years she would be unknowingly using mandatory company software built out of his brain. The thought of it made her sick, so sick in fact that she had to open the window, hanging most her upper body out of it in her haste.
The early summer air was not enough, and barely cooler than the office. Her head was full of images of tubes and needles and twitching bodies strapped into beeping machines, and she clutched the windowsill desperately as she retched.

With a lot of effort Silicia made herself swallow the bile down again, but she struggled to banish the grotesque images from her mind. It helped a little to focus on her breathing, but the guilt sat heavy in her lungs and in her stomach - a physiological manifestation of her complicity.

For the rest of the day and a few after, she felt like she was dying. There was no other way to describe it - her body was sluggish and unhappy to obey her, and she was unable to focus on anything but the constant lump in her throat. As someone with a psychology degree, it was plenty obvious to Silicia what was happening to her, but that didn't mean she could do anything about it.

While her coworkers seemed for the most part to not think anything of Erik's disappearance, the kids looked downright haunted. They had been uneasy for a while now, but clearly hadn't really grasped the scope of it previously.

To make matters worse, Lia confided to her that Cris was the one who'd seen it happen. He'd been unable to stop it of course, and when Silicia saw him later in the week, she could easily see that just like her, he'd not been able to think of anything else since.
Ultimately, that was why she did it - it seemed like such an obvious thing to do that she barely hesitated.

"It's a shame about the flower beds outfront," Silicia said conversationally. The flowering bushes had been crushed by snow the last year, and no one had bothered to replant them or any of the other flowers, so now they were stone rimmed collections of weed and plant debris.
"I feel like after last winter they've just given up on maintaining the grounds. They've not even fixed the fence by the old oak, it's been more hole than wire for months now."

Cris looked at her with narrowed eyes; an echo of a look he used to give her when he was younger that had always reminded her of a dog figuring out a puzzle toy.

"Why are you small-talking me?"

"You're adult enough to have opinions on the weather, aren't you?"

She smiled innocently, until he gave up and moved the conversation along.

---

Mira had finally achieved her goal of becoming CEO of Tump Inc. after the previous figurehead had met an unfortunate fate in a traffic accident, which meant that she was very busy once more.

Silicia sat through the celebratory dinner in an uncomfortable red satin dress and a gloomy mood, listening to Mira network and poking at some of the best food she'd ever eaten. It was hard to enjoy it, so she made a private game out of getting as drunk as she could without anyone noticing. Mira noticed, naturally, and when Silicia tried to kiss her as they were waiting for their taxi home outside the venue, she pushed her face away and called her gross.

She had read something once about bids for connection, probably in one of the magazines that had kept turning up whereever there was a seating area on their university campus. She'd thought it a silly overcategorization of basic human interaction, until she asked Mira later that month if she wanted to go to the cinema with her. Not only did she say no, but her supposed girlfriend barely even bothered to make her 'too busy' sound apologetic.

And so she stood there behind the couch, looking down at Mira's back, stunned. It would be hell pulling the roots of her out of Silicia's head, but she'd have to do it sooner rather than later.
For now, she urgently needed a distraction, something productive to do: if Mira had already planned out a way to deal with the chips she figured, then she would be able to dig it up. And so Silicia got to work.

---

They'd told the kids that Erik had been locked up in his room for everyone's safety after another burst of violence, which was both insulting and blatantly contradicted by the fact that Cris had seen him be dragged in the opposite direction. No one said anything about it; the other counselors because they didn't know enough to care, and the kids because there was really nothing to be said that hadn't already been said. Fred now looked at her almost exclusively with nervous concern, and she thought bitterly that it had taken him quite a bit to catch on.

Tump stayed after their next session, fussing with the hem of his shirt. Silicia turned a weak smile on him that he didn't see, his eyes glued unwaveringly to his lap.

"Miss Dale, why don't they let us out anymore?"

She'd never been more relieved to be linguistically excluded from a group she ostensibly belonged to, but she didn't have a very satisfying answer for him.
In the end she settled on, "I think they're trying to keep a closer eye on you."

"Why," Tump asked, his voice small.

When his head tilted up, Silicia looked away and conspicuously rubbed at her neck, right above the blinking red light that shone through both their skin. She legally couldn't answer that.

Thankfully, Tump's eyes widened minutely in understanding.

"I think they're trying to control outside influences," she said.

"Like a cult?"

Silicia pressed her lips together and wished to any god listening he would just get up and leave now and spare her this.

"Like an experiment."

He stared at her for a long time, like he could see straight through her and what he saw there was not encouraging. Silicia was deeply uncomfortable, but felt that she deserved to be.

---

She saw the same look in Lia's eyes when Silicia was playing at being proud about Mira's current PR tour. What the CEO did shouldn't be any of the kids' business, but they both knew it was. Lia listened quietly and her thinly pressed together lips said tell me you don't really believe that. Silicia honestly didn't know anymore what she believed. She just knew she had to tell it to someone, someone who hadn't heard any of it before. She was beginning to fear it might be because she was desperately trying to find a spin that would make it sound good.

"I like to talk to insects sometimes when I'm struggling with something, because they can't understand what I'm saying," Lia told her bluntly when she'd finally heard enough, eyeing the spider that'd been setting up a net in the corner. She'd left it so far, because it was getting to be fly season.

"Spiders are arachnids," Silicia said.

---

The first cheerfully bright days of the oncoming summer mocked her misery.

Having spent the morning organizing files, she was just sliding the last folder into its place on the shelf when her office door banged open. Silicia looked up to see Lia in her doorframe, breathing like she'd run all the way there and looking absolutely beside herself.

"Erik-" she choked out, urgent like Silicia had never heard her, "we snuck into his room, he's-"
She had to pause to take a deep breath, and Silicia sunk into her office chair, feeling months of exhaustion hit her all at once.
"He's not there! He's not on house arrest; they said..."

"I know," Silicia admitted, sagging, deathly tired.

Lia froze, standing still like a statue for a fraction of a second before she was angrily bearing down on her.
"How dare you!", she bellowed, and when she slammed her hands on the desktop Silicia could see the muscles in her arms trembling with fury.

"I'm sorry," said Silicia quietly, and put a hand on the girl's in what she hoped would come across as sympathetic rather than patronizing. Lia tore her hand away like she'd been burned and stumbled back from the desk.
Absently Silicia realized that no one had ever been this angry at her before.

"I couldn't do anything," she tried again, unsuccessfully.

"You two-faced-" a breath, "selfish-" another, "lying arsehole!" Lia panted out, her nose scrunched up in blatant disgust.

Ouch.

"Listen," Silicia started, but was immediately interrupted by Lia wildly poking a finger in her face.

"No, you listen! My friend is missing, or dead, or worse and you've just been sitting here in your little office acting like everything is just dandy!"

That wasn't strictly true, but it sure felt true.
Lia wasn't done. The ire brought out a slight accent that was usually absent, but Silicia was too distracted to place it at the moment.

"How long have you been doing this, huh? How long have you known? You didn't tell any of us anything - in fact I'd bet you've been doing the opposite!"

Silicia shrank back when the girl slapped her hands on the table again, feeling like a kid getting the scolding of their life.
"I'm-", she started.

"And don't tell me you're sorry - why would I care? You've done absolutely nothing to help! Why are you even still here!"

Her tirade got progressively louder until she ran out of things to throw at Silicia, and in the ensuing tense silence they stared at each other for a breathless moment. Then Lia made a frustrated growl sort of sound and stalked out of the office. The door slammed, and Silicia made herself take one deep, slow breath in, which did absolutely nothing to make her feel better.
'Really not so morally superior than me now, are you?' the imagined voice of Mira taunted in her head.

---

Without much fanfare, her charges resolutely iced her out. If they would answer her questions at all, it was as briefly and derisively as possible. Cris said bitingly that Alec had been wrong about her, and Alec himself called her 'disappointingly flaky and disloyal'. She'd known that cultivating their trust would only bite them in the ass in the end, but she found herself ill-prepared for the emotional fall out she herself would be subject to.

It was understandable that they would let their anger out on her, really. They were even more powerless than she was. Tump was the only one who seemed to understand that, but even he was withdrawn and short with her.
Really, the only people who would give her the time of day were her coworkers, who tried in vain to cheer her up. Of course she couldn't risk any of them giving the kids up for going out of bounds, so they had scant little context to work with.

When she apologized to Tump for being such a coward the following week on desperate impulse, she could have sworn he looked at her with pity. Being pitied by a 14 year old was pretty rough.

Again and again, she caught herself wondering what Mira would have thought of her actions (or lack thereof). Selfishly, she liked to think that the Mira she fell in love with years ago would have found something smart and encouraging to say. How normal was it to miss someone you saw nearly every day?

---

Despite feeling like a roof collapsing slowly under the weight of feet of snow, Silicia kept on, because at this point returning was as tedious as go o'er.

Over time the children didn't exactly forgive her, but it seemed they did arrange themselves with their new irrevocably tainted impression of her - after all, short of getting her fired they were stuck with Silicia. She did her best to not provoke any more tantrums, and they too would bite their tongue on things that she would have rather heard than be given leave to imagine herself.

If nothing else, it ought to make them less hesitant to steal from her. Thus, Silicia set out her keycard on the desk before an appointment with Rin one day; not out in the open, but not hidden either. When she returned after having excused herself for a nonexistent call, it was gone. Silicia smiled, and Rin's face remained perfectly blank.
Since the girl wasn't a good liar, her strategy was usually to clam up completely. It was anything but inconspicuous, but Silicia pretended to have seen nothing and hoped it would be understood as penance.

Silicia's office unlocked with an old fashioned metal key, and by the time she usually arrived to work most doors she needed to go through were already open, so she barely felt the impact of losing the keycard. That was good, because she strongly suspected the security would run on credit card rules and the old card would cease working as soon as a new one had been issued.
That being said, she'd never actually bothered to wonder about how the door locks in the facility worked. The restricted floors in the elevator needed a key, but most doors, if they had a lock at all, worked via high tech card swipe.
She knew from toying with her keycard in moments of boredom that it consisted of a computer chip with a few wires and boxes wedged between two thin pieces of plastic, so it was at least as complicated as a pet tracker.

Should they be GPS tracked, it would of course show her card still in the building, which shouldn't be a problem unless Tump Inc. had also developed hyper accurate location tracking while she'd been looking away.
On that note, she shook her head clear and got to work making up yet another weekly report for Rin from wholecloth.

---

In the face of her own helplessness, Silicia resorted to bureaucracy. Or, she tried to. It turned out to actually be very hard to locate the form needed to file an official ethics complaint. Go figure.

Having a task to whittle away at gave her the reassuring feeling of actually doing something, which made her less abjectly miserable. Her coworkers were happy to see it, and started inviting her out to eat again. They'd stopped doing that because recently all she'd do at outings was sit in a corner with her shoulders hunched and stare at the table before her sullenly, barely responding when addressed.

To give her mental health a little boost, she picked up running again, which she'd done last in college. It was okay, but not worth it, so she stopped fairly quickly and instead took the stairs every day, which worked just as well to make her legs hurt.

---

Although she did her best to act as unchanged as possible, the metaphorical space between her and Mira rumbled, cracked, and split apart into a whole grand canyon's worth of distance. On the occasion of their first fully silent meal she reflected on how this had happened and found herself utterly unable to recall the starting point. It was like one day they'd been laughing, cuddled together on the couch, and the next they had both lost all desire to have more than formal business interactions. As though girlfriend had become her job title.
There were now two distinct Miras that haunted her: there was the old Mira, the woman she'd been (or the woman Silicia had thought she'd been), who smiled up at her from the graduation photo that sat on her desk, who'd inspired her to be better and been there for her without Silicia ever needing to ask. But then there was also the new Mira; the ruthless CEO, the press darling, the genius inventor, the monster, the woman who sat across from her night after night and had nothing left to say to her.

Silicia got up, placed her unfinished dinner in the fridge, put on her trainers and coat, and left. Mira didn't ask where she was going, just called 'bye' after her when she opened the front door. Silicia buttoned up her coat and walked through the cooling evening air trying to work through some emotions, but really just feeling numb.
When she returned Mira had already gone to bed.

---

It took her ages to get the ball rolling on befriending the right people for chip-related research, but in the end it was having met Mike Lakerson and being privy to his very private concerns that served as her in.

When he saw her loitering outside the cafeteria chatting up his lab assistants, Lakerson strode over and shooed her hurriedly into his office. As soon as he'd shut the door behind them, his shoulders slumped. Silicia could see that same exhaustion in his eyes that haunted her too.

"What are you doing here?"

"Outside the cafeteria?"

"Cut the crap, Miss Dale, if you will?"

Silicia huffed, but cut the crap.
"I'm feeling out who can get me the information I'm after."

Lakerson raked his hands through his hair and trudged over to his desk.

"What are you trying to do?"

She thought about this. Meanwhile, he took a tiny key out of his pocket and unlocked a drawer in his desk. It was a rather feeble lock, and not even hidden. Shoddy precautions.

"I'm not sure yet. I guess I'm looking into my options," Silicia quipped. He sighed, and slapped a bound stack of densely printed paper on the table top.

"How much time do you have?"

---

Juggling her regular workload, going through the material Lakerson had given her and making progress on her ethics complaint project was taxing, but it was made easier by the fact that none of the children ordinarily spent any more time in her presence than necessary anymore.

A new, smaller batch of teenagers arrived that week, but it did not affect her beyond seeing unfamiliar children in the halls again. This strengthened her suspicion that her charges had been very intentionally isolated from the rest.

For a bit of fun (read: occupying her mind to stop herself spiralling), Silicia also kept herself busy by modifying the most shoddily coded VPN she could find online to flip between making her appear as different computers on the internal Tump Inc. network. It was a satisfying project, but only took her a day or so. She'd been hoping to occupy herself thusly for a longer time, so she came up with another activity that could be useful in the future: She started trying to hack into Mike Lakerson's account.

All Tump Inc. issued work emails followed the same format, with the only variables being whose it was and whether it was an internal or external inbox. Each person's name was shortened to a four letter abbreviation plus a random number. Since Lakerson was the representative of the company's research department, she could find his external email on the official website with ease, which let her simply recombine to get the internal one.

Guessing his password on the other hand proved to be as challenging as she'd hoped, so she happily squeezed in a few minutes of guessing whenever she needed a break.

---

Alec was glaring at her coldly, leant forward all the way in his seat across from her desk.

"I'm angry," he said, "I'm so angry, all the time, and I know I'm right to be fucking angry. How do you stay so calm? Is it an adult thing? I really hate you. I hope you know that."

Silicia blinked at him. He blinked back, his face a mask of stone giving nothing away. Her own felt frozen, like her muscles were numbed.

"I'm revolted by your weakness," he intoned, and a voice joined him from behind her chair.

"So am I," said Erik.

Silicia wanted nothing more than to turn and face him, but she couldn't move, caught in Alec's gaze.

"And I," said a small voice. She didn't actually remember what she'd sounded like, but she knew that it was Claire.

"You let me die," whispered Erik, "and you'll let the rest of us die too. Who's next, hm? Do you know?"

"It'll be Tump, of course, and then Rin," Alec speculated with a revolting little smile. "It's going in the order of how much you like us, so I reckon it'll be Lia, then Cris, and me last, won't it?"

Erik's hands wound around her neck from behind and squeezed.
"Why didn't you help me?"

Silicia sat up in bed dizzy and feeling like she was burning up. Her head was hurting something awful, and it got only worse when she lay back down. She curled up and put her hand over her mouth, desperate not to wake Mira as she cried.

---

Mira carried on as though nothing had happened, as she was wont to do. In all fairness, Erik hadn't been part of a project she directly oversaw for years now.
The first step in excising her presence from Silicia's head was to become aware of it, and so every time she caught herself wondering about how Mira would have felt about something, what she would have replied to someone or done in a situation, she grit her teeth and directed her thoughts purposefully away. It was miserable, frankly, and not always successful.

She ripped the print out of the complaint form she'd finally been emailed out of the machine and held it close to her chest like she was doing something illegal. The whole time she was crouched over her desk filling it out - her office door locked and other unfinished papers at her elbow so she could quickly hide her real aim - her mind tortured her with the phantom sensation of Mira standing over her, watching her write. She couldn't say for sure if it was a result of their fraught interpersonal situation or simple garden-variety paranoia, but it was a drain on her focus either way.

---

Conveniently, getting a new keycard was fairly easy. It really was just a request form and lying in an email, and a few days later she had a new one. Hopefully the kids had made use of it while they'd had it, although she would likely never find out.

The hardest part of the whole ordeal was pretending not to be offended by Fred mocking her for losing her card, but of course she couldn't tell him what had really happened to it.

---

Guessing Lakerson's login was a dead end, but one afternoon that summer something even better fell into her lap.

She'd strolled into one of the 9th floor labs to meet Jutta for lunch only to find the place deserted. Jutta was one of her top informants, so it wasn't the first time she'd been in there, but it hadn't been in the height of summer before. The dry heat had forced everyone out of the poorly ventillated space as soon as the clock struck 12 - everyone except Jutta, who was still flipping through a whirlwind of loose papers when Silicia entered.

"I just have to photocopy these, hold on," she called, and Silicia smiled her understanding. Her acquaintance rushed out of the room, leaving Silicia with a few minutes to snoop.

Most space in the lab was taken up by desks, but to one side there was a plexiglass wall separating the machinery and associated work space from the carpeted part, and to the other side was a row of closed off rooms. The very last one in the row was the current project lead's, labelled Oscar Cooper, and since his door had a window in it, Silicia slunk over to peer in.
Because fortune favours the brave, she threw a glance back at the corridor through which Jutta had left, then tried the door. It was unlocked.

The office' decor was spartan to put it nicely, with scuffed up looking black and grey furniture and a standard issue desk that had seen better days. Silicia crept around it intending to look through his drawers when she noticed it: a sticky note on the monitor proclaimed the old fool's login information for all the world to see. Human error, she thought, her lips quirking up, and quickly jotted her prize down.
She didn't dare stay in there any longer lest Jutta come back quicker than expected, but the rest of the day she was in an uncharacteristically good mood.

Chapter 13

That afternoon when she came back to her office, she found that her old keycard had been slid under her door. She picked it up and, turning it over in her hand, wondered how hard it would be to modify.

Mira was lounging on Silicia's couch with takeout when she came home, though she hadn't waited for her girlfriend to join her to start eating.

"You know, I was so sure I'd lost my keycard, but I found it slipped behind a shelf today," Silicia said casually, peeling a slightly soggy takeout container open.

"It was a ratty old thing anyway," Mira said distractedly, and Silicia nodded, cheewing her first bite.

"I suppose now I've got two."
She glanced up carefully, but Mira's disinterested expression hadn't changed.
"Kinda wonder how they work, now I have a spare I could dissect. Do you know?"

"Oh, no clue. You'd have to ask the tech team I guess," said Mira, getting up to toss the remnants of her dinner and put her cutlery in the sink.

"Yeah," Silicia said, "maybe I will."

---

And indeed she did.

Wedged into the corner of the building on floor 10 and only accessible through a series of artificially lit corridors was the 2.5 rooms officially labelled the Internal Engineering Department.

Ironically, the door was open, so Silicia stepped in and knocked on the doorframe from the inside with her most charming smile. Only about half the room even looked up, and then a guy with big round glasses and a shorn head stood up at the back and wove his way through the tables to shake her hand. His name was Arthur Cossman, and he positively ate up Silicia's highly embellished story explaining how she'd come to be interested in the keycards' internal workings.

Arthur sat her down at an unoccupied desk in the front of the room and put out a whole bundle of blueprints in front of her. What followed was a painful hour of pretending to find minute technical design choices unbelievably interesting, but Silicia did get what she wanted, so she felt quite fond of the jumpy little man anyway.

As soon as she'd gotten back to her office and locked the door, she grabbed a pair of scissors and eagerly snipped a corner off her old keycard to reveal its innards. She peered inside, trying to bend the sides apart to get a better look. The plastic proved too stiff, so she had to resort to drastic measures.
Silicia nearly broke a nail and her fancy letter opener doing it, but eventually she succeeded in separating the two sides of the mutilated keycard. What she revealed was exactly what Arthur had shown her, but in the most frustrating turnof events of the century, she found that a mere few tiny screws which held shut the tiny frame in which the actual chip sat halted her progress at this step.

To her great luck, it was Friday, so the next day she went out and bought a tiny screwdriver and a microchip adapter. She daydreamed about cracking the card open and rearranging its guts all weekend, until she could finally put screwdriver to screw first thing on Monday morning.
She made short work of hacking the thing, thanks to the backend programming job she'd briefly held almost a decade ago. The keycards' hardware was identical regardless of security level, while what they actually communicated to the door was a value she could easily increase manually as soon as she'd gotten inside the chip.
And voilà, a top level security keycard short only one corner and a bit of structural integrity.

---

In the face of her recent successes her depressive mood had swung over all too easily into recklessness. Silicia knew this, but she indulged herself anyway. At this point what would being booted do but take the responsibility off her shoulders?

Even still, what she planned to do that evening was a bit extreme. Before she drove home, she wedged a door stop under the fire door on the 12th floor and covered the security camera there. It was her last chance to do this, because they'd recently all been warned that the very next week the company would be installing a more modern security system. As things stood, there were only the various door locks and cameras at the entrances and on the floors where the kids stayed to be avoided.

When night had fallen, she put on the least conspicuous thing she owned and drove a few minutes to the edge of town. There she parked, checked and double checked that she'd got everything, and walked the rest of the way to the facility. It wasn't very far, and actually quite nice out - or it would have been, had she not felt so paranoid.
Driving right up to the facility her car would have been caught by the security cameras out front, but even on foot she had to stick to the shadows as she snuck around to the side of the buildings.

It occurred to her only when she was already more than halfway up the fire stairs that, even covered, the security camera at the top might have audio. But in for a penny, in for a pound.
She threw the camera a concerned glance around the heavy door as she inched it open as quietly as possible. No alarms started blaring, so she optimistically considered herself in the clear.

The deserted unlit hallways and lobbies were eerie as all get out, but having been there many times, Silicia navigated the 12th floor easily. She had to stop for a second to take a calming breath when the beam of her flashlight fell on the little seating area she and Mira used to meet over lunch breaks, then she hurried on.
It was just a left turn from there, and then she could swipe her modified security card and step into the pitch black lab.

She followed a corridor deeper into the department, which was decorated like a doctor's office. To her great relief, the doors were labelled and unlocked: head office, documentation, examination, and finally chip servicing.

It took her a few minutes of fumbling around in the dark to locate the right machine, as well as to find its on-switch.
Silicia cheered quietly when a console to her right lit up. There was a range of physical buttons, but the scan programs themselves seemed to be intended to be selected via touch screen. She felt around for a USB stick slot, failed multiple times to insert the annoying thing the right way around, then nearly gave herself a heart attack when it struck her suddenly that she hadn't actually considered how long this would take.

To be safe, she selected the simplest looking scan, labelled as an overview image.

Operating a machine designed to be used by a professional on a patient all by herself was expectedly tricky. She ended up leaning back into the scan area for the verification process, then jumping up to press 'proceed' before the machine registered she'd gone, and hurrying back before her absence could mess up the output.
It was undignified, but lucky for her no one was there to see.

The scan took a bit under half an hour, and then another tense three minutes as the machine took its sweet time to transfer the data onto her USB stick.
She ended up having to swipe her card again to gain access to the options menu that let her delete scans from the server they were automatically backed up to - and thank god for the little pop up that informed her of this.

Having gotten what she'd come for, Silicia hurried out of the facility and back to her car no less nervous than she'd been on her way in.

Her flat was empty when she returned, which was hopefully a good sign. She assumed Mira had slept at her own seldom used apartment, though she hadn't said a word about it to her. They were like that, these days.

---

She went to work the next day feeling like everyone who even glanced at her would be able to tell that she'd done something illegal, but absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened. No one was waiting to arrest her, or fire her, or to threaten her with arranging her getting into a convenient accident on her way home.
Silicia decided to count that as a victory. Now her next step was to decode that image.

---

The whole week the kids were in various states of bloodless and shaky, variably lashing out and curling in on themselves. It was plain to see they'd had the absolute shit scared out of them, but Silicia had long lost the right to push them on it. She tried to be gentle, and to pretend that Tump whispering "we need to get out of here" wouldn't feature in her nightmares for years to come.

Silicia, too, had the absolute shit scared out of her by what she found the chip under her skin could be pushed to do to her nervous system. She had to get that awful thing out of her neck, and pronto.

---

The dying summer lay hot and fetid in the valley, swallowing up noise and making the air slow and stale. Anne was fanning herself with one of the leaflets laid out on the pommes frittes cart's rickety plastic tables. The little decorative rock that usually barely kept them from being torn away by the wind was superfluous today, as not a breeze dared disturb them.

"It's odd, honestly. People don't just disappear these days, do they?" said Anne, à propos of nothing.

Silicia hummed and ran her hand through the sweat slick hair at the nape of her neck in a vain attempt to keep the flyaway hairs off her overheating skin.

"With the chips, too," she said grimly, taking a sip of her rapidly warming beverage.

Lilly Ndara's probable disappearance had irrevocably shifted the atmosphere among the 8th floor staff. It put even those who had been able to dismiss all the previous oddities with a clear conscience decisively on edge. Yet despite the general sense of shared unease, no one seemed willing to openly discuss anything, like they were all expecting that they would be next if they let on at all that they suspected the company of sinister intentions.
By all accounts, this was her moment.

---

"You understand these things, don't you?" she whispered to Lakerson in the elevator that afternoon. There wasn't a reason to think anyone would be listening in over the inane music, but Silicia valued caution these days.

He bade her continue distractedly and adjusted the strap of his bag over his shoulder in what Silicia recognized immediately as a fidget. He wasn't the most proficient secret-keeper.

"If the chips can be rewritten for re-use, couldn't we do it ourselves?"

"Silicia," he started, but she didn't wait to be chastized.
"It means if we could get ours out safely, we could effectively lobotomize them, couldn't we?"

"And how, pray tell, do you plan to 'get ours out safely'?"

"I'll figure it out," Silicia said confidently. She actually was relatively sure she could find a backdoor into the surgical machines, drawing on both what Lakerson had given her and the documents she'd stolen from Mira.
"I just need you to figure out what all we need to reprogram. It'll have to be quick."

Lakerson turned to look at her very sceptically then.

"Are- do you mean to do this over lunch or something?"

Silicia smiled and nodded, and he didn't get the chance to reply because in that very moment the elevator doors slid open and released them into the first floor lobby.

---

She came home in a good mood, not expecting Mira to be there. But she was leaning against the kitchen table with her arms crossed, as though waiting to ambush her the second Silicia entered.

"You," she said, and Silicia's stomach dropped. Immediately her mind ran hot with horrible possibilities, spinning out trying to pinpoint where she'd made a mistake. If Mira had found out she was plotting against her, she'd have to warn Lakerson, her team - the kids?

Tump Inc.'s CEO came stomping into the entryway looking livid, intimidating in the pristine formalwear she still had on.

"An ethics complaint, Si? Are you serious?" Mira accused, and Silicia breathed a small sigh of relief.

"Who do you think you're helping? Are you trying to sabotage me? I'm doing important work, Silicia, I don't have time for your soft-hearted whining about people's feelings!"

"Important work, is it?" Silicia asked, quickly undergoing the second dramatic mood switch in about a minute as fear morphed seamlessly into anger. She'd have to process that dig at her profession later too, but there were more important things right now. Like-
"All I'm seeing is you're torturing teenagers!"

"Excuse me?" Mira hissed. Silicia could count on one hand the times she'd heard her take that tone, and she'd always done her best to avoid it being turned on her.

"No, you're right, you're probably not even doing it yourself. Getting your own hands dirty would be unbecoming, wouldn't it? You're too important for that. What did you order be done to Erik, huh? Do you even recognize the name?"

"Silicia!" she shrieked, grabbing her by the collar like she was going to punch her in the face. Silicia didn't yield.

"I always knew you didn't concern yourself with the details of things, but I didn't realize that category included human beings," she snarled, watching Mira grind her teeth behind angrily flushed cheeks.
"The kids are miserable, Mira, and they have been for years now - whatever you're doing can't possibly justify it!"

"It'll be worth it," Mira insisted, her voice harsh and face too close to Silicia's.
"I'm changing the world! A few sacrifices-"

"Then use adults! Hell, test it on yourself if it's so important! This is monstrous, Mira, can't you see that!"
The hand on her collar was shaking, and so was she.

"It wouldn't work, you know that! Si, why are you suddenly so mad at me - you knew, didn't you? You always supported my research!"

"Don't turn this on me," Silicia said sternly, and then she said no more because there were lips on hers. Mira kissed her like she was trying to drown her, desperate and mindless.
Silicia's hands closed around her upper arms meaning to push, but she hadn't the mental strength to resist.

They broke apart to gasp in a breath of air, and Mira pressed their bodies together, finally letting go of her collar.
"I love you," she said with intent to harm. Silicia swallowed heavily, and concluded that if the bridge was already burning, she ought to get off it.

When she tipped forward again, Silicia turned her face away. Mira didn't even afford her the courtesy of being subtle.
At some point her hands had wandered to Silicia's hips, though she hadn't noticed until now. Silicia grasped her wrists and shoved the woman away from herself.

The look on Mira's face fell into blankness in an instant.
"You're not going to make this easy, are you."

"Get out of my flat," Silicia said. She watched Mira huff and pull on her coat, and bit down on the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted blood.
Then Mira was out the door.

Chapter 14

The grey autumn weather outside made leaving the facility over breaktime decidedly unappealing, which was the perfect pretext for Silicia to wander into the first floor med bay with an alibi drink in her hand. Two of the windows were cracked, letting in cool humid air and the sound of the intermittent rain, and the few nurses on rotation were crowded around a cleared lab table eating sandwiches.

"You're allowed to eat in here?" Silicia asked, entering with her most charming smile in place.

"As long as no one snitches," Jaqueline called, grinning, and got up to greet her.
"You wanna sit with us for a bit, love?"

Silicia let herself be led to the table and introduced, and sat in on inane conversation for a while sipping her watery coffee-machine tea. Her opening appeared when the conversation turned to the topic of the rain.

"Isn't the humidity bad for the machines?"

"Eh," said Mahdi eloquently, "Never been a problem before. They're fine with it as long as they aren't running."

"I suppose they designed the things with their future users in mind," Silicia teased, and mentally added a tally mark to her side of the board when the group of nurses around her laughed.

"So how do these babies actually work," she inquired as casually as she could muster.
"When I got my implant it was nothing like this."

"What's it to you?" one of the nurses asked sharply. She had not spoken a word so far, so Silicia had honestly forgotten she was there. Tally mark for Tump Inc..

"Neda!" Jaqueline chided, "there's no need for hostilities!"

"Hey, I'm just curious," Silicia defended herself mildly. Conveniently, the rest of the group jumped to her aid. The conversation quickly dissolved back into general chatter, but half an hour later when lunch time was about to end, Silicia still left the med bay satisfied with having gained a general understanding of its layout and staff. After all it had been a scoping mission, not a raid.

To her surprise, she ran into Anne in the lobby, who was fidgetting with the empty plastic sleeve of one of the mediocre wraps the cafeteria sold.

She greeted Silicia nervously, and the two of them embarked on the journey back up to the 8th floor together.

"I've been thinking," she said as Silicia was tipping her cup back to gulp down the last of her luke warm tea.
"My kid could really use me there, at the moment, and with my husband just having been promoted..."

Silicia realized with a start where this was going.

"Maybe I should take some time off to focus on family matters-"

"Are you quitting on me right now, Annemarie?" Silicia asked incredulously. Anne smiled awkwardly and urged her with nervous little hand gestures to please keep walking before people noticed.

"Is this going to be a problem?"

"No," Silicia rushed to assure her, "no, of course not. No. It's understandable, you-"

They stepped into the elevator, and Silicia bit her lip and fumbled a bit as she selected the 8th floor.

"I understand. It's a good choice."

"Thank you," Anne said quietly.

Silicia nodded at her, and they spent the ride up staring straight ahead not saying a word. It was one of the less awkward silences Silicia had had the opportunity to bask in recently.

---

She enjoyed a surprisingly nice weekend after the busy recent weeks - the fall was making one last effort before succumbing, and golden sunlight glinted off puddles and the windows of buildings. Being alone at the flat she took several walks to make use of the wonderful weather and found quickly that even the thin coat she'd brought was a bit too much.

Her fragile sense of peace shattered when she came into work the following Monday to find Fred waiting for her. This would have been normal, if not for the way that he positively radiated unease.
Her coworker looked like a man caving in on himself, worry painting his face ashen white, and she soon found out why.

As it turned out, the kids had mounted an escape attempt over the weekend, probably figuring they wouldn't get that warm a day again until spring. They'd really needed it to be warm, because when they'd been caught they were attempting to scale the banks down to the lake - if they'd made it down, they only would have had to make it a hundred meters or so to be invisible from the facility's grounds, and another 50 to be fished out of the port in the closeby town. But they hadn't gotten that far, because one of them had told.

Fred relayed all this to her in the safety of his office, though both of them felt far too restless to sit and attempt their usual façade of calmness. The undecorated white wall at her back was the only thing keeping Silicia upright as she slumped against it, feeling like her legs were about to give out under her as Fred talked.
When she came to sit ungracefully on the carpet after he'd finished, Fred stopped his pacing and joined her against the wall.

"Why are you still here, Freddy?", she asked, tipping her head back against the rough wallpaper.
Next to her, his bouncing leg stilled. While Fred thought it over, Silicia covered her face with her hands and concentrated on breathing in an even rythm. That plan could have gotten the kids killed, even if they hadn't gotten caught.

"I think my replacement would be worse," Fred finally said. Silicia nodded her understanding, because she felt exactly the same way.

---

With all but one of her charges locked up in their rooms, Silicia had gained time in her days that she used mostly to wander the emptiest hallways the facility had to offer like a ghost, thinking as little as possible. It made a nice if psychologically concerning counterweight to her periods of activity. Maybe Mira was punishing her by denying her work to distract herself with - if so, it was working.

She had all of two days to dread her next session with Cris, and when it came to pass she had settled on a course of action as childish as it was effective. She handed over the question sheet to him and sat there in silence until he'd finished filling it in. He caught on quickly, and a terrible superior smirk played around his mouth the entire time he was writing.
The time for professionalism had long since passed.

---

"Maybe we should unionize," Silicia said. In the gloom that had come over the 8th floor recently, employees tended to gather in silent somber bunches around the coffee machines and chairs in the lobby. As far as she could tell, others' patients were scared and disappearing too, though she wasn't brave enough to ask - they might answer her honestly, now.

Fred looked at her like he was trying to figure out her game. Silicia was pretty sure there was nothing left to figure out except how much the others could be trusted.

"Before they start testing mind reading on us," Naomi agreed, taking a fortifying swallow of his latte.

Samuel looked between them with an expression Silicia couldn't read at all, which scared her. He had always been quiet. If she were running Tump Inc., she'd have spies that reported directly to the top in every department and team. But then, a mole would likely make more of an effort to integrate himself than Samuel ever had.

Fortunately, he said right then: "While they still underestimate us," which won him Silicia's tentative confidence.

"Let's meet somewhere where there's fewer cameras, though," said Fred.

"A park or something?" Naomi suggested, but Silicia shook her head.
"Someplace it would be normal for a group of coworkers to meet. A bar, maybe?"

Fred nodded and punched in his third coffee order of the day.
"There's a nice irish pub on the corner of Linden street and Avery. This Saturday, everyone bring whoever they trust?"

They all agreed, and swiftly dispersed as naturally as they could each manage.

---

"Go away," Alec called through his prison door when she knocked, and again more angrily when she said his name. Instead of telling him she was glad he was alive - which was true - she moved on. It would do neither of them any good to keep bothering people who didn't want to talk.
Rin and Lia were much the same - only Tump seemed remotely willing to be checked in on.

Mostly, he seemed caught in his own spiral of despair, insisting to her that he could have made it - could have swum all the way and kept the others on course if not for...
Silicia bit her tongue. It didn't really matter enough to argue over. He would never get another chance unless she gave it to him, and it would not involve swimming to freedom.

---

Silicia had gone back and forth on whether or not to bring Anne to the pub with her that weekend, and in the end had decided not to. She was the only one of them who had her own children to think of, and deserved to not be put in any more danger of being targeted by the company.
What they were doing was plainly risky, but it seemed the facility staff had finally reached a point where inaction would be worse than taking that risk.

Instead of Anne, she had invited Lakerson, who in turn had insisted on bringing along his coworker Sarah Norman. They met outside the pub, trying and failing to interact casually, and entered together.

The group they were looking for was easy to make out, and much larger than Silicia had anticipated. Her arrival caused a stirr as seemingly the whole table got up to rearrange themselves into a more orderly gathering.
Silicia ended up in the very centre of the group, seated with Fred to her left and Lakerson to her right like a king and her advisors. It was embarrassing, which made her very glad when someone put a pint glass in her hand and she could drink instead of speak.

The meeting opened with a round of introductions - they'd gained members from nearly all departments the facility boasted - followed by people's justification for being there. It was a necessary precaution, but had her feeling a bit like she'd accidentally ended up leading a cult initiation ritual. The others kept glancing at her like they expected her to pass judgement.

Finally they got to the meat of the matter. Silicia set her pint down with enough force that the sound carried across the table. Her fingers were slick with condensation and the seam of her trousers kept itching against her ankle, but she put on her bravest face and recounted all that she had learned so far of the company's misdeeds.
She had to pause when she got to the chips' true capabilities to allow her audience time for their various expressions of fear. Lakerson spent the entire time staring resolutely down at the scratched up oak table - Silicia, too, worried that people would turn on him for his complicity, but no one did. She supposed at least they were all on the same page about being in the same boat.

Chapter 15

She was padding down a random corridor and wallowing in the lunch time quiet when the whirr of a photocopier drew her attention. Silicia crept towards the door and peered through the inset window to find the office occupied by only a single soul: the snappish woman from the med bay, shuffling a handful of documents about.

Sly as a burglar, Silicia inched the door open and slunk inside.

"Well, well, well."

She was gratified when the nurse flinched violently, quickly shoving papers behind her back as she spun to face her.

"Oh. It's you," she said flatly and Silicia grinned, the most intimidating way she knew how to.

"What do you have there, hm?"

The woman's eyes narrowed as Silicia stalked forward, pulling the bundle of papers out of her clammy unresisting hands.

She flipped through a few pages of hastily copied files on surgical machinery and slipped effortlessly into pretending to be Mira.
"Corporate espionage? My my. Who would have thought."

"Give it back, you can't just- What are you after?" the woman demanded in a rush of confidence which quickly ran out.

"Huh?" said Silicia eloquently. Was she being mistaken for a fellow rat right now?

"It's what you're here for too, I can tell. I'll get you the info you're after, let's strike a deal."

Her courage was admirable, though Silicia did not miss the way that the little spy flinched minutely when Silicia began grinning again.

"Yes," she said delightedly, "I suppose we can come to an arrangement."

---

The good news was that Silicia had secured a way to get them into the med bay without having to sneak around - the bad news was that she'd managed it by employing the tactics of someone so lacking in morals that she found nothing wrong in torturing children. Silicia was sorry about how badly she'd scared the sneaky little nurse, but she had to operate on ends justify the means principles where it came to this. Even if it made her mildly nauseous, she'd long missed the window for asking nicely.

---

Upon coming home that night Silicia's mood took another blow. On her kitchen counter sat Mira's apartment key, atop a slip of paper which read 'get out of my facility'.
'Why', she thought grimly, 'I plan to'.

It would seem that during the work day, Mira had cleared out every possession of hers still remaining in Silicia's home, though she'd left the enamel fish keychain Silicia had bought for her 26th birthday with the key. It was a painful omission, and likely calculated.

---

She made her way down to Lakerson's office doing her best to summon a bit of cheerfulness. Norman joined them in planning their first chip removal operation - for lack of animal models, they would have to stick out their own necks. After a lot of very academically restrained arguing, they settled on Silicia being the first to go under the knife. They could not risk damaging Lakerson or Norman's expertise. Silicia's deep seated wish to be free of the terrible parasite may have clouded her judgement, but a decision was a decision.
She would not, of course, be fully rid of it. That would have been both visually obvious and immediately detectable by the company, so their only option was to reprogram the chip and shove it right back in.

Silicia did not look forward to the whole affair, but well, what had to be done had to be done. At least this time it was winter, so no one would question her wearing a scarf inside.

---

It had been sort of laughably easy, Silicia reflected as she shut the med bay door behind them. Mira would have said something smart about humans being the weak link in her system in that moment, and the comment laid itself on her tongue innocently, ready to be spoken. Silicia swallowed it and said instead:
"Alright, remember we only have about an hour. Everyone in their places."

Her own place in this play was on the main stage: she untied the gaudy scarf from around her neck and sat down on one of the contraptions. They somewhat resembled dentist chairs, but she avoided putting her hands on the arm rests, lest shackles spring from them to hold her down.
They had put together a small taskforce to get the de- and re-chipping done in an optimally unsuspicious timeframe which consisted of Silicia, Lakerson, Norman and Naomi's friend Colin, who did something vaguely medical Silicia hadn't bothered to commit to memory.

Now she sat, her hands folded in her lap, and watched Lakerson and Norman fuss over a laptop until Colin turned her head to the side to disinfect the extraction site. The cool touch against her neck made her shudder, and his face screwed up minutely. It made her the slightest bit apologetic about her lack of professionalism, before she remembered that they were essentially testing highly illegal experimental surgery on her. She was owed a moment of weakness, really.

Having her neck cut open was, generally speaking, not a great experience. Especially considering that disconnecting the thing from her nerve tissue caused a number of unpleasant sensations none of them had given enough thought to.
Colin tossed the awful little chip the machine pulled out of her into a bright plastic medical tray and handed it over to Norman without delay. Once she felt that she could stand, Silicia pressed a piece of gauze against her open wound and pulled up a chair to watch.

The chip sat in its tray still bloody, its torn off nerves indistinguishable from her own tissue. The thought chased a shiver up her spine. It was still blinking red, too, but without a clear rythm.

Norman began by wiping Silicia's blood off the thing, then pried open a panel and connected a slim orange cable that Lakerson handed to her. His laptop was surrounded by a whole cluster of disorganized wiring and additional bits of tech that Silicia didn't really understand.
When the computer made a little 'connected' sound, Lakerson cried out "Aha!" and was quickly shushed by all conspirators present.

What followed was an unbearably long time in which Lakerson did nothing but read and click through different files, occasionally taking down an observation or moving something from one folder to another. Finally, he inserted a few lines of code, checked everything over twice, had Norman check it over, and then nodded with finality.

Silicia stood apprehensively. She wasn't honestly thrilled about the prospect of being re-chipped, especially just as the incision had stopped bleeding.

"This will work," Norman assured her, clapping a warm hand over Silicia's shoulder and giving her a crooked smile, "you've nothing to worry about but pain."

"Thanks, Norman," Silicia said with a sigh. Colin hurried her back into position and she began to be glad she hadn't taken the time to have breakfast.

"I think considering the situation, you can really call me Sarah now."

Silicia smiled at her.

"Brace," said Colin.

---

The second time around, the adjustment period was less harsh, but complicated by being alone and actually having to hide that she was feeling under the weather. That night as she lay on her sofa spacing out, it occurred to her that she should change her locks. It might be just paranoia - with Mira moved out she was finally able to store her stolen documents and notes outside of Tump Inc.'s reach, but whether Mira could be trusted not to have had a spare key made she couldn't say. And so she begrudgingly got up to make a note in her calendar reminding her to call someone about her locks.

---

A week later, Silicia felt normal again, except for the deceptive lightness in her chest put there by the growing hope that she could be free again. They could all slip out from under Tump Inc.'s thumb without the company (or Mira) being any the wiser.
Testing her new modified chip was an even bigger hassle than modifying it had been, unfortunately: they had to sneak around visiting machines they didn't have clearance to even know about, and Silicia kept a diligent journal to document any potential psychological effects. They had to be absolutely sure that the chips were reasonably safe before offering them to the rest of their lot. Many of them likely would have volunteered even for an untested version, as Naomi had argued, but that was exactly the point. It was up to them to set moral standards above the barest minimum, even and especially in the face of desparation.

---

When Silicia came in on Wednesday, Fred brushed past her rudely and slipped a note into her pocket like some sort of cliché secret agent.
It read friend of Felix' has an idea. Lunch on 7th floor.

So Silicia carried on with her morning routine, finished her paper work for the day, and strolled into the 7th floor lobby fashionably late for lunch. Casual, normal, unsuspicious.
Someone was loitering by a drinking fountain and looked up in recognition when she stepped out of the elevator. She followed their impatient head gesture into a corridor which led off from the main area into the bowels of the facility.

Her guide's name was Sasha Novikov, and they stayed eerily quiet and shifty eyed the entire time they were walking. Eventually, the two of them arrived at a door which revealed a deeply nondescript room, bare like an interrogation chamber. Fred was tapping his foot against the leg of a chair in the middle of the room and rose at their entry.
As soon as the door had shut, Sasha became a different person. The uneasiness melted out of their posture as they dropped into a seat and pulled a folder over to themselves. Silicia came to stand at their shoulder and realized what she'd been invited to.

"I got this plan for approval yesterday," Sasha started without preamble, flipping through several pages of a formal construction proposal to show her the appended figures. She couldn't make much sense of them beyond guessing that they showed a densely labelled floor layout.
"They're redoing the 12th floor because they'll have to tear out the carpets to fix some water damage anyway - that's what you get for insisting on indoor fountains..."
They caught themselves trailing off and refocussed, smoothing a hand over the page until their pointer finger landed on a relatively blank leftover room created by the building's odd shape.

"This bit here, which is currently a small server room, is what I want to talk about. At the moment it's destined to become a high end broom closet."

"Which means no one would care if we found a different use for it," Fred cut in. Silicia flicked her eyes up to look at her colleague. He was visibly sleep deprived and impatient, but there was unmistakable determination in the hard set of his mouth. He was leaning over the table with tense shoulders and Silicia wondered why she had ever waited this long to involve him in her plotting. Fred was not a great actor, but he would have been an asset to any war council.

"I was thinking," said Sasha, drawing her attention back to the matter at hand, "that if we altered the layout at this stage, we could put in separate walls and reserve a more or less secret space up there. It's not a very populated floor, especially not after these renovations."
Their nose wrinkled derisively at what was surely a very ill advised remodelling plan.

"Won't someone notice that easily?" Silicia asked, but Sasha shook their head with a snort like her concern was not even worth taking seriously.
"I'm the first person who gets these things from the contractor, and the middleman for later inquiries. That means the only one with all the context needed to notice our little alteration is me."

"Alright," she conceded, uneasily noting that that would also mean they would be blamed, "so what could we use it for?"

"It's equipped with wiring and everything you could ever wish for from its previous life. So I thought we might use it to store jailbroken machinery," said Fred, who had thought about this at length already.

Silicia inclined her head and asked after the time frame. Apparently Tump Inc. had a certain reputation in the area for paying contractors handsomely for very quick, potentially illegal jobs. How terribly convenient neglecting safety regulations could be.

---

In what was either an earnest mistake or a weird powerplay, Cris had forgotten his notebook in her office. Unsure, Silicia turned it over in her hands a few times before she finally resolved to open the damn thing. It was already her job to invade his privacy, so what was one little look to satisfy her curiosity?
As it turned out, she need hardly have worried. The thing was blank except for a timetable, some math notes and a few pages at the back. Those were the most interesting part, because they were filled top to bottom with hastily scribbled writing. Much was struck through or ran into other lines, so it took her a bit to understand that he was drafting a psalm. She shut the notebook decisively and left it in front of his locked door.

---

The weekend snuck up on her, and so she found herself sat on her couch that friday with absolutely nothing to do for the first time in who knew how long. Her locks were getting changed on monday and she was staring down the barrel of two whole days in which she could do nothing but think.
Being able to rely on someone other than herself to work towards a goal again was quite something, she was learning. It did wonders for her work life balance. Unfortunately it also meant she had gained an unfathomable amount of new people to worry about.

How had she ended up here? She'd gone from living with her loving girlfriend to attempting to actively excise her from her mind in just a few years, from working a fulfilling job to scrambling to save lives within a mere handful of months.
All that was too much to think about at once, so she made herself a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table to plan the kids' rescue.

Knowing what she now knew about the chips' capabilities, a moral dilemma presented itself: either way they would need to rework the kids' chips. While she already had her metaphorical fingers in their brains, it would be so deceptively easy to wipe the whole horrible ordeal from their minds, to send them off with a bullet-proof coverstory... people who didn't know any better always made for the best liars. They could have a proper fresh start, a whole new, normal life, and all Silicia would have to do was take the burden of knowing upon herself.
Instead of Mira's, she imagined Fred's reaction to her suggesting this, and was genuinely startled to realize that the idea would not be likely to go over well with anyone in their little resistence cell. Maybe she was already so tainted by Mira that she should leave the decisions to the others alltogether, she thought. It was very unfortunate that they had unofficially elected her their leader.

Chapter 16

Their second top secret meeting was held at a smaller table in the back of a bar Naomi had suggested. The table was sticky and they had to cram themselves in strategically to accomodate everyone even with multiple extra chairs, but their server was as cheerful as she was unsuspicious.
Silicia found herself once again in the centre of the congregation, reporting on their branching out into secret room interior design.
She and Lakerson had agreed beforehand not to reveal their recent human experimentation on her person to the others until they had something actionable.
Guiltily she leaned back and tried to ignore the sweat beading at her nape as someone new spoke up. Silicia had to crane her head around a few people to see, but thought she remembered his name being Felix.

"We should really go to the police with this. It's out of our league," maybe-Felix said.

"And tell them what, exactly?" Naomi asked defensively, arms crossed and leaning heavily on the table. The guy's face twisted in displeasure or possibly distress, and he stayed mum.

"I think that until we can actually do something, we should focus on being a thorn in the Inc's side. Delay their plans as much as we can, keep them from... taking more kids," Naomi addressed the group.

"Ideally without them realizing it's us doing it," Fred added unhappily, tapping a finger to the side of his neck. Several others raised a hand to touch their own necks, and Silicia felt even worse keeping her possible freedom from them.

Lakerson spoke up for the first time then. She hadn't expected it looking at how he acted in private, but the large group seemed to actually intimidate him somewhat.
"We're already working on that."
Silicia shot him a grateful smile and stepped in before anyone could question him.
"Naomi is right, and we need to be focussing on gathering information and being a hindrance. Everyone here can be trusted to keep information shared with them secret, so I hope that none of us will hesitate to reveal new findings. In the mean time, let's start coming up with ways we could stall or derail the company's plans, shall we?"

At the far end of the table, Art from Top Research raised their hand like they were in school. Silicia was a tad relieved when they spoke without needing verbal prompting when everyone looked their way.
"I get why we can't just rock up to a police department and go 'hi, I would like to report a laundry list of human rights violations committed by the largest company in the country'. But surely we could give them a hint?"

People were still just looking at them, and they blushed but continued.

"What I mean is, we could anonymously call in with a tip on one of the missing kids, right? They made it on the news and all, it was a pretty public affair a few years ago."

This was a genius idea, actually, and the table spent the better part of an hour working out how to put it into action. Silicia was quite proud to have assembled such a competent group of people, but then that selection had already been made by Tump Inc. in the hiring process, hadn't it?

---

"Miss Dale?" Tump asked tiredly. A lump formed in her throat at the reminder of their project's urgency. She'd been looking up what places would take unattached teenagers. The search was complicated by it having to be out of state, not to mention the matter of identity. Would Tump Inc. chase after their abducted assets, or would they simply take new subjects in to replace them? Would she be as responsible for them as she was for Tump and his friends?

"Silicia," she corrected, "please."

On the other side of the door, Tump was silent for a moment. Then he said: "Can you tell me how the others are doing?"

If she were being frankly honest, they were doing bad. Still none of them would really talk to her - or anyone, apparently - but routine assessments and schedules still came across her desk. None of them except Cris were allowed to go to classes anymore. Instead more and more they were ordered up to the 11th floor to aid in research. And not just more often, but also for longer and longer times.
But the same things were true of Tump, although she'd previously assumed they were not being kept in total isolation from each other up there. Him having to ask had concerning implications.

"Cris is still keeping up with his school work. The others are... involved more in research than you all were when you were still students," she finally offered.

"Suppose I'm not alone in that, at least," Tump said bitterly.

"Do they keep you away from each other in the lab?"

"Don't know. But I'm sure not getting to talk to anyone."

'Anyone but me,' Silicia thought with a cringe. She was probably not a great conversationalist these days.

---

She put in a formal request the following day, after lying awake thinking about it all night. Somehow, she was thus granted permission to accompany Tump through the research lab for a day. She suspected strongly that this was because the system was so seldomly used that it was automated, but she wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

She was waiting outside of Tump's room the very next morning, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed in her best imitation of unquestionable confidence. The woman who came to fetch Tump took one look at her and clocked immediately that she was up to something.

"As a matter of fact I did get permission," Silicia said icily. "He has been my charge for years."

The woman rolled her eyes and opened the door. It seemed they both felt a little bit silly when Tump was standing right there, having heard everything.
To her great chagrin, he would not meet Silicia's eyes - he just stared at the awful old carpet the entire deathly silent walk to, and ride on, the elevator. His shoulders were hunched, which showed off the bruise at his nape.

The lab was as sterile as she'd expected, but packed with people wielding all kinds of equipment it almost looked more like a movie set than a laboratory. She went to stand behind the person at the main console and watched with her teeth clamped around the inside of her cheek as Tump was lead to a chair in the middle of the room, facing towards a wall with a large screen.
He twitched away when a nurse grabbed his hair and began sticking electrodes to his scalp, while another person came up with a bundle of long cables draped over their arm. As they began to attach them, Silicia's eyes followed the cables to a machine which sat against the wall beside the screen. It appeared to still be off, but dozens of other wires snaked out from it all around the room, plugged into power outlets and consoles, different smaller machines or ending nowhere in particular.
One of the nurses gave a thumbs up, and the room quietened as someone threw the lever to bring the big machine to life. The console in front of Silicia lit up with a flurry of calibration screens, and before long the lights dimmed so that what appeared on the screen could be seen more easily: It was a maze, constructed simply of black lines on a white background with an exit to either side. A small orange dot blinked into existence in the bottom left, and then someone indicated the maze's exit with a pointer stick, like a teacher showing something on the whiteboard.

Silicia watched with bated breath as in front of her Tump raised his hands and the dot began to move. As he steered it around the maze with practiced gestures, she thought to take the opportunity to peer around at the other occupants of the room unnoticed. But to her surprise, she found that most people not absorbed in a console or a notepad were staring off into space in boredom. That seemed not at all appropriate for the technological marvel they were witnessing. Though as the ones who had orchestrated it, she surmised said marvel must have appeared ordinary to them.

When Tump's avatar had reached the end of the maze, the screen shut off without much fanfare. Two people hurried over into the middle of the room to nudge Tump to stand and check a few of the electrodes, their faces indifferent and their movements clinical. Then the chair was carried off and the screen flickered on again.
The cruel routine of the situation made Silicia sick to her stomach. Tump's next task was again a maze, but this one required him to steer the orange dot through three-dimensional space. It became apparent quickly why the chair had been removed, as he was now using his whole body to direct it.

Silicia was taken aback when the room suddenly exploded into movement once Tump had mastered the second maze: machines were being moved to and fro as people came and detangled Tump from most of the electronics while others again attached new ones. Her hands balled into fists as someone pushed a line into the crook of Tump's left arm, but she was quickly distracted by the new machine that was now being wheeled into the lab from a side room. Everything else must have been moved to accomodate it, as the thing was huge.
Unconsciously, Silicia leaned forward to watch the whole crowd of people who assembled to fiddle with it, trying to make out what they were hoping to accomplish. Multiple of them were doing nothing but checking and connecting cables, while a few crouched by a control panel in the side of it, holding a hushed but intense conversation with someone sat behind a large old computer.
Then one of them slid away the top half of the machine and Silicia could finally see inside. Not that there was much to see - it was, in essence, a high tech casket.

Tump was led to sit on the edge of the pod as a nurse unceremomiously divested him of his shirt and stuck something to the back of his neck which made him flinch. Silicia tried to catch his eye from across the room, but Tump wouldn't meet her gaze even as someone gripped his shoulders and lowered him into the machine.
A jolt went through his body when the hook ups over his spine clicked into place inside the pod, and then he lay still.
Soon her view of him was obstructed by a swarm of people leaning over him, and when they dispersed she could no longer make out his face among the sleek curves of machinery parts with blinking indicator lights and the tangle of cords and cables spilling out of the machine.

Silicia was pressing her fingernails into her palms so hard she was sure they would draw blood by the time the screen blinked back to life above the whole terrible spectacle. It showed a crudely mapped out 3D environment like it had before, only there was no dot. As the perspective of the maze shifted she realized that that was because they were now viewing the task from the perspective of her charge's digital avatar.

She cast one last look down at what she see of Tump's body, still and small, and hurried out of the lab as fast as her feet could carry her, finally breaking into a full on sprint once she'd passed the threshhold of the building. Every time she thought she'd finally reached the extent of her capacity to feel the horror being committed all around her, the company swooped in to prove her wrong.

---

Either she was finally losing it, or the whole facility was getting quieter. The bustle of students seemed less and less present - until one day she stopped in the middle of the corridor at the realization that the slow yet gradual change had kept her from noticing just how stark the difference really was. This was quickly followed by a second, even scarier revelation: she hadn't seen or even heard Alec in nearly two weeks.

There was absolutely nothing she could do about this except despair and blame herself, so that was exactly what she did. Fred tried to cheer her up, but only ended up giving her an idea that was possibly even worse for her mental health: What was stopping her from accessing the surveillance cameras' video feeds to check on the kids herself?

Chapter 17

No one reported to her directly about the progress of their attempts to bait the police into taking down Tump Inc. with a tip about the missing children; she did however receive the company wide email vaguely chastising employees for sharing company secrets and threatening the immediate termination of anyone too chatty. Evil often worked quickly, Silicia thought, so it was a given that the Inc would be drafting a formal mail the second someone came knocking on their door, but that the police had acted within the month did surprise her. It seemed they were under enough public pressure still to have felt an obligation to grasp straws.
It was still sort of a mystery to her how a heavily reported on string of disappearances - of children, no less - could be swept under the rug so easily. No doubt Tump Inc. had paid their way into security, but the amount of people who would have needed to get a slice of that pie to actually prevent anyone from digging deeper seemed astronomical the more she thought about it.

If she could just identify the right weak point, Silicia was sure they would be able to topple the whole horrible house of cards. The problem was that any attempt to do so would put their lives and probably those of quite a few people in very acute danger. And that was a pretty significant problem, actually.

---

A bit of classic snooping revealed that the only thing stopping Silicia from accessing the surveillance cameras' video feeds was a trivial matter of physical reality. This was easily remedied, especially these days now that the facility appeared like a ghost town most of the time. Any guard post that was hooked up to the surveillance system would do.
There was no particular need to even sneak - she just took a few days to learn the guards' schedules and then walked right on in just after the morning shift left for break to be replaced by the next guard shift. They had even left the computer on for her, so all Silicia had to do was plug in her usb stick, wait a few seconds, and walk right out again with all she needed.

This was a laughable level of security, but then she was already in the facility, already permitted to loiter around without drawing suspicion, already in the system, not to mention able to write her own code to modify it. That could be said of very few people, and among them the number of people using their position for good was even smaller.

Keeping watch on her former charges calmed her somewhat, even knowing that she could do nothing but watch through the grainy feed as they were taken periodically to appointments she could never be sure they would return from. The people who arrived to fetch them wore bright blue plastic gloves and plain white uniforms somewhere between a nurse's outfit and a soldier's. It made her wonder if they were lab assistants or even some sort of private security force, but she had never seen anyone dressed like them outside of the research floors, so it must have been the former.

---

Foolishly, she asked Tump the following week to please tell her if he learned anything about what sort of research the others were subject to. He gritted his teeth but agreed. It seemed like he'd not fully forgiven her for her stunt two weeks ago, although whether he was upset about her coming with or her leaving, Silicia couldn't tell. She regretted hurting him, but felt that at this point she had to pull herself together and accept that there were more important things right now than a teenager's opinion of her - like for example said teenager's life.

"I wish they'd at least talk to me like a person," he told her resentfully.
"I keep asking but all anyone will ever tell me is that me knowing too much could spoil the test results."

"Tump Inc. is as Tump Inc. does," she muttered, before she froze at the realization of what she'd just done.

"What?"

Tump was staring at her, blood draining out of his face, and Silicia thought, eloquently: 'fuck.'

---

While Silicia was happy to see the remodelling on floor 12 commence, she was less thrilled to find out that there would also be construction on floor 9. The constant hum of machinery and people stomping around like they were processing grapes for wine made it hard for her to concentrate on tantalizingly routine things like drafting a request to requisition a new desk for one of the 8th floor offices.
She found herself checking the camera feed on the kids' rooms more often than she'd have liked. It was a deeply unhealthy habit, and only made worse by the fact that she did in fact catch the moment they took Rin away, but only realized it hours later. It had looked like every other time one of them was escorted up to the lab; there was a knock at the door, and then two people in their weird uniforms led her out of her room. Only this time, she never came back.

Once she'd rode out the panic attack, Silicia got up from the floor and went home without saying a word to anyone. For the rest of the week, she spent all day cooped up in her flat, the curtains half drawn in fear of being seen despite living on the third floor, and drafted a plan.

---

She expected to have a bit more time to get her things in order, but fate had other ideas.

When she took the call she initially expected it to be something trivial, but the question the gruff voice at the other end of the line posed made her jolt out of her desk chair. It was one of the researchers from the 11th floor - she recognized the voice: he'd introduced himself to her, but she'd forgotten his name - and he was asking if Tump was currently in her care.

"Yes," she said, and "I will bring him back shortly," and then she slammed the receiver down and bolted out of the room.
If they didn't know where he was, that meant he'd gotten out on his own, and if he'd escaped now and not during the night when no one would check on him, that meant he'd had an urgent reason to.

Her feet carried her to the elevator and she wrung her hands anxiously as the floors ticked by.
A handful of construction workers looked up in surprise when the doors slid open on floor 12. Silicia quickly put on a nervous smile and declared with a laugh that she appeared to have pressed the wrong button. They looked back down, but she only let the painfully cheerful expression drop when the elevator began moving again. Her face scrunched up as she waited - it was only two floors, but the ride felt like forever anyway.

She walked the corridors of floor 10 with anxious stumbling steps, peering into offices and on a few occasions even closets as she went. She had to find him, and there was only so long she could take before all hell broke loose.
After far too much time had already passed, finally it came to her that she wasn't looking for just any kid, she was looking for Tump. What business would he have down here where they built the horrible things his friends were probably fed to?
Since she'd gotten off it someone else had used the elevator, so when she saw the display begin leasurely counting up as it ascended to her, Silicia turned instead and ran for the fire stairs. She took the steps two and three at a time, the metal walkway shuddering under her feet until she finally made it back up to the 11th floor, taking in big heaving gulps of air.
She wasted no time catching her breath as she pried open the heavy door and hurried down the corridor, past the lab she'd already seen straight for the door opposite it. Neutral blocky letters above the door frame proclaimed 'ARIAS', and a laminated sheet of paper denoted it as a lab-personel only area. The door wasn't windowed like most doors in the facility were, but unlike them, it was open.

She found herself in another corridor, empty and quiet except for the voices she could hear coming from deeper inside the department. Despite her exhaustion, she sped up.
This part of the facility had no rest areas or water coolers, only scratched up grey laminate flooring and greying white walls with white doors in them. There were grooves carved into the floor in some places like something heavy had been wheeled through the corridor from room to room. The quiet gave the empty department an eerie feeling, but Silicia paid it no mind as she finally reached where the voices were coming from.

"That's not my name anymore," said a rough voice over the speaker system just as Silicia burst into the room. Tump was standing transfixed in front of a large, cylindrical tank full of fluid. Floating in it was Alec, connected to uncountable wires and drains that spread out behind him like a network of blinking, pulsing roots.
With a monumental amount of willpower, Silicia tore her eyes from the sight before every detail of the horror could burrow into her brain and debilitate her. She rushed to Tump's side, ignoring Alec's tirade of insults, half pulling half pushing her charge out of the room, gripping his wrists tightly enough to hurt when he resisted. The whole thing became a blurry mess in her memory later on, except for a few snapshots she could recall with absolute clarity.

One: Pushing Tump, who had stopped resisting, onto the cushioned chip modifier and hesitating only a breath before putting in the memory blocker she'd been doubting herself over for so long.

Two: Tump looking up at her blankly from the backseat of her car as she shut the door, confusion and childlike trust swirling in his eyes. It made her think of a duckling faithfully following around the first creature it sees in its life.
Silicia had never wanted to be a mother and that hadn't changed, but if no one else would step up, she decided then and there, she would just have to deal with it. Damn the list she'd already compiled, she was not leaving Tump in some random charity home. She jammed her car keys in and drove.

Three: Tump standing in the entryway to her flat looking around like he'd never seen a normal living space before - had he? - while Silicia threw together a bag. She'd put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, straightened his glasses, and lied to him.

Chapter 18

Silicia drove them all the way down to southern Illinois, stopping only occasionally at gas stations or at the side of the road to sleep. The entire time, she kept up a steady stream of inane conversation while Tump stared out of the passenger side window in amazement. Silicia had no time to admire the rural midwest as it sped past - she was busy drafting up their new lives. The easiest way to disappear was to reappear as someone else. Her passport and other important documents were hidden away under the cushion of one of the back seats, and as soon as they'd crossed the border into Illinois, she pulled over to use a creaky old phone booth by the road. The connection was fraught, but could not be traced to Silicia Dale, and the lady from the Social Security office understood her just fine.

---

Champaign was a lovely city made up of wide dust-brown streets and lively lush trees throwing shade onto squat old buildings. Spring welcomed them with a cheerful breeze, which smelled heavenly after too many hours in the car.

Silicia put on the act of her life trying to convince a series of government workers that she was fleeing a life among the amish with her nephew, and was met mostly with polite disinterest. That was alright, because either way they walked out of the office with two brand new identities.

At the hotel she called herself Alicia Rue & him Thomas for the very first time. The young woman at the reception was easy to chat up and felt misplaced pity for the two of them that led to them getting breakfast on the house the next morning.
Silicia had already lined up a series of possible work places, and so she knuckled down writing out application after application in their little hotel room while Tump watched tv, soaking up knowledge about a world as yet unknown to him like a sponge. She made an effort to talk to him as much as she could, trying to quiet that little voice in the back of her head that whispered to her that she'd done irreversible damage to him by making him forget. It took a while before he seemed to find his footing and started acting more like a 15 year old kid than a traumatized shell of a person again, and so she could assure herself that he was better off this way.

Twice that first week she dreamt of running through an endless impossible maze of corridors which looked exactly like the ones she had walked 5 days a week for years.

---

Alicia Rue had never given the direction of her life all that much thought. As a teenager she'd wanted to do something cool, and so she'd gone to university where she'd met Mira, and Mira's plans had become hers. Even when she'd finally detached herself a few scant months ago, she had been caught up in urgent matters so completely as to never question what would come after.

Now it was after, and she had a kid to her brand new name, a low paying job in a city miles away from where she'd grown up and absolutely no clue what the rest of her life would look like.
So, for lack of a more meaningful thing to do, she clung onto 'Tom'. She spent her energy on helping him with homework, teaching him to wash dishes and fold clothes, to read street signs and use a smart phone.
But as much as she tried to focus on their peaceful future, she was irrevocably changed by their shared half forgotten past. When she spaced out over tax forms, she found herself wondering about Fred, when she passed out in front of the tv, her dreams were haunted by ghastly visions of what had happened to the other kids. Whenever she left him at home, she left the kitchen window open so he could climb out in an emergency.
Worst of all was not the paranoia, but the burning curiosity. Every morning she scanned the paper for mentions of Tump Inc., and every few days she would lose herself looking through forums and threads online for anything, anything at all that would tell her what had happened after she'd left.

---

Tump was a shy but friendly kid, and so he made a lot of friends, though Silicia worried about how deep those connections actually went. He still leant on her a lot, and though she didn't mind, exactly, she had expected that he would eventually grow ashamed of her as all teenagers did of their parental figures. But he never did.

Finally, when she came home one night he introduced her to his new online friend group, which he'd met in a little online community he was active in. She'd encouraged him to take charge and help shape it when the chance was offered to him, and she was satisfied that it was a good way for him to learn about responsibility and conflict resolution.
That did not go as smoothly as Silicia might have hoped, but she did observe that it made him very passionate about helping and guiding his peers. The thought crept up on her unbidden then: there were people who needed him more, and she'd turned her - and his - back on them.

That wasn't a productive way of thinking about it. Making the best choice in the long run sometimes involved facing harsh realities, she decided. But still the image of Alec floating in a tank, angry, helpless, wouldn't leave her.

---

Silicia was walking home and clumsily cramming the last pastry the bakery had had into her mouth when she could finally avoid it no longer. Her phone dinged in her pocket - she refused to get anything smarter than a blackberry with a slide out keyboard - and she checked it to find a message which read simply:

Please help. We need him.
-L

---

Tump was not only the missing puzzle piece to Tump Inc.'s monstrous plan, but also the one thing which could unravel it all. To bring the company down would require turning their own system against them, and the only way to do that was from the inside. And the only person who could do that...

For nearly a whole week, Silicia was able to brutally beat the knowledge of what she had to do back down. This sucked - it really, really sucked.
But there was no way around it.

---

It wasn't that she thought Tump wasn't capable. She was just of the firm belief that he should not have to carry this much responsibility on his shoulders.

With a heavy heart, Silicia did what she did best: she plotted. She prepared Tump as best she could, she anonymously made contact with what was left of her seditious network at the facility, she worked out contingency plans. She was quite plausibly stalling, but this was far too important to mess up.

Eventually, after weeks of this, she sat Tump down at the kitchen table one Saturday evening and began to explain. They both cried, and when she offered that he slap her he declined, but she could see in his eyes that he considered it. They went to bed, neither of them sleeping, and she didn't see him until Sunday afternoon.
He came up to her as she was writing out some unimportant email under a name that wasn't really hers and said, "how do we start?"

---End---

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