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.

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