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.

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