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.

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