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.

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