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.

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