Chapter 16

Their second top secret meeting was held at a smaller table in the back of a bar Naomi had suggested. The table was sticky and they had to cram themselves in strategically to accomodate everyone even with multiple extra chairs, but their server was as cheerful as she was unsuspicious.
Silicia found herself once again in the centre of the congregation, reporting on their branching out into secret room interior design.
She and Lakerson had agreed beforehand not to reveal their recent human experimentation on her person to the others until they had something actionable.
Guiltily she leaned back and tried to ignore the sweat beading at her nape as someone new spoke up. Silicia had to crane her head around a few people to see, but thought she remembered his name being Felix.

"We should really go to the police with this. It's out of our league," maybe-Felix said.

"And tell them what, exactly?" Naomi asked defensively, arms crossed and leaning heavily on the table. The guy's face twisted in displeasure or possibly distress, and he stayed mum.

"I think that until we can actually do something, we should focus on being a thorn in the Inc's side. Delay their plans as much as we can, keep them from... taking more kids," Naomi addressed the group.

"Ideally without them realizing it's us doing it," Fred added unhappily, tapping a finger to the side of his neck. Several others raised a hand to touch their own necks, and Silicia felt even worse keeping her possible freedom from them.

Lakerson spoke up for the first time then. She hadn't expected it looking at how he acted in private, but the large group seemed to actually intimidate him somewhat.
"We're already working on that."
Silicia shot him a grateful smile and stepped in before anyone could question him.
"Naomi is right, and we need to be focussing on gathering information and being a hindrance. Everyone here can be trusted to keep information shared with them secret, so I hope that none of us will hesitate to reveal new findings. In the mean time, let's start coming up with ways we could stall or derail the company's plans, shall we?"

At the far end of the table, Art from Top Research raised their hand like they were in school. Silicia was a tad relieved when they spoke without needing verbal prompting when everyone looked their way.
"I get why we can't just rock up to a police department and go 'hi, I would like to report a laundry list of human rights violations committed by the largest company in the country'. But surely we could give them a hint?"

People were still just looking at them, and they blushed but continued.

"What I mean is, we could anonymously call in with a tip on one of the missing kids, right? They made it on the news and all, it was a pretty public affair a few years ago."

This was a genius idea, actually, and the table spent the better part of an hour working out how to put it into action. Silicia was quite proud to have assembled such a competent group of people, but then that selection had already been made by Tump Inc. in the hiring process, hadn't it?

---

"Miss Dale?" Tump asked tiredly. A lump formed in her throat at the reminder of their project's urgency. She'd been looking up what places would take unattached teenagers. The search was complicated by it having to be out of state, not to mention the matter of identity. Would Tump Inc. chase after their abducted assets, or would they simply take new subjects in to replace them? Would she be as responsible for them as she was for Tump and his friends?

"Silicia," she corrected, "please."

On the other side of the door, Tump was silent for a moment. Then he said: "Can you tell me how the others are doing?"

If she were being frankly honest, they were doing bad. Still none of them would really talk to her - or anyone, apparently - but routine assessments and schedules still came across her desk. None of them except Cris were allowed to go to classes anymore. Instead more and more they were ordered up to the 11th floor to aid in research. And not just more often, but also for longer and longer times.
But the same things were true of Tump, although she'd previously assumed they were not being kept in total isolation from each other up there. Him having to ask had concerning implications.

"Cris is still keeping up with his school work. The others are... involved more in research than you all were when you were still students," she finally offered.

"Suppose I'm not alone in that, at least," Tump said bitterly.

"Do they keep you away from each other in the lab?"

"Don't know. But I'm sure not getting to talk to anyone."

'Anyone but me,' Silicia thought with a cringe. She was probably not a great conversationalist these days.

---

She put in a formal request the following day, after lying awake thinking about it all night. Somehow, she was thus granted permission to accompany Tump through the research lab for a day. She suspected strongly that this was because the system was so seldomly used that it was automated, but she wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

She was waiting outside of Tump's room the very next morning, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed in her best imitation of unquestionable confidence. The woman who came to fetch Tump took one look at her and clocked immediately that she was up to something.

"As a matter of fact I did get permission," Silicia said icily. "He has been my charge for years."

The woman rolled her eyes and opened the door. It seemed they both felt a little bit silly when Tump was standing right there, having heard everything.
To her great chagrin, he would not meet Silicia's eyes - he just stared at the awful old carpet the entire deathly silent walk to, and ride on, the elevator. His shoulders were hunched, which showed off the bruise at his nape.

The lab was as sterile as she'd expected, but packed with people wielding all kinds of equipment it almost looked more like a movie set than a laboratory. She went to stand behind the person at the main console and watched with her teeth clamped around the inside of her cheek as Tump was lead to a chair in the middle of the room, facing towards a wall with a large screen.
He twitched away when a nurse grabbed his hair and began sticking electrodes to his scalp, while another person came up with a bundle of long cables draped over their arm. As they began to attach them, Silicia's eyes followed the cables to a machine which sat against the wall beside the screen. It appeared to still be off, but dozens of other wires snaked out from it all around the room, plugged into power outlets and consoles, different smaller machines or ending nowhere in particular.
One of the nurses gave a thumbs up, and the room quietened as someone threw the lever to bring the big machine to life. The console in front of Silicia lit up with a flurry of calibration screens, and before long the lights dimmed so that what appeared on the screen could be seen more easily: It was a maze, constructed simply of black lines on a white background with an exit to either side. A small orange dot blinked into existence in the bottom left, and then someone indicated the maze's exit with a pointer stick, like a teacher showing something on the whiteboard.

Silicia watched with bated breath as in front of her Tump raised his hands and the dot began to move. As he steered it around the maze with practiced gestures, she thought to take the opportunity to peer around at the other occupants of the room unnoticed. But to her surprise, she found that most people not absorbed in a console or a notepad were staring off into space in boredom. That seemed not at all appropriate for the technological marvel they were witnessing. Though as the ones who had orchestrated it, she surmised said marvel must have appeared ordinary to them.

When Tump's avatar had reached the end of the maze, the screen shut off without much fanfare. Two people hurried over into the middle of the room to nudge Tump to stand and check a few of the electrodes, their faces indifferent and their movements clinical. Then the chair was carried off and the screen flickered on again.
The cruel routine of the situation made Silicia sick to her stomach. Tump's next task was again a maze, but this one required him to steer the orange dot through three-dimensional space. It became apparent quickly why the chair had been removed, as he was now using his whole body to direct it.

Silicia was taken aback when the room suddenly exploded into movement once Tump had mastered the second maze: machines were being moved to and fro as people came and detangled Tump from most of the electronics while others again attached new ones. Her hands balled into fists as someone pushed a line into the crook of Tump's left arm, but she was quickly distracted by the new machine that was now being wheeled into the lab from a side room. Everything else must have been moved to accomodate it, as the thing was huge.
Unconsciously, Silicia leaned forward to watch the whole crowd of people who assembled to fiddle with it, trying to make out what they were hoping to accomplish. Multiple of them were doing nothing but checking and connecting cables, while a few crouched by a control panel in the side of it, holding a hushed but intense conversation with someone sat behind a large old computer.
Then one of them slid away the top half of the machine and Silicia could finally see inside. Not that there was much to see - it was, in essence, a high tech casket.

Tump was led to sit on the edge of the pod as a nurse unceremomiously divested him of his shirt and stuck something to the back of his neck which made him flinch. Silicia tried to catch his eye from across the room, but Tump wouldn't meet her gaze even as someone gripped his shoulders and lowered him into the machine.
A jolt went through his body when the hook ups over his spine clicked into place inside the pod, and then he lay still.
Soon her view of him was obstructed by a swarm of people leaning over him, and when they dispersed she could no longer make out his face among the sleek curves of machinery parts with blinking indicator lights and the tangle of cords and cables spilling out of the machine.

Silicia was pressing her fingernails into her palms so hard she was sure they would draw blood by the time the screen blinked back to life above the whole terrible spectacle. It showed a crudely mapped out 3D environment like it had before, only there was no dot. As the perspective of the maze shifted she realized that that was because they were now viewing the task from the perspective of her charge's digital avatar.

She cast one last look down at what she see of Tump's body, still and small, and hurried out of the lab as fast as her feet could carry her, finally breaking into a full on sprint once she'd passed the threshhold of the building. Every time she thought she'd finally reached the extent of her capacity to feel the horror being committed all around her, the company swooped in to prove her wrong.

---

Either she was finally losing it, or the whole facility was getting quieter. The bustle of students seemed less and less present - until one day she stopped in the middle of the corridor at the realization that the slow yet gradual change had kept her from noticing just how stark the difference really was. This was quickly followed by a second, even scarier revelation: she hadn't seen or even heard Alec in nearly two weeks.

There was absolutely nothing she could do about this except despair and blame herself, so that was exactly what she did. Fred tried to cheer her up, but only ended up giving her an idea that was possibly even worse for her mental health: What was stopping her from accessing the surveillance cameras' video feeds to check on the kids herself?

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