Chapter 3

Silicia's breath was visible in the early December air as she struggled to balance the pine wreath on one knee while digging around her bag for the keys.

The days were short and dark now, which she'd always liked, although it was a pain to spend every hour of daylight inside and return home only to see the sun was already disappearing behind the horizon. Somehow it made the world feel smaller, and Silicia always made an effort to be cheery for the people around her this time of year.
Neither of them cared all that much about christmas, but they marked he occasion anyway.
She had tracked down a rare book about cultural conceptions of the human mind for Mira, and rushed home the earliest she could for nearly a week so her girlfriend wouldn't be the one to receive the package when it arrived.
Fortunately, this worked out as she'd hoped: earlier when she'd left to buy the wreath, the wrapped book had been sitting on her doormat, waiting for her.

Snow blanketed the city and she wore the nice cashmere scarf Mira had gotten her last year to work daily. It was possibly the closest to a perfect christmas she could get, as an athiest.

---

The next few months went by as months rarely did: predictably. For once she felt neither like time was crawling to a stop, nor that she was endlessly chasing impossible deadlines as the days sped by. In fact, everything really seemed very within reach. This was new but of course not unwelcome. She found the children cooperative, her coworkers friendly, and her sleep restful. Her desk had been slowly accumulating piles of notes, trinkets, and personality. Reports got easier and quicker to write the more she'd finished, and for possibly the first time in her life Silicia felt like she was getting a snatch of the motivating upwind that had carried Mira into an overseer position for one of the top research teams of what was possibly to be the biggest company in the country.

Something had to go wrong eventually, of course, because Silicia was just a very unlucky person like that. Still, it took her a good two weeks to actually notice.

---

Silicia frowned as she crossed out yet another week's time block in her pocket calendar labeled 'Claire'. When the girl hadn't shown up to the first one, she'd gone out to check the large roster on the pin board in the lobby and found their session that week canceled.
Silicia had left her quiet office to get a coffee from the machine, and on her way out spotted Anne dozing in one of the nicer chairs in a seating area at the end of the corridor.

Having to wait had soured her mood enough to make her stride over to rudely wake her fellow psychologist. Anne groggily told her that Claire was sick, and that someone had probably just forgotten to tell her in time.

The following week she used her free hour to sit in the 12th floor seating area and drink bad vending machine coffee with Mira. When on Monday she found the next session with Claire not canceled but missing from the schedule entirely, she did a terrible thing: she wrote an email.
The 8th floor's manager told her the same thing Anne had, only now the story was that she'd gotten so sick she'd been pulled from the program altogether.

This, at first, was aggravating but not suspicious. It became suspicious when Kate, one of Claire's closest friends, asked after her. Silicia repeated the little hand me down story. Kate frowned in confusion as though she were hearing of Claire's illness for the first time, and Silicia felt suddenly like there was a chunk of ice sitting in her stomach.

---

She'd arrived earlier than normal, and her calculation had worked out. She was loitering by the coffee machine just in time for Fred to arrive, which made the two of them the only people on the floor this early. He looked surprised to see her there but didn't comment, just nodded good morning and stalked towards his office to stow his bag. Silicia pointedly pressed down the button for a latte, producing a definite click.

"One for you too?"

"Please," said Fred gratefully, and she hid her smile as he disappeared down the corridor. Step one successful.

She stirred a packet of sugar into her own coffee and started the program for his, then sank down into one of the chairs to wait. The sun rising in the window behind her painted stripes on the ceiling and walls.

"What has you up so early?"

Fred took his coffee, emptied two milk packets into it and then, to Silicia's relief, took a seat by her instead of excusing himself immediately.

"Couldn't sleep, so I figured it wouldn't really matter where I drank my coffee," she started, feeling like she was speaking too fast but unable to stop herself.
"If I turn out to be coming down with something I really hope I didn't catch it from Claire."

Fred twitched minutely at her mentioning the girl, and she knew it, she'd known there was something. She took a scalding gulp from her cup instead of blurting out a question to let him work out a reply.

"Yeah. Poor thing," Fred said weakly.

"Wonder where she caught it, though. None of the other kids have anything I don't think, although I suppose Allan is newly out with a cold too."

Allan- who hadn't been removed from public life without a trace. He'd almost definitely caught it from Anne, who'd told Fred over the phone she'd got it from her father when she called in sick, and then he had told Silicia that yesterday. She was counting on him putting together that she'd connected the dots there.

"Well," Fred said vaguely, gesturing with his paper cup like he was alluding to some universal truth. "Children. Disease magnets, they are."

In this case disease magnets with extremely limited contact to the outside world and no pre-existing illnesses more severe than a cat allergy, according to their medical records. It would seem that she'd need to push.

Silicia turned to him fully, not quite dropping her nonchalant act but deliberately leaving the metaphorical door open.

"What do you think it is?"

He met her eyes but only briefly, using the cup in his hands as a pretense to look away. When he replied she wasn't sure he himself knew what question he was answering.

"I really don't know, Silicia. They told me the same thing they told everyone."

---

That entire week, she was the first one home, and it only contributed to her somber mood. She didn't really know what to make of Claire's disappearance (as she'd begun to call it in her head), and so she made stew instead.

Everything continued on as normal. Perfect, really. Silicia liked her job.

It was beginning to eat at her how little attention she'd payed the girl before this.

---

"The biggest issue with replicating a brain," Mira opened, talking in full swing even before she'd sat down, "is actually accessing that original data, as it turns out."

Silicia rested her chin on one hand and nodded to the cooling cup of coffee already sitting on Mira's side of the table, prepared to her exact specifications.

"You can't just hook it up to a voice box and have it tell you about what you want to know?"

Mira's expression made her laugh. Her girlfriend looked at her like she was missing the point so completely it was hard for her to even grasp what to explain first, so in the end she just continued on.

"We've gathered our base data, in multiple formats of course. We thought it would kind of work like a rosetta stone if we matched up our map of neural connections with the protein clusters and so on, but, well."

She took her first sip of the coffee and shot Silicia a brief smile of approval before barrelling on. Silicia wondered if rubber ducking for a classified project could get her, or worse, both of them, sacked.

"We can simulate things in their totality, but that's useless; we'll still need to construct a whole new complex system to actually read specific parts, see."

"You're not wanting to lean into mind uploading? Could be profitable," Silicia teased.

"Oh no, no, definitely not. That's a whole other can of worms and they could not pay me enough to open it. I'm just here to pick apart the human brain and sell the bits."
Saying this, Mira laughed, genuinely, happily, and Silicia was genuinely happy for her, getting to do what she'd always wanted. Nevertheless she spent the rest of the day imagining what Mira would do with the ability to fully de-mystify someone's thoughts.

---

The weather was still drearily wet, but shameful as it may have been, Silicia's mood was lifting again. The open question of Claire's whereabouts was still weighing on her, but as the world seemed to move on seamlessly it almost became hard to hold onto the fact that she had been real in the first place. Silicia was working off of very limited information, even if the official story actually was untrue - for all she knew what they were hiding could have been as innocent as Claire's parents pulling her from the program. It would have looked bad, and she knew well that a pioneer project's spotless record was always more important than reality.

Passing the security guards at the front entrance had stopped bothering her, seeing as she'd walked by them every day for a good year now, and they, too, didn't pay much attention to her anymore. She'd started to actually notice who worked what days, and intended to make an effort to memorize their names, although that idea died a slow death as she struggled to find excuses to come close enough to read the name tags.

Soon, summer swept over the facility's grounds and the days already grew longer again, and then the children would be leaving them soon. It all came far too quickly, as endings always do. She'd gotten so used to her little life here that when she turned the page on her calendar to find the enddate marked right there at the end of the new month, she scrambled for the newspaper to confirm what day it was.

But it was true, and if she was unlucky, the leaving children would be taking her job with them.

Silicia found herself in a state of restlessness for the remainder of the month from which her concentration suffered. Her relief was immeasurable when they finally deigned to send her a summons to discuss her (hopefully) continued employment with the department's manager.

She walked into the room and back out not fifteen minutes later, quite unable to recall most of it. Her job was safe however, thanks to the next batch of students - larger this time, and she'd been assured that wouldn't mean more work for her, just more colleagues.
The day after she received an email containing a summary of the coming years - information which she found easier to absorb and retain now that she knew she wouldn't be cut loose. Their new wards would naturally be subjected to a much improved learning regime, and intimately involved in the company's research on the human brain. Thus, she would now actually be told who her reports were going to, which would change as the research project progressed.

They were looking to use the children in a number of non-invasive studies that were suited to the controlled environment the facility provided, and she would be instrumental in recommending the right children to the researchers - essentially the same job she already held.

This all sounded quite exciting to her, and even more than that it sounded like Mira would be overjoyed at the path the company was taking. When she arrived at the flat that night, Mira grinned at her proudly and declared that she looked forward to having Silicia under her.

---

"It's so quiet here, now," said Anne, her head laid limply over the back of a lobby chair next to Silicia.

The children were leaving, one by one. They all went home to different places, and so the facility's middle floors had been clearing out gradually as cleaning crews moved into the vacated space. The floors' former occupants had left marks all over - chips in the tables and skirting boards, stains on the carpets and spots where small bored fingers had picked at the wallpaper.

Her office hadn't felt quite right in the quiet afternoon, or maybe she was just feeling a little wistful. Either way, Silicia had taken her papers out into the 8th floor lobby to escape it. Her coworker had already been there, maybe for a similar reason. While Silicia was still making an effort to not let the late summer heat slow her brain down, Anne had already sunken into her seat, abandoned stacks of paper and binders strewn around her.
Silicia couldn't blame her, and in fact was planning on following her example once she'd read through the paragraph she was currently struggling to keep her eyes on.

After re-reading the second to last sentence for the fourth or fifth time without processing any of it, she gave up and leaned her cheek against the chair's sun warmed back. Silicia closed her eyes to feel her thoughts dissolve for a moment, drifting in the unreality of a warm summer's day. She thought vaguely of Mira and her hands that were always warmer than hers.

Then Anne shifted, and the slight rustle of fabric snapped Silicia back into her body.

"Lucky them, imagine having to sit in a classroom all day in this weather," she said quietly, and Anne's answering laugh matched her volume. Outside a bus pulled up, loud in the languid silence.

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