Chapter 4

An explosion on the turned-down tv woke Silicia, and she blinked awake on the couch, half spread over Mira's lap. Her girlfriend was just hanging up the phone - it was one of those modern hand helds, provided by Frinet to important people. Of course, Mira was important. She cut the person on the other end of the line off with a definite good night, smiling down fondly at Silicia all the while.

She didn't really feel like speaking yet, so she just hummed inquisitively.

"I've just gotten something approved," Mira said with the confidence of someone who'd known they'd get their way from the start.
"You wanna go back to sleep here or move to the bedroom?"

Silicia made a non-committal sound and closed her eyes again, smiling when Mira wound gentle arms around her middle and started lifting her.

---

The next day Silicia came into her office to find a document sitting primly in the middle of her desk, and wondered for a split second if she'd forgotten to lock the door the day before, despite the key she'd just used to get in still being in her hand.

It was an offer of a promotion, more or less. She would be moved a rung up inside the department, gaining some coordination responsibilities in exchange for an amount of money that was hard to turn down. Underneath that was an invitation to an administrative meeting.

---

"Obviously you take that," Fred said, gesturing at her with a french fry before he bit into it.

"I didn't earn it though, did I?" She strode over to the nearest trash bin to drop her cleared paper plate inside before he could swallow and answer. When she returned he was frowning at her.

"Watever, sure, why does that matter so much? I wouldn't say you exactly don't deserve it either."

Silicia grimaced, and shrugged. It felt like being gifted something she would never be able to afford to give in return.

"Si, you can't not - Besides, you could abuse your position of privilege to make some of those surely huge benefits trickle down to the rest of us."
She watched him wink and stuff another fry into his mouth and tried to imagine what Mira's expression would be like if she told her she'd turned the promotion down. She so rarely did things that Mira would be taken aback by.

---

The few months inbetween classes she had very little to do, though still more than the others, who were officially her team now. They'd been doomed to endless workshops and meetings about didactic methods and the like, while Silicia sat in her office and wrote templates for them to help coax the information the evaluation team wanted out of the children. By far the worst part was that they had her writing reports on her fellow psychiatrists, but she managed even this without losing her ability to look them in the eye somehow.

While she didn't answer directly to Mira, her girlfriend did now oversee the greater research project and would occasionally slip Silicia ideas on how to charm her underlings or what questions to put emphasis on. It all felt very important, and sort of exciting, like things Mira was involved in often did.

Every time they talked about it, it seemed more clear to her that Mira was looking for something specific in the children. Silicia couldn't guess at more than the vaguest shape of it, until one Saturday night when they were walking home from the cinema and Mira straight up told her.

"You give me too much power, first at work and now outside it too," Silicia teased, stowing Mira's clutch in her backpack when she'd gotten tired of carrying it.

"You always say that, but I'm telling you, it's me who's got too much. It's giving me a big head, I'm starting to scheme!"

Silicia laughed, and hooked her arm through Mira's, who was shivering a bit in the quickly cooling evening air. The skin of her own arms was pebbled with gooseflesh, and close as they were Mira's hair tickled her exposed shoulder.

"Whose murder are you planning, then?"

"Oh no one's, no one's - but," she leaned in conspiratorily and almost overbalanced in her spindly heels on the cobble stone.
"I do have a target in mind."

"If you get arrested for manslaughter maybe they'll give me your job," Silicia suggested cheerfully.

"No, no - I just need someone to base my AI off," Mira confided easily, grinning at her with infectious enthusiasm.

"One of the children?"

"Ten points to Gryffindor! And next you can guess who will find them for me!"

---

The entire 8th floor was conscripted to help with getting the new children moved in, probably to make the staff seem approachable on first impression. It was immediately obvious that for this batch of fresh meat a much wider net had been cast vis à vis personality.

Over the next month Silicia would be very busy, as it had been revealed to her recently that the evaluations of her team she'd been made to pen had not actually been intended for performance reviews as she'd feared, but to make this next task easier for her: Silicia was to personally meet every student to assess which counselor would suit them best.

Since they'd hired enough new ones to bring their number up to eight and Silicia didn't know anything about the new arrivals, her evaluations would go to an impromptu council (on which Mira served) to settle the final match-ups.

Most of the children were quite average- or, all of them were, because they were dreadfully young teens. She could only note down 'struggles with self worth' so many times before she already spotted it in their mannerisms before they'd even closed the door behind themselves.
The real issue was the sheer volume: she felt that this really ought to be at least a two person job. Nevertheless, she went to work every morning with an extra granola bar in her pocket as a mood lifter, and went home every day with a headache, and made it through the month.

---

A shy boy with sandy blonde hair trotted into her office and Silicia almost groaned and let slip her annoyance.

His fringe shadowed his eyes, but after he'd sat he looked up and hesitantly smiled at her. She returned it without really thinking and launched into her little introductory speech. By now it was well rehearsed.

At the top of her note pad it said 'Tump' in large block letters, underlined twice so it would draw her eye when she'd inevitably be rifling through a whole pile of practically identical files to retrieve this one.

The boy was suggestible and insecure, but possessed an innate kindness that she'd rarely seen in children. He had a funny, slightly pinched expression on his face as she made him go through the hypothetical scenarios and exercises on her sheet that she couldn't quite decipher.

---

The kid greeted her with a formality more befitting a business meeting. Alec had almost unnervingly light eyes and windswept dark hair, and he chatted to her happily about his home life and personal opinions. There was a certain incongruousness about him that she observed, because he was very clearly just as busy observing her as she was him.

He was a charming kid, if one was willing to look past every word out of his mouth being a lie.

Silicia crossed out the entire paragraph of notes she'd begun writing and started fresh. He was telling her what he thought he should - generally fairly normal behavior - only he was crafting a whole personality for himself with impressive precision, especially for a thirteen year old. It was only his occasional minute expressions of displeasure at what he was saying that gave him away.

She let him do it. This was not a therapy session, it was an evaluation, but she did include her own speculation on the things he did not say - topics he noticeably glossed over, the little twitch his nose did whenever he said something she thought likely to be entirely fictional, the way he sat ramrod straight with serious eyes yet his clothes and hair looked like he'd just come in from the playground.

---

She kept meeting Mira over break, but was far too distracted to make intelligent conversation. Instead, she drank her caffeine in desperate gulps and listened to her girlfriend recount office gossip.
Mira was not the person people gossipped with, with her general air of authority, but she had something of a talent for eavesdropping and persuading people to tell her their secrets. That was how she'd gotten Silicia's trust in the first place.

---

The next child was a very short girl, who performed a little leap to get the door to properly close.

She strode up to Silicia's desk confidently, stepped half onto the chair, and held her hand out to introduce herself as Rin. Silicia shook it, amused, and waited wordlessly as the girl folded her legs under her with great care before launching into her usual opening monologue.

Rin was confident to a fault and had a strong sense of what was right and wrong, although some of the trickier questions baffled her completely. That was alright; 'no idea' was also an acceptable answer. She was one of the slightly younger children, and it showed. Nevertheless, she was very sweet in the way that children who had realized how to leverage the power they had over adults were, and a few times Silicia got the suspicion that the girl was playing it up for her.

She left with one of Silicia's fidget toys in her pocket and waved to her before closing the door.

---

"Cris," said the child, nodding to her before sitting. His prim and proper demeanor was sort of cute, like a little highborn gentleman.

He was undeniably also sort of worrisome. Cris watched her with attentive eyes, and was always very careful to consider his words before he spoke, even about little things. The way he would cock his head made her think of a bird evaluating whether she was more likely to feed it or shoo it away.

The boy had an unwavering self assurance about him nevertheless, thrown into stark relief against the unguarded confusion on his face that some of her questions produced. It was almost like he'd never thought about himself within the context of others' perception - he was a refreshing exception in that.

---

Anne sometimes brought her a cup of the flavoured hot water the coffee machine in the lobby called tea in the evenings, and listened to Silicia lament how exhausting her job was. She herself was busy still with various crash courses about pedagogy and the like, and sharing them with the other 8th floor staff made her a handy source on them. She even let Silicia talk through a few of the cases she struggled to definitively assign to someone, and about halfway through Silicia found herself stopping in the tea isle of the grocery store considering buying Anne a fancy Oolong as a thank you.

Her entire life she'd made friends easily and then lost them when she moved on, to a new school, to uni, to a new job. She was under no illusion that this friendship would be any sturdier, but it was wonderful to have Anne while she did anyway.

---

The kid carried himself like someone trying their hardest to appear as small as they could. Erik shuffled meekly into her office and kept his eyes downcast for the entire half hour. Silicia got the sense that he was making as little noise as possible, and without really thinking about it she lowered her voice too, trying to put him at ease as though he were a frightened animal.
Out of what she'd optimistically call curiosity, she mispronunced his last name, waiting to see if he would speak up to correct her. He did, but had she not already known better she would not have been able to make out the correct pronunciation, so quiet was his complaint.

She really hoped he would open up a bit after he'd had time to settle in, because if not whoever was assigned to him would have their hands full trying to get through even the basic forms with him.

---

The more she wrote, the more diligent her note taking got, because she knew that otherwise the children would start blending with each other in her mind. Her impulsive notes in the margins became invaluable, as she trusted the judgement of her in-the-moment self more than her poring-over-stacks-of-notes self.
People were all different, but they were fundamentally also all the same. Although that fact was arguably the basis of her job it did start stressing her out a bit. Silicia started wondering if she shouldn't start sorting the children into personality archetypes to standardize the process, then suffered a moment of dreadful clarity in which she realized that would be an insane thing to do.

Mira was in very high spirits - or maybe it was just the contrast to Silicia's own mood that made it seem that way? - and interestedly read Silicia's finished reports, often in front of her, and often delightedly remarking on details. Silicia hadn't the heart to tell her she only vaguely remembered most of what she'd written once it was edited and sent off.

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