Chapter 5

It seemed that Mira had taken the week before Silicia's deadline off work to sit in their (Silicia's) apartment and cover the dinner table completely in methodically annotated and colour-coded print outs of Silicia's work. Every time she walked past, Mira seemed to have arranged them into different piles.

Finally, one night as Silicia was dozing off with her chin resting on the back of the sofa, her face turned towards Mira at the table but her attention steadily slipping, Mira slapped her hands on the table top so loudly it startled Silicia fully awake all at once.

"I've got it!" she exclaimed, pointing at her dazedly blinking girlfriend, triumph lighting up her face. Silicia frowned, eyes flicking between her and the reports on the table, unable to put together what the breakthrough could be. She had to take a few deep breaths to calm her still frantically beating heart before she could ask:
"Got what?"

"My lynchpin!"

This did not clear up her confusion, and it must have shown on her face because Mira's expression softened and she came around the couch to settle next to her.

"I know who is going to be the base for my program. Remember I told you I wanted to make an intelligent computer program?"

"Oh," Silicia said dumbly, finding herself unable to fathom what remarkable quality of the children she'd missed that would have stood out to Mira. She laid her cheek back against the cushion and closed her eyes, humming happily when Mira slid a warm hand up her neck and began gently combing her fingers through the short hair at the back of her head.

"I need a teen for this because I'm looking to minimize the amount of data I'll have to wrangle, but I don't want to lose out on too much complexity. My test data was very helpful for improving our foundational grasp of brains, but wasn't quite enough to actually build what I really want to create, see."

Something about that rang a long forgotten bell in the back of her head, but trying to connect the dots was too much work right now, so she just focussed on Mira's low voice as she went on until Silicia had fallen asleep again.

---

She finally finished the last of the reports and delivered a heavy stack of freshly printed paper and microfiche to the head office, a note declaring she would be taking the rest of the week off at the very top. Then she went home and slept for thirteen hours.

---

When Silicia came back in the next Monday, the building was abuzz with chatter. The ground floor lobby was packed with boxes, equipment, and people, and one of the security guards who saw her apprehensively watching the crowd she'd have to fight on her way up informed her that they were redoing something in the sub-basement. She really hoped that would mean the construction would happen mostly out of her way.

Getting to the elevator wasn't as bad as it looked after all, but then she stepped out of it and was greeted with yet another unplanned gathering.

Silicia pushed her way through the gawking crowd of possibly every 8th floor employee come to see the new announcement pinned to the board. A hand written table proclaimed who had been asigned what students, and the rest of her team were hurriedly scribbling down the dates for the first sessions listed behind their names. It reminded her terribly of high school.

Silicia squinted, trying to determine if what she was looking at was a one or a seven. There would probably be a printed plan available in the next few days, luckily.

A hand landed on her shoulder and she started, but it was just Fred.

"Well, have a nice vacation, boss?"

"I mostly slept to be honest. And I've asked you not to call me that, Freddy."

Fred laughed, and started needling her with questions about the children she mostly couldn't answer in any sort of detail. The two of them naturally gravitated towards the coffee machine, and lingered there until they eventually both had to get to work in their own separate offices.

---

Out of interest she cross referenced the new schedule with her notes, and it stuck out to her how it seemed the board had listened to her recommendations on matchups for the entire 8th floor team except Silicia herself.

She'd been assigned six children, four boys and two girls, and was strongly encouraged to 'help them along' in becoming friends. She didn't really think that was part of her job description, but when Tump forgot a worksheet on her desk that first week, instead of heading out herself she took the golden opportunity to have Alec bring it to him.

This worked shockingly well. She surmised it really was easier to make friends as a child, especially with their necessarily shared circumstances to bond over. It worked so well, in fact, that she did it again, having Alec bring Cris something she'd 'forgotten' to give him. He hesitated to take the papers from her outstretched hand, looking up at her with transparent suspicion. Finally he took them, with his eyes still comically narrowed.

Silicia just smiled at him.

---

One of the children she'd been assigned she had to look up in her notes, because she'd left practically no impression on Silicia. Lia had been one of the older students, intelligent but almost unwilling to reveal it. At the time she hadn't really considered whether that stemmed from her naturally inexpressive face or was an actual decision on the girl's part, but it took her only a few minutes now to determine that it was most certainly both.

Lia seemed to be able to tell when Silicia was deviating from lines she'd prepared in advance or been instructed to say with surprising ease, and responded much better to off the script questions. It made Silicia feel like she was being trained like a dog, having a certain behavior rewarded like that, but she couldn't deny she sort of enjoyed talking to the girl, in the way that she enjoyed working on a puzzle. While it had unnerved her when Alec did it, Lia's shrewd evaluation of her was amusing, if not downright charming.

---

She saw Mira very little over the next few weeks, as she seemed to always be busy with something, which made her stay late and come home when Silicia was already asleep. She only rarely woke her coming into the bedroom at night, and both of them naturally were too tired for proper conversation then. When she did come home at a reasonable time or even earlier, it was to collapse in bed because she'd spent the preceding night in her office or lab, working.

It worried Silicia, but Mira waved her concerns off every time that she did get an opportunity to voice them, saying she was doing this because she wanted to, and that she would return to a healthier schedule as soon as she'd cracked this most recent project. For lack of any measures she could actually take beyond setting out food for her, Silicia left her to it.

A lot of the time that was freed up by her girlfriend being busy, she spent with her coworkers. She was getting closer with Fred and Anne (who frequently regailed her with tales of her toddler stirring up trouble in kindergarten) and was also in the early stages of work friendships with multiple of the new staff.

---

Lia and Erik were next on her to-do list. She wondered if Alec would tell on her if she used the same trick a third time - then she decided it would be pretty funny if he did, and went for it. Of course she'd carefully selected the children with the most compatible personalities for her meddling, but she was still surprised at how quickly the friendships took. Erik and Rin were the only ones who'd actually made friends worth mentioning outside of the group assigned to Silicia, and maybe that played a part in it. Either way, soon when she asked her weekly questions under the header 'social environment', they actually had anecdotes to tell of what they'd gotten up to with the others.

Rin proved an incalculably valuable asset in both keeping Silicia's spirits high and progressing her social manipulation side quest as she quickly, and without needing any encouragement from Silicia, befriended Tump. Even better, she found out that Rin and Cris had already known each other before they'd arrived. By extension this all folded Alec and Lia into the growing friend group, which earned her a kind of email she'd never gotten: curt praise with no new furher instructions.

---

Instead of finishing up and returning to normal quickly as she'd promised she would, Mira seemed only more and more exhausted. There were bags under her eyes the size of Alaska and Silicia now frequently found her asleep on the couch with her laptop open next to her when she came home. Despite it all, whenever she did catch her awake, there was that spark in her eyes.
It was unduly enthralling. It made Silicia suspect it was only the inconsequential matter of her physical body holding Mira back from achieving the impossible, because she was filled to the brim with almost divine inspiration. She was working on something important, and though her nervous leg bouncing and constant tiredness weighed her down, she would succeed come hell or highwater. Silicia hoped she would not burst out of her body to become a being of pure energy any time soon, because she rather preferred Mira remaining embodied. Further, she also preferred her awake enough to make use of said body.

That month they got word the company's internal system would get a complete overhaul, and so they were all instructed to back up their data and take two days off while they laid new cables and hooked up the offices to the brand new main computer. It seemed that had been what they'd been installing in the basement.

Silicia used her free time to walk around the snowed-in city, waking up barely early enough to see off Mira, whose excitement at having had a hand in the new system now being plugged into the facility was palpable.
She wondered how the children were doing. She wondered what Mira even had to do with any of it. The small supermarket around the corner from them was offering her favourite jam for half off, and when she found the display stand empty, she wondered how many other people's favourite jam it was.

---

"You hear about the brain chip thing?"

Anne, casually making her way through a cafeteria meal-deal sized bag of chips, startled at the speed with which Silicia's head jerked up.

"I'm sorry, the what?"

"The uh... the lower research guys were talking about it at lunch yesterday. Think they're making a little brain implant to like... actually I don't really remember what they said," she trailed off, twirling a finger by her temple. When Silicia just stared at her silently, she eventually continued.

"I think it was something about monitoring brain functioning?"

"That's..."
Unhappily, Silicia shut her mouth again. She didn't really have a conclusion to that thought yet. It was scary, but also logical, which honestly had implications she didn't really want to think about too hard.

"So what, are they chipping the children like property or is it just research?"

The sentence slipped out barbed and without her input, and she almost wanted to cram it back in. It contained the seed of an idea that she hadn't yet consciously acknowledged, and voicing ideas as they came to her was really not Silicia's style. Luckily for her, Anne hadn't picked up on it. She was making a show of shrugging to give herself time to swallow the mass of chips she'd stuffed in her mouth during Silicia's brief stunned silence.
She watched her coworker take a sip of water and worked to relax her shoulders.

"Yeah I mean, it sounded something like that. I don't know, you probably have a higher chance of getting the details than I do here."

That was undeniably true, and she resolved to ask the next time she caught Mira awake. It now made a little bit more sense how busy her girlfriend had been, if she'd not only been working on parsing brain scans but also on a new method of acquiring them.

---

It took her another day and a half to actually speak to Mira properly again, and it was on one of the now rare occasions that she could spare enough time to invite Silicia up to the 12th floor so they could spend a lunch break together.

She spotted Mira as soon as she stepped out of the elevator, loitering by the corner where the transparent patterned wall to the relaxation area met the solid (and very thick) wall of the lab, waiting for Silicia's arrival. She looked much like she had the past months, jittery and with the same bruises under her eyes, but some part of the project had clearly taken a turn for the better. Despite the visible sleep deprivation, she radiated the refreshed energy of someone who'd just had their first restful sleep in weeks.

"You look like you've just won the lottery."

"Ha, no news that good sadly. But you're close, I've finally had the breakthrough I was waiting for!"

Grinning, she led the way to a table and they sat. That was definitely not going to be the last thing Silicia would hear about it. It was oddly lucky that none of the other people on Mira's floor ever seemed to be there when they were. She wondered if Mira had been eating.

"I've finally got it, Si. My problem was decoding data that's written in neurons, right? And it's easy, it turns out: you build a second program to read it out to you!"

"I thought you were a neurobiologist, not a programmer," Silicia interjected cheekily.

"Hey now, what do I have a whole team for? Okay, so it's not exactly easy to build, but," Mira tapped her finger to her own temple and smiled conspiratorily, "what is easy is to instruct other people to make a program for me."

"Fair enough. Then that's not the breakthrough?"

"Oh, no. We managed to get that passably working two months ago. We also built a network on the principle, actually, sort of interweaving multiple simulated brains to create an intelligent system. They're working on that down there as we speak! But I'm getting off track."
She got up to head for the coffee machine, barely pausing her explanation for Silicia to take the hint and follow.

"Of course the next challenge is to create something truly new from that - to make use of what we've decoded we need a way to actually test our assumptions about our data sets first. And we've - well, actually, I have - worked out how we can do that!"

"Pray tell?" Silicia watched distractedly as the machine poured her a watery hot chocolate. She'd had too much caffeine this week already.

"We're going to gather dynamic data, so we can watch the brain's responses in real time."

"Don't they already do that in hospitals and stuff?"

"Aha, but they do it only in explicitly experimental conditions. That's a necessarily selective data collection method."

That's when it dawned on her that she was not going to have to awkwardly inquire about a rumor she wasn't even sure had any basis. Silicia took her searing hot paper cup out of the machine and met Mira's eye seriously.

"The rumors about brain chips are true, aren't they?" It was a statement until the very last word, when she remembered that she should probably phrase this as a question.

Mira's eyebrows shot up, but she didn't look that put out beyond the grand reveal of her genius not landing quite as intended.

"Yeah. They're not that sophisticated yet," she admitted, "mostly just a small scanner in the back of the head so we can go through the foramen magnum and avoid too much bone in the picture. They're admittedly kind of basic in what they can really capture and they're not actually brain chips yet."

"...not brain chips yet?"

"Well," Mira looked kind of awkward now, like now Silicia was undermining her great plan by asking after the particulars.
"Okay they aren't actually implanted. They're going to be! But for now since they need to record, store and transmit data, they have to be able to be charged. So, uh. We're kind of just gonna glue them on for now."

Mira busied herself stirring multiple capsules of milk into her coffee, embarrassed like she expected her to laugh.

Silicia had to admit that it was kind of funny. It was also much less sinister than it had seemed when she'd not had the full picture. It struck her as kind of clever, actually.

"That sounds like a pretty impressive bit of technology either way. How are you going to solve the power problem long term though?"

Mira took a sip of coffee, her eyes narrowing, and Silicia had to bite her lip to poorly hide a smile as they wandered back to their table.

"We're delegating it to lower research, to be honest. I haven't gotten their finished project report yet, but I think they're either going to try to work out wireless charging or try to power it like," she made a vague hand gesture, "biologically."

There was definitely something concerningly parasitic there, but Silicia wasn't sure she had the qualifications required to really grasp the implications. So instead, she remarked on the other option.

"Wireless charging would have the entire tech industry on our doorstep begging you for just a hint, wouldn't it?"

Mira laughed, and it sounded only slightly relieved.

---

The thought of her unfavourable first response to the idea of chipping the children sat untouched in the back of her mind until three weeks later, when Tump was waiting in her office the afternoon after the finished prototypes had been fitted to the students.

It was only a note on the staff calendar to her until she spotted it for the first time. As per protocol, she started all her regularly scheduled sessions by asking the children to wait a bit as she finished up something on her bulky desktop computer. The thing she was 'finishing up', of course, was a cursory assessment of the children's mental state based on how they behaved during the wait time. This helped her approach them with the right tone during the session and made it easier to later fill out the full weekly report.

Tump was looking out the window behind her as he often did, before he turned to idly sweep his gaze over her shelves of books and assorted knicknacks, and then there it was. She was just glancing up as the turn of his head revealed it to her, sitting right below the soft junction where his spine met his skull like a metal barnacle; a small assortment of boxes and wires woven into a plaster that looked like it almost seemlessly melded with the skin around it.

A shiver of revulsion ran down Silicia's back, and then he looked back at her, hiding the ghastly device from her sight, and met her eyes. Silicia worked very hard to swallow down the unexplained feeling that had risen up like bile. It was a device for research, she told herself, and he was only here now because he'd agreed to take part in experiments like this. It helped, but only a little bit, because fundamentally, it was a feeling she was fighting, and not a thought.

She forced herself to smile at the boy and began the session as she always did. She would do him no favours by making him uneasy about this.

(Tump's brow furrowed slightly. Silicia was sure she was not doing a great job of hiding her thought process, but he said nothing about it, either.)

---

The eerie stickers only stayed on the children's necks for a month or so, before Silicia received a sheet of questions about the finished trial to put them through. The responses were about as expected; they mostly found it sort of fascinating, and had seen no ill effects from the proto-chips beyond a bit of itching from the glue.

The students' response put Silicia at ease, although she knew that the project's next stage might tickle even more body horror out of her.

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