Chapter 9

On the morning that the first night frost of the year had left brilliant ice crystals on the greenery out front, Silicia opened her office door and spotted a sealed envelope on her desk. She leaned back into the hallway as though she might still be able to catch a glimpse of whoever had left it, then chastized herself for it. The mature thing to do was to get it over with and find out instead of fretting. So, she ripped the thing open resolutely with the corner of a ruler and began to read.

To her great relief, she was not being booted without explanation. The message the envelope really conveyed was much more puzzling: firstly, that in the coming months the company would rebrand and change its name - news only a PR team would be enthusiastic about, but lest she think it was courtesy to inform her early, the letter also contained the reason she was being notified. Silicia read the line multiple times, not really understanding. It said there, black on white, that they were to do all in their power to stop the students finding out.

She turned the letter over, but the underside was blank. They hadn't told her what the new name would be.

Footsteps and talking in the hall startled her out of her thoughts, and she rushed to the door, suddenly craving another cup of coffee.

Fred and Anne, on their way to the lobby, paused when her door opened behind them. They were both frowning like whatever they'd been discussing had not been too pleasant a topic. Based on this, she made a gamble.

"Did you get one too?", Silicia asked, and they nodded. Anne waved her over and she followed them into the lobby.

---

"And what emotion would you say has dominated this week," Silicia rattled off, tapping her pen against the edge of the table. Cris sneered like he always did and gave his typical rehearsed answer. That was no trouble: she'd already come to her own conclusions.

Silicia looked up in genuine surprise when he didn't spring up and out of his seat the second their scheduled time had run out. Instead, Cris was grinding his teeth, his eyes glued to the corner of her desk. Then Silicia dared to do something she would have considered a fireable offense just a few months ago.

"What can I do for you, Cris?"

"Rin's birthday is coming up," he bit out, like it was costing an immense amount of self control to work up to what he was going to ask. She hummed encouragingly.

"There's a plushie I want to get for her that-" he broke off mid-sentence to pull a slightly torn leaflet out of his school bag. When he put it down on the desk between them, she could make out that it was an advertisement from a nearby zoo's gift shop.

"But even if they let me out on my own, she would ask where I'd gone. So I thought maybe I'd ask you..."

Silicia looked at the toy his finger had landed on, a small brown horse, and decided she wouldn't force him to finish his sentence just this once.

"You want me to go buy one and sneak it in for you?"

"I would pay you. Of course."

"Sure," she said, although she was pretty sure he was trying to emotionally manipulate her right now by seeming vulnerable. She saw no harm in giving in.

"Really?", he asked, nakedly surprised.

"Really."

---

When the next day she saw Lia clutching the same leaflet, she had to fake a cough lest she start laughing and make the girl walk right back out the door. Utterly unsurprisingly, Lia was much less nervous about her request.

"If I give you back the money," she started, laying the leaflet out on the table top as Cris had done and folding her arms behind her back innocently, "will you buy me this?"

"For Rin?", Silicia asked, and Lia just looked at her expectantly.

"Why the sturgeon?"

It was a stout green and brown plush, the shapes of individual scutes demarcated with rows of green stitching.

"I've seen Rin looking at it again and again. I think she's a little afraid to admit she likes it in front of the boys, but I want to get it for her birthday."

Silicia smiled indulgently.

"Consider it done."

---

She had the two gifts packed in separate bags for her at the zoo, and the following week she lifted one up from where it had sat hidden behind her desk and watched Cris' eyes light up. Lia came in only a few minutes after he'd left, knocking on her door with shifty eyes to retrieve such dangerous contraband. The whole illicit affair felt so deeply silly.

---

It seemed to have become a habit for all of them to stay after their sessions when they wanted something. Alec ignored her dismissal and leaned back in the chair.

"So. You did it."

"Did what?", she asked with a polite smile, knowing full well what he meant, but not knowing why he was asking.

"I knew we could trust you," he said instead of answering, and Silicia's expression sobered. She felt suddenly quite torn - encouraging their trust might end up hurting them in the end; she could not guarantee that she would always be on their side, especially if the company put the pressure on. On the other hand she really, really wanted them to trust her, if for no other reason than that she liked them.

She settled on the most non-answer she could come up with on the spot: a veiled plea for caution.

"It was hardly a dangerous thing to smuggle."

"You should know I gave them the idea," Alec said, trying to look cool but his face betraying how happy he was with himself. This conversation was giving her whiplash.

Silicia had wondered where they'd gotten it. The shelf in the main lobby that held countless leaflets no one ever read was of course the most parsimonous answer, but that had still left open why they'd been messing around with those in the first place. It would seem that she had been quite intentionally tested, and had passed.

"That's very clever of you," she said, meaning it. Alec preened under the praise.

---

Silicia was beside herself with joy at how much solid information about the kids this one event had given her. She really ought to be thankful to Alec for the gift he'd dropped in her lap.

Tump had gotten Rin a box of her favourite tea, a fruit tea with vanilla, which he'd emphasised was the important part. Erik had bought her her favourite sweets, which he explained were only intermittently in stock at the little store on level one. From how he made it sound he'd gotten her enough to last a year.

Alec, finally, had divulged that he'd also bought her chocolate, but secretly his gift had been letting her help him with a school assignment. 'Rin loves to feel useful', he'd said, his head swelling with self importance until it bumped against the ceiling.

The message hadn't gotten through to Rin, but that was alright, because she liked the chocolate.

---

"The force truly holding back technology is the human mind, see," Mira was saying, bouncing her leg like she just couldn't stand to wait until she'd get to get up and walk again. Silicia, leaning against the bus window, decided to humor her. This time she'd been the one who'd asked, after all.

"How do you figure?"

"I mean think about how you use your computer - even if you've got all your folders perfectly organized, the computer still doesn't actually understand the filing system. It couldn't replicate or explain it to another user, no matter how simplistic."

"Isn't that the machine's weakness, not mine?", asked Silicia, who had not previously perceived that as an issue.

"Nooo," Mira whined, sounding already frustrated. Silicia suspected she'd had this same discussion with someone else (or more likely, multiple someones) before, who hadn't followed her logic either.

"No, you're not getting it. That means without you the user, the computer is useless."

"And why does it need to be useful, without a user?"

"Because products that allow the user to form a bond with them sell better," Mira quoted with gritted teeth. Her restless feet were straying dangerously close the the boxed up lamp they were transporting home.

Silicia had no idea what that had to do with filing systems or independently operating computers, but the bitter undertone she was quite familiar with.

"I was wondering when they'd force you to actually make a viable product out of your groundbreaking research. Promotion not all you'd hoped it would be?"

Mira groaned, slumping against Silicia's shoulder.

"They gave me responsibilities, Si."

The petulence in her voice made her smile.

"And a whole lot of money."

"Money that comes with an orchestra's worth of strings attached..."

"They're forcing you to care about the details of execution while you're pursuing your dream project in the lap of luxury? Oh, woe is you," she said with a laugh.

"One of the shareholders said he'd veto my funding if I didn't finish up the digital assistant project first. I just want to get back to my brain scans, Si," Mira lamented. At least she'd stopped kicking her feet, laying limp with self pity.

"You're making a digital assistant? How is that supposed to work?"

"Well," she started, straightening a bit, "on paper it's sort of the perfect product for a tech giant, right? Top priority is convenience, and no one's done it before so we'll start out on a completely new market..."

"Only it's not the perfect project for you."

"It's so boring - it'll be fun building the skeleton of it, but actually making it useable is going to be such a drag!"

"So you already know how it'll work?", Silicia inquired, and Mira's eyes brightened a bit.

"Of course I do, and it's going to be brilliant, you can bet on that-"

As Mira pitched her vision of the perfect digital assistant to her, Silicia couldn't help but wonder which of the children would serve as her base. A huge selling point would naturally be the customizability of the digital assistant's personality, but Mira also let slip that the program's core would be its own intelligence - here she babbled something about the ultimate convenience of an assistant that understood you like a person but didn't have opinions like one. That felt a bit pointed, but beyond that she still couldn't claim to really get it.

Silicia thought it would likely be more of a hassle to have a whole system essentially constructed as a black box, which unlike a human would not respond to psychiatric help. But the expert here was Mira, not her, so she held her tongue.

---

Rin stepped into her office on Tuesday with a pep in her step and that cute new bracelet of hers noticably missing. Silicia quirked an eyebrow at her bare wrist. She'd bought the thing just last week, after telling Silicia she'd been considering spending her meagre pocket money on it for weeks. Rin saw her looking and winked.

The girl dropped herself into the chair with a mischievous grin.

"What did you do?", Silicia asked suspiciously, feeling like a character in a sitcom. Rin leaned forward, resting her elbows on the edge of the desk very smugly.

"I made a deal with Lia - I was in need of her talents."

Silicia's eyes widened. Over the weekend someone had clearly hacked into the facility's system, because on Monday the entirety of the floors used for schooling had found that someone had set their computers' system language to wingdings and somehow randomized all system sounds.

Rin laughed so hard at the expression on her face that she hit her elbow on the armrest of her chair.

---

In only another month and a half, Silicia found out why they weren't allowed to talk about the company name change to the kids.

'Tump Inc.' it said in the letterhead at the top of the document. With a thump, her balled up fist landed on the table hard enough to make the pens on it rattle. A second time and the little open container of paper clips spilled all over her work surface.

So furious she couldn't have even articulated why she was this angry if anyone had bothered to ask, Silicia stood and looked around for something to throw. She yanked the detatchable cushion off her office chair and hurled it at the wall. When that wasn't enough, she grabbed an empty folder out of the shelf and threw that after the pillow - then another, and another, until the shelf was empty. She cast around for another projectile, and her eyes landed on the hole punch.
It impacted with the wall with a much more satisfying sound than the folders had and left a small indent where the corner of it had cracked the plaster. Silicia still felt like screaming, like raging, like hurling her chair through the window. Instead she sat back down, now a good inch lower without the cushion, and finished reading the letter, before she tore it into tiny pieces with shaking hands.

After she'd finished with that, she stood again and assessed her desk. Then she swept everything but the computer monitor and keyboard off of it in one angry motion, and when the clatter and rustle of it still weren't enough, she hit the flat palms of her hands against the cleared table top until they stung.

The door opened and Fred peeked in, noting the dent in the wall, the office supplies strewn around, and Silicia in the middle of the chaos, head bowed over her desk and shaking. Quietly, he shut the door again.

---

After she'd calmed herself down somewhat, the first thing that really hit her was an irrational sense of betrayal. Somehow, she'd gone along with Mira at every incremental step and still not seen where she was being led, and now it was too late to turn tail.
When Mira had suggested her for this job, she knew this was where it would go. Silicia had been the one laying the groundwork for this project the whole time, for years now, just like she'd always been the one who worked out the details in Mira's grand plans.
Only she'd somehow never put it together, never looked up and seen that the way Mira was heading lay a teleological nightmare of human rights violations.
And its architect had let Silicia go on deluding herself while they laughed together and cooked dinner in her little yellow kitchen.

Now it was Tump on the chopping block, and she'd been the one who'd led him there. There was no contract in the world that could be signed by a ten year old's parents to make it justifiable to patent and sell his personality.

Silicia made her way up to the fire stairs that clung close to the side of the building barely noticing that's where she was headed. The metal creaked hauntingly in the wind, and the emergency exit doors were all a little stuck because no one ever used them, making the fire stairs the ideal place for a private mental breakdown.
She sat down on a step halfway up to the 9th floor, not dressed warm enough to sit out here in the middle of winter at all, with the wind biting at her with icy teeth. It didn't really matter. She sunk down further, then thought 'to hell with it', and leant back until the back of her neck rested on another stair.

The cold slowed her thoughts, but did not calm them.

She was in too deep to get out - she tried to imagine it, and failed. She would quit, would have her belongings in boxes before Mira came home. Settle in another city, another state even, find a new job - boring, but not this.
But she was deluding herself. She had to stay, had to do her best to be the one remaining force for good in these kids lives. Or maybe that was arrogant. Maybe deep down, the thing keeping her was just that she didn't hate Mira, that she couldn't. That she maybe never really would no matter what she did.
What had she done, really? Exactly what she said she would, and probably what she would have always done, with or without Silicia. She couldn't leave and pretend she was just an innocent victim here.

Mira was - she loved her, far, far too much, had for years and would for years to come. But she knew at that moment that she would betray her.

Entire Work

Last Chapter

Next Chapter