Epigraph

content/read/011.md

@@ -1,115 +1,125 @@
-# RJ Brewster --- 2112
+# Dr. Carter Ramirez --- 2112
 
-AwDae slowly picked emself up off of the floor, staggering to eir feet.
+"Listen, Ramirez, I'm just not sure if you--"
 
-Ey was standing, swaying, in the middle of a long row of lockers. And then ey was sitting again. Not from weakness *per se*, but the shock of being in the tech booth and theater sim, and then suddenly being back in high school was taking its toll on eir wits.
+"No, come on. Sanders, just hear me out." Carter sighed and settled her weight against the edge of her desk. Took a slow breath to buy herself some time, organize her thoughts. "I'm just saying that we ought to look into social connections between the patients, too. That way, maybe we can see if there's some factor that's tying these occurrences together. With that under our belt, we may be able to formulate a better theory of what's going on here, even neurologically."
 
-Ey swiped eir paw from left to right in front of emself to bring up the usual menu.
+Sanders looked up to the ceiling, visibly counting to ten, then shrugged. "It's just that you're talking about contagion here, Carter, like this is some sort of flu or computer virus. Not only do we have very little data to go on, but there's no indication that this is something passed from one person to another. We've had the rigs checked. Exos too. All of the data suggests random--"
 
-Only, no menu came up. There was nothing in this sim, if sim it was. No global menu, no ACLs. No control.
+"Sanders," Carter said, voice stern. "I know how the project works. I know the data. There's a lot of questions still left in the air. I'm not suggesting that getting lost is contagious. We dismissed the virus aspect ages ago. I'm merely suggesting that we might find shared factors within a social realm as well as the physiological. Surprised we haven't, actually."
 
-Panic crested again, broke the surface.
+Carter stood her ground. No sense paling under his glare. She was lead of the research team, she could tell Sanders to do whatever she wanted him to. Or, well, strongly suggest. Hell, there was no reason for her not to. She was plugged into all of the teams that he was not privy to. He may be lead of neurochem, but Carter was above basically everyone except the UCL itself and whatever grantors were sponsoring the project.
 
-AwDae felt behind emself, reaching for that sense of reality outside of the sim, that cool breeze of the tangible that should be at eir back. It *was* there. Ey could feel it. A cool breath of air on the back of eir neck, but muffled. Only, there was something keeping em from reaching for it, touching it. A thin barrier. A membrane. A sheet of keeping em trapped within the sim.
+After a few tense secionds, he caved, shrugged, turned his back on Carter. He nodded towards his own team.
 
-And then, with a jolt of pain driving like a spike down the back of eir neck and along eir spine, it was gone.
+"Look, Sanders," Carter said, following after. "You're a fantastic doctor, and I respect that, I really do. I'm not trying to impugn that or anything, and I'm not pulling labor away from the neurochem team. I'm merely suggesting that we add a sociological aspect to our attack here."
 
-Throughout all of the practice runs, the endless training on the rig that had gone into eir education, that feeling had only come up a scant handful of times. It was the feeling of being forcibly disconnected from the rig through the manual expedient of removing the contacts from the cradles in which they rested. It was the shock of being brought to reality from out of a sim with no disconnection. It was the rush of eir exocortex dumping its core and the interferites struggling to hand back control with the last of their stored power. It was panic made tangible, halfway between electricity and the feeling of missing one's step on the last stair.
+He held up his hands in surrender, then headed for the coffee station.
 
-And with that, AwDae should've found emself back in the tech booth, trying to figure out what strange loop the theater had gotten itself into that would have frozen eir rig.
+Carter rolled her eyes and let him go. She turned back to the remaining team. "We've got a hunch on the social front. Or, I do, but I think it's worth following. There's a couple of patients who are involved in the same subcultures, so maybe there's distinct ties between them. Loose ties, sure, not everyone knows everyone else, but they *are* there."
 
-The lockers never wavered, though, and now ey found emself stuck in eir old high school with no contact to the world outside of whatever this place was.
+They nodded. Some looked unconvinced, but none hostile.
 
-Ey screamed.
+"Let's time-box half a day to chase down these ties and see just where they lead. If they lead nowhere, fine. If we can find a way to tie them together, then we dig into all the ways that the web ramifies." She smiled in a way she hoped was disarming. "Worst case, half a day is spent tracing along the 'net, but best case, we find another avenue of research that lets us predict --- and then maybe interrupt --- future cases. Got it? Catch you at lunch."
 
-Ey didn't know how long ey screamed, how many times. Ey didn't know how long ey cried or beat eir fists against the lockers. Ey didn't know where ey was.
+Carter sighed. Speeches. Hell of a start to the day. She collapsed into her desk chair, closing her eyes to collect her thoughts.
 
-Lost.
+Rather than sequester herself in an office, she had taken a desk among the team. Four foot cube walls separating her from her neighbors. Made of glass, too; token walls rather than real ones. Not that there was much room for an office in the repurposed classroom. All the same, the deliberate attitude with which she had chosen to join everyone in equal conditions had endeared her to the more stubborn among the crew.
 
-Lost like so many others.
+On the other hand, the lawyers-*cum*-statisticians were badly out of their element. Thankfully they had their implants and were able to spend most of their time in the office sim.
 
-Lost like Cicero.
+All the same, sometimes she wished for an office, if only for the door. A nice, thick, hardwood door. One with a solid core so that she could voice her ideas. Or scream.
 
-Or perhaps Aeneas, Odysseus.
+Sometimes she just needed the ability to put things into words. No matter how often she tried to set things down in the notes on her phone, she always felt hampered by the small screen and her clumsy thumbs. Neither had she gone full immersive-on-the-go yet. Something about that glassy-eyed stare, the silly headband, the controllers gripped like walking weights, packed full of electronics, set her teeth on edge.
 
-Sing to me the reasons, O Muse. Sing, Muse, the fatal wrath.
+At least she had a private corner in sim.
 
-Eventually, ey cried emself out. Minutes, hours. Eventually, eir tail went numb and eir feet fell asleep.
+She delved in rather than work on a tablet or screen. *One scream,* she promised herself. *Then I'll organize shit.*
 
-*Nothing for it.* Ey wobbled to eir feet, kicked off now ill-fitting shoes, shoes not made for fox paws, and began to trudge.
+Once she left her private corner, Carter's chosen workspace, her 'desk', was totally black. Not the complete blackness of unseeing, but the vaguely luminescent darkness of *Eigengrau*, as if wherever she looked, she saw the faint light of non-seeing. It was black enough to be easy on the eyes almost by definition. At least, as much as she had eyes in the sim.
 
-Ey walked slowly down the halls, memories coming back in a wash. Realities blurred effortlessly. Realities of the embodied world. Realities of online life.
+Black without being unnerving.
 
-Nails on feetpaws clicking against the tile, following the math wing to the student center, a cavernous space that acted as a terminus for all of the different hallways, each hosting a different subject. They spread away from the cavernous room like limbs, a giant insect clutching at the earth.
+Scattered throughout the space were decks. Decks upon decks.
 
-Neither halls nor hub had ever seen a fox. They were supposed to be home to students. To students and teachers and staff. To humans. To anyone, not some lone half-beast.
+Each was a point of light. A white rectangle with just enough depth to give the impression of being several cards stacked on top of each other but no more. Each was surrounded by a dim halo that dispelled the darkness. If she were to engage with a deck, it would fill her vision almost to the periphery with that fine velum paper. Almost, but not quite: the non-black provided a border and seemed to shine, in its own non-light way, through the paper. From there, she would be able to explore and expand that portion of the project at will.
 
-Inside the student center, AwDae sat down and tried to reach towards reality once more.
+The decks themselves were organized into groups, surrounded by bright lines of white string --- literally string; Carter had chosen cotton string as her group delimiter. Decks within groups were linked by string, and many of these groups in turn were related to one another with more intangible threads.
 
-Nothing.
+She was a ghost. A non-being. A being of nots. A gesture from her non-hand would show the whole setup from the top. The mind, ever attracted to a two dimensional representation, sometimes appreciated this aspect. The mind, ever attracted to the *hereness* of space appreciated walking through the sim just as much.
 
-Ey sagged, rolling onto eir side in eir increasingly frustrated attempts to pull away from the contacts, though that shock of pain suggested those in reality had long since pulled em away.
+Even with perspective in play, the scientists and lawyers working the project had tended to alternate between the aerial view and the interactive view, with the cards positioned at chest level throughout the sim.
 
-Frustration, anger, fear. Hopelessness. Terror. All simmered within em, working up to a boil as ey tried increasingly harder.
+Everyone's view of the sim was different in its own way. Sanders, she knew, preferred an oak-paneled room with dark green carpet, a facsimile of luxury with each of the grouping lines drawn out in finest silver. Others preferred pencil sketches, harsh angles, subdued colors on a dim background, or even more abstract, textual interfaces. So long as the concepts of decks and spatiality were maintained, it was up to the individual.
 
-Finally, ey gave up and, hastily brushing at the tears staining eir cheeks, slipped out of eir tux jacket as well. Why keep it? Yet another unfoxly garment.
+Cards had their ACLs, too. Some were visible only to the individual. Some were visible to everyone, but only on the surface, with details invisible to others. The vast majority were visible to everyone, completely open.
 
-Ey swished eir tail to the side and lay flat on eir back on the cool terrazzo floor. Ey pulled eir suit jacket up over eir face and buried eir muzzle in the soft lining. With paws holding the cloth to eir face, ey deliberately let the tears come. Willed them too. Forced. Screamed and begged. Anything for release from the tension building up.
+Carter began creating a publicly visible grouping, knowing that others were delving into the sim along with her, visible as diffuse shapes in her dark space. She wrote in air, titled the group in her stolid, blocky font of choice. "The Social Connection".
 
-Time held no meaning. It was a few minutes or hours or days before ey peeled the coat from eir face and stood up once more. Exhausted, ey bent down to roll up the cuffs of eir slacks to keep them from bothering eir feet.
+From there, she began creating sub-groupings. For cases. For leads. On and on. For the "cases" group, she tapped a few of the case decks to make symbolic links, drawing lines of cotton twine which she dropped in.
 
-It was in the middle of the second cuff that ey realized the absurdity of the motion. In the theater sim, ey didn't have a body, and when ey 'woke' in eir normal sim, ey was dressed only in the clothes ey had on when ey went to bed. Usually nothing. Ey disrobed before disconnecting more out of habit than anything.
+Two were positioned at the top of the list:
 
-So why was ey still in eir tux? Did ey even have a tux in eir wardrobe?
+  ------------------
+    Patient aca973d7
+    M --- 2086-01-28
+   Lost: 2112-11-08
+  ------------------
 
-AwDae puzzled over this for a moment before completing the cuff rolling. Something to look into later. For now, ey needed to find eir way out. Find eir way *back* out. Or, failing that, at least find one thing ey could finish. One, simple task to complete. Something to make em feel less powerless in the face of it all.
+  ------------------
+    Patient 0224ebe8
+    X --- 2084-05-09
+   Lost: 2112-12-07
+  ------------------
 
-Exploring, then.
+Carter connected these two cards with fine thread. Hanging pendant from that, she switched to virtual keyboard and created a metadata label, more tag than card:
 
------
+  ------------------
+  Possible acquaintances
+  ------------------
 
-The sim was startlingly complete.
+The others, those shadowy figures, caught on to what she was doing, and got down to work, dragging symlinks of decks and expanding this new group of social connections.
 
-Perhaps. Ey had been in London a few years, and before that, on the coast at university. *Was* it complete? Was it accurate? Despair lay around the corner: the thought that the chances of em being able to compare the sim and reality vanishingly small.
+Carter pulled back out of the sim when her personal timer went off fifteen minutes before the time-box was up.
 
-In fact, the only thing that seemed to have changed was AwDae emself.
+She backed out and made her way from her workstation to the small counter at the front of the old classroom. She filled the electric kettle from the tap and set it on its base for tea, letting it heat up, then scooped a few heaping spoonfuls of coffee and chicory into the coffee maker. While she was in the sim, she had ensured that everyone else's rig would have an alarm for the time-box, and it was only fair that she make everyone a cup of coffee before they pulled back.
 
-AwDae's curiosity won out. Ey made eir way back to the school's auditorium. It was exactly as ey had left it all those years ago. Trudging up the few steps toward the entrance, ey feared that it would be locked. Missing. Somehow erased from existence, such that it had never been there in the first place.
+The coffee had finished brewing and the mugs were all set out in a row in front of the pot and kettle, each waiting with handles out toward the room for ready hands. Carter poured herself some of the coffee, thick and bitter, and topped it off with a dash of sweetened creamer to dull the latter.
 
-But the door swung easily beneath eir paw and eir nails clicked against the sound guard in the doorway, leading em into the dimly lit hall.
+One by one, the ten techs pulled back from their workstations and ambled, glassy-eyed, to the counter where the coffee lay. Carter suppressed a smile: a horde of zombies in various states of disarray drawn to caffeine. It'd be nice, but over the months they had spent on the project, the team had settled into a comfortable ritual of meetings over coffee. The habit remained unbroken.
 
-The house lights were at quarter, the stage lit only by utility lights from the back. All the same, it was enough for em to find eir way to the small sound booth. A counter with a light: off. A bank of sliders and knobs: all zeroed out.
+"So," she started, once everyone was gathered around and tead-and-coffeed.
 
-AwDae brushed eir fingerpads along the lower lip of the soundboard. The screws were exactly where ey remembered.
+Silence. Sanders wouldn't meet her gaze.
 
-Swishing eir tail out of the way, ey sat on the stool in before it. Ey reached a paw up past the master sliders, just around to the back of the board, where ey found the power switch.
+Finally, she caved and broke down her thoughts. "Time-box is over. I think we got a bunch of good stuff done in a few hours, some not even related to the task at hand. There's definitely connections there. We've got a good number of them among the cases we have at our hands, but there's precious little data on why those connections exist. We've got a few furries, a few 'net addicts --- well, more than a few --- and we've got a whole lot of DDR junkies. None of those point to anything that would lead people to getting lost."
 
-Click.
+"Man, have you *seen* DDR zombies, though?" Everyone laughed.
 
-Nothing happened, so ey reached a little further back, finding the power strip for the booth itself, and toggled the switch on that. The board let out a satisfying pop of recognition as it came to life. The brief surge of power echoed throughout the room as speakers awoke. The theater uncoiled, purred to em, just as the one back in London had done...what? Three hours back? Five? A year?
+Another voice piped up, "And the correlation on the neurochem side is extremely low. Might as well be non-existent."
 
-Ey fumbled with the booth light, finding the ancient dial switch to wash away shadows with lazy red light. Light that illuminated a thin layer of dust covering the board and booth in a matte coating. Light that illuminated countless motes already disturbed. The only breaks in the coating were where eir fingers had brushed the dust away, leaving black slicks.
+Sanders smirked down to his coffee mug before hiding the expression with a sip.
 
-So familiar. So many dreams. Dreams of flawless performances of breathtaking beauty. Nightmares of feedback and missing equipment.
+"No, there's no doubt about that." Carter sighed, shrugged. "So, again, time-box is over. What do you think? Is this line of thought worth pursuing? Plus-one, minus-one, zero. Sanders?"
 
-Acting on a dream, ey slowly brought the master volume up to the spot ey still remembered from so long ago, turned the gain to mid on mic one, and brought the slider up slowly.
+"Minus-one." The response was immediate.
 
-Blinked.
+Carter slipped her phone from her pocket and started a tally on the calculator. "Alright," she continued. "Jacob?"
 
-A soft hiss filled the hall. The channel was open.
+"Zero."
 
-*That doesn't mean anything,* AwDae thought. *There could be anything plugged into the snakehead in the pit. A line with a powered mic. A wireless receiver. Hell, a fault in the system.*
+Tallying as she went, Carter went around the room, The running tally took a few dings (neither of the lawyers were for the idea, she noticed), but remained net positive until the end of the line.
 
-All the same, it was something. Something in this seemingly abandoned hulk of memory was turned on, something else besides emself was making noise.
+"We're left at two, then."
 
-Ey was about to head down to the pit to check on the snakehead, the terminus for all of the microphone cables or wireless receivers that stretched up to the board, when ey caught sight of a sheet of paper, folded in quarters, tucked between the side of the board and the wall of the booth.
+Sanders set his mug down with exaggerated care, but otherwise stayed silent.
 
-AwDae plucked the paper free and unfolded it, held it under the red light of the booth lamp to get a closer look at it.
+"Hardly universal, so let's triage. Can I get one from neuro, one from stats and history, and would one of the law team be willing to devote an hour a day to helping us out? Just to run stuff by as we come up with leads."
 
-There, in tiny print, was a good chunk of the content of the vcard ey had created earlier that morning to add to Sasha and Debarre's deck. Cicero's DDR ledger, containing transactions that comprised votes made, bounties collected, and comments posted.
+_**If** you come up with leads,_ was written on Sanders' face. She ignored it.
 
-A note, though. Doubly weird. The paper didn't act like a normal vcard. No menu, no ACLs ey could sense. And yet the closer ey looked at the paper, the more the data seemed to unfold, fractally nested and seemingly infinitely deep.
+Prakash Das from the neurochem team raised his hand, and Avery from statistics and history volunteered. One of the lawyers, Sandra, gave a noncommittal shrug and promised some of her time, saying, "We're on shaky legal ground, I think, but we can probably keep it in check."
 
-Ey blinked, and the moment passed. The note once more contained only tabulated transactions.
+"Alright. Let's sync up, you three." Carter smiled toward the rest of the group, "Not leaving you guys behind. One-on-ones and daily stand-ups will continue at the usual times. We'll set another time-box of--" She checked her phone. "Three days, after which we'll reconvene and vote again."
 
-Frowning, AwDae refolded the note and stuck it into eir trousers' pocket. A small scrap of the outside world stuck in this elaborate fantasy.
+Sanders strolled back toward his workstation, Ramirez's eyes on his back.