Epigraph

content/read/019.md

@@ -1,73 +1,105 @@
-# RJ Brewster --- 2112
+# Dr. Carter Ramirez --- 2112
 
-Sleep did not come easily.
+Carter hadn't meant to dodge her subordinate's question. They truly did need to go in to eat.
 
-As padded as the auditorium seats were, they were not made for laying down on. They folded down, and while there were no armrests to get in the way of stretching out, the gaps between seats were awkward and painful. AwDae found that ey had to face toward the backs of the seats, lest eir tail get crimped against them. It left eir back exposed in a way that felt unsafe, no matter how empty the sim was.
+The food was, as promised, excellent. Carter made a mental note to come here more often. A note filed into the appropriate box in mind, then set aside. She had to work through the implications of what had been spilled by the tabloid.
 
-At first, the faint dusty smell of the seat fabric inspired nostalgia, but it did not last. The memories were not comfortable, either.
+She couldn't visit this RJ any more than she could fly out of the restaurant's second story window and back to her lab.
 
-Eventually, ey got up and began pacing blearily around the auditorium. There must be some way to rest that did not involve folding seats.
+It would be a useless gesture, of course. Her team didn't need access to the patient to do all of their work, because much of their vitals, properly anonymized, were provided as a real-time stream of data. It had been shown that physical contact was not registered at all by the lost; it would hardly matter if it was a researcher any more than a family member.
 
-Ey could pull down one of the curtains and make a nest out of it. But, as ey did not know how to do so without ripping the fabric, ey was loath to do so. They carried some of that same smell, those same memories. A last resort, perhaps.
+There would be people between her and RJ, as well. Not just doctors and nurses, but her own administration. She would have to go through any number of layers of bureaucracy just to get access to...to what? To variables that likely wouldn't help her investigation at all? Eye color? Hair length?
 
-Exploring beyond the auditorium it was, then. The door out the back of the stage led to the hall containing music and drama classrooms. Ey started cataloging additional places where ey could hole up. The black fabric orchestra seats were promising, and they could be arranged however ey wanted, but ey hit pay dirt in the theater storeroom.
+And of course, there was the law. Carter well understood the purpose of the Western Federation Personal and Health Information Protection Act. It was part of her research at a fundamental level. Anyone in medicine knew it, had the inevitable posters tacked to the walls.
 
-The back of the room was sectioned off into a wardrobe area, housing costumes and rack upon rack of identical tuxes and dresses for the choir singers. Nestled behind all of these rows of clothing was a sofa, old and sagging.
+Hell, she had voted on it, herself, in the DDR. It was something she felt strongly about regardless of her work. The tabloid had breached that, in a way. There was no culpability, of course, but there was a breach by publicly announcing the case.
 
-There was zero reason for the room to contain a sofa. Ey did not remember one being there the few times ey tagged along with Sasha. As inexplicable as it was, however, AwDae wouldn't have been surprised if such a thing had existed in the school ey when had attended.
+And yet, there was nothing to stop her from going to a show in the next day or two.
 
-Thanking whoever had created this sim, ey flopped down onto it. Musty smell intensified, lingered, settled.
+Feeling very much the sleuth, she stuffed a small egg roll into her mouth. Savoring the taste. Savoring the idea, the plan.
 
-Ey was asleep within minutes.
+Yes, she'd go to a show up in Soho.
 
-Sleep, while restful, brought dreams of unnerving intensity. Dreams of twisting passages, of locker-lined corridors looping impossibly back on themselves, leading always into the same dim light of the student center. And in the middle, a menu, canted away at a steep angle, no different from what ey might get by swiping eir paw left to right in any sane and sensible sim.
+With her resolution firmly planted, she found it difficult to make it through the rest of the day. Rather than wrangle the two competing strands of work groups into some cohesive whole, she spent much of her time distracted. Antsy.
 
-Every time ey got close to try and read the menu, however, it would slide closed, leaving only its shadow behind. An unexpected rendering error.
+Finding tickets was easy enough, though the price left her winded. She was thinking about all of the ways in which she could approach the cast. Or was it the crew? Would she even be able to get in contact with any of them? Supposing so, what would she even say? *Tell me about your sound tech*?
 
-AwDae jolted awake feeling as if ey had drastically overslept. Ey hadn't paid attention to when ey had gone to bed in the first place. One in the morning? Two? Rehearsal, and then hours of searching. Was it the same day? The same week?
+The rush was wearing off, as it always did.
 
-All the same, ey felt late.
+Avery and Prakash were both settling into the routine of investigating what had gone on before the incidences of the lost. Those precious few minutes saved from the precious few cases where a core dump had been provided.
 
-With the shock of transition, the need to explore the auditorium and hunt school for the mic, ey never did make it outside of the school. Could ey even do so? Ey felt silly for not trying, now.
+Avery was collating what data they had from each case on the social front before the event and searching for social connections between each of the cases, as much as the law would allow. Prakash, meanwhile, was digging through biochemical data that had been collected from each of the patients and searching for similarities for them. All stuff he had been doing before, of course, but now based specifically on the time before they had gotten lost, rather than during or after.
 
-Wake up, then. Ey stretched and started to plan a way out of the school. If nothing else, ey wanted to see how extensive the sim was.
+Carter had supposed that this would be innocuous enough, but Sanders had taken the opportunity of the boss dining out for lunch to chat with a few members of the workgroup. Not once, but twice while she was working, she had needed to field private messages from teammates. Both had concerns around the direction of the project, and questions about the wisdom of separating the already fractured group into smaller units.
 
-It was customary in-sim to lock the doors that did not lead anywhere. Although the Crown Pub did have bathrooms and fire escapes, for instance --- all for the sake of authenticity --- the doors were locked tight. Beyond them would have been nothing at all. That was simply the extent of the sim. It was not inaccessible so much as nonexistent.
+In both cases, she reiterated that this would only be a temporary investigation. If it turned up any useful information, then they would have that conversation again in the near future. If it didn't, oh well. Everyone would cohere once more. There was comfort in the words, she hoped, but all the same, Carter wasn't sure of their efficacy.
 
-And yet there were much larger sims than the school itself, much more intricate. AwDae couldn't be sure of the boundaries without exploring.
+She had had an idea. A hunch. One she thought worth investigating. That's what one did in science, right? Have ideas. Investigate. Be open to being proven wrong.
 
-Ey wondered what must have happened to eir body back in reality, even as ey walked toward the front doors. Ey didn't feel hungry, though ey felt ey should. Such things were translated in-sim as safety measures to keep addicts from starving themselves. After all, ey had still felt the need to sleep. Something had clearly been done with eir body.
+Sanders, however, had an *ideal*.
 
-That train of thought wound around the question of how exactly ey had gotten lost in a sim without being connected to it. Were other lost individuals in whatever sims they had been before, empty now of others? Did everyone experience getting lost the same?
+Or so Carter assumed. When assessing the team's standing on the issue, she had used the usual three point scale: for, neutral, against. What she hadn't asked was how many fucks each of them gave. There were, after all, two parts to making a decision. Which way you vote, and how much you cared about it.
 
-Obviously, time had passed, and certainly the crew hadn't left em just sitting at eir rig after ey had finally lost touch. Even so, ey should've been pulled back to that reality when eir hands had been lifted from the cradles and head pulled away from the NFC headrest.
+Carter could easily estimate Sanders giving ten out of ten fucks against this current plan of exploration, while in fact, until this afternoon, she would have likely given five or six fucks.
 
-Had time passed, though? Had it? Had ey explored? Had ey slept?
+That question hadn't been asked, though. She couldn't make up her mind whether she wished she had asked or was glad that she hadn't.
 
-And yet here ey was.
+This afternoon, with the determination to learn more for the sake of the project (so she promised herself) and the sense that she was on the right path had significantly bumped the number of fucks she gave. And there was the hope of proving Sanders wrong, no small amount of competition within academia.
 
-Where was eir body, then? Some hospital somewhere? Insensate and tied to life support?
+-----
 
-And if ey was in a hospital, where did this sim exist? A sim this size couldn't simply live in eir gear. Especially not with all of the mechanics ey had encountered so far. Fully functioning sound booth and mic. Papers in the office. The sleeves of costumes hanging from the racks ey had brushed eir hand across on the way to the couch.
+The play was some contemporary work.
 
-No answers to be had. All ey could rely on was what was in front of em.
+The Short Trip, the ticket site informed her, chronicled an indecisive youth taking a trip away from family, purportedly to visit a bunch of friends for three days, the real goal of the trip being to visit his long-distance partner, but in the setting of a party, with guests, known and unknown, weaving their way through the scene --- and, at times, through the audience.
 
-Ey stopped at the bank of doors at the front of the building, staring at one of the panic bars. Would it be locked? Would it open at a touch? Should ey slam eir weight against it, or test gingerly?
+This much she learned as she made her way south and west. Carter had to duck out of work earlier than usual to make it over to the theater on time. She had actually to travel past RJ in the UMC, borne along the yowling Victoria line to Soho. Glad she left early, too. She needed to wait for three trains to pass before she was able to squeeze aboard.
 
-Resigning emself to whatever happened when ey pushed it, ey rested eir paws against the smooth metal, claws clicking against the door itself, and gave a firm shove.
+The train vomited her out into Oxford Circus and left her spinning. Looking, looking for the right exit to the tube station, comparing directions on her phone. Each was helpfully lit up with a thin, translucent display overlaid above the older signage in painted tile. Both bore the unerring curves of Helvetica, perpetual winner of the font wars.
 
-The door swung open and ey pinned eir ears back, squinting into the deafening sunlight beyond. Holding the door open with one paw, the other shaded eir eyes.
+Neither meant anything to her.
 
-Ey saw the cul-de-sac for dropping kids off. Ey saw the street beyond, the set of townhouses that lined the road opposite the school. Ey saw grey. Ey saw fog. Despite the very sunny day, shadows cast sharply against concrete, ey saw fog.
+Easy enough to find the theater by following the crowds. Her identity --- and thus her ticket --- was proved by a touch from her contacts, a grip around a simple bar in front of the theater. The bar flipped around to provide its other end to the next customer, the end she had touched getting a quick sanitizing so that everyone got a clean surface.
 
-Fog of war? Render distance? Some visual indicator representing the furthest that the system was willing to draw? Or a boundary hemming em in?
+Carter was first surprised by just how much she enjoyed the play, then chagrined at her surprise. She had decided not to approach cast or crew beforehand, a decision that had proven surprisingly difficult. She worried that she would spend the entirety of the play thinking of what to say. She wound up engrossed in the performance all the same.
 
-Old tech. Tech unneeded for perhaps a century. Was it a limit of eir exo? Some languishing remnant? It had occasionally been used as an invisible boundary, ey knew. That it was there in the first place, closing off the street in either direction a hundred yards into the distance, confirmed that this was indeed a sim, not just some artifact of eir subconscious.
+Lying to parents. Moving through the party. The awkwardness of meeting for the first time. The cast nailed it all. She'd had her own long-distance fling while an undergrad, and she knew the feeling well. *Meet at a public space where you know people,* mom had even cautioned. *Like a party. Just in case.*
 
-Did it, though? *Did* it confirm that? Did that truly follow? Was it a sign? What was its referent?
+It was well into the third act of three that she realized she hadn't given any thought to the sound of the play. A passing thought: this was probably a good thing. This was the sign of a job well done. An understudy, perhaps?
 
-Ey stepped out onto the sidewalk by the flagpole and stared. Shoulders sagged. Tail drooped. There were no answers.
+She applauded as heartily as the rest.
 
-No answers.
+Still, her mission, such as it was, was right at the fore as soon as she stood. She was perhaps a little rude in her haste, making her way out into the lobby of the theater where some of cast and crew, as well as the director, were greeting the audience. Opening night, after all.
 
-Nothing for it but to keep looking.
+"Mr. Johansson. Mr. Johansson!"
+
+The bulky man turned toward her with a pleasant, if bland, smile. A smile at war with the obvious worry lining his face. "Ma'am. I trust you enjoyed the show?"
+
+"I did! Of course I did. I'd like to ask you something, though, if I might."
+
+"Mm." The sound was assent, but only just. The rest of the audience was starting to stream out of the theater, his mind was elsewhere.
+
+"I was...It's just, about RJ--"
+
+The immediate focus of Johansson's attention was a heat lamp against her face. The intensity of it startled Carter out of speech.
+
+"I mean, if it's not too forward to ask," she trailed off, a hint of a question.
+
+"It is forward," he confirmed, eyes probing her. Too many reporters? "But I'd like to know how you know of em?"
+
+"I'm a researcher at UCL, working on the lost."
+
+Johansson took her elbow gently in his grip and led her off to the side, out of hearing of the rest of the audience and the curious cast. Gently, but brooking no disagreement.
+
+"That doesn't tell me how you know of em. Aren't you-- isn't that privileged information?"
+
+"The tabloids had a--"
+
+The growl was immediate, hidden behind gritted teeth. "The paramedics told me I couldn't contact anyone but the hospital, but the rag said you guys had declined contact."
+
+Carter straightened and shook her head. "We did not, nor would we have. Although, I must admit, the interview process would be far more formal than this. I only put the pieces together based on location and pronouns."
+
+"So what do you want from us?" Johansson's shoulders sagged, the intensity lessened, permitting emotion. "We miss RJ. It's been a real mess without em. Please, miss--"
+
+"Ramirez. Dr. Carter Ramirez." She hesitated for a moment before continuing. "We're looking for...well, a few of us are looking for social connections between the lost, rather than just simple personality or neurlogical correlations. What can you tell us about RJ in that sense?"
+
+Johansson looked up to his cast, then leaned a little closer to murmur, "O'Niell's, once we're done. Then we can talk. I have more to do here, so it may be a while. Please wait up, though."