WHO: Silje Halvorsen WHAT: Contemplation of discoveries made last night WHEN: Tuesday, 4 June, after dinner WHERE: Her room, 6F WARNINGS: Mentions of sex STATUS: Complete
19:22, play.
She had watched it five times already. Not the whole thing; there was no point to watching the entire recording, she had been a part of the live show, there were no surprises for her, and while it had been good, it wasn't as though the best sex of her life had been captured by camera, to live on for years as a high water mark.
She was watching to make an objective assessment about what someone else would see, what it would make them think. It would take a particular sort of person to reach 19:22, given the nineteen minutes of content that preceeded what happened. It wasn't shocking, it wasn't horrifying, but Silje had become accustomed to considering her own actions and the predicted responses of others, so she scrutinized herself now. He was tethered more securely this time, though even in the still frame there were visible hints that he had not spent all nineteen minutes as the passive party.
She tapped the screen and peered closely as the scene came to life, a few moments of obvious enthusiasm and then - she had stopped moving abruptly, splayed both hands wide across his skin, over the chest of someone who did obviously spend a good deal of their bored time in the gym.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing." Her hair partially obscured her face at this angle, but as she watched her body return to moving the way he had wanted, Silje deliberated whether or not others would accept her answer as readily as Hugo had in the moment. She stopped the video, setting her phone aside, and gave more attention to what couldn't be seen on a camera.
Vol Squad wasn't humanitarian at all, beyond a familiar front. The existence of an elite team wasn't as shocking as it ought to have been; though some of the names on it were unexpected, some were more predictable than the entity itself. It was practically a paradox: What came first, Sam Thompson or a covert team of IVF lapdogs?
Everything she had learned last night only served to make her hungry for more information, to see if everyone had the same story, to find a way to twist together all of the knowledge she had accrued thus far, and create a sizeable stack of chips with which to bargain. Silje wanted a seat at the final table, without regard for the means it meant to get her there. She would get in any bed necessary, she would file literal mountains of inane paperwork in a menial office job so long as it sat her beside a living, breathing someone who held ten times the amount of valuable information than the file folders did, she would have no difficulty turning away from people she called friends, so long as she knew that at the end of it all, she would be one of the ones to survive. Loyalty wasn't a foreign concept, it was a commodity. But who was the best bet, and was it the best time to cash in?
Another minute passed.
She picked up her phone and cleared to the home screen.