. (isconfetti) wrote in repose, @ 2019-04-28 01:17:00 |
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Hannah hadn't seen it coming. She'd known that her contract with the military was almost up, and she'd just started to try to think of ways out, out, out, because she didn't want to go back to Tethys. She assumed that was the logical next course of action, to go back to Tethys, and Hannah had tasted too much freedom to become the starling in the cage crying to get out again and again. But she'd only started thinking about solutions and options and ways to break an unbreakable tie, and then it happened. At 6 a.m., as per usual, she arrived at the facility and reported to the scientist in charge of observing her during the contracted period. But the scientist wasn't there, and instead it was the head of the cybernetics division at Tethys that met her. The conversation that followed was kind of blur, but she was made to understand that Tethys had decided to remove themselves from both Repose and the area of cybernetics, and they had sold her to CARNEM. All their research went along with her, and CARNEM was headquartered in the Capital. Hannah already knew about CARNEM, having broken in with Rory to utilize the dreaming platform that would allow her to experience Westworld. She knew, too, that Albin had created said dreaming platform for CARNEM, and so she wasn't surprised when the cybernetics head explained that the man coming to pick her up worked for Albin in some capacity that he wouldn't divulge to her. Hannah, who had very few items remaining at her facility-issued room, went and packed what remained in one bag, and, under security supervision, she returned to the civilian entrance to the military facility. She knew she had a few minutes to think, think, think, because whoever was picking her up would need to go through multiple checkpoints, even to access the civilian area, and then he would need to sign to have her temporarily placed in his care. She would, ultimately, report to CARNEM, but, for the time being, she was going to be working on some kind of training and testing with Albin. She wasn't familiar enough with the corporation to know if they were as terrible as Tethys had been, but she kind of thought that anyone who built things for CARNEM had to be questionable. But Hannah was nothing if not resilient. Dressed as she'd arrived that morning, she sat on the bench at the guarded entrance to the facility lobby area, and she waited. At least this ensured she could remain in the area for a time, which was better than her prospects with the military, and she knew enough about organizations in the private sector to know they could be bought and sold in a way that was challenging when working with the government. After all, Tethys had covered up murder for her, and that had taught her a very valuable lesson. And so, the young woman that everyone viewed as largely naive and flighty sat, knees together and oh-so-calm. She was thinking. Whir, whir, whir and looking deceptively human and fragile as she sat there. Maybe Albin knew she had used their dream platform, maybe they kept track. She would need to warn Rory, and maybe that meant they knew she could dream. Maybe, maybe, maybe, and whir, whir, whir as she waited. A year into this, and Arthur was used to doing what he was told. When Albin said jump, Arthur didn't ask how high, he just jumped, and tried to be unpredictable about the height in case they'd just told someone else to shoot there. In this latest leap, Arthur was crossing the threshold of a boring lobby filled with cameras and well-trained guards, wearing a wool winter suit and a scarf that said style in Italian. "It's amazing how much of my work happens in places like this," he said, once oiled leather creased over the center of the tiled room and he approached the woman matching the description he'd been given. "The more boring, the more dangerous." He was thinking the same thing about her, obviously, looking at the sober suit and the good looks. Naive, flighty, okay, but on paper there were facts. Eames was the one that dealt with personalities, instincts, subtle vagaries of humanity; Arthur dealt with facts. The facts told him Albin didn't throw a well-trained agent on an escort job for no reason. Arthur wanted her to know that he didn't underestimate her, a kind of subtle respect, which might prevent her from trying to kill him in the next three hours as he tried to get her from point A to point B--if that was her intent. Arthur didn't know anybody's intent these days, except his own. His own facts, plans, and long, long game. Arthur was patient, as most planners were, and it had got him through the last hour of checking and re-checking his credentials. He knew the building, as much as he could know given how little was available on this place, and he made a few mental notes while he took two more steps and came to a stop a respectful distance from her bench. "And everything is always taupe." Arthur put his hands in his slim pockets, and waited to see if she would get up fast or slow. He had no idea if she approved of this transfer or not. He had no idea how human she might be. He had no idea if he was in danger or not. It was a tough life, this spy thing. "I'm Arthur. Are you ready to go?" Hannah rose slowly. She didn't rush, didn't twitch, didn't even look scared. She was wide eyed, an ingenue dolled up in copper-penny colors, pallid and harmless, soft and tall, but she didn't look scared. There was no wilting and no weeping, but she wasn't hard, either. There was no bite to the curved line of her shoulders, and her smile, sparse as it was, didn't try hard for ice or heat. She just looked at him with eyes that brought the word cornflower to mind, and she blinked slowly and curiously, like a cat inspecting her world. And, at present, her world was this boring and taupe room, and it was this man in wool. He wasn't at all what she expected. She expected a scientist. She didn't even expect security, cops, men with guns. Thus far, it had always been men in white coats. He didn't look like a white coat had ever weighed heavily on his shoulders. He wasn't suited for coarse fabric and a name in script above a pocket. "You're not a scientist, Arthur, and you're not a doctor," she said in response to his greeting, and, like Amy before you, she had no accent at all. She was a Floridian, and that was almost the same as coming from nowhere at all, and she touched her hand to her breastbone. "I'm Hannah, but you already know that," she added, sounding not at all bothered by it. But she was worried, and she was scared, and she was concerned. She didn't know if this would be better or worse, or if it would be worse or better, and she nodded at him in just a slight inclination of copper silk. "I'm ready." And she was. As for killing people, maybe he didn't know her record. CARNEM did, but she really didn't know if CARNEM had told Albin. She thought they probably hadn't, just like Tethys hadn't told the military. But he looked intelligent, and she assumed an intelligent man had looked her up. Hannah Smith had only begun to exist two years ago, before that there was nothing and no one that someone like him would put stock in. Oh, she'd been given a fake history, but it was surface and he looked like he might scratch to find what was beneath. Sealed records and paid off departments, and that would lead here, to the military, and to a contract with Tethys for AI technology. She did assume that CARNEM knew she'd used the dream platform with Rory, and she also assumed her brainwaves were different, and maybe Rory's were too, and maybe they knew she'd killed the things the dream created to come after Rory. She assumed he knew that, and she assumed Albin knew that, even if CARNEM didn't. These were the assumptions Hannah made as she stepped, stepped, stepped to where he was standing. Tall for a woman at nearly 5'10, and too soft for modern beauty standards, she looked at him with clear eyes and understanding that he was capable. If he wasn't capable, he wouldn't be here. She was too, too expensive to risk. "I'm not going to run," she told him plainly, in his space and maybe too close. But Hannah didn't understand personal space, and she wasn't very good at not saying what she felt. Social niceties were, as a rule, lost on her. As she stood, Arthur's first thought was that she looked like something Eames might dream up. Hot, in a way that was weirdly mysterious. She had blue eyes that looked vacant to him, a lithe, trim figure that quite daunted Arthur's (not inconsiderable) height--in the kind of pumps he'd have worn if he was a woman with that body. She was too memorable to be a good spy on the surface of it, but (on reflection) you could do a lot with that hair and that face if you had to. She was not the kind of person Arthur would have made if you gave him all the brains and a backyard to do it in. "No, I'm not a scientist." He gave her a wide-eyed look that said he couldn't think of anything else that he could be farther from, and it was true. "I'm a specialist. An intelligence analyst." He said it in front of her, the cameras, and all the guards, since at this point, it was common knowledge. He'd just walked into a facility commonly used by the US government, even if it wasn't owned by the US government. If their file on him hadn't been updated recently, it sure as hell was going to get a footnote tonight. It kind of pissed him off, as Albin had done it on purpose, but that wasn't Hannah's fault. Arthur was the kind of person that said please and thank you to Alexa. "Nice to meet you. We go this way." She would know that, of course, as they were exiting the same way he'd come in, but it was his way of announcing to the room that he was escorting her out. He turned. He didn't do anything weird like off her his hand or take her arm, but instead strode forward with his hands out of his pockets and his face blandly set. With her height, she could keep up with him without effort. He pulled the door open, held it for her, and then walked after her. The hall lights shone on the oil in his hair, and he smelled like Prada. He unbuttoned his coat as she preceded him, a move that would have made firearms available to him if there had been one in the holsters under his arms. They were currently empty, checked at the first antechamber, but it was the kind of habit Eames would have noted. He gave her an interested look. "I guess if you wanted to, you could do it any time," he said, thoughtfully. "If you change your mind, I would appreciate it if you gave me a heads up, so nobody finds it necessary to shoot anybody else." He gave the guard they were passing a meaningful look, and was ignored. "Also, you would have worn different shoes." He opened another door for her. Hannah wasn't expecting anyone who transported her to say it was nice to meet her. It wasn't that she wasn't treated well by the world, because she was, but inside the facility and within the walls of Tethys and military labs, she was an 'it,' and not a 'her.' She was a valuable 'it,' but she was an 'it' all the same. "Thank you," she told him warmly, and smiling came easy to Hannah. Her face was soft, and she kind of looked like she always just on the brink of a smile, and, there, there, there it was. She took a step forward, toward Arthur The Not-Scientist, and she hoisted her bag a little higher on her shoulder. She didn't say goodbye to the man at the door, and that was hard. It was in her programming to be polite, to say nice things to people who owned her and controlled her, but she didn't. She followed this Arthur out, and she noticed the gleam in his hair. She didn't know any men that took care of their hair like that now, but her knowledge was presently limited to military men, scientists, and the johns at Hookerville, and none of them had hair that shined like water on a duck's back. Hannah noticed him unbuttoning his coat, but it didn't make her think of weapons. It made her think of Marcus, of wealthy men unbuttoning their coats to sit, making more room for themselves. Men were comfortable creatures entitled to a large amount of space in Their World, and this was what Hannah knew. But Arthur wasn't sitting, and she cocked her head curious and curiouser, and whir and whir, because he was different. Wealthy, maybe, but not like Marcus. No. He was put together, she decided, and not like Jeremiah was. Observant cornflower blue followed him as he walked out. When he finally spoke, her smile went softer, more real and with warmth slipping into the corners of her eyes and the lines around her mouth. "I killed a man while wearing stilettos once. I can run in heels," she promised him, and she said it softly and easily, as if she was asking him if he'd like something to drink. She didn't tell him that she'd killed that same man with her stiletto, deciding that was an unimportant detail. "And I don't have many shoes." She looked down at his. Arthur stuck to his wardrobe more assiduously than a sixteenth-century gentleman. It was his only foible, a distinction that he really shouldn't indulge in, but he couldn't help it. He had money, yes, both payments and thefts, but that wasn't the purpose of the clothes. When Arthur walked into a room, he made sure that he knew what other people saw. "You don't have more things?" he asked, because he thought that her bag was kind of small and surely she might have another set of pumps. Her clothes were tailored to her. Maybe her body never changed. If so, more clothes wouldn't be hard. He noticed her attention on him, and a man with more instinct might have been even more susceptible to that smile than he was. Even Arthur the analyst liked it when a pretty woman smiled at him, and his interests weren't even primarily in that direction. He thought she was probably meant to smile at him like that. It was a little disheartening, but not too much. Spies lived in a world of lies. Arthur blinked hard, twice. "I'm not sure what I could say to that," he said, honestly. "Except to say you obviously need more shoes." Once they were out of the facility, Arthur wasn't planning on taking her direct to the Capital. He wanted to drive around a little bit, ideally in some unexpected place, to see if anyone turned up watching. They probably wouldn't be watching her, but him, and that was valuable information. He might burn a drop box while she was watching, just to see if she told anyone. This was the kind of thing Arthur did when he met a person in his world. They walked down a long fluorescent hallway. He swept a flap of his coat aside and tucked one hand in his pocket. The scarf was getting warm, but he didn't move it. "I don't have more things," she said. "I mostly don't live here." She stated it as fact, because it was fact, and because her relocation wasn't going to alter that. She wasn't going to live wherever he was taking her. Whoever was there maybe thought she was going to live there, but the military had thought she was going to live on base, too, and Hannah had wiggled her way out of that. She stayed there sometimes, but only enough to not be noticed as too absent, and she was programmed to be really, really good at sweet talking the right men. She didn't realize he was thinking about her body changing, and she didn't know the answer to that. She knew there had been some talk about ensuring she aged, but that was in old paperwork, and she really wasn't sure what Tethys and Marcus had decided on the matter. The rest of the paperwork, the really, really old stuff that she wanted to find, was still locked away somewhere and out of her reach, but she'd find it eventually. Namely, she wanted to know if she'd existed before and, if so, as who, as what. She looked down at her shoes after his hard blink. "I think I have enough shoes, but I think it's good that I'm capable regardless of what shoes I'm wearing," she stated, head cocked to the side like a curious, curious little bird that awaited his response. He was different than the men she knew, and she walked them all through her mind like little emotional soldiers. He didn't seem emotional, and she couldn't imagine him crying on her shoulder. Most of the men she knew cried on her shoulder really often. She counted the fluorescents as they walked, and she did it because she'd counted them the first time she'd come in. She moved her lips as she did it, not feeling the need to hide it, and she barely, barely glanced at the hand he slipped into his pocket. The light ahead beckoned, and she turned her head a little to look at him. "My brother likes to count things. He thinks it's soothing. Do you keep your scarf on because it's soothing?" she asked, curious and like Alice falling down a rabbit hole and filled with questions about the rabbits in her new world. Arthur found it interesting that she "lived" anywhere. The word implied that she had a home somewhere, and if so, this was a really, really advanced AI. He suddenly had a wild thought that maybe she dreamed, which was absolutely 100% fucking terrifying. He turned his head and stared intently at the side of her head above her ear, wondering what was going on in there, for about three seconds, and then he had to stop so that a muscled woman in camo could open the door for them. "Nobody can ever have enough shoes," Arthur said, distractedly. It sounded like something he said regularly, given the rote rhythm of the response. He watched the woman with her ID card, but was looking elsewhere by the time there was a chance she would see him. He wanted to know if they were magnet or RFID, and he got a look when she stepped back, and that was all he wanted. "Soothing?" he looked surprised. "No. This suit looks strange without something along the lapel." He did not reach up and touch either lapel or scarf, because he wasn't that self-conscious. Arthur liked to dress, but not because he wanted to hide. Then, his brain catching up, he said, "You have a brother?" Now they were moving to the last couple antechambers, and they progressed from steel to glass, and finally to offices and desks. There was a potted plant. Then sunlight. The whole process gave Arthur an appreciation for the kind of maze one could create. Hannah didn't pay much attention to the woman in the camouflage. She mostly spent her time with the scientists, but she ran errands for the military division, and she saw soldiers all the time. They really didn't pay attention to her, not usually. Mostly, they walked past her as if she didn't exist, and they always left her feeling a little cold, and so she was kind of accustomed to just ignoring them. Instead, she watched Arthur and his attention to the woman, because that was new and interesting, and she thought she might learn something about her new employers by figuring out what kind of man they hired. That thinking, while absolutely not in line with her programming, made complete sense to her. Whir, whir, and so her mind went, and she'd noticed that he had stared at her for a few seconds. She waited until the woman moved on with the RFID card, and then she spoke. "What did I say that you thought was strange?" she asked, because that was how she'd interpreted that sidelook he gave her, and she didn't know it was about her living somewhere. She looked down at her shoes, but that was an afterthought, and she was paying more attention to what he was saying about his scarf. Hannah liked fashion, but she didn't make a lot of money in Hookerville, and she'd given what she had to Si, so she mostly bought secondhand. "How can you tell that it looks strange without something at the lapel?" she asked, falling into easy step beside him. Hannah, at 5'10, was tall for a woman, and she didn't have any trouble keeping up as they past the last few antechambers. She'd already memorized all these hallways, just in case she needed to escape, but she'd never needed to use the knowledge. "I do have a brother. I have two brothers," she said, and she realized why he would ask, and she realized why he would be surprised. "I have a brother named Si, and he's my twin. I have a brother named Jamie, and I have a sister named Mars. Margot, but she prefers Mars. And there's David. He isn't my brother, but he was engaged to my sister, Molly, who was killed, and so we've kind of adopted him." She paused, waiting for that all to sink in. "There was a girl named Amy," she explained to him, "and her husband knew he was going to kill her. He didn't want to go to jail, and he was really, really wealthy, so he paid Tethys to download her subconscious and memories into an AI that looked like her. That's me. They tried to do it again since a bunch of times, but none of the other AIs worked. CARNEM tried too, but all those AIs went insane." Her question caught him several thoughts ahead. "What?" he asked, blankly. He went backward a minute in the conversation, keeping the majority of his concentration on completing the mental picture of the facility he'd seen in his head. He counted off the paces from the door to the front desk without appearing to do so, and finally picked up once more on the conversation. "Oh. You said you lived somewhere. I thought it was interesting that you didn't just go somewhere and plug in." Arthur didn't mean the comment to be cruel, and he said it with frankness. In the same tone he continued, "This is a notched lapel," (here he touched the two points just at his collarbone), "and without the scarf the lies too flat and thin. Too sixty years ago for me, even though I'm skinny as a beanpole." And with this Americanism, he held the last door for her, and they were out in the frail sunlight. They had to cross the lot now to his car, and Arthur felt extremely exposed. It was always unpleasant walking out under the open air with all of these higher vantage points staring down at you, and he wasn't going to get his weapons back until they drove out to the gate, where he was told they'd been transferred. Arthur reminded himself that if they wanted to shoot him, they would have done it on the way in, and led Hannah to a black Audi with white leather seats. It had about as much character as her suit. Arthur listened to this family backstory with a feeling of a person standing on the age of a deep ocean. "If this husband wanted to kill her, why did he make someone exactly like her to live with?" He did not open the passenger door of the car for her, but let her do it herself after he beeped it on approach. She'd be able to draw every single hallway and door of the facility if given paper and a pen, though she didn't realize she could do it. It was passive programming, rather than active, and she just walked along while knowing each little inch and thinking nothing, nothing of it. She was, instead, thinking on his comment about plugging in, and her expression showed that it bothered her. She didn't say as much, but it was kind of the same as when Si asked her if she was made out of plastic. "I sleep," she told him," and she did. "I didn't know I was an AI for a long time," she added, "and I wasn't supposed to ever know, and I think being plugged in might be a big tell." She said it simply, as if it was plain fact, and only her sad expression indicated that it bothered her to talk about herself as something that wasn't living. She was living, just not in the same way as him. "I bleed, and I sleep, and I can die," she told him, though she didn't think he'd agree it was quite the same thing. "Inside, I function just the same as you do, but synthetically. Like an artificial heart, but on a bigger scale." She looked at his lapel, and she was much more interested in that conversation. "I love fashion, but I don't make much money, so most of my stuff comes secondhand from the Capital, but I was in New York a while ago, and the consignment shops there are wonderful." It was a tiny lull, an emotional break, and she opened her own door, after listening to his question, and settled herself in the passenger's seat before responding. "He wanted to kill her and not be caught. He didn't want to go to jail, so he had to replace her, since he thought she had told everyone how terrible he was, and he would be the very first suspect. So he had a version of her made, but more agreeable, more malleable. I'm supposed to behave better than she did, to be agreeable to everything he could ever want." She didn't come right out and say she was a sex doll, but she knew he would understand. "But he's dead now," she added, not outright adding the fact that she was nowhere near as agreeable as her human predecessor had been. They settled into the car. It smelled of new leather, spun polyester, and, more gently, the cologne that Arthur wore, a signature Prada that had a dark citrus and metallic bite. Everything was default. No music turned on when he hit the button, and the air conditioning was set to a chilly neutral 68. "You didn't know?" He appeared to chew on that information, but really he only had half a mind on the conversation, since he was still half-expecting an army to decide it didn't like the two of them and riddle the car with holes. "That's semi-terrible." It was, but it wasn't the studied reply it seemed. Arthur was just talking. He nodded when she explained she could die, and to Arthur, interestingly, ceasing to exist was the equivalent of dying. He accepted it without question. "He sounds like a bastard," he said of the dead man, without much emotion. "A lot of those genius-types are." Not a scientist. "I'll take you shopping," he promised, still without thinking, as they navigated to the gate. "I'm not buying consignment." They investigated the car again, with mirrors on sticks and scanning devices. Arthur hadn't put on his seatbelt, explained when he had to get out again for the scanning, and so did she. They returned two firearms to Arthur, which he put in holsters along his ribs, like some kind of svelte cowboy. Arthur pulled his coat down, readjusted his scarf, but did not button what had been buttoned before. The fact that he had been nervous became evident as soon as they both got back in the car and they got out of rocket-range of the facility, because he relaxed. It was around his eyes, his mouth, and his shoulders. They pulled onto the freeway and the import accelerated to 75 without a grumble. Arthur hit a button. The sunroof cover rolled back, and then the sunroof itself, a mobile window. "Stick your head up there and see if you can see any drones following. I'm going to take a detour on the way to the Capital. Do you have GPS?" He glanced in the rearview, was satisfied with the empty road, and looked forward again. They passed a refrigerated semi, and then one carrying lumber. "All this empty space is nice, I can see why they're out here." She settled in the car, and she immediately thought about how different it was than riding with Jeremiah or Si. It was quiet and quiet, clean and unlived in, and Si was messy, and Jeremiah was always playing music he thought was romantic, and he would chatter and talk and explain things. Si was quiet, quiet, but not like this, and there was always something in the background to punctuate her chatter and Si's lack of words. But this was different, and she was just settling into that when he said it was semi-terrible, and that made her laugh. Maybe it wasn't the right reaction, but it was the reaction she had. Giggle, hand to her mouth, and she nodded about Marcus being a bastard. "More than semi-terrible. Can you imagine if right, right now you believed you were who you are, but you really weren't that person at all? Maybe you're not real either," she suggested, and not because she believed it to be true, but because it had been like that for her. She had been just like Arthur, sitting there and thinking he knew what he was, and then it wasn't true at all. "Can we really go shopping?" Hannah liked fashion. She didn't have much practical experience, not experience that was actually hers and didn't just feel like it was hers, and she brightened like sunny days when he made the offer. He looked really, really nice, and she wouldn't mind looking as pretty as he did. She thought about that word for a moment - pretty. Maybe he could be considered handsome, but she thought pretty fit better, and she stared at him that whole while, curious and curiouser, as if she'd never seen an animal like him in his native environment of leather and silence. She also knew nothing of drones, but she assumed he was just asking her to see if something had followed them from the facility. Hannah was very good at losing a tail, and she gleefully popped out of the sunroof and looked. She didn't see anything, but she did linger there. The whipping breeze against her skin and hair was amazing, and it was new, and when she settled back into her seat her cheeks were red and her smile was brighter. "I didn't see anything, but I think they do have a way to track me." She looked at him hopefully. "Maybe they can turn that off once we get where we're going?" "I've thought about that," he said readily, not even glancing away from the road as she questioned his entire existence and reality. "We do that in my profession. Only your mind determines your reality and you have to be careful when you work with people who make reality. So, yes, I could just be a really advanced AI, I get that. You could also be a really advanced person. No," he corrected himself: "advanced human." He sat deeper into the bucket seats, settling patent leather against the pedal and taking them through an interchange and along the highway in a long sunset shot that lasted for several minutes. "Need gas." Arthur noted, blandly. He downshifted and they exited the turnpike, turning off into a town even tinier than Repose and rolling to a stop at the gas station. Looking, it was obvious that the car was actually low on fuel--just the right amount to suggest a stop would be a good idea. Arthur left nothing to chance. He pulled up to a pump. The station was dusty, abandoned. There was no one waiting on the shop inside, and there was a yellowed 'closed' sign hanging in the window. "Serial killer's outhouse," Arthur observed. He took out a penknife from the glove box and, standing outside the car, used it to pop open the container that held the valve and meter. It swung open and he took out black device that looked about the size and shape of a walkie talkie, just with a stronger antennae set and a screen. Silently, he held his finger to his lips to indicate privacy, and gestured at her to stand away from the car, since they already knew she was bugged. And he proceeded to move it over the interior of the car, methodically. Meanwhile he put the nozzle in the car and did in fact pump gas, making all the requisite sounds. Still bland, he continued their conversation. "I guess shopping shouldn't be a promise." Again, he did not look to her, inspecting the road. "I'll see if I can request you for a job, and then we'd need to go shopping for it." He smiled a little to himself. "Business expense." The scanner picked up something in the backseat and lit up orange. He examined the signal and pushed a button on it. Now he straightened and leaned on the roof of the car to peer at her over it. "Temporary jam. I think that's your new employer's bug, not your old one. Just want to have a private chat. Other than murdering people in heels, any other skills you can think of?" He deliberately did not elaborate, curious to see how she would represent herself in the face of such an inquiry. She was quiet at first, just trying to think and think about who would make reality. She thought he was smart, and she didn't want him to think she wasn't, so she really did want to come up with her own answer before asking the question: Who makes reality? She'd met a lot of people in Repose, but none of them could actually craft reality, not in a supernatural way. "In a way, the CARNEM people craft reality. Or they want to. They want to find a way to use dreams to download people's peopleness. Then, they can download them into AIs and escape death entirely. But they haven't managed to make it work yet. That's why they purchased me, because Tethys made it work. But Tethys has never, ever managed to make it work again. There's just me, and no one knows why." She was pretty sure Tethys hadn't told CARNEM that, but Hannah knew it to be true. It was the reason the military hadn't purchased the technology in the end, because there was no guarantee it could be reproduced. The gas station was obviously abandoned, and Hannah understood immediately that it wasn't just a gas stop. It was a gas stop, since the tank was low, but she already understood that the man driving her was a little bit meticulous. He probably knew exactly how much gas he needed, and he wouldn't have needed to stop if it wasn't a deliberate choice. It made her wonder how much his employers knew about him really. She wondered that as she watched him place the pump, and she wondered about it as he revealed the black device. She was about to ask questions, but he indicated she should step out, and so she did. She stood a few feet away, ear to her shoulder and all curious little bird as she watched him. He was scanning for something, which she understood, and she just stood there and waited for him to say something. "What kind of job?" she asked, the interest bubbling up and making itself obvious on her lips. She had no idea what her new job was going to be, and she really wanted to know. She knew better than to think someone from HR was going to pull her aside and tell her about her duties and benefits package. She'd learned really quickly that people just told her to do things, and she wasn't human, and they didn't expect to need to give her explanations. She didn't deserve explanations in their eyes. She wasn't expecting him to jam the signal, though she knew all about jamming signals thanks to Eddie. She wasn't expecting his questions, either. Again, her ear went to her shoulder, and she wondered what she should tell him. She just met him, and she didn't trust him, not yet. He worked for an unknown equation, and Hannah wasn't as naive as everyone thought she was. She straightened her head, and she gave him that same vacant look she gave most people. She didn't think it would work on him; he wouldn't believe she was an idiot. It was an answer, kind of, without being one. It said there was more to her than was probably immediately evident. As for what she said, she kept it to the things already in her files, and he didn't add any of the strange things she'd noticed on her own. "I'm just normal. I can do things you can do, but I'm not super-fast, super-powered, super-anything. I make really bad coffee, and no one really notices me when I'm working. I'm like furniture a little," she said, and that was also a tell, one she was assuming he would read correctly. Hannah had eavesdropped on lots and lots of military secrets. "I'm sorry if that disappoints you," she added, perfectly vacuous. Arthur didn't have an answer for her question about the jobs. He knew what kind of jobs he did, but not what kind of jobs she did. He wasn't going to give her more information about those jobs if she wasn't going to be in them, and he didn't know how much Albin was willing to trust this woman, or the company that used to own her. They had the tech to be sure of some things, like the tracker or listening devices, stuff that might be beyond him when under their roof. Hannah appeared to have a considerable intelligence, and if you hobbled intelligent people they didn't do a thorough job. That didn't prevent companies from doing it. "Up to them. We'll see." Arthur leaned his elbows against the roof of the car, drivers' side, as he waited for her answer. He watched her head move back and forth. It could have meant anything, and all he knew for sure was that she was processing the request. Then she apparently decided on the answer, and the answer was… nothing. He stared back at her blank-eyed face. It was the kind of subtlety that was better spent on people like Eames than him. Arthur liked more substantial things, statements and evidence. Those things were incriminating in the wrong circumstances, a double-edged sword. He stared at her another minute, and then accepted this non-answer for what it was. He shrugged, glancing away, accepting. It was a kind of dismissal, not fabricated. Not an ally, not an enemy. Okay. More non-entities with lethal potential. Just what he needed. "Okay. Hop back in." He put the gas apparatus (including the mechanisms that had nothing to do with gas) back where they'd been when they started. He pocketed his knife, adjusted his scarf, and then slid back into the anonymous car, as anonymous as he'd been an hour ago. "Short ride back." He shifted gears, and they pulled back on the hallway. |