Participants:
| Scene Title | Find the Lady |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Two old hands at lying try to get a read on one another. |
| Date | July 8, 2021 |
Elliot slept through the day mostly untroubled, despite the rocking of the vehicle. Despite the glare of the light of day. Despite having washed a man's blood off of his hands in the early hours of the morning.
He'd like to think the lack of dreams is a good sign, but he's past fooling himself about the efficacy of his actions. He knew going into it that relief was a long shot. Regardless, as he got a break from driving for the first time in days, he slept well above the troubled waters of his choice.
There's nobody else in the network. He didn't want to risk bad dreams about what he did making their way to anybody who might nap throughout the trip. It didn't matter in the long run, but there were other reasons to keep people out of the network today.
It's almost like being alone, despite the noise of the camp setup unfolding around him. He's back in his waxed canvas long coat, having returned a better jacket to its owner before leaving town. His ears aren't ringing, another small mercy. Now he just wanders, wondering if he should eat despite not having the appetite for it. He should, before his sleep schedule is pushed any further from normalcy.
Rising Sun, Wisconsin
There are people he needs to find, conversations he needs to have, but he thinks he's earned a day to decompress. Elliot wants to be level before trying to get an audience with a ghost who might have seen a child die. Before asking for help from a man who might help since the ghost of another man, who he couldn't find in the Pelago, isn't able to. A man who doesn't know that he might be Relevant. Could be Foundational.
He meanders toward the food supply, wondering if something purchased in New Chicago might be made flavorful enough to make him hungry. He'll force down gruel if not, but it would be better to enjoy it.
And then, there is someone approaching.
"Hey, Elliot!" Silas calls amiably, striding Elliot's way. "Got a minute?" Sometimes you find the conversation, and sometimes conversation finds you, it would seem.
Elliot is glad, at the very least, not to be addressed as Easy Mac. The thought of eating the watery Kraft Dinner dispels any appetite he might have been cultivating at the moment. He looks up to Silas unbothered, smiling companionably. "Got a few," he admits. "What's up?"
"Well…" Silas begins, his smile fading a bit as he considers where to actually start. "There were a couple things I was wantin' to talk to you about. If I was feeling cheeky I'd say I'm taking bets on when Richard shows back up… but I'm not, so I'm gonna lay my cards on the table. Richard's apparently gone off to do something on his own, but before he pulled his Shadow act, he told Destiny he wanted me to handle leading the away team," he says, getting more serious.
"Why in God's name he'd do that, I don't know… though it's a pretty magnificent bit of skullduggery on his part, I'll give him that. Not really sure whether I should punch him or shake his hand when he comes back…" Silas muses, shaking his head. "Anyway. Short of it is… if I'm gonna try to do this thing, there's a lot I need to know. Hell, I don't even know what I need to know. I'm hopin' that you might be able to help me fill in some of the blanks."
Elliot sighs as he remembers the confusion, possibly disappointment, in learning that Richard was no longer among them. Certainly there is frustration that the chain of command has been muddied, though the frustration largely lies elsewhere. That another person who'd learned a large part of the truth has left him behind to handle it on his own.
Nathalie is still here, but she knows little more than that he also has access to a mindscape he doesn't own. Merlyn found the Anchor, and though Wright saw the pleading confusion in her eyes, she couldn't explain to his wife what it meant. Not there, in the bugged hotel room. In the room across from her minders who almost certainly had a preternatural skill set for listening in.
"I'll usually go with a handshake to hold the person in place while I get in a left jab," he commiserates without a trace of honesty. "That way you get to do both."
He ambles away from the more crowded part of the camp, assuming that the man he plans to turn will turn and follow. "I'm not sure what I should tell you," he continues with more seriousness. "Not even sure what I know at this point. The gambit could be better served if you act on your moral instinct without the contamination of the mission details we were given. Honestly I'm not even sure why you'd come to me and not… someone with history. But if you want to know something, ask."
"Ha," Silas chortles with genuine amusement at Elliot's suggestion for a sucker punch. "Noted!" It's bullshit, but it's well-spun. He can respect that.
Silas follows as Elliot starts to walk. The bit about moral instincts sees his amusement cool, though. "Moral instinct, huh. Think I traded my last one of those to a guy from Delphi for a few sides of raccoon meat and a box of Twinkies," he offers.
Then he reaches out to his ability, wrapping them in a shroud. "This is a private conversation now, unless someone dug up a tape recorder somewhere; nobody's gonna hear what either of us say. That said — there's way too much at stake here for me to just sit back and wing it," Silas asks quietly, a hint of low-burning anger hidden behind his words. For a moment he says nothing more, his expression grim…
Then he laughs. "Besides. It always seems to turn funny-shaped when I do. Sometimes I try to take vacations. They usually get real interesting." For a moment, Silas pauses, his own words inspiring a bit of deeper introspection. Might even be a constant with me. Kain blindsided me in a Chinese restaurant. Redd blindsided me when I wrote him off. And the vacations… Food for thought.
"Anyway. Why I'm askin' you? Easy," Silas says, and there's no Mac that follows, but the gleam of mischief in his suggests that he at least thought it. "I know the others to some degree. Richard, I met over on your side of the Looking Glass. Chess, I've had a few words with. Robyn… more than a few. Eve… both in this world and the other, I've met Eve. But you… I've never met any version of you. You're the one I know the least about… and therefore, the one I have the most to learn from."
"So whaddaya say we start this small? Or… small given the stakes, at least. As I understand it, this was a one-way trip for you lot, yeah? Barring a miracle, at least. So… why'd you come? And if you hadn't come, what'd life be like for you now? What do you do when you're not venturing across probability, down the road not taken?"
Elliot feels himself bend against and fall away from the perceptions of the people surrounding them. It's been a decade since he felt this ability from the inside, though less than a day from the last time he witnessed its use.
Outside the Ark
November 8th, 2011
"Fuck! Fucking run!" Backpedaling out of the tunnel, Avi Epstein fires indiscriminately back into the darkness. Bullets ricochet off of the walls, followed by a high-pitched mechanical scream that comes from a six foot tall mechanical behemoth lunging out of the grate. Bullets tear through its chassis as it collides with Avi, knocking him down to the ground and pinning him to the concrete with curving talons. Its broken head sputters and sparks, broken jaws working open and closed against the stock of his rifle he's jammed into its mouth.
Tala reaches toward Avi as though there's something she can do to help him. She remembers Avi because Elliot is remembering him, hands clapped over his ears against the cannonade of the big gun. People stream around them in a panic without perceiving them.
"Get this fucking thing off of me! Fuck! Help!" Avi screams over the cries of terrified children as more pops of gunfire echo out of the tunnel. The Ferry is in full retreat and the Arcology is on a meltdown behind them.
Yancy taps against Elliot's hand before clutching him by the arm and pulling him forward. "Someone else will help him," he says. "We move. Everyone here is expendable."
Tala balks for only a second because he's right. No matter what, they have to survive. They're all that's left. She takes Elliot's hand, squeezes it in the way that means I love you. Nobody sees them abandon Avi as they step into the light of day.
Elliot is lost in thought for a while, trying to press down the intrusive memory from another life. It's Wright who draws him out of it, quickly repeating the last thing Silas said. His eyes turn to Silas, and he tries to chalk it up to the answer being a complicated one.
"I…" he says, but thinks better of it. "My partner Wright has a daughter. Invested in making sure she doesn't die in the apocalypse." Only biologically his daughter.
"We're both with Wolfhound," he continues. "Got the skill set, plus my telepathic network provides the team's only reliable communication with home office. I'm an infiltrator by trade. Also I was told I'd be given information I need in exchange for doing the job, though that turned out to be a lie."
Silas nods slowly, watching Elliot out of the corner of his eye. For a moment he doesn't respond, considering what Elliot's said — there's a few blanks filled in there, at least, a few things to think about. "Kids," he finally says pensively. "I never had any myself," he says with an off-handed shrug. "Always worried I'd be a bad dad. But if I'd had a kid, and I found out about something like this… yeah. I'd probably be here too," he admits. Which is another point in the 'Richard's going to be back' column, too.
"Then again… guess you never really know, do you?" he asks, grimacing. "Easy to guess how things mighta gone if you took the other path," he says, shaking his head. "Not nearly so easy to guess and be right."
"Anyway. Wolfhound — that's the…" he frowns. "They were the ones who rounded up a lot of the guys headed to the Albany Trials, weren't they? Tough crew, from what I heard." He nods slowly. "Makes sense. I've always thought you were a, how do you put it… a survivor type, I guess." Abruptly, he grins. "Gracie was pretty worried, you know, when we found out your double was in town. But I figured you probably had a pretty good handle on it."
Elliot did not in fact have a good handle on it, but things did work out okay if you don't factor for a murder.
He believes she was concerned. She wasn't concerned enough to stay, though he can't blame her. He's terrifying when you get to know him; the local Elliot had nothing to do with that. She's safer there with him, he doesn't have an ability to kill her if she copied it.
“Hard one to get a read on, our girl Gracie,” he says, looking away. “I was hoping I could get the truth out of her in a way where she wasn't outed catastrophically, but I fumbled it. A few hours later the Pink Floyd laser show started, and here we are.” Sans Gracie.
Silas appraises Elliot for a moment, considering. "So you heard about that, huh," he says, then lets out a sigh. "I think a lot of miscalculations were made with regards to Gracie. I think that ours are among the least of them, for what it's worth… but that's not a whole lot, all things considered."
"How much did you hear about that whole mess? About Gracie? Just so I'm sure we're on the same page and you're not talking about the shocking amount of bourbon she can put away," he says, mustering a wry grin; it's a poor attempt at a joke, but the whole situation is a godawful mess, as far as Silas is concerned.
“The amount of bourbon she can put away is no surprise at all,” Elliot says ruefully, “considering back home I'm in a relationship with one of her.” He returns the joke as well as he can.
“Squeaks pointed out some inconsistencies in Gracie's behavior while we were on the road,” he says, getting to the important part. “Since then I started noticing more of them, and put some pieces together. She knew things a local Rue shouldn't know, used jargon popularized in another timeline that's made its way into the vernacular of mine. ‘Primal’ as a synonym of ‘awesome,’ for example; that's a Wasteland thing.”
“She came to my room last night and confessed to having an ability,” he continues, looking around for Squeaks even though she wouldn't be able to perceive them right now. “And said my Rue was probably hiding one from me, but I'd ruled that possibility out already since she had nearly broached the subject earlier. I confronted her about my suspicions regarding her origin and she bounced. Never had time to report it because…” he waves vaguely, Silas was there.
“My read was that she was scared,” he admits, “and not actively working against us, but I have no way to prove that. But she's fooled me before, which is difficult.”
Silas listens closely to Elliot's explanation, nodding slowly after a moment.
"She fooled me too. Gr — Rue," he corrects himself, not without a bitter twinge, "helped me out after we — the Travelers headin' to your reality, that is, all got welcomed aboard the Ark," Silas says, and a hint of the old anger — fucking Kenner — leeches through into his voice for a moment at that memory. He takes a breath. "She and Liza were welcoming, helped show me the ropes on kitchen duty. Helped me fit in so I didn't get dragged off and shot or shoved out an airlock or something. They didn't have to be," he adds more quietly.
"Which… is neither here nor there, I suppose. My read's the same as yours. If she wanted to actively work against us, she had opportunity," he says tightly. If she wanted to actively work against us, we'd be dead, he thinks, but does not say. "And I think we blew a hell of an opportunity. But there's not a lot of use crying over spilt milk, and I think that our opinion on the matter is probably pretty unpopular. I think Richard came around at the end, but…" Silas trails off, waving vaguely; Richard's not here.
"You have any thoughts as to why he might've left?" Silas asks, glancing over to the other man hopefully.
Elliot never got a chance to meet the local Rue, the real one. The one his Rue gave him permission to sleep with, not that he would have with her either. He didn't know she'd made it work with Liza; he'll be happy to tell Rue that her fears of a curse are unfounded.
“Well, he didn't talk to me about it,” Elliot admits, though he's willing to guess. “But considering what's come to light, I'll wager that he's trying to introduce chaos into the system. Without external interference, we'd take whatever actions have already been predicted and planned for. A little action chaffe might confuse things enough to give us room to make meaningful change in a predetermined, or at least predicted, series of events.”
Silas frowns. "'What's come to light?'" he echoes, tilting his head slightly.
“Change in temporal mechanics according to Glory;” Elliot begins to list, “possible conspiracy involving Mazdak and the OEI; the existence of an imposter in the group who said some alarming things. Though, I'm not privy to whatever she said to you following her incident.”
“Oh,” he adds with a shrug, “and Agent Castle warned me not to report any of this to home base. Well, the Gracie shit hasn't happened yet, but. It's a weird thing for an Office employee to whisper under their breath at the end of a temporally severed meeting.”
Silas is silent for a moment. "This is why I'm talking to you," he says at last. "Because if I'm being generous, I got maybe three fifths of what you just said. Not really what I'd call a passing mark," he says, smiling as if it's a joke, even though it's really not. "But now I have a little better idea of some of the questions I need to be asking."
"Temporal mechanics is a little above my paygrade, I think; I've seen two timelines and what's in between, but I'm no Michelle Cardinal. If you want to give me the For Dummies version, I'd be happy to hear it, but otherwise I'll let that one lie for now," Silas says dryly. "But Glory was already on my list of things to ask about. I'm pretty sure she's about as much from Delphi as you are. What's the deal there?"
“Glory hasn't been born yet,” Elliot admits. He's not too sorry about being vague, setting the stage for asking questions was the point.
“So we have some options here. I can give you a rundown,” he continues with an air of unserious dismissiveness. “Boring. Pedestrian. Inefficient. Or I can share all the relevant memories with you through the network, including my entire—but admittedly incomplete—general understanding of temporal mechanics. You'll lose the skill once the link is broken but you'd remember what we talk about with more context.”
“In return, I'd appreciate it if you directly shared your memories of what happened with Gracie,” he adds, hiking an eyebrow to show interest in the possibility.
Silas blinks once at the comment on Glory. It's a hell of a thing to drop on someone, and he's definitely surprised… but he's not all that surprised. Not after the conversation he'd had with her.
"Okay," he says, and pauses there because Glory hasn't been born yet is one of those things that is hard to spin something quippy off of. It takes him a moment. "So we're in a Terminator movie on top of everything else going on, and we may have to worry about OJ coming back after us, too," he ventures. "Or maybe she is the OJ." Not something he believes, but then, he's not just gambling with his own life anymore, a chip that's already long past its cash-in date; Richard had dropped a helluva weighted mantle on his shoulders, and Silas is feeling that weight.
Elliot's offer sees Silas's lips curl into a thoughtful frown. Instant understanding would be a valuable thing… but the prospect of linking brains still isn't one Silas feels altogether comfortable with, and after a moment he shakes his head. "Let's… save the cognitive crossover for later, if it's all the same to you." He takes a breath. "Just give me the rundown as best you can."
Disappointment doesn’t show on Elliot’s face, he’s used to running a long con. For now he focuses on the task at hand. “Current wisdom on time travel is that minor changes are irrelevant,” he begins. “Ripples don’t redirect a river and all that. Once something massive happens, or enough small changes add up, a timeline will split into two parallel versions, one containing none of the changes, and one carrying forward with all the new information.”
He clears his throat, looking around to give his eyes something to do. “Glory informs us that this is no longer the case. Any alteration to events through temporal manipulation results in a reworking of the current branch of the known timelines. Refactoring, she calls it. So changes ripple forward, reworking known events to make up for the alterations without creating a parallel branch.”
“This is unconfirmed, but I’m working on it,” he adds. “There is some evidence to support it, since we over here aren’t affected by alterations to our home timeline. Well, I am, I remember both versions of events. Wright, back home, is affected and only remembers the revised timeline events.”
Silas nods at that, expression impassive as he turns that explanation around like someone sizing up a puzzle piece for matches. There's something interesting there — maybe two somethings — but whatever it is, it doesn't seem quite ready to come into focus; that's fine. Some things need to cook a bit before they're ready. "Okay," he says after a moment, nodding.
"So. Next question. You mentioned an… OEI conspiracy?" he asks, frowning. "What can you tell me about that?"
“Richard was told by agents of the Bright timeline’s OEI office—off the record—that information about Mazdak has been related but all such information somehow isn’t making it to home office,” Elliot explains. “Which is bad, for obvious reasons, without even considering departmental interference.”
“We reviewed some of Agent Castle’s memories about those communication sessions,” he continues, “And I didn’t notice any sign of missing bits of the memories. When I want to share important information but leave out the distracting fact that I had an itchy mosquito bite at the time, I can just give the pertinent details but it’s possible to recognize that something’s missing.”
“So if information is being removed from Agent’s memories, that’s bad,” he summarizes, “and somebody, potentially Agent Gates, is involved in the memory removal. I find this unlikely, as Gates has a passionate hatred of Mazdak.”
Silas is silent for a moment, his expression screwed into one of concentration; after a moment, he nods and holds up a hand. "Alright, we're gonna have to back up here again for a sec for a basic terminology check. A whole lotta things I had lumped into the 'not my problem' drawer suddenly are my problem. So… bear with me here," he says, offering a faintly apologetic grimace.
"OEI, I get to a point, but I don't have a lot of experience with them or their organization chart. So… OEI backed this field trip from your timeline to this one, 'Flood'." His face curves into a sour grimace as he raises a hand and waves in a vaguely easterly direction, towards where the Pelago presumably still stands. "Aptly named," he grumbles.
"And they sent Captain Kid — van Dalen, really shouldn't call her Captain Kid, not after she made a trip from Alaska — to pick you up; she's got a line to the OEI here — somehow — and is presumably working for them." He pauses to consider. "So, dovetailing back to the temporal mechanics talk we were having for a second — what timelines are there? I joined Elizabeth's crew late, and nobody wanted to talk much about the others. And does OEI have agents in all of them?"
“This one,” Elliot begins counting on his fingers, “which branched into Virus, which branched into Bright, which branched into Wasteland, which branched into mine. This isn’t accounting for the fact that in 2011, One of the Wasteland Richards smashed through time, creating branches of each of them but ours starting in 2011. That is dependent upon Glory’s refactoring problem, which might mean that there are no 2011 branches, but the original events in those timelines were refactored into a new series of events without diverging.”
“Basically,” he continues, “there is a chance that this is not the original Flood timeline, just an offshoot from 2011. It’s hard for me to get anything approaching concrete evidence for this theory. As for the OEI, it appears to have started in mine, hooked up with the Bright off-shoot, and they may have contacts in the others through Captain Nova’s ability.”
"Alright. So. OEI is a big organization spanning multiple timelines — at least two. I assume I should probably catch — " Saffron, he starts to say, but checks himself " — Agent Castle if I want an in-depth chat about organization and the like."
"But," he says, raising a finger, "You say there's something rotten in OEI." He considers for a moment, then lets out a slow breath. "But OEI lined up your whole trip here, right? So how does that pertain to this?" he says, gesturing broadly to include the expedition. He pauses for a moment. "It sounds like Richard thinks some mastermind's pulling the strings and setting us up for failure… but if the threat's as dire as you've been saying…" he trails off, frowning as he tries to line up the pieces.
“It was reported to Richard off-book that Intel on Mazdak wasn’t being followed up on,” Elliot explains. “It could be as simple as bureaucracy but either way that has not been reported by me to anyone at Home Office at this point, Though Richard says I might tell Gates, who as described is not their biggest fan.”
“That is to say,” he clarifies, “we have no direct evidence that this mission is compromised, merely that the OEI may not be following leads on their other areas of concern. Which isn’t great, obviously, if true. Eve has had visions of Marcus Raith that appear kind of malicious, but prophecy is inherently unreliable in my opinion. He does seem like an asshole of the highest caliber.”
Silas grunts. "Prophecy delivers, but the devil's in the details and those are usually a part of the benefits package you don't get unless you pay extra," he grumbles.
Then he sighs, looking back to Elliot. "So this Marcus guy is an asshole who's probably running some kind of racket, but not necessarily one that's gonna shove a stick on the spokes of this particular job. That about sum it up?" he asks. "Anything else I need to know about OEI?"
“I'm sure there's more we all need to know about the OEI,” Elliot chuckles grimly. “It's a secret branch of the Department of the Exterior, which oversees the rebuilding of the US space programs. Wright has never seen an actual base of operations for the OEI, she's working out of a DOE building in KC.”
He looks down as he scuffs something off the bottom of his shoe absent-mindedly. “My read on the majority of the Agents is positive,” he adds. “Seem like decent people performing sensitive work which could probably benefit from oversight. But then more people know about the electromagnetic anomalies and the apocalypse and all that, panic is generally something to avoid.”
Silas lets out a low grumbling noise at the last; keeping the secret of the apocalypse isn't something he's entirely happy about, even now, even if he has come to see it as a necessary evil. "Alright, I'll take your word on that."
Then, as one of those puzzle pieces in the dark of his mind comes sliding forward, he glances back to Elliot. "So why can you remember both versions of events? Before and after refactoring?" he asks, frowning.
Elliot grimaces, scratching at his jaw. “Keeping in mind that I am working with only a few data points,” he says, “my best guess is that it's because I was streaming Wright’s perspective at the time events were altered. I currently don't have any reason to believe I'd be different than the rest of the away team in that regard. They all remember the original iteration of the deployment event, which was more catastrophic than the current iteration. Wright and Suresh are still alive instead of having ridden Gates’ unconscious body into an electromagnetic anomaly like a boogie board, for example.” It's said with a flippancy that doesn't do much to hide what it is like to remember something that horrifically alien.
“So my theory is that there is some feature of temporal mechanics that normally prevents the effects of refactoring from crossing the divide between timelines,” he explains. “The alteration occurred after the looking glass was destroyed and the portal closed. Unless it happens again while I'm not actively streaming Wright's perspective, I won't know if it's an interaction with network use. If it does and my memories don't composite, then it's likely a barrier. If I'm not streaming and it composites my memories of the iterations anyway, it could be weirder. Either way I'll still, hopefully, remember the iteration that we left.”
“It's worth noting that this instance appears to have been caused by Juliette Luis hopping out of the looking glass event in Rianna Cardinal’s body,” he adds. “Causing all related events from that point back to the Sunspot looking glass event to refactor to include her in the timeline. So Wright remembers Rianna around the office the whole time even though she never crossed over in the original iteration. Also, as I mentioned, she's infested with some kind of parasitic, spatiotemporally-dislocated consciousness that pulled a similar trick on the mother of somebody Eve knows. Back in the eighties.”
Silas frowns, nodding as he makes mental notes… right up until the point Elliot mentions Rianna Cardinal coming out of the Looking Glass, at which point he goes very still.
"Whoa, whoa whoa. Sorry, hold on a second. Juliette Luis I dunno anything about, but… what do you mean Rianna Cardinal came out of the Looking Glass? I was at Sunspot, she didn't…" He breaks off, frowning. Doyle hadn't popped out at Sunspot either, had he? But he had popped out… somewhere. "I saw her get ripped apart to power the Looking Glass on this side," he says, one hand coming up to scrub at his mouth. "You saying she popped out somewhere else?"
“Technically I'm saying that you were correct,” Elliot says, glad to have a perfect example that Silas can relate to. “She did not make it through at Sunspot according to the others on the team, and like you they were over here with the door closed and events were changed in our timeline so that she did make it. According to Eve, this is because of Juliette who is, to some degree I'm not sure of, in control of Rianna’s body.”
“Richard says she might help us,” he adds with a shrug, not sure he agrees. “But on description alone she's fucking dangerous to everyone and everything. A rogue player who can manipulate time isn't going to make our jobs any easier.”
"Huh," Silas says, frowning as he processes that. "So she got ripped apart in our timeline, but you're saying Juliette grabbed her somewhere in between and tweaked things so she ended up popping out somewhere on the other side?" he asks, and his eyes take on a thousand-mile stare as he remembers again the in-between.
He shakes his head, looking back to Elliot. "We're on a suicide mission where the cost of failure is the end of the human race. If she's playing with us, she might just." He stops, considering. "Tell me more about this Juliette. She's a… spatiotemporally-dislocated consciousness?" he asks, pronouncing the words with exaggerated care to make sure he gets them right.
“Best I can tell,” Elliot admits. Dealing with his own share of dislocated consciousnesses, he’s historically not been a fan. “Apparently her ability involves both time manipulation and body-swapping, which could mean Juliette Luis was just another host to someone or something else. I have almost no concrete information about this. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Ria about it.”
"Yeah?" Silas asks quietly. "Maybe you oughta have Wright look into that. Quicker the better," he says, and there's a seriousness to his face that wasn't there earlier. "Any information you can get on Juliette Luis, I want to know it. The sooner the better," he says seriously. "Okay?"
“Wright is under constant surveillance,” Elliot says with a sigh. “And she’ll do what she can, but given Juliette's capabilities, interacting with her could be dangerous if she doesn’t want people to know she’s not who she says she is.” And Wright isn’t getting into the same room as Odessa Price for certain. Maybe she can message her.
“There anything we should know about your enthusiastic interest?” he asks.
Silas is silent for a moment. "There's something somebody told me once. It all comes back around." He looks to Elliot. "I've got a feeling — hell, an intuition, even, if you wanna call it that — that she's gonna come back around sooner or later. My gut's telling me it's gonna be sooner, and I want to know who we're dealing with when she does."
“I'm with you there,” Elliot says. “What's the priority? Rather, how invasive do you want Wright to be? She gets to stream a lot of my spy knowledge including computer systems infiltration, so she can do more than water cooler chat if you want her to focus on it.”
He focuses on the familiar sensation of disconnect from local observation. He doesn't think about the Palace, just looks at the Deck of Cards and remembers the riffle between Yancy’s hands.
“Richard's standing orders were to minimize communication with the department,” he adds. “Unless instructed otherwise you can assume Wright is being glib with management.”
Silas takes a moment to consider, and suddenly there's a coin in his hand — the black and gold one from New Chicago. He rolls it in his hand for a few moments, then sighs. "I'd say keeping a channel of communication open that isn't controlled by the OEI is more important, especially if this Marcus guy is pondering foul play. So if she gets an opportunity she thinks is low-risk enough to justify it, go for it; otherwise, play it safe." He glances to Elliot, trying to gauge his opinion on that.
"Anything else she's working on over there?" he asks, curious. "And has there been any progress on that message from Japan?"
The instructions receive a nod in confirmation. “She's mostly watching movies and staving off boredom,” Elliot says. “Waiting for the right opportunity to talk to people.”
“The computer is chugging away at the code,” he continues. “Last time I checked, we were a little over one percent of the way through. So far it's printed five thousand words in random bits of what feels like newspaper articles, though at this point there's no discernable theme. It's entirely possible that it's a second code.”
He sighs, because even in a best case scenario there's not much he can do to speed up the process. “If we outsourced to somebody else with the needed skills we could speed it up,” he says, “but that involves more people having access to it. It's being kept from the OEI at this point, and everybody i can think of who could do it better is already in their orbit.”
"So hurry up and wait, huh. Well, fair enough; it's been waiting awhile," Silas says with a grimace. He shakes his head. "Just gotta trust that it's where it needs to be, and whatever message it's got will end up with who it needs to be, when it needs to be there."
"Alright. That's about all I've got for the moment. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me; this has done a lot to shed some light on things. I may still be flying by the seat of my pants, but it's not through a stormcloud now." He nods his thanks. "Anything else you can think of that I should probably know? And was there anything you wanted to ask me?"
Elliot takes a moment to consider, tapping his cold fingers against his upper arms. Silas is important, and Elliot needs his help whether or not he is willing to give it. Silas's hesitation to join the network isn't new, but he already has and nothing bad happened. Unless something bag did happen, and Elliot couldn't perceive it. His ability, after all, is nearly identical to Yancy’s. It's Foundational and Relevant.
Wright's sudden donation of cognition lights up his mind like a stimulant as he focuses now on reading Silas’ body language. His own body language remains perfectly unoffended, merely curious. He's had over a decade of needing to be the best liar in whatever room he's in or everybody in the room dies.
“Can I ask what makes you hesitant to contribute to the network?” he asks, eyes coming back to Silas from the middle distance. “I understand the general fear of telepathy, trust me; I'm not a fan of telepaths. What I do is far from traditional telepathy, and relies entirely on consent with an instantly deployable disconnect option that I have no way to stop.” It's entirely true, as well. No matter how hard he holds onto someone they're still free to leave without restriction. Within the first few weeks, anyway. He's fastidious about managing how far he allows a prospect to symbiose.
“I couldn't link Richard until he got rid of the conduit for safety reasons,” Elliot admits with a shrug. “But being able to get you directly into point of view for some operations would make my job easier. Plus, with a handful of co-hosts, we could probably overclock this ability to cover the entire convoy by distributing the burden of use across multiple people.”
The coin in Silas's hand stops its restless movement for a moment, then shifts into a new, more complicated pattern of movement for a moment, his gaze sliding off to the side. After a moment, he notices he's playing with the coin; there's a hint of tension as he vanishes it again, discreetly passing it to his other hand and slipping it into a coat pocket with not so much as a hint of wasted movement.
When his attention comes back from that middle distance, when Silas's gaze falls on Elliot again, his body language is… not precisely a mirror of Elliot's, but it's not dissimilar — a layer of mildness over a shroud of blankness. Silas, too, is an extremely good liar; if his life before the Flood hadn't honed that skill to an edge sharp enough to carve flesh from bone, then the time after certainly had.
"There are benefits," he concedes. "But I don't see the necessity at the moment." He shrugs. "There may come a time when that necessity does become apparent to me, and at that point I'll give it due consideration. But as you yourself pointed out — you managed well enough without having Richard linked in for awhile. And I don't think you've got any shortage of prospects," he points out, reasonably. Then, with the slightest narrowing of his eyes, he adds, "But maybe we can talk about these 'safety reasons' you mentioned."
Elliot decides not to react to Silas looking like he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “There's a chance that Nathalie killed one or more network users when she was a child and we were in separate mad science experiments in Boston,” he says offhandedly, as though he hasn't promised Bastian that he'd get the boy out alive. “Waiting to rule out a potential hazardous interaction before risking it. Should probably get around to that.”
“Would it ease your worries if I told you that one of the first regular network co-hosts had the same ability as you do,” Elliot asks, “and that in all the time he spent linked in there were no weird ability interactions?” Or is that not the problem?
Silas nods slowly, considering. "Good to know." That has given him food for thought at least. "Under what other circumstances have there been hazardous interactions?" he asks, regarding Elliot evenly.
“Why do you assume that there have been other hazardous interactions?” Elliot asks with the same manicured evenness.
Silas smiles thinly, but the corners of his eyes tighten in frustration. "I didn't. But then, I didn't know about this one until just now, either." The smile drops and he shrugs, gaze shifting in the direction of food. "Anyway. This has been helpful; I appreciate the information. It's helped me to make a little more sense as to what's going on here. Any other subjects you want to hit?" he asks, his tone reverting to something more casual.
“I said potential hazardous interaction,” Elliot corrects with a casual shrug and a smile tinged with embarrassment for having accidentally misled the man. “Neither of us have reliable memories of the mad science days. I just know that she was interfaced with the project I was in near the end, and that other people in my group died that day. I’m just playing it safe out of an abundance of caution. The conduits are powerful and nearly alien compared to other abilities, I’m honestly surprised how comfortable everybody else seems to be with so many of them within explosion range.”
He’s not getting anything out of this man, he knows. Not without a lot more work, which he doesn’t have the time for. If Silas did see something he shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have been able to see, he’s obviously not going to budge on it for some reason. He can’t bring himself to trust the man enough to tell him what Richard learned before he left. He might have to, hopefully before Silas makes any hypothetical play against him. The lives of everybody here are at stake, and that’s more important than those same people’s feelings about Silas having to die if he tries anything.
But then again, maybe it’s nothing. Never hurts to be prepared.
Silas mulls on that. "Fair," he says, shaking his head, this time with a mix of weariness and frustration, though it doesn't seem to be directed at Elliot. "Caution is something we can both agree on, especially given the stakes. It ain't just us who'll die if we fail."
For a moment longer he regards Elliot, not for the first time trying to figure out where he fits, and not for the first time failing to come to any real conclusion. He shakes his head. "Alright. Enough doom and gloom from me. I've got a lot to think on, and unless I'm mistaken I've kept you from your lunch for a good few minutes now," he says, with a faintly apologetic grin. "Let me know if you hear anything new. You know where to find me."
“Unless you don’t want me too,” Elliot laughs.