Illuminae (The Illuminae Files #1)(15)
The door hums closed as she unpeels from the ceiling and drops to the ground. She walks over to one of her fellow student’s stations, still logged in. The enviro system is still beeping, and she looks up at the speakers like she wants to silence them with her death glare. It’s a pretty good death glare, actually. I’d behave.
Subject inserts a mem-chit into the station’s port, pulls on the HUD headset and drags out the old-school keyboard. It slides out from the side of the station, sitting vertically, and her fingers dance. She sends a batch info dump to an anonymous holding drive—we know this from what we could piece together of the drive records. We still don’t know what most of that info was. Sliding away the keyboard, subject pulls off the HUD and dumps it on the desk. She then crawls in under the desk, so for a moment all you can see is her butt sticking out.
No complaints here. Just saying.
For those playing along at home, she was attaching a device called an interface leech. Has to be attached physically, and allows access to a super–low frequency broadcast band the fleet commanders use for emergency communications. So if you can access it, you can piggyback your own comms on it without anybody noticing.
Also, somebody should probably tell the UTA they’ve got a fleet-wide security vulnerability going on there.
At 11:48 the enviro alarm stops beeping without warning.
She freezes. Caught by surprise, I’m guessing. Abruptly, she’s scrambling out, banging her head on the desk in her hurry, clambering to her feet, yanking the mem-chit from the station, though she still pauses to give the monitor a little pat, like it’s a good dog for behaving so well. Subject hurries over to the back of the room, stuffs the chit into her pocket and crouches in the shadows behind a bank of desks.
At 11:49 the students and datatechs file back in, grumbling about the interruption. She slips back into her place and makes for the door. The head datatech says something inaudible. Subject replies with a quick smile that’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from that death glare, and says something inaudible in return. They don’t need this girl in neurogramming, they need her in psych-ops, eyeball-to-eyeball with the guys who need to see things a little differently. Just saying. What she says must be an excuse, and it works. He doesn’t bat a lash, and palms the door open for her himself. She strolls back down the hallway ultra chill, stands there waiting until a datatech opens the door from the other side. She slips past, and she’s out and free. As the door hums shut, subject is visible pivoting and blowing a kiss back toward the server room.
I don’t blame her. She just plundered that thing.
It took twelve f*cking minutes. And she’s just strolling away.
Subject: Journal
Date: 07/22/75
Learning is everywhere. I remember my mom telling me that when I was little, making mundane things seem like they were full of adventure. What I wouldn’t do for a little mundanity at this moment. Or my mom.
I wonder if I’ll be able to claim some kind of school credit for the stuff I’m learning on board. It’s not exactly conventional, but I haven’t given up on college and I don’t want to end up behind. Note to self: figure out how to argue the merits of practical experience in computer crime to a college application board without getting arrested. (ha ha, I am on a REFUGEE SHIP limping alongside a disabled military battlecarrier being chased down by a BeiTech dreadnought and hoping to live long enough to find a jump gate so I MUST NOT GET BEHIND ON MY SCHOOLING … I sound dusted.)
I am just too funny, but there’s nobody here to appreciate my jokes. My group leader says I mask my emotions with dark humor and sullenness. Maybe she’s right. The poor woman used to be a geologist before they made her a counselor, and the only thing she’s got going for her is that our group is about as easy to talk to as a bunch of rocks. But who wants to break the dam on stuff like this in public? You write it down and put it away, then back to work.
Today’s counseling session was about looking behind the face we put on in public to think about what else might really be going on. I wonder if that was just a sideways attempt to get me to be nicer to some of the others, walk a mile in their shoes, blah blah.
Anyway, she gave us the theme, as she launched off into another round of how-does-that-make-you-feel, I kept thinking about this traveling holoshow that came to Kerenza. They put on a play in the community complex with light-projected puppets, and I snuck away from my parents and went around the back to investigate the puppeteers. The whole romance scene was spoiled by me sauntering out on stage to share my discovery. (I am only realizing now mom and dad must have wanted to hide under their seats, but to be fair it was hardly the first time I’d mortified them.) I remember that moment really clearly. It was so important to me that everybody understand that what they were seeing, this romance, these feelings right there on stage—none of them were real. And that the girl puppet was really a guy with the biggest moustache I’d ever seen, which struck me as hilarious.
Clearly I had missed the romance of the moment.
I was all over today’s theme of What-Might-Really-Be-Going-On though, even at the age of eight. I knew it mattered, getting behind the pretend, the masks, and finding out what was really happening.
And romance? I knew even then it wasn’t the real deal.
Today, as we practiced empathy and pretended to put ourselves into the shoes of others (without really doing it, because none of us want to imagine anyone else’s grief, we have enough problems with our own), I thought a lot about that holoshow, and the commanders of our little refugee fleet.