Hargrove kept looking. His missives to D'Atombe found her unresponsive after her initial support; while AI were under the Oversight Subcommittee's purview, she said, terroristic attacks were not. The Freelancer Project, Agent Connecticut had said, was attacking the so-called Insurrectionists instead of the other way around, which meant that Hargrove had hit a dead end on his investigations of either Leonard Church's operation or Charon's.
The next time he asked D'Atombe permission to travel in order to investigate something, she was reluctant. She called him into an office separated from his only by glass partitions. False transparency seemed an appropriate description for most of the investigation he was pursuing.
"I want to speak to someone at a Charon base which has not yet been attacked but seems likely to be," Hargrove said, his hands clasped behind him.
D'Atombe looked up from behind a cup of coffee. "I thought the UNSC project was the priority. Tell me again about it."
"He's trying to overwork his smart AI by inducing a split in it, creating a child program," Hargrove said. He scratched behind his ear, feeling his short hair.
"How? Wouldn't it just shut down? It's basically a computer." She blinked slowly. Hargrove hadn't expected such resistance in regards to the part of the project that had been already approved.
"The details are highly scientific and dull, but be assured, the results are twisted. AI have minds of their own," he said. "I can send you a deck with further details if you prefer."
In fact, the details weren't entirely clear, but were heavily classified by the Oversight Committee. Connecticut had been right about several things, and one of them was the value of the data. That data had been under heavier protection than Connecticut's real name.
"And what will you ask Charon?"
"What kind of ordinance Project Freelancer has used against them, and whether they have found any evidence of these unconventionally created artificial intelligence programs."
She nodded. "It is a long way to their nearest office."
"I have chosen one at which the administration, I felt, was confident that it would not be attacked, but which also sits in a vulnerable corridor. This should both almost ensure the safety of our endeavor and prevent us from appearing biased, or like a war coordinator."
"No, we have other people to do that," D'Atombe said, setting down the cup next to her slate. "Do it. Have Joe record your mileage on the way out."
"With all respect, ma'am, I will carry out those exact requests."
"Don't say 'with all respect," Hargrove. It's what people say when they're about to be vicious. Enjoy your trip."
He gaped for a moment, then closed his mouth and smiled tightly. "Ma'am."
He left, and took the next acquiescing UNSC ship to the base nearest the Charon outpost he had chosen.
It was planetside, a large corporate office beside a warehouse. The office manufactured weapons components, according to the details available on the public net, but he knew in fact that there were handguns assembled on the premises, if nothing else. This office was also responsible for some of Charon's cryogenics operations. The receptionist assured him that the corporate manager would be available in a moment, so Hargrove stood looking between his own suited reflection in the silver floor and the hologram of the company logo. By the time she appeared, he had begun to think about Charon's UNSC contracts and their practice of hiring ex-military, something unremarked-upon but not secret. Charon was not, in the broad scheme of things, one of the corporate giants of the world - other tech giants had firmer footholds in the human economy, although Charon dominated the regional one...
When the manager appeared she was walking fast, and hit Hargrove with a handshake that almost hurt. "I'm sorry to keep you waiting." She had short, dark hair, heavy costume jewelry, and a lined face. "Someone was trying to host this slipnet video on our servers and it slowed everything down."
Hargrove raised an eyebrow. "Unfortunate."
"It's all right now. I'm Linda." She leaned forward so that he thought she might subject him to the handshake again. "You'll actually be speaking to one of our security shift leaders about the attack on the tower."
"As long as they are aware that this is under the upmost secrecy."
"Of course." She started walking, and he followed slightly behind her as they moved through wood-lined hallways. The many intersecting corridors disoriented him instantly.
"Conspiracy theories have already arisen about the attacks," Linda said.
"Is that so?"
"Some people say it was a military experiment, some people say that..." She hesitated, for the first time appearing less rushed and more uncertain. "The office is in here."
"Is it, now."
Linda turned around and met his eyes. "We're an above the board operation, chairman."
"That's assistant to the chairperson. Are you concerned about appearing otherwise? We're simply corroborating evidence presented to us in a case entirely unrelated to your corporation."
"That's reassuring."
She opened a door. The conference room was empty, with a long oval table in the middle like the iris of an eye. When she turned back to him it was with more composure than she had had before, which likewise lowered his hackles; he had not wanted to have to manage a company crisis. She said, "You'll be talking to one of our shift chiefs on the security team, Joshua Harrington."
The windows were frosted white, and seemed to glare at him as Linda sat down. Hargrove took a seat beside her without being asked. "Has Harrington been briefed?"
"He knows that you want to talk about the attacks on our operations in space."
Hargrove nodded.
The signal caught quickly, just audio and blue holographic text noting the coordinates of the signal's origin.
Linda said, "Are you there, chief?"
"Hi ma'am, this is Harrington."
"I have the assistant to the chairperson here." She leaned over the microphone. "And you know this is classified. Everyone knows. This does not leave the room."
That wasn't even entirely true, Hargrove knew. He would, by necessity, share the information with the chairperson and the rest of his department, if necessary. None of them seemed interested in inclining an ear that way, but if they did, he would worry about allocating those resources in as secure a manner as possible later on.
"What did you see, Harrington?"
The voice sounded young and energetic. "What else did any of us see? Rhee Sebial was at the tower. You know that. We think the same group attacked a cryogenics facility a few weeks earlier, but that's all."
Hargrove asked for details.
As he went down the list, he found that the story corroborated Connecticut's in both fact and in that both groups blamed each other. If Connecticut was to be believed, Leonard Church had orchestrated that confusion simply by telling the Freelancers in no uncertain terms that their foes were Insurrectionists. The Freelancers had, it seemed, continued to believe him, to the point that even Connecticut believed that the sometimes narrow-minded UNSC patriotism of 'us vs. them' applied to their own missions regardless of the amount of collateral damage that ensued. This made Hargrove even more determined to bring Church to justice, although it was with a sort of fascination that he looked back on Connecticut's obvious fear of and respect for the man. While she worked against him, she never underestimated him.
Confirmation was all that Hargrove had needed, but he left Charon corporate with the distinct feeling that he had missed something, or been asking the wrong question. He fiddled with his cufflinks as he waited for a taxi, staring at the leafy trees across the street.
-
The next time CT contacted the Leader, she used her own slate and simply found a hidden corner, near the engines of the ship, in which to put her back to a wall and talk at the bright screen that cast reflections up against her helmet.
"I dreamed that I killed someone. I saw her face slack, black and blue and pink. Something about the skin..."
She did not tell him outright that it was the woman he had been standing with in the Insurrectionist base many weeks ago; if he figured that out from her mention of it before, then maybe she would find whether she wanted to talk about it. He grunted and averted his eyes down and to the left, toward his heavy gray and red armor.
"Listen, Connie. You have to know something."
"What?"
"I got a call from the Oversight Committee yesterday, the same people you talk about."
"They asked you something?"
"They asked corporate. They were trying to corroborate your story."
She hesitated before replying with the most positive of the many responses she felt. "That's good. That means they're working."
"Yeah, but I'm worried that they might think we're doing something wrong. They asked a lot of tactical questions about the freeway." He sounded uncomfortable when he talked about it, which she understood. She rubbed at the back of her neck.
Why would they think that? Why would they hint that, if not for the same reasons CT had thought of it before?
"About what kind of weapons you had, about basically why we couldn't beat you. He seemed really interested in how Carolina and Texas moved so quickly."
She wanted to say something, but couldn't decide between conciliatory or carefully informative. Possibilities stretched out like interconnected radio channels. The Leader switched tracks before she needed to decide.
"You've got to remember, Charon is just a job," the Leader said. "I don't want to get in over my head. That's why we have to leave, soon."
Just a job. The sentiment was so different from York and North asking whether the Freelancers were 'the good guys,' but it also meant somewhat the same thing - that the Leader did not want to be blamed, did not want the spotlight on him while CT was pointing a flashlight at the Director's secrets.
"Not just yet."
"You know the Director's going to find you soon."
"I know." We both know. That's why you're saying it. "But I need to do this right. I'm not playing around. Tex still needs to know that she was part of the Alpha."
"So leave her a message. You said you had the data compiled."
CT did. She had captured it in a USB she had hidden inside her dog tags. It had taken tense hours to create a hollow in the thin compartment.
"What do you think the Oversight Committee has on you?" she said.
"I don't know. Could be anything, from how many of our guys are stationed where, to just the fact that I talked to you."
"The Director will know what I have soon, but not yet." She was almost sure. "And you just told me that Charon knows. So that's one more group of people that I can't guarantee the Director or the Counselor won't talk to. It'll be soon, Joshua. It has to be."
He signed off quickly after that, and she was glad of it; she needed to go triple-check her security, from the data mining she had done on the Mother of Invention's network to the dog tags hidden at the bottom of her kit bag under neatly folded shirts and socks.
The Oversight Committee shouldn't have had time to free her.
That, of all the rationales swirling around inside CT's head, was the one that got her to research Malcolm Hargrove. The hunch that he had taken her on as a pet project, the suggestion, based on his activity as well as on Joshua's, that Hargrove was paying a lot of attention. Maybe he was just a considerate, diligent employee.
CT didn't trust that.
And she found, in UNSC files she was allowed to pull out of storage, correspondence between the Assistant to the Subcommittee Chairman and Ingrid D'Atombe.
I have growing concerns about Charon's purview...
...and related queries about Project Freelancer. The accounting anomalies in the FML ledger have been corrected. Please see the attached deck.
The Oversight Committee shouldn't have stalled, shouldn't have agreed when she said she needed more time. Hargrove was busy, she knew. He wasn't busy with her. Judging by the black net boards and underground messages from potential deserters, the whispers passed just under the UNSC's nose, he wasn't busy with anyone else, either. The Oversight Committee had been stalling, and maybe it was just volume. Maybe it was D'Atombe answering to a different master.
CT had gotten into the habit of distrusting everything, but hers was a scientific paranoia. It had to be corroborated.
It had already been sunk inside her head, not blindly pressed but slowly percolated, when she decided to leave Freelancer.
It was one of a thousand departures, one of so many breaks she had tried to make between her rational mind (they're servants, they're co-conspirators, they're being dragged along into the Director's vicious storm because they couldn't feel the raindrops) and her affection for the project that had empowered her. Each target hit, holograms turning from angry red to satisfying green, made her love what the project had taught her. Every laugh layering over nine familiar voices, every arm slung over someone's shoulders, every joke made her feel like this was a family it had taken her decades to find.
Every mistake, every fumble, the memories of the dead woman and the disastrous mission where Maryland died too, those sank into her and did something more permanent than memory - they disappeared, became something CT couldn't examine.
Because of them, she examined everything else.
Near the end (there were so many ends,) she left a rec room where York and North were playing handheld video games on a couch with a snapped leg, and South was doing endless pull-ups with Maine spotting. Wash caught her arm, fingers sliding on the pocked surface of her bodysuit until they caught at the crook of her elbow. He asked her about a tactical puzzle that had faced them earlier, and his voice slipped and clouded. She flopped her arm until his hand released. "Not now, Wash."
"Oh. I thought you were heading to this part of the room," he said, awkward.
"I'm taking a personal call."
His shoulders fell. "Right."
He let her go. He believed her.
CT left another message. She had already placed Tex's in the locker, waiting until she knew everyone was in the rec room enjoying their slim time of relaxation. This one she spoke just to herself, sitting in the locker room under the blue square of light from the leaderboard, daring someone to connect the obvious dots. She whispered onto a removable drive words that she could control, words that she could save, words that she could throw away and crush between metal and metal if she wanted.
"Words are important. Words are the key. I knew something was wrong with the Alpha when he started acting strangely, when the facts about the Insurrectionists didn't line up. The scoreboard was just another emotional key, something designed to keep us from comparing notes because we would be too busy competing with each other. The Oversight Committee is the same thing. The UNSC has to watch its own back, but that hasn't been done." She wasn't quite ready to commit Hargrove's name to digital permanence. "I'm not going to leave anyone out of these facts that may sound like accusations. They are mine, and no one else's. After all, I'm a freelancer."
To this file she added all of her correspondence with Hargrove, emphasizing his curiosity about Freelancer technology, as well as some of the belligerent, passive-aggressive messages between him and D'Atombe that she had intercepted. It was less a completed puzzle and more a curated look at a personality. It was something that, she hoped, would be a puzzle piece for her down the line. She had put a similar profile of the Director on the drive she left for Texas. It was beginning to be a pattern, CT thought, and therefore she would need to stop soon. She wasn't a detective.
She hadn't yet found out the delivery method for this information, but she would.
She sat back, then propped her chin on her hands and squeezed the edges of her helmet as if she could work them into a new shape. She knew how to be a soldier and a spy more than she knew how to be a detective. Maybe, soon, she could follow the trial of the AI and find out where the blueprints for him had come from. Do some solid spying, if not some solid soldiering. The Director had maps in his files of underground facilities and bases on alien worlds so remote that, CT had discovered, even his sim trooper program hadn't stretched out that far.
After that, she could think about retreating to the safety Joshua talked about with increasing desperation.
Time, for CT, was both critically important and entirely inconsequential. She had planned for both.