I only needed to take one look at the Crowd Control project the military had handed over to civilian contractors to know why they'd passed it off. Atlas did have a promiscuous history of corporations and the generals hopping in bed for projects, but not usually for stuff this important. As far as I knew the original Atlesian Knight hardware and software had both been made in-house. But looking at the hovering schematics on the terminal, and the list of 'requirements' that came with them, I understood why'd they'd reached for outsiders. The two large chunks of work ahead were pure software: the IFF and the CID. Identification Friend and Foe and the broader umbrella of Combat Identification. The General Board's stated requirements were hellishly complicated, by Remnant standards. On one hand I was glad the people running this kingdom hadn't thought it was a good idea to send in sloppily-programmed robots to break up riots, especially considering those robots were armed. On the other hand, I was now expected to make this work, and while I could see light at the end of the tunnel it was going to be a rough three months.
Marigold Company's specialists had begun work, but what I was looking at was… bloated. The Chain of Responsibility patterns were an aggressively maze-like slog. So far they'd tried to put the threshold for an object being considered 'hostile' as either someone attacking the platform or moving beyond a certain speed, but as things currently stood any car or airship passing within the Knight's sensor range would get tagged. I read a design note with a man's signature at the bottom, making a case for the CID being 'appearance-respondent'. He wanted to slap a fucking Faunus detector in there, because of course at least one person would suggest that. It was a good thing for him I didn't have firing rights, because he'd be out on the street right now. I began setting down the framework for weapons identification instead, then swerved to the side and began a responsibility tree defining different levels of 'hostile'. I wasn't getting any angry kid throwing rocks at the robot-cops tazed if I could help it. The least violence could be laid at my feet, the better, though I knew at this point morally speaking I was just playing semantics.
The work effectively took over my afternoons, and for all that Weiss currently lived in my house over the days that followed I saw relatively little of her. We both had lessons, her more than me, and while we ate together it was rare for us to actually share a room beyond that until late afternoon. I exited the programming interface, closed the monitor and made my way out of the work room that had been made available for me in the restricted wing. It was still restricted to me, pretty much: I was handed a keycard at breakfast and had to hand it back to security when I was done with work for the day. My idle attempt to find out how difficult it would be to forge one of those had led to answers varying from 'hard' to 'are you a professional forger? go home then'. I'd say this for Mother, she might be a ruthless amoral profiteer but her security was tight. I put down my keycard in the awaiting palm of the sunglass-wearing woman wearing a suit that stood by the last door, and politely wished her a good day. She nodded back, but didn't speak. She never did.
I found Weiss idling in one of the playrooms I'd had since the age of five but had never really gotten around to using. The few games I indulged in were on my bedroom terminal, and it wasn't like I ever had anyone over except this one. Speaking of her, I hid a smiled when I saw she was wearing a long-sleeved vest embroidered with the Marigold logo over clothes that had clearly been brought over from her own closet. Weiss Schnee had been raised a proper little lady – the forms of rebellion she engaged in were always subtle.
"Henry," she said, white-crowned head rising from her book. "You're done with your lessons?"
"Afternoon's work, more or less," I said, and grabbed a seat next to hers. "But yes. I wash my hands of further coding. If I'm at it any longer I'm going to start seeing the world like floating numbers."
"Your grasp on reality is feeble enough as it is," the girl told me, smirking. "Do refrain."
"Are you sassing me, Weisscakes?" I snorted. "I control the taffy stocks, Schnee. Beware of consequences."
"I wager if I asked your mother she'd get my own bag," the brat replied airily.
Of course she would, I thought. Bailey Marigold had not been shy about splurging to make an impression on Jacques Schnee's youngest daughter. She'd outright bought a piano and ordered a former guest bedroom turned into a music room for the sake of what would be exactly three lessons lasting no longer than two hours. Let it not ever be said that Mother was half-assed in her social climbing attempts.
"Don't you break my monopoly," I warned. "I haven't even begun abusing it properly."
I forced myself to sound amused, instead of vaguely appalled that my mother would not bat an eye at dropping a few thousand lien just have a kid my own age think well of her.
"I will consider mercy, for appropriate concessions," Weiss drawled haughtily.
I decided to distract her before she could actually set those out. That way lay me agreeing to come at playdates for SDC kids, and I wasn't going through that a second time if I could help it.
"What are you reading, anyway?" I asked.
The pointed look on her face made it clear she was not fooled in the slightest, but she was too polite to actually call me out. Ah, manners. They did make my life easier on occasion.
"Violet's Garden," Weiss said. "An assigned reading. Perhaps a bit too prosaic from my tastes."
"You mean dry as Vacuo," I cheerfully said. "Not enjoying the classics? For shame, Weiss."
"I've never seen you with anything but a technical manual in hand," she replied peevishly.
"Character assassination," I said. "I also read history books."
"At least you don't watch cartoons," she sighed. "If I have to sit through another conversation about X-Ray and Vav by my peers I will-"
"Silently repress your anger in a tight ball that will only erupt when you're a teenager?" I suggested.
The coldness of her glare implied I might have hit a little too close to him with that one. I hastily cleared my throat and put another tack on the conversation. It wasn't long after dinner, and after the meal – Mother attended, which stilted the conversation somewhat – we migrated towards my room. Door open, because Schnees were creatures of propriety. Mostly she finished her homework chapters while I tried and fail to tinker on my terminal. Mostly I ended up on the Network, following recent news. Rumours of the White Fang planning a large strike were floating around, but nothing concrete. After the shutdowns in Atlas City they must have been more careful about preparations.
"What are they complaining about this time?" Weiss suddenly asked.
I turned and found blue eyes staring at the very unflattering picture of Faunus protesters plastered by the article I'd been reading.
"Being unable to afford both food and the monthly Dust bill, I imagine," I said.
I almost added that the people on the image were miners, and that their conditions were by far the worst, but I bit my tongue. She was ten. All that she knew about mines was that her family company owned a lot of them.
"They're always making trouble," Weiss said. "Father says-"
"Your father says a lot of thing," I interrupted quietly.
I regretted it immediately. She looked like I'd slapped her and I grimaced.
"Weiss, I-"
"Don't," she said, voice rising over mine, "I've heard it all before."
I passed a hand through my hair, unsure where to go from here. I didn't exactly want to be the enemy here, but I wouldn't be doing anyone a favour by saying nothing at all.
"It's not a you problem," I said. "Or a me problem. It's an Atlas problem, and the Council's not doing great at solving it."
"Perhaps it would be easier if the vagrants didn't riot at every opportunity," Weiss snapped. "They should be glad to even have jobs."
I drummed my fingers on the desk. I could say quite a few cutting remarks in answer to that, but what would that accomplish? Win an argument with a child, one only I was prepared to have of the two of us?
"I don't think there's a point in us arguing about this," I said. "Not until you've actually gone out and read up on it yourself. We're not talking about the same things, not really."
"Your mother would agree with me," the white-haired girl said.
"My mother," I replied tiredly, "says a lot of things too."
Her eyes went wide.
"Henry," she whispered.
"It's not like with you," I said.
Emotionally manipulative, if not outright abusive, I meant.
"It's just…" I trailed off, looking for the right words. "I got a reminder the box I live in isn't nearly as large as I'd like. And that trying to step outside of it has consequences."
"You can talk to me, you know," Weiss said.
"It's fine," I replied, waving it away. "Nothing worth talking about. I'll handle it."
The white-haired girl looked away, knees up against her chest as she sat on my bed.
"You never let me help you," Weiss finally murmured. "It's always the other way around."
Setting aside the fact that her sister would murder me with great relish if I got her involved in anything on my plate, I balked at the idea of relying on a kid on principle. We were the same age physically, but it couldn't be denied there was a gap. I still had my memories of the Old World, however vague. They weren't to be relied on, but they were a buffer of sorts just bye existing. I remembered being an adult, in bits and pieces.
"It's not stuff either of us could do anything about," I said. "Not until we're older."
Limpid blue eyes studied me.
"But when we are?" she pressed.
"Only one of us has Aura," I teased. "I'm clearly not going to be the brawn of this operation."
"Or the brains, for that matter," she replied without missing a beat. "That leaves only the load, Marigold."
Given how quickly and smoothly the putdowns came to her these days, I suspected I was being a bad influence. Still, I sighed with relief. Crisis averted. More or less.
"This is going to be my last night here," Weiss suddenly said.
Or not. Goddamnit.
"Yeah," I replied. "Sorry I-"
Was too scared of your father to try to press for more, my mind suggested. That I folded at the first sign of compromise on his part. Sorry you're going back to a house where the pretence there's a family living inside is going to be paper-thin.
"It is my home," she said. "This has been… pleasant, but vacations do not last."
"You can come back anytime you like," I said.
It was wrong, I thought, that a ten-year-old girl could look so bitter.
"I think my visiting rights will be restricted for some time, after this," Weiss sighed. "I will not escape without punishment, however discreet."
Yeah, I suspected I wasn't going to be welcome in Schnee Manor for the foreseeable future either. Not after the pleasant chat I'd had with her father.
"Then call," I said. "You've got my Scroll number."
She nodded firmly.
"Whenever I can," she promised.
I'd not considered until now she might be losing Scroll privileges for this stunt, but now that I thought about it it did seem likely. I wasn't the only one who'd taken a step out of the box, or who'd be facing the consequences of that. We stayed up late, after, both careful not to let the conversation turn to something that would have us arguing again. It wouldn't do to spoil what might be our last face-to-face for a while. The morning after I got up early to see her off, and waved at her from the strip when her family airship lifted off.
I would not see or hear from her for eight months.
XXX
The Atlesian Knight OS contract was known within the Marigold Company as the classified Project Toybox. Mother's dark sense of humour at work, I suspected. The original work schedule had the first draft of the software ready at the end of the fifth month, with the last before presentation being reserved for polishing and the marketing people to put their seal of approval. It didn't end up like that at all, mostly because of me. I never actually met any of the other employees in person, or actually went to a company work facility. I had access through an encrypted network to everything that was in the local terminals, and though I traded Network messages and notes with the others my name was never actually revealed. My handle within the project was that of 'Special Consultant', though some of my interactions with the employees hinted that it was known by some who was sitting on my side of the screen. Within the first week I'd consigned to the scrap heap about a month's worth of work by other people, which didn't exactly make me popular.
There wasn't much pushback aside from some passive-aggressive messages, to my surprise. Apparently someone had made it clear I was relatively high in the pecking order, because even the project lead took my 'suggestions' to heart. A month in, watching the work pile up on everyone because I'd pushed for a complete redesign and reboot from scratch for the IFF, I went to Mother and asked her to put my tutoring on hold until the project was done. She agreed without hesitation – her priorities were pretty clear. My hours were spent in that little work room, interrupted only by sleep, meal breaks and wandering the halls when I could no longer stand to be in front of a terminal. Occasionally I worried about Weiss never getting in touch with me, but there wasn't really anything I could do about that. No word from the Schnees at all, and when I tried to call Winter's Scroll I found the number she'd used to call me no longer existed. Clearly she was learning all sorts of things at Atlas Academy.
Even with my whole attention on Project Toybox, I didn't go anywhere close to where I wanted it to go. Four separate times we had to simplify the interface because of time constraints, and when it was suggested it was done on the CID as well I actually put my foot down and went to Mother, passing over the project lead's head. She was noticeably colder in our messages after that, but I got my way. I hadn't been sent to this project to make friends. Five months and two weeks was what it took before the 'draft' was done. We were cutting it very, very close. In my humble opinion the software was a clunky piece of shit with an object pool pattern twice as large as it needed to be, but the chatter from the others was excited. No one threw around epithets like 'revolutionary', but 'cutting-edge' did come up quite a bit. The only part I was actually proud of was the threat identification suite, and I'd let no one else code even a single number of that. As soon as the coding part was done I washed my hands of the whole thing. Hardware adaptation wasn't my problem, neither was polishing.
This was a proposal piece, anyway, not the final product. Just a fancy bit of work to impress the General Board. Mother hinted she wanted me to remain on the project if our workup was the one chosen by the military, but I turned a blind ear to that. I might agree, if I really needed something, but otherwise limiting my exposure was the highest priority here.
For a week after I was taken off Project Toybox I did absolutely nothing productive. If I'd been of age for it I would have gone for drinks, but being a prepubescent waste of space the best I could manage was lounge around like a potato. Mother tacitly allowed it, but after those seven days of bliss lessons resumed. I returned to my old routine and found Weiss' absence to be glaring. I'd not realized, until now, that she was basically the only person I saw that wasn't hired help or a blood relative. Marigold House was just a little colder, without her occasional presence. I started tinkering with Snapchat Ripoff again but progress was slow and my efforts half-hearted. It took me a while to put the finger on why. It went back, I realized, to that conversation I'd had with Mother in the solar. The one where she'd casually pulled out my unplayable strategy game. It'd been a reminder that I had no privacy. Odds were good that every single thing I did on my Scroll and personal terminal was logged somewhere for my mother to peruse at will.
The urge was there to try to make something like Incognito, software that would allow me to use the Network without being traced, but there was a problem with that: to make the damned thing, I'd have to use the terminal already being watched. I had no private bubble to do anything on. I had access to my own accounts – the quantity of lien in them surprising even if I'd already known I was wealthy – since Mother had kept up her end of our bargain, but her name was still on them. I couldn't spend a fucking penny without her knowing when, why and where. If I went on the Network and bought an airship ticket for Vacuo tonight, I'd find security waiting outside my bedroom tomorrow. The boundaries of my little world had never been so obvious, and it chafed. The worst of it was that I couldn't think of a solution. I genuinely had no other options than to stew in my discontent. I had a wild hope of asking one of the hired help to buy a Scroll for me, but I wasn't close to any of them and Mother paid their salaries – they knew who they needed to be on the good side of. I'd done this to myself, to an extent. I'd isolated myself willing and now there was no one willing to go out on a limb for me. In a way that made it sting even more.
I grit my teeth and bade my time. Though the idea of going to a prep school rankled me, especially now that I'd effectively graduated at least the first year of it through tutoring, I realized it might be my only way forward. It would get me out of Marigold House, at least, and that was the starting point to getting basically anything done. Twelve years old, typically, was when children entered either prep schools or combat schools in Atlas. I might be able to get in early, though doing that would draw attention and I'd still be too young to be let out of sight. The notion of waiting more than a year and a half still before doing anything about my situation rankled, but it might be the best way to approach this. I couldn't afford any mistakes here – I would not be given two chances to get out cleanly. I could begin to make plans, at least, though not to write them down. Disguising my efforts on the Network as a general interest in education, I tried to get a handle on my options.
Legal majority came at sixteen in Atlas, though weapons permits could be gotten younger if you were in a combat school or had the connections to get them. At that age I'd get full control of my accounts, though no shares of the Marigold Company. They'd been inherited by Mother after my father died, and though I was the legal heir for a controlling stake I wouldn't get anything while she lived. I couldn't count on the company for cash, then. Blossom was filling my pockets while I did nothing, so there was that. I could live comfortably for the rest of my life off the trickle of profits I got from that, but to actually be wealthy – like I needed to be if going to Mistral remained the plan – I'd need more. Since my only marketable skills were programming and engineering, that meant I'd need connections and something to sell. There was, of course, one problem with that. I'd recently pissed off the head of the SDC, and if the largest Dust company in the world was out to get me being in business of any kind was going to be very, very difficult. I'd need to think more about this, but I was hesitant to research too much on a watched terminal.
I was still weighing my options when, the day after the presentation before the General Board, I was told to head for my mother's solar after supper. She didn't need to say anything for me to know how it had gone: the triumphant look on her face was quite enough. Our proposal had been picked.
Now, I thought, things were going to get complicated.
