Dawn was starting to creep over the horizon as Solace drove home in a cloud of wonder and delight. She had never thought, never in her wildest dreams, that spending a night out with an Agent… former Agent… at a restaurant that was very probably another creation of the computers that ran Matrix… would be so much fun! The food, despite the knowledge that it was just so much data, artificial input for her senses, was exquisite. The whole atmosphere had been one of casual, elegant self-indulgence. There had even been a little dancing, towards the end of the evening, when nearly all of the humans had departed and the only really substantial group left was the head of the restaurant and his entourage, men and women who Solace was sure were some sort of program.
They had to be. Smith had very nearly said as much, when he had said that the restaurant was run by an old employee, not from his same department but a similar function. Old employee of the same firm most definitely meant a program. Different department. She had no idea what that meant… the function of the Agent AIs was to track down and kill or otherwise eliminate the threat of the resistance. Different department. That would mean that the AIs had a different function. But what?
It didn't matter. Solace laughed gaily as she spun the car into the parking spot. For now… for the moment, the Matrix could all just not exist for her. She would just be another young woman, coming home after a wonderful night out. She would go up to her apartment, take a nap, and then unplug in several hours. Or perhaps the other way around. Whichever. The events of the evening were already starting to take on a sort of indistinguishable, enjoyable blur. She couldn't remember if the sort of vague introductions to the head of the restaurant had occurred before or after dessert, if the first dance to the slightly bluesy music had occurred before or after…
She smiled. Best not to think too long on it.
The smile dropped from her lips, turning into a puzzled frown as she walked through the parking lot and over to the lobby of her building. Someone was in the lobby arguing with the concierge; someone who looked like Resistance, but from the back could really have been anyone. Solace stopped where she was, taking a deep breath and offering up a little prayer to whatever gods still existed that it was just some punk kid coming back from their own sort of night on the town. Someone else whose tastes ran to excessive amounts of leather and vinyl.
No such luck. As she walked into the lobby and nodded to the concierge the man turned. Kerr.
"Sol, I have to talk to you."
"We have nothing to talk about." She pushed past him, tried to freeze him out with body language alone. It didn't work. It rarely had.
"Sol, I'm serious. It's important."
"If it's important you can talk to me about it at work." She didn't want to say 'on the ship' even in the hallway… you never knew, after all, when the Agents were watching. "You don't need to come to my home and wait for me and ambush me right before I go to bed."
"It's about your new boyfriend…"
She whirled on him. "Okay, first of all, he's not my boyfriend. You know damn well he is not, and could never be anything like that. Second of all, you know damn well what's going on, and you know damn well that your hanging around could get me killed. So just stay the hell out of it, stay the hell away, before you do something we both regret."
He kept a couple paces back after that display of temper, but didn't leave entirely. Solace opened her door violently and nearly slammed it shut in his face; he put a hand out to stop it and went in, closing it with less force behind him. "Solace, we need to talk."
"No, Kerr, we really don't.'
"Yes, we do. We need to talk, and you know exactly why. You're bordering on treason here.."
She laughed, and it sounded harsh and bitter and full of sharp edges and emotions. "Treason? Listen to yourself, Kerr, you sound like an eighteenth century soldier. This may be a war, but it's not the kind you can define with lines on a map. I haven't turned in any fellows to the AIs. I haven't implicated anyone else in this madcap scheme, and I haven't betrayed anyone's existence or location. There's no treason here, Kerr." Just a lunatic experiment that's getting me in deeper all the time. But you don't need to know that.
"Oh really. How long do you think it will be before you start taking their side? I've seen you, Sol. You never used to be this friendly with Agents."
She stared at him. "Yes, but… that's the point, isn't it? Or don't you remember that part of the speech? The point is to be friendly to the Agents, to see if there's something there beyond or besides their singleminded programmed purpose. And if there is, to encourage sedition and defectors in their ranks. Not ours."
"You can't have it both ways, Sol. You can't get close to them without them getting close to you. I told you this was a bad idea from the beginning."
"I know that, Kerr. But you don't think the experiment will succeed at all. So, frankly, I don't even know why you bothered trying to talk me out of it."
Kerr scowled. "I should have tried harder, then. Now you're going to take us all down with you."
Despite her instinct that he was just bluffing, grandstanding to try and get her to back down and see things his way, something in his voice made her blood run cold. "What are you talking about?"
"We've been keeping an eye on Smith… really, we've been keeping an eye on the Agents. And they've been keeping an eye on Smith. A close eye. And on everyone he comes into contact with. You've been the person he's had the most contact with so far… really, he's only had contact with five people."
"Five?"
Kerr nodded, looking even more grim … as though that were possible. "And of the five, you're in a category by yourself. The other four… I don't know what's going on with them, but the Agents talk about them like they're something different, something big."
The other AIs. So Kerr didn't know. Either that or there was something else, some hidden connotation to the 'employee' business that they were both missing. Either way… "You think they've found out that I'm not plugged in to the system?"
"Not yet. I think all they know is that you're anomalous for some reason. And at the Agent's level, apparently they don't have instant access to everyone who's plugged into the system except for purposes of jumping into the host bodies. So they haven't figured out that you're anything other than what you seem to be… yet. None of them have taken the chance of trying to jump into you either. I guess they don't want to scare Smith off."
Solace felt the muscles in her face twitch before she could suppress all reaction. She hadn't even thought of that… that some Agent program might try to jump into her as they jumped from body to body to catch the unplugged Resistance members. She also had managed to put out of her mind the fact that Smith was actually an invader in someone else's body, and the thought was not a pleasant one.
"So basically you're telling me that I'm too close. That I should back off."
Kerr sighed, sounding as though he were frustrated with some recalcitrant child who wouldn't go to bed on time. She wanted to smack him for it. "I'm saying that this whole experiment is a bust. What have you discovered, really? That Agents can be fired? What happens to old programs when they become obsolete? The information's helpful, Sol… really, it is, but we could have found that out any one of a number of other ways. The real reason you're here… your real hypothesis hasn't been proven at all. You really should just give it up and come back home before you're discovered."
Patronizing little… "Kerr, I think you'd better leave before you yourself give me away. Right now you're the only thing linking me to the Resistance that Smith knows about, and he thinks I don't know what you get up to in the Matrix. He's told me that you're part of a terrorist organization, and that he's put an alert out for you."
Kerr flushed, angry. "You told him about…"
"I told him that I hadn't had any contact with you for a long time, and that I was probably the last person you'd try to get ahold of for any purpose other than to get back together with me. Which, actually, I thought would be the case. And I'm still not sure I'm wrong about that." She glared, all the more worried by the fact that he wasn't denying it. "So why don't you stay out of the Matrix for a while, give things a chance to calm down. Hopefully, after a while, he'll forget about you. Either that or the experiment will be over, on my terms…" she raised her voice and punctuated each of the last few words with a finger stabbing into his chest. "And it'll be safe for both of us to come back."
Kerr stared at her in dismay, frustration, and growing anger. "You haven't been listening to a thing I've been saying…"
"Yes, I have…"
"You have no idea what you're doing.." Voices raised.
"Yes, I have, Kerr, your enthusiasm is touching, it's also futile. I have sanction for what I'm doing, I'm perfectly aware of the consequences, and frankly I think I'm in a better position to know when I'm in danger than you are. You're emotionally biased and you're paranoid."
"Bullshit!" he yelled. "That's bullshit, Sol. Maybe this experiment had some sort of value in the beginning but by now your judgment is completely clouded and you're just using this as an excuse to indulge yourself in the Matrix because you can't stand it in the real world. You can't stand that all the real people are out on the outside where it's gray and dark and you're spending all your time here in the sun, burying your head in the sand…"
"This goddamn experiment could give us the edge we need to win the war, you idiot!"
"This isn't an experiment, Sol, it's a junket. This is you taking any official excuse you can get for a pleasure cruise. You need to shape up, you need to come back, and you need to remember who and what you are, and what you're fighting for."
"I know what I'm fighting for," she snarled, her voice gone quiet again. She was almost to the point of tears, hands clenched into white-knuckle fists, half-moon marks on her palms where her nails were digging into the skin. "I've always known. It's you who never understood, Kerr. And you couldn't stand it that I had more faith than you did."
"I'm fighting for our daughter," he practically spat it in her face. "What did you have in mind?"
She hit him. Blind, helpless fury took over, and she moved with the preternatural speed of the unplugged, never mind the fact that Smith or someone else in the building could have walked through the unlocked door at any moment. It wasn't even an elegant hit, either, just a barroom punch, a roundhouse to the side of the jaw. It did the job at least. Kerr staggered back, rubbing his jaw and glaring at her in shocked and angry surprise.
"What the hell…"
"Don't play those goddamn games with me, Kerr. Don't you ever play those goddamn mind games with me. You wanted her, and rather than subject her to years of fighting I let you take her. Don't you ever dare imagine I don't care for her as much as you do. Sole custody was your choice, not mine."
"You stayed away because you couldn't handle being a real goddamn human being, for once."
"I stayed away because I didn't want her to have to see us beating the crap out of each other."
"You can't handle your feelings for any human being…"
"And you can't handle your temper. You can't even keep a goddamn grip on reality."
This time he was the one to hit her, a full and open-handed slap upside the head that sent her sprawling. It was designed to humiliate, she knew… but she'd also had enough of that kind of treatment at his hands. She rolled with it, swinging her leg around and sweeping him to the ground. The second part of the move didn't go nearly as well; she tried to keep a foot on his chest, keep him down, but he upended her onto the floor. Her head hit the table hard enough to make her see spots, and she yelped.
Kerr stopped. He didn't always know when to stop, she thought ruefully, but at least he stopped now. "You're a cold, heartless bitch, Solace." His voice was perfectly calm. A sociopath's voice, she thought with a shiver. "You're more like a machine than a real, human woman. I guess that's why you prefer them to us."
He was gone before she could stand up and open her mouth to retort, although the brief bout of physical combat had taken most of the fight out of her. Angrily she slammed the door behind him, remembering to actually lock it this time. The cell phone on her table began ringing almost as soon as she had.
"Solace…"
"Hey… " It was Tank. "I saw what happened. Are you okay?"
She sighed. Her head felt horrible, and she even felt a little nauseous. The ironically bad ending to an otherwise perfect evening. And no nap, either. Damn. "I'll be okay eventually. I guess since I'm going to be up for a while I might as well go over some stuff with you. About the only part out of that whole mess that I believe is that the Agents are watching Smith, which means I have to be even more careful."
"All right. We'll go over it now, in case you need anything… and then I'll bring you out, okay?"
Solace sighed. It had been a long night, and it was going to be an even longer day. Damn Kerr and his petty jealousies… why couldn't he just have left her alone? Why couldn't he have left her and Lily alone? She sighed. It was probably time to get down to business.
"All right."
They had to be. Smith had very nearly said as much, when he had said that the restaurant was run by an old employee, not from his same department but a similar function. Old employee of the same firm most definitely meant a program. Different department. She had no idea what that meant… the function of the Agent AIs was to track down and kill or otherwise eliminate the threat of the resistance. Different department. That would mean that the AIs had a different function. But what?
It didn't matter. Solace laughed gaily as she spun the car into the parking spot. For now… for the moment, the Matrix could all just not exist for her. She would just be another young woman, coming home after a wonderful night out. She would go up to her apartment, take a nap, and then unplug in several hours. Or perhaps the other way around. Whichever. The events of the evening were already starting to take on a sort of indistinguishable, enjoyable blur. She couldn't remember if the sort of vague introductions to the head of the restaurant had occurred before or after dessert, if the first dance to the slightly bluesy music had occurred before or after…
She smiled. Best not to think too long on it.
The smile dropped from her lips, turning into a puzzled frown as she walked through the parking lot and over to the lobby of her building. Someone was in the lobby arguing with the concierge; someone who looked like Resistance, but from the back could really have been anyone. Solace stopped where she was, taking a deep breath and offering up a little prayer to whatever gods still existed that it was just some punk kid coming back from their own sort of night on the town. Someone else whose tastes ran to excessive amounts of leather and vinyl.
No such luck. As she walked into the lobby and nodded to the concierge the man turned. Kerr.
"Sol, I have to talk to you."
"We have nothing to talk about." She pushed past him, tried to freeze him out with body language alone. It didn't work. It rarely had.
"Sol, I'm serious. It's important."
"If it's important you can talk to me about it at work." She didn't want to say 'on the ship' even in the hallway… you never knew, after all, when the Agents were watching. "You don't need to come to my home and wait for me and ambush me right before I go to bed."
"It's about your new boyfriend…"
She whirled on him. "Okay, first of all, he's not my boyfriend. You know damn well he is not, and could never be anything like that. Second of all, you know damn well what's going on, and you know damn well that your hanging around could get me killed. So just stay the hell out of it, stay the hell away, before you do something we both regret."
He kept a couple paces back after that display of temper, but didn't leave entirely. Solace opened her door violently and nearly slammed it shut in his face; he put a hand out to stop it and went in, closing it with less force behind him. "Solace, we need to talk."
"No, Kerr, we really don't.'
"Yes, we do. We need to talk, and you know exactly why. You're bordering on treason here.."
She laughed, and it sounded harsh and bitter and full of sharp edges and emotions. "Treason? Listen to yourself, Kerr, you sound like an eighteenth century soldier. This may be a war, but it's not the kind you can define with lines on a map. I haven't turned in any fellows to the AIs. I haven't implicated anyone else in this madcap scheme, and I haven't betrayed anyone's existence or location. There's no treason here, Kerr." Just a lunatic experiment that's getting me in deeper all the time. But you don't need to know that.
"Oh really. How long do you think it will be before you start taking their side? I've seen you, Sol. You never used to be this friendly with Agents."
She stared at him. "Yes, but… that's the point, isn't it? Or don't you remember that part of the speech? The point is to be friendly to the Agents, to see if there's something there beyond or besides their singleminded programmed purpose. And if there is, to encourage sedition and defectors in their ranks. Not ours."
"You can't have it both ways, Sol. You can't get close to them without them getting close to you. I told you this was a bad idea from the beginning."
"I know that, Kerr. But you don't think the experiment will succeed at all. So, frankly, I don't even know why you bothered trying to talk me out of it."
Kerr scowled. "I should have tried harder, then. Now you're going to take us all down with you."
Despite her instinct that he was just bluffing, grandstanding to try and get her to back down and see things his way, something in his voice made her blood run cold. "What are you talking about?"
"We've been keeping an eye on Smith… really, we've been keeping an eye on the Agents. And they've been keeping an eye on Smith. A close eye. And on everyone he comes into contact with. You've been the person he's had the most contact with so far… really, he's only had contact with five people."
"Five?"
Kerr nodded, looking even more grim … as though that were possible. "And of the five, you're in a category by yourself. The other four… I don't know what's going on with them, but the Agents talk about them like they're something different, something big."
The other AIs. So Kerr didn't know. Either that or there was something else, some hidden connotation to the 'employee' business that they were both missing. Either way… "You think they've found out that I'm not plugged in to the system?"
"Not yet. I think all they know is that you're anomalous for some reason. And at the Agent's level, apparently they don't have instant access to everyone who's plugged into the system except for purposes of jumping into the host bodies. So they haven't figured out that you're anything other than what you seem to be… yet. None of them have taken the chance of trying to jump into you either. I guess they don't want to scare Smith off."
Solace felt the muscles in her face twitch before she could suppress all reaction. She hadn't even thought of that… that some Agent program might try to jump into her as they jumped from body to body to catch the unplugged Resistance members. She also had managed to put out of her mind the fact that Smith was actually an invader in someone else's body, and the thought was not a pleasant one.
"So basically you're telling me that I'm too close. That I should back off."
Kerr sighed, sounding as though he were frustrated with some recalcitrant child who wouldn't go to bed on time. She wanted to smack him for it. "I'm saying that this whole experiment is a bust. What have you discovered, really? That Agents can be fired? What happens to old programs when they become obsolete? The information's helpful, Sol… really, it is, but we could have found that out any one of a number of other ways. The real reason you're here… your real hypothesis hasn't been proven at all. You really should just give it up and come back home before you're discovered."
Patronizing little… "Kerr, I think you'd better leave before you yourself give me away. Right now you're the only thing linking me to the Resistance that Smith knows about, and he thinks I don't know what you get up to in the Matrix. He's told me that you're part of a terrorist organization, and that he's put an alert out for you."
Kerr flushed, angry. "You told him about…"
"I told him that I hadn't had any contact with you for a long time, and that I was probably the last person you'd try to get ahold of for any purpose other than to get back together with me. Which, actually, I thought would be the case. And I'm still not sure I'm wrong about that." She glared, all the more worried by the fact that he wasn't denying it. "So why don't you stay out of the Matrix for a while, give things a chance to calm down. Hopefully, after a while, he'll forget about you. Either that or the experiment will be over, on my terms…" she raised her voice and punctuated each of the last few words with a finger stabbing into his chest. "And it'll be safe for both of us to come back."
Kerr stared at her in dismay, frustration, and growing anger. "You haven't been listening to a thing I've been saying…"
"Yes, I have…"
"You have no idea what you're doing.." Voices raised.
"Yes, I have, Kerr, your enthusiasm is touching, it's also futile. I have sanction for what I'm doing, I'm perfectly aware of the consequences, and frankly I think I'm in a better position to know when I'm in danger than you are. You're emotionally biased and you're paranoid."
"Bullshit!" he yelled. "That's bullshit, Sol. Maybe this experiment had some sort of value in the beginning but by now your judgment is completely clouded and you're just using this as an excuse to indulge yourself in the Matrix because you can't stand it in the real world. You can't stand that all the real people are out on the outside where it's gray and dark and you're spending all your time here in the sun, burying your head in the sand…"
"This goddamn experiment could give us the edge we need to win the war, you idiot!"
"This isn't an experiment, Sol, it's a junket. This is you taking any official excuse you can get for a pleasure cruise. You need to shape up, you need to come back, and you need to remember who and what you are, and what you're fighting for."
"I know what I'm fighting for," she snarled, her voice gone quiet again. She was almost to the point of tears, hands clenched into white-knuckle fists, half-moon marks on her palms where her nails were digging into the skin. "I've always known. It's you who never understood, Kerr. And you couldn't stand it that I had more faith than you did."
"I'm fighting for our daughter," he practically spat it in her face. "What did you have in mind?"
She hit him. Blind, helpless fury took over, and she moved with the preternatural speed of the unplugged, never mind the fact that Smith or someone else in the building could have walked through the unlocked door at any moment. It wasn't even an elegant hit, either, just a barroom punch, a roundhouse to the side of the jaw. It did the job at least. Kerr staggered back, rubbing his jaw and glaring at her in shocked and angry surprise.
"What the hell…"
"Don't play those goddamn games with me, Kerr. Don't you ever play those goddamn mind games with me. You wanted her, and rather than subject her to years of fighting I let you take her. Don't you ever dare imagine I don't care for her as much as you do. Sole custody was your choice, not mine."
"You stayed away because you couldn't handle being a real goddamn human being, for once."
"I stayed away because I didn't want her to have to see us beating the crap out of each other."
"You can't handle your feelings for any human being…"
"And you can't handle your temper. You can't even keep a goddamn grip on reality."
This time he was the one to hit her, a full and open-handed slap upside the head that sent her sprawling. It was designed to humiliate, she knew… but she'd also had enough of that kind of treatment at his hands. She rolled with it, swinging her leg around and sweeping him to the ground. The second part of the move didn't go nearly as well; she tried to keep a foot on his chest, keep him down, but he upended her onto the floor. Her head hit the table hard enough to make her see spots, and she yelped.
Kerr stopped. He didn't always know when to stop, she thought ruefully, but at least he stopped now. "You're a cold, heartless bitch, Solace." His voice was perfectly calm. A sociopath's voice, she thought with a shiver. "You're more like a machine than a real, human woman. I guess that's why you prefer them to us."
He was gone before she could stand up and open her mouth to retort, although the brief bout of physical combat had taken most of the fight out of her. Angrily she slammed the door behind him, remembering to actually lock it this time. The cell phone on her table began ringing almost as soon as she had.
"Solace…"
"Hey… " It was Tank. "I saw what happened. Are you okay?"
She sighed. Her head felt horrible, and she even felt a little nauseous. The ironically bad ending to an otherwise perfect evening. And no nap, either. Damn. "I'll be okay eventually. I guess since I'm going to be up for a while I might as well go over some stuff with you. About the only part out of that whole mess that I believe is that the Agents are watching Smith, which means I have to be even more careful."
"All right. We'll go over it now, in case you need anything… and then I'll bring you out, okay?"
Solace sighed. It had been a long night, and it was going to be an even longer day. Damn Kerr and his petty jealousies… why couldn't he just have left her alone? Why couldn't he have left her and Lily alone? She sighed. It was probably time to get down to business.
"All right."