Sextday, Guire 29th 067.M42
Today marks the end of the first week of doubles with no rest day. Twenty hour shifts. It's not even worth the time it takes to try to get home. By the time I do, I'd get maybe an hour or two sleep before I'd have to turn around and come back again. A lot of us have taken to bringing in sleeping sacks, and a few who did minimum service in the PDF have brought in their sleeping kit. You'll find people passed out in the dining hall, in the halls, in the office infirmary, sleeping where they fall.
Personally I've found myself a rather comfortable space between the unsecured data stacks. There's a few of us in the stack room actually, but the noise from the stacks and the size of them makes it more like a series of little cubbies. It, well it could be worse. With a sleeping sack, a pillow, the warmth from the stacks and the exhaustion that comes from twenty straight hours of staring at a cogitator screen, it's pretty easy to get yourself a good six hours of sleep. Most people were also smart enough to bring a couple of changes of clothing, and we've had a few people gather up everyone's worn things and take them to a laundromat in their down time, eschewing sleep for a day to ensure that everyone who needs it has clean clothing to wear.
It's kind of touching, the way we're all coming together in this. I haven't witnessed any arguments or fighting, there's been no foul humours or tension. Everyone seems to understand that they have to do what they have to do, and we get on with it. I guess it's pragmatism on most peoples' parts. If we all pull together and burn through this work, then perhaps we may only have to suffer through it for another week or so.
I've tried to make sure I call Mum at least once a day, either in my lunch break or sometime after I've managed to get some dinner into me. She says that Mei's doing well, she really seems to have settled into a routine, and she's even starting to take daytime naps without needing someone sitting with her until she goes off to sleep. But she's still not able to settle at night, poor little bird.
The Magisters finally came back to us with some news, though as I expected it really wasn't anything of use. They say that Daisy left her hab on the 4th, pict footage shows her leaving the lobby of Elysian Heights and heading out into the street. They think from the fact that she had some shopping bags with her that she might have been heading for the local market, and they managed to trace her route part of the way there, but at some point between her hab and the market, she must have made a different turn or got caught up in a crowd and just… vanished. They weren't able to find any other pict footage, even expanding their search out to the several streets around where she'd last been seen. She didn't seem to be acting in a way congruent with trying to run away or escape from something, so their best theory is that she met with some foul play. But they've also decided because there's no definitive proof, they're shelving the investigation. Something about operational limitations, funding and personnel. I have to admit I'd tuned out by that point while Mum was telling me. I didn't really want to hear that they were just going to give up on her like that.
I know that thousands of people go missing every day. They run away, they run into… problems. They're attacked or have an incident or fall ill and end up dying. But it just… It feels so wrong to turn around and say "Well, we know that she's gone missing, and it seems like there could be something afoot here, but we just don't have the funding to do anything about that. Sorry!"
I wonder if they'll let me have the last footage they have of her… if they're not going to look for her, maybe we can. Maybe we can do something so my niece doesn't have to grow up never knowing what happened to her Mum.
I don't know.
Thought for the Day: Death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain.
