A Brief Conversation

Again, she was quiet, but this time it was the right sort of quiet. It was security quiet, the silence of an agent who was weighing the options before them and deciding which of them best fit the needs of the situation and the goals of the Foundation. Laine's feelings about Alex - whatever she might have defined them as - still hadn't gone away, but she had compartmentalized them once again, put them into a tidy little box until someone came along and upended things again.

Dr. Redd was acting like a researcher, analyzing the situation in the way that researchers did. There were many questions about what had happened, why it had happened. There were things that Dr. Redd didn't know, and he didn't like not knowing.

Sometimes researchers were not very good at not asking questions. Eventually, Laine shook her head a little bit. "I do not think it would help. If SV-3 was involved in the decisions, then there was a reason for it. Not being privy to information does not mean it doesn't exist. Many things are classified because they are hazardous. The Foundation makes the best decision it can at the time, and sometimes that is detrimental to some people or anomalies. I... don't like it, because it's Alex. But I wouldn't feel that way if it were anyone else, and that means this is an irrational response. I will trust the judgment of the security council as in the best interests of the Foundation."

Laine considered this statement and decided it was going to have to belong there. She might not have liked it, but that didn't mean there was something wrong with the statement itself. Her expression drifted for a moment, considering the man before her - the researcher.

"Perhaps, though, you can tell me what you find out, since you are going to decide to ask him anyway."
 
Last edited:
There was the security agent. Deliberation, then solution, and it was arguably the less interesting solution, but she already knew that, and she knew he knew that. He tried to be sheepish when he smiled at her last comment, but it turned out more jovial. It didn’t take anomalous ability to guess what he’d do.

"I’m just saying, he wasn’t on the Council yet," he said, raising his hands a little in joking defense. "And he’s given me a side project that overlaps with it! It’s not my fault if he gave a researcher something to make him ask questions."

Or, well, he’d given a project to Isaac that involved the researcher asking questions. That didn’t change the current outcome. He sighed again, but it was the winding-down sigh of someone who’d gotten excited and needed to be serious again, not the deep breath of someone breaking bad news or itching for an answer that was just out of reach.

"I’ll put it in the report. We can see what happens from there when we get to it." The finality of that statement would keep him from bugging Laine any more than he already had. His smile had returned when he looked her full in the face, although maybe it was meant to hide the lingering concern behind his eyes.

"Thank you, Laine. I promise I’ll keep you in the loop about this. I know how hard this was for you. This has been really helpful, I mean it."

It hadn’t given him answers, but it had given him questions, and questions were a great place to start.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Dr. Redd did not argue with Laine's assessment that he was going to bring the matter up with SV-3 anyway. Laine was not particularly surprised by this. It had not been a particularly challenging analysis - Dr. Redd was a known quantity, after all, and most of the parameters she understood for him indicated he would dig further into things until after the point at which it was good for him.

Perhaps this also applied to this conversation, but they seemed to have gotten through it intact. At least there would be a report. Laine appreciated that. It made things more worthwhile, if there were reports about them. Then this was not just a conversation, but something official, and that made it better somehow. She nodded acceptance at his thanks, though she was not sure whether or not they fit. He seemed to think they did, though, and he was the location manager. Laine wondered a bit which parts of the conversation had been most helpful, and to whom, but perhaps that was another conversation for another time, as this one seemed to be drawing to a close.

Laine glanced down at her desk again. Her pen was leaking.

It had never done that before. She'd had it for fourteen years. It had died once, but it had gotten better.

"Dr. Redd? There may be other situations which require the Foundation's attention at the moment."
 
Last edited:
Cody blinked at the odd response, then followed Laine’s gaze to the pen she’d set down. It was damaged.

Laine’s things didn’t get damaged. That wasn’t a thing Cody had ever heard of. He wasn’t her researcher, so he didn’t know everything about her or that pen. But– he was a researcher, and he knew Laine. His mind switched gears as his eyes flickered back to her.

"Uh, Laine? What does that mean?"

The question slipped out before he could stop it. He considered taking it back, but decided against it. It was a perfectly reasonable question given the circumstances. And it wasn't like anyone else belonged here right now to ask it.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Dr. Redd asked her what this meant. That was a very good question for a researcher to ask. Laine considered the pen, the situation, and the inquiry, and came up with the answer.

"I don't know."

It was not necessarily the most helpful answer in terms of research - or perhaps it was, because it established a parameter to Laine's knowledge base. That wasn't an answer to this question, but it might have been an answer to another question that was to be asked at another time.

Laine watched the pen a little more. Sometimes it was hard to try to push her anomaly into doing things. It was always there, but it didn't always do what people would have liked for it to do. Laine had gotten quite a lot better about not doing things that people did not want her to do, but that did not always mean that she could do what they asked.

Still, it had been a very good question. And she liked Dr. Redd.

"I think..." A pause. That wasn't right. She needed to work through it. Usually she would have done so silently, but... Dr. Redd had talked to her about Alex. He had been the first one to do so in a long time. The conversation had been sad, and it had hurt, and Laine missed Alex, but she had also realized that she missed talking about Alex. Maybe it had helped a little bit, just talking about it.

So, maybe just this once, she could try working through it out loud, like she had done for Alex, a long time ago when Alex had not-belonged here but been here anyway.

Besides, Alex would have liked to know. "No. I'm sorry. I shouldn't think. This isn't a thinking situation. My anomaly doesn't work by thinking about it. It works by knowing about it." Laine nodded a little to herself, organizing her thoughts. They were already very organized, but that didn't mean that she couldn't cross-reference them. Cross referencing was very useful.

"I know when I was very small and I didn't come apart, I came to the Foundation and a man gave me a pen and I gave him a Name. And he still has the Name and I still have the pen. The pen is leaking and that is very untidy, but so is he, which is sometimes necessary because you cannot write things down if you don't mark. This is more untidy than it should be. So that is not good. But the pen isn't dead, and I think the leaking is slowing down, so perhaps we shall see if it stops. And if the pen is dead when it does."
 
Last edited:
She didn’t know, but she did. She didn’t know about the question at hand, anyway – but she did know the pen, except the pen was an allegory, or maybe a metaphor, or maybe a metaphysic? That was the point where Cody stopped thinking about this kind of thing. He’d never been able to get into weird reality or magical shhhh–tuff. Like Names.

Instead of focusing on the thinking or the knowing or whatever Laine was doing, Dr. Redd focused on connecting the dots she laid out. She didn’t draw them because her pen was obviously leaking, but Cody flipped to a new page and scribbled his way through the thought process. Back when Laine came to the Foundation – she’d been here at L-14 from the start, because putting anohumans, even little anohumans, in any kind of city-storage environment was a bad idea for obvious reasons.

So who had Cody known at L-14 who’d said the word Name like that? Only one person. Or at least, only one person who’d died.

"Oh, [EXPLETIVE]." He blinked, then frowned. "I mean frick."

He stared at the pen. If it was an allegory-metaphor-simile-thing, then that meant someone important was doing something probably unsecure, which was usually fine, because half the council was researchers so it wasn’t their department to be completely secure, but given this was that Councilman, it was probably something bat[EXPLETIVE] crazy.

There was a moment of silence as Cody tried to actually come up with a manager-approval response, and not redactable expletives or ten billion questions at once, approximately.

"Soooo…" He tried to fill the quiet, because it might be fine for Laine but was only helping him come up with more questions he didn’t have the ability to answer, "There’s nothing we can do about it."

He sat back in the office chair, his own pen set aside so his free hand could tug at ACF-255. There were people he could tell, but nobody who could do anything, because the people who could do something would already know. He could tell Isaac, but that would just be another problem for Isaac, and he didn’t need anything else on his plate right now.

So that left Cody sitting with Laine to watch a pen leak and see if it died. Again.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Dr. Redd seemed to understand what Laine was saying, although it took him a little while. Laine generally thought that what said about things was perfectly clear, but she had been repeatedly and emphatically informed that this was not actually the case.

In this particular instance, it seemed that there was enough effective communication for Dr. Redd to figure out the situation. He had started taking notes, which Laine appreciated. It was good to know that someone was taking Note. Notes. That was a strange phrase to belong there. Laine didn't understand it, but had a feeling that she was not supposed to, and so she let that one go.

Dr. Redd had finished with what he was writing, and didn't ask a question. It was not a question, anyway, but Laine understood that it would have been a question if Dr. Redd were not the location manager, because this was a situation where the location manager was supposed to have the answer and not the question.

Laine understood that, and answered what hadn't been a question, because she could tell that it had wanted to become one. "I can't put things back together once they come apart." Laine considered the situation and what options were available.

"We could write a report." Reports were usually very tidy, though this one probably would not be. Still, they were important. Things were generally better when there was proper documentation.
 
Last edited:
She answered his nonquestion, which was considerate of her, because that resolved a few of the questions. She didn’t tell him to go tell someone else, which left other questions, and the conversation had gotten steered far away from his original situation. It could probably be included in his report, later, when he sent it to Jupiter, because it was either extremely relevant or a coincidence, and with anomalies it was usually hard to tell which.

"It might be better to wait on a report until after the situation’s done. So it has all the details." That was him definitely not avoiding writing a report, because he was definitely more responsible than that. Everything to do with relevance and answers. Not questions, about the pen at least– or, well, maybe just about the pen, because with the initial shock fading Cody was starting to dwell on the relevant versus coincidence category.

Maybe he could kill time by asking questions.

"Did Alex know – I mean, I’m sure she knew about the pen, but did she know about – what the pen represents?"

Was the pen synergy? Probably not, because Cody had a hard time believing that guy was capable of that, and because Laine had needed the pen to know if he was dead, unlike Alex, who he was pretty sure she knew was still alive somewhere. So if not that, was it just part of her anomaly, or a secret third thing?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
"It might be better to write an outline and rough draft in the interrim so that all the details are properly recorded," Laine countered. She was not precisely arguing with him. Laine was only stating a series of possibilities, with the full knowledge that Dr. Redd would not be interested in those possibilities, because his tendency to avoid paperwork until absolutely necessary was somewhat of a well-known quantity. It was, of course, entirely in character for Laine to support paperwork, in full and as soon as possible. It was not in character to do something so abstruse as tease someone, especially not a location manager, which was why she was definitely not doing that.

Another question came, and it was met with an exhalation that was almost a sigh. "The pen is not a representation, Dr. Redd. It is a pen." Pen or not, there was that hint of anomalous undercurrent in the way that she said the words that implied that whether or not it was representative, it was certainly important. It had meaning, even if it was not meaning. This made sense to Laine, but she was very literal at times.

"Alex... would have liked to know." A thoughtful sentence, one which carried the answer only tucked away. Laine shook her head. "She knew I had it. And she knew I always had it - but she did not know about this. I did not know back then, Dr. Redd. And I do not think it was quite so important until after she was lost."

Because there had been a time of silence, and even if Laine hadn't broken out of it on her own for quite some time, perhaps it was natural that she would have, in that time, tried to find something else to hold on to - anything else. Even something as small as a pen.

Or perhaps it was nothing like that at all, and the change had only come over time, as Laine herself grew and her anomaly grew with her.
 
Last edited:
He’d managed to render her explanation about outlines and drafts irrelevant by changing the subject, which he was going to count as a win, because he wasn’t going to be lectured about getting it done. Instead, he was going to be lectured about a pen, which he could think in her tone, because he could hear it, but he didn’t have an anomaly for that. He had an anomaly for pretending to be diseased.

"Right, counterargument, I can’t say it like that. The closest I can get is trying to explain it." It felt important to point that out to Laine, because she knew what she was capable of but she wasn’t always good with people. The very slight edge of sarcasm wasn’t completely intentional.

It did open him up to questions about Alex again – like whether, being Laines’ researcher, she could echo that tone. He wondered if she’d ever tried, like he probably would after this was done so he didn’t embarrass himself in front of Laine. But that was a curiosity question, not a relevant one, so he left it alone.

There was another curiosity question that might’ve been related to the pen, or to Alex, or to the original nonquestion. Cody didn’t know which, but as he looked at the pen, it did feel relevant.

"Does he know?"
 
Last edited by a moderator:
"Yes, but your explanation does not fit." It was possible that a better explanation fit, but Laine did not know what it was. Perhaps Alex would have, but Alex was not here. It was certainly a question for research, not for security. "Maybe you just need to find the right words? Would you like a dictionary?"

Perhaps, though, that was a research for another time. Dr. Redd had a question that was much more fitting for the current research, relevant to the pen and the situation that surrounded it. Was Strings aware of the situation, of what he had done? He had certainly understood about the Name, Laine had known that much even though she had been very small at the time.

"It is entirely possible, but not necessarily so." It was another way of saying that Laine didn't know the answer to that question, either. Strings knew many things, many of which he perhaps should not have - yet he was not omnipotent, and he had always thought Laine was not very interesting. Perhaps she had not been, when she had met him. Maybe that was because she had been very small at the time.

Sometimes, small things knew when to be quiet and uninteresting, after all.

"Perhaps not at this very moment, though." The pen seemed to have stopped leaking. Laine picked it up once again. There was no spilled ink on the desk, of course, because that would be untidy. Experimentally, she drew a small question mark on a piece of paper - the writing was faint, but it worked.

"Are we required to tell him?"
 
Last edited:
The pen had stopped leaking, and apparently hadn’t quite died, which was a relief for some reason. The guy that was the pen to Laine – he’d bench that subject for now, and didn’t even touch the idea of the dictionary – was a real piece of work, but he was also a Councilman, and had ended up there somehow. If they’d needed to replace him there would’ve been a lot of issues for a while while a level-1 location got readjusted. Again.

But he hadn’t died, and Laine had a question that Cody chewed on while taking another long drink.

"No."

He said it with a firmness that surprised himself, but didn’t take it back. Not just because of management, but because it was the right answer. He checked it, and then added the right explanation, because unlike Laine he needed to think about these kinds of things.

"I’ll tell Jupiter, because it’s part of the report I’m doing for him. And I’m sure Isaac will inform Dr. Hobbes so she can tell Leviathan since it’s part of their ethical research. But he’s clearly got other things going on at this very moment."

Pause. Curiosity again. He decided to follow through with it, this time.

"Unless you think he should know, because of– well, whatever that is." He gestured to the pen again without actually calling it anything, which might be worse, but was definitely less of a headache. Or at least a temptation.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Laine shook her head slightly. "I think if he does need to know, then SV-3 or Leviathan will certainly inform him." This wasn't the same as saying that she didn't think he needed to know, but that was a decision that Laine was very uncomfortable about making. This was why the Foundation had organization and order. There were people whose department it was to make those decisions, and Laine could trust that they would make the right ones. It wasn't her place to decide, nor should it have been.

She was, after all, an anomaly, and they were called the Anomaly Containment Foundation for a reason. Many anomalies were not supportive of the idea of being contained. Many anomalies were capable of lies and manipulation in order to get what they wanted. Just because Laine did not consider herself to be in either of those categories did not mean that the Foundation should take her word for it. As a security agent, she could assist the Foundation in carrying out its goals - but Laine was not and should not be the one who was determining what those goals were and what courses of action to take.

"I think writing a report is appropriate."

Of course, this was Laine. She always thought writing a report was appropriate.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top