The Girl Who Chases the Wind

Chapter 11: Mari and Kala

With a flourish, another girl joined the proceedings. She was dressed in shorts and a top much like Mari wore this very day. They got her hair perfectly and her face. In fact, it wasn’t even an approximation. It was Mari from her scowl to her figure. Before I could say anything, in Mari fashion, she took off like a bolt fired from a crossbow over the uneven ground. The other girl called soundlessly after with her hands cupping her mouth and tried to keep up with Mari. Before long, they were both lost to the mists.

Edgar joked, “Sorry…she likes to run.”

Clearly, that was Mari. But who was the “someone shared”? Someone Edgar was told about? Too vague. I sensed that Edgar knew her name but if I asked then I was likely to get evaded again. Instead, I asked, “Could you bring the girl who wasn’t Mari back?”

Silence drifted over the screen, the oppressive kind of silence which makes ears ring as it swells. The clouds took on a noticeable, darker pall. It was Edgar’s turn to clear his throat as he replied, “If you like…”

Mari shadowed the other girl when she returned. They walked together, sometimes in step. They were different in subtle ways beyond their attire or their demeanor, but they still looked so similar.

I was about to ask more when the door to the room opened and Feldon reentered. By the time I was able to look back to the screen, they’d both crossed back to the left edge of the frame from which they’d emerged.

Feldon apologized for the distraction and observed the screen. His eyes lingered suspiciously, but he quickly complimented Edgar on the lovely background. The fog rolled in a little deeper, obscuring some of the details.

I left a note about Edgar, said my goodbyes, and rejoined Dr. Feldon.

After some quiet walking, I thought it would be fine to ask Feldon, “You like that one? Edgar sure can make some interesting places.”

He coughed and gave a little bob of his head before telling me, “He didn’t have to make that one. It’s a real place. It’s lovely. Wonderful memories.”

I gathered that it was a forest seeded by the government in some area of Europe as part of an expanded park. And that was all I got from him. I made a note and let him take me to that ‘worrier’ I’d been promised.

The room was in the rear of the main ranch building at a small off-shoot from the main hallways. Feldon led me into a small room lined with servers as thin as paper. I’d seen newer ones before, but these weren’t bad. The room ran cold with what felt like a cross breeze off a fridge blowing all the time.

The ‘worrier’ was seated in a small, wooden chair before a pale blue computer console. It was old-school, even more so than mine, dependent more on the keyboard than any other kind of control. I narrowed my eyes as the worrier turned to face me with a slim hand hanging limply out.

He had breasts. They were pretty obvious through the pale, glossy tan of a collared shirt. Their voice drifted between male and female with a rough drone which made me land on male before flittering over to female when it surged up to a high pitch. His face was smooth and glossy, especially with a sheen like sweat despite the chill of the room. His hips flared and he was several inches shorter than me. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just put out my hand and he took it. His fingers felt cold.

“Logan Harper.”

“Kala Vorpan.” The name rolled off with a soprano squeak like the introduction of some D&D character. I had the vague suspicion his/her name was as much of an alias as my own.

Clasping his hands, Feldon began, “Can you tell my friend here about what you do for the Mantlemay Project?”

In twitching reflection of Feldon’s clasped hands, ‘Kala’ interlaced a set of fingers and then stretched them behind her. It didn’t look comfortable, but Kala didn’t wince. Then, Kala spoke.

“Troubles. All troubles. Coding. Fixing. Failing. Fixing. Knowing all goes wrong. Just prep for. Invest problems before problems. Check background new people. Check labs. Information lossless no noise. Get ulcers.”

I just stood there for a moment trying to parse all Kala had just spewed at me. I could only offer, “What?”

Kala sheepishly gave a bow of the head. “Sorry. Words. My head. Jumpy. I worry. I fix. I worry more.”

That didn’t really help my understanding. But I’d been able to parse that particularly staccato and ‘jumpy’ article proposal yesterday, so I could handle this.

I just didn’t know what to ask this little bundle of net nerves. Feldon put forth a question to help, “What do you worry about with Memetic Crystalline?”

Kala’s eyes bulged as ‘she’ gripped ‘her’ hands in front of ‘her’. Had to be double-jointed or some other sort of weird joints.

“Grey goo. Containment fail. Crystal earth. Violent injury. Command override. Self-awareness. Mind-controlled human avatars. Memory failure. Conversion failure. Nano accidental blood-brain incursion. Shock trauma. Magnetized mutation. Puncture bleed out. Failure analogue protein leading to immune attack. Overwrite errors. Seizure damage to crystal….offhand. More saved.” Kala gestured to the computer with a saved file entitled “Memetic Crystalline - Possible Faults”. Kala definitely seemed thorough, if you could follow chaotic streams of thought. Feldon flashed Kala a look and ‘she’ offered to send me the file directly to my personal device.

That was all Kala said about Memetic concerns. Additionally, Kala had come up with contingency plans in the event of each possible scenario. Some of them amounted to “delegate to outside authorities”. Others, Feldon explained, had been implemented as fail-safes.

I would say that Kala seemed skittish but, before we left, ‘she’ rattled off a series of possible problems within the ranch’s computer grid along with an extensive list of ways a person could die from an improbable micro-meteorite brain strike to an only relatively rare aortic dissection. Each burst out with the same staccato. However, I noticed ‘her’ mood relaxed with the length of the list rather than adding anxiety to ‘her’ demeanor.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

As Kala flipped a bit of hair over an ear, my thoughts turned to how I might consider him/her. While I loathed simple gender binaries, I wasn’t sure how to ask Kala one way, the other, or neither…especially since it might draw attention to my own ambiguity.

I let Kala simply be Kala so far as I was concerned and I let Feldon lead me away. Already Kala was back to work on what I assumed would be the next worry.

It wasn’t long before I received the file. It was pages upon pages of running, truncated sentences. I brushed my cheek. Feldon noted it was lunchtime break but didn’t present me with any teasers of our afternoon session.

I’d seen a decent overview of cases and infrastructure. It would be stretching to investigate beyond tomorrow. At the same time, I still had so many questions, along with the name ‘Mari’ holding the edge of my tongue. That said, this was a job and I’d barely touched on what my patron wanted of me. No clear questions of corruption. I wasn’t even sure on the media. And as for the dirt…

Feldon receded as I rechecked my device. The file sent by Kala. In a separate tab, I opened up the patron offer. I frowned.

Patron offers were typically anonymous, ghostwriting for all forms of publication. They were filtered through my publication client who represented me online and weeded out illiterate twelve-year-old conspiracy theorists with impossible requests to find noted international fugitive, Simona Hatch. If I clicked the upfront payment on those then I’d likely just get pulled into some pyramid program or worse. This one claimed to be from a legit online publication which I’d done regular work with, the main reason I didn’t question it.

I sighed through my nose and tried to recall the last service station I’d seen on the way. I returned to the parking lot. There were a few more cars than when I arrived but no one near my spot. The air felt thicker than in the morning with Mari. If this wasn’t a desert then I would’ve expected fog. As it was, I noticed a gray, crinkled edge to the sky.

I gave a quick glance to the track. No one. I got in my car.

After some searching, I found the place I wanted. It was several miles out. I stopped to recharge and made use of their pathetic wireless connection. It was downright turn of the century with kilobytes crawling by. Still, it was enough to get a message to my client.

I asked, “Confirm message by patron” and sent along the original text. There had been a time when I sent out such messages as routinely as breathing. But, for all my other paranoias, I’d come to trust my client’s vetting system such that I didn’t nag them about what was their primary job.

I munched on a few small snacks and waited. It wasn’t too hot. A light breeze fluttered from shifting directions. It pushed the warmest air on my face and scattered pebbles against my shoes.

The reply came quickly. They confirmed it was a valid patron offer from the right place. No funny business. I expected that. As confirmation they sent me the registration ID along with the IP and a few other identifiers they used. Most importantly, they sent me the trackmark.

Once used by online intelligence agencies during a darker age of the web, the infrastructure was still in place for trackmarks. Registrations could be faked. IPs could be dynamic, confused, or spoofed. But a trackmark told no lies. I signed up for it with my client when I first started taking offers. Trackmark usage was right in the patron application for my work. I knew it scared away some patrons, but it made me feel a little safer. I’d only asked for a patron’s trackmark once before.

Carefully, using the programs I had on my device, I went through the registration and IP checking. I turned up the prestigious online magazine I’d been published in several times, which had been among the last holdouts of physical publication. I went to trackmark.

The initial results were inconclusive, which was a kind of confirmation in itself. It could’ve easily come from that magazine or from someone else. But if it did come from that magazine, then I could think of a few reasons why I couldn’t just track it back to them. Sighing and rotating my head, I dialed a friend who had experience in this sort of thing. I’d met him through a prior story. Fighting my connection, I managed to send him all the relevant information. And I let him work.

I expected an answer in ten minutes. It turned out it took him half an hour before I had an answer.

“Your guy is not playing around. Actually, a pain in the ass but I got them.”

I soon had the correct contact information. I clicked over to the other tab and read. I confirmed with my friend that his search was correct.

The file Kala had just sent me and the patron offer to write a story about the Mantlemay Project had come from…exactly the same place. Maybe even the same Kala but my information wasn’t that exact.

I clenched my jaw and considered the possibilities. I’d been hired for a fluff job with the request to get dirt when my target was actually clean. I’d been hired because Feldon wanted to call attention to the clinic without directly inviting a reporter. Or he wanted to document something or put it to rest. Or Kala or someone else at the ranch was trying to expose stuff Feldon didn’t want me to know. The explanations I could imagine were varied but unflattering to Feldon. I clenched my device in my hand and got back in my car.

As I headed back to the ranch, I noticed the edge of the sky had gotten dark, pregnant with rain.

A storm was coming.