Lydia has had about five hours’ sleep when Madison sends the domestic up to wake her because she wants help with some correspondence. Talking to Madison has made Lydia realize Fitz was a man of few words, or at least a man capable of restricting himself to a few words. Madison thinks aloud constantly, largely not expecting any replies, but whenever Lydia tunes out and goes on her scroll Madison will abruptly address a question to her and then get cross when she has to repeat herself. In these snatched moments Lydia does manage to go on Booth’s homeroom on the NYNU site, where she finds a list of office hours. Any students can come and see her at these times. A perfect opportunity for Lydia to bluff her way in … and it’s slipping away. Booth’s only office hour this week starts at eleven o’clock, which is in eight minutes.
Lydia’s attention is called back to Madison, who has questions about Fitz’s role in the bid to bring the Winter Olympics to Vermont, and also questions about what the Winter Olympics is and what it’s for. Lydia pretends to know less about this subject than she does because she needs to get out of here and get down to NYNU.
I could really use a break, she says after explaining what a biathlon is. And she does need a break, she’s absorbed a lot of words in a short space of time and feels completely smashed.
Madison reluctantly accepts Lydia will be afunctional if this continues much longer.
Cheers, Lydia says as she clambers down from the chair and puts her feet on the floor.
Where are you going?
Fresh air? Lydia takes a step towards the door.
You’re standing on the paperwork!
Sorry—
Lydia steps back, falling against the chair and knocking it over, before landing on her arse. I’m alright, she says as she picks herself up off the floor. I’m fine. She carefully makes her way to the door, keeping to the edges of the room and holding on to the bookshelves for balance.
NYNU is located in what used to be the Consulate General of France, along with a neighboring building that was probably an apartment block. Lydia hurries into the lobby shortly before midday, drinking a can of Wired she bought from a vending machine in the hope it might sober her up, and is confronted with security gates, which she should have anticipated. Yet looking to her right she sees a series of terminals which claim to offer instant access to the university in return for payment. Turns out it’s possible to take classes on a pay-as-you-go basis, then cash in any credits you earn for a degree: They offer “fractional degrees” after as little as one class and a one-hour assessment. No previous qualifications are required. Lydia realizes these are aimed at tourists, allowing them to boast a “degree” from a New York university in exchange for the same time and money they’d spend going to a museum. Frame it and put it in your hallway. It’s a pretty good grift.
Lydia selects a fractional degree in American literature and pays the fee. The terminal captures an image of her while processing her application, then a message flashes up saying YOU’VE BEEN ACCEPTED! and her student idee card is spat out into the tray at the bottom. The hologram of her looks dreadful, she’s all sweaty and red-faced from rushing over here, but she tells herself nobody’s going to look at it: her bioprint is on the university’s records, the card is just another souvenir for tourists. Sure enough, when she approaches the security gates they open for her without any need to wave the card.
When Lydia reaches the English department on the fifth floor of the neighboring building, it’s 11:49. The door of Prof. Booth’s office is closed and she appears to be with a student: their muffled voices can be heard inside. One other student, a skinny, smartly dressed young man with an extremely weak jawline, is waiting his turn. This is promising. Lydia joins the end of the queue.
The minutes pass.
A loud wailing sound comes from within the office. It’s not the voice of Prof. Booth, but the voice of the student she’s talking to. The wailing settles into snotty, shuddering crying, the sort where someone wants to get it under control but can’t.
The skinny student turns to Lydia and rolls his eyes. She makes a similar gesture in return as if she knows exactly what he means.
The student in the office cries on. The monotonous voice of Prof. Booth can be heard in the gaps between sobs. From what she’s seen of the woman, Lydia can’t imagine her being strong on emotional support, but eventually the crying ebbs away, replaced by sniffles and low muttering.
“This is bullshit,” the skinny student says to no one. “Office hours are for academic issues.” He makes a show of checking the time even though his only audience is Lydia.
Lydia also checks the time: it’s 11:54. “It’s fucking ridiculous,” she agrees, speaking in an American accent though she’s unsure why. Seems more … incognito or something? It’s wank, she decides, but she’s stuck with it now. She’s still drunk from this morning’s lengthy translation session and needs to interrogate her decisions more thoroughly. “Don’t these guys realize we’ve got places to be?”
“Exactly,” he replies, fidgeting. Then he checks the time again and storms away down the corridor with a stage whisper about how he pays his fees for contact time, not standing around in a fucking corridor time.…
A minute after he’s gone the office door opens and the weepy student emerges, looking hollowed out. He seems surprised to find Lydia there, like it’s only just occurred to him that anyone outside the door might be able to hear. Then he hurries away.
Lydia enters the office to find a tutting Prof. Booth directing her domestic to pick up the used tissues the weeping student has left scattered across the floor. The office is not at all like she expected a literary scholar’s to be: slick, white with hints of gray, very little color at all except for Booth herself, who is today wearing a purple dress of a very similar cut to the one she wore for the interview with Sheppard. Against the monochrome backdrop of her office it has a similar effect: she seems bold, larger than life. Lydia is surprised the purple seems to suit her just as well as the blue, before realizing Booth must have tweaked her skin tone to complement the dress. Just three items sit on the glass-topped desk: a screen, a dark gray stone bust of some old guy, and a box of tissues. The only shelving in the office is a small, three-tiered corner unit that holds no more than thirty books, half of which are by Booth herself.
“Are you the last one?” Booth asks without really looking at Lydia.
“Yes,” says Lydia, dropping the fake American accent and hoping Booth didn’t hear when she spoke in the hallway.
“I can give you four minutes, max. Turn off your cam please.”
Commercial models of glasses can easily be pinged to check if they’re recording, so the person they’re recording has the opportunity to withhold consent. Lydia wonders if it’s worth trying to get hold of a sprung pair that can’t be pinged.
“Sorry,” says Lydia, turning it off and sitting down. “I didn’t realize it was on.”
“I encourage my students to cultivate something called a private life. People used to have them, many years ago. And I don’t want anything I say in this room getting repurposed or decontextualized.” Booth looks Lydia full in the face for the first time and frowns. “You’re not a student here. But I know you. Where do I know you from?”
“I am a student here, actually.” Lydia holds up her new idee for Booth to see. “Just registered. So no need to call security.”
“I wasn’t going to.” She leans back in her high-backed chair and points at Lydia. “The cultural attaché’s translator.”
“That’s right.”
Booth nods. “It’s a terrible shock, what’s happened. It must have been only a few hours after we spoke.”
“It was. And yeah, it was a shock.”
“So you’re … taking a course here?” says Booth, looking at her curiously.
“Yes, I’m just … trying to keep busy and, er—”
“Why here?”
“Well, it’s a good university, isn’t it?” Lydia has no idea if it’s a good university but Booth is hardly likely to disagree. “Er, Professor—”
“Marcia, please.”
“Thank you”—Why are you thanking her? Shut up—“I didn’t know anything about you before we met, but last night I was thinking of signing up for this course and looked you up and found your view of my late boss was … not quite what you made it out to be when you spoke to him?”
Booth appears perfectly calm. “What did I make it out to be?”
Lydia can’t answer this question so she answers a different one. “I saw an interview you gave—”
“With that Sheppard guy?”
“Yeah.”
Booth shakes her head. “He misrepresented what I said, cut and smoothed it to hell. No real journalist would do that.”
Lydia doesn’t buy this: To her it felt like Booth was being given all the space she wanted to say her piece. But of course she’d say that’s what Sheppard wanted the audience to think. These things just go round and round and who the fuck knows what’s true. But: “Why didn’t you challenge it?”
Booth snorts. “You ever tried invoking Good Faith?”
“I did once, yeah.” Sometimes people generate fakes from her feed—sometimes not even people, ayaies churn out vids of her saying words culled from old movies or articles or chat archives—to support some stupid bait about the Logi. Usually they come and go and it doesn’t bother her. But there was one where someone had her talking about books like she just hadn’t understood them, like she thought To Kill A Mockingbird was about an actual mockingbird, stuff like that, making her look really thick, and it circulated quite a bit. That was when Fitz suggested she lodge a complaint under the Good Faith laws.
“Did it work?” asks Booth.
“Yeah. But it was a huge hassle, I had to give them loads of evidence.”
Booth shrugs. “I don’t have that kind of time.”
Lydia’s hackles rise at the implication her time is less valuable than Booth’s, but she lets it slide. “I looked at some other things you wrote though—”
“Yes,” Booth says, a tone creeping into her voice as one might use to a foolish child. “I’ve often taken a critical view of the Logi and how they operate, as is my right. Sorry but I don’t see your point, and my office hour is now up, so—”
“OK,” says Lydia, deciding to deploy a tactic she’s not completely sure about, but she can’t come out and accuse Booth of killing Fitz because she’ll sound insane, and this is the best idea she’s got. “The real reason I came is the police suspect me of killing Fitz—”
“You mean Fitzwilliam?”
“Yes, I always called him Fitz—and the thing is, I was in the building when he died, and there’s no record of what happened and who else was there, and I can’t remember anything.”
Booth raises her eyebrows. “Can’t remember?”
“Yes, the translation process—”
“Ah, the intoxication thing.” She leans back in her chair. “Wow. That’s inconvenient. What does it have to do with me?”
“I don’t actually remember speaking to you at the banquet either.”
Booth laughs. “Oh.”
“But we did speak?”
“Yes. How did you know, if you can’t remember?”
Shit. “Er, someone else who was there said they’d seen Fitz talking to you. And I just, er … like, how did he seem to you? Like, did he seem worried about anything?” She’s fishing here—doesn’t know what she’s looking for.
“I’m afraid I find his people very hard to read. May I say, you didn’t strike me as excessively intoxicated, I thought you were very professional.”
“Thank you, but unfortunately I need people to believe I was intoxicated and really don’t remember anything, and I’m not just making it up because I don’t have an alibi.”
Booth gives her a sympathetic look. “You’re in a heap of trouble, aren’t you?”
Lydia nods. She has slightly exaggerated how much trouble she’s in, but she is in trouble. She’s hoping Booth might inadvertently reveal something, like maybe let slip she knows Lydia didn’t kill Fitz because she has some idea who did.
“I can think of someone the police might want to talk to, in regard to all this,” Booth says.
“Really?” Fucking hell. Lydia hadn’t expected a name—but she runs with it.
“I had a student a couple years back,” Booth continues. “Quite a good student. Used to come to me in sessions like this, wanted to talk about my work on the cultural interface. I encouraged her to become a postgrad, but she had a breakdown in her final year and never completed. I kept in touch, telling her we were keeping her place open and her credits on record. Told her she could get a B point nine two if she just went through the formal exit process. But she never replied—until I did that interview with Sheppard.”
“Ah.”
“She assumed I was into all his dumb conspiracy theories, and she started sending me more of them.”
“Like the one about them erasing all those texts?”
“Much more far-out than that. Sheppard’s thing is an overblown and very simplistic version of a thing that’s really happening. But the stuff I was getting from this student was like, nanobots controlling our brains, First Contact happened in the 1980s and it’s been covered up, the Logi caused climate change…”
“And you don’t agree with that stuff?”
Booth laughs shortly. “I’m a critic, not a crackpot.”
“So you’d let me know who this student is?”
“On two conditions,” says Booth, tapping the desk so the interface for her screen appears.
“Right.”
“First, don’t tell anyone I gave you this, it’s against data laws. Second, she’s troubled and may not be in a great state of mind, and if the police approach her they have to do so carefully, right?”
“Sure, of course, yeah.”
Booth flicks the contact card across to Lydia and it appears in the corner of her glasses. It includes a name—Jene Connor—and a last known address.
“I hope she’s OK,” Booth says. “I feel like I should have done more for her. I told myself I had enough responsibilities already, and if she was no longer a student, she wasn’t my problem. But if she’s gotten into anything bad, I’ll feel partly to blame.”