There’s no way Lydia can casually walk into the residence while carrying this much paper, not least because she has to do it in three trips. She briefly considers asking for help from the porch cop, but decides not to push it. She walks past him, just a normal modern young woman carrying two boxes of paper, it’s what all the cool kids are doing these days—
“Heard you caught him!” the cop says.
She looks up and sees it’s a different cop than the one from this morning—she’s started noting their numbers. She’s not sure what she might do with this information but it feels like the kind of thing she ought to pay attention to.
“Sorry, what?” she replies, because she wasn’t really paying attention to what he said.
“The suspect.”
“Oh! Yeah, he approached me when I was—out.”
“You OK, though?” Porch cop seems genuinely concerned for her welfare.
“Fine, yeah. Absolutely fine.” These boxes are heavy and the cab’s waiting—
“Dumb mistake on his part to talk to you, the only one in the city who knows him.”
“I think that’s exactly why he talked to me.”
“Because he figured you’d help him out?”
“No no, he didn’t even know he was in trouble. He just wanted to say hello.”
The cop shrugs. “Some people are good at acting innocent. Some even convince themselves they are. Let’s hope he’s our guy.”
“Well, we’ll see,” says Lydia meaninglessly to bring the conversation to an end, and she enters the residence. Madison isn’t here, thank fuck, so Lydia puts her boxes down and heads back to the cab for the rest—only to find the cop has brought them in for her. She thanks him, he nods and returns to the porch, where no doubt he’ll report her box-related activity to his superiors.
You’ve been gone a long time, says Fitz as Lydia carries the last of the boxes into her room.
Yeah, it’s been quite a day, says Lydia, trying to remember which of the things buzzing around her head happened today and which of them happened yesterday: to her surprise she realizes they all happened today. Fitz perceives time very differently than she does because he doesn’t have access to the constant updates humans take for granted: he absorbs events in larger packages, not the data plankton she’s used to. Time isn’t a constant, and for some reason humans have worked hard to make it feel like it’s passing faster—but to Lydia, today seems to have lasted an eternity.
It takes awhile to put events in order for Fitz because Lydia keeps remembering more details and having to go back and fill them in, but it’s helping her get it straight in her own head.
What makes you think all this paper is important? asks Fitz.
I don’t know, but Jene thought it was important. Anyway it’s all I’ve got to go on at the moment. Lydia feels increasingly alarmed as she feels the truth of this: It is all she has to go on. She hasn’t found Jene, she’s just found this. I don’t know if any of it adds up to much, she admits. I mean that death threat wasn’t really anything, and nor was that professor woman, and now I’m looking for some girl who went mad and started inking out game code. I don’t know what I’m doing really.
Don’t underrate yourself, Lydia. You have good instincts.
Lydia needs to take advantage of Madison not being here, so she takes a box of the inked-out code down to the study and feeds it into Fitz’s scanner. He used the scanner constantly, and it’s a top-of-the-range model—he wrote a lot of his correspondence longhand, fed it in here and sent it over to the embassy’s typing pool. It scans in under 1.2 seconds with crystal clarity (in fact, drawing the next page into place takes far more time than the actual scanning) and can pull text with high precision. So it’s the best tool for the job she could ask for, but even so, one missing page or a blurred spot might make the entire thing fail. She doesn’t even know how much of the game is on these pages, or even if it will produce something functional without the elements—she may be able to draft in some generic art and sound, but she’s not sure how she’ll tell the game where to find it.
Do you mind if I sit on your sofa? Lydia asks. It’s strange speaking to Fitz down here: she hasn’t done so since he died, in case Madison overheard.
Why would I mind?
I dunno. It’s just … that was your place.
By all means sit there.
She sits on the sofa and starts looking through the other inkouts she brought down: the chat logs. When Madison comes back Lydia will sense her approaching and can grab the paper out of the scanner and pretend she came in here to read one of Fitz’s books—in fact, she gets one of the books down so she can have it on hand for this purpose. She places the box the code came in behind the arm of the sofa, out of sight: it would be easier to bring all the boxes down here, but a pile of boxes would be far more conspicuous, so she’ll have to bring them down one at a time. She doesn’t want to answer any questions about why she’s doing this.
The thing about this, she tells Fitz, is I get why Jene wanted to ink off the press release, because that explains what the game is.
Yes.
And presumably she wanted to ink off the code because she was looking for something in the game?
Or, says Fitz, because she was trying to preserve it?
It’s not really preserving it though, because this isn’t all of it. If she wanted to preserve it she could’ve just burned a copy onto an imager, that would work.
The curious thing is, inking it off is exactly what I would do. Maybe she just didn’t trust digital media?
But why keep all this chat? says Lydia, running her thumb across the edges of the pages. There’s loads of it. Maybe if I knew anything about coding I might get why it’s important.
I’m afraid I won’t be much help, Fitz replies. It’s all a mystery to me.
Lydia starts reading the pages—not every word obviously, or even most of the words, but glancing down each page and taking in what they’re about. The deeper she goes into them the more baffling in-jokes and office politics she finds: it’s like being a temp at the edge of a workspace, not really part of the team, hearing everything but unsure if she’s allowed to join in. It’s clear they all work remotely and rely on this chat to connect them—and accordingly this can’t be the complete chat log, there’ll be far more than this. Someone—Jene? or someone else?—has curated it. So what were they trying to keep?
Lydia’s about a third of the way in, explaining the contents to Fitz as she goes, when she starts to grasp the story underlying it. She becomes so absorbed in it, she barely wonders why Madison hasn’t yet returned. She pauses only to feed more paper into the scanner, or occasionally to fetch another box from upstairs.
The team’s boss is a French guy called Jules who takes the ironic xenophobic jokes of his team with good humor—but suddenly one day Jules is gone. No one knows why he’s quit. There’s talk he might have been forced out, or resigned on a point of principle. What no one can believe is he appears to have handed over the ayaies that do a lot of the rote work of the operation, which he personally holds the patents on. The project will continue without him. A newly installed manager passes down decisions without getting involved in less formal group chat.
The tone of the chat is far more businesslike from this point on. Some of the team note their queries up the chain have gone unanswered. Some have been given whole chunks of code to insert without being told what it’s for. They’re puzzled playtesting is happening without their consultation. They’re all being required to work punishingly long hours.
But this story lacks an ending. It’s half a story, or maybe two-thirds. As the pages dwindle, Lydia fights to hold the picture of it all in her head. Several of the team have left under a cloud and the game, though it’s coming together, no longer generates the excitement it did. Everyone just wants it to be over.
On the last page, Lydia finds a message from one of the senior designers, a woman called Paz:
So I was playtesting the Shopping Mall Siege sidequest and used the jerry-rigged pay phone you find there, because you know that’s been buggy, and I heard these overlapping voices and I thought great, now it’s gone buggy in a whole different way. One of the voices was meant to be there but the other one was like narration and didn’t seem to connect to anything in the game, so I figured a sound file had been copied in by mistake or something and I logged it, though whether they take action on bugs or not seems totally random now. Kept playing, finished the quest, mostly everything looked solid.
Then I logged out of the game and went to make myself some soup and, like, I don’t know if you ever get intrusive thoughts? I used to get them a lot but my medication dampens them down these days. But they just started up, random stuff, I couldn’t focus on anything. It took me an hour to think straight again afterwards. I can’t explain how disturbing it was. Thing is, the thoughts didn’t seem like they were in my voice, if you see what I mean? They were in the voice I’d heard in the game, the buggy voice on the phone. I was gonna report it but then I thought: What if this is exactly what the game’s meant to do?
Fuck it, I’m out of here. I can’t keep working on this thing. And I strongly advise all of you not to play it.
Lydia reads this page again, dizzy from absorbing it all while explaining it to Fitz, and lays her head on the arm of the sofa, thinking: Maybe this story lacks an ending because it hasn’t happened yet?