Week 89: Two Women in a Tiny Submarine

Carmen wasn't a big talker, and after the mission, Silvia had observed she was not a big swimmer, fighter, pilot, or... well, many things that most agents were. She could hide, though, and knew her way around computers. And now she was lying down thoughtfully along the bottom of the submarine. There wasn't a ton of space, but she was somewhere looking at a computer in her own mind. After a long pause, she mumbled, "We smell."

"Huh?" Momentarily distracted, Silvia glanced at the new Agent. "Smell? Oh believe me, this isn't smelling."

Carmen tutted, and rocked her weight to another side of her body. "It is smelling. But it's no open old city sewer, yes." When she spoke in Mandarin, her accent was natural, fluent, without the thick Russian that pervaded her English. "Just because something is less bad than something else does not mean it is not bad... Aren't you rich, like the rest of them? What about agent strength deordorant? Like... Orpowder or Grittum?" Her nostrils flared. "After enough time in Oracle, you should be able to buy most of your problems away."

"Well, yes, but...this isn't even a particularly bad smell," Silvia tried. "I mean, I've smelled so much worse that it really doesn't register much. And there's not much point bothering with deodorant at the moment. I'm just about to go back to do some surveillance, so I don't want to smell too good. And it would only last a couple of days. Less."

Carmen rolled her eyes a little... But when she spoke she sounded speculative, thoughtful. "You all don't live like millionaires... Or terrorists. You hear so much about Oracle, and it's just a bunch of.. agents with problems who forget they could buy and sell thousands of people." She didn't sound particularly.. fond. Maybe Silvia's general quietude made her feel more willing to discuss the things happening in her head.

Silvia shrugged as best she could in the confined space. "I...don't want to buy and sell thousands of people. Or much of anything, really. I have what I need - at least, as far as money can buy. Those of us who are just in this for the money tend to leave fairly quickly once they've got a few million." There was a tone in her voice at that last statement that might have been scorn, or possibly disappointment.

Carmen sighed. "Not buying people doesn't mean you can't buy people. That's my point, agent, you forget." She rocked against the side of the tiny ship, but not much. She gently touched the rebreather that was around her neck. "And there is nothing wrong with leaving when you no longer need to stay. Most people would relish the chance to try to earn a few million and leave." The tone of her voice suggested that she was probably not one of them.

"Yes, most people might," Silvia replied, a note of irritation detectable in her voice, though it didn't appear to be directed at Carmen. "But Agents aren't most people. We shouldn't leave a corporation just...because we can." She hesitated, aware that Carmen probably didn't want a lecture on Agent morality and that anyway, she wasn't very good at giving such lectures. "Sorry, I...never mind. I...anyway, money's not that important. Not to me, anyway."

"That, at least, I can respect.. Agents are just not people. but you should not forget how much money you have. Wearing a dress that is more than I have ever earned before Oracle, more than four generations of Carmens have earned in a lifetime." She huffed slightly, and then relaxed. "But I guess there are other reasons why people are.. in Oracle." She let those last few words trail off hopefully.

"Yes. Yes there are." Silvia left it there - she didn't trust Carmen nearly enough to start talking to hear about her reasons for joining Oracle yet.

Carmen didn't reply for a long time. When she finally spoke, the disdain was far from her voice. "How did you.. come to the corporation? ...When did you?" She sounded almost hesitant, as if she was worried about the answer.

Silvia hesitated. She had tried to close this off, and she still didn't want to just tell Carmen her life story. There was something about the other woman that made her uncomfortable. But, on the other hand, she had to say something.

"I used to work for Shinjitsu," she said, carefully. "Spent a long time out in South America for them. Mapping the wilds. Then when I came back...things had changed. They had changed. They just...didn't treat me right. So...I left. And Oracle picked me up."

"Nng." Carmen grunted her understanding, and let silence fill the ship. Well, as close as silence could be, with the motor going and water rushing around the mini-submersible. Eventually she asked softly, "How did they find you?"

"I don't know," Silvia replied. "I just got an email when I stopped over in Seoul. The CEO never said how they found me." She seemed entirely comfortable with that. "Why do you ask?"

"..I wondered. I wondered if anyone applied or if we were all.. found." This was not something she seemed happy to talk about, and if Silvia glanced over, she would see the grimness on her face. "You, I get. Some agent who spent their lives killing BIOs in the wilderness like Gril Barton, yeah okay. But a journalist? A spire brat from an agent prep school? They are as common as street meat vendors." She sighed.

For a moment, Silvia was silent, doing nothing but piloting the sub and thinking over Carmen's words. Eventually, though, she spoke.

"Most of us...or, at least, a lot of us...we seem to come to Oracle because we...have nowhere else to go. I did, Fenris did, Hugo did...the CEO seems to find a lot of us like that."

Carmen's brow furrowed. The more she talked, the more relaxed her accent was. Natural. "Is there anyone who wasn't.. displaced or between corporations?" She seemed very concerned, but wasn't looking at Silvia. Her eyes were on her phone. Close to, her skin was dirty but very youthful.

"I'm...not sure," Silvia admitted. "I mean, some people...I know they left their corporation, but I don't know whether they were planning to join Oracle or not. Like Dani. Others...others I just don't know about. Never really asked. Amets, Karishma...even Coraline or Shinobu." She shrugged. "No reason to. The CEO trusts them."

"Besides an offer of employment, do they have any reason to trust him?" Her voice was grim as she asked the question. The hacker didn't seem to expect an answer.

"He's...the CEO," Silvia said, a little hesitantly. "We have to trust he knows what's best for Oracle."

Carmen was quiet for a few minutes, looking at the screen of her phone. It was unlikey she got service down here. Eventually the screen lit up, and she flicked her thumbs rapidly back and forth as colors flashed around the screen. A game. She appeared to be good at it. "Corporations don't care about people. They don't care about agents. They care about.. investments. Agents are investments." She tutted. "And with us, we invest in ourselves. Corporations care in the bottom line... We cannot get much more bottom than this."

"Uh...right." Silvia sounded a little puzzled. "That's...that's one way to look at it." She wasn't really watching Carmen, keeping her eyes fixed on the seascape around her.

Carmen sighed. She continued playing the game. Just at the edge of hearing, it made tiny tinkling noises as she scored points. "It's hard to focus beyond rust spots, bioboils, firework carcinoma, sunken towns, relocation, murder, slaughter, the Urumqi Shooting of 2437, the Gray Water incident and all that child leukaemia..." She trailed off, her mind on the pleasant topics of corporate mass murder, pollution, factory spawned cancers. She seemed miserable and almost.. guilty.

"Well...yeah, I guess...some of the corporations do do some...pretty...horrible stuff," Silvia agreed, somewhat half-heartedly. Then a thought seemed to strike her and she looked at Carmen with curiosity.

"Is...is that why you joined Oracle? To try and...expose that sort of thing?"

Carmen snorted, and after a second, actually laughed. It was fairly bitter at the end, though. "What good would exposing that do? Give some BS documentarian a hard-on while he writes a tear jerker to sweep this year's Realsies? I know about those and two dozen more and nothing changes..." She trailed off again, shaking her head. Pling plinkle bink!