Week 83: Meeting the new hacker

Carmen's reply was nigh on instant. The wording was comfortable, as if she very familiar with Mandarin.
I could do that, yes. But not today. On Wednesday? Coffee sounds fine.

See you there.

At three PM, Carmen showed up outside the small cafe. She walked around outside it, dressed masculine in a dark coat, warm gray hat, high collar covering her face... A small dufflebag--nothing as fancy as a muletech--was slung over her shoulder.

Five minutes before the appointed time, Carmen ducked into an alley and quickly changed into the dusty red jacket and hat combination that Fenris had seen her in a few weeks before. She walked in before Silvia did, or at least, before she saw saw Silvia go in.

Silvia arrived a couple of minutes after Carmen, glancing around a little nervously to locate the Russian woman. Once she saw her fellow Agent, she headed over to join her, a slightly hesitant expression on her face.

"Uh...hi," she tried. "I...it's good to see you. Sorry, I...I'm not good at introductions." She pulled out a seat and sat down across from Carmen, grateful to have something else to focus on doing for a second.

Carmen, already nursing something with a whipped topping, only offered a flicker of a smile. After a moment, she removed her hat and placed it on the long bench beside her. "They say I am not good at pleasantries. I am sure we will manage." Without the smears of ETE paint, she looked young, almost as young as Silvia looked. She was mousey, with clear blue eyes and fair skin. She even looked a bit Russian. "But don't worry. I have only been here a few moments."

Silvia nodded, a little relieved. "Okay, okay. That's...that's good." As one of the waiters scurried over with a smile on his face, she turned to him and said "I'll have the usual, please, Jong."

"So...uh..." she continued, turning to Carmen. She had arranged this meeting as much out of an obscure kind of guilt as anything, aware that she hadn't done very much when it came to greeting new Agents. "How are you...finding Oracle so far? It can be a bit...overwhelming."

"You hear about how rich Oracle agents are. But you don't really understand it until.. you see for yourself." She looked down at her coffee, and raised it in her small hands for a sip. There were red marks along the sides of her fingers, calluses, nothing painful. "I was not expecting the cyberwolf, either." There were some things that were on her mind, and these were the ones being spoken.

Silvia winced at the mention of cyberwolves and one hand automatically went to her throat, seeking reassurance that it was still there. "No one...cyberwolves are hard to anticipate," she managed. "They...they're faster than they should be. And...trust me on that."

She looked down at the table and finally lowered her hand before looking back towards Carmen. "And...yes, it's...it's hard to grasp. It never really...registered with me until I got paid for the first time. And that...that was an eye-opener."

"I have yet to be on an actual mission, but I have made more money than the history of my family combined." Her voice was strangely devoid of emotion as she spoke, the simple recitation of facts. Her eyes looked cloudy and dark, though. (Pass lying and acting by 1.) She continued to nurse her drink, and she sighed into the steam rising from below the creeem. "It still doesn't seem real. I could get everything I want and still have so much. But.. Mmmn, there's so much more than life than money."

Silvia glanced around as the waiter returned. "Thanks," she said, taking her coffee from him. As she put it down, Carmen could see that it was the cheapest one on the menu - the kind of synth-coffee that could be mistaken for over-bitter liquidised grit. Certainly not the kind of coffee anybody who could afford better tended to buy.

"Yeah..." she said, turning back to Carmen. "There is. I...I've never quite got the hang of having money like this. And I never...never really wanted it. Not as much as this, anyway. But there...there are things I want. And money...money could help me get them." She glanced around to ensure that nobody was looking, causing Jong to hastily find business at another table. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. "And I...I could probably use your help as well."

The Russian's eyebrows raised a little, but she took another sip and didn't immediately respond. After a moment, she too lowered her voice. "Oh?" She looked Silvia over--her cheap coffee, her pretty and very young face marred by self-consciousness, the obvious cybernetics--and met her co-worker's eyes again. "What kinda of help could you not buy?"

"I...I could maybe buy this kind of help, but...I need it kept secret." Silvia's voice was still quiet and her eyes were darting from side to side, making sure that nobody was listening in. "You know the Resistance? In Taiwan? My...my brother's part of it. Not...not just part - he's one of the leaders. And I...I'm trying to help him. And to do that...I need to find some members of the Cult. The Cult of Machina. And get in contact with them. But I...I don't know where to go." She glanced down at that, embarrassed by her admission. "So I...I could really use some help finding them. Or at least...narrowing down where they might be found."

Carmen coughed into her drink, causing half the remaining creeem to slop over the side. She looked at in in mild alarm, and took the next few moments to get a deep breath as she reached over and began to activate the table's cleaning mechanism. She licked the creeem off the side of the cup, and seemed composed by the time she finished. (Fail Lying and Acting by 1.) "I make it a point to avoid the cult..." Her voice was still quiet, but unlike Silvia, wasn't conspicuously intense. "But the Resistance..." She trailed off, shaking her head. "Cultists don't go online much. But I bet there are cultist spotters. Hmm. I could see."

At Carmen's accident with the coffee, the ever-in-the-background Jong had taken a couple of steps towards the table, only to be hastily waved back by Silvia with a nervous smile.

"That...that would be really great. If...if you could," she said, turning her attention back to her co-worker. "I mean...I don't want you to put yourself out or anything, or get into any danger, but...it would be really helpful."

"I am not really one to get into danger." Carmen shook her head a few times, and went back to drinking her coffee. She seemed to have recovered well. "It may take me a few weeks to actually get to the research.. Can the Resistance last so long?" She was genuinely curious.

"I...I hope so." Silvia's voice was troubled as she stared into the depths of her coffee. "I should...I should go back over and check on them again." She sighed and raised her head again, giving Carmen a wan smile. "I'm sorry, I...I don't mean to burden you with all this stuff. It's...probably not a good introduction to Oracle. And you know...I did want to introduce you to Oracle. Actually...be welcoming for once. As well as ask for help."

Carmen waved a hand softly. "I have received more than enough welcome. The wolf woman, Fenris, she gave me a fair bit of money, and for the... non-mission Han lead, he gave me.. even more. Much much more." She shook her head, "I don't know if I understand it. Maybe I will... But asking me to do a little for you... I am interested. It is fine."

Silvia frowned. "There is...more to being welcoming than giving you money. I mean...after a few weeks here, money starts to become...unimportant. You...you learn to value other things. Or...or maybe that's just me." She shrugged, awkwardly, and swallowed a mouthful of coffee. "I mean...I didn't care about money all that much to start with, and neither did Hugo or Shinobu or Fenris, I think, so maybe...maybe other people did and I'm wrong. But that...that's the impression I get. People come to Oracle for the money, or because they have nowhere to go, but they...they stay for other things."

Carmen's eyebrows raised, but she did well to keep her obvious disbelief from warping her features. Much. She took her eyes away from Silvia and placed her cup on the table, reaching for a napkin to wipe her fingers clean. "I believe you will find other things matter precisely because you do not need to worry about money. Things are different when you have none of it." He voice was clipped, and she dropped the crumpled napkin on the table. "It is when you have none of it that you find out what is important to you. Desperation makes everything clearer." It was only now she looked back up at Silvia.

"Maybe," Silvia said with a helpless shrug. "I mean...for a long time, I had very little money, but I was...I was somewhere where I didn't need it. Where I had to survive on my own. And...one of the reasons I left Shinjitsu was because they wouldn't pay me. Though I...now I think that was only part of it." She dropped her eye contact with Carmen, staring into her synth-coffee. "And I guess I've never really been...poor. Compared to those around me. At least, not for long. That might have something to do with it."

Carmen nodded, keeping her eye contact with Silvia even as the agent looked away. "You survived mapping. You struggled. The money did not matter until you came back. Desperation makes things clearer, yes? It makes things very hard and very simple. People who grow up with money don't know until they are somewhere desperate. You sound like you found out somewhere away from people and money." She ran a hand through her burned out looking pale hair, and then returned her hands to her drink, her movements soft and deliberate. "It's a very.. corrupt system."

Silvia shook her head, still not looking up. "No, I...I was never desperate. For money. I never really needed it in the wilds and...when I came back, I would have had enough. I wouldn't have gone...would have had enough. I just...they didn't honour their promises. And there were...other issues. That...that had nothing to do with money." She drank, filling the awkward hole in the conversation, and when she replaced the cup she looked at Carmen with a slightly awkward expression. "Sorry, I...I don't mean to get too personal."

Carmen shook her head once, sharply. Her cup was n the table, her eyes slightly unfocused. "I did not mean desperate for money. Desperation makes things clear, is the point, yes." She smiled faintly, and looked down. "Clarity is important. No money breeds desperation, but so does struggle. Life and death... Life and death in ways merely being an agent doesn't expose you to. Place to live, corporate pay, free drugs, cybernetics. Mm." There was still that light edge of amusement to her voice, distant, as she continued to smile.

"I...that's not what I've found," Silvia said, a little apologetically, as though she were sorry her experience wasn't the same as Carmen's. "When...when I was desperate...when I had nowhere to turn to...there was no clarity. Exactly...exactly the opposite. That was when everything was...confusing, blurred...when I had no focus and nothing to cling to. When I'm part of a corporation, when I'm not struggling to figure out the...the basics...that's when I have clarity." She shrugged, awkwardly, and took another drink. "Maybe that's just me, I don't know. It...it does feel like I work a little differently to a lot of people around here."