writing novel chapter fiction scifi post-self qoheleth
Carter hadn’t meant to dodge her subordinate’s question. They truly did need to go in to eat.
The food was, as promised, excellent. Carter made a mental note to come here more often. A note filed into the appropriate box in mind, then set aside. She had to work through the implications of what had been spilled by the tabloid.
She couldn’t visit this RJ any more than she could fly out of the restaurant’s second story window and back to her lab.
It would be a useless gesture, of course. Her team didn’t need access to the patient to do all of their work, because much of their vitals, properly anonymized, were provided as a real-time stream of data. It had been shown that physical contact was not registered at all by the lost; it would hardly matter if it was a researcher any more than a family member.
There would be people between her and RJ, as well. Not just doctors and nurses, but her own administration. She would have to go through any number of layers of bureaucracy just to get access to…to what? To variables that likely wouldn’t help her investigation at all? Eye color? Hair length?
And of course, there was the law. Carter well understood the purpose of the Western Federation Personal and Health Information Protection Act. It was part of her research at a fundamental level. Anyone in medicine knew it, had the inevitable posters tacked to the walls.
Hell, she had voted on it, herself, in the DDR. It was something she felt strongly about regardless of her work. The tabloid had breached that, in a way. There was no culpability, of course, but there was a breach by publicly announcing the case.
And yet, there was nothing to stop her from going to a show in the next day or two.
Feeling very much the sleuth, she stuffed a small egg roll into her mouth. Savoring the taste. Savoring the idea, the plan.
Yes, she’d go to a show up in Soho.
With her resolution firmly planted, she found it difficult to make it through the rest of the day. Rather than wrangle the two competing strands of work groups into some cohesive whole, she spent much of her time distracted. Antsy.
Finding tickets was easy enough, though the price left her winded. She was thinking about all of the ways in which she could approach the cast. Or was it the crew? Would she even be able to get in contact with any of them? Supposing so, what would she even say? Tell me about your sound tech?
The rush was wearing off, as it always did.
Avery and Prakash were both settling into the routine of investigating what had gone on before the incidences of the lost. Those precious few minutes saved from the precious few cases where a core dump had been provided.
Avery was collating what data they had from each case on the social front before the event and searching for social connections between each of the cases, as much as the law would allow. Prakash, meanwhile, was digging through biochemical data that had been collected from each of the patients and searching for similarities for them. All stuff he had been doing before, of course, but now based specifically on the time before they had gotten lost, rather than during or after.
Carter had supposed that this would be innocuous enough, but Sanders had taken the opportunity of the boss dining out for lunch to chat with a few members of the workgroup. Not once, but twice while she was working, she had needed to field private messages from teammates. Both had concerns around the direction of the project, and questions about the wisdom of separating the already fractured group into smaller units.
In both cases, she reiterated that this would only be a temporary investigation. If it turned up any useful information, then they would have that conversation again in the near future. If it didn’t, oh well. Everyone would cohere once more. There was comfort in the words, she hoped, but all the same, Carter wasn’t sure of their efficacy.
She had had an idea. A hunch. One she thought worth investigating. That’s what one did in science, right? Have ideas. Investigate. Be open to being proven wrong.
Sanders, however, had an ideal.
Or so Carter assumed. When assessing the team’s standing on the issue, she had used the usual three point scale: for, neutral, against. What she hadn’t asked was how many fucks each of them gave. There were, after all, two parts to making a decision. Which way you vote, and how much you cared about it.
Carter could easily estimate Sanders giving ten out of ten fucks against this current plan of exploration, while in fact, until this afternoon, she would have likely given five or six fucks.
That question hadn’t been asked, though. She couldn’t make up her mind whether she wished she had asked or was glad that she hadn’t.
This afternoon, with the determination to learn more for the sake of the project (so she promised herself) and the sense that she was on the right path had significantly bumped the number of fucks she gave. And there was the hope of proving Sanders wrong, no small amount of competition within academia.
The play was some contemporary work.
The Short Trip, the ticket site informed her, chronicled an indecisive youth taking a trip away from family, purportedly to visit a bunch of friends for three days, the real goal of the trip being to visit his long-distance partner, but in the setting of a party, with guests, known and unknown, weaving their way through the scene — and, at times, through the audience.
This much she learned as she made her way south and west. Carter had to duck out of work earlier than usual to make it over to the theater on time. She had actually to travel past RJ in the UMC, borne along the yowling Victoria line to Soho. Glad she left early, too. She needed to wait for three trains to pass before she was able to squeeze aboard.
The train vomited her out into Oxford Circus and left her spinning. Looking, looking for the right exit to the tube station, comparing directions on her phone. Each was helpfully lit up with a thin, translucent display overlaid above the older signage in painted tile. Both bore the unerring curves of Helvetica, perpetual winner of the font wars.
Neither meant anything to her.
Easy enough to find the theater by following the crowds. Her identity — and thus her ticket — was proved by a touch from her contacts, a grip around a simple bar in front of the theater. The bar flipped around to provide its other end to the next customer, the end she had touched getting a quick sanitizing so that everyone got a clean surface.
Carter was first surprised by just how much she enjoyed the play, then chagrined at her surprise. She had decided not to approach cast or crew beforehand, a decision that had proven surprisingly difficult. She worried that she would spend the entirety of the play thinking of what to say. She wound up engrossed in the performance all the same.
Lying to parents. Moving through the party. The awkwardness of meeting for the first time. The cast nailed it all. She’d had her own long-distance fling while an undergrad, and she knew the feeling well. Meet at a public space where you know people, mom had even cautioned. Like a party. Just in case.
It was well into the third act of three that she realized she hadn’t given any thought to the sound of the play. A passing thought: this was probably a good thing. This was the sign of a job well done. An understudy, perhaps?
She applauded as heartily as the rest.
Still, her mission, such as it was, was right at the fore as soon as she stood. She was perhaps a little rude in her haste, making her way out into the lobby of the theater where some of cast and crew, as well as the director, were greeting the audience. Opening night, after all.
“Mr. Johansson. Mr. Johansson!”
The bulky man turned toward her with a pleasant, if bland, smile. A smile at war with the obvious worry lining his face. “Ma’am. I trust you enjoyed the show?”
“I did! Of course I did. I’d like to ask you something, though, if I might.”
“Mm.” The sound was assent, but only just. The rest of the audience was starting to stream out of the theater, his mind was elsewhere.
“I was…It’s just, about RJ–“
The immediate focus of Johansson’s attention was a heat lamp against her face. The intensity of it startled Carter out of speech.
“I mean, if it’s not too forward to ask,” she trailed off, a hint of a question.
“It is forward,” he confirmed, eyes probing her. Too many reporters? “But I’d like to know how you know of em?”
“I’m a researcher at UCL, working on the lost.”
Johansson took her elbow gently in his grip and led her off to the side, out of hearing of the rest of the audience and the curious cast. Gently, but brooking no disagreement.
“That doesn’t tell me how you know of em. Aren’t you– isn’t that privileged information?”
“The tabloids had a–“
The growl was immediate, hidden behind gritted teeth. “The paramedics told me I couldn’t contact anyone but the hospital, but the rag said you guys had declined contact.”
Carter straightened and shook her head. “We did not, nor would we have. Although, I must admit, the interview process would be far more formal than this. I only put the pieces together based on location and pronouns.”
“So what do you want from us?” Johansson’s shoulders sagged, the intensity lessened, permitting emotion. “We miss RJ. It’s been a real mess without em. Please, miss–“
“Ramirez. Dr. Carter Ramirez.” She hesitated for a moment before continuing. “We’re looking for…well, a few of us are looking for social connections between the lost, rather than just simple personality or neurlogical correlations. What can you tell us about RJ in that sense?”
Johansson looked up to his cast, then leaned a little closer to murmur, “O’Niell’s, once we’re done. Then we can talk. I have more to do here, so it may be a while. Please wait up, though.”