[b]The day before[/b]


Thanks to the aids of wakefulness drugs and cybernetics, days had little meaning to Grace. Her life ran based on an ever growing list of tasks, sunrise and sunset were merely enjoyable diversions, just like the game of correspondence chess she had been playing with one of her superiors. She was in the bunker hidden beneath her purposefully generic home in Irvine when she got the message with the latest move. Her heart sank when she saw that it had gone exactly the way she had hoped it wouldn’t, and even a cursory computer analysis told her that there were no viable options. That was the time when her Avatar decided to enter the discussion, speaking out to her.

“You lost again, didn’t you?”

“I never win against Ray. This time I got to a long end game.” She said

“And then?” He said

“He turned it around and got me to a solved but unwinnable eight piece combination”

“Did you ever think that you lost sooner? That when you were still fighting he knew it was over.”

“You will be hemmed in by those who know more, always.”

She wanted to stare into his face, but she knew he wasn’t really there. She would see him in the shadows or at a distance, only to get blurrier and vanish every time she got closer. It had been a long time since he had remained coherent enough for her to examine him closely. They continued.

“There will always been paths not taken. Unexplored options, branches of the tree that will never be visited.”

Then she decided to explore, probe a little more. Her Avatar was only the product of misfiring signals in the brain, that was what she told people in psych evals, yet it acted in ways that baffled her. When she could see the face it looked like someone she had always admired but had never met, and it seemed to know much of what he did, things Grace had never learned. Wherever this knowledge came from troubled her.

“Meeting you was one of them. The real you, not this version, which is just some image I built up over all the years, thinking you were everything I wanted to be. I wouldn’t settle for anything less inventing my own field by the time I was 32, just like you did.” She said, pausing as she thought about how this Avatar, this inner voice was based on a man she used to idolize, the one whose face she saw in textbooks and whose thesis she read like holy scripture, so much that it had burned itself into her consciousness and left her with this phantom version haunting her. 

“I was naïve then” She said

“If you had met me in my last years would’ve found just another old man with Alzheimers. Nothing like your ideal. Perhaps it’s best that never happened.”

“Know yourself, know not just the path you are walking but the ones you could’ve taken. Find out why you are the way you are, and then you will be able to confront your future. As I once said `We know the past but cannot control it. We control the future but cannot know it.` When it looks like every door is closed, when it looks like every present option has been exhausted, then you will find something you never knew you had with you all along.” He said, fading away with every word, until she was alone again.

She didn’t have much time to waste on conversations with her inner self, there was work to be done even before leaving her domicile. First she checked a laser rifle that was due to be delivered to Mihail, someone she had yet to meet but was vouched for by people she trusted. Eva put in a request for a suitable weapon via email. At least she asked nicely. On the gun, everything was still in working order, as Grace confirmed by drilling several holes in the target at the opposite side of the room. The ARASAKA HLR-12X  was an older model, one of the earliest works after they moved weapons R&D to Japan. This one had some details of its design leaked when some incomplete memory erasure led to one of the draftsmen they had enlisted inadvertently reusing the design for his critically-acclaimed manga; not the only time it happened but still a smaller breach than those that had occurred when the weapons lab was in Los Angeles. What she didn’t appreciate was that it came with the software updates made in the 90s, the only “helpful” words it got across the implant wireless link before she turned it off were “Hello, it looks like you are trying to shoot a target. Would you like help with that? “ . People without cybernetics would never how lucky they were, and Grace did her best to make sure these settings were thoroughly disabled. She placed the rifle in the case, then sealed the ID lock and engaged the tamper-prevention device before dropping it in the outgoing package bin on her way out of the house. Now the real work of her day could begin.

	The agents that raided the occult bookstore just after sunrise wore FBI uniforms, but belonged to a unit that only existed on paper. It would vanish into obscurity it was no longer needed, just like the tax fraud case justifying their raid, and even some of the agents themselves, being only semisentient clones with shortened lifespans. Grace was sitting in the operations van, identifying herself as Alice Chiang, the FBI agent in charge of this investigation. She handled the mundane tasks of coordinating with the LAPD over the radio, but also operated powerful counter-magic, a precaution against anything unexpected. The plan went off as expected, and although none of the high value targets were in Grace’s files were present, they did manage to catch some low level sympathizers. Her schedule was busy that day so she couldn’t stay for the full investigation afterwards, but as prepared to leave Grace watched as the RDs were loaded into the back of a van, off to a place that knew no due process or justice, only efficiency. The luckiest of them might resurface in a mental institution someday, with only a shell of their original selves left.

Grace’s next appointment is a breakfast luncheon for a new fundraising campaign at USC. There she is under the identity of Han Seo Kim, an executive at a nonprofit dedicated to free market ideals. She is here to gather information and build connections, see who of the wealthy and powerful could be useful if brought into the fold officially, and who represents a risk to their agenda. It’s a bunch of empty conversations designed to be unmemorable, so that no one would think too much about who she was or what she wanted. It also provided an opportunity to talk to the administration about certain professors, making discrete complaints and laying the groundwork for campaigns against work that ran counter to the desires of the Technocracy.

It’s not yet 10 AM and For a phone call with a reporter from the LA Times Grace is Eleanor Jia, Rand Corporation analyst and expert on disaster preparedness. The reporter will never see her in person, but trusts her words implicitly. It reassures her to see that someone still trusts experts. They were working on a feature story about the wildfires, and thanks to Grace’s work it will carry the preferred narrative. It will insist that there’s a solution to wildfires, to sea level rise, to everything wrong with the planet that can be found through technology. She is not sure whether she should be disturbed or relieve when she had to use any special techniques to convince the reporter.

Now at 11 AM and after some delays in traffic, she is Rosalind Chen, a consultant from McKinsey, hired by the city of Los Angeles as part of a federal urban revitalization program. She’s in the room with lower level staff, the type of people who will be tasked with actually implementing whatever grand visions come out of this whole process. She likes this type of meeting better than presenting before high ranking officials, that takes more preparation, and it involves so much noise and change in the decisionmaking process little will stick. The staff stared at the map projected on the conference room wall, quibbling over where one zone ends or where to best spend some highway expansion numbers. She hangs in the back, giving out journal articles and Gartner reports about the need for smart cities and their omnipresent web of sensors, promising a brighter, more organized future. She know the reports say exactly what she wants them to say, and advises them about what studies to perform, devising the methodology and manipulating the subtle currents of psychology and probability so that they if the staff runs them all they will find is more support for the Technocracy’s dreams of an orderly and controlled metropolis. 

Her Lunch appointment sees heading to an office park off of Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica. At the security desk she identifies herself as Joan Ito, partner at In-Q-Tel, here to meet with a start-up about a potential investment. She is here not only to validate their new surveillance technology but also to validate their people. Grace sweeps the office with her eyes and a dozen other senses only available thanks to her gift and her cybernetics, searching for signs of anything awry. At the company lunch hour where they have a catered lunch of expensive but uninspired Thai food, she uses those same gifts to examine the employees, trying to gain impressions of their psychological profile and susceptibility to other influences. The whole time she is compiling a list of employees needing further investigation and a writing a glowing recommendation of the company as a useful resource.

As the end of the day approached she was in the bunker again, shut off from the sunset outside and with only the faintest light coming from the overhead lamp. Grace didn’t need more; her enhanced sight worked well in the dark. She was at a desk full of esoteric electronic gear, like an electrical engineer’s test bench covered in wires as dense as kudzu. Several of cables ran off the bench, into the next room and through an opening in the secure door. On the other side was one of the people apprehended at this morning’s raid, all wired up for the next step. Grace didn’t know their name, didn’t know anything about them, but she didn’t need to know any of that to peel their memories from their brain through raw electrical pulses. It was a tedious process, slowly activating the right regions and making little bits of current bleed through the safeguards to expose the secrets. She settled in for a long session, looking at the trinkets from earlier days that still sat in the drawers of the desk, a box of mixtapes of 90s goa trance in one spot, a few vials of “research chemicals” from her college days that even she didn’t know how she made in another. At this point, all those relics represented to her was how little those days were worth remembering.