Archive of Our Own

   I want to explain myself. Before I leave, Dr. Kalin, I want you to understand: their stories entwined together, danced through and between and around one another’s. A Rube Goldberg machine that shouldn’t have worked but did. A pile of brightly colored pickup sticks balancing on the edge of a table. The rhythm of sidewalk pedestrians weaving around Agent Brown and I when I stopped short in the sunlight to take off my jacket. My first day on the job, I tripped over a bundle of cords and spilled my coffee all over you. No more take out, you bought a new coffee maker for the lounge, and five years later it short-circuited and we lost every file we had on East-coast weapons smuggling and Espinoza was killed later that month with the hollow-point round from a stolen Mashkov pistol. These are the things that astonish me, that I killed Espinoza, that the world is indeterminate and determined, butterfly wings and a sound of thunder. It's why I work for you, here where I can see the whole world and the strings and the data points. You ordered me to end it, the stories bound and wound up. But who was I to break that?

   - Kaminsky

   Facts are immutable. My name is Leonorah Kaminsky. Fact. I joined six years ago and I left yesterday. Fact. AJ09-0921 is the first subject immune to the effects of Darrow Deficiency Syndrome, and in 2027, he received the commensurate level of augmentations from David Sarif. Immutable.

   Facts shiver, though, like a cold hand held up in a dark room against the artificial light of outside. They aren’t steady, even if you’d like them to be, Dr. Kalin. For example:

   “…from David Sarif”. Our open access file reports that Reed was the driving factor behind his chance encounter with Adam Jensen. The real file states it was our influence.

   Here is what I imagine.

   David Sarif, sitting alone in his office after the attack, the aftermath leaving no visible markers except the dead computer screen. Detroit, with no LED network, pelting instead toxic pyrite chunks of light at the windows. Outside, phones ringing, shareholders, board members, investigators, and detectives and alarmed employees and mislaid data. Maybe he hits something – a desk, a chair, a balanced stack of eBooks off a table. He wants to face the people who did this to him, to his family, he wants to confront them and smile at them and then meet with the chief of police and say in no uncertain terms that those god-damn bastards will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and then some, he’ll think. Their lives are over. Because, and the facts don’t know this, he is afraid. Sitting alone in the semi-darkness, knowing some strangers were crawling around their emails, their research, their personal files – cockroaches skittering around the core of the Industries, he can feel them on his skin like lice slithering across his scalp. He’s afraid to turn on his computer, so he tries to be angry instead.

   Angry gets him to the Detroit Police Station, where maybe he sees Jensen out of the corner of his eye. Angry gets him in front of the perpetrators, thin desperate things, only one of them meeting his stare with mirrored fury rather than cowering with the rest, away from the light he sweeps in with but still, he can pretend, for now, that he isn’t afraid of them. The fear waits, it sits for a few years. Eventually, it brings a hacker back – cyber security. And fear is not a fact, and it can’t be appeased – so, more security. Adam Jensen. Do you see how it begins to fit together? Not Reed, not us – a group of people and a target and two distant stories looking up and meeting each other’s eyes for the first time. Immutable.

   You can see it, Kalin. The whole sentence, the whole fact is like that. He received the commensurate level of augmentations from David Sarif. “Received” – fact, but not the whole truth. Truth – the second attack happened, the fear was back, and Sarif wouldn’t let it happen a third time. “Commensurate” – a fact, but not the whole truth. Cracked mirrors. Dark glasses. Unpacked boxes. Physically commensurate, emotionally unsuitable.

   Facts are immutable.

   I like my extrapolations more.

   Extrapolations can be misleading, especially when they look like facts:

Adam Jensen , AJ09-0921

Family:     Arthur Jensen

       Margie Jensen

   This is the official story.

   Better that most of us believe it.

   But infolink frequencies can be got. Can be bought. Can be coaxed out of high-strung fugitive freelance hackers. And then you can hear the extrapolations disintegrate in real time.

“Pritchard,” he’d said, urgency clear in his slow precision, “I need you to assign a temporary security detail to an apartment on Brooklyn Court. The woman’s name is Walthers. Michelle Walthers.”

“Security detail?” Absent – derision. “What the hell, Jensen – who is this woman?”

“She’s…family.”

   An edit in the file, then →

Adam Jensen , AJ09-0921

Family:     Arthur Jensen

Margie Jensen

Michelle Walthers

   Extrapolations can be misleading. Stop too short and you miss the little extra bit that makes the difference.

“Security detail? What the hell, Jensen – who is this woman?”

“She’s…family. But she’s vulnerable. I’ll explain later. Just do this for me, please. Can I trust you on this, Pritchard?”

   I’m not afraid, Daniella, I know you see it, the manifold sequences that all have to fire at the right time, in the right order. Smile to a barista and you get the extra bit of coffee that burns just a little deeper and next thing you know, Agent Espinoza bleeding out in the snow. Tiny things, from which come the extrapolated events. I sat down with van Bruggen, outside in the springtime noon light, and scooted towards him a sealed plastic bottle full of a blue liquid with extra sugar and caffeine, he’s takes it but, fact – that’s not why I was talking with him. He was only alive to be talked to because Jensen handed him a pistol. He only met Jensen because he’d hacked Sarif. And Sarif only knew because Pritchard cracked the drive yanked from the ruined head of a dead proxy. Arie talking to me, from the top I know things must look even, look ordered, but go just that little bit further down, not even too far, down here we rely on histories sideswiping just enough to matter. Tiny things like:

“I gotta deal with nucl3arsnake again. He's becoming a real pain in my ass.” – Windmill

   Help van Bruggen with that. An exchange. All the power of everything we know from my hands to his, and he gives me the infolink frequencies, and then I was a part of it too. I was a fact, immutable, a part of the narrative they were pulling around themselves. I stayed sitting when he left. Too dizzy to walk straight.

   With the infolink frequencies, new available data. New data, new facts, new extrapolations. So, revision.

Adam Jensen , AJ09-0921

Family:     Arthur Jensen

       Margie Jensen

       Michelle Walthers

       Francis Wendell Pritchard

   It works both ways, Kalin.

Francis Pritchard, FP23-2610

Family:     Adam Jensen

   You think I take extrapolations too far. So many of my other reports you’ve plunked on my desk, with that lone square sticky note – TOO FAR. But never with them. I made sure.

   December 2018, last year of the great snows, 22 inches in Metropolitan Detroit. 2 dead – falling power lines, 1 dead – tree. Heaviest blizzard of the decade. 2027 – not the heaviest, but truth – the worst.

   2027 – protesting the super soldiers, a riot, and a man flings a bottle of vodka with a dirty burning rag in the neck through a glass window. The flames drag through the inside and up the top and burned bricks tumbling over the street, months later, the trucks can’t get through. They can’t even try. So when the transformer blows and it’s gangland that’s down and out – who cares? We do. Agents and agitators among the downtrodden, advance defenders against the inevitable drafting of the displaced. And our defenders say, with the illness carrying through cracks in cardboard walls and frost claiming the stiff skin of people we aren’t sure are not yet corpses, they say with the gasoline burning smell in their noses and then the wood burning smell and then books and then nothing, they say it is not the heaviest blizzard but it is the worst. People die. You can’t see anything through the snow, wind battering, gusts hitting, hitting just a little extra bit harder against any buildings which can’t decide if they want to stand or not. Even when the buildings collapse, there is no sound in the storm, even of thunder.

   In the morning the survivors begin to take a count, and they find their world looking clean and promising for the first time in a long time. Everything buried.

   In the morning I take stock, too, ask Espinoza to check in on a potential asset in Brooklyn Court. I do not say why. In the morning they find Walthers, fine, well, smiling blankly under a pile of blankets that do not belong to her and making facsimiles of origami shapes out of Cyberboost energy bar wrappers. Espinoza reports this, and then on their way out, a man with a Mashkov pistol shoots them in the leg and steals their coat. It turns out the streets are more dangerous in the morning than they were during the night blizzard, and so, Dr. Kalin, you tell me this:

Francis Pritchard, FP23-2610

Family:                Adam Jensen

Michelle Walthers

   My extrapolations. Sticky note worthy?

   I depended on us. I needed us. I never cared what we called ourselves. Illuminati – it fit, in a way. Ancient seekers of wisdom and it’s in the name – lumen, illuminare, latin: to light up. Fact. The light showing us everything, giving me for the first time enough to look at, and to understand. I want it for you, too, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? Our stories, you and I are tight like grains of sand fused into glass. Inseparable. Beautiful in its own way, but that wasn’t them. Good dance partners pull apart, from time to time, and then they come back together. Together they brought down Palisades, and then you wanted a They file. In that moment, though, you were wrong – people on the sidewalk parted to move around Brown and I. You feared them working together and I watched them working apart, you had to understand how they moved. Here, together and then apart:

TRANSCRIPT

FP23-2610: You know, Jensen, this may be the last time…we ever work together. Assuming, of course, you don’t get yourself half-killed saving the world again and call on me to get you-

AJ09-0921: Goodbye, Francis.

-DISCONNECT-

AJ09-0921 [Addendum]: Take care of yourself.

   You wanted to pay attention a little bit too late for us, and anyway, divide and conquer doesn’t work:

• Open infolink channel afraid to hear a voice more afraid to hear water, but you can pretend to be angry instead when overlapping screaming for help bleeds through the static, guide them to rescue and rescuers to them, it's not him, but still, a dozen lives not drowning anymore-
• Alloyed finger about the chose the wrong directory folder, a distant whisper from the past echoing a suggestion veiled as a criticism, and you withdraw silently back into the dark before the alarms go off with an unvoiced mental thank you. We get there and you’re gone, even if the camera remembers-
• Angry desperate thin faces and cat-eyes and a scarred thug with a Mashkov shotgun centered on you, and even though he’s right there asking demanding, it’s the apartness and the absolute knowledge that he can’t won’t stay, which drags the commands from your fingers onto the wrist keyboard and lets the Neuropozyne go. Maybe you hope that what goes around comes around, and just that little action will somehow help on one of those days where he’s off seeking the crosshairs of every other idiot with a gun. Maybe I underestimate you, and that’s when you get it, the way your stories are apart and tied like shoelaces. Maybe it explains ↓

TRANSCRIPT

AJ09-0921: Goodbye, Francis.

-DISCONNECT-

FP23-2610 [addendum]: Hnh.

FP23-2610 [addendum]: That would be the day.

   If you ever listened to the audio recordings, Dr. Kalin, you probably can extrapolate the level of annoyance in that addendum. You can’t tell, though, how quiet it was. Unless:

FP23-2610 [addendum]: _{That would be the day.}

   You had to understand how they moved. Two people always one misstep away from landing on one another’s feet, but they never did. Take care of yourself. That’d be the day. Can you see how combining it together changes the message?  Taking it apart tells you what it meant in the first place.

   Kalin, in my imagination I can feel your foot start to spasm. Impatience was your strong suit, and you want my result, I suppose. Permanently delayed – but at least you’ll have a chance to speak with the higher-ups. You can spin anything, including my defection, even if, technically speaking, I’m not joining anyone else. But when it’s us against the whole world revealed, I guess leaving is enough.

   Results, Kaminsky.

   And yet another sticky note.

   Well, then, here is my formal statement. My name is Leonorah Kaminsky, LK04-CD07. I was recruited into the Analysis and Sourcing department six years ago by Dr. Daniella Kalin. Last week, I received an order regarding the subjects of my lead assignment. I was required to provide trigger points and stress factors that could be used to dissolve emotional ties between the primary and secondary subjects. I was also required to suggest feasible termination methods for the secondary subject. This order conflicted with my moral beliefs and stance on the ethics of information gathering, and I willingly and deliberately chose to disobey that order. Further, I willingly and deliberately chose to inflict damage upon such resources as could otherwise be utilized in my absence to carry out the aforementioned order. Yesterday, I removed my personal information from the databanks and vacated the premises. I do not intend to return.

   ↑ Fact
   ↓ Truth

   After all these years, it becomes easy to make a misstep, doesn’t it?

   I’d been working.

   I walked out into the cubicles, found Agent Brown’s and rested my chin on one of the walls. Palisades finally under investigation, new facts, so, revisions, and I finally had my first full draft of the file. Full of papers, and crumpled sticky notes, and photos and satellite data and personality examinations ripped from the backup version of a media contact I’m not supposed to know that I know about. I’d had to seriously consider asking for a bigger stapler.

   It was heavy, felt like a gallon of milk in my arms, and I dropped it on Brown’s desk while he was glued to a game of Solitaire. On his desk, along with the regular assortment of pen/pencil cups notepads bobble heads and a scattering of unused Pocket Secretaries, was a photo of him out with Espinoza at the bar one late night, tipsy smiling mid-snicker, arms slung around shoulders and no one sure who was holding who up. Brown’s about to fall and bring Espinoza down on top of him, about to cover up the clumsy with a quick kiss that burns Espinoza’s lips, and I’ll laughing so hard with them drop the camera and crack the lens – antique, Brown’s, six hundred credits spent for new sand-fused glass.

   I dropped my file. I should have sprung for the stapler, or maybe not, because it came apart, the papers slid free, and knocked over pencil cup, bobble head, photo. The frame falls over on top of a paperclipped bundle of facts and extrapolation. Brown’s eyes rolling at me and his hand carefully rotating the frame back up to sit on its base, but none of that matters at that moment, because on the page, an image. The cracked mirror image of Brown and Espinoza, Jensen and Pritchard. The one minus one long, black coat covering matte and shining black stretched out around thin shoulders desperate to stay upright because even though he with the physically commensurate levels of augmentations, I can’t be quite sure who is holding whom. And I can’t shake the feeling of time moving parallel in both images, of Jensen slipping just that little bit, just enough to bring Pritchard down on his chest and me dropping camera glass shattering on the ground but not because I’m laughing. I’m panicking. The picture is moving, sweep the papers and pencils up and retreat pulling Brown’s keyboard and nearly tripping backwards over the cords on the ground. Return everything to my own desk, and sitting alone in my dark office, put the file back together by the artificial light of outside.

   I hold them up to the light, them falling together and behind the image a hundred other things twisting free of the open folder. Two separate purchases tracked apart, two VR systems and two digital download keys unlocked together baseball global multiplayer. Hologram still ripped mid-transmission, partially assembled Pritchard hiding behind his back a scratched wrist and the tight metallic band of a rough-cut wristwatch even less assembled than the hologram, extrapolation – someone else reaching for understanding. Jensen three days home sick, a normal thing, except same time, cyberattacks, our databases down, and when everything is set again, there are several facts – Jensen home, Pritchard online, and not a trace of Michelle Walthers anywhere in the world. Everything is in motion and I almost have to let them go and grab the desk instead. Reminder: this isn’t the moon base, gravity works fine. I make myself hold them up to the light, my hand shakes, and I get it, really, the full depth of what you want me to do.

   Kalin, my whole life I’ve spent being fascinated by the connections, by the way the world is indeterminate and determined at the same time and if you have enough light, and distance, you can see it all laid out. It can’t be my fault, that I thought I got Espinoza killed. But when I held the picture up to the light and I couldn’t tell if I was looking at them or at Pritchard, I got it. That’s life. It’s that easy, Kalin, that’s what makes the coffee spill, what makes me stumble and what shoots Espinoza dead in the snow. That’s what makes the machine work, that’s what brings two people together to a police station in the middle of the night just in time, just that little bit in time for timelines to collide, not me, not us, not us even when we try. I thought glass was fused inseparable but it turns out mirrors crack and lenses shatter and if I do what you want, if I break them too they don’t get put back together. Their stories aren’t something detached, something reliable, something goodbye-able, it’s this living, moving thing, Danielle. It’s not extrapolation, it’s not fact – it’s alive, in motion, moving parts clicking into place so clearly that alone, at my desk, I could hear in my ears the sound skittering around.

   Kalin, up here at the edge of the world we think we control everything, but Danielle, I held them up against the light and saw in them Brown and Espinoza and me and we are a part of it, all of us together. Life is so much bigger than just us and our plans and our strings and our data points. You want me to break that, but even if I could, who am I to try?

   Dr. Kalin, I can’t stay. I don’t know where I am going to go, but I have my entire life to figure it out. You won’t find anything but this account in my office. I’ve taken everything I can, and van Bruggen has helped me destroy the rest. If you ever get it, if you ever understand

   let me know.

   I’ll be out there, somewhere, winding among the people on the sidewalk and trying to feel the springtime sunshine on my skin, but still.

   I’ll be paying attention.