Arc 8 | Chapter 287: The very, very bad thing

Emilia had known it the moment Olivier entered the restaurant, not even needing to see the man to know he was there, not needing to glance his way to know he had been seated a few tables away from her and the triplets.

There were a few reasons why she knew he was there, although it mostly boiled down to the fact that while she wasn’t a Hyrat clone, wasn’t even a regular Black Knot agent, she was highly trained in their ways, her Censor constantly tugging at their intelligence systems just as much as any agent. The moment anyone entered the restaurant—or any other space she was in—they were run through the system. Were they a risk? Someone Emilia or the clones knew? Someone who was wanted for murder and was somehow skirting the OIC System? Someone they’d need to detain at the cost of their dinner?

The de la Rue family was no different, their faces sliding into Emilia’s Censor and informing her that they were there, inside the building, this man she wanted to fuck and convince to be her lawyer—not necessarily in that order—and the family she knew little about despite their relatively public lives. Mostly, that lack of knowledge about Olivier’s brother was the result of his age—he was only a year older than she and the triplets were—while their parents just seemed the sort to lie and fake their public personas. There was tons of information on them; Emilia didn’t trust a word of it, especially not after eavesdropping on their conversation.

Oh, wait! Let Emilia correct herself! Eavesdropping on

Judith de la Rue’s

conversation. Other than a rather hilarious argument that had occurred between Olivier and his brother—seriously, the fact that the older man could be so petty as to bully his brother out of his seat was just too much and had almost sent her into a fit of giggles—their insufferable mother had taken up the entire table’s airspace with just being a completely unpleasant person.

Honestly? The fact that Olivier was

only

a little finicky and grumpy, despite growing up under that woman and her silent husband’s care, was amazing. If the lawyer had been twice as unpersonable, Emilia would have still said it was amazing he was so well-adjusted.

Well-adjusted—given the circumstances—and beautiful. Unfortunately, she could only peak at him through the restaurant’s security system, the OIC System it interfaced with gently rolling its eyes at her but allowing her a view nonetheless. There had been so many moments in the ten or so minutes that Olivier had been sitting behind her where she had wanted to look back, wanted to just gaze upon him in his crisp dress shirt, his coat flung behind his chair despite his mother’s complaints that he looked better with it on. Emilia wanted to touch him, pull that perfect tie loose and graze her lips over the gentle brown of his jawline.

She couldn’t, though, because while he wouldn’t notice her while the clones were the main thing he could see—and he had spent a hot minute staring at them when he’d first arrived, Emilia glad that she’d already ordered them

not

to stare back—if she looked back, she wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t notice her. There were exactly three non-clones who could always resist the pull of the clones’ shield of invisibility: herself, Andre Laprise, and Kouren—the Blood Rain General. Three people, three non-devs. That could be the most important aspect, something about non-devs leaving them so attentive to the world that they would never be blinded by the tension and power and

otherness

of the clones, but it could also be a coincidence! Certainly, for all that Simeon was all attention and overwhelm, he had never seemed to immediately see through the clones to her or anyone else with them. More quickly than many other people, yes, but not with the immediacy that so many of the non-devs she knew did.

So, yeah, it could be something else. Andre had grown up with the clones, although the fact that his brothers’ still occasionally startled when she popped out of a group of clones, despite having been perfectly visible the whole fucking time, told her it wasn’t

just

normalcy and decades of experience. The Blood Rain General, on the other hand, was… well, he was the Blood Rain General! That man was the only person outside of the clones themselves who knew that she could spot even undercover clones, their faces and bodies different and yet still giving off the undeniable energy of a clone. He’d never done anything with that information, but he was far from the only person of power and renown who had witnessed her interact with an undercover clone. Still, he remained the only one to have ever seen whatever small tell she had possessed as a teenager, giving away that moment of recognition when she stumbled across a clone in the wild.

In other words, the Blood Rain General could just be a weird old man, capable of seeing far too much.

In other words, Olivier being a non-dev may or may not affect his ability to see her, and while Emilia was so, so, sooooo curious whether he would see her or not, she also didn’t want to be caught sneaking a look at him! Plus, the guy had experience learning to work with clones! He was also a lawyer, trained to be observant! Regardless of the whole non-dev thing, he could be an anomaly of attention as well!

Hence, she’d gotten up to go pee, Baylor making an inappropriate joke as she left and earning himself a kick from Valor. Her intention had been to sneak a look at Olivier as she was moving. If she were walking, looking around the restaurant, there would be nothing strange about her seeing him! Definitely not as odd as it would have been had she twisted in her seat to look at the man.

Except! Olivier had followed her!

How did she know this? Well,

technically

she could say that The Black Knot’s system had altered her he had moved—it had decided all on its own that she needed to know exactly where he and his terrible mother were at all times, for whatever reason only its little AI brain could understand—and while it had, that wasn’t why she knew Olivier had followed her… or at least, why she knew he was also needing to use the bathroom.

So… here’s the thing. The bad thing. The very, very bad thing. When Emilia had been a teenager, just learning how to code and hack, she’d been infinitely frustrated with being a non-dev. For so long, she had been different—brighter, sharper, her mind moving too fast, too much. Part of that was definitely the ADHD, but another part was the whole

perfect being

thing, as ridiculous as she now thought that sort of definition to be.

Still, she had felt so separate from her friends because while Andre had also tested as a non-dev, he had always been the odd boy—the youngest son of The Black Knot’s ruling family, the one born without a black knot. Realizing he was different in yet another way had been easier for him, a finding of a reason why he had no black knot to begin with. For her, who had spent nearly a decade finally not being classified for her silverstrain alone, as she had been in her first home, to be pulled back under such a powerful umbrella, this thing that was

being a non-dev

, hadn’t been fun, hadn’t been wanted.

In some ways, Emilia knew that her leaning into aspects of being a silverstrain—being free and happy with her sexuality and accepting that she liked sex, liked being

easy

, liked being okay with pretty much any suggestion her partners threw her way—was a way of choosing which designation she wished to be known by. Granted, she had eventually learned to accept her non-dev tendencies as well. Yet, there was no denying that many of her friends fit into the passion and intelligence and obsession she often associated with the genes that made her a non-dev, and in the end, that part of her identity had become more associated with being part of her friend group, her graduation class, The Penns as a whole.

To the Emilia of today, so much of what she was was a combination of her friends—and enemies, in Halen’s case—constantly pushing each other to do better, to be more insane, more creative, and the genetics that had led numerous governments—past and present—to force silverstrains into sex work. When she was just learning to be herself, however, there had been a desperate need inside her to learn what other non-devs were like, and finding non-devs wasn’t just difficult, it was virtually impossible.

There were a few non-devs from the Free Colonies who were public about their status, but each of those cases was more a result of their Free Colonies bragging about how great said non-devs were to Baalphoria—Baalphoria was, in the end, one of the few nations that actually gave that much of a shit about such things, at least to such an extreme extent. While she’d lucked into meeting and befriending the Blood Rain General, he and his heir were the only Free Colony non-devs she’d ever gotten that close to, more the result of her own desire to keep her status a secret, rather than some conspiracy to keep her away from them.

If she’d come out and asked—said

Hey, I’m a non-dev and would like to meet your non-devs

—Emilia was sure at least a few would have acquiesced, especially given the rumours she’d heard of non-devs in Byshire and The Atrium who were close in age to herself. Wanting to keep her anonymity, however, meant she couldn’t do that.

Her great solution? One she still regretted to this day? Release a collection of functions aimed at low- and non-devs, hoping to find a few more non-devs in Baalphoria.

Technically

, distributing functions that had a backdoor that allowed her to learn far more about the users than they realized wasn’t illegal—they’d even talked about it in Olivier’s class! Essentially, if a function was released officially, through the organization that managed Censors, it couldn’t have that sort of thing—there were government regulations—but there were loopholes that allowed anything not released through those official channels to hide things within the code.

Ostensibly, the laws that allowed these loopholes were aimed at organizations, from law enforcement to random corporations, that needed some sort of extra access through their custom Censor Systems. The Black Knot’s CS was designed to allow the clones easier access to their agents' minds, both for ease of information transference and to make finding spies easier—the system was also quite likely to out spies, although there were ways to avoid it noticing anything was amiss. Corporations tended to focus on corporate spying, both the intention and virus kind, and occasionally monitoring thoughts to make sure anything worked on during company time belonged to the company—stars forbid an employee be inspired to do a side project during work! Didn’t they know those thoughts belonged to the company!

In these cases, there were usually forms and contracts involved, everything managed in the background by AIs that would only share relevant information, and even if the employee didn’t know

exactly

what they were installing into their Censor, they knew that

something

secret might be lurking within it. For hackers and the functions they released, things were less clear, but it was generally accepted that if you installed some random code you picked up on the aethernet, it

might

have something insidious inside it.

This was why new hackers often took a while to get a following, even if they released sweet functions and skills. Eventually, either enough time would have passed without incident for them to become trusted, or an elder hacker would step in to test their shit. Of course, in either case, the hacker could be releasing acceptable code, only to turn around the moment people started to trust them and add something terrible to their code, but that was just the risk of hacking your Censor, and realistically, it was rare anything too terrible happened.

More often than not, anything insidious in code was either meant for something bigger—like that whole virus working as a corporate spy thing—or looking for pay—sometimes they siphoned directly from the user’s bank, other times they locked up parts of their victim’s Censor and demanded pay in exchange for releasing it. Hence, people didn’t tend to worry too much about accidentally installing a bad hack. Usually, it was a nuisance and little more.

Olivier having a version of her old hack—which her guilt-ridden ass had almost immediately re-released as a version that did not include her stalking virus—was surprising. She’d known he had it, of course, having learned the only public non-dev in Baalphoria had installed it shortly after it was released, but given her almost immediate regret over the function’s nefarious purpose, she had stopped monitoring what information it sent back to her within only days. It was only after meeting him, feeling a tug to get to know the grumpy man more, that she’d given into the urge to look at what information she had gotten on him, assuming it would only include a few days of his life, back when he’d still be in his twenties.

The original version of the function had only been available for five days, and Emilia had expected the lawyer to have either removed the function or updated to a newer version in the last fourteen or so years. He hadn’t. Instead, he still had the function’s initial release, the exploit within it still filling up a database with information on him.

Emilia had almost immediately blanched and closed it, horrified at the sheer amount of information she had on the man. Still, that hadn’t stopped her from occasionally looking at where he on campus, using it to hunt him down on his way to class when he was in a good mood in an attempt to wear him down, nor had it stopped her from peering into the information as he moved about the restaurant.

Mostly, she’d just been curious to see how his body was reacting to his mother’s diatribe—to her blatant selfishness and disregard for her extended family. What she’d seen was, well, fascinating, and way too intimate—she was a glutton for punishment and had so little self-control that resisting the urge to look was nearly impossible, and she really needed him to install the newest version, thanks—and she’d quickly switched it to just monitoring where he was.

Where he currently was was pushing into the bathroom behind her, her own stall door clicking closed just as the door swung open. Had it been anyone else, she might have assumed they were chasing her down in an attempt to hook up in the bathroom—not that this particular restaurant was a prime place for that—with Olivier…

With Olivier, it was probably just a coincidence—the information in her terrible, bad, bad, bad database did confirm he really needed to use the bathroom as well, if perhaps not that badly, but you know what!? If he was using the bathroom as an excuse to get away from his mother, she wouldn’t blame him!

Still, it was an unfortunate coincidence, and! She still hadn’t been able to get a good look at him! Life was so unfair sometimes.