Chapter 220 The Murder
POV: Fell | Facility sublevel, then lower sublevel
Raines has been with the program for four years and he has been useful for four years in the specific way that lab assistants are useful, which is in the management of details that require consistent attention and which I have not had the capacity to attend to while managing the program's larger architecture. He has been less useful in the past three weeks, since the coalition's breach attempt and the facility relocation and the execution and the vitals crisis and the bond severing and the recovery, which has required every available resource and which has left no room for the specific kind of assistance that is actually assistance rather than the kind that creates additional work.
Today Raines is in the category of additional work.
"The Order is gone," he says. He has said this before, in various forms, over the past two weeks, and each time I have explained the relationship between the Order's institutional existence and the program's essential validity, which is that the first is not required for the second, and each time he has received the explanation and returned within a day or two with the same observation restated in different language.
Today the different language is: "We should stop."
I am logging the recovery from the noon crisis, the vitals returning to acceptable parameters after six hours of intervention, the bond disruption managed, the development timeline adjusted to account for the disruption. The log is precise and the data is good and the data tells me clearly that the program is on track, that the two months to viable birth are intact, that the crisis was managed correctly and will not be repeated because the conditions that caused it no longer exist, which is to say Valentina Corvino no longer exists.
"The program is not stopping," I say, and I say it with the patience I have always applied to this particular category of conversation, which is the patience of someone who has been having the same argument with institutional resistance for forty years and who has learned to address it efficiently. "The data is good. The subject is recovering. The timeline is intact."
"We're alone," Raines says. "No funding. No support. They know this building or they will. We cannot complete the program under these conditions."
"The conditions," I say, and I hear the specific quality of my own voice and I note it as information, the quality that means I have moved past patience into something adjacent to it but different, the quality that means I am addressing an obstacle rather than a conversation, "are that the program has two months of viable gestation remaining. The conditions are that I have maintained this facility independently for two years and I can maintain it for two more months. The conditions are that I will not stop."
"I'm leaving," Raines says.
This is the obstacle.
Raines has been present in this facility for four years and he has detailed knowledge of the program, of the facility's location, of the preservation protocols, of the subject's developmental status, and of the specific vulnerabilities in the facility's security that the coalition would need to know to conduct a successful extraction. He has knowledge that I cannot allow him to carry out of this room.
I understand this clearly, as a fact, the way I understand facts, which is without the additional processing that emotional valence adds to factual assessment. The fact is that Raines leaving with this knowledge is an outcome the program cannot accommodate. The fact is that the program is the priority. The fact is that two months of viable gestation is two months, not a variable, and anything that threatens it is the obstacle and the obstacle must be addressed.
He is dead before he reaches the door, which is the speed at which the assessment produces the action when the assessment is clear and the action is the only one available.
I stand in the room with the specific quiet of a room that has just changed and I note the practical consequences and I address them in order, which is the protocol for any situation that produces unexpected variables.
I am alone now. This is a fact. It was already nearly a fact and now it is complete.
From the next room the hybrid prisoners are silent in the specific silence of people who heard something and who are processing it with the instincts of people who have been in facilities, which is correctly.
One of them begins moving within twenty minutes, which I hear through the sublevel's specific quality of carrying sound, movement in the room that has not been moving, and then the sound of the emergency exit at the far end of the corridor, which I had sealed and which was apparently not sealed adequately.
One hybrid escaping.
I return to the logs. Two months. The work continues.