hh_mirror

^{• FROM THE DESK OF ARIANE EMORY•}

TO: Arthur
FROM: Ari
RE: Psych
DATE: current

I want to talk shop. Have time/inclination? Location is Hat Shore hq, aka Sparklypoo common room -- don't laugh.

Ari Two had never lacked sympathy for Ari One, precisely, but she was developing a newfound appreciation of some problems her predecessor had faced.

Why had Gehenna happened? Because the Bureau of Defense wanted what it wanted, common sense be damned; and because Ariane Emory senior had considered it better to help them than to shun them. Defense and Science were seldom comfortable bedfellows, and Ari senior had never been reluctant to play hardball. Yet she'd accommodated their demands to create a population of azi -- clones, basically -- to abandon on the world of Gehenna. The azi were produced by Reseune and turned over to Defense. The only influence Reseune could have, had to be carried within the azi themselves. Ari One had handpicked the genesets for them, to the specifications Defense required, but with a little extra: she'd seeded those azi with psychsets Defense knew very little about. She could get away with it because no one else was working at Ari's level. No one knew how to read what she was doing.

Ariane Emory had been in her seventies at the time, kept artificially young by rejuv, an experienced scientist and a seasoned politician. And Defense had its own internal logic, even if it didn't agree with what Reseune wanted. Ari senior knew how to gauge them, think around them, forestall and stymie them.

The Sorting Hat ... was not so much with the logic. And Ari Two was only eighteen. She'd benefited immensely from her predecessor's notes and an immense body of computerized messages and guidance that had been left for her, encrypted, in Ari One's system. She was savvier and older than her chronological age ought to allow. But she wasn't Ari One, wasn't anywhere near the consummate command of psych that Ari One had held.

And Hat Shore was not Gehenna. And Hogwarts, damn it all to hell, could never be Reseune. Reseune had people in it whom Ari Two depended upon: her azi Florian and Catlin for their knowledge of security; her teacher Justin Warrick and his azi companion Grant ALX to noodle over psychsets and design; the store of knowledge left by Ari senior herself in Base One. At Hogwarts, Ari felt keenly the lack of all these resources.

The closest thing to a colleague she had here, for good or ill, was Arthur. No azi, no tape, no deepsets, but he worked with psych for sure. She still had the psychology journal he'd given her in the Sorting Room, too, and she'd made the connection between that scent-and-memory article and the scent of lavender in the dream-maze-building he'd shown her: whether he claimed the title or credentials of a psychologist, he was using the tools of the discipline. She didn't even know whether Arthur was given-name or surname, but she'd trusted her gut, decided he was all right despite the inability to vet anyone the way her Reseune security would've done for her at home. So she felt all right about talking to him.

She didn't give a whole lot of thought to it, once the idea occurred to her -- just dashed off a message to him and sent it off with a house elf, then turned her attention back to her work.

When he arrived, the bewigged house-elves Flobby and Caddy let Arthur in and offered him refreshment. They made whimsical and somewhat inept receptionists.

Sparklypoo common room had undergone remodeling, a collaboration between Ari and Jherek Carnelian. His aesthetic and hers blended to create a weird hybrid of designer excess that wouldn't have been out of place on the set of a 1980s evening soap (Reseune's idea of luxury) and dreamlike fancies befitting End of Time. Stacked about the place were a quantity and variety of supplies that a nuclear bunker might need, including the uncontaminated water Ari had procured during the castlewide plumbing problems the month prior. On one wall, a screen had been stretched, its view the entirety of the Harkonnen Dining Experience within the Hat Shore house.

Ari had been using a long table as a desk. Stretched across most of its surface was a blueprint of Hat Shore which had been unfurled and held down at the corners with paperweights: a large chunk of amber encasing a prehistoric insect; coral in glass; a purpley pyramid thing; a dry fishbowl with a layer of plain gravel at the bottom.

There was a sitting area with bookshelves and a coffee table, quite normal except that the coffee table was a cube of glass filled with blue-lit water, home to tiny moon jellyfish; and while the couches were not alive, they felt as though they might be -- like memory foam with a mind, making themselves uncannily accommodating to the form of whomever sat upon each. A bouquet of fresh lavender sat atop the aquarium-cube coffee table, Ari's nod to the scent-and-memory association begun in the shared dream.

When Ari and her guest were settled comfortably on their respective couches with their respective beverages of choice (for Ari, it was vodka-and-orange), she said: "Ever try to work around someone completely irrational?"