by J. S. Volpe
* * *
Events unfolded exactly as she said. The very next day a Nünite priest visited him in his cell. Reynard played the part of the eager new convert to the hilt. Within a week, he was transferred to a lower security wing. A month later he was released from the Repository, but on probation, with orders to perform regular community service, attend Nünite meetings every third day, and visit a counselor once a week. The counselor was a smiling, overly trusting fool whom Reynard could run intellectual rings around in his sleep. Reynard didn’t see Solace at all after the evaluation.
A year later, after the entirety of his sentence had been served, when he was, then, a free man, he hacked into the Repository’s Galacticom node in hopes of learning how he could get in touch with Solace. (He had tried more orthodox channels already, but had been told by the Repository’s public interface liaison [i.e. help-desk worker] that information on specific employees could not be distributed to the general public.) The personnel databanks informed him that Solace Desidáre (where, he wondered, had that strange surname come from?) had tendered her resignation eight months earlier, abruptly terminating five years of impeccable service. Her file contained nothing after that except a note added three weeks later by an obviously frustrated administrative employee, reading, “All sprocking mail to Ms. Desidáre’s sprocking node returned as sprocking undeliverable! And no sprocking physical address on sprocking record!”
Reynard laughed when he read this, but behind his laughter lurked disappointment. He had been hoping to get in touch with her instead of enduring yet another encore performance of her disappearing act.
He started to navigate out of the Repository’s node, then stopped.
What was he thinking?
While he was here, he might as well do a little creative reconstruction of their node to help its users understand chaos on a deep and primal level…
11
Haven
11012 A.C.