Chapter Text
Ishim University. One of many centers of learning under the aegis of District 14.
One can only presume Ayin enrolled there after graduating school — he might have finished a course at some other institute, but so far there is no evidence of his life before attending Ishim that could have been found. There is no knowledge of his parents other than them being high-profile researchers of the Head—
“Hey, Rita.”
“Mmm?” A young woman turned around from her glowing computer to the speaker.
“We still don’t have anything on Ayin’s parents,” he said. “Other than what you saw in the drafts. Do you think I should mention that?”
“Axe it,” Rita said. “Wish we had something more concrete to go on…” She sat down on her table and tapped it — once, twice, thrice, then in a rhythmic rattle. “Besides, does that even matter?”
“We should have asked when we had the option,” the speaker — a young man — muttered, not taking his eyes away from the keyboard. “The track wouldn’t be worth it. Maybe once all is said and done—”
“I don’t think it’s safe to leave,” she replied. “Misha, I specifically packed everything we’d need here.”
“Don’t—” Mikhail caught himself. “Okay. Make a note for later, to maybe revisit when we’re otherwise done. Moving on.”
The conclusion is that he met the other people involved in the foundation of Lobotomy Corporation during this time, although one cannot be sure on the details. We believe that the leader of the group at the time was his close friend, a woman called Carmen.
While Carmen was born in District 11, due to its dwindling fortunes at the time she pursued her education in District 14, alongside Ayin and a man by the name of Benjamin.
“Do you have citations?” Rita asked.
“If by citations you mean ‘I heard it from Hokma’, then yes, I have citations,” Mikhail said. “I don’t have anything committed to paper. You won’t find any record mentioning Ayin’s or Benjamin’s name even if you go back to the Library, but Carmen — there are notes on her. We looked for them years ago.”
“You’d have to be more precise.”
“Remember how I had to help with delivering a baby?”
Rita cringed. “Oh, that — yes, we were hunting for information on Carmen back then, now I remember,” she added. “You even found something, but—”
“I translated it,” he said. “I already knew a related language, which helped a lot, but also, translating a yearbook wasn’t that hard.”
“Wait, it was her yearbook?” Rita giggled. “Do you still have it — oh, we probably left it in the Library.”
“Too much to haul around,” Mikhail said.
Carmen was described by her peers as having a strong, magnetic personality, able to draw others with warmth and compassion. In the City of yore, she stood out like the sun, enchanting others to contribute their wealth and aptitude to the project.
One of the most famous contributors to the project was Kali, a Color Fixer known as the Red Mist.
“Do you think citing Hokma or Gebura—”
“The less people know about our connection, the better.”
At the point of her recruitment into the project, she was considered a Grade 2 Fixer, and had only attained the Color classification when the project was already in progress.
“So she only became the Red Mist when she had her E.G.O., right?” Mikhail asked. “Did Gebura tell you anything about this—”
“She did demonstrate the E.G.O., but she was very curt on the details,” Rita said, standing up to move to the couch. “How she desired a shell of her own, how it became her shell. Maybe it became a sour topic to her over the years.”
A Color’s moniker is often based on something significant to them. While there are tongue-in-cheek references to how the ‘Red Mist’ is what her enemies were reduced to, her ability to manifest a shell of red mist, which we now understand to be an example of effloresced E.G.O., was first reported before her promotion.
“An effloresced E.G.O.” Rita said.
“Yes. She was able to—”
“Misha, you want to call attention to that happening before the White Nights and Dark Days, or people are going to think you’re wrong at least somewhere.”
“I’m—” Mikhail lifted his hands from the keyboard. “You’re correct. How about this: ...now understand to be a unique example of an E.G.O. effloresced before the White Nights and Dark Days…” He added the sentence to the text. “Does this sound better?”
“Much better.”
The phenomenon of Distortion and the prominence of effloresced E.G.O. have both followed the White Nights and Dark Days, during which Lobotomy Corporation fell after its headquarters emitted a pillar of light not dissimilar to the Library Beacon.
“Does that thing still work?”
“I saw it yesterday,” Rita said.
Nothing of the sort occurred in the branch offices, which were merely shut down on the fourth day, when the Dark Days started. Further analysis of said branch offices revealed the Golden Boughs, currently used to produce energy for the City.
“I think we shouldn’t mention what else the Boughs can do,” Mikhail said. “The less people know about it, the better.”
She nodded.
The initial experiments were interrupted by Carmen’s death, which seemingly had no precedent or explanation. Shortly after that, the Outskirts laboratory which the group used as headquarters was raided by an Arbiter and two Claws due to—
—a violation of the AI Ethics Amendment, which would mean that this was the period of time when Angela’s development started. Visual descriptions of Carmen seem to match Angela’s, meaning that the Director of the Library was most likely based on the late leader of the group.
“No, not a good idea to actually write this down,” he noted.
Ayin’s traces seem to vanish after the raid on the Outskirts laboratory, likely indicating that he either perished in the raid or found a way to obscure his identity. Since no bodies were recovered from the laboratory for further identification by the Head for possible collaborators, the second outcome is more likely.
“Going for the bodies angle?”
“I cannot cite Hokma’s existence to indicate that Benjamin survived the raid.”
“Fine by me.”
At the moment, District 12 was controlled by a different Wing, which could possibly link the Smoke War to this as a prime cause — in this case, Ayin was the prime beneficiary of the conflict, as the fall of the previous L Corp allowed him to take over and establish Lobotomy Corporation. The previous L Corp was known for production of energy, which was seemingly—
“Mined.”
—mined from the Singularity. Comparative analysis of electricity prices and consumption shows that Lobotomy Corporation’s method was cheaper, or at least it was more eager to provide energy to other companies at cheaper prices than its predecessor.
Mikhail saved the document and shut the computer down. “Enough for today. It’s nice to be doing this again, after all this time.”
“We should have never stopped,” Rita said.
“I don’t make the calls here,” he replied. “You do. I said that we’d need the purest samples to work on private information, that we would need to stay in this spot to procure these pure samples, and you said it’d be an acceptable risk to stay here. Nothing’s going to see us in this blind spot.” He turned to the windows, entirely blocked by the lilac flourishing outside. “They’re going to be busy with W Corp’s affairs, right?”
“I haven’t been outside for a while. Newspapers — aren’t really helpful. They’re still litigating what they’re going to do to the Singularity.”
“It would be extremely convenient if they just made it public.” Mikhail stood up and approached the couch, sitting down next to his companion. “Just think of the potential.”
“Which they needed first-class tickets to fund.”
“I’m not so sure it would be that — still. It can’t be that bad.” He closed his eyes. “Any news from the Library? Does Jean still write about that?”
“There’s nothing to write about,” she said. “Which is probably good.”