Chapter 5 (Cont.)
"You seem a little stressed, Mr. Gotard. Is everything alright?" I heard a gentle yet authoritative voice coming from my right side. A feminine voice... I looked down at the shot glass. Another chug was already readied. No mixes, no cocktails. Squallid. Moonshine or absinthe? The icecubes inside caused condensation on the external lateralis of the glass and fingertrails erasing them were mostly in place. I did not shift focus from the condensation on the glass. The bottle of Ringinrunt, premium vodka, was largely consumed already— leaving only about a quarter in the bottle now. Look yet... Yet... Condensation was still apparent on the glass. Evidence said: the person who had been using that glass was not so erratic that he was fondling all over the glass and the person was neither so careful with it as if to retain a naked-eye level forensic evidence of a very particular human interaction with it. The condensation on the glass, and its erasure thereof, reveals that the person holding and using the glass, despite inebriation, has control over his firewater and the routines of his life. Here and there, the condensation field was erased slightly more than the breadths and lengths of his fingers, which reveals: disciplined yet human. Not obsessively cautious... Absinthe or moonshine? Have I been under enough to be imagining things now? "Just a little, ma'am. I try to forget about it when I'm off-duty but you know, professional stress sometimes even intrudes in leisure time haha!" "Sure, but Mr. Gotard, you seem a bit too tense for someone living in the day of a vital promotion and early leave, aren't you?" What in the... Of course, I could not be so ignorant to think that I needed an insignia to be a detected by a surveillance agent huh? We're even in the same corporation. The surveillance division must have a detailed record of all cybernetics officials. But these would only be stored in real-time, not relayed to the surveillance agents in real-time. The incidence where a surveiling operative knows the real-time datum in the same day as its disclosure, encountering the relative of the datum completely coincidentally, is very uncanny. But... do I know about the Ontopologix as much as I claim to know? By the merits of all Datamangle cybernetics and modern neuro- and information science, the chance of something being able to mind-read in real time would be mythically rare... And I have minimal dependence on cybernetics anyway, the breach surface should be smaller than the majority of the population so what's happening... For the first time since I have sat on the stool near the bar-counter, beside the surveillance agent, one stool of distance between us... For the first time, I explicitly turned my head to the right, gently, and looked at her, she was still focused on her wine and maybe her procedures, her dark brown hair fell to her sides and past her shoulders with utmost discipline, partially obscuring her profile, yet I could see her calm eyes, the grey which was focusing on something else was still speaking to me collaterally. I replied: "If I had to worry about 5 things before the promotion, now it's 20. If previously it was 10, now it's 50. Marketing is more taxing than it had ever been in the old world, no? And I wouldn't know much about that for certain but the officials of the surveillance division could not possibly be relaxing a lot either, am I right, miss..." For the first time, she turned her head to the left, the calm yet piercing greys looking into me, freezing me within, controlled, majestic, serene. Beautiful... "Agatha Granger".
Junktitled #54
Animal Affirm VI / Passionsfrucht