Vince found Ayer at the exact place where one of his coworkers said he will be - it was one hallway near an area of the building which remained deserted after the layoffs. While approaching Ayer, Vince though whether it is appropriate to bother him this way - he hadn’t talked to him in almost a month, and the only reason why he knew where he was, was his colleagues’ unwanting, or inability, to shut their mouths. And Ayer didn’t look like he wanted to speak to him either - out of his many emotionless expression which Vince had learned to differentiate in the course of the last several months, this one was particularly uninviting. Still, he approached him and greeted him formally:
“Hello Cadman, what are you doing, are you free to talk?”
Ayer did not say anything at first, at the end he muttered something but it was far from the level of coherence which Vince was expecting to from him.
“Don’t get me wrong, I always thought that this hallway was a pretty nice place.” Vince continued “- it is just that it doesn’t go anywhere, you know?
“It’s not like I am going anywhere either.
“Yeah but… What’s happening Ayer?” Vince thought that being honest was the best way to attack the situation, “Your manners, your tone… you act like we don’t know each other.
“You think I don’t know who you are and why are you here?” Ayer stared at him. “You are my boss. You came to me because it’s been exactly three months since I started here. You pretend to be my friend, although you’d probably prefer to be my parent if you got to pick. You like me, but you feel bad about it. Have I made a mistake so far?”
“Can you stop please?” Vince said, but Ayer didn’t quit:
“You are married to a woman you are friends with, but towards whom you don’t feel passionate about. You pretend that you don’t need passion, but in fact, you do. That is why you need to make up for your life’s dullness by flirting with your partner in a way that’s, if I may say so, rather clumsy.”
“OK, enough!” Vince said. “You got everything correctly. You win. You are good. One of the best in fact, not that this is such a big deal. But still, I am your boss. And now you have to come with me.”
“So, people say nice things about your work.” Vince started, once they settled themselves in the canteen.”
“I don’t understand. I did nothing. Den’s file is almost empty.” Ayer replied.
“Are you kidding? You must have solved ten cases since you got here. And a hundred more were solved by the Detective using your ideas. Like we care about Den Lee.”
“The Japanese have no records about this person ever existing.” Ayer continued. “She was running away from something. I don’t have any idea what. But I believe she is the key to finding out who is behind the odd crimes. There must be some reason for all this which is happening.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Vince said, “In any case, why do you bother with it? We capture all perpetrators with zero issues, you do a pretty good job at solving the deviant cases, and after the boffins implement some of the tactics you use into the Detective, we all can basically drink tea all day.”
“…drink tea all day,” Ayer repeated.
“Yes,” Vince said, “Look, I said it earlier, you are correct that being an employee of the month is not important. You know what is important though? That if today you submit a patch to the Detective’s algorithm, it will always be there and as long as the infrastructure is there it will always prevent similar crimes from happening. In effect, we might say that you created an antidote for a given class of crimes. Don’t you find this amazing? If not, consider this: counting the number of solved cases, which is for me the only objective metric, you will probably be the most successful investigator ever!”
Vince raised his voice, trying to grab Ayer’s attention, but all he got was a raised eyebrow.
“All I do is to make up and test numerous somewhat absurd ideas until one of them turns out to be somewhat correct. I don’t think that this practice is in any way as useful as you present it to be, neither do I consider the numbers as important.”
“Absurd? Nobody else in the whole building could come up with something close to what you do. But I am beginning to think that there is no way for me to make you happy. You are coming tonight, right?” Vince said.
The party was organised in a rather simple and ad-hoc way. After the working hours had ended, all employees were invited to the big conference room, which looked exactly like any other day, except that the chairs were placed next to the walls and some music could be heard from the conference speakers. Vince and the rest of the management (excluding Jane) came for around 10-15 minutes to congratulate Ayer and his colleagues.
After that, someone delivered pizzas and several kegs of beer which the boffins attacked immediately. Ayer didn’t drink alcohol but that time he realised that he had nothing to do and decided to pop a few bottles and to indulge in some technical conversations with them.
After a while, a boy whom he didn’t know at all came to their table and sat next to him. Ayer turned to him and, without being afraid that someone would notice, he scanned his appearance as meticulously as he could.
“Ayer, don’t you have any respect for our new colleague’s privacy?” Chad yelled from across the room when he noticed Ayer’s stare.
“What is ‘privacy’?” John asked and everyone that wasn’t already laughing started doing so, “Cover yourself!” he turned to the boy who was just noticing how Ayer looking at him, “Cover yourself with something, or he will read your mind!” He was almost sick with laughter as were everyone else in the room, except the boy, who looked rather perplexed.
“Don’t mind that guy,” Allie said.
“I don’t.” The boy smiled. “I just don’t know what is happening.”
“Wait, I have an idea.” Chad said, “Ayer, can you scan this person and tell us the most embarrassing things you find out.
“Come on, Chad,” Allie said. “Won’t you stop having fun at other people’s expense!”
“Fun is not the only thing that he is having on other people’s expense, I can tell you that,” Johny said and started laughing at his own joke. “Why don’t Ayer scan Chad instead of that boy. Yeah, Ayer, why don’t you scan Chad and tell us what you find out!”
“I am not scanning anyone,” Ayer said. “I am not using my abilities to embarrass people.”
“Don’t worry, I will take it.” The boy said. “Seems interesting.”
“Do it Ayer, but be nice please,” Pankill said.
“But not too nice,” John added.
“No, doing this would indicate that I don’t take my abilities seriously. And I take them very seriously.”
“Come on, Ayer, you are always using your skills to show off,” Chad said.
“That is different.”
“Or maybe you don’t see anything you can share with us?” He continued.
“Maybe I don’t.”
“But do you?” That was the boy. “I want to know whether you are really as good as people say you are. And if you don’t want to, I won’t tell anyone whether you are correct or not.”
“And we still get all the fun from watching you two - sounds like a plan,” Johny said and the rest expressed silent agreement to this idea. They turned their heads to Ayer, almost simultaneously.”
“Alright,” Ayer said. “Let’s begin. I think that your parents are divorced.”
Everyone looked at how the boy would react in return, but he acted like he didn’t even hear Ayer’s remark.”
“Because of the way their relationship ended you are still afraid to talk to women for fear that you will end up like them,” The boy still said nothing.
“That, plus, you had terrible acne when you were a teenager…” Ayer continued and pointed at a little scar on the boy’s forehead, “You decided you will impress people with your brain, not with your looks, but there were people who had the looks and were no less smart than you…”
“That’s mean, stop it, Ayer!” Allie said.
“Yeah man, just admit defeat,” Johny said. We won’t embarrass you.”
Ayer took a closer look at his colleagues. They did not look disappointed, but quite the opposite - they were happy. He did what they wanted him to, not because he had to do it, but simply because he wanted to blend in. In a way, that was their goal of the whole exercise - to assimilate him, to make him “one of them”. Ayer felt that his job is done and left the room without saying anything. On his way to the exit, he saw the boy whom he tried to embarrass and asked him how many of his assertions were true.
“Well, actually all of them,” the boy said after a brief pause. But what difference does it make?”
While still slightly sad (and very drunk), Ayer found himself in his office. He turned to his wall where he had transferred all material from his home. Articles about disappearing people. In Japan, there were around 100000 of them every year, who were going in the dark mostly because of shame of personal failures. Not clear how many left the country, but even if he knew that he knew that he cannot iterate all of them.
He turned to the other wall, where he kept some pictures of Den’s dolls. Looking at them reminded him of the last hand-made object that he’d owned. It was a teacup, rather clumsily-made, which he had from year three to around seven. It was made from porcelain and was shaped like a figure of a fat person, with the person’s hands acting like handles for the cup. It was always so in his face that he made him uncomfortable. He remembered feeling its author’s presence when looking at it - feeling like he or she was sitting next to it there all the time poking his shoulder warning him not to break it, or being grumpy when his/her creation was left unwashed. The memory dispersed. He looked at Den Lee’s dolls again and thought that something so unnatural as them just had to be connected, either directly or indirectly, to her case. On his computer, he saw the last query that he was working on. He started reading it, but he was appalled by the dumb heuristics that he was using - it now seemed to him that all he did was to consume the ideas and features that OSCAR had, rather than produce original content. “And to think that this shit can actually work?” he thought, “Imagine if some true inspiration was employed.”
At that moment, he realised that from a given standpoint there wasn’t anything unnatural about either Den’s dolls, or the cup which he owned - they were both designed and produced by people, in the same way as everything else around him was. And unlike everything else, they were easily identifiable as such - by looking at them you can tell who created them and for what purpose. Whereas when he was looking at his work from the last couple of months he was clueless as to what the hell he was doing.
Then he sat in his chair and he started typing. What he created was not cheap to run, nor was it pretty in the sense in which boffins used that word when they spoke about code. But it was correct. And he knew before he would run it, that it will return exactly one result.
Vince entered Jane’s office without knocking and sat on her couch.
“That kid again,” Vince said. “Now using his colleague’s computers to run some queries.”
“They complained?”
“No, they were stone drunk. Probably still are for that matter,” Vince tried to remember whether the boffins were at work that morning. “Look, I know what are you going to say but ‘No harm done’ is not enough for me. If we don’t put him on his spot now, there will be no way to control him.
“Then go and do it. Why are you coming here?”
“Jane-“
“Listen we are in a gigantic mess that we haven’t even begun to untangle and our most valuable resource if you will, has got his resignation in his pocket since day one. And your biggest issue is how to control people?”
“OK, I get it. I will keep my mouth shut.”
“I am afraid sometimes merely doing nothing is not enough,” Jane said. “You know what’s Ayer’s problem? That the Yard does not give him anything. Like for example, have you actually seen what he did on those computers?”
“Something very costly. I am not good at computer programming.”
“Well,” Jane said, “it is about the case of Den Lee. And is near damn brilliant.”
“You said this case is bogus.”
“I did. But I might be wrong. And even if I am not, would it hurt for him to check? You need to keep employees happy. Besides, isn’t this the perfect opportunity to close this case once and for all?”
Ayer went on his way to Vince’s office while constantly reiterating the message that he had sent him. “There is someone I want you to meet.” The mystery tone unnerved him, especially when he considered from where it came from.
He entered the office hesitantly. There were two chairs next to the door. One of them was occupied by Vince and on the other sat a girl which looked exactly like Den Lee. Ayer couldn’t get his eyes off her. The girl stood up before him. She made a deep long bow and he made a clumsy attempt to imitate her gesture.
“And you?” he started. “You, actually-“
“I am her sister,” She replied in perfect English.
She sat upright, with her toes touching the floor with a posture that made her look like she was about to attack him. Both her toes and her nails were painted with dark nail polish - perhaps to hide signs of biting, but the layer was so thick that he couldn’t be sure. She looked like she was about twenty, but she was dressed and made up as a much older woman, indeed, the level of sophistication of her wardrobe was unlike what he had seen by people her age. Perhaps this was a way for her to show character or exactly the opposite - to conceal her character from him. If the latter was true, she was doing a perfect job of it - the number of traits she managed to hide from him was astounding. This was probably the smallest he’d ever known for a living person in a long while. He looked at her and smiled while trying to relax himself with the fact that it was probably her race that prevented him from seeing a clearer picture of her.
“Mrs Kei Lee is in the city for a few months,” Vince entered the conversation, “I contacted her unofficially after I read the new findings regarding her sister’s case and I invited her to talk with us.”
“I won’t going to ask you why you didn’t notify me.”
Ayer felt like he had to speak although the information he had for her wasn’t nearly enough for him to feel confident. With his eyes closed, he started what would turn out to be one of the hardest (and least successful) hearings in his career:
“So firstly I am sorry for your sister,” he turned to the girl, “I don’t know how it feels to lose a close one so I am not going to say that I sympathise, but nevertheless take my deepest condolences.”
Kei nodded but did not say anything.
“It is particularly unfortunate to see such thing happening to a talented person like your sister.
“Oh please,” She smiled but her eyes did not move an inch, “by now you’ve probably figured that the crafts were just a hobby for her.”
“Alright, what would you consider her job then?”
“She did not do anything in particular. She was overcoming some emotional problems which I would prefer not to discuss.”
“Are you positive about the ‘nothing’ part?”
“I am sure of it - we spoke often,” Kei replied, “We were sending each other letters.”
“I don’t understand, Vince said. We traced all her Internet activity, there were zero e-mails sent from her accounts.”
“Not e-mails. We were sending each other paper letters,” Kei said, “for as long as I can remember.”
“And where are these letters? Do you have copies?”
“No, I don’t have them, they are gone.” She said and Vince had a hard time digesting the fact that there really was absolutely no way to know what information Den had shared with Kei nor with anyone else for that matter, “but what we discussed in those letters was nothing… material, so I doubt that their content would interest you.”
“Were you aware of your sister’s whereabouts after she ran away?”
“Of course I was,” She said, “running away is not always about leaving.”
“Then what is it about?”
“Excuse me?”
“You do realise that the more details you share, the more likely it is for us to find out what had happened,” Ayer said.
“But I know what happened,” the girl said.
“And you are sure?”
“Yes,” she lowered her head and for the first time she looked her age, “My sister had serious issues.”
“Serious enough for her to jump out of the window?” Ayer said.
“As I said, I prefer not to discuss this,” She remained calm and made Ayer regret his blunt remark.
“What do you make of the call?” Ayer asked.
“Nothing,” Kei said. “I don’t know why she did that.”
“You think that someone does?”
“Alright, what do you want me to say,” she laid her head on her elbows, written on her face was an emotion that he could not decode, “What response do you hope to get from me?”
“I want to know the truth,” Ayer said.
“Well, you already know the truth. I already told it to you.”
“Look, I understand that you don’t believe me, and quite frankly I think that you do not care too much about how exactly did your sister die. But before us lays a question, and that question surely has an answer.
“All of this is true,” Kei said, “however-“
It wasn’t before Vince had already walked Kei to the door and had closed the door leaving him alone in the room when Ayer realised that she played him out. Her responses were always circumventing his questions. She made very good use of her position and didn’t even give him a chance to ask her some of the things he had in mind, like the disappearance of the dolls from her apartment. But maybe she secured herself a bit too much. Because now Ayer was certain that this girl was hiding something. He was sure of this like he was sure that she lied about not having the letters her sister wrote.
Ayer wondered whether there is a point to discuss this with Vince at all. Vince’s job was simple - to make sure all procedures were followed properly. In fact, it was so simple, that knowing a thing or two about how the organization worked, Ayer could almost construct the whole dialogue that they were about to exchange: “You had your shot, “ he’d say, “There are no grounds whatsoever for engaging Kei in any other way. No, I won’t make an exception. I guess you don’t realize that I am already making one by letting you speak to her!” “What suspicion? On what grounds?” “Just because she didn’t think your ideas were plausible does not make her suspicious.”
Ayer looked at his profile as he was exiting the room and quickly realized that he will never be capable of arguing with this person. He could not argue with someone who had never entered the realm of the abstract. Couldn’t argue with someone who didn’t know about the existence of the worlds that he was inhabiting. Couldn’t argue with someone, who, at the end of the day, he didn’t even consider fully human.
Ayer focused at the window, which was facing the exit of the building.
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