QT UK - Ch 15 (WIP 2)

Here's the next chunk of Ch 15 for you. It's probably still got another 5k words or so to go and might get finalised as two chapters, but there's enough of a pause point here to share for now :)

If you're a supported of CorruptingPower's patreon you might recognise the new character here from his latest Phil's Tale chapter. He reached out to me and asked if I'd like to do something where I introduced the character in this story ahead of him and to synergise between the two, which obviously I was very on board with. Downside being that you should have got your first glimpse here weeks/months ago if I'd not ended up getting quite so held up.

*****

The odd sensation that had wrapped itself around Ethan while he’d been near Jess loosened as he left, leaving him feeling oddly unmoored as a little of the heat disappeared with each step - until his body noticed that the thin jacket he’d collected from his room was barely enough for the chill. And the sight of Nia in a long dark coat didn’t help.

She was where he was told she would be, at the upper edge of the hall’s grounds, where the best view of the landscape, spilling out in green-smudged fells, could be found and where a small wooden gazebo had been placed, originally for weddings. The jasmine that had been coaxed up the faded white trelliswork looked like it was already longing for the sun more than he was, but was still just enough to frame his partner with what felt like artistic intent as she sat on a bench beneath it - failing to notice his approach until he was almost alongside her. Instead, Nia was too engrossed in the video call she was obviously making, talking towards her phone with uncharacteristically animated hand gestures. Ethan knew that the spot was where the best of Taymont’s notoriously patchy phone signal was to be found, but between the chill and noticing how unguarded Nia seemed, he didn’t manage to ask why she was out there rather than simply using Pallisade’s wifi. 

He stopped a few paces away as a pair of dark eyes flickered towards him. Nia’s body language immediately closed, slightly, although the subtle smile that came with it was hard for him to miss now. And as she did, he felt that same disembodied sense of something in the back of his head reaching out towards her, as if it was now trying its best to anchor itself on her - and the thin thread of stress he somehow knew she was feeling. 

She raised a finger, wordlessly asking for a moment longer and Ethan obliged, waiting silently for her, close enough to catch the voice of a woman with a thick scouse accent on the other end of the call.

“She’s coded as yellow on the audit software. The lads on the backend are arguing that, but fuck knows. Like, you’ve seen how rushed this whole thing’s been and the underlying code’s this jarg knockoff of the Americans so there could be any number of bugs in the Naive Bayes crap they’re using as their architecture.”

“She wasn’t yellow,” Nia replied, her voice firm.

“Dunno what to tell you Babe. I’ve asked for clearance to look at the code meself, but Delphi is technically its own project and I’m getting the same old shite with all the pushback.”

Nia must have seen the way Ethan’s eyebrows lifted at the voice’s term of endearment, something knowing playing across her face for a second before she interrupted the other woman, who seemed ready to keep talking for as long as she was allowed.

“I’m going to have to stop you for a second, Jordan. My partner finally decided to wake up.”

“What, like, as in, he’s there now?” 

There was an eager sort of excitement to the voice’s response rather than any sort of concern, and Nia simply nodded, before undramatically turning her phone towards Ethan. A blonde woman’s face leaned intently towards the screen, as if doing so might allow her to get a better look at him. 

She appeared to be roughly the same age as himself and Nia, but immediately Ethan was struck by the contrast to his teammate - the other woman’s sharp features notably expressive and unrestrained, with intelligent brown eyes that seemed to leave nothing hidden as she took him in. And while she was obviously in a lab, the care she’d evidently taken over her hair and makeup made her look like she’d be more at home in a swimsuit on instagram than somewhere made for research.

“Uuuh, hi there?” Ethan mumbled, raising a hand in greeting, suddenly aware of how underdressed he felt.

The woman smiled. “Remind me - how many weeks did you argue against lettin’ an algorithm pick anyone for you, Nia.”

The statement was casual and playfully approving, spoken as if it was something that Ethan would already know, and it took him a second to realise he hadn’t. His stomach gave a small jump and he looked to Nia, but she’d already turned the phone back towards herself, and if she’d noted the slip of new information, she was intentionally ignoring it.

“Given what we’re talking about, I don’t know if you can blame me for being cautious,” Nia said, flatly. She then looked back up at Ethan, shuffling along the bench to make space for him to join her beneath the overgrown trellis, and giving a small pat to the seat beside her. “This, Ethan, is Jordan Price. The current head of one of Averna’s research teams and one the people I worked with at…”

“She was the CTO at AexaSphere, I know,” he said, as he slipped alongside her and leant in to join her in the camera’s frame, able to see her surprise on the screen as he finished her sentence. “I did a deep dive on your LinkedIn.”

Normally Ethan would have blanched at the idea of poking through the profile of someone he was dating, no matter how public it was. However, he’d become so used to Nia’s attempts to be across every detail she could find, that he’d convinced himself she’d respect the effort to learn about her, something confirmed in the way her attention fell on him. 

Not that they hadn’t already talked about their pasts enough for him to be broadly aware of AexaSphere anyway. It was a biotech company she’d joined as a start up, working to develop AI tools for use in healthcare and disease diagnosis several years ahead of anyone else until its eventual multi-million purchase by Veraxiontic in 2018. And from there it was simple enough to trace her path through the corporation’s executive structure to Averna and Project Upstart. What she’d quietly left out however, was just how much attention AexaSphere had received from the specialist press, with her and Jordan’s pictures even heading a fawning article in The Financial Times about the visionary, female CTO and COO poised to revolutionise Britain’s tech field.

“Jordan wasn’t just the CTO at AexaSphere,” Nia corrected, after a moment, “she was AexaSphere. The company was just there to support her work on AI models.”

“Ni, I swear we aren’t having this argument again.”

Between her accent and unashamedly casual manner, Jordan made for an unconventional sort of genius, but it was clear that just how much more heavily Nia weighed the other woman’s contributions than her own was an old scar on the familiarity between the two of them. Briefly, he felt that Nia did, in fact, want to have that argument again and it took her looking up at the grey horizon for a second to compose herself, and think better of it.

“I asked for her help,” she continued instead, “with trying to work out what happened with Alex.”

Ethan moved closer to Nia. “That’s what you were talking about? Something about a Code Yellow?”

Jordan nodded, blonde hair bobbing on the screen with an almost nerdy enthusiasm. “Yeah, we insisted to Averna from the start that the Delphi teams should have a system for auditing any errors with team assignments. We ended up with nine different categories for the sort of things that anyone could think of going wrong, but it was Nia’s suggestion to colour code them. Blue and Green cover end user human error and are something like 90% of the cases that have been logged. Orange is for someone physically forcing things, while most of the others are for technical fuck ups on the back end. Yellow’s what they’re using for coding errors and bugs in the Delphi system itself, glitching out and producing results it’s not meant to.”

The wind blew, bending the frame of the trellis. “You’re telling us that what happened to Alex was just a glitch?”

“I don’t know what else to tell you, like. Delphi’s system lead was already seein’ her arse when I reached out to her. Apparently they’ve had several hundred yellow cases since the start of the month and she and her team are insisting they’re being over reported. Says any time anything goes wrong it’s automatically been written off as her code without a proper assessment. She’s proper fumin’ that we’re not using the Grey code for unclassified cases where any doubt exists, rather than rushin’ to close em so quick, but it feels like Stevens and some of the other blerts on the board are pushing to get things nailed down. That said we’re talkin’ less than a percent of matches so it’s still in the system’s margin for error and without access to the current version I can’t tell who’s covering themselves.”

 “And your intuition actually believes that?” Nia asked, with an incredulity that was almost as visible to Ethan as the small clouds of steam coming off her breath in the cold. “What about Red? Or Black?”

It was only later that he would have the meaning of those two codes explained to him, with Black being used to designate an external hack able to pry it’s way through multiple layers of security software, and Red any sort of internal manipulation or corruption of Delphi’s processes by someone with the means and authority to do so. Strictly speaking the coding was intended for someone tampering with the algorithm or database, but Nia would confide in him that her passing the vaccine to Aoife, outside of the programme’s authorisation, would also be classed as Red if anyone chose to hold it against her.

For the first time, Jordan seemed to slow down in her response, rubbing at one temple with what Ethan thought was irritation before she spoke. “We’ve not had a confirmed case of either. Black would have caused all sorts of drama. And Red…trust me Babe, I’ve done the blue sky thinking on this already. There’s nothing to tell you there.”  

Ethan could almost convince himself he felt Nia’s reaction to something he’d missed before he saw it and he looked over to her to see her body coiling with a feline sort of tension. Three of her fingers drummed rhythmically against her thigh, as he waited for her to speak and only stepped in when she didn’t.

“You can’t just brush this off so easily,” he started, his voice rising as he found his own anger at how Jordan seemed to be dismissing what had happened to Alex out of hand. In his own mind there was simply too much sex and power to be traded to not presume the worst, and the redhead was owed so much more than the answer promised her. “Not when there’s…”

A dark hand stopped him, with a careful, cautionary press against his arm, quieting him as Nia’s voice came in low. “You’re certain?”

“Yeah. I mean, with you that far away, as certain as I can be.”

Jordan’s answer was somehow both vague yet also certain. Nia moved, with Ethan only realising how close the pair of them had ended up as she pulled her coat more tightly around her and the space suddenly opened up again between them. The feeling in his head reached for her again, but whatever was there wasn’t as strong as with Jess, and it struggled to find purchase. Even so, it was enough to make him reach out and place a hand on her back reassuringly and the pressure immediately softened. Next to him his partner tilted her head away, unreadable as she picked out a spot on the clouds and chose to watch it rather than immediately replying. Whatever had just been said was enough that she was choosing not to push any further, and Ethan convinced himself to trust her enough to wait before asking why.

His attention rested on Nia and stayed, only realising he’d zoned out when Jordan started speaking to him. 

“So, Ethan, Nia said you got a tiny bit of unexpected downtime after yer last pairing.”

The attempt to change the conversation was obvious, but he still took a second to catch up, admitting to himself how fuzzy his head had felt since he’d left Aoife. “Uh…yeah. If we’re calling it that? Honestly, I’m still trying to work out what happened.

“Well? How are you feelin?”

The question was friendly, but came with an over-eagerness that left it clear he was being scrutinised from the other end of the call. But, for whatever reason, he wasn’t quite ready to admit to the mental tugging sensation - the idea of it feeling foolish until he’d confirmed it wasn’t just some hallucination - and he kept his answer vague, hoping one of the two women would fill in some gaps for him first.

“I don’t know? Off? A little like my focus is all over the place and my brain hasn’t quite caught up yet.”

Jordan’s look quickly became more intent. “No physical changes? Healed scars? You sound like you were out for long enough that any regeneration would have been fairly significant.”

Ethan shook his head. “No. Nothing like the reports we’ve had anyway. And I definitely don’t feel better than I did before this anyway.”

There was a small flurry of questions from Jordan, with an academic intensity that appeared from beneath her accent as she probed about his heart rate, appetite and mental state. “If you’re willing, get your site’s medic to send me over a work up. Gemivax is like several kids in a trench coat pretending to be a real drug sometimes. We had to set the cycle rate to be higher than the US serums to get production to work over here, but not only is that causing the libido boost but it makes the model the smart proteins work on a little less stable. If it’s doing something weird, you might not see all the results dead quickly, but I’m happy to chip in where I can.”

The concept of ‘smart proteins’ was one Ethan was familiar enough with, not least from the mountain of documentation on immunology and organic chemistry that had been couriered to the project by a Dr Siobhan O’Sullivan, the bulk of which had immediately gone over his head. Luckily for him it was Armstrong’s job to parse the workings of the serum into something they could convey in a 5 minute section of their broadcast - and she’d managed to explain to him how the vaccine essentially worked by running algorithms on a near molecular scale, able to keep up with DuoHalo as they iterated over multiple generations and growing in complexity the more nodes they could add to their network.

“Do I need to be worried?” he asked, before realising that his concern was more for Aoife and the others than himself. “Or my teammates?”

“Definitely, probably not,” Jordan replied, leaning back in her chair, stretching arms that somehow managed to look naturally tanned despite being on lockdown. “Your model might be diverging a little, but if it is you’re not going to know until any changes start to appear. And they’re always what the serum thinks is beneficial.”

If the answer was meant to reassure Ethan, it didn’t quite manage, but he only got halfway through a frown to himself before the sound of Nia’s fingers rapping on the wooden bench drew his attention sideways with a tense little tug. She hadn’t spoken since the conversation had changed, and while she was looking at the screen, the furrow of her own brow made it obvious half her thoughts were elsewhere.

Jordan seemed to notice a second behind him.

“Need me to love you and leave you?” The blonde asked, softly.

Nia considered, then finally nodded. “I think I’ve a few things I need to discuss with him now, if that’s ok?”

The other woman laughed. “He’s your partner. You are allowed to tell me to piss off when I’m overstayin’ me welcome you know.” Nia responded with a flat look that felt like it must have been well practiced, but Jordan ignored it. “Was good to meet you Ethan. Make sure you call her out for me if she tries to keep things too close to her own chest, ok?”

Ethan smiled, about to tell Jordan that seemed easier said than done but, beaten to it by an over-exaggerated sigh from the woman beside him; he left them to play out whatever the dynamic between them was. 

“I’ll talk to you later,” Nia replied, in a manner that managed to not quite be either a statement or a question. 

“Yeah, sure.” The scouse woman leaned forward to turn off her end of the call and locked eyes with the camera as she did so, departing with one final smirk. “Love ya Sugarnips.”