The thing about {A Private Moment}? If you knew what you were doing, you could get around its security protocols.
Skills, as a whole, were split into three different categories: private, public, and everything else. Public skills were, well, publicly available, while private skills had never been distributed outside of specific people.
There were a handful of reasons why a skill might never be publicly distributed, ranging from it being a limited edition raid skill—such as Emilia’s own {Worriful Weather}—to the creator just never bothering to do so—Emilia herself had created hundreds of skills over the years that only herself and her friends ever saw. Sometimes private skills were sold, other times they weren’t—no one was under any obligation to offer up their skills to the world.
Public skills were exactly how they sounded: skills that were freely available to anyone, but that didn’t mean their code was freely visible.
As a control mechanism, every public and private skill had to go through testing with D-Tect. There were a number of reasons for this, ranging from making sure there was nothing nefarious in the skill, assuring that The Black Knot could stop its use, if necessary, as well as determining whether a skill needed to be encrypted or not for one reason or another.
People often forgot this little part of skills, never giving much thought to which skills they used and could never look inside. Part of it was that few people would be able to understand the code that powered any skill, let alone the ones deemed dangerous or important enough to hide away the precise details of. The reality, though, was D-Tect kept the
how
of a lot of skills hidden, only allowing certain people and organizations access to the code so they could learn to work around them.
{A Private Moment} was like that: a skill that no one but a select few would ever see inside, simply because seeing inside the code allowed them to work around its effects and drag memories back to the surface. Where a regular person might fear their memories being locked away by the skill, someone from, say, The Black Knot, had no need to fear such a thing.
There were plenty of people in their organization who could bring those memories back, then lock them away again—lock away the fact that {A Private Moment} could be worked around, as well. Organized crime used {A Private Moment} to keep their newest recruits quiet. The Black Knot swiped them up, plucked those memories out, then locked them and the visit itself away again. A recruit went back about their life, the little itch of
something lost
inside their brain no different than it had before their visit with a Hyrat clone, who were generally responsible for such things.
This fact was, of course, considered one of The Black Knot’s most important secrets—as much as the encryption of {A Private Moment} meant it couldn’t be altered by anyone outside of those given the unencrypted version, if the existence of its back door access was discovered, it would only be a matter of time before those with something to hide from The Black Knot were paying their best hackers to design a new skill. It wouldn’t be easy—seriously, whoever had created {A Private Moment} had been a fucking genius, understanding minds and Censors so completely that, knowing how the skill worked, the anonymous creator’s ghost terrified even Emilia—but eventually, someone would get there, creating their own skill that fell into the
everything else
category.
What was the
everything else
category? Simply put, they were skills that had either never been tested by D-Tect—Emilia also had numerous skills like that, but as Rafe worked for D-Tect, she’d had him officially test most of her skills at some point, mostly just for fun—or had been deemed too dangerous for even an encrypted release.
Technically,
skills that were deemed that dangerous were supposed to be erased. Emilia knew that rarely happened, although most skills that dangerous were never even sent to D-Tect in the first place, the people who coded them aware enough of what they had created to know it would never be approved… or working outside the law and smart enough not to tip the government off to their creations.
All that was to say that skills weren’t as cut and dry as most people pretended they were. The reasons for that mostly started and ended with people disliking the idea that there were people out there who could work around the so-called rules of their world. No one would like the fact that {A Private Moment} could be cancelled out by a small group of people. No one liked the reminder that there were people out there who could alter the skill that powered sparks with nothing more than a passing thought, allowing them a way through every skill limiting security system, only the complete shutdown of their Censor enough to stop them, to keep them contained… maybe.
People didn’t like to remember that they walked among veritable gods, the rules of the world nothing but guidelines they chose to follow.
Currently, Emilia and Samina were not choosing to follow those rules.
It had been a long time since Emilia had worked her way through the mess of connections {A Private Moment} created. Slowly, she plucked through the disaster inside Samina’s head, reconnecting fragments of her friend’s conversation with Professor A as she went, pulling the bits that didn’t belong out, wondering what sort of mysteries she would find within Samina’s head.
Already, she could tell that Samina hadn’t been the one to activate {A Private Moment}, the small indicators of who had started the skill absent from her mind. So, Professor A had done it. With Samina’s consent?
Yes. There was the moment, before the skill had been activated, lingering to the edge of the chaos created by the skill. Professor A, mysterious and always a little too seeing, telling Samina that he wanted to come along. Samina, asking why. The response:
“I have my reasons. If you insist, I’ll tell you, but only in private.”
Her childhood friend had agreed, the world immediately shuddering with the force of {A Private Moment} descending.
Then, the world blurred, only coming back into focus when the skill dispersed, leaving Samina and Professor A facing each other.
The specific variety of {A Private Moment} that her teacher had used hadn’t completely locked Samina’s memories away. Rather, she couldn’t talk about it and could only think about it in the vaguest of terms. In those first moments, after the skill disappeared, Samina felt… concern, curiosity, and a strange layer of trust that neither seemed to belong nor be implanted.
Emilia doubted Professor A had done something to force Samina trust him—although if he had wanted to, there, inside both the locked down training room, where even The Black Knot wouldn’t have been able to tell if something odd was happening in her mind, and the privacy of {A Private Moment}, would have been the place to do it. Still, something had clearly been said within their conversation. Samina hadn’t even hesitated to hand over the extra two tickets to Professor A, who had promised to meet them at the dock at the agreed upon time.
The fact that Samina hadn’t even bothered to confirm with her that the tickets were still unspoken for said a lot. Specifically, it said that Samina trusted her teacher enough to bring him along
and
thought that bringing him along would be more advantageous than anyone else they could find.
Fascinating, if also concerning.
Plucking another strand of Samina’s mind, following the resonance where it was meant to go, Emilia continued pulling her memories together until a picture of their time within {A Private Moment} began to form. Broken. Stuttering. There.
Oh. Well. This was clearly why Samina had told her she’d probably need her own memories of the conversation locked away: there was no way she was going to be able to pretend she’d never seen this.
This was…
Well, it certainly explained some of the odd things she’d felt from her teacher over the years. It also explained the strange relationship he had with his ward, who had started at Astrapan a few years after Emilia and her friends.
“Wild, isn’t it?” Samina asked, her consciousness coming to stand beside Emilia as she watched the fractured memories play.
They could be further reconnected, but there was no point: Samina would need these memories tied back up as well, at least until she was done interacting with Professor A and his ward, who was the intended recipient of the second ticket.
Forwarding a copy of the memories, as well as the remaining mess, along to one of the clones—Varo, one of the older clones, who had become holder for various memories that needed to be both protected and kept secret during the war—Emilia began the slow process of tangling Samina’s memories back up.
“We should tell someone else,” Emilia noted, wondering whom to tell.
The danger with revealing memories tucked away by {A Private Moment} was that someone would realize the memories had been seen—would learn that the skill was compromised. In the case of Professor A, who was already so observant…
Yeah, the man would definitely notice if he ever met someone who knew his secret. Unless the person they told the truth of this to was stone-cold, Professor A was liable to notice the strange way they would inevitably treat him, not to mention his ward.
Still, while Emilia agreed with Samina’s assessment that her teacher’s reasons for helping them were, at their core, truthful and… she wouldn’t say kind—they were definitely reasons that verged into the selfish and self-serving—but they weren’t cruel, either. Professor A wanted the person responsible for distributing the knotters caught or killed. He had his reasons—reasons Emilia couldn’t exactly say were
good
, but certainly weren’t the worst.
There was no reason, as of that moment, why they shouldn’t trust him, and even knowing what she now did about his ward… No, Emilia still didn’t think there was any reason not to trust that girl either, but that didn’t mean they shouldn’t be prepared to be betrayed, for something to go wrong, for someone to need to know who the pair really were.
As much as Varo would have the memories, could do with them what he thought was best, the Hyrat clone would prioritize the secrecy of {A Private Moment} workarounds over the safety of their little group. Part of the reason Varo had been picked for the role of secret keeper had been the fact that he was one of the few clones that wasn’t very attached to her. Where many of the younger clones loved her and may very well give up secrets to keep her safe, Varo wouldn’t.
Emilia liked that about him. She wasn’t stupid; she knew The Black Knot had been compromised more than it potentially ever had been, in its many millennia of existence, by her and her friends. Love and affection corrupted The Black Knot, but usually, it wasn’t quite this bad, and despite her decade long disappearance, her immediate reconnection with Samina, her brief meeting with Malcolm, not to mention the dozens of irate messages she’d received from the clones about her ex and his roommates, told her it had made no difference.
In the end, she was a weakness for The Black Knot, as was every other person she loved. That meant she needed another person to hold this secret, and it couldn’t be just anyone—it had to be someone she trusted to manage the information well, to neither spill it for no good reason, nor keep it so close to the chest that, if things got bad, they wouldn’t come in with some excuse as to why they were suspicious of Professor A and his ward.
Someone who liked her enough to potentially risk Professor A growing suspicious about the security of {A Private Moment}, but not someone who felt so little for her—or so much for another cause—that they’d let her or any of her friends die keeping it a secret.
That… kinda ruled out everyone in The Black Knot. Black knots just made love a little too intense, was the thing—was the reason why there was a problem with so much of the organization’s love being directed at her and her group of friends. The alternative was either they were trying to kill you—black knots hated with the same intensity that they loved—or they felt absolutely nothing for you.
So, someone outside the organization, then. It was unfortunate Halen was dead—he hadn’t particularly cared for her, had been a great liar, and had enough compassion to not just let people die attempting to keep a secret. Plus, he’d been a skilled enough hacker that he could have sold dragging memories out of {A Private Moment}’s victims as something he alone could do.
“Stupid raid dream,” Emilia muttered to herself as she sat suspended in the Virtuosi System, Samina having left to rest for a moment, her mind readjusting to the itch of a fresh secret—it wouldn’t do them any good if she remembered any of Emilia’s digging, so this entire hacking situation had gone down inside her own instance of {A Private Moment}.
She was still rolling over her list of potential secret keepers, cringing for how awkward contacting pretty much any of them was going to be—
hello, been a decade, but can you keep a secret for me, until you think I need to know it for safety reasons?
—when a message came in.
Emilia blinked at the message, then smiled.
Perfect.
.
!
Arc 6 | Chapter 243: Can you keep a secret?
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