Oliver wasn’t sure what to make of the situation they had accidentally found themselves in—if the mysterious incident apparently brewing in the city was even something they could consider themselves more than vaguely adjacent to. Still, when Emilia slid into place beside him, he welcomed her presence… even if it did start with another attempt to make him update {Blissful Silence}.
“Please~? For me?” the silverstrain asked, blinking prettily up at him—not that he was looking.
His Censor, however, always seemed to be watching Emilia, pushing its awareness through the veins of the aether to see the world around him and making sure he saw every aspect of her person. The majority of the population couldn’t retain much of what all they could see through their Censor, so it naturally pulled their awareness smaller, lest their brains burn to ash under the strain. Low- and non-devs could retain most of what would be visible to them, were they able to spin and take in all aspects of the world, many of them able to reach around corners and sometimes even through walls that weren’t reenforced with Censor-proof materials, although such information was so blurry, it was almost useless. Still, unless manually set to feed them less of that information, Censors would give it to them.
The Censor System hack—which Olivier now knew was Emilia’s creation—he used could limit what his Censor fed him to some extent, although he favoured her function instead. He was just too obsessive—too worried about missing something important happening around him—to completely turn down what his Censor was taking in; once that information was gone into the aether and not recorded, there was little way to get it back, after all. So, where the hacked CS would pull the user’s awareness smaller, {Blissful Silence} removed the data from the user’s conscious mind, while storing it away for later analysis. It could also be set to monitor for certain things in that stored data—such as the user’s name being said—although it was slightly limited due to the strain it put on the Censor if too much was happening.
Censors had their limits, just as the brains of the humans they were installed in did. Occasionally, the hardware for Censors was updated, but it was rare. Usually, those updates were only distributed to teenagers, getting their Censors installed, or the rare person who had suffered damage to their Censor and needed a new one. Few people ever bothered to undergo surgery to have a functional Censor removed, just so they could have a slightly upgraded one. Mostly, law enforcement were the only ones who bothered: high-ranking soldiers and SecOps agents; the majority of The Black Knot upgraded theirs regularly, as did members of the more secretive organizations the Baalphorian government utilized for even more questionable missions than they already used The Black Knot for.
A few months previous, Axelle had regaled him with some research out of The Ridge Rind, as a more substantial Censor upgrade had been developed. A number of the researchers had updated their Censors, then released data on how much faster their Censors were. It was amazing, how much faster they had been, but even the researchers themselves had agreed that outside of life-and-death situations, a faster activation time for skills was rather useless.
Baalphorians didn’t depend on their Censors enough for such things to be relevant in their day-to-day lives. The upgrade had sped up and expanded Censors’ capacity to handle more complicated, power-hungry functions, while also upgrading its cooling capacity, but while Baalphorians tended to too heavily rely on their Censors for some things, the average citizen was still highly unlikely to care enough to upgrade.
In the end, the researchers had also determined that while some low-devs—and perhaps Dyads, who often relied on their Censors to limit their abilities—might benefit from the upgrade, the majority of the population would barely notice any difference.
Emilia, as his luck would have it, was just as fascinated with this topic as his cousin was—not that he told her that; chances were if he mentioned Axelle to the girl again, she would turn the conversation back to his cousin’s mortifying smut. If that happened, Olivier was sure Emilia would figure out he didn’t just know about the smut but had also been forced to read the majority of it. While he certainly wanted a lighter topic than either his refusal to update {Blissful Silence}, despite now knowing Emilia could see practically everything about him through it, or whatever situation The Black Knot was concerned was happening in Lüshan, he didn’t much want to discuss whether he had enjoyed any particular moments of Axelle’s hacker-Halen/hacker-Emilia smut.
Fortunately, the moment he asked whether she had read the research about Censor upgrades, Emilia went off, distracted and happy to ramble on and on about it. Olivier didn’t mind. For one thing, as Emilia clearly didn’t want anyone knowing about her hacking, she had already erected a Black Knot grade privacy barrier around them, so while they were occasionally getting odd looks from his students, none of them had any idea what they were talking about. Not only did this mean they weren’t disturbing the tour guide—although Emilia gesticulated enough that the tour guide was occasionally shooting them distracted glances—but as the class was aware that she was attempting to court him as a lawyer, they were liable to think she was continuing that mission… or perhaps that she had succeeded in convincing him, and they were now discussing her case. She hadn’t convinced him.
“Yet,”
a too big part of himself hissed as he listened to Emilia babble about how sad it was that most people didn’t care to use functions that would
totally make their lives better.
“Even worse!” she complained as they entered the city spire, the tour guide falling silent as the entire class gazed up and up and up, the Falmíer spire hollow through the centre and offering a mesmerizing view of the hundreds of floors that circled the spire’s edges. “Virtually no one uses skills! I mean, just look at your class! It’s bad enough that most of them
still
don’t seem to have had the sense to install even the most basic of translation functions, but I doubt they’ve installed any of the skills I heard them talking about yesterday either!”
Through Emilia’s huffing, Olivier noted that at this point, they probably had an excuse, as it wasn’t as though they could easily train with the skills on the ship.
“Have you asked about a training area?” Emilia asked, her own head tilted back to gaze upwards, although he had long come to the conclusion that she had most likely visited all of the cities on their agenda, save perhaps the penultimate one. Still, she let her eyes flicker over the beautiful stone of the spire, gems adorning large swatches to create complicated patterns and images, while rivers of colour flowed down others, creating illusions of both water and lava falling upon the floor.
“No,” Olivier admitted as their tour guide softly called to the group and began directing them to an elevator that would take them to the seventy-seventh floor, where the museum was located. As it was located near a stairwell, he and Emilia were gifted with a brief moment of enjoying the horror on a number of the students’ faces, when they assumed they would be forced to climb yet more stairs. “I could ask, but nothing like that was listed as an amenity on the ship.”
“Weird,” Emilia muttered, frown marring her face before she asked for the list of skills he had sent the class.
While some of the skills might give away where they were going, if Emilia thought hard enough about it, Olivier still forwarded it to her, enjoying the brief silence as she looked it over. It wasn’t an enjoyment of her ceasing to speak—something he had often wished for, even if the silence of his imagination was often brought on by his cock being stuffed into her mouth. Instead, it was simply an enjoyment of being in her company—something that, over the course of the previous evening, had become comfortable and easy.
That ease was the main reason he hadn’t brought up her nightmare from the night before, although his mind itched to find out how her friend BJ being an odd member of their group had pertained to her nightmare. The need to know scratched at his throat, urging him to ask while they still existed in their privacy. It tugged at his Censor, bidding him to message her and ask, lest she not want to speak her nightmares into the waking world.
He couldn’t do that. Unlike the night before, the Emilia standing beside him now wasn’t tense and worried whether her nightmare would snap around her the moment she fell back to sleep; rather, she was relaxed, mostly. What tension was there was almost certainly related to the situation they knew nothing about—probably, some of it was due to Cameron Fulbrun, lingering behind them as the tour guide disappeared into the elevator with the first group of students. Even he was tense with the Drinarna officer glaring at their backs, and the woman wasn’t there to babysit
him.
The point was that while Olivier wanted to know—wanted to be someone Emilia trusted enough to utter the truth of her terror to—he wouldn’t ask. If she wanted to tell him another time, he would let her, but he wouldn’t ask unless she once more fell into nightmares in his presence.
“Depending on where we end up next and our schedule,” Emilia finally said several minutes later, as they finally stepped into the elevator along with Cameron Fulbrun and the last two students, “we could probably get a few hours in the embassy’s training room. I’d suggest here, but considering we kinda want to get out of here sooner, if we can… Actually, if anyone starts to think something is
going down
, I suggest we pretend to be doing exactly that: reformatting the day to include skill training. The embassy should be at least a little safer than out and about— I mean, it
could
be the target of whatever might happen now or who-fucking-knows when, but usually, if an embassy is targeted…”
“All of the citizens of that nation are targeted as well,” Olivier finished.
Unfortunately, such things were common, both abroad and in Baalphoria. Some people were very against their nations’ attempts at healing the wounds left by millennia of wars; some people still held strong to ancient—and not so ancient—grudges. It wasn’t uncommon for embassies to be attacked for their representation of those attempts to heal; neither was it uncommon for foreigners to be attacked at random, or to be targeted during assaults on the embassies. Still, due to the risk to foreigners visiting even the most friendly and welcoming of nations, the embassies tended to have… rather intense security, making them some of the safest places to seek shelter within, even when they were being actively attacked.
There weren’t many Free Colony embassies in Baalphoria, and most of those that existed were located in a single area of the capital. According to his Censor, there was a Dionese embassy near the border between their nations—although
technically
the dead lands that surrounded The Core separated their nation—as well as a building that had representatives for a collection of Free Colonies that had some sort of agreement to protect each other's citizens should trouble arise. Apparently there was also a similar collective located on the Baalphorian side of The Bridge. Most of the attacks on embassies the last few decades, however, had tended to focus on the more specific embassies, as far as Olivier knew.
“The weird collective embassies don’t see much use,” Emilia told him when he mentioned them, seeking to distracted himself from thoughts of the cases they had covered in school dealing with disputes between Baalphoria, embassies and Free Coloniers seeking protection within their walls while the Baalphorian government attempted to charge them with some crime or another.
As Free Coloniers weren’t common in Baalphoria, such cases were few and spread over hundreds of years. While less information had been lost during the last Colonial War than previous ones, some amount of the cases had been reconstructed from memory, leading to a distinctly purist tilt to most of the case older than two-hundred-and-fifty years old. His family’s bunker was generally considered their most prized possession, and as a result, its existence wasn’t public knowledge—although a few of their closest allies did appear aware they had access to at least some case records that shouldn’t exist anymore. That hadn’t stopped Olivier from looking through the bunker for the originals of many of the older cases his school had covered. The results had been, more often than not, horrifying. The tilt of the records reformed from the memory of lawyers—and occasionally the involved parties—was, honestly, rather staggering. The official, remembered cases often portrayed the Free Coloniers who locked themselves within embassies, seeking to avoid charges, as evil. More often than not, the remembered cases accused them as far worse crimes than the originals he found within the bunker showed.
One day, Olivier hoped to be able to publicly reveal at least some of the files. He and his cousins would need to secure their hold on the law firm first, but one day…
One day, perhaps, they would be able to right some of the wrongs that those remembered cases, and the laws and precedents their flawed existence had set and allowed into Baalphoria, might be corrected.
Unfortunately, that
one day
was still far, far off.
.
!
Arc 9 | Chapter 369: Upgrades Aren’t Useful
Comments