In Council They Sit

Huh... Oh? Oh, nothing.

Just realizing that my brain handed me something, that's all...

For this week's story dear reader, I invite you to think of what it might take to keep certain types of information hidden from the world. Not the forgotten stuff that will never see a scanner, or the sorts of things a government will do so that a camera phone can never be in the same room as certain materials.

All that's needed for these sorts of things to hit the internet is five minutes and a curious somebody with a cell phone. No, what I wonder is, if you had certain sorts of power at your fingertips, then wouldn't you go to great lengths to insure that your protected documents protected themselves, always and forever?

From electronic eyes, anyway. But then, wouldn't those with similar means be very interested in what you'd taken all that trouble to hide away?

I rather think they might. Powerful folks tend to come together, for mutual protection, especially those of a magical bent in this cold cruel modern world. And wherever such folks gather, they will have purposes, often crossed. Come with me then, dear reader, and let us read of conspiracies that might be born among such powerful folk when...

In Council They Sit by M. K. Dreysen

Dwight Thompkins rode the elevator down from the council room, leaving his thoughts to array themselves as they would. He focused on the mechanics of the old beast, the brass rail and trim, the buttons that lit only occasionally when pressed. The hesitant stop and start motion as the car aligned itself, mostly, with the destination floor.

These very mundane elements of the world grounded him. Measured out the moments. Sure, he recognized that these weren't beats, heart nor metronome. Even his strides didn't pace themselves routinely. He walked through the open elevator doors, across the lobby, half grimacing half smiling at the way his heels thumped out of time against the marble tiles.

"Ah, of course," he murmured to himself. "Grace, how delightful of you to wait for me," he said louder, when he twisted himself free of the lobby's rotating door.

"Do you believe him?" she asked.

"Is this opportunity, you mean?" Dwight returned. "The Council has tabled the matter, for now. We'll discover soon enough. Or not, if I'm honest."

She frowned at that. "You're not worried? That's out of character."

"I said we may not learn whether it's an opportunity or not. I didn't say that there would be no consequences."

"Ah." Grace gestured to the parking lot. "Walk with me?"

"My pleasure."

Dwight waited, comfortable in the rush of hot air, exhaust fumes, and his unmetered strides. The pain in his hip and knee he could have done without, but these annoyances kept themselves below the intolerable level. For the moment.

His companion waited until they'd drawn alongside her car to speak further. "Your new student, Maria?"

"Martha," he corrected. "I don't quite know what to think of her, yet."

"You're normally so sure..."

And he was sure. Professor Thompkins took few enough mundane students; those whose non-mundane talents rose to the level of a Councillor's direct instruction came along so very rarely. But even so, Dwight had husbanded his reputation for turning down even the "promising" students, sending them on to the care of others where he felt them better suited.

Martha Hazard was, if he remembered correctly, his first apprentice in close to fifty years. No wonder that Grace Yung worried about his assessment of the new protege. "I'm well certain of Martha's character and her talents, Grace. It's simply her focus I'm waiting patiently to observe, that's all."

"Hmm. So you'll not be sending her out to keep an eye on things for you?"

Professor Thompkins chuckled. While the questions, and consequent directions, had yet to completely coalesce in his mind, he did have a broad outline for his next steps.

And those of the newly apprenticed Martha Hazard.

****

Martha rather enjoyed tennis balls. They did so very much, after all. They entertained the Mutt From Hell until both of them were exhausted. And then when the Foul Beast had chewed the fuzz completely loose, and she cut the remains into suitable chunks, tennis balls served admirably as table levelers and other necessities.

Yes, all in all, tennis balls, mundane rubber neon yellow fuzzy spheres were, in Martha's estimation, remarkably useful little objects.

Especially when, perchance, one were to whisper to such a little hairy ball. Suggest to it that, just perhaps, it would bounce once from the handplate on the opposite side of the hallway she knelt at the entrance of. And then roll back to her hand without any side adventures, or any particular weight that might impinge accidentally upon any of the various floor switches scattered through the hallway.

She tossed the ball, it flew along in a nice gentle arc to kiss the handplate just so, and then happily bounced back to her hand in a very improbable path, once on the floor, off the left wall, the right wall, once more on the floor just so. "Thank you," Martha whispered before tucking the ball into her backpack.

Martha let the brief surge of giggles fade away before she addressed the floor plates. The now open door at the end of the hallway could wait until she'd negotiated with the sensors.

Fortunately, since the alarm system had only ever been set off in testing, the weight sensors were happy enough to listen to her suggestions. It helped as well that Martha's conversation let her know where the sensors were, and thus didn't have to test directly whether the sensors had lied to her.

The room on the other side of the door didn't really have much place in a modern business. When did anyone need this many boxes of faded old parchment, crumbling books, index cards... an actual Rolodex? Martha shook her head at that.

And to try and shake the buzz of electrons from her ears. That was the little room's actual secret. The security theater was meant to protect the place, but surely...

She marveled. Someone had done a great deal of hard work indeed to build an interface between the computers of the outer world and these very tangible old documents, a one-way interface locking the information written upon them so that no electronic machine could ever read or store it. An electronic black hole of sorts, mouldering away in ink and dust.

Martha pulled what looked like a standard pair of welder's goggles from her backpack, slid them into place, then whistled when her eyes adjusted.

Each box, book, and card had now a line of light connecting it to the ceiling, floor, or walls. The Rolodex was wrapped into a photon spiral so tight that Martha wondered how it hadn't exploded into flame. Only the door she stood in contained no traces of the one-way connections flaring in her now-shadowed sight. Martha slid a pair of bull-hide gloves into place, complements to the goggles.

"Impressive, isn't it?" someone said from behind her.

Martha looked over her shoulder while she stretched her fingers within the well-worked leather. "Someone" was a tall drink of water, but indistinct otherwise behind the purple shade of the goggles. "Very much so. Your work then?"

"Absolutely. I can't tell you how happy I am to be able to show my work to someone who can appreciate it."

"And the time. How long did it take you to connect them?" Martha suspected the flip side of hiding the archive in this way.

Her interlocutor would have had to touch every single page. Only briefly, but they'd have definitely needed to know what each connection meant. Who, what, where, the information the thin web of light they'd constructed had come not lightly away from the ravenous the internet.

"Oh, you have no idea." The figure, still anonymous on the other side Martha's darkened lenses, shrugged. "Worth it though. Unfortunately, now that you've had your view of it, and I do appreciate a good audience..."

The figure had already brought their hands from where they been hiding behind their back. In the left hand, they carried something that looked close to a stun gun, though Martha rather doubted that simple electricity would be the only energy hidden within the tool's facade.

Her assumption was confirmed when a bolt of crackling blue, mingled electricity, light, and the incredibly strong suggestion to "Sleep" woven together, shot toward her face. Martha caught the bolt, redirected it, and threw it... carefully... into her opponent's stomach.

"How..." the other said, before slumping to the floor.

Martha twisted her gloved hands, then realized she was showing them only to herself, her newest aquaintance having passed all the way to wherever the bolt had sent them.

Martha knelt to wipe all traces of these moments, most especially anything to do with her own face, from the memory of the still figure. When the quartz stone she'd chosen as a receptacle glowed to her satisfaction, she returned it to her pack, then stood and considered the data locker. "Now, where were we?" she addressed the tangled weave of light. "Right."

Time to flip the Rolodex.

****

Dwight Thompkins extracted himself from his vanity; however much it pained him to climb out of the low-slung, vaguely European-style sports car, he enjoyed the ride that much more. And, he loved to admit, the puzzled scratching of heads that accompanied as casual observers tried to place the make and model. Unsuccessfully.

And, of course Grace awaited him at the car park's walking exit. "You look remarkably smug, Dwight. Tell me?"

"And here I'd gone to so much trouble to hide the matter."

"Confess, tall dark and handsome."

She backed it up with a smile, but Dwight had already decided to inform his oldest friend in the world of the list of names and contact information that Martha Hazard had provided.

"And you were worried that this wouldn't be an opportunity," Grace reminded him when he'd finished. "Plus, your apprentice?"

Dwight strode carefully across the lobby to the old elevator; waited for open doors and the half-hearted ping of the machinery's acknowledgement, and then the rise toward the upper floors before he responded. "She did well."

"What about Renau's apprentice? If Martha left any trace at all..."

Dwight smiled, nodded his assurance, but the doors opened with no warning and Martin Renau, president of the Council, rose from his seat in front of the Council's meeting room doors. "Ah, Dwight, Grace, how good to see you. I do hope you've both had a good month?"

Dwight winked at Grace, then turned and made his limping way forward to grab Renau's hand. "Of course, my friend, of course."