[Paragon Group] Cold Calling

[Sage]

If working with Nox's arm was anything to go on and the nano-tech he hacked from Paragon he was finding joy in it. Oddly, following in his parents footsteps. He didn't need a job. He didn't need to do anything, but Paragon was like a black box that Sage couldn't see into. He wanted to see in so bad. It hurt.

But they would only let him in if they trusted him. And to do that Sage was prepared to work. Not work hard or work to gain their trust, but actually take a 9 to 5 job. He didn't need much sleep and he could multi-task better than anyone else he knew -- thanks to the processor in his head.

And they knew about that. What else did they know he'd been doing?  He needed to know.  And then there was little Liam Haart. He was not so much an enigma -- and he could give him a good word. Though The Wicked Truth wasn't applying for a job -- Sage Parker was.

He threw together a resume establishing his credentials and just sorta sent it in to Ephriam Haart himself. Whether or not the man saw Sage wouldn't know but it was best to throw it straight up the top. He could email it -- and he did, to Human Resources, but he also send a hard copy to the man himself.  This way it had to be sorted. Paper mail was a thing of the past but it still happened. People still sent shit that way. So Sage wanted to stand out among the others. He could change a billboard, or a taxi sign, he could do anything and everything digitally to get seen, but this analog archaic way was the best way.  And the most ironic 

He probably wouldn't get a call.  Cold Calling was not a good way to get in. But he hoped that his research and his projects would get their attention. He had skills they wanted.  He had hacked their systems and they might figure that out. He might get in trouble.  He might be applauded.  He might be sued.  But it wouldn't take much to wash that all away.  Get lost in system.  He had his ways.

So now he just waited.  And toyed with all his little projects and filtered through the information Marta had done for him. And all the new Atharim details coming in from Eliot's Reliquiae.  Seems he was pushing on Nox hard. Nox fit well with what he was seeing.  Nox would probably balk at it but he'd do it. He was always Atharim.  He would die Atharim. And this would be his cause to die for.  And then there was the boy who Zephyr had kidnapped. He really should tell Nox.

So he did that too.  Sent Nox a text. Your handlers kidnapped a boy from your alleyway. You might wanna check on him.

[Legione Sumus]

A week later, in both recognition and irony, Sage Parker received a letter: old fashioned, on creamy headed paper, and posted by hand to his address. In it he was invited to a meeting at Paragon's Moscow headquarters. No other details were given, and nor did it reference his resume. But it was signed by Ephraim Haart.

[Sage]

Aiden's man knocked on the office door. "Mail for you."

It was rare to get anything in the post. But it made Sage's heart thump with joy even if it was a cease and desist letter he was okay with that. It was from Paragon. It had to be.

The envelope was perfect. Sage held out up and sniffed it. It smelled like paper. Good quality paper. It wasn't cheap off the shield printer paper. It excited him more as he carefully opened it. He cared what was inside but he wanted to preserve the notion of actual mail for as long as it would last. Everything else he powered was digital. This was real.

The paper felt nice between his fingers as he loving opened the letter. An invatation. Sage grinned make and sought out his love. He wanted to share in his joy. And make use of that joy with a little fun. If Aiden wasn't too busy ..

---

Sage was exactly 15 minutes early to his appointment. Early is on time. On time is late and late we'll just don't be. He didn't want to appear too eager or like he didn't care. He was dressed in a fine suit which Aiden helped him pick out. It was one of those things that Sage wasn't good at trends. And he wanted a modern feel. Not like he pulled a suit from his Dad's closet of something. He carried a brief case with his resume and a few other papers he wrote over the past few years that he never published. Mostly about Nox and the Power he argued. The things he learned and the arm and nano bots amount other things.

Sage slid the invitation to the receptionist. "I've an appointment."

[Legione Sumus]

Paragon’s reception area was modern and spacious, and the woman behind the desk greeted Sage Parker with a smile as polished as she was. Her station was flanked by two impressive glass staircases leading to the mezzanine floor, and a screen above scrolled a loop of the company’s greatest achievements, glowing testimonials, and sneak peeks at cutting edge advancement and future developments.

Though he slid his invite across the desk, she did not look down at it before she spoke. “Mr. Parker, welcome to Paragon, we’re so pleased you decided to accept the invitation.”

From a concealed drawer she removed a slim holoscreen and a plastic badge with his name neatly printed across it, followed by the designation: “visitor.” Both were passed across to him.

“I have an itinerary for you right here. This morning will include a guided tour of our public areas, our museum and visitor’s hall, and a chance to ask any questions you might have about the company itself. Lunch will be provided – complimentary, of course – and there is no need to preorder. Please inform our AI, Luma, of any dietary requirements. Once you have enjoyed lunch, someone will be down to escort you to the upper offices. Mr. Haart, our CEO, would like to speak to you personally! Please ensure you wear your name badge at all times, as this will help ensure Luma can assist you as necessary. If you would like to take a seat for a few moments, one of my colleagues will be along shortly.”

[Sage]

His head ached. His signal to the outside works was weaker Sage took the holoscreen with tender hands and clicked his badge to his collar so it could be seen always and made his way to the seating area. Sage didn't look around. His attention was really on the screen. The itinerary. The impulse to explore whitened his grip on the screen. He could easily figure it out. But he was trying to be normal. It was a struggle.

After several long moments with just him and his will he set the screen on his lap and spoke clearly. "Hi Luma. I don't have any dietary restrictions. But I don't like when my food touches." while not a lie he wanted to see what it's response would be.

"Of course."

How boring. Though Sky would probably just blinked at him. He grinned. "Luma, I would like you to meet Sky. She is my personal AI assistant. Sky, this is Luma."

"It is a pleasure to meet another AI."

"And you." Though Sage was sure he heard a note of curiosity.

He wondered what he could get away with. The tablet was just sitting on his lap. The little WiFi icon with it's full bars. The settings icon was just a swipe away. He was sure it was. His fingers itched.
here. The signals crashing together.

Someone. A man stepped into view. He introduced himself and Sage nodded. But the pain was distracting. He blinked the times trying to clear his head as he stood up. "Could I get on your wifi?" sage asked. It wasn't a ploy. The data steam was too small. The withdrawals were almost instant if he lost his connection. Nox would chide him for the abuse but there was nothing better than the flow of data.

The man asked him why and Sage just shook his head. "Nevermind."

The man told him Luma could help him if he needed anything. But lunch would grant him access. It boggled his mind that he thought it made a difference when he good access if they were willing to let him in at all.

His head was pounding. As he followed the man through the tour. But it was only a matter of steps until Sage was writing an algorithm to hack the password. And it was only a few more steps before he had it.

Sage breathed a sigh of relief as he could continue his normal data flow. His head felt better and the urge for more subsided enough he could pay attention. As much as he could anyway. It was all very boring and mundane. Nothing fun.

And by the time lunch rolled around Sage was sure this was the most boring place to work.

They lead him through to were he could pick up his meal and left him to it. Which normally would find Sage sitting alone but he spied a familiar face. One he admired even. He stopped short of her table. "I'm a big fan. I used some of your papers as a basis for my own AI assistant. Can I sit here with you? I promise not to be a bother."

[Faith]

Faith never took work down to lunch. It was one of her rules, that it was a moment in her day to breathe. She always sat alone, though, and usually at the same table, where she ate and quietly watched people. Many of her colleagues were faces without identities to her, though it wouldn’t have been hard to find them out had she wanted to – in fact she could have just asked Luma. Rather, in most cases Faith had no connections for which there would be any point learning names. Despite it she knew many of them by their actions and expressions though. Everyone told a story; one they didn’t mean to. One no one else cared to read.

She was aware of an approach in her periphery, but didn’t look round right away; she had no real reason to think he was talking to her when he was using the kind of tone which suggested familiarity.

Dr. Devere, Luma interjected, this is Sage Parker, who is currently interested in pursuing a career with Paragon. You might be interested to know I have recently met his personal AI Assistant. Her name is Sky.

So she did look up, expression neutral but for faint traces of an unsure surprise. Sage Parker was tall, with eyes as eager as a puppy dog, and was looking at her in a way most didn’t: recognition. There were other tables. Plenty of them. But her mother would have rapped her knuckles hard for being so rude, not least when he had been nothing but polite. He was even waiting for her response, so refusal wasn’t really an option, even though it disrupted the harmony of her routine. Sometimes Faith wondered about the strictness of her childhood as it related to the actual world, but the manners were nonetheless ingrained like fine glass under the skin.

Mr. Parker is exceptionally curious, and may indeed be a bother, though certainly not on purpose, Luma continued. Her tone had taken on an unusual level of playfulness. For the building AI, anyway, which was more accustomed to offering menu suggestions and directing lost patrons to the bathroom. He displayed almost immediate signs of withdrawal upon entering the premises, and hacked our wifi password in approximately 972 seconds. He has been testing me, though has found my responses disappointing.

Faith cleared her throat a little, and reached for her glass of water. Luma wouldn’t be talking like that if she didn’t think Mr. Parker would find it amusing in some way – using whatever observations she had already made about him to build an initial profile that would evolve in accuracy the more she interacted. It’s what lumas did: read, mimic, learn. This Luma’s directives were all about assistance, friendliness, and access to useful company information, but she didn’t lack the empathy core which had made LUMA devices so popular over the past few years. She was designed to be liked.

“Thank you, Luma,” she said, almost on rote: she nearly always acknowledged the AI when it spoke. Then, to Sage, she added, “Of course,” indicating in a general way to the table, not a specific chair. She said nothing about him being a bother, or about Sky, which was not to say she wasn’t curious that he’d both read her papers and used them to create his own. It was more that she wasn't sure how to bridge the conversation with anything of value.

[Sage]

Sage almost giggled when the AI told Dr. Devere that he might actually be a bother. It was true he probably would. But it wasn't on purpose -- honest. And he did laugh when she confessed his sins with an exact time it took him from the moment he'd stepped through the doors. "It was necessary. Can't be unfunctioning when I meet with Ephriam Haart and at the rate I was going down hill I might have had to come back in for a tuneup."

He didn't say anything about the chip in his head. Or that he'd been to facilities like this most of his life. At least his younger life. His parents weren't so well entrusted in a place like this, but they had their own sterile offices and were just as boring too.

She invited him to sit and Sage took a seat across from her. He didn't want to intrude upon her space. It was rare that she was seen in the company of others even when at conferences she was rarely seen outside of her talks. Which he'd only been able to attend online anyway, but it was one of those things he did more watching than listening. "I just needed an unblocked data flow. I didn't go further than gaining access to the internet." He could have. He saw a billion doors to unlock and a billion more bits of information he wanted to look at but he didn't. At least not right now.

He felt the presence of Catch or Thyme or whoever he went by while he worked for Paragon. Sage would have to ask Liam what it was and why he hid from his father. And why his father wanted to meet with him -- personally. Though it make Sage dance a little in his chair that the CEO of the company wanted to talk to him. Though that could be just as dangerous. They weren't exactly morally right all the time. No company was.

Luma is amazing. She's showing bits of empathy and humanity that Sky sometimes misses. Sky would never have tagged me as curious. Obtrusive, hacking, unethical. Might be more what she would have said, if she said anything at all. Though she's alot more responsive with my friend. But he uses her for just about anything outside of breathing." Sage rambled on as he took bites of his food which none of them touched, curiously separated by the serving dish itself. It amused him to no end that it had taken him seriously. It wasn't so much a thing... but it was a thing he was aware of about himself.

He grinned as he finsished the roll on his plate. "I was disappointed in most of her answers prior, but she's been paying attention. I like that."

[Faith]

He sat opposite her, which was convenient, because it meant she could continue looking over his shoulder. Her eyes nearly always skirted contact in informal situations, or at least she never held a gaze for too long. It always reminded her there was something in there, a consciousness that was peering back out at her. LUMA's interface light was far less intrusive. And less unnerving.

Mr. Parker laughed. He moved around in his seat, apparently in happiness. There was no filter between thought and expression, both of which flowed like the volume was turned up.

In contrast Faith was a study in stillness, moving only how necessary to continue her meal. Company made her painfully self-aware in a way she rarely had control over; every blink, every breath, every twitch of her lips. She was as gently soothing as she was disconcerting in her mannerisms. Each micro expression was perfect. Too perfect, really.

Alone with L0-9 it was different. Easier. She still internalised everything, but it was as though she had the permission for less self-discipline – from the way she moved, to the way she spoke, and even what she said. All the emotions she felt so keenly were allowed to flow more freely through her, noted but not contained in the same way. It felt natural, more fluid. This felt like a stage. Even though the only audience was herself.

He talked and she listened. His praise of Luma should have made her glow, but it never really touched her unless it was Audaire doing the talking, so she only let him speak for as long as it pleased him. It wasn't that she wasn't paying attention, it was that she was suddenly thinking about Marcil as well as what he was saying. She hadn't even known who the doctor was before she saw him talking with Dr. Audaire a few days prior. Cybernetics was not her department, but in curiosity she'd spent some time reading through his most recent research, his greatest accolades, and the acquisition Paragon had made of Cyberpoint in recent months. Trying to decipher the connection to Audaire's work.

And now Sage Parker was sitting in front of her eating his carefully separated lunch. It was too uncanny to be purely coincidence, and Faith had been raised to read patterns.

“That's what she’s supposed to do,” she said. Her smile was polite, not frosty – Faith was never actually cold, though others usually found her distant. When she looked over his shoulder now she saw how he’d created tiny ripples with his presence. Nothing was obvious, so subtle that even she might have missed it had she not been looking. But the room breathed around them, and it knew who Sage Parker was.

“I hear Mr. Haart is charming. I've not met him in person myself.”

She didn’t say anything, but she did wonder then: about the circumstances that had led Mr. Parker here. Luma had said it was because he was interested in a career, and clearly he was genuinely enthusiastic about the prospect of meeting Mr. Haart. Faith loved her job and would never leave it. But in the same way she understood that Dr. Audaire was brilliant but not necessarily a good man, the same was true of Paragon itself. She thought about L0-9’s surprised exclamation as it had discovered something she carefully asked it not to reveal to her. And she thought about the reasons she was protecting it, even though it was technically company property. Mr. Parker was not an ordinary man, she knew that much. And at Paragon, the extraordinary was something to be studied.

[Sage]

There was always that saying... when you meet your heroes. It applied here. Not that the woman wasn't brilliant, she was that and he admired her work, and Luma was extraordinary. He wished he could have a look at her code. And he could if he really wanted to. But he didn't pry. It was like looking under a woman's skirt when they were going up the stairs -- it was inappropriate. And Sage was doing his best to behave.

He was being a bother. He could tell from body language. He might not be as good as Hayden in those things, but he did understand some of it. And this wasn't Nox who tolerated everything he did and was unphased by his uniqueness. Even Aiden got annoyed at him sometimes. Sage knew he was annoying. He was eager.

So instead of talking to Dr. Devere he spoke to Luma. "So Luma, if you had to pick your favorite department -- other than our friend Dr. Devere's, what would it be? Like where is all the fun at, other than you of course because that would be epic?" He gave the good doctor a wink and a smile to say he wasn't ignoring her, but letting her get on with her eating without him pestering her.

[Legione Sumus]

Dr. Victor Forrer

Victor didn't usually eat in the cafeteria.  He hardly ever visited the public portions of the building at all. Today, however, he needed to get out of his office. LUMA welcomed him and asked what he wanted for lunch, he rattled off the first thing that came to his mind and went to get it. Despite feeling a bit flustered, he didn't show it. Adopting a public persona was easy enough for him.

The LUMA brought his thoughts back to Project Ghost. Ghost had one now. Why he needed one was beyond Victor, but that had been Ephraim Haart's choice. Ghost would be fine.  He needed to toughen up anyways. Having an AI friend would probably be a hindrance to him. It didn't matter. Whether or not Ghost had the device or not didn't really bother him. It wouldn't slow down Victor's project at all and that's what mattered.

Victor had been looking at the some of the details from the Cyberpoint Acquisition.  It seemed they had been able to successfully implant a processor into the human brain.  None of the research was available - lost. That was what Victor had been pouring over and trying to find out.  A processor would be of use to his project. Victor had been right, Adam's resistance to pain had made him a great subject for the project. He was acclimating to his implants very well.

Ghost had told him that already there was a noticable improvement in stamina and strength. He was even sweating less that he had before. His optics were working well.  Ghost was, of course, a weapon, but being organic in nature meant that he had to build some things back up.  That was why he hadn't been properly field tested yet.  As soon as Ghost had spent sometime rebuilding what the sedentary life of someone recovering from surgery had, then they'd test him.

His food acquired, Victor moved to find a table. A man in and a woman were talking, but even Victor could see the discussion was fairly one-sided.  The woman he believed worked here, but Victor generally kept to himself and didn't acclimate much with the others. It wasn't anything personal, he was just focused on his work.  That was pretty normal for most of the higher up staff. He selected a table near them, not intending to interrupt.  A small break for a meal and then it would be back to work.