[b]Costa-Silva infiltration:[/b]

There’s been an operational miscommunication here that’s fairly easy to make. Luis isn’t the target, Luis is the house-husband. So a lot of these reads are useful or correct, in that he’s ranking Costa-Silva in charge - but the ex-highschool teacher isn’t Walter White. He’s Skyler. Still, every highschool teacher is fundamentally enough of an authoritarian that Green’s vision had enough right in it. Luis study is exactly where she expects it, for the reasons she expects to find it there.

 What she finds there is a more modest room, filled with mostly fiction books. Physical books that can be taken down from shelves and shown to people, shared with them. Some are old in that they are antique, but most are old in the sense of being battered and well-read and well-loved. This is a writing room, too, where he works. 

This is still where you can learn a lot about Carmen Costa-Silva though. The photos he displays of himself and the two have together are also old - her graduation from law school, their wedding. None of her elevation to the supreme court. They still love each other, then, but maybe not as much as they used to. You get the impression his loyalty is unwavering, though. Maybe it’s the fact that this is clearly the space of a man already retired, and Carmen is still at the height of her career. 

A small pinboard on the sidewall has news site printouts of her biggest cases; One case where she ruled on a major cartel that sold agricultural-grade implants to people, several against police corruption. Nothing about property crime. It could just be that it wasn’t her specialization, or that Luis wasn’t impressed by it. 

There were useful weak points to learn here, and something else. It was easier to slip security coming up in this direction. Carmen’s information must be back the other way then. 

One could even get a sense here, from this room, that as much as Luis still loves his wife, this is the part of her life he would rather keep as far away from him as possible. 

[b]Sophie:[/b]

Sophie isn’t really a programmer, just a debugger for the most part. That being said, she’s also literally a brain surgeon. The march of science didn’t make that field any easier, it just meant means that a 2080 brain surgeon has to know even more than a 2020 one could. 

She slips a scalpel down the shoulder of her gothic-lolita scrubs and tears strips of it away, showing the skin from her neck to her collarbone. “Bite here.” She says. “You can keep going if you taste blood, just remember this is the arm that’s going to be fixing you up after.” 

At some point, Red blacks out. This was always going to happen, seeing what rises from the surface when Red slips under it was part of the diagnostic study here. 

Maybe thirty minutes later, with only bruises to show for it, Sophie is running through her final results. The glue has long been dissolved, and Sophie’s cuddled against Red reading from a tablet when she regains consciousness - and as promised, she’s repaired most of the damage she caused, aside from some scarring that will need more time to properly go-over. She pulls out her phone and puts a long password into it, before putting it in Red’s hands. “Good girls get lollipops. Make it 19,050.” There’s more than 50 pictures in the gallery, which is a hell of a way to learn that Sophie has a full length mirror above her bed and gets creative with an old-fashioned Wartenberg wheel. Scrolling down, there are definitely more than fifty pictures in here, and it’s probably a very educational experience for anyone with an interest in old fashioned medical tools. The monofocus of this gallery implies the existence of other galleries, then, with other themes.

She shakes her head. “Found all I’m going to find anyway. Nothing I can fix, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with fixing the sandwich thing, but at least now we know a bit more about that mood swing, before.” Her eyes flick to the other patient, kept chilled on the floor for almost an hour. Sophie’s ankle isn’t getting better either. “I hit the guy with both treatments at the same time to speed things up. You mind helping me move him to the padded room overnight? He’ll be under sedation the whole time, just… He’s fucking heavy. We can knock off for the day, after that.” 

Normally it’s way too early for that, that’s not why she’s deciding it. 

[b]Crystal:[/b]

“No, they can’t do that.” Crystal says, exhausted but matter-of-fact. “It’d be against-“ She stops. She almost said there were laws against it. That human rights can be so fragile, so conditional, isn’t something people forget because they’re naive. It’s something most people find an unquestionable and inviolable truth in their heads, because they can’t excise their Black into a different person. Some fears are so total they get in the way of living.  

Crystal is quiet and still, and stares at her feet. You can’t even tell if she’s thinking intently, or unable to think at all. 

At least, at least you got all the stress adrenaline out of her first, or this would be going very differently.