. .. IC Contact | Duplicity .. .

[konstant]

                                                                 

You've reached the electronic inbox of KD6-3.7. 

Leave your pertinent details and I will return contact as soon as possible.

Comments

Re: Video;

[hippie_ninja]

Yeah.

[He starts the sink filling]

Don't worry. I'm going to need your help, I'll be calling you as much as I can.

Re: Video;

[konstant]

[K frowns, doesn't bother wishing out loud, but he does glance around his own cell again briefly, studying the door.]

There's no sign of struggle or fighting? He hasn't been there?

Re: Video;

[hippie_ninja]

Well, Nibbles has food. So he was here in the last forty-eight hours at least.

Re: Video;

[konstant]

Okay. I'll keep an eye on this but I'm going to try something.

Re: Video;

[hippie_ninja]

...From prison?

[cryfrustration]

Vrenille genuinely doesn't go trying to seek out the points that will make K tense up like a touch-sensitive leaf. He does indeed seem to find them though, and he's getting used to the signs of when he's brushed up on something particularly sensitive.

His reaction to that now is the same as ever--he leaves it be. It's not the path to walk, that's the meaning he takes from K's tension. Too much, not this way, a different route. It's not down to a lack of options, and K does not want to hear him say more about it. So he doesn't. He doesn't cajole or try and argue the toss. No is no. It's at the very heart of personhood, being able to say no, and he knows that for K that hasn't been much of an option before now. That makes it, in Vrenille's estimation, something a bit like sacred ground.

He lifts his eyes to the water overhead, the motion of the light in it as a grouper, big and grey, crosses above them. "Y'know they're not going to let you just opt out 'n still walk free. You're okay with that?"

[konstant]

K still fully expects to be rolled right over like Vrenille's leaf; he has learned to brace exactly like this over a lifetime of being ignored and being used in spite of his preferences, to reserve the most blatant refusals for the most distasteful of denials. He still doesn't quite know what to think of it when Vrenille lets himself be turned aside.

K's eyes slide towards him though he doesn't turn his head; he's still watching the tank but also, now, watching the other man.

"I know," he says as simply. "But it's different from the injections. It's just me, in the cell until I'm not. That or they're hiding something." But he's not afraid of that. He's not unwilling to suffer that if he gets to do so on his own terms.

[cryfrustration]

"If that's all it is then I don't doubt you can wait 'em out." And this is wide of the topic maybe, but it occurs to him: "I don't even know--do replicants age? Do you have an...I dunno, a sunset date built in? Anyway, on will alone I don't doubt you could outlast the lot of 'em, still be sitting there when today's SIN guards are all old 'n gray."

However. "I dunno what they might do down the line if just locking you up doesn't sway you. I wouldn't put hiding something past 'em."

It makes him think of things that happened here years ago, things he supposes most people have forgotten now because the city has, overall, a very poor memory, perhaps by design. Maybe the most reliable thing about Duplicity is that it's hiding something.

[konstant]

"Some of us do, if the client requested it," he answers, an abbreviated answer, the relevant portions of it amongst a complicated history: "I don't know if I do."

He's already passed the four year mark, but he's a service model, so maybe it'll be eight.

"I understand. And if that happens, I'll reevaluate, but for now - I know what you've said about the contracts." His voice is so low he might be telling a secret to the grouper, though it doesn't care; it swims by, fins fanning delicately, mouth working in its own silent mutterings. "I just don't see how it can be true."

[cryfrustration]

Vrenille's voice is low too, but so that their words remain private, so nothing carries.

"You mean how they can be..." how does he want to phrase this, "fair? How they can be anything besides enslavement--ownership of one person by another?"

That's the rub here, isn't it? Reading between the lines, he thinks it must be, but he wants to hear how K will put it, how exactly it's framed for him.

[konstant]

Where is the place in the world you feel safest? Within.

K nods, and watches his own reflection in the glass doing the same; he almost leaves it there, lets that stand as its own answer. But if he's going to go to that extent to escape something he can't think his way around, he doesn't want to come off as just mulish, or childish. He has tried to talk himself around.

It's just he hadn't begun to feel steady until he made the decision to refuse to participate.

"It's like trying to imagine a color I've never seen based on someone else describing it. Or like being told go ahead, jump off this roof, I'll fly even though I never have before."

Did they keep you in a drawer when they were building you? Dark.

[cryfrustration]

"Leap of faith," he murmurs, thinking of Jacob and this mad thing he does, jumping from rooftops, sailing down, plummeting with arms outstretched, throwing himself into the safe landing that he can't possibly have seen from above.

Vrenille's never known how he knows, how he identifies the places he can jump from, but he does it, much the way he somehow seems to just see, just know: people in a building, their locations, their attitudes, friend or foe--his "eagle vision" he calls it.

So it's a little like that maybe: Vrenille can't see what Jacob can see; he'd doom himself leaping off a building. And that's what it's like for K as well. Vrenille can understand that.

"Maybe it's 'cause humans use contracts for so damn much," he offers, "even if we call 'em different names--bond, deal, bargain, pact, arrangement...shit even debt--they're all parts of the same thing. Maybe we're just more used to the double-speak." He casts K a sidelong look, not sure if this will make sense to him and not wanting it to be misunderstood.

"Sometimes I think there's not much that's more deceitful in this whole place than these contracts they got us all signing."

[konstant]

K is listening, even though he's not looking at Vrenille anymore; he's watching the patterns the light through the surface of the water cast onto the sand, onto the backs of the fish broader than they are tall, the wavering lattice work of interlaced halos, the soothing slide of refractory shadow in between.

He does understand the words, even thinks he understands the context, but then Vrenille calls the contracts deceitful and K breaks his number one rule from working cold cases: he lets it fall into the shape of what he's been expecting all along.

"How so?" he asks, a bit too promptly, openly wary - not of Vrenille's answer or honesty, but because this is what he was expecting all along.

[cryfrustration]

And yet maybe it won't be quite what he expects:

"Well when you think of the shape of this place, you got the Creator, who's obsessed with the idea of this 'deceit gene,' right? Wants to find someone without it, someone free of deceit. And he's a submissive y'know--got a contract same as anyone. So he drags all of our sorry asses into this city that says, first, fuck each other but do it by the numbers--our numbers. And then goes 'n tells us we gotta sign contracts if we wanna walk anything close to free." He's had years to think about this--for him, by now, it all feels quite clear.

"So what do we collectively do? We see a city that's damn well begging for deceit on all sides 'n we say 'Ha! Sure, we'll take your system 'n the letter of your law and we'll sign on these dotted lines, but jokes on you; we'll just live as we please in all your blindspots. You want us to trick you? Well shit, we can trick you.' It's deception all over. The law demands it. And the Creator's out there wringing his hands wondering why he can't find anyone free from deceit."

He shakes his head, laughing a little at the irony and the contradiction of it all, the vulgarity of this whole place.

[konstant]

It's a thought K has had, too. Irony and how this place encourages what it claims to denounce, what all the rhetoric lists in terms of condescension. And he had accepted it then: he lied to Joshi, he worked to deceive Luv and Deckard. He deserved to be here, wherever here is, whatever the explanation for this place is.

But this is different. He is in open defiance now of what he's been told he must do, but he's being as up front about it as the situation demands. He is being honest.

"I am trying not to be," he points out, but it's disingenuous; he knows he'll omit something if the consequences are severe enough for someone he cares about. "Why do you say the contracts the worst of it?"

[cryfrustration]

"Oh it's not on you," Vrenille waves it aside not to be dismissive but because there are certain things that, it deserves to be acknowledged, are bigger than anyone--things that are structural and systemic. K shouldn't feel he carries this one on his shoulders when he doesn't.

That's part of why Vrenille's pointing to the contracts as the worst, though also, this part is a little difficult for him to explain. He understands it when it sits in his own mind, but then as soon as he tries to say it aloud, it always seems to lose something. He tries though, to at least come close, to convey something to K of what he's realised in his time here.

"I think maybe it's 'cause the contracts, they're to do with the law here, right? And...well, it took me a long time to work this out 'cause I guess I'd always thought that the law and truth were on the same side together. I don't think that's it though. I think when it comes right down to it the law's probably one of the worst tools there is for getting to the truth. 'Cause the law doesn't care 'bout truth, it cares 'bout law."

He doesn't want K to misunderstand him here, so to clarify--"I'm not saying people who work for the law don't care 'bout truth. I'm not saying you don't. But the law itself?" He shakes his head. "That's something else. Truth is messy. Telling the truth? That's even more messy. And there's a lotta truths the law can't hear. I think...anytime you got something fixed that you're holding folks to the letter of, you're gonna miss half the truth by doing it. And then you got deceit built in. Two sides of a page, y'know?"

text; un: nomad

[disrupts]

Choom...

You ok?

Video | un: Caifornia Dreamin

[konstant]

[K's answer comes back immediately, and he doesn't waste time with text.]

V - where are you?

Voice

[disrupts]

[ Switching to voice, he's not quite ready to show his face just yet ]

Apartment with Nibbles.

Meant to come see ya sooner...

[konstant]

Never mind that.

[He's not panicky, not by other people's standards, but his voice is very direct and very firm, the closest he's ever sounded to a police officer since V has known him.]

Are you okay?

[disrupts]

[ The extended silence on V's end of the line might begin the answer. The heavy sigh continues it. ]

Couldn't tell ya.

I feel... numb.

[konstant]

[Jesus has already told him some. V's answer isn't encouraging.]

V...

Let me see. Please.

[disrupts]

[ Hesitant but unable to pin down why, eventually there's a video feed that joins his audio.

One side of his face is a collage of bruises, old lacerations tight red lines in his complexion.

He looks like he went a few rounds with an 18-wheeler but lived to tell the tale. ]

Don't recommend the hospitality there. Couldn't tell ya where this came from though.

[ What else is there to do except try bury his head in humor? ]

[konstant]

[Most people communicate via tone and body language - and K does too. He prompts people to answer certain questions sometimes so he can match up expressions with words, but by and large he reads faces. Microexpressions. Cues.

It's harder through the screen, and V has cyberware which changes the signs K is used to reading in humans, but the tradeoff is he's open, easy to read even from the start. It means that K spends several long moments just watching him, just reading him, before finally he shakes his head gravely, brow furrowed.]

You're not okay.

[disrupts]

[ He's not going to insult K's intelligence by pretending he's okay. Crest-fallen isn't quite his expression, but he's missing his usual spark of vitality. ]

No. 'm not.

[ Which is something for him to deal with because everybody else around him has their own shit to worry about.

Like K and jail. ]

They been treatin' ya okay in there?