Driving Dr. Sepulveda

Grace
As agreed upon, Grace is waiting for Dr. Andrés Sepúlveda at ten. True, she was there at 9:30 just in case things ended early, but Grace carries her entertainment in her pocket. It's no biggie.

Her new acquaintance will find her outside the federal courthouse in the driver's seat of her red Toyota reading Hillary Clinton's emails. Somebody made a search engine for them. Here she is asking how LinkedIn works. Here somebody is reminding her to drink eight glasses of water. There are people in the top echelons of the United States government with AOL addresses. One wonders how many of them just had to change those addresses after the twenty years or so they've had them, now that they've been signed up for every porn service known to man.

It's a distraction. A way to pass the time until her 'friend' shows up. He's not really a friend. This is just part of the duty, right? Keeping people together, making sure they know, it's all part of making them a resilient network. Even if this guy comes across as a little... abrasive. It's not like she did much better, right?

Surely, it'll be cool.

Sepúlveda
Because nothing has ever occurred during the course of a 30-mile drive that has led to one person or the other getting out of the car with the intent to walk the rest of the way.

Just past ten in the morning, a short man in a suit and glasses walks out of the federal courthouse and ambles down the steps. He is not dressed for a casual breakfast with new friends and colleagues but for an inquest. Seems fitting then that they are on their way to discuss an absent associate and the war that the Technocrats threaten to bring to them.

He has not shaved his face since the last time she saw him. That does not seem to be in his list of things to concern himself with.

The thought occurs to him that she might not take too kindly to him smoking in her car. So he does not light up before he opens the curbside back door to throw his briefcase onto the bench seat. An arpeggio of door-sounds and then there he is in her passenger seat.

"This is going to be fun, eh?" he asks as he buckles his seatbelt.

He actually sounds like he means it. But then again he may just have had a lot of coffee. Then again also, he was a little hyperactive the first and last time she met him. And she still agreed to this.

Grace
On the list of things Grace concerns herself with, other people's grooming habits ranks somewhere near the bottom. Her own grooming habits only rank a little higher than that. If she were male, she'd be sporting a kernel hacker's Unix beard of the type shipwrecked islanders might look askance at, if only because shaving is time better spent building a script that would do it for you if you had the right robotics equipment.

The first thing she notices is not the unkemptness of his facial hair, but rather that he doesn't feel quite as unwholesome this time around. That's... odd. Well, okay. He still feels creepy as fuck, but the word creepy does not even begin to describe what it felt like when he walked into the bar that first night. She just looks at him with a tilt of her head, like she's trying to figure him out when he gets in and starts talking to her. What did he say? Oh yeah. Fun.

"Fun? Why?"

She takes one last glance of Hillary Clinton's emails and sighs, shoving her phone into her jeans pocket with a little car seat gymnastics to make it fit. Then, she starts the engine, looking for some kind soul to let her out into the street proper.

Sepúlveda
As unkempt as (and short. he is short. Grace is taller than) he is, Dr. Sepúlveda is a handsome man. Something about the way the bones in his face have arranged themselves or the color of his eyes. Doesn't do a thing to offset the fact that he feels like the inevitable end that awaits us all.

His resonance does not feel like the denial of it. Rumor does that for him. If Grace were to ask her friend Sam if he had ever heard of this guy her friend Sam could query his connections and come back with a few stories but nothing substantiated. She knows: the Society and the Elite do not often meet.

Why fun.

"Ehhh," he says. Buckled in now, he shifts beneath the belt. "At least interesting." Anticipating the followup question: "It's rare I get to meet anyone who is not Etherite or Verbena! On the coasts, it is all Order of Hermes, and Celestial Chorus, and...!" A beat. "Eh, I had a long lunch with an NWO Operative one time, but--" Hand wave. "We don't talk about that. Inland, there's more diversity! Outland, I've only found people who are impossible to talk to! Onward and upward, yeah? I'm interested to meet your brethren."

Grace
Her eyes bug out a little bit when he mentions that he had a long lunch with a NWO Operative once, which had to have been interesting indeed. She's tempted to ask why. About the only thing she can think of to talk about with one of them is why they suck. Here, I can explain it more thoroughly with these example network graphs and their associated equations...

"Hmm. Really? I've never been to the coasts. Well, I have, but not while Awake," she says, looking behind her shoulder, pulling out into the road.

"I don't know who is going to show up, but I think you'll find the Denver demographics to be more full of people going their own way. We've got Hermetics and Verbena... Pan left us without a Chorister," she says, nods to his point. "To go live on the West coast, hah."

"There's a couple of my kind here, some Chakravanti... People come and go, but I think I've met like one of everything, and a lot of Orphans who would prefer you not call them that, because you're not their mom."

Sepúlveda
A frown.

"Do the Orphans here not call themselves Orphans?" He considers this. "I have two apprentices, for now, until they find their own tribes, but I will not call them Orphans unless they, after deep reflection, say, 'You know, yes, I reject all other reason and order and tradition, I am my own person.'"

Sigh. He rustles around inside his suit jacket.

"The language, man..."

Grace
"Eh. It's always struck me as being a bit patronizing, because it sets up the Traditions as like, these parental figures. And they're the poor, lost Orphan children? I know plenty of people who were like 'nope' at that, and I agree with them," she says, checking mirrors switching lanes, stopping at a light. "Like, it sounds like the kind of name an especially stuck-up Hermetic would come up with, while thinking they were being kind."

"But then, I don't know. Here, I've met more Hermetics who complain about their Tradition having a stick up its ass than I've met actual stuck-up Hermetics, so," she shrugs.

Sepúlveda
As Grace has been ranting the Doctor has found within his inner pocket a flask. Which he would have had to have turned into something else to make it through a metal detector to go into a government building. Or else cloaked somehow. Which might explain why the flask itself reeks of his resonance. He has done something to it.

Anyway: he takes a swig off the flask. Does not wince. May as well be water in that thing but for no one carries water in a little metal pint container.

"If you're going to choose to join a tradition that calls itself the Order of Whatever," he says as he tucks the flask away again, the ghost of mescal in its wake, "you got no room complaining about sticks or asses or anything else. In my opinion. Not that anybody asked me." A beat. An attempt to change the topic: "I was in Miami, last. The Orphans there, they were proud to call themselves Orphans. This nonsense is new to me, Gracia."

Grace
Grace huffs out a bit at his jab at the Order. The Order of Anything is Order-ly. She shrugs at his suggestion that the Orphans in Miami were proud of the name.

"Well, that's them. My policy is to call somebody what they want to be called," she says.

The topic of conversation has so far not strayed anywhere near what they're going to be up to when they reach their destination. Silly people and their need to talk about the weather, or the Orphans or the don't-call-them-Orphans. Grace is going on random rants, partly because she's pent-up. Every other thought is about what she's going to find out. Maybe somebody's dead. Maybe somebody's going to die. Well, we all are.

We're all going to die. Eventually. But most don't really want it to happen all at the same time, as an activity to share with your friends.

Strains of Tom Leher's "We Will All Go Together When We Go" have been working their way into her head as an earworm. Denver will do that to you.

"I imagine you might meet one who isn't today. Maybe not."

Alex won't be present, though. That's the undiscovered fact.

Sepúlveda
"Well, if this Schrödinger's Orphan tells me not to call them an Orphan, I'll ask them what to call them, and I'll call them that for now. Eh?"

He runs his hand through his hair. Settles back in the passenger's seat. Doesn't seem to care too much about the scenery going by out the window. It's all highway and mountains and, further down the road, desert. Big fucking deal.

Grace
The city slowly slips away, replaced by suburban sprawl, and then the brownish, whitish expanse of grass in winter, and the snow that covers it. The road twists through hills that will become mountains.

There is an uncomfortable silence. Grace is not, herself, uncomfortable. Such things are fairly normal, in her experience, and who cares anyway? Still, after a while:

"I hope everything's okay. But I kind of doubt you'll be meeting everybody at their level best, all because Sera thought that gingerbread cookies were important enough to go Top Secret over..."

Sepúlveda
A beat. If she gets the idea that this guy doesn't Do Feelings, then that only means she has enough of a grasp of empathy to tell when another person doesn't have much of it. Sympathy sure he can probably sympathize with a person if he's experienced the same situation they have.

Well. He played his trump card when she met him. He doesn't seem like someone who wears his emotions out for the world to see. Hard to read an Etherite. Must be in their bylaws.

So he sounds skeptical if he sounds anything.

"'Kind of'?"

Come on, Grace. You're in the car with a Scientist. Doubt it all the way.

Grace
"Ohh, or maybe we found a land of rainbows and unicorns, and need to be careful to protect it," she says, rolls her eyes at the mountains. She does know better.

"Who am I kidding, really? They'd turn out to be evil unicorns out to destroy anyone who isn't a virgin, mark my words."

Denver does that to you, doesn't it?

Sepúlveda
[WP: don't say it, andy.]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 8) ( success x 1 )

Sepúlveda
"So..."

Half a second where he could not say what he's about to say. He has the intelligence and the Spheres to invoke a verbal filter. But more than that he has a few strands of self-control left after whatever happened with the whole dead wife thing.

He clears his throat before he can let that thought out. Not before she can tell he was about to say something else and then changed his mind but maybe it's for the best that he stayed his own tongue.

Then he replays what all just came out of Grace's mouth and frowns.

"... what?"

Grace
She glances over at him for a second. "Yeah. No comment, buddy."

Attention back to the road, again, she fiddles with the steering wheel, like trying to scratch a speck of dirt off. "Just, you know, it could be something good. But it's never something good."

Another pause.

"So... I should really just stop trying to figure out what's happening and just drive. We'll handle it. Even if it's evil unicorns."

Sepúlveda
"No wonder you're so skinny." This coming from a guy who's got maybe an inch on her if he's got that. He holds his ring-bearing hand up to his temple and makes a jostling motion even though she's not looking at him. "All that worrying about shit you have no control over--" Back into his lap. "--you have to burn off every calorie you take in." A beat. "'Evil unicorns.' Virgins tame unicorns, not the other way around."

Grace
"It's not worry exactly. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be worried about. I just know I have to do something, and it's all the way out there," she says, gesturing to the hills. "At the Chantry, and why can't I just be there right now and find out?"

Well, technically, she could.

Patience has never really been Grace's strong suit. And now, there is something within that pushes her even harder.

Sepúlveda
"You can be..."

Fucking Virtual Adepts. He scratches his beard.

"... but you offered me a ride, and I don't know where I'm going, so..."

Grace
"So you get to deal with me going on about evil unicorns. Sorry."

She doesn't really mean that apology.

Sepúlveda
"How are unicorns evil?"

He's not shouting. He's just bemused and a touch emphatic. Out of nowhere. About a mythological creature. As if the illogic in the analogy is enough to distract him from the fact that she isn't even a little bit sorry.

"Animals are not capable of morality! Did you bang your head in the Digital Web?"

Grace
"Maybe they're sentient unicorns," Grace says. "I mean, they're already a little more than animals with that built-in virgin-o-meter."

But, you know, that's not the point.

"Anyway, it was just a metaphor. Like, here's something pure and good, but if it popped up in Denver, well. All bets are off."

Sepúlveda

When the Etherite holds up his ring-bearing hand it is in a gesture as if he's trying to take hold of what sense Grace possesses and examine it. Easy to point out the delicacy and sureness in his hands. Without his hands he has no profession. A medical examiner is useless if he cannot hold a scalpel.

As of this moment, he can hold a scalpel. He also talks with his fucking hands.

"First of all, I feel the need to point out, before I indulge this anxiety of yours any further, that the unicorn is a mythological creature, its existence discredited by the scientific community, being as the monoceros trait in an equine indicates--" A breath. His hand turns palm-up as if to shrug. "--well, a fucking fatal birth defect, and if one were to show up, I would be more inclined to blame whatever rampage occurred as a result of its mindless bloodlust on its creator. The Marauder or the Mad Scientist or the toxic waste dump. Not the beast itself. Eh? A rampaging unicorn, or whatever you'd care to call it, turns up anywhere, you got bigger problems than the rampaging unicorn." His hands return to his lap for half a second before he continues on: "And second of all, even if your friend is missing, he could have gone missing in Los Angeles, or New York, or Ottawa, just as easy as he went missing here. If he is even missing. Don't blame Denver. Denver is no more fucked than any other city in the northern hemisphere."

Grace

"Oh, well, I was just..." Grace trails off, looks sideways at him like she's a bit concerned.

She is beginning to suspect that this man has yet to figure out that sarcasm or metaphor exist in human communication. That's perfectly understandable. She herself went through most of her childhood completely oblivious to anything except for literal interpretations.

"I apologize for not being completely accurate, and I will attempt to be more so with you, in the future," she says, completely changing tone, like someone finding out it's okay to switch accents now.

Only problem is, now she can't talk to anyone about evil unicorns. At least, not in this car. Maybe she'll write a story about the evilness of unicorns when she gets back to the office, just to get it out of her system. For now, she just attempts to resume the silence.

Sepúlveda

He returns the sideways look. Does not respond. His oldest student is about her age and he would have argued as to why using unicorns as a metaphor was perfectly valid whether or not it had any scientific validity until they arrived at their destination. Grace is not Ned.

"Don't apologize," he says, like he's conceding her disengagement from further discussion, and pulls out his smartphone to start answering work emails. "You wanna be wrong, that's your choice."

That's one way to spend the next 25 minutes driving in complete silence.

Grace

"I do," she says, the shortest, and bluntest of responses.

Sometimes, being wrong is the only possible way to be right.

Storytellers tell the biggest lies. They throw them at you as hard as they can, in the hopes that your mind might break just enough to glimpse the truth. Scientists lie too. They say one year: "This is the way it works!" and then, the next year, when they have better data: "No, this is the way it works!" Copernicus was wrong. Einstein was severely wrong. And they're wrong twice over. The first time they're wrong is when they go against what everyone else thinks, and bring a new truth into being. Everyone says they're wrong then. The second time they're wrong is when their new truth becomes the old standard, and something even newer is discovered.

The truth is that there is no truth.

Sepúlveda

Scientists will admit they are wrong when evidence of their wrongness presents itself. They do not apologize however and Grace knows as well as anyone else, she being a brilliant mind herself, that a combination of high intelligence and poor social skill does not often make for conversation that is anything but awkward.

"Good," he says without looking up from his phone.