[New Hire Encryption] Pay Dirt

[onequartershark]

Hello, rig crew. I have an update on the Dick Washburn situation. The guilt finally got to him, and he decided to make himself helpful.

[ She turns her comm's camera to scan over two small but extremely important objects in her other hand: a piece of paper with some complicated-looking sequences of numbers and mathematical symbols... ]

[ ...And Dickwash's shock collar control fob. ]

We have less than four hours before he misses a security check for the fob. Then they'll remotely detonate it, and we won't be able to block that signal. The paper... has to do with the activation frequencies for the nanochains? He stole the data from Boyle.

[ She turns the camera again. She's proud of what she's accomplished here, but not sure what this win is going to look like in motion. She is Not A Scientist. She's not a diplomat either. This is a wild day in the life of Carolina. ]

I can't stop anyone from making choices, but I told him to get out once it's clear we've started moving against the company. He wants to go hide his family from retaliation, and I don't think he'll be our problem ever again.

[ Carolina is not interested in punishing him any further. She saw the look on his face. He'll punish himself enough, she thinks. She's been there. ]

In the meantime...

[ A lot has happened. Time to remember who was doing what in the wake of Brainiac 5's murder, before she charged off on this gamble. ]

Cammie? You were trying to pick up Brainy's work on the collars, right?

Comments

[onequartershark]

[ Carolina has pocketed her prizes again and is prooobably on the move to deliver them to more capable hands. ]

That is exactly what I said.

[zerg_rush]

Never really considered him having a family.

[At least subconsciously, she'd assumed his type just sort of spontaneously generated in the menswear section of expensive department stores, or something like that.]

[onequartershark]

His mom and daughter. They live on the edge of the Livable Zone.

[ Safely stumping through crew territory, she's not worried about this being picked up. ]

If this gives that kid a shot at having a dad who regrets zapping the Easter Bunny, it's a better one than I got.

[zerg_rush]

...He has a kid?

[Kerrigan now has to deal with the twin realizations of knowing that probably means a woman was willing to have sex with Washburn, a thing she has trouble conceptualizing, and that there's a girl out there who's already missing one parent and now stands a chance of missing the other because he made the right choice.]

[onequartershark]

Wife died in the apocalypse, apparently.

[ She supposes there's a chance that maybe Dickwash was a more regular human being before all this traumatized him into boot scum. Maybe that's why there was still enough humanity in him to pull back up. ]

I'm getting soft in my old age. Starting to believe in second chances.

[ She got one she might not have deserved, once. ]

[zerg_rush]

[A moment of silence on Kerrigan's end as she chews on all this.]

Lillian has to go down. She'll figure out he flipped. She's too smart to risk herself going after him, but she'll rat him out when she makes contact with Jorgmund again.

[This is...some progress? By Kerrigan standards? You can take the girl out of the top-secret assassin program, but you can't take the top-secret assassin program out of the girl.]

[onequartershark]

Got ideas?

[ They have well and truly pivoted on Dickwash's survival odds in this group. She's not even sure if she's proud, it's just something that's happening and that analysis will come back from the lab later. ]

[zerg_rush]

[Having clocked Celeste from Day One as a handler and thus the real threat, Kerrigan's just been looking for an excuse and an opening, and it looks like she's about to have both.]

Assassination is what I was literally made for, Carolina.

[While she's made some advances on the "good person" front, Kerrigan is never going to be the type to hold all life sacred, especially not when that life belongs to someone as dangerous as Celeste Lillian.]

[onequartershark]

Then I won't need to wish you good luck.

[ Carolina's mercy requires a baseline of decency (or plausible effort to improve) that Celeste has not achieved this week. Kerrigan's plan gets a gold star in her book. ]