Chapter Text
The facility library had the quality of a room that had been furnished to appear functional without having been designed for actual use.
The books were real — Akira had checked, which was the kind of thing he checked — but the selection had the quality of something assembled by someone who understood the concept of a library without having a specific reader in mind. Reference texts, a range of fiction that covered the expected categories, several collections of technical material that were either genuinely useful or had been placed to look useful. He had found three things worth reading and was on the second one.
He heard Ringo come in before he saw her — the specific quality of her footstep, which he'd catalogued without particularly intending to, the way he catalogued most things about the people around him. She came to a stop when she registered him at the table near the window.
She could have left. She didn't.
She went to the reference section and pulled something out with the deliberate quality of someone who had come here with a specific purpose and was maintaining it. She sat down two tables away.
He read his book.
She read hers.
This lasted approximately eight minutes before she said: "You already know what Madoka is planning for the next round."
He looked up. "Yes."
"You've known since this morning."
"Since yesterday evening," he said.
She looked at her book. "You didn't share it with the group."
"The group would have acted on it immediately. Acting on it immediately would have been the wrong move." He looked at her. "I shared the relevant portion with you this morning. Specifically."
She was quiet for a moment.
This was the thing about Ringo that made her genuinely interesting — she processed information in sequence rather than in parallel, which meant she was slower than him on initial assessment but more accurate on the conclusions that mattered. She was running through the morning's information now, aligning it with what she'd just said, finding the gap.
"You gave me the piece I needed for my positioning," she said. "Not the full picture."
"The full picture would have changed how you moved. I needed you to move the way you would have moved anyway."
"You used me," she said.
"I used the correct information in the correct place," he said. "Those are different things."
She looked at her book. He watched her process the distinction with the patience of someone who had made it and was confident in it.
"The one-tenth copy," she said. "If you understood my ability completely — if you knew exactly how I was going to use it — you could predict my output precisely."
"Yes."
"Do you?"
He looked at her.
"Mostly," he said, which was more honest than he usually was, which he registered as information about something.
She looked up from the book. Her glasses had the specific quality that glasses had when someone was using them to manage the distance between themselves and whatever they were looking at. "Why mostly."
"Because your ability responds to the emotional state of the person you're copying from," he said. "One-tenth of their power at the moment of contact. The moment of contact is variable depending on how you read the situation." He looked at the window. "I can predict your strategic choices. I can't fully predict your read."
She was quiet.
"That bothers you," she said. "Not being able to fully predict something."
"It interests me," he said. "Those are different things."
She looked at him for a moment with the careful attention she brought to things she was trying to read accurately. He was aware of being read and did not adjust for it, which was itself information he was offering.
"You catalogued everyone in the program," she said. "Their abilities, their decision patterns, their likely responses under pressure." She set her book down. "When did you catalogue me."
"First week."
"What did you find."
He looked at the window. The facility's grounds were visible from here — the training areas, the staged environments, the infrastructure of something that had been built to run games.
"Someone who underestimates her own ceiling because the fraction framing of her ability makes it sound like a limitation," he said. "One-tenth of a very strong ability is still something. One-tenth of multiple abilities compounds." He paused. "You've been treating it as a ceiling. It's not."
She was quiet for a longer moment than usual.
"You've been thinking about how I should use it," she said.
"I think about how everyone should use their abilities," he said.
"That's not what I asked."
He looked at her.
She looked back with the specific quality she had — the careful, precise attention of someone who had learned to find the accurate thing underneath the stated thing.
"Yes," he said. "Specifically."
She picked up her book. She did not return to reading it. She held it in the way of someone who had done a thing that gave their hands something to do.
"The next round," she said. "What do you need me to do."
"Nothing yet." He returned to his book. "I'll tell you when the timing is right."
"How will I know it's right and not you managing the timing again."
He looked up.
She was looking at him with the expression that was slightly different from her standard careful attention — the one that had something underneath it that wasn't strategic.
"You'll know," he said, "because when the timing is right I'll tell you the full picture."
She processed this.
"That's a significant concession from you," she said.
"Yes," he said. "It is."
She returned to her book. He returned to his. The library held its assembled-without-a-specific-reader-in-mind quality around them, and outside the facility's grounds ran their program infrastructure, and two analytical people sat in the same space reading books that were only partially being read.
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