Scene 1: “irresistible impulse”
*
“This is pathetic,” he sighed in defeat. Quatre leaned back in his chair and frowned at the computer screen. The white cursor blinked as if in waiting on the blue background.
Seven lines. All the information he had on Dorothy Catalonia took up a mere seven lines.
Not even a middle name.
Most of it didn’t even exist anymore, but was old data he’d scraped together from the background check he’d conducted in 195, and what little more he had been able to upload from the Sanc Kingdom’s Order of the Royal Guard’s records.
The cursor continued to blink merrily, expecting him to continue typing. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even be sure if the information that was anything worthy of basing his search on.
He sighed again, closing the word processing window and opening his jury-rigged search program. He typed in the word “Catalonia” and hit return.
“Over three hundred thousand returns,” he announced to himself in a moment of masochism. He then added “Dorothy” to the search and hit return again. “No results to display,” he read for what seemed like the thousandth time.
He leaned back further and stared at the ceiling tiles.
“How can a person just up and disappear?” he queried the ceiling. The paint proffered no answers.
The information was there. . . . It had to be. He didn’t just dream up her entire existence. Or that belly wound, he reminded himself, absently touching the scar through the fabric of his shirt. It was just a matter of finding it. If he could, he’d ask the Duke of Suffolk himself, but Dermail was quite assuredly no longer among the living.
“Master Quatre?” Quatre snapped his head back down and shot a halfhearted glare at the intruder. The secretary shrunk away slightly and guilt forced Quatre to smile, which seemed to calm the frightened animal. Skittish creatures, those secretaries. “If this is a bad time. . . .”
“No, come in.” He waved to the slight man who obeyed, cautiously leaving the safety of the doorway and seemingly amazed to find himself in the Winner Enterprise’s impromptu Cambridge office. “Well?” he pressed the secretary.
“There’s a call for you.”
“There are thousands of calls for me every day.”
“Y-yes, but . . . this man was quite persistent in his demands that we put him through to you. Obviously, the first time we closed the call immediately, but he called back and has somehow blocked our system commands so that we can no longer close the call.” Quatre sighed, knowing whom it probably was calling him in his hotel room.
“Did this man identify himself as Duo Maxwell?”
“Uh- yes, he did.” The secretary’s dark eyebrows shot skyward as realization dawned on him. “I sincerely apologize, Master Quatre; I had no idea he was an acquaintance of yours.”
“Yes, yes,” Quatre responded, waving him away. “Don’t worry about it, just put him through.” He had gone through similar incidences early in his presidency of Winner Enterprises, but after some months, the entire slew of secretaries and receptionists knew Duo’s face and that his calls would supercede all others received by their employer. His friend was no doubt annoyed at finding himself back at square one with Quatre’s temporary staff during the New London Legislative Convention.
Pulling his chair up to the desk, he waited for his computer to beep at him before opening the call from Duo. His tension melted slightly as his friend’s beaming face filled the monitor.
“Hey Quat! How ya holding up?” Quatre smiled back.
“Well enough. There’s only a few more days of talks planned, and then I can go home.” Duo rolled his eyes and waved his hand dismissively over his shoulder.
“Yeah, then you get to reassure the colonists that yes, you protected their interests, no, you were not swayed or intimidated by the Earth reps, and no, the Earth is not out to dominate the Colonies. I don’t think I could stand having to do all the mollycoddling you and Relena use to reassure the public.” He accented his point with a melodramatic facial gesture.
“They don’t trust each other entirely yet,” Quatre defended. “I’m confident that in time people will truly become unified in this Unified Nation we’ve formed. They just need to remember that both sides entered into the Nation as equal partners and neither side is subordinate to the other – they work together.”
“Do you think we’ll see it in our lifetimes?” Duo’s eyebrows knit, and he frowned staidly at something off-screen.
“I’m content to have seen the seeds we planted bourgeon. We’ll just have to have faith that those seedling will continue to grow and, eventually, bloom.” Quatre shrugged, having come to this conclusion long ago. Duo sighed, shedding the seriousness their conversation had taken and smiled again.
“You almost made me forget why I called.” Quatre heard the tapping of keys over Duo’s voice and raised his eyebrows in silent questioning. Duo’s eyes took on a maniacal gleam. “I’ve got video clips of the baby shower!”
“I can’t wait,” Quatre admitted honestly. “Did Hilde like my gift?”
“She went gaga over it,” Duo assured emphatically. “You really blew her away with that antique cradle. I thought for a sec she was gonna start crying.” He furrowed his brow. “She does that a lot lately – start crying over little things, I mean.” He shrugged again and went back to tapping keys before announcing, “There! I’ve sent the file. You should get it in a few moments.”
“Fantastic,” Quatre said with a smile. His smile quickly faded though as a new thought came to his mind.
“Quat?” Duo looked worried and Quatre sighed as he realized that he would have to let Duo in on his new “project” in order to obtain his help. He had been planning on calling Duo for a few days now, but somehow had never gotten around to it – he supposed he should be grateful Duo decided to call him first.
“I need a favor, Duo.”
“Sure. Anything,” Duo said with a shrug. “You know I’m always here if you need something.”
Quatre leaned back and steepled his fingers in thought before continuing.
“While I’m here, I am completely cutoff from my personal computers on L4 and as such, find myself unable to utilize some of my less honorable methods of procuring information. That said, I–”
“Say no more. You need one of my homemade explorer viruses? Consider it done.”
“You’re sure? I mean, it’s not on too short notice?”
“No problem, but – if I may ask – what is it for?”
“I’ve found another Crier.” Duo raised his eyebrows. “Or rather, she found me.” Duo was one of the few people to whom he had ever imparted knowledge of the many sleepless nights he endured during his younger years as a result of his empathic hypersensitivity. It had been a relief to tell someone what he went through and explaining what it was like to feel your mind inhabited by another, but despite the closeness he felt to Duo after sharing such information, he hoped that he would not pry this particular time. He did not want to expose all that he knew of this Crier, but concurrently, did not believe himself capable of lying to Duo.
“I thought you’d found a way to block that kinda thing?”
“I did – I mean I have – but this one’s pretty powerful.”
“Powerful enough to overwhelm you, huh? Well, I have a skeleton program that I can tweak to fit your needs.”
“It needs to be able to dig up erased files, if that’s not asking too much.”
“Erased files?”
“Is that a problem?”
“Not at all. But it does seem, well, a little odd.”
“I think some group, governmental or otherwise, has already tampered with her.”
“What makes you think that?”
“The apparent coverup.”
“Ah. . . . Hence the need to find that which is no longer there.”
“Exactly.”
*
Quatre let Duo’s virus run for several hours while he continued on with his duties as a representative during the endless meetings and conferences. As he sat at one of the countless tables during the monotonous day, Quatre glanced across the room more than once to watch Relena working. He briefly entertained the idea of plying her for information on the elusive Dorothy Catalonia, but immediately dismissed the thought. He could not ask her to betray whatever secrets Dorothy might have imparted on her – additionally, he didn’t think she would react too well to any form of interrogation.
What Quatre didn’t realize though, was that as the program Duo had made for him went about its function in restoring deleted files and archiving pertinent data, it was setting off countless flagging programs. These flags were cumulatively reported to the programs’ designer with a single, demure beep.
A few keystrokes opened a monitoring program and the programmer could immediately access all the files Duo’s virus had that had been guarded by the flag-programs. The programmer glanced over the list of files and immediately began writing an extensive search program to track the explorer virus to the computer that had implemented it. After several minutes, he finished applying the case-specifics to a skeleton program and a single keystroke sent it out to begin its function.
The programmer leaned back in his chair, content to wait the few minutes it would take to finish tracking the virus.
*
Quatre sighed heavily as he untied his cravat, letting the silk hang loosely around his neck as he reached out to the doorhandle to his suite of rooms. Suddenly he felt the muscles in the back of his neck tense as his digits closed around the handle.
“Master Quatre?” Quatre jumped slightly and quickly turned around to face his secretary.
“What?” he asked a little more harshly than he had intended.
“I – uh,” he stammered slightly then apparently seemed to get a grip on his nerve. “Is there anything else you will be needing tonight?”
“No, nothing,” he answered, mildly impressed by the young man’s improving backbone. It was endlessly tiresome to have to work with someone who was terrified of you. The secretary nodded and turned to leave Quatre in the desolate hallway. Quatre sighed again and finally entered his room, all the tension of the past week seeming to amass in this final act as he collapsed into a chair just inside the doorway, dropping his briefcase unceremoniously on the floor at his side.
“Sloppy,” a coarse voice grumbled from a distant corner of the room. “Very sloppy.”