WMCOG - Chapter 3

Lin

Here is the link to Chapter 1 if you want to catch up!

The connection indicators turned green one at a time, and then the screen opened and she was there.

She was sitting in a room with white walls and a drawing behind her of a man standing at the end of a sidewalk that dropped off into nothing, looking over. Small objects lined the shelf beneath it — ceramic animals, a glass paperweight, a wooden box with a brass clasp. The room wasn’t untidy so much as overly lived-in. Mugs on the desk. A blanket folded unevenly over the arm of a chair.

Lin herself was neat. Her auburn hair was pulled back tightly, and her shirt was clean and pressed. She sat straight in the chair, her hands folded on the desk in front of her, hazel eyes looking through the screen at Theo. His first impression was that she looked different than he had expected; the traces of Anglo-Celtic ancestry gave her an exotic appearance. His second impression was that her eyes were slightly swollen and the skin beneath them was darker than it should have been. She continued to look at the camera and say nothing.

“Thank you so much for making time, Lin.”

“Of course. They explained what this is.” Her voice was lower than he had expected, rough at the edges as if she had been talking too much or not enough.

“What did they tell you?”

“That you’re consulting. That you were brought in to help with the investigation.” A small pause. “I believe the term they used was ‘to provide a human touch’.”

“Then we are all caught up.”

“Alright.” She unfolded her hands and placed them flat on the desk, one on each side of one of the mugs. “What do you need from me?”

“I’d like to start with the last day. Walk me through it - not every detail, just the shape of it.”

Lin nodded. She looked past the camera for a moment, not at anything in particular, and then looked back.

“It was a normal day. A good day. We went into town that morning, walked along the coast road, in and out of shops. I bought a piece of driftwood I thought looked like a horse. May didn’t see it.” A flicker crossed Lin’s face, gone before it settled. “We had lunch at a place by the water. Sat there for a long time. Then home, the porch, the afternoon. I was drawing, she was reading. Evening came, and I packed, and we walked to the station.”

“Was it just the two of you? The whole visit.”

“Yes. Her and me and Dumpling.”

“No one came by? No calls, no visitors?”

“No.” Lin’s hands moved slightly on the desk, her fingers pressing against the wood. “May liked to keep it quiet.”

“And at the station, how did you leave it?”

“I told her to come visit me. She said she would. I said she always says that. She said one of these days she’d mean it.” Lin recited this without inflection, her face blank. “I hugged her and walked to the platform.”

Theo waited a moment in case she was going to say anything else.

“Did she mention plans for the evening? Anyone she was expecting?”

“No. I assumed she’d paint. That’s what she usually did at night.” Lin’s fingers pressed harder into the desk, but otherwise she was unmoved.

“Is there anything else I should know?”

Lin looked down at her fingers, the tips of which were now white.

“I almost stayed another night, actually. My train was the last one, and I could have taken the one in the morning instead. I had nothing in Sydney the next day.” Lin swallowed quickly.

“But I didn’t. I took the evening train.”

Theo leaned forward slightly in his chair.

“Why?”

“I thought she might want the evening to herself. May hated having people over. She made an exception for me, but like I said, she was private.”

Theo waited again, but Lin said nothing else. Then he asked:

“How did you find out?”

At this, Lin’s eyes flashed, and another expression - a darker expression - took over her face for only a moment.

“Why are you asking me this?” Her voice was cold and steely.

Theo was taken slightly aback by this question and started to respond. “I’m trying to figure out what happened that nig—”

Lin cut him off, her composure breaking more fully this time.

“You’re asking me things the system already knows. You asked how I found out. I found out like this: a call. Early. I was still in bed. A Gardener was on the other end, and they wanted to know every detail of that night. It is already in the logs, and I see no reason to go over it again.” In the low winter Australian sun, her hazel eyes were almost red.

Theo held his hands up in surrender.

“I’m sorry.”

Lin nodded curtly.

Theo smiled in his most convincing attempt to be charming and asked:

“Can we start again?”

“I would very much like that.”

“I want to know more about May - who she was. Not mechanically; we have all of that, but as a person.”

Lin’s face was blank again, and she looked away, seeming to study something on the wall.

“May was restless. That’s the short version.” She paused. “The long version is that she could spend months doing nothing but walking on the beach and painting, but at the same time grow tired of a city in a week. She never complained about her life. She loved the house. She loved the ocean. She loved Dumpling. But she kept testing things - travel, work, people. She kept testing for resistance.”

“Did she ever say that?”

“Not in those words exactly. She’d say things like the painting wasn’t giving her anything back, or that there weren’t any mountains left to climb. But it was more an energy than anything specific. She was pushing, and there was nothing to push against.” Lin stopped and looked at Theo.

Theo leaned back in his chair. He had been to May’s studio and looked over her entire catalog; maybe this was what he had seen. The restlessness Lin was describing could explain the shift from bright coastal landscapes to something darker and more crowded - the canvases that seemed to be fighting themselves. The AIs saw the same period and called it an internal creative cycle, after all. No documented life change. No flagged event. Nothing. But still, Theo felt confident it had to mean something else.

“I want to ask you about her work,” he said. “Her painting.”

“Alright.”

“Did you notice a change in it? A few years back. The palette got darker. The compositions got heavier.”

Lin’s eyebrows lifted slightly.

“You’ve seen them.”

“I’ve seen the full catalog.”

“Then you already know the answer.” Lin picked up the mug and held it near her mouth but did not drink. “Yes. It changed. She was working through something. The paintings got angry for a while. I asked her about it, and she said she was experimenting.”

“Did you believe that?”

“No.” Lin set the mug down. “But May didn’t lie to me. She just chose not to tell me things, which is different. She’d go quiet on a subject, and you learned not to push.”

“When was this? The shift.”

“Four years ago. Maybe five.” Lin thought for a moment. “Closer to five.”

Theo turned the glass in his hand.

“Did anything happen in her life around that time? Anything at all.”

Lin looked at him. Her expression was careful now — not guarded exactly, but aware that the conversation had shifted somehow.

“Are you asking about Victor?”

Theo said nothing.

Lin held his gaze for several seconds. Then she leaned back slightly in her chair, crossed her arms, and said:

“I’ll take that as a yes. His name was Victor. An Administrator.” Lin uncrossed her arms and placed her hands back on the desk. “They were together for about two years. Met at some kind of cultural event in town — a show, I think. I met him a few weeks after they started seeing each other.”

Theo’s face did not change.

“Tell me about him.”

“Smart. Extremely smart. The kind of smart where you can feel it in the room even when he’s not talking. He’d sit and listen and then say one thing, and it would be the thing nobody else had seen but which cut to the core of the conversation.” Lin moved her hand across the desk, a slow lateral sweep as if brushing something away. “He was also controlled. Everything about him was deliberate — the way he dressed, the way he spoke, the way he moved through a room. Nothing wasted. Nothing accidental.”

Something crossed Lin’s face.

“You didn’t like him.”

“I didn’t trust him. That’s not the same thing.” She paused. “I thought he was trying to own her, to control her. Not in any obvious ways. He was possessive in the way that smart people are possessive - everything framed as concern. Every demand was actually a gift from him to May, a gift that she didn’t want, but needed.”

“Did you tell her that?”

“Once. Early on. She told me I was wrong, and I let it go.” Lin’s jaw shifted. “She was stubborn about the people she loved. Once she’d decided someone was worth her time, she’d hold on to that decision past the point where most people would have let go.”

“What were they like together?”

“Intense.” The word came out quickly. “They were intense in the way that two very intelligent people are when they’ve found someone who can keep up. They finished each other’s sentences and argued for hours about things nobody else cared about.”

“How long did they date?”

“About two years. The first year was good, and the second year was harder. Eventually the fights shifted. May would never talk to me about them, but they stopped seeming intellectual. They became real fights - quiet ones where you could tell as soon as you entered the house.”

Lin took a deep drink of whatever was in her cup.

“What were they fighting about?” Theo asked.

“Like I said, May wouldn’t tell me, but I suspect it is all in their post-breakup paperwork. But if I had to guess, they were probably fighting about life. May wanted something more than you could get here in the Garden, and Victor - well, Victor was the Garden.”

“Something more?”

At this, Lin bent over and picked up a backpack that had been sitting near the desk.

“She gave me this.”

Lin held the bag so Theo could see a patch with the letters RJR emblazoned in red on a black background.

“I know that they had argued about this. May always found the Jacksonians interesting, but Victor was too straight-laced to put up with it.”

Theo was genuinely surprised by this. The RJR was not something that someone like May or Lin usually showed interest in, let alone walked around with iconography of. Lin noticed this and put the bag down.

“I remember she gave me this patch, and at the time I thought it was a joke, but she was quite serious about it. After—” Lin choked slightly on this word and then continued. “After she was killed, I put it on my bag as a way of honoring her.”

“Do you know where she got this?”

“Yes. She and Victor went on a trip to Rome together. They were gone for some time, and it was actually on that trip that they broke up.”

“What did they do in Rome?”

“I imagine what everyone does.” Lin smiled a little at this.

“Anything else you remember from the trip?”

Lin nodded once. “She came back different. Quieter. She mentioned having stayed with a group of artists for a while. She said the residents were serious in a way most people weren’t.” Lin smiled a little. “I remember she said that because I laughed at her. The idea that Rome could be serious was downright comedic.”

“After the breakup. Was there anyone else?”

“No. Not that I know of. After Victor she was alone. Her and Dumpling and the house and the ocean.” Lin was no longer smiling. “She was settled for the first time in a long time, at least from the outside. She stayed in one place. She worked. She stopped making long trips.”

“And Victor? After.”

“I don’t know much about Victor after. May stopped talking about him, and we were never close. I saw him once - maybe six months later - at a party with some mutual friends in Tokyo. We didn’t talk. He looked exactly like he always looked. Clean, put together. He said the right things to the right people.” Lin paused. “I remember thinking he looked too fine. Like nothing had happened. But I didn’t know him well enough to say what was real and what was performance.”

Theo sat still.

“The thing about Victor,” Lin said, and then stopped to think for a moment. “The thing about Victor is that he was the kind of person who always knew what was expected of him and always delivered it — in any room, in any situation. But it was all fake. There was a different Victor, one I only saw through May.” Lin emphasized the word through.

“Did May say anything about how he handled the breakup?”

Lin looked worried now and a slow realization came across her face.

“You don’t think?”

“I don’t know. The Gardeners told me there were no significant relationships in May’s life during that period,” Theo said. “No sustained relationship. Nothing in any of their records.”

Lin blinked.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “They were together for two years. Everyone knew.”

“Everyone.”

“Her friends. The people in town. I met him at her house three or four times. Dumpling used to make dinner for the two of them.” Lin frowned. “How could that not be in the records?”

Theo did not answer the question. Instead he asked another one.

“Is there anything else about Victor that you think I should know? Anything May said, anything you observed. Anything at all.”

Lin’s face was gray now, the look of a long-suppressed fear being realized in front of her eyes.

“May loved him. In spite of whatever happened between them, she loved him. She never said a cruel word about him after. Not once.”

Theo nodded.

“Thank you, Lin.”

“Find out what happened to her. That’s all I want.”

“I will.”

The screen went dark.

Theo sat in the office. The display had returned to its default state - the notes pane, the transcript pane, the connection status bars now gray. His heart was thumping in his chest and all he could hear was the rush of blood.

Theo walked down the dim hallway. Lotus had shifted the house into evening mode, and the lights along the baseboards gave off a low amber glow. From the nursery he could hear the soft mechanical hum of the climate system and, beneath it, Billy’s breathing, light and fast. He did not stop at the door.

Downstairs, the kitchen was lit by the hood lamp over the stove and nothing else. Augustus was at the counter with a glass of water, scrolling through something on a tablet. He looked up when Theo came in.

“How was the call?”

“Productive.”

“Did she know anything useful?”

“I’m not sure,” Theo lied as he opened a cabinet and took out a glass. He filled it from the tap and drank half of it standing at the sink. His heart was slowing down now, and a delicious feeling was replacing it.

“Where’s everyone?”

“Karl is still on campus, and Soren’s already gone to bed.” Augustus set the tablet down. The screen cast a pale rectangle of light on the ceiling. “Dad, the news tonight said the Gardeners are going to expand the forensic perimeter.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I need to confirm something first.”

Augustus gave his father a look, trying to read his face. He picked the tablet back up and then put it down again. His fingers drummed once against the counter.

“I keep thinking about it - about what it would take. To do that to someone, in their own home.”

“Me too.”

“You think you’ve caught him, don’t you?”

Theo put the glass down and looked at his son. He saw himself reflected back — the jaw slightly softer, the eyes wider — but it was his face.

“It’s late,” Theo said. “We can talk about this more tomorrow. I need to talk to a Gardener.”

Augustus opened his mouth to speak but didn’t. He picked up the tablet and went upstairs. Theo listened to his footsteps cross the hall above and then the soft close of a door.

When Theo stepped outside, a Gardener was waiting for him. It hovered at the edge of the veranda, its arms tucked tightly beneath it. This was the same one that had come to the house earlier, or at least Theo thought that it was.

“Professor. We have reviewed the interview.”

“Good.”

“The commission has concluded that Lin’s account is a product of grief-induced confabulation.”

Theo stared at it.

“You think she made him up.”

“We do not think. We have checked.” The Gardener rotated a quarter turn, and when it spoke again its voice had the quality of someone reading from a list they had already verified twice. “No relational connection between Victor and May exists in any index. No communication logs. No proximity flags. No co-location data across any residential, transit, or commercial sensor network. No shared travel records. No domestic overlap of any kind. No secondary corroboration from any other registered source.”

“She said other people knew about them.”

“If a sustained two-year relationship had existed between an Admin and a resident of this district, the data surface would be extensive. Cohabitation patterns, energy usage, biometric co-signatures, communication metadata, travel bookings, medical co-referrals. We are not speaking of one missing record. We are speaking of the complete absence of thousands of records across independent systems, none of which share a single point of failure.”

The Gardener paused, and its appendages curled and unfolded slowly.

“The alternative to Lin’s account being incorrect is that someone systematically erased every trace of a relationship across every monitoring layer we operate, without producing a single anomaly in any audit log. That has not occurred in the history of this system. It is, as a practical matter, not possible.”

Theo said nothing. The compound’s exterior lights cast long patterns across the gravel drive.

“Grief confabulation of this kind is documented,” the Gardener continued, more quietly. “Lin was May’s closest companion. She is in acute bereavement. The mind, under that kind of pressure, constructs narratives to fill the absence. She is not lying. She believes what she told you. But the data does not support it.”

“Where is Victor?”

The Gardener’s limbs tightened briefly — a small contraction, like a hand closing and opening.

“Victor is a registered citizen of Hainan District. He resides approximately twenty minutes from here. He has no flags, no alerts, and no documented connection to May.”

“I’d like to speak with him tonight.”

“There is no investigative basis for that request.”

“If Lin is confused, then I’ve wasted his evening. If she isn’t, you have a problem that your data can’t show you.”

The Gardener was still for a long time. Then it spoke.

“A supervised interview can be arranged. This does not constitute a reclassification of Victor’s status. The interview will be conducted as a voluntary consultation.”

“Fine.”

“We will notify him of our impending arrival and arrange transport for you.”