INTERROGATION OF SUBJECT ‘ORION’, FURTHER ‘O’

AUTOMATED PROCEDURAL TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO RECORDING

SESSION THREE

LEADING INTERROGATOR: RYAN SILAS, FURTHER ‘RS’

__TH OF ____, XXXX

RS: Interrogation of suspect, code-name ‘Orion’, session three, lead by Ryan Silas.

O: You really make it sound like you care with that standardised intro.

RS: Let’s just get on with this. We’ve concluded the depressingly small amount you know about Michael Runner. Can you repeat, for the record, what your explanation is for the incident that destroyed one and a half blocks of buildings and tore up a street?

O: I said someone managed to hack physics.

RS: Right. We can come back to it later. You interacted with Runner and Stone before they disappeared. What can you tell me?

O: They weren’t themselves. And I don’t mean having a bad day. Whatever happened to them, it did a lot of damage. Max was experimenting with mind-altering drugs in the literal sense. He was trying to force specific traits. Remember the lab we raided a while ago? The one also raided by definitely not you, because that would have been an unsanctioned operation? They were trying to download an artificial consciousness into a person, and they were getting close to succeeding with Runner at least. I’m no expert, but I would be surprised if he and Stone didn’t show something very similar to PTSD in the near future.

RS: How do you know about what the lab was trying to do?

O: That’s further down the timeline of my origin story, we’ll get to it.

RS: You’re not very good at linear story-telling, are you? You keep going off on a tangent.

O: This isn’t a story, this is my life, and I’m going by memory. Cut me some slack, I’m doing my best.

RS: Fine. Tell me about your team.

O: That’s one hell of a change in topic. You mean the rapidly changing people hired to impersonate aliases?

RS: Sure, let’s go with that. Tell me about the aliases.

O: Well, one’s a boy, and one’s a girl. Though that’s a very narrow view imposing social categories, if you ask me.

RS: You’re going to be a lot of work, aren’t you. Something easier, then. One of your aliases, Lilly, was filled by someone named Alexander Rivers.

O: Or someone pretending to be Alexander Rivers, since that’s a real person.

RS: Sure. Alexander is rumoured to be Max Rivers’ son. Anything you know about that?

NON-VERBAL VOCALIZATION DETECTED

RS: Are you done laughing your lungs out?

O: Oh, this is gold. I didn’t know it would stick so well.

RS: So?

O: Nah, it’s just a rumour. Ah, but your face is priceless. When I first made use of Lilly, and stole Alexander Rivers’ name, nobody had made the connection yet. Nobody had even heard of Alexander before. I suggested a prank to test out the alias, and since I knew the right people to talk to, and the right comments to drop, it went off nicely. We dressed Lilly in a suit and barged into some night club demanding stuff. Predictably, someone asked who in the Hells we thought we were. Lilly answered, why, he was Alex Rivers, and he’d tell on them to his dad. They almost pissed themselves.

RS: What did you do then?

O: Well, they caught on eventually, but we got away with a few duffel bags full of cocaine. Had to dump it in the river to throw them off our heels when they realised what had happened. Not like we wanted the stuff in the first place, so it was no big loss. In the end, of course someone overheard the whole thing, and the rumour spread. We didn’t do anything to discourage it. A nice, horrible reputation is workable, you know? Even the Agency got sucked in.

RS: I can imagine. Max Rivers never took offence?

O: If he did, he didn’t complain to me about it. Hey, can we take a short break? I have to piss.

END OF AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

ANNOTATION BY RYAN SILAS: CONTINUATION OF SESSION AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW

ORIGINAL AUDIO FILE OF THE SESSION AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW