Employee of the Month

[Corile]

Dia nodded as he stood up. "I'll take what I can get. Thank you."

She retrieved a few torn pieces of paper and a pencil from her purse. She had a Gallic pre-paid PAD on her as well, but she preferred analogue means of recording information, as they were inherently more difficult to trace and surveil. She doodled a few animals on one of them, waiting for the admiral to return.

Eventually he did, carrying a small folder of papers and a memory diamond. There were free consoles available for students at the library, but she would rather avoid accessing them and the content of the diamond. There was not enough time and the written notes would probably contain more information.

"Thank you, Admiral," she spoke, taking the folder from his hands. She placed it on the table, opened it and reviewed its contents. Vaillant watched her carefully, she felt he did not trust her with the documents. Neither did she trust him — operating under the suspicion that his readiness to help her was not dictated by the goodness of heart. "I'll do my best to get through this quickly."

The folder contained a number of printed documents in French, English and Greek. It seemed like each language version contained the same information and they were just translations of each other. The only difference was that some of the documents in Greek contained highlights and notes handwritten in pencil. She put aside all of the French documents and placed the English and Greek ones side by side in front of her, glossing over the contents.

A large number of the files were useless: internal memos, shopping lists, construction contracts, proposals of cultural exchange programs, among others. Only two papers piqued her interest. The first one was a memo detailing the staff that would be brought in from Crete, another contained the details of the embassy evacuation following the news of the Council fleet breaching New Paris. It appeared from the memos that the non-essential Custodi staff was successfully evacuated and reached Crete safely, however there was still a small contingent left behind. She did not recognise any of the names, but she knew there was little chance that anyone besides Katsouranis would have made it out alive. She noted down the names anyway, hoping that she could look into this further later.

Nothing that she saw gave her any tips as to the Ambassador's current whereabouts. She sighed, drummed her fingers on the table. Her eyes wandered towards the memory diamond, but she had hoped that by this point she would have found something. The Admiral must have noticed her upset expression.

She must have missed something. She carefully went through the two documents again, looking for patterns in the wording or letters, but there was nothing that she could decipher. She shook her head.

After a few tense minutes, in a last ditch effort, she put away the English and Greek file and picked up the French one. She intended to ask the admiral to help her with deciphering the language, but before she could do it, from among the ruffled pages an unfastened, handwritten page fell out and dropped onto the table.

The note was written in Ancient Greek, a variety of the language only learned and understood by consummate scholars. This fact, and the elegant and condensed cursive, made her believe that it was Katsouranis himself who wrote the note. She understood very little, but she stared at the note for a good few minutes trying to make sense of it, eventually realising that it was a short story, condensed into a single paragraph.

At that point she recalled a book that she had read years before, as a teenager. The book told the story of a couple of families living under an oppressive regime that censored all of correspondence and literature, as well as restricted the use of encryption. In order to evade the censors, the families in the book communicated with one another by writing stories with animal characters, much like Aesop's fables, which utilised broad symbolism to conceal their true meaning.

Through that lens, she eventually managed to decipher the message. The story was a short day in the life of an insect that, on a hot day, saved itself from the scorching sun by biting into an book and making his shelter there. She took it to mean what she already knew, that she should look for answers in a library... But there was nothing else here. Knowing that she must have missed something, she read through the paragraph again and again. Eventually she started scribbling on her paper, hastily transcribing the note while changing some letter forms and using synonyms so that it did not resemble the original too much, to read and research later.

Exasperated she whispered under her breath. "Tipota, tipota!" She wanted to collect her thoughts and go through the papers another time, but the admiral stood up. She understood that her time with the archival documents was over.

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Reflections on the Revolution in Gallia
Custodi // High City of Heraklion // The Cult of Archangels
Log Filter // Post Creator // Manhattan