Ludolf: Elisa’s another servant. I’ll give you the ID# on her microchip, and you look up how much time she spends near the gate where Thorn is stationed.
Sigvard: . . . None. She takes walks in the garden, but she’s hardly been registered even within 50 feet of the gates.
Ludolf: Do they have chat logs?
Sigvard: Between her account and his? No.
Sigrún: Does Leif talk with Thorn about her?
Sigvard: Searching . . . Only 2 hits on her name in their chats.
Ludolf: Can you search the audio?
Sigvard: Those two have talked for hundreds of hours at the gates. One of them with a heavy foreign accent. You want me to run voice recognition on all of that?
Sigrún: . . . is it hard?
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…the laments of a software engineer
Actually, it’s not hard. One thing computers are very good at is patience. If you can run voice recognition on one minute of recording, you can also run it on hundreds of hours. Just … it may take some time. Like, hundreds of hours.
(Ok, PROBABLY not hundreds of hours if they do it on optimized server and if the hand-held devices can do voice recognition in real time. But probably longer than they have time for now.)
Is this where I’m allowed to reiterate that Thorn having a relationship with Leif is really fucking stupid from a security standpoint?
I think you have to wait until BOTH sides are trying to turn the foreign national into an asset?
Or not. I’m a produce clerk, not Military Police.
Stupid from a “You are still under threat of being compromised” perspective. I know, I know, we all want them to be happy, but these are techniques the world’s intelligence agencies have perfected to gain more of what they want to know. The second Thorn decides he can rent Leif for a night, you can bet your ass Somheim will force Leif to tell them what he heard during pillow talk.
And giving Leif the title of equipment implies that Sonheim cares enough to maintain him if he breaks a bone or suffers an injury outside of feeding. And with the equipment I’m used to, it also would imply he actually has a will of his own.
Sigvard suggested Just Order Leif To Be A Human Listening Device once already. Ludolf is fairly certain that Leif, while quite biddable, might actually resist that order.
“Servants aren’t crystals. You can’t just re-program them so they’re capable of doing anything you need. Even if in some ways Leif is . . . more programmable than most. … Leif might be a useful spy if we can give him a goal that has equally compelling emotional weight. If not, we risk making his guilt work against us. ” [Manager Ludolf, Watching Over Me, pages 3-4]
As for Sønheim not ‘maintaining’ Leif… They’d have to be pretty stupid to just leave servants to die, even leaving aside the human rights issues. Servants are SELF-REPAIRING, so long as you give them the right materials. You can extend their contracts by adding their recovery expenses to their debt, or make more money by adding their recovery expenses (plus 10% for profit) to the cost of rental. You can make even MORE money by adding a penalty clause that, if injured beyond ‘standard wear and tear’ for the agreed activity, the renter owes a significant ‘penalty fee’, that does not pay down the servant’s debt.
So why even bother with this whole game then? It’s been at least a year since they took the embassy post right? More than enough time to get a feel for what Thorn’s personality is. If they aren’t cultivating him as a potential source of intel on Ceannis then what has been the point of all this? Eventually they need to pull the trigger on whatever they’re trying to do with Thorn, but if it isn’t turning him into a source of any kind or turning a situation into blackmail to put him in their pockets what other options are there?
…And now that you’ve added that in, I hate this nation even more, bravo my friend.
They’re not specifically *trying* to do anything with Thorn, remember?
The Embassy didn’t initiate this with a goal in mind. They didn’t initiate it at all. Leif went and fell in love on his own. The higher-ups are just keeping tabs on the situation, on the theory that it might *become* useful for some currently-unforeseen purpose in the future.
…Oooooooooh.
Oh wait. Leif isn’t a foreign national. He’s equipment.
Also, I’m almost certain the logs are S.O.P. for the embassy, and would exist regardless. Thorn knows the devices are there, seeing as he purged a room on the embassy grounds of Sønheic listening devices, with Juniper noting “This place already gets swept for bugs every week. What do you know that I don’t?”
Yeah, these logs aren’t anything secret or insidious, they’re the standard security footage of what happens at the gates. Those cameras would be rolling no matter what. (And the characters all know they exist, and moderate their behavior as necessary.)
The Ceannic knights’ headquarters is actually across the street, not on Embassy grounds! Not a place Sønheim would have any legal rights or expectations to put recording devices.
1. “Oh, just search the audio!” pfffthahaha
2. The “What kind of Patreon rewards do you find most appealing? (Pick as many as you want, and/or add your own!)” poll has radio buttons instead of checkboxes, such that one can’t, actually, pick multiple options :'(
Ugh, I definitely ticked the “allow multiple answers” option when I made it…should be fixed now!
It is indeed fixed!
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