Mold
Ravine Mold. I am aware there's more to the name than that, because everyone who's mentioned him has done so with a look I've learned to recognise, but I do not have the rest of it and I am not sure I want it. What I do have is this: he is netherlander, he works for the milting, and he has been asking after me, by name, for longer than I have known he existed.
Being netherlander, the hivemind doesn't run through him the way it runs through the rest of us jellyheads -- no channel, no chatter, no free ride on the network that tells everyone else in Hellsborough where everyone else is. He gets round that with terminals. Devices, several of them, that he carries and swaps, and that let him drop into the hive mind's traffic from the outside, listen, ask, and leave again before anything's had a proper chance to notice him doing it.
What makes him worth an entry rather than a rumour is the clearance. I've had it confirmed, second-hand, that there is almost nothing in Hellsborough his milting paperwork doesn't open -- doors, records, other people's business -- with one exception. The fungai doesn't answer to milting paperwork, and if you're the sort of person who needs somewhere the hivemind can't reach you, that's currently the only sort of somewhere there is.
I don't know what his actual brief is. I know it involves me, and I know that whatever milting want reported back concerns the state of the Hinge, which is not a subject I discuss in writing any more than I have to. He hasn't approached me directly. Netherlanders don't move like that, in my limited experience of them. They watch first, for a long time, and only close the distance once they've already decided how the conversation ends.
He isn't alone in this. He carries a kibble with him -- a symbiot, the small familiar creature that reads a bearer's gesture and click same as any other, though I understand this one has a name and a short story of its own, which is more biography than most symbiots get. Where the terminals let him listen to the hivemind from the outside, I suspect the symbiot is what tells him what he's actually hearing.
Field note: if you learn a milting-cleared bounty hunter is asking after you by name, assume he already knows more about your movements than you do. I have stopped trying to find out how.
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