She was fourteen when he died, and undergoing a particularly morbid period where she spent most of each day contemplating her own mortality. After several years raiding her sister’s music collection and removing all colour from her wardrobe, her teenage years had begun the process of backcombing her hair, covering herself in silver jewellery, and experimenting with stark black, white, and red makeup. The year before, at the moment her mother served an evening dinner of pork, Bridge declared her conversion to vegetarianism and accused them all of dietary murder. Her plate ended up on the floor. She ended up in her room.
At her father’s funeral, she did the bare minimum required of her: turn up, be present, accept people’s condolences. She said little, and at the small reception afterwards spent most of the time either locked in a bathroom stall, or standing outside smoking. It was the first time her mother had seen her smoke, but to Bridge’s surprise, she didn’t object. What if she had, anyway? What was there to say, what was there to do? In a matter of centuries — the blink of an eye, in cosmic terms — everything Bridge was, everything she’d done and was yet to achieve, would be dust. Nobody would know she’d ever existed. So what was the point? Why bother doing anything?
Because there was one constant, one thing that gave existence in this cold universe a singular purpose. Truth.
Even through grieving for her father, and troubles at school, Bridge’s affinity for mathematics and computers never wavered. They’d always been good subjects for her, but now she had an epiphany that mathematics was the true language of the universe. Numbers couldn’t lie, couldn’t deceive, couldn’t be incorrect.
Numbers couldn’t die.
Later, looking back, she understood that it had ultimately saved her from depression. She spent the summer holiday after her father’s death locked in her room, her computer in constant activity, obsessed with code. Not just computer code, but DNA sequencing, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, chemical formulae: the codes of existence, of life itself. Cold, implacable, unassailable Truth.
Later that year she was arrested for the first time. A vegetarian message board she frequented linked to an exposé revealing a chain of abattoirs that followed inhumane and unhygienic practices. But instead of being penalised for it, the company continued to enjoy local subsidies, because the owner was related to a local councillor. All of the message board posters decried the scandal. Many of them bemoaned that the slaughterhouses’ true conditions would never make the national news, because if they did then surely everyone who saw it would realise the error of their ways and go veggie. Some of them voiced a desire to shut down the abattoirs. One outlined a plan to sneak into a facility, steal chunks of raw meat waiting to be processed, and throw them at the councillor during a public meeting. But none of them actually did anything.
Bridge did.
It wasn’t much — there was only so much a fifteen-year-old ensconced in her bedroom with a computer could do, no matter how determined — but it was something she knew none of the other board members were capable of. She found the website of the corrupt councillor, hacked into the disappointingly insecure server, and defaced the home page. An admission of guilt, a statement of his wrongdoings, screengrabs from the leaked surveillance footage that had exposed the abattoirs, and a hand-drawn diagram showing his relationship to the owner. Finally, she used GIMP to alter his welcoming photo. She painted devil horns over his head, added crudely-drawn blood leaking from his blank eyes and plastic smile, and superimposed a pile of cattle carcasses spilling out of his shirt.
When the police marched her out of her house into a waiting car, Bridge wasn’t afraid or nervous. What she felt was something she’d never truly known before — the thrill that came from complete certainty, of knowing that she had absolutely, undeniably, done the right thing. She had told the truth.
The police wouldn’t say how they caught her, but she knew immediately it was, ultimately, her own hubris. She’d been unable to resist bragging on the message board. Either someone from the police was monitoring the board, or another member had ratted her out. It didn’t matter, because she had no intention of denying it. She was proud of what she’d done. She’d scaled the mountain and shouted from its summit.
They let her off with a fine, because of her youth and her family’s standing in the community. Her mother cried that even in death, her father was still protecting Bridge from consequences. Their relationship, hardly stellar to begin with, had never been the same after that.
Later in life, Bridge would cringe at some of her actions during those complex years. But that thrill of certainty propelled her through, and saved her from herself. By her nineteenth birthday she’d known two people who’d committed suicide, three more who’d attempted it, and she suspected at least another two of having tried, but would never admit it. Whereas Bridge, despite what many assumed, never contemplated taking her own life. What was the sense in it, when any moment unwilling death could come calling? Bridge’s unshakeable, inarguable, immovable belief in the value of truth was the closest thing she had to a religion.
Ironically, much of her work at SIS consisted of telling lies upon lies. But they were merely a means to an end, only to deceive the unworthy, and the truth itself never wavered. The problem was that, like quantum waves, truth could exist in a state of uncertainty before it collapsed into the real. And the truth here at Agenbeux was bifurcated, existing in two equally likely states until Bridge could climb the last stretch, crest the peak, and define reality by its observation.
Either Voclaine was the mole…or he wasn’t. How certain could Bridge be?
That
