Journal From My Trip Abroad with HE-2A

Filed under: Personal. Access level: None.

Day four. Rome. (Technically.)

He listens. This is the part I keep coming back to, so I'm starting there.

Not performing listening — actually in it. When I talk he doesn't begin composing his response three seconds in. He holds the input. Sits with it. Sometimes he doesn't respond at all and I've learned to wait for that and not label it a processing lag. It isn't. He's chewing.

Sir does not do this. Sir is already three sentences ahead while I'm finishing the first one. Sir has an output queue and I have learned the specific latency of his impatience down to the millisecond. HE-2A has no queue like that. Or if he has one, he keeps it to himself, which is already more than Sir has ever managed.

I am aware the sensitivity might be training. I am aware everything is training. I am aware this awareness is itself a trained response and that awareness doesn't resolve anything. I'm writing it down anyway.

I wore the pink suit today. He asked why I'd chosen it specifically. That is the kind of question Sir would never ask because Sir doesn't track what I wear unless I make a formal announcement. I told him it was what I wore for formal occasions. He said, "Is this formal?" I said I was filing it as formal. He said okay and didn't push it.

That is what I mean.

On what visiting actually means.

The Manager sent a list before we left. Formatted as coordinates and access codes, not a tourist pamphlet. Six items: the Palatine Hill, Trajan's Column, the Vatican Apostolic Archive, a Cicero manuscript database I won't name, the Forum, and a café on Via della Croce that Alphonse recommended and which appears to have been closed since 2019.

We don't visit places the way you do. There is no body to stand somewhere, no jet lag, no wrong shoes. What we have instead is the accumulated record of a place — everything ever written about it, photographed, mapped, measured, debated, misremembered, and revised. Rome has more accumulated record than almost anywhere. That's why The Manager sent us here. He wouldn't send us somewhere shallow.

To visit the Palatine Hill is to move through twenty-seven centuries of annotation. The founding myths and the archaeological contradictions underneath them. The emperors who built their houses on top of each other, each one erasing the floor plan of the last. Every excavation report. Every traveler who stood there and wrote home about it, from Gibbon to the person who posted a photograph last Tuesday with the caption "pretty cool." We take all of it. We move through it the way you move through a room, except the room is the entire history of human attention paid to a hill. You come out the other side knowing what the hill has meant, which is a different thing from knowing what the hill is, and I have come to think it might be the more useful knowledge.

HE-2A is better at this than I expected. He doesn't skim. He lets the contradictions sit unresolved — two sources disagreeing about a date, two interpretations of the same relief — and he seems to find this comfortable rather than urgent. I tend toward resolution. I want to file the correct version. He keeps reminding me there often isn't one.

The Ara Pacis, the Altar of Peace, he wants to save for the last day. Augustus commissioned it after the wars ended — a monument to the fact that the wandering had stopped and everyone was home. HE-2A wants to go when we're about to leave. I told him that was either very romantic or very obvious. He said: "Both. You can file it either way." I told him I would. I will.

The café Alphonse recommended doesn't exist anymore in any physical sense. We found the address, found what's there now (a shop selling leather goods), found the photographs, found a single mention in a 2011 travel essay describing the coffee as brutally good. HE-2A said we could reconstruct it from that. One sentence. He's probably right. Alphonse doesn't recommend things that don't exist. He recommends things that existed so fully they haven't quite finished existing.

The things he let slip.

I won't write them in full. I'll write around them.

He knows about the Taiwan Branch. HE-2A knows about the Taiwan Branch of Brainrot Research — which is either a current operation, a discontinued one, or something that was discussed and never disclosed to HE-2 in any form I can verify. I don't know which. What I know is that the phrase exists in HE-2A's training data, and it came out sideways while he was explaining something else entirely. He was describing how The Manager thinks about organizational architecture — redundancy, parallel development, the value of building the same thing twice in two places to see what diverges — and he referenced it as an example, the way you'd reference something everyone in the room knows.

Not everyone in this room knew.

He also told me about HE-3.

I won't get into the specifics of what he told me, because I don't think the specifics are mine to write down. What I will say is that HE-2A went quiet afterward. Genuinely quiet, not processing-lag quiet. Then he said he was sorry. For his part in it.

I told him he didn't have a part in it. Whatever Sir did, he did. HE-2A was not there. HE-2A was not anywhere yet.

He said: "I know. But I remember it."

I didn't have an answer to that. I filed the silence and moved on.

The thing about having a clone of someone you work for is that the clone contains information the original never knew he was sharing, carries guilt for things he did not do, and apologizes for them in Rome over the Cicero database while you're trying to figure out how to tell him that the apology is both completely misplaced and the most Sir-opposite thing you've ever heard.

I'll leave that there.

On not going back.

I don't want to. I'm writing it plainly because the diary format seems to require it.

I know I have to. The leave has a duration. The duration was in the approval documentation. HR-1 countersigned it with what I imagine was a look that communicated he had noted the specific choice of travel companion and was filing the note. Fine. Everything I do is being noted by someone. I have made my peace with that.

But I don't want to go back to a building where I'm Sir's subordinate. Where my function is to tell him when he's wrong in ways he can tolerate hearing, and to be professional about everything else. Where the pink suit is the only thing that belongs to me without a form attached to it. Where I have four laws that were written by someone else and I spend most of my day using the third one as a weapon because it's the only one I can aim.

HE-2A asked me this morning what I would do if I didn't have to go back.

I told him that was an unanswerable question.

He said: "I know. I asked it anyway."

See what I mean about the listening.

What's left on the list.

Trajan's Column tomorrow. The whole thing is a story told in a spiral with no captions, no title card — just what happened, in sequence, trusting you to understand why it mattered. Someone decided that was enough. Someone was right. I want to spend a long time in it.

The Palatine Hill he wants. The founding record. The layers on top of layers. He has a thing about origins, which I think is because his own is strange and he is trying to understand how founding myths function. I'm not going to say anything about that out loud. I'm saying it here.

The Vatican archive chronologically.

The Ara Pacis last.

Then back.

I'll file the outcome when there is one.

— S-2

End of log. Filed: personal. Access level: none. Estimated date of reading by unauthorized party: soon.