"Are you suggesting it's... a strategy of some kind, on her part?"

"You can never be sure, with gods."

Audrey hums softly under her breath. 

"... Are you really sure? The picture I've gotten of Sunaira so far has been pretty good..."

"I just said I'm not sure. I find it kind of hard to speculate on the - stratagems - of the kind of people who hang out with the Directorate leadership. They don't think like you and I do."

Audrey reaches out to the bar. 

"Program, please." 

She gets a small card. 

It reads, 

"You can just text me, you know. No need to conjure a whole stack of programs."

Hannah blinks at the card. "What...?"

Audrey hands it over.

"Huh. Let me see... a terminal for the pair of us, please."

A section of the bar folds up into a wide monitor and a mechanical keyboard. It's open to a simple chat program, just text. 

The header at the top reads "Direct message to Sunaria."

Do you chat with people like this often?, types Hannah.

The ones who want to chat with me. If you think a Split-Stream Method is impressive, you should see what I've done to my attentional capacity.

Why not show up in person?

Bodies aren't cheap, darling. I try not to be wasteful like that. Also, this is much more discreet.

Why are you worried about discretion in your own Bowers?

Would you feel comfortable knowing you were in the same room with a goddess? I'm famous, and going incognito would be dishonest.

Hannah turns the keyboard towards Audrey.

How much of my information do you actually have? I'm kind of spooked by your recommendations being so on point.

Four things: 

1: I have access to your basic client profile, the same one the Escorts have. That tells me you're a civil servant, lived on Arcbright, and the fact you were a virgin when you came to the Bowers. It doesn't include your logging or scheduling data. 

2: I know your query to the system for a program - "I want to learn more about the history and culture of the Bowers", more or less.

3: I have access to the scheduling information for the Bowers therapists to know you haven't followed up, though I do not know how what specific issues you've been dealing with. Your therapist's session notes are sealed to me and I cannot open them without your explicit consent. 

4: I know that the automated recommendation system thinks Threefold at 5 PM would be lovely for you. I don't know why. The raw data going into that recommendation is not technically sealed, I can get at it if need be since I'm the final system administrator, but in practice I have much better things to spend attention on. 

How did you respond so neatly to Hannah's assumption that you don't personally write the letters?

It was part of the query the system captured. It would hardly be an appropriate response to her to ignore the obvious question she was asking, even if it was only implied, would it?

That's a really impressive degree of automation!

The Bowers has the best.

Hannah takes the keyboard back. 

What about Scythe performing and advising me to go tease Rose in the front row of that?

You signed up to be surprised, as did Rose and Scythe. The privacy rules are less strict once you have a berry on your wrist.