I’m back with a second WIP Wednesday on the trot, with another grown-up Mathilde snippet. Except this time it's from a fic where she goes off to uni and encounters a Bondian scheme by one of her professors bc I grew up the Young Bond novels and I just think they're neat. Will I ever complete it? Probably not but I’m having fun writing it.
‘Spare me the patronising tone, Miss Bond. Turing used his incredible brain to aid the war effort, there are no clean hands.’
‘His work saved millions of lives. The war would’ve dragged on for years longer had he not cracked Enigma.’
Irritation bubbled over in Claiborne’s eyes, ‘It was the Poles who cracked Enigma. You really should’ve paid more attention in my lectures, Bond.’
Mathilde grimly noted the use of the past tense. This must have been what had happened to Nathan Richards. He must have found out about the zero day attack too and Claiborne had him murdered for it. Now it looked like Mathilde would suffer the same fate. ‘Turing did refine the decryption, I’ll admit that. But what about Babbage and his Difference Engine?’
‘What about it?’ She said with equal frustration as she fruitlessly struggled against the restraints pinning her wrists to the chair. ‘He never got a chance to make it.’
‘Imagine that he had. He intended it to be used to calculate the financial assets of the British Empire. Its conquests, its wars, its plunder. At least tell me you know where the word computer comes from?’
If Claiborne was affording her the chance to play the smart Alec she decided she might as well take it, she didn’t want to show how frightened she really was. ‘From Latin, via the French. To determine together through reason.’
‘By jove, she does know something. You see Miss Bond, I reason all this technological advancement, all this progress in the end it has always been used to do what humans have always done. This is power as its most pure. I’m just staking my claim.’
‘That’s it? The miracle of technology and it all comes down to making algorithms to decide who to kill and how to do it most efficiently? And make yourself a little more rich in the process? You’re a monster, sir.’
If Claiborne was wounded by her words he didn’t show it save for the brusqueness with which he spoke his next utterance. ‘I do believe this tutorial is at an end, Miss Bond. I truly am sorry it has to end this way, you really were a very promising student.’
It's doubly fun to write a villain 😁 I'm imagining Claiborne as Samuel West because he did such a marvellous job as Sir Hugo Drax in the radio play of Moonraker and he is delightfully devilish as Peter Judd in the Slow Horses tv series.
