Agent Chetiri

Chapter 2

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

-Albert Einstein

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After his meeting with Alexa, Q had headed back home and immediately got to work on making sure that she would have the abilities and qualifications to work in the Q-Branch. If everything in her legal papers checked out, he would then devise a plan that would both allow him to see how she really worked whilst giving her the opportunity to figure out that she did have some higher purpose than protecting the banks and businesses of London.

The next day, he decided to head to work a little earlier than usual. He usually came in first to the office anyway, but today he was early by about twenty minutes. Q logged onto his laptop and typed in her name on the national database servers. In about thirty minutes, he had been able to access her files and he printed a hard copy for M to look at later.

Upon his first glance, her papers looked more or less like everyone else's. Q found that she was born as Alexandra Georgia Abbott and brought up in an orphanage in Dover. Her teen years were generally uneventful; she was a rather quiet, reclusive child, who preferred to blend in with the crowd. In university, she had allowed her professors to catch a glimpse of her creative mind, where she had created new algorithms to benefit the advancement of her technological endeavors. After excelling in college, she then completed her schooling with a master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, ranking only second to him upon graduating. The rest he was aware of, that she had gone to work at Enigma Tech. What he did not know, however, was that some of this was fictitious. Alexa was as careful as she seemed, and she had taken painstaking steps to ensure that each path to her past lead to a dead end. Her past was carefully crafted, but the less he knew about her real identity, the better things would be.

Q then spent the remainder of that day making sure that her background was correct by contacting her former professors and receiving their opinions about her. Although their words varied, they all generally said that she was "initially shy, yet intelligent", and that she would do well in a challenging and inventive environment.

He called the city hall in Dover to get in contact with the owner of the orphanage Alexa had lived at to ensure that this was all correct. However, he soon found that the orphanage she had been raised at had gone out of business and the former owner had died of liver cancer in 2007. This did not deter nor dishearten him, since it wasn't really her childhood he was looking at. All he had to do was make sure that she was not affiliated with any unsavory characters and that she would be capable of doing her job. She had surely passed his inspection on competency, but her lack of verification in her past years intrigued him.

After delving deeper in his search, he was left vaguely intrigued but not wholly invested. Her childhood and teen years had turned out to be quiet and generally boring. She did not have a history of political involvement, nor did she have a criminal history (domestic and international). As he contemplated on hiring her, M's pressure for him to find a new replacement took a stronger hold, and he decided to hire her. Even with his decision, he knew that everyone had a few demons (even him, admittedly), and he would have to keep an eye out to see if she had any from her past that were problematic.

The next day, Q had decided that it was time to see M, so that his plan to recruit Alexa would be approved. He picked up the folder with Alexa's files and walked briskly down the stone hallway, towards M's office. Q knocked lightly on the door before walking in to meet the eyes of his boss, Gareth Mallory, who was now the new M.

"Ah, Q. You're earlier than usual today, which is saying something. What brings you here?" he said as he stood up.

"I've come on the premise of hiring a new employee," Q said as he approached M's desk.