PRT Los Angeles has run a paperless office since 1996. Rebecca, only a local Director at the time, pushed against it then; this was in the wake of ReCipher's landmark ISC West presentation on electron memory data reconstruction, when confidence in digital security was at an all-time low. She fell in line eventually, but that record ended up backing her bid for Chief following Rutherford's resignation after the Millennium Tower data breach.
The paperless policy was, of course, never rolled back. It would hardly be practical. They papered the problem over with new encryption and biometric authentication, tightened up need-to-know protocols, and the world turned on. But anyone on the PRT LA Requisitions floor will tell you, in hushed words, as if letting on a great secret—like clockwork, the Chief Director orders to her office every week a 200-sheet spiral-bound notebook.
Documents go in the computer. Notes stay on paper. Rebecca writes to think; when she's done workshopping her thoughts, she folds them back up into her brain and tears them out for the shredder. It's her process, and it's also part of her cover: a real, physical footprint in the world, each day another inch of paper scrap in the clear box on her desk. It's these little stories that ground the illusion of presence, when it's not her at the desk half the time.
Not that it matters now. These days she pens her short-notice absences to her work calendar instead of Elena's handler. She orders her notebooks anyway, and writes in them, and shreds them.
It's a Sunday when she's just flown back from a weekend conference in Houston. She took their Wards out to clean up the nest of self-replicating vine scuttlers in the Midtown sewers, pretended Eidolon hadn't been ignoring her calls, and spent hours being shouted at by men half her tenure who a few weeks ago were scraping to get in her good graces. Before that, she spent all week breaking up the upstart syndicate down in Compton.
She's been waiting for a quiet afternoon to review budget proposals.
