It’s Saturday, so it’s time to turn the website over to Kendra to give us some deeper background on some of her friends. Today, we get to meet Amanda McAllister.
MAC. Zeus take it, nobody calls her Amanda McAllister! I don’t even think her partner calls her Amanda. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, calls her Mac.
Let me walk that back just a bit. Hecate still calls her ‘Director McAllister’, but that’s Hecate being stubborn. There isn’t a single flesh-and-blood who calls her anything but Mac.
I wish I had a photo of her. This isn’t a bad representation, but it’s a little bit less energetic than she actually is. Mac is all go, no stop, and has been since Cass met her back in ’13.
Actually, now that I think of it, we met her at the same time. She was the agent who came out to bring us into the OutLook HQ after Joe had his little encounter with an alligator, and the first thing we both noticed was her amazing ability to speak without seeming to need to breathe. Let’s see if I can find where Adam wrote a bit about her. Here it is!
‘Are you talking about Joe, wasn’t that the most awful thing you’d ever seen, I can’t imagine being there when a damn big gator’s trying to rip off someone’s leg, he’s so lucky you kept your head and got it off of him, I’m sure he’ll tell you when you see him again!’
‘Do you ever stop to breathe?’ asked Kendra.
‘Oh yeah, I breathe all the time, see?’ And she demonstrated.
‘Tell me, Mac, are you usually out in the field?’
She exhaled, then said, ‘Not usually, I’m more of an IT specialist, you give me a system and I can hack it so clean they won’t even know I was there, why do you ask?’
‘Oh, no reason.’
And that’s true. She really didn’t have much field experience when we first connected with her. I didn’t see her much; I was busy, those 48 hours between arriving and when I had to go off on mission, and so was Cass, but afterwards Cass and Mac really clicked. There just was something between them. I don’t know if it was that they were both smart, geniuses in their own ways, but very insulated from the rest of the world. Maybe it was just Cass’s vulnerability that resonated with Mac. Whatever it was, in just a few days Cass had totally recruited Mac to help rescue me.
For someone who didn’t spend much time in the field, Mac certainly got a crash course over the next couple months. Yes, she’s a tech genius; always has been, always will be. But for all that she didn’t have any practical experience, she proved that she had all the skills of an agent. Our final confrontation she held her own, at least until she was shot; that’s where she got the scars.
After that, she went back into her happy space as the Assistant Director at OutLook, running all of the IT and training there, until she got pulled into the Federation when we needed her skills on Njord. No, wait. It was Diana at the time. In any case, she got pulled back into orbit.
She, and Harpocrates the AI, had totally revised and secured our network. Now, you have to remember that our network already operated in a totally different way than the other planetary systems. I might get this wrong, but the way Cass explained it is that the Q-Net operates using quantum mechanics and quantum teleportation principles where the planetary networks were still using 21st century technology. From a security perspective, it meant we could tie into the planetary net but they couldn’t link into ours.
Where was I? Oh, Mac. Mac was behind that. Then she took over the whole Missouri project, which her partner, Ted, really helped her with. But then came the really challenging assignment.
She, the Chief, and Alyssa Jordan went down to Luna, deep undercover, to coordinate with the would-be revolutionaries. They spent weeks down there, hiding, living as unobtrusively as possible. Mac didn’t miss a beat. She kept them hidden, invisible, and when they had to fight their way out she was side-by-side with both the Chief and Jordan.
It’s no exaggeration to say that, if not for Mac, neither Cass nor I would be alive today; Artemis would still be under the yoke of their anti-democratic leaders; and the Federation wouldn’t have had the slightest chance.
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