“We will deal with it ourselves.”
“As you wish, Guide Anavosa. I will inform Advisor Ridani as soon as I return to my office.”
“Again, thank you. Dismissed.”
40
* * *
Iona Rowan made her way to the provided address in one of the business districts of Synra One. Since she was supposed to be anonymous, she’d changed out of the formal dress suit that was de rigueur at the embassy, exchanging it for loose slacks and a sleeveless tunic for the night.
The address belonged to an unremarkable commercial building on a street of unremarkable commercial buildings. It was closed for the night, but when she input the provided password at the panel beside the door, it opened.
In a wide room on the second floor, eight chairs sat arranged in a circle bounding a hardware module. Six individuals loitered around the room; she was one of the last to arrive. Per the rules, none of them conversed with any of the others, lest morsels of their personal lives slip out and taint the game. Iona followed suit, leaning against the wall beside the door and adopting a pose of bored disinterest.
Most of her Advisor colleagues would be aghast to learn of the manner in which she’d chosen to spend her evening. These gatherings were not illegal—so far—but allowing a stranger unfettered access to your mind was considered unclean at best and highly dangerous at worst.
And it was absolutely both of those things. Iona got off on the danger and the thrills, but mostly she did it for the escape it brought. Escape from the endless primitive chattering of the Chizeru at the embassy, the endless selfish demands of the businesspeople clamoring for more kyoseil, the endless cold, judging glares of the Guides. Escape from a life that, though residing at the pinnacle of existence, was strangely disappointing.
These games allowed her to live a different life, if only for a few short minutes. Plus, they presented a fun challenge. Not every time, but often enough.
A woman walked in and past Iona, and the door closed. One of the other attendees, a uni in a black jumpsuit, cleared their throat. “Everyone, please take one of the seats. Do we have anyone here for whom this is their first time?”
Two people raised their hands.
“Excellent. I’ll briefly cover the rules and expectations. You should have each prepared a scenario, copied from your own experiences, for the challenge tonight. You will make it open and available in the top layer of your processes. When I give the word, everyone will drop their barriers and link to the central controller.”
They indicated the module sitting silently at the center of the circle. “The controller will match you to a scenario, ideally one as different as possible from what you might encounter in your own daily lives. Your principal conscious processes will then be transferred to that scenario, while the consciousness assigned to your scenario will take their place in your mind.
“You will have twenty minutes to attempt to win your assigned scenario. Once time is up, the individual who devises the solution judged most unique or inventive will win a sealed bottle of Taiyok piciane. Are we ready?”
Everyone nodded, and the controller flickered to life. A pale gold light effused through the cylinder from its core.
“Let’s begin. Hands outstretched everyone, fingers spread. Drop your barriers.”
The golden light leapt out from the controller in sixteen jagged bolts of raw power.
Tristan McLeros found himself sitting at the head of a marble conference table. To his left sat two men and a woman wearing dark business suits and darker scowls. To his right sat…he blinked.
Were those Chizeru? They must be. He’d never met one, but they looked like the images looked: tiny, rough, leathery. Ugh. His friend Steph had always insisted they were cute, but he was going to have to take exception.
In his virtual vision, the scenario instructions scrolled by:
ICHINOSI RESEARCH REQUIRES 40 KILOGRAMS OF KYOSEIL TO BE DELIVERED WITHIN TEN DAYS. THE LOCAL CHIZERU CLAN LEADER PROTESTS THE TIME SCHEDULE, SAYING IT WOULD REQUIRE THE MINERS TO WORK OVER A SACRED SOLSTICE HOLIDAY. FIND A COMPROMISE AND MAKE THE DEAL.
Tristan sighed. He was a factory technician, not a diplomat. A translation routine had been included to decipher the chirpy chattering from the Chizeru, but he didn’t know the first thing about their…anything. They kept the kyoseil flowing, and that was good. He’d never needed to learn anything else about them.
He eyed the businessman sitting closest on his left. The man shot a look of disgusted contempt across the table at the Chizeru then drew his shoulders back and thrust his chest out. “We will provide an additional two dozen sets of soft linens over and above our initial offer, but we must have delivery in ten days.”
The Chizeru in the middle chortled…Tristan guessed. “Would be most welcome for at the morning-after rest follows solstice celebration. Sad to turn soft linens away, but all earn right to join in celebration.”
“The miners can come to the next solstice celebration.”
The Chizeru who had been doing the talking gasped, leaping half out of his/her/its chair. “Oh no no, to miss a solstice is to doom the season follows.”
Rock, meet hard place. People were so much more complicated than machines, and Tristan was starting to think aliens might be triply so. He had a tool, augment or routine for every problem that arose with the machines at the factory. What were the odds any of them would do a whiff of good here?
Without him thinking about it, the new limb augment he’d installed the day before sprung to life around his left hand. Ten virtual fingers elongated in a fan pattern out beyond his real fingers.
All three of the Chizeru squealed and began bouncing excitedly in their chairs, pointing at his hand over and over.
Tristan stared at them, then his hand, then them again. Was this excitement or fear? They didn’t fall out of their chairs and scurry for the door, so he was leaning toward excitement. An idea began to form in his mind and…hey, it was worth a shot.
He smiled and stood to move around the table behind the Chizeru. They twisted around to gesture at his hand, tiny eyes wide and leathery lips chattering away.
He offered the hand to them, letting the virtual fingers expand outward to their maximum length. “You like this? Go on, try and touch them. Ah, they’re not really there! Where do you think they are? Let me show you what else they can do.”
Iona sat on a rolling stool in front of a wide bank of panes, at least half of which were blinking in angry reds and oranges.
She glanced around, but the room was otherwise empty. In her virtual vision, the scenario instructions scrolled by:
THE OLIGASI CUISINE FACTORY MANUFACTURES FOOD PREPARATION MODULES FOR RESTAURANTS, HOTELS AND OTHER HIGH-VOLUME SERVICE PROVIDERS. THE MANUFACTURING PROCESS INVOLVES 22 STAGES, 41 COMPONENTS AND 11 DIFFERENT SPECIALIZED ASSEMBLERS. AN ERROR HAS APPEARED BETWEEN STAGES 7 AND 13. FIND THE CAUSE AND FIX THE ERROR.
Shit. She couldn’t exactly smooth-talk a bunch of machines into cooperating, could she?
Her gaze flitted across the obnoxious alerts…she only understood what about a third of them were trying to convey. Which mostly amounted to “ERROR!” Lot of help that was.
Her talents resided in her words and how she massaged them just so. In a thousand nuanced variations of a single facial expression. She didn’t know hardware tools or assembly lines. Was there truly no one here to help her? No aide, or secretary, or floor manager? “System?”
“System status: An error has manifested in the assembly line between Stages 7 and 13—”
“I know that! What is the error?”
“Unable to determine. Further investigation is required.”
“You don’t say.” Iona frowned at the panels. Were they grouped by stage, or assembler, or….
Okay. They weren’t squabbling adversaries bickering with each other, but they were talking to each other, right? The assembly line was a system. In order to create a finished product, the stages and equipment had to convey need
ed information to one another during the manufacturing process. So she simply needed to track the conversation until it broke down.
“System, show me the output transmitted from Stage 6 to Stage 7.”
Iona dragged herself into the hotel room around one in the morning. She was too tired, and possibly drunk, to bother to travel all the way home, so she’d gotten a room at the hotel attached to the Synra One transit hub.
She hadn’t won the game—some construction manager from Namino had—but she had solved the challenge, so she’d call it a win. And there had been drinks after, obviously.
She crashed on the bed and lazily toed her shoes off. As her schedule helpfully reminded her, she needed to be back on Chosek at the embassy by nine o’clock Chosek time for a meeting. Nine o’clock Chosek time converted to…shit.
She prided herself on never having been more than three minutes late to a meeting, ever. But lying here now, she couldn’t seem to bring herself to care. What did it matter if she arrived late? After all, there was a first time for everything.
41
* * *
“I don’t have time to be here, Adlai. I have a broken factory and multiple crises lining up behind it to demand my attention.” Dashiel added a dark glower to the remark for emphasis. He was in a foul mood, if one entirely of his own creation, and he needed an outlet.
He’d folded and told Maris everything—almost everything—because what else was he going to do? She was terrifying in her graceful persuasiveness. Plus, she’d saved his ass, and not for the first time. So he’d left out the part about NOIR, but everything else came spilling out.
Now Maris was insisting on seeing Nika, just as he’d known she would, and what the hells was he supposed to do about that? After the circumstances in which his last meeting with Nika ended, he doubted opening the next one with ‘Hey, your ex-best-friend, who’s a wealthy Culture Advisor specializing in the arts, wants to meet you for tea—is tomorrow good for you?’ would go over particularly well.
Assuming she agreed to see him again at all.
An uncertain future filled his mind, one where every choice carried a heavy price. After years marked by quiet, repressed desolation lurking beneath an outwardly charmed life, the near-constant emotional upheaval of the last several days was proving to be too much of a shock to his system, s the night before spectacularly demonstrated.
For a single moment, he’d broken—though the effects would likely stretch for far longer. Reeling from the chilling harshness of her rejection, cast as it was amid destruction and suffering, his emotion processes had fractured from his logical ones. He wouldn’t let it happen again, even if meant permanently deprioritizing those emotion processes in order to withstand the near-constant whiplash flogging them.
Adlai matched Dashiel’s glower with a grimace. “I apologize. But I have updates for you, and you did say to contact you as soon as I found out anything. I confirmed the presence of an invasive virutox in your limb augments.”
“Good. What are you—”
Adlai cut him off. “Then I went to see the Guides and informed them of the threat to public safety.”
“Also good. What did they say?”
Adlai’s expression flickered. “They are…concerned about the situation. They want to talk to you about the virutox. And they want you to bring your contact who initially discovered it with you to the meeting.”
Whiplash.
“I…can’t do that. What else did they say about it? Are you confiscating the augments?”
“You can’t bring your contact along? Why the hells not? Dashiel, when the Guides ask, you don’t refuse.”
He rubbed at his jaw and, while he didn’t technically deprioritize his emotion processes, he did prioritize his analytical ones. “I full well realize that—I’ve been an Advisor longer than you, remember? But the fact remains. I’ll say I wasn’t able to connect with them again.”
“Is that a lie? You’re going to defy the Guides then lie to them? Are you mad?”
“Are you claiming you’ve never massaged information to put the best spin on it when you presented it to them?”
“Putting the best spin on a complex truth is one thing, but an outright lie is another entirely. What is going on?”
Dashiel exhaled harshly. He’d told Nika he didn’t trust anyone…but Adlai was near the top of the list of people he really should trust. Also, for better or worse his friend now counted as the sole member of their former circle who didn’t know about her return. And if he was going to stand the slightest chance of getting out of this snare of a trap with his career, his fortune and his love intact, he was probably going to need Adlai on his side.
He glanced around the office. This was Justice, which meant odds were better than even for listening devices being installed in every wall.
So he moved around the desk, leaned in close to his friend, and dropped his voice to a barely audible whisper. “My contact? It’s Nika.”
“What? Why didn’t you say—”
He gestured for Adlai to calm down. “Not so loud.”
“It’s fine. I’m the only one who can monitor the recording devices in here. They’re for my own uses, so you can stop whispering. You finally found her?”
Dashiel kept his voice quiet anyway. “She found me. Adlai, she didn’t request R&R five years ago—she was psyche-wiped and dumped in an alley as a blank.”
Adlai’s face blanched in horror. “That’s awful! You—both of you—should have come to me with this right away. I’ll open an investigation immediately.” Adlai paused. “If she got psyche-wiped, how did she find you?”
“It’s…complicated, and also not important. The point is, anyone who could psyche-wipe an Advisor then conceal the act with a false data trail has to be high up in the governmental power structure. Extremely high up.”
Adlai drew back in his chair. “You’re not suggesting…?”
“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m merely saying that she’s not going to step within a hundred meters of Mirai Tower. Not blind and lacking any insights into who may be her enemy.”
Adlai shook his head. “Just convince her to go to the Platform. The Guides will be livid to find out their records were corrupted and one of their Advisors assaulted. They’ll protect her.”
“I wish I could make her believe that.” I wish I could believe that. “But she’s understandably paranoid about a horrific violation she doesn’t remember. She’s seeing threats in every shadow, and I’m not in a position to say she’s wrong to do so. ”
“Psyche-wiped…I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her. Let’s think about this for a minute. If the perpetrator was someone powerful—possibly even another Advisor, as disturbing as the thought is—the answers to what happened to her can likely only be discovered by the Guides, or on their direct order. I appreciate that she’s afraid, but she needs to get in front of them and explain everything she does know about what happened to her.”
Dashiel started to protest again, because Adlai really wasn’t getting the message here, but his friend held up a hand to forestall the protest.
“I tell you what. I’ll issue a witness protection order for her, and she can appear under cloak of anonymity. Security won’t be able to touch her, and there will be no official record of her appearance. No Advisor beyond the two of us will ever know she was there.”
“And if the Guides protest the anonymity order?”
“You know they have the right to revoke it, but I don’t see why they would—not once they hear her story. Nowhere will she be safer than on the Platform. Dashiel, they have to be told about this.”
Adlai was making a fair amount of sense, from an objective point of view. Trouble was, the Justice Advisor was the only objective one on the playing field. “I’ll try to convince her, but no promises. How long do I have?”
“They said promptly, so…maybe six hours? I’ll have the protective order ready in two.”
“Right. I’d better get mo
ving.” He headed for the door, then stopped to turn back. “I appreciate the help. I know you’re at the edge of your comfort zone here.”
Adlai sighed heavily. “My comfort zone left for safer environs several exits before this one.”
Once the door closed behind Dashiel, Adlai dropped his elbows on his desk and fisted his hands at his chin. He hadn’t been exaggerating—his comfort zone was firmly in his rear view mirror. But he hadn’t dared to share the primary reason for it.
He hadn’t told Dashiel about the rescinding of the augment confiscation and quarantine order, though it was certainly relevant information. Dashiel would have been…displeased, to say the least, and Adlai didn’t feel up to verbally defending the Guides’ order or his following of it. He was able to justify the decision in the sanctity of his own mind, only barely, but justifying it to another person, much less one as logic-driven and stubborn as his friend, was a different matter.
He’d have to tell Dashiel eventually, of course, but he’d save that storm for another day.
What could possibly be threatening the very existence of the Dominion? What could it possibly have to do with reducing the size of the criminally inclined population through an insidious virutox? Had some cosmic god appeared on the scene to judge the virtuousness of their civilization? It was an absurd concept, but it made as much sense as any other explanation.
Ultimately, it didn’t—couldn’t—matter for him. He didn’t make the rules; he enforced them. He executed on the will of the people, as expressed in the Charter and shepherded by the Guides. When the latter two conflicted, the Guides’ wisdom must win out, because they were the moral compass of the Dominion.
If he began to doubt them, then he had no compass. He was lost.
So he would continue to believe in their ability to lead everyone through whatever this crisis was now looming over the Dominion. He would believe in their ability to protect Nika—once his friend, now revealed as a victim of the most heinous of crimes. That an Advisor could have been psyche-wiped and the crime itself erased as thoroughly as her mind was surely another sign of society’s creeping slide into chaos.
Exin Ex Machina Page 23
