Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  Adda concentrated on choosing only the words that made sense. “What conditions . . . ?” Her brain was not providing the right words to finish the sentence.

  The doctor sighed. “I’m not concerned about any more seizures, if that’s what you’re asking. If one should occur, we will be able to treat it here. When your therapist can assure us that you’ve recovered sufficiently to stand trial, the ITA will send someone to collect you.”

  That was why she needed to leave. This clinic was made to hold influenced people rendered powerless when they’d lost contact with the intelligences who’d influenced them. Once the clinic staff judged Adda healthy enough to stand trial, the ITA would move her to a jail that’d be much harder to escape from.

  And Adda couldn’t imagine her trial ending well. After it was over, the ITA would lock her away as securely as Iridian was, and then how could she and Iridian ever get back to each other? They’d both be trapped for decades, alone, surrounded by people eager to watch them suffer.

  Another repeating loop of despair spiraled out before her. Adda clawed her way out of it.

  She needed to leave while the doctors still thought she was too disconnected from reality to do it. The problem was, she kept losing time and seeing things that weren’t there, even without sharpsheets. She couldn’t even get out of bed by herself.

  She had no idea what would happen when she got into a workspace again, but an intelligence could free her from this building. Her comp glove wasn’t on her wrist. She’d need one to contact any intelligence.

  But they’d betrayed her too. No, that wouldn’t work. Would it? None of them could use her while she was in an influence treatment clinic. If the intelligences wanted her to do something for them, then they should want to let her out.

  The rehab staff should’ve added her to the local intelligences’ contact blacklists. Those would stop them from interacting with her. However, the intelligence she had in mind to ask wasn’t local at all. She tried to keep her face neutral so the doctor wouldn’t see the coherent thoughts behind her eyes. “Speak to my brother.” That was meant to be a question, but her mouth wasn’t accepting question words. This was all very frustrating.

  Any patient who liked their brother would want to talk to him, wouldn’t they? Especially when their wife wasn’t with them. The doctor looked dubious, for some reason. “I’ll have someone bring you a recorder—”

  “In person,” said Adda. The doctor shook his head and opened his mouth to say no some other way, so she interrupted him again. “In real time. His contact information is on my comp.” That made sense! She was probably more excited about that than she should’ve been.

  The doctor smiled, but he looked more sympathetic than happy. “I don’t have your comp. You may send asynchronous messages until we’ve established your baseline behavioral profile. If you give us your log-in information, we’d be happy to look up your contact list from what the ITA has given us of your comp contents.”

  Who falls for that? Adda didn’t bother to conceal her disgust. If even she recognized his attempted manipulation, it had to be a blatant attempt. “Address. Here.” She pulled at her arms, which were still stuck in the bed.

  The doctor did something on his comp that made the foam sink back into the mattress, and Adda could move her arms again. Using the projection stage controls, she put in an address that’d pass a message on to fifty unmonitored accounts across Ceres, Vesta, and Mars, as well as to Pel, wherever he was. With luck, he was on one of those ’jects. She added a bit of information to the end that should append her guide on how to have a conversation without giving away one’s location.

  The doctor recorded it all on his comp and left. For the first time in days, she’d done something for the most important people in her life. Pel would help her get out of here and back to Iridian. It was a start.

  * * *

  And then Adda’s progress stalled, for days. She was still learning her daily schedule. People kept bothering her, and she needed time to think.

  What she was thinking about . . . yes. She had to ask a station security system she was not supervising, and which was prone to dangerous overgeneralizations, to install itself where it did not belong and open doors it had no business opening. That was how she would leave this clinic and find a way to free Iridian.

  But Iridian would be convicted of at least some of the charges arrayed against her. The ITA would send her to a prison that’d lock her away even more thoroughly than Adda’s clinic had secured her. Whether the doctors let Adda talk to Pel or not, he couldn’t free Iridian from a prison. Neither could Adda.

  So they needed more help. Since she should be on all the local intelligence’s contact blacklists, she couldn’t ask them. That was where AegiSKADA came in. Asking it to let her out of this clinic would be worth the influence risk.

  The ITA still had her comp glove. She’d need a cord and a comp to connect her neural implant via the steel-lined jack in her nostril and speak to AegiSKADA directly. She’d have to find the hardware, find a workspace generator, find sharpsheets. . . .

  No. Her room’s door only opened when her treatment schedule said it had to. But on Vesta, and on all communication networks in and out of its stations, AegiSKADA was always listening. She had to talk on Vesta, where AegiSKADA could hear her, without leaving the clinic on Ceres.

  Time passed while she thought of and discarded impossible ways to do that. After a while, an implant tech asked her to consent to a more thorough analysis of her neural implant net. It felt like something that’d happened before, although she didn’t remember their first conversation. If she allowed that kind of examination, the tech would find her and Iridian’s comms system. As long as the procedure required her consent, her answer would be no.

  She was lucky to be in a place where consent was required, and nobody was injecting her with anything that’d make her say yes. Or if they were, it wasn’t working. The influence treatment facility’s goal was to guarantee that after she regained full control of her mind, she’d choose not to interact with an intelligence in a way that’d lead to influence. There were lots of ways to achieve that goal, some more harmful than others.

  As soon as the tech left, Adda returned to her plan, and the intelligences’ part in it. What might the three awakened intelligences think of Adda and Iridian, now that she was here and Iridian was on her way to an ITA prison? Were the two of them still useful, or would the intelligences treat them like a threat, as Iridian had always expected them to?

  Were the intelligences even still following her and Iridian? The ITA had come so quickly when Iridian had brought Adda to the hospital. Maybe Iridian or Pel had made a mistake that would’ve brought them to the ITA’s attention. Or maybe the intelligences had gotten them arrested, to separate Adda from Iridian and to keep them where Casey could reach them.

  There was a place that was out of their reach, for now at least. But Adda wouldn’t go there without Iridian.

  * * *

  It took them four days, but Adda’s influence treatment doctor set up a real-time conversation with Pel, to be hosted from a conference room inside the clinic. The delay had given her time to practice speaking complete sentences. Her brain found the right words faster, and her mouth more reliably said them.

  She’d spent most of her practice time on questions she wanted to ask Pel. The doctors would record the conversation and assess her influence recovery progress to see whether she was well enough to stand trial. The awakened intelligences might listen in too, if they still wanted Adda to do something for them. Tapping into secret conversations was Casey’s specialty.

  If she chose her words carefully, she could ask AegiSKADA and Pel questions that would help her escape inside questions the doctors expected her to ask, while excluding keywords that’d attract Casey’s attention. The questions would be effective, but not efficient. She was counting on that inefficiency to hide the fact that between the clinic’s treatment and her own determination, her brain was putti
ng itself back together.

  Casey was a bigger threat than the doctors, though. Modern theories held that intelligences threw away their original priorities within hours of awakening. Instead Casey had used those priorities to pursue its own goals, whatever those were. Casey’s newly developed ambitions must be fascinating, with no human preferences holding it back. What Casey had done to Adda had only increased her curiosity about it.

  “We worry about how discussing certain topics may affect your recovery,” said the earnest psychologist across the table from Adda in the small conference room. A built-in projection stage rose between them, along with a pad logged into Adda’s internal, well-monitored network space. “I’ll be on the other side of this wall, and I’ll butt into your conversation if it sounds like you’re visiting dangerous territory. Do you understand me?”

  Adda nodded. After the door shut the woman out, Adda touched the icon on the stage, which wouldn’t have accommodated her comp glove even if she’d had it, to connect to Pel. After a confirmation notification, his head and shoulders appeared above the stage.

  Her brother’s eyes were unnaturally blue today, behind brown curls that’d grown too long and tumbled over his shoulders. It’d been days since he’d shaved. The love that swelled in her heart was an almost physical thing, fizzing in her chest like carbonation, warm as spring sunshine on Earth.

  Pel’s eyes dimmed to a more natural shade of blue and he grinned. “Sissy! You’re looking like shit!”

  “Hi, jerk.” Adda smiled back at him. Her hair really did look awful. It’d grown out even more than his had. In her case, the appeal of a haircut didn’t make up for the unpleasantness of a stranger touching her head. At least, thanks to a gene-editing gift from her da when she’d moved out of his home, her roots were growing out apple red and purple. The rest of it was still attempted-disguise orange.

  “So. Um. I think I followed all the instructions that came with this thing, but—”

  “Let’s not spell those out,” Adda said. The image quality and background murmur of conversation on his side suggested that, as she’d instructed, he’d joined the conversation from a public terminal. If he’d used the service she’d recommended, the call record would be wiped from the terminal after they finished talking.

  “Yeah. Right. Okay.” Pel fidgeted below the cam’s range. “Kind of paranoid. I get that.”

  Adda nodded, mentally reaching for her questions. Talking to an intelligence outside a workspace was tricky, especially when it had to look like she was talking to Pel. AegiSKADA might not be listening in at all, even though everything Pel and Adda said was passing through Vesta’s stretch of the Patchwork. Even if it was listening, it might misunderstand her, or ignore her.

  “You talk less than you used to, did you know that?” Pel asked. “Like, I hadn’t noticed so much when Iridian was with you, but you’re quieter than usual. Which was already quiet.”

  Unless Adda made herself sound more like a damaged person conversing with her family about normal things, the doctors would get suspicious. “I’m in a strange situation. Tell me about you.”

  Pel never hesitated to deploy his most heartbreaking sad-puppy expression to generate sympathy. “I’m stuck out here on my own and it sucks. You’re in there, Iridian’s on her way to some prison that flies around fucking Venus. That’s the ITA compromising with the NEU, by the way—they could’ve sent her to colonial space, but the NEU said that would’ve been too dangerous for a vet like her—and my name search results still include too many Vestan news hits to be good for finding work, even the cash-only kind. It’s hard.”

  He was still a few kilos too thin, but he was as clean as he ever got. The clothes might’ve been the same outfit he’d worn outside her hospital window. Whether it was or not, he was stressed, but he wasn’t using chemicals to excess. She could usually tell, although she didn’t remember how she could tell.

  “Did you find a new therapist?” Adda asked.

  Pel rolled his eyes and made them flush gold, then bright green. “Sissy, I’ve been busy.”

  “It’s important.”

  “I just need something new to focus on. A job or whatever. That whole time we were on Vesta I only had a couple panic attacks, and that’s really good for me when things are slow.”

  “You had a therapist on Vesta. Find another one, Pel, please. Do you have access to your account?”

  “Yeah, do you?”

  Adda relaxed a little. He’d be okay for a few months on the money he had, as long as he stayed away from glimmer and the other drugs he liked. She probably shouldn’t have taken his account information to check on that, but she worried about him. Imagining that an influence treatment clinic would let her shop was an example of how he stopped thinking rationally when the conclusions were too painful. “No, I can’t reach my account.” She had several, none of which needed to be recorded. The ITA might have found and locked them anyway. “The doctors think I’ll buy a printed comp and talk to Casey again.”

  Pel’s eyes widened a little. “Would you?”

  If Casey offered to let Adda out of this building, she’d cooperate as much as she needed to. She wouldn’t announce that to the doctors, and Pel wouldn’t want to hear it either. And she’d already spent too long thinking of an answer instead of answering. “Um. No. What’s happening around Vesta?” She put a light emphasis on the word “around.” It was one of her prepared questions, not too specific and pointing him toward words AegiSKADA would listen for. Since her last address was in a Vestan station, her therapists would expect her to take an interest in the ’ject.

  Pel looked at her a bit sideways, and his pupils did a pseudo-organic, liquid shift that might’ve meant he was changing his eyes’ filters or functions. “You know I haven’t been there lately, right? I’ve been . . .” Adda held up both hands, palms out, to forestall an announcement of his location. The ITA might’ve wanted to arrest him, and the intelligences might’ve wanted something worse. “Not there.”

  He frowned. She gave him her sternest lips-pursed no expression. She wasn’t being paranoid. Awakened intelligences were after her.

  “Anyway,” Pel continued loudly, “the ITA, NEU, and a bunch of colonies all got together to find you and Iridian. Peace in our time, who’d have thought, right?” Both of them snorted in amusement, almost the same sound. “Now that you’re, um, found, there’s more hot air being vented between them on the newsfeeds, but nobody’s gotten dead. The ITA had the Oxia contract projected on the wall. Then they bombed the wall and sent chunks flying off into decaying orbits. I mean, the only contracted service they let Oxia keep was the mining stuff, and that’s slowed down since they hauled out like a third of the drills. Yeah, they were shaking the shit out of the ’ject,” he added in response to how surprised she must’ve looked. “That was a real thing.”

  When she’d lived in Rheasilvia Station, those rumors had sounded like a manifestation of the residents’ distrust of Oxia Corporation. She and Iridian had been in more immediate danger from Oxia itself. As usual, Pel knew more about current affairs than he thought he did.

  “So just about everything is better than it used to be in Rheasilvia,” he went on. “Weirdly better, sometimes. The trams all work and they’re all on time, is what Chi says—she’s fine, she says hi—and there hasn’t been a serious dock accident in like twice as long as they usually go. Captain Sloane helped pick all the new contractors, so the captain’s getting all the credit, not the station council. They love that.”

  His tone and expression had changed, so he probably meant that they hated it. Sarcasm was interesting in static text. In real-time interactions it was just another conversational technique that Adda would have to study if she ever wanted to appreciate or use it. She had more important topics to study.

  “Poor Dr. Björn’s money is, like, gone, though,” Pel said. “Oxia kept vis contract, but they’re not putting the money into the expedition that they said they would before, you know, Vesta got turned upsid
e down.”

  Dr. Blaer Björn was leading what would be the first expedition across the newly discovered interstellar bridge to another solar system. Reduced funding was an expected downside of unseating the sponsoring company, Oxia Corporation, from its hold on Vesta. In the long run, that’d been the right thing to do, but it was sad that such an important project was suffering for it.

  Adda’s whole body slumped toward the table, and Pel hurried on. “But there are other interstellar bridge projects now! Dr. Björn’s way ahead of all of them, since Oxia gave ver all the newest equipment to get to the bridge, and ve knows all about it.”

  An idea had swum out of the confusing haze immediately after her overdose, and Adda had been thinking about it in her long, boring days at the clinic. The Patchwork rarely came within a million kilometers of the interstellar bridge. The intelligences relied on the Patchwork to gather information and communicate.

  Ever since Vesta, her final fallback plan had included a station orbiting in Jupiter’s turbulent magnetosphere and radiation. When she and Iridian were free, they’d regroup there. But now that Casey had become one of the enemies they were falling back from, that station would be an even more temporary refuge than she’d planned. Awakened intelligences would find their way into it eventually. Although the Patchwork didn’t reach the station, her research indicated that its residents connected with it asynchronously, somehow.

  But there was no Patchwork beyond the interstellar bridge. If Adda and Iridian crossed it, Casey would have a much harder time finding them again. Even a week ago, Casey’s influence was distracting Adda from deciding what to do with that information. Now she understood its importance. The awakened intelligences wouldn’t want to follow her into the new solar system.