by Patty Jansen
“I think we should run this through the imager,” a voice said behind her.
Melati started. She hadn’t heard Dr Chee come in. She turned around to face him, glad to see him. He looked out of place in his lab outfit in this prison cell. He’d been preparing cultures for the construct cohort.
“The imager? Do you think that would work? Some sections are a big mess.” They ran the process on the memory modules prior to uploading them to the construct mindbases. The software rendered a VR projection from the mindbase code. She would sometimes watch it to check if the memories that they gave the boys prior to waking made sense. Constructs tended to hold this “before” dearly.
“Then we run the imager once, trim the sections that give strange results and then run it again. It will be a really crude process, but we don’t have time for more. If the results are worthwhile, we can present them to Dolchova and ask for an extension.” She liked that he used the word “we”. She needed his help, badly.
In a few sentences, she explained what she had found so far, and his frown deepened with every word.
“It’s likely that Allion fights through technology,” he said, speaking slowly and still looking at the screen. “They don’t shoot missiles. They send malicious software.” He nodded at the screen. “I fear that this is the weapon.”
“Inside the mindbase?”
He nodded, while his dark eyes went over the text. “Well, let’s see if we can defuse and take apart this weapon and use it to our advantage.”
“You might start with the sections Jas has already highlighted.”
Jas, in the corner of the room, smiled at her.
Dr Chee took one look at the screen. “Agreed. The rest of the mindbase can run through the imager. I’d like you to take care of that, since you’re more familiar with the station than any of us.”
Melati made a small space for him to work, and he hooked his PCD up to the screen and she provided him with access to the file and Jas’ notes.
Melati fed a section of the file into the imager. It said it would take about half an hour for the first results to come out of the program and while it ran, she couldn’t use the computer, so she went to check on the prisoner, but he was asleep, unaware that his deepest thoughts were being analysed and taken apart. She judged him better off not being aware of the process. She didn’t go into the cell, but didn’t think he’d been allowed to wash yet.
Why not? She could take him to the shower while she waited.
But Lieutenant Kool was in a meeting with a few prison wardens, the door to his room closed.
So she went back to the office and watched Jas work over his shoulder.
He had a bunch of sections lifted from the file that were complete nonsense, with even the statements all jumbled up within the lines. He was attempting to untangle the interwoven statements, cutting sections loose and floating them over the top. He arranged the fragments in the order that he thought they should be in and, when satisfied, slotted them back into the file.
If she had to do this, she would be worried that she might forget where the sections came from, but Jas could remember this perfectly, because he understood mindbases in a way she didn’t. He could feel where things belonged. Watching him work was fascinating.
“The image file is completed,” Dr Chee said.
Finally. Melati had used only a section of the mindbase, the one where recent memories were most likely to reside, because to do a complete analysis would take overnight, and there would not be any time to rerun part of the process if necessary before they needed to make a useful presentation to Dolchova.
Melati pulled out her chair. Dr Chee handed her a VR headset while she set her PCD up so that it would record her comments. She put the headset on, enveloped by the slightly musty smell inside the visor. Why did these things always smell so bad?
She leaned back in the chair and gave Dr Chee the thumbs up to start the recording.
Her vision went dark.
Chapter 5
* * *
IN THE RECORDING, Melati sat in a dark room where strobing lights flashed between dancing and talking people. She was counting out little foil-wrapped packets on a sticky table in front of her. She was in the New Hyderabad merchant’s mind and she recognised the place: it was one of the malampaks in New Jakarta’s B sector. The air smelled of kreteks and sweat, and the jaipongan music was so loud that her chest vibrated with it. The merchant didn’t care much for gamelan music, and to be honest Melati had often joked about its lack of musicality, but her heart ached with the jangling, earsplitting sound accompanied by the thrumming bass and sharp drum beats. That sound represented the barang-barang in all their diverse, confusing and jumbled-up glory. That sound was home.
Someone clapped the merchant on the shoulder and sat down on the bar stool on the other side of the table. The person was a hypertech dressed in black, with his face and head covered with a black veil and helmet. He was probably male, judging by his build, and the reflection of her face stared back from the gleaming surface of his visor. His face, rather. She recognised the New Hyderabad man with the beard and the expressive eyes. He looked friendly and intelligent. His clothes were smart, clean and quite new. She wasn’t sure whether to be happy or disappointed that he wasn’t one of the smugglers.
The hypertech said, “I knew we could count on you, Moshi.” Yes, he was male. He wasn’t using a voice box, but still Melati didn’t recognise the voice. He picked up one of the parcels from the table and took the foil off. Inside was some sort of electronic part, a little chip the size of a fingertip with tiny legs where it would slot into a board.
“It was the only one I could get,” Moshi said. “Supply is not good while ISF maintains the blockade. Have to source them from on-station, and I can’t be sure that none of them come from places where they’re needed.”
“Yeah. I would have liked to have another two, but this will have to do.”
Moshi nodded. “Maybe, if you can wait until the change of guard. I know someone who may let me into the stores, but he’s not on duty until later. According to the stores database, they have another seven in stock. When are you cutting off?”
“Hopefully tonight. All the guys are ready to go.”
“Big operation, huh?”
“Yeah, we’ve got everyone coordinated across the sector and when the word goes out, we’ll all close off the vents and cut the lines to the hub and start up our own processes. It’s not ideal, but hopefully the recycling will run more reliably when we look after it ourselves. It’s been bad recently.”
“Tell me about it. At the back of JeJe yesterday we had no power at all for two hours.”
“They’re trying to scare us. It’s like they’re slowly trying to kill us.”
“Yeah.” Moshi thought for a while. He didn’t really know what the station management were doing and why they couldn’t keep the recycling running or why they didn’t configure the tethers so that at least they had no more power outages. Once he would have been in the loop about things like this, but that was before he became a private contractor. “If I get into the stores, I’ll see if I can get anything else that’s on your list.”
“Thank you. Most of the stuff on there is of secondary importance, but next week would be great.”
“No pressure, huh?”
The hypertech drew a clear bag from his pocket and swiped the packet off the table into the bag which he inserted in his pocket. He patted it with his hand. “Any word on what they’re actually doing up there in command and why they have all these troubles?”
“Well, I can’t go there, but we get told that they’re working hard to solve the problem.”
“My arse. They’re not doing anything at all. StatOp would have been out here every day with testing equipment. I’ve not seen a single air quality monitor around. All that ever comes through that door are people with weapons. And you, of course.”
Moshi was not the only private contractor who came into the B secto
r, but the only one to mingle with the people. “They’re telling us that the problem is in the computer system, which they can’t get under control. They say that just before they took control, Bassanti let loose a worm that’s destroying the system as fast as the IT people can rebuild it.”
The hypertech snorted. “Bassanti wouldn’t be smart enough for that.”
“He destroyed a lot of stuff that we’ve had to rebuild.”
“Destroying physical things, yes, he’ll do that, but he’s not tech literate enough to activate a worm.”
“Well, that’s what they’re saying. I’m sticking by it until I have other evidence.”
“By God, Moshi, you’re so touchy about this.”
“That’s what happens when people keep blaming you for things you haven’t done. Whatever he did, Bassanti left the system in a mess. I don’t understand why it’s not easy to fix, but no one has tried to explain it to me. I’m not in command. I don’t have anything to do with Kerakis. He doesn’t order me. I don’t report to him.”
The hypertech clapped him on the shoulder. “Relax, relax, we’re not blaming you personally for anything.”
But they were blaming him, and he knew that, and they knew that, too. He couldn’t blame them either. He was, after all, a willing member of the party they’d long seen as their enemy. Never mind that Allion was a commercial enterprise and that they’d been around the station for years. God, those ISF people could be so shortsighted.
A male voice shouted into the room. An order or a warning, Moshi couldn’t hear what. People stopped talking or dancing and turned to the door. They seemed alarmed. The music was still going but no one took any notice of it anymore.
Then the lights went off and the music stopped. In the pitch dark, people pushed into Moshi. He hung onto the table for support, calming his breathing. This was just an outage of the regular kind. Nothing to panic about . . . except he didn’t like being in the dark in an unfamiliar place.
The lights flickered back on, and off again. A blast of hot air came out of the ceiling vent. And the lights came on again, accompanied by the wailing of an alarm.
Someone yelled, “Power malfunction. We’re closing, people! Everyone make an orderly exit please.”
People were now moving in the direction of the corridor, but the room’s only door let through only so many people at once. There was jostling and pushing.
Moshi rose, unsure what to do. He wanted out of this room. He wanted fresh air and he hated crowds. The stifling atmosphere suddenly made him feel hot and short of breath. The scent of kreteks burned in his nose. He despised smoking at the best of times. It was hard enough to keep the air clean in a space station. Why foul it up deliberately?
He let go of the table and let himself flow with the crowd.
A flash tore through the room, from someone’s PCD or an emergency light.
A man shouted, “Everyone, show permits and ID.” He had spoken Centrasian, which was Allion’s main common language.
People around him pushed into each other. The man and his companion blocked the door, or at least Moshi thought there was a companion, because there was a second voice.
People could no longer get out. Voices around him sounded alarmed. Several people commented that they didn’t have ID on them and several others said that their ID had expired in the past ten months and that they had been given no option to renew it.
In between people’s heads, Moshi caught a glimpse of a couple of soldiers in the middle of the room: dressed in blue with First Division insignia on their chests. By God, what were those heavily-armed guards doing in here? Whatever they were looking for, they must not see him, because if Kerakis knew that he supplied the civilians with tech even after his merchant agreement ended, it would make for a fast trip out the airlock.
His hypertech customer had melted into the crowd of dark silhouettes. Moshi stood as frozen. People pushed into him, and into the bar stools, one of which pressed painfully into his thigh. The human tide surged away from the soldiers: towards the far end of the room, where it was dark and smelled of sweat. Moshi didn’t want to go further into the room. He pressed against the hot and sweaty bodies. The light kept flickering. Lately, it would do this for hours on end.
A female voice at his shoulder yelled, “Watch out where you put your elbows.” The girl was shouting at a man on her other side. “Hey, stop pushing me!” She leaned her shoulder into the guy’s back.
Moshi pushed the other guy so that the girl, more than a head smaller than he was, still had some room to move. Melati recognised the girl. She used to hang around in the passage from the docks to the B sector, bronze legs protruding from too-short skirts, batting fake eyelashes and blowing air kisses to passing istel pilots in the hope that they’d be green enough to toss her some money for half an hour spent in a hotel room catching sexually transmittable diseases. Most istel crew were not stupid, so pickings were slim and customers who actually paid even more so.
Moshi took her arm.
She clung onto him, enveloping him in a smell of cheap perfume and sweat. He might not like what she did, but that didn’t mean he’d let her be crushed in the crowd. He put an arm around her shoulder and followed the stream of revellers out the door, past the soldiers. They were occupied with a young man holed up against the wall and were searching his clothes.
* * *
Moshi was in a rumak. Not Uncle’s, but one belonging to a competitor of Uncle’s. The owner was called Benjamun and he came to the table carrying a wok with steaming rice. He was a small, thin man whose hair used to be sprinkled with grey, but in the ten months that Melati hadn’t seen him, it had gone white.
Around seven or eight people sat around the table, including a young woman, Fatima, whom Melati knew to be a hypertech. She didn’t wear her veil, which meant that there were no heathens in the room. These were the faces of the hypertechs.
Iman, Benjamun’s son, came out of the kitchen with a bottle.
“What’s with that?” someone asked. “Our supply is short enough already.”
“Moshi doesn’t want us to know that it’s his birthday, but we’re going to celebrate it with him, because no one else will.”
“Oh, that’s really not necessary,” Moshi said. Amongst his peers, alcohol was very much frowned upon, and he generally didn’t take any, even though he did like Benjamun’s brew.
“Of course it is necessary,” Benjamun said, picking up a glass gone matt with age. “You’re one of the family. This is what we do for family members.” He opened the bottle and poured. The liquid was golden brown and smelled sweet.
Moshi took the glass Benjamun offered him.
“We’ll make up for the fact that you never had a family who cared for you,” Fatima said. “You’ll be invited to my wedding, too. Have you ever been to a wedding?”
He hadn’t. The tears pricked in his eyes.
Across the table, groom-to-be Iman laughed. He was a handsome young man, much better to look at without that black headgear. “Yeah, man, we’ll look after you. Once we have this recycling fixed, we’ll have more time. I’ll get you fitted out for some proper clothes.”
Moshi wanted to protest, but he knew that these people did this because they considered him part of the family. He’d never had a family either. When he’d grown up in the massive cruiser Mistral, home was a big crèche with about a hundred other children. It was a lot of fun, but at night in the dorm, he wondered why some children went to their families at night. He’d watch them being picked up by their mothers, chatting about their day and walking out of the modern and child-friendly classroom.
They sometimes said that they wanted to stay in the dorm, because there would be no parents telling them what to do. They didn’t understand that they were the lucky ones. He had everything he wanted, except the thing he couldn’t get: a mother who cared about him.
With dinner out of the way, the plans came onto the table, and the hypertechs discussed the upcoming operation to switch
off the recycling and electricity feed from the main hub and start up their own. These were good people, smart people, who were as resourceful as the people of Zenora, the backwater station where he’d been sent as teenager to “learn proper values”. Grandmother Maria would whip the naughty little ones, but once settled in, she would give the older boys and girls more responsibilities than they’d ever dream of having in a bigger station. Life on Zenora was hard, with deliveries few and far between, so everything had to be reused and repaired.
In his final year there, they’d often sit around the table with plans like this, in order to discuss the fixing of a problem or a modification.
He knew resilience when he saw it.
* * *
The scene changed and he was in a dark corridor and people were running past him. He’d fallen on the ground. Up ahead there was a light, but it only showed people’s silhouettes. It was too dark to see who they were. The air was full of smoke. Something had exploded nearby.
Moshi climbed to his feet, trying not to get stepped on by anyone.
“Move, move!” a man yelled at him.
Another said, “We’re closing off this corridor, get out of the way.” The voice was vaguely familiar.
Moshi searched the crowd in the direction where Iman had been, opening a panel to a power board. The doors to the panel had blown off and smoke poured out. A hypertech was emptying a canister of foam into the open hole.
“What happened?” Moshi asked this person.
“No idea, mate.” The voice was Fatima’s. “I hadn’t even touched the panel and it went boom.”
“Not much point trying to connect that box to the system,” Iman said. He had set his electrician kit on the floor and helped Fatima wipe the foam out of the way. “Urgh. This substation is pretty much out of action.”
“Got any other power failures?” Fatima asked.
Iman was silent for a bit, probably checking his diagnostics in the inside of the visor. “The entire outer wall in this section is out. Everything outside the habitat. The maintenance tunnels, the vat rooms, the outer skin, location lights, power supply to the tether—”
