Deep Core

by F X Holden

  “Got to check 95, 98 and 103 first up. 98 has a busted window pane, bird flew into it. This afternoon I got to look at the scrubber in 96 before the new resident comes in,” AJ had said. “Not sure I can fix that today. Might be a compressor needs replacing. Then a few ad hoc things,” he’d told her.

  “Leon still got those headaches,” Cyan said, not a question.

  “Yup.”

  “You've seen him taking his blues, right?” Cyan asked, always worried Leon wasn’t taking his anti-rad meds.

  “Yeah, every day at lunch,” AJ said. “When he’s here.”

  Cyan straightened up, “Look, I forgot to send you a message. The new resident in 96 came in last night. Family got the dates wrong and they turned up about 2300 and I couldn’t really send them off to find a hotel for the night, so I let them bunk in.”

  AJ frowned. He was supposed to get a week’s notice before a resident moved in, to get everything perfect for them. First impressions were lasting impressions, and you moved into an apartment that wasn’t newly recoated, with a dripping tap or busted globe or worse, scrubber not working, what would you think about your new home you just paid a significant deposit for? AJ had painted 96 and fixed a few small fittings, but that anti-rad scrubber being non-com, that was a show stopper. Rads were going to be in the high 70s today and even a double dose of blues didn’t give you long term cover.

  Cyan could tell what AJ was thinking. “I know,” she’d said. “I told them we weren’t expecting them until next week and the apartment still had some things needed fixing up but I left it to them, and they decided they’d pay the extra fee for coming early, because otherwise it was all the way back to Gakona for them and then back here again, and that would just upset the new guy more.”

  “Resident is a gentleman?” AJ had asked. He could interface with Sol Vista’s system and pull the data down, but most times it was more enjoyable talking. He liked how random interactions with citizens could be. Also, pulling data from the Core like that in the middle of a conversation was something citizens called ‘Core drifting’. It was obvious, because when he did it, the blue glow between his brows pulsed. They didn’t like it when cybers drifted, so he tried not to do it too often and relied on his biological memory as much as possible. Drifting sucked up bandwidth too, which meant fewer credits in his account.

  “Gentleman?” she’d laughed, “You could call him that.”

  “Family still here now?”

  “Stayed overnight. Going home at lunchtime,” she’d said.

  AJ frowned at that too. New residents’ families were offered the choice to stay for a week in the Carers' Apartments to help their family member settle in. Most stayed at least a few days, soaked up a bit of South Coast City sunshine, ate a bit of fruit off the trees, fed the ducks and convinced themselves grandma or grandpa was going to be OK here. It was rare they stayed a single night, then took off again.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Cyan agreed, seeing AJ's frown. “But we’re talking two grandkids who’ve got young families of their own. The guy’s own son is on Orkutsk somewhere, garrison duty I guess, I don’t know. So they’re just standing in for him.”

  “He won’t get many visitors then,” AJ noted.

  Cyan shook her head. AJ loved it when she did that, micro drops of sweat flying into the air. Cybers didn’t sweat as much because they could control their body temp more easily than citizens. Sweating was super weird but also super tactile … if you were close enough you could smell it - sweet and sour, bad but good. Cyan kept talking, “You OK with it, looking at that scrubber first up? You can’t fix it, I’ll authorize you to get the Core time, pay what it costs. But you’d better start with that in case you need to get it repaired today, right?” It was good Cyan had authorized Core time if AJ needed to buy back some of his bandwidth. A scrubber was a complex bit of equipment, so he might need to pull in some additional processing power for the fault finding.

  “OK. What stage is the new resident?” AJ had asked. Staff had their own way of dividing up the residents, because everyone came in with a diagnosis of ‘early stage TGA’, and left again when they reached ‘moderate’, so at Sol Vista they needed their own language for the different graduations of ‘early’. AJ of course knew the all the medical classifications, but not all citizens at the center did, so after talking with the clinicians, Cyan had settled on Green, Blue and Yellow. Green being ‘early early’, blue being ‘mid-early’ and yellow being ‘late-early’. Yellow meaning the resident was on a more regular program of Core monitoring to make sure they were caught before they tipped over from Temporary into Permanent Global Amnesia, into the Red zone. Sol Vista’s treatment goal was to keep their residents in Green or Blue as long as they could and catch them as soon as they got into Yellow, so a smooth transition to intensified care could be arranged. “Got to confirm it, but he looks like late Green to me. Apparently it was his choice to move here. Put in the request for rehousing himself.”

  AJ had grunted. Early green would have made it easier, the guy was likely to be less forgetful, less fearful or distracted. He tapped the new resident’s Core data and got caught up on his clinical status. It looked pretty standard. The only interesting thing was that the guy’s data file had a flag on it, that made of note of whoever was accessing it. Interesting, but not radically so – there could be a million reasons for that, and it was something a citizen could request themselves.

  “Look, I know this is really not how you like it,” Cyan said.

  “It’s OK.”

  Cyan had put a hand on his shoulder, “No, it’s not. It’s not how I like it either, but we just have to deal with it, OK?”

  “OK.”

  She’d given AJ a big smile. “You’re a champion. You call if you need that Core time approved, OK? I’ll let Brownie know in case I’m out or busy.”

  “Yup.”

  That had been the start of a pretty strange day.

  He’d called to unit 96 at 0830 and a young lady had answered the comms, so he’d asked could he come past to look at their scrubber and the lady had asked could it wait, they were just having breakfast and he’d said well, it couldn’t wait past 0930 if he needed to book Core time to deal with it because that had to be negotiated. The lady had sounded put out and asked couldn’t it wait until tomorrow and AJ had said, “Well, rads are going to be mid-70s today, it’s your call, your grandfather can just double up on his blues today but what about tomorrow?” Plus AJ knew it was best to have a first introduction to a new resident when family was present in the apartment, so he tried to sound like he was insisting.

  He’d done the Crockers in 95 first, a lovely old couple who made him a cup of tea while he checked the time on their clock was showing exact New Syberia time, so they knew when their son out there would be calling, which was their big panic. Couldn’t miss that call. Plus the rolling screen on their decon unit was sticking a bit, so he looked at that and found a dolphin tooth earring down in the guide rails and Citizen Crocker said wow she’d lost that about two months ago. Imagine it had been in there the whole time and it was only slightly scratched up.

  At 0925 he walked over to 96 and knocked on the security screen. Staff never used the bell; the idea was, if someone was knocking on your door, it was usually staff and you didn’t need to worry who it was. But he didn’t get to explain that because the door was ripped open and the new resident, Dave Warnecke, was standing there and he took one look at AJ, then turned and said over his shoulder to someone standing behind him, “Sheriff is here.”

  AJ had looked down at his clothes. OK, so, he was wearing his utility belt which maybe did look a little bit like an ancient gunslinger’s belt, with his multitool in a holster on his hip. Else he was wearing green utility trousers and brown shoes and a blue poly shirt with the top button undone and the sleeves rolled up. Yeah, probably it was the tool belt.

  Despite that she was a bit curt on the comms, Warnecke’s granddaughter was nicer in person and told AJ to ignore
her granddad being a smartass, and offered him a cup of coffee. As she was fixing his coffee with whitener and sweetener from the ‘welcome pack’, Warnecke sat watching AJ through squinty eyes without saying anything, and a young guy who had clearly just woken up came out and said hi to him and started fixing himself a coffee too. Warnecke’s grandkids didn’t look much alike and AJ found himself wondering if they were even blood brother and sister, or maybe halves. The guy had red hair and a thick blonde beard and freckles everywhere, while the sister was light-haired, not red, and not freckled and her nose was totally different, while their grandfather, he was more like the girl, compact and tight-muscled with thin brown hair and no freckles. Dave Warnecke wasn’t a handsome man – his face looked like a handful of knuckles. Data on the family connections wasn’t something AJ could access; that kind of stuff was private. But if they were only his grandchildren it maybe explained the dynamic - them not feeling obliged to hang around and help Warnecke settle in.

  The granddaughter said her name was Sarah and her brother was Ben and she started telling about their trip across the Inland Territory from Gakona and a blowout they got and how no one would stop and help them and finally this family of Floehoppers had stopped and given them a lift to a recharge station and after all that, they got here and found they were a week early because their Dad had given them the wrong dates and he was no help at all because he was an officer on Orkutsk and couldn’t exactly say ‘hey my old man needs to get checked into a new care facility back on Tatsensui, can I loan a fast cruiser to get back and help’, so he’d asked them to work it out … AJ let them talk because he had 48 minutes and all he needed to do was get a look at that scrubber unit.

  Meanwhile, Warnecke was sitting there, just sizing AJ up. His medical record said he was 60 something, and if you had to guess you’d think maybe he was a South Coaster, because of his tanned face, broad cheekbones and piercing green eyes, but the name Warnecke, that could be Capitol State. It’s not that he didn’t look friendly enough, but he did look suspicious, and he had this thing with his left eye, it keep winking at you. AJ took a minute or two to realize it wasn’t deliberate. Every few minutes, Warnecke winked at you with his left eye, but it was just a twitch. Must have been expensive to fix though, or the guy probably would have had it seen to – after all, if you could afford Sol Vista, you should be able to afford a minor muscle regen. Then again, AJ had seen worse and citizens had this weird thing; they liked their little glitches. Things like scars, missing fingers, limps. They got attached to them and even though they might be distracting or even ugly, they often hung onto them. Go figure. The guy suddenly spoke, “Careful what you say Sarah,” he said. “Sheriff here might take it down and use it as evidence against you.”

  “Oh, Gramps” the granddaughter sighed.

  AJ wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable right then. Usually the first contact with the resident, there would be with someone from Resident Reception with him. They were trained in these conversations. They knew every answer to every question a resident or their family could ask. AJ knew everything there was to know about Resident Services but anything about Finance and Accounting and Medical and Legal, it should be someone else explaining it. Sure he could Core-drift to look it all up, but the small lags made the conversation awkward.

  He turned to Warnecke, “I’m pleased to meet you sir. My name is AJ. My job is to make sure the apartment is in good order for you to move in, and we weren’t quite ready for you yet. Your scrubber unit isn’t working properly and I think it’s the compressor that needs looking at.”

  The granddaughter perked right up at that, “Gramps used to be an engineer. Maybe you could look at it with him Grampa?”

  AJ was going to explain that residents weren’t allowed to carry out their own repairs but he checked himself before he spoke. Every resident has a history. You should never forget that. Sol Vista had people here who used to be judges and lawyers and dark matter engineers, and they once had an Admiral here too, but he had a stroke and moved on pretty early.

  “What kind of engineer sir, if I can ask?” AJ said.

  “None of your business,” Warnecke said. “Read me my rights Sheriff, or get out of here.”

  “Manners Gramps.” Sarah said. “Ice Planers,” she said to AJ in a half whisper as though her granddad wasn’t allowed to hear. “Different teams. Worked right up until, what, about five years ago Ben?” AJ nodded respectfully. Planers were manually piloted racing bikes, created for the zero degree conditions under the Skycap. They raced across the rough surface ice, ‘planing the ice’ to create their own tracks. It took a hard-core love and knowledge of the ice to make it onto a Planer team.

  “Less than five years ago, I think,” the grandson said. “IP teams have cybers on the crews these days but they still need citizens to come up with the new ideas, the counter-intuitive kludges. Gramps could get under the hood and listen to an engine that was sucking wind and in a few seconds he’d tell you five things it could be and five ways around it. He could listen to the machine slice the ice and predict what was about to go wrong too.” Ben smiled, “A.I.s suck at physical prediction. No offense. Even the cybers called him the Oracle.”

  “What do you think I know about damn scrubbers? Not many scrubber units out racing the icefields,” Warnecke said to his granddaughter, trying to point out there was a world of difference between the high-speed Ice Planers and a dumb domestic appliance.

  “Well, it’s not allowed for residents to do their own repairs,” AJ said. “That’s why I’m here. Anything goes wrong with the place, from a laser diode to a dripping tap, you just call Resident Services, and me or Leon will fix it.”

  “That’s great,” Sarah said. “Isn’t it Gramps?”

  “Great? It’s what I’m paying for, isn’t it?” Warnecke grumbled. “It’s not a social service.”

  “Still.”

  AJ had that feeling building up that he was falling behind schedule. He usually allowed himself an hour per job, and if one took more, the others had to take less. The Crockers had been 25 minutes, so he was ahead on that one, but he’d already used 20 minutes here and he hadn’t even started on the job yet.

  “OK, well, I’m sure you’ve got a million questions and someone from Resident Reception will be past soon to answer them, but I have to look at that scrubber unit,” AJ said.

  “Sure, I guess we can leave you to it?” Sarah said. “We’ve still got some unpacking to do.”

  “No problem, I’ll just get my tool kit and be back in a minute,” AJ said. He took his coffee cup to the sink, emptied and rinsed it out and put it down to drain. Warnecke watched him all the way from the chair to the sink to the front door where he’d left his toolbox and was still watching when AJ nodded to him and went through to the laundry and out the back door to the back patio, where the radiation scrubbing filter was mounted on a small steel frame. It was a pretty quiet unit usually, but when AJ restarted it, it had a strange rattling noise. The service contract on these units was long expired, and so there was no problem with AJ taking off the service cover and kneeling down to poke around inside to see if there was anything really obvious that had come unseated or broken away, or wires become disconnected. He used his multitool to remove the service cover and pulled his flashlight off his belt. It was a bright sunny morning, as usual, but inside the unit was dark, and he angled the torch up and around and cocked an ear and listened to the rattle, but apart from a bit of rust running down the inside of the unit from what looked like a screw hole with a screw that had fallen out, he couldn’t see or hear anything obvious. He could call up a simple schematic and some fault finding routines from the Core, but anything more than that, he’d have to book Core time.

  “Compressor fault you said?” said a voice and he pulled his head out of the unit to see Warnecke standing there, looking down at him.

  AJ stuck his head back in and looked around a bit more, “I thought maybe, yeah. The way it’s rattling.”

  “Uh
huh.”

  AJ checked the error readout, ran a couple of routines, and did a physical scan. He didn’t like admitting defeat and requesting Core time, but he looked around a bit more, concluded that whatever the problem was, he couldn’t nail it down. He backed out, sent a request to Brownie for approval and got ready to negotiate a fat pipe to the Core.

  “How is it mounted in there, the compressor?” Warnecke asked. “Bolted to a frame, or how?”

  “Bolted on an A-frame, yeah,” AJ said. He checked again, “But I checked the mounts and welds, they’re all solid, that isn’t it. I think it’s something with the compressor itself.”

  “Uh huh. That A-frame, it got ridged edges?”

  AJ reached up with his gloves, felt the frame. The supports were V-shaped, for added strength. He ran his finger along one, it was about a half inch deep.

  “I guess, why?” AJ replied.

  “Check all the way around,” Warnecke replied. “There’s something metal, a bolt or screw, it’s fallen down into that frame and it’s rattling around in there. That’s your noise.”

  “Yeah?” AJ said. He wouldn’t have picked that up himself without poking a camera in there, with a Core AI analyzing the video and audio feed. So he was open to suggestions. He reached up with his hand and ran a finger around inside the frame, first on the left, then front, then right. Inside the right-hand frame he found the screw that had fallen out of the rusty hole. It was about an inch long, quarter inch thick and as soon as he pulled it out, the rattling of the scrubber unit stopped.

  “OK, that got it,” AJ said, standing up and showing it to Warnecke. “Good call.”

  “Yep. Amazing. Don’t let the door hit that big ass on the way out,” Warnecke said, turning and going inside.

  AJ found the granddaughter in the main bedroom, pulling clothes out of a box and putting them in the built-in wardrobe. Single apartments, like 96, had a main bedroom with a walker accessible en-suite bathroom for older or disabled residents, then on the other side of the corridor, they had a guest bedroom which came with two single beds standard, and a bit further along the corridor a guest bathroom and down at the other end of that a sitting room.