The turbolift opened onto absolute silence.
Stepping out, Sadiki led Vesto Slipher across the datacenter full of blinking consoles and cabinets of server racks whose sweeping ergonomic curvature filled the entire width of the viewport overlooking the prison’s central docking station.
The entire room around them seemed to be holding its breath. Off to her right, Slipher opened his mouth to speak and then stopped, puzzled, when no sound came out. Sadiki tilted her chin up, indicating the crosshatched wedges of acoustical foam running perpendicular to one another, lining the walls and ceiling, absorbing every decibel of ambient noise.
The Muun nodded in understanding. For a moment they just stood there watching the young man at the console going about his work, streaming the previous night’s data-flow, running diagnostics, making all the fine adjustments that constituted the fabric of his existence here.
At last Sadiki tapped a switch and the foam wedges changed angulation ever so slightly, the eerie silence draining away as the datacenter filled with the buzz and rumble of ambient sound. At once, the whole room seemed to exhale around them with an audible sigh of relief.
“Very impressive,” Slipher said when his voice returned. “White noise generators, I presume?”
“Not entirely.” Sadiki nodded. “There’s a design component as well. The whole datacenter is an anechoic chamber.”
“Both inside and out,” she said. “Do you know anything about tapered impedance?”
“I’m afraid it’s rather outside my field.”
Sadiki nodded at the walls. “Those foam wedges alternate at ninety degrees out of phase with each other. When they’re properly aligned, the pyramidical absorbers simulate a continuous change in the dielectric constant.” She shook her head. “It’s all been designed to create what my brother calls an absolute free-field open space of infinite dimension. It literally swallows sound waves.”
“Your brother …” The Muun glanced at the young man seated in front of the command suite. “He sounds highly intelligent.”
“He is.” She shuddered. “Personally, I find it all incredibly creepy.”
“Ah.” The Muun gave her his smirk again. “You prefer noise?”
Sadiki shrugged. “I prefer reality.”
“In that, we find ourselves in agreement. Still …” The Muun regarded the room with new respect. “You know, for a moment I couldn’t even hear my own heartbeat.”
“I’ve never quite gotten used to it. Of course, I’m not the reason it’s been installed here.” Walking over to the young man in the gray tunic, Sadiki leaned down to brush her lips against his cheek. “Sleep all right?”
He turned and glanced up at her, an abstracted, childlike smile rising over his face, this silent twin, her own personal ghost, as if she’d only just now wakened him from a pleasant dream. Knowing that the smile wasn’t for her didn’t make it any less endearing; Sadiki understood that her brother’s first and truest gratification in life had always come from his algorithm.
“May I introduce my brother Dakarai,” Sadiki said. “Dakarai, this is Vesto Slipher from the IBC. He’s come to check up on us and make sure we’re not dipping into the till.”
“Oh, now, really,” Slipher said, “I’d hardly phrase it that way.” He ventured nearer, approaching the cabinets of data storage and processing units. “So this is the famous Dakarai Blirr. I have heard so much about you, from many trusted sources.” He extended his hand. “The pleasure’s all mine.”
Dakarai just gazed at the hand, his expression inscrutable, then turned instead and reached for the white ceramic coffee cup with the stylized CH7 logo emblazoned on the side.
“You’ll have to excuse my brother.” Sadiki watched as he lifted the cup with both hands like a child, bringing it up to his lips. “He hasn’t spoken aloud to anyone in ten years.”
“Really?” the Muun asked. “Not even you?”
“Not a word, I’m afraid,” Sadiki said, gazing down at her brother with what might have been a hint of melancholy—real or artificial, even she wasn’t sure. “At this point I don’t think I would even recognize the sound of his voice.”
Dakarai looked back up at her. Above the rim of the coffee cup, his programmer’s eyes shimmered, pale blue and slightly watery, lit from deep within. In the ambient monitor glow Sadiki sometimes thought their irises appeared almost liquid-crystal gray, like beads of condensation, deeply set in the smooth, pale face whose high forehead and patrician nose were so strikingly an evocation of her own. Like her, he wore his jet-black hair just slightly shaggy, the chopped bangs tumbling over the brow in an errant simulation of serrated recklessness.
“Not a word in ten years,” the Muun reflected, looking back at Dakarai as if seeing him in an entirely different light. “Is it a vow of some sort?”
“Nothing so monastic, I don’t think,” Sadiki said, running her fingers fondly through her brother’s hair. “Dakarai’s a connoisseur of soundlessness. The last time we spoke, he told me that he found the silence of the algorithmic certainty to be the closest thing to pure joy that he ever heard. Everything else, including his own voice, is just a distraction.”
“I see.”
“Math is music, he told me once, and it’s perfect, so why should we think that we can somehow improve on it with our grunts and howls?”
“Math is music,” the Muun reflected, visibly pleased with the phrase. “Again we find ourselves uncannily like-minded. And speaking of mathematics …” He turned back to the consoles. “I assume that this is where you run the software? The systems that arrange all the fights, correct?”
“That’s right,” Sadiki said. “Dakarai wrote all the code himself. After he finished upgrading the Ando Overland Podracing course for the Desilijic Clan five years ago, he got the idea to create a completely new piece of software—” Seeing Dakarai wince at her choice of words, she corrected herself. “Excuse me, an algorithm, that could analyze all the data from every potential contestant in a closed gladiatorial environment to create the closest and most exciting competitions in the history of galactic pit fighting.”
“So,” the Muun said, leaning in, “from this suite you can monitor—”
“Every aspect of every inmate’s behavior,” she said, “yes, that’s correct. Everything from weight gain to heart rate to the constantly changing alliances among prisoners and gang allegiances that might factor into the outcome of a bout. The algorithm analyzes all of it and generates two sets of inmate numbers for two matches, every day.”
“Two?”
“We’re considering adding a third.” Sadiki’s eyes flicked back to the monitor screens again, scanning them more carefully. “Anything new to report?”
Dakarai paused, steepled his fingertips on either side of the bridge of his nose, and shook his head. Frowning a little, he tapped in another series of commands, waiting while the data washed up over the screen, and then squinted at what he saw there.
“What is it?” she asked him.
When Dakarai’s frown didn’t change, Vesto Slipher leaned in, glancing at one of the monitor screens on the far right of the console, where a Zabrak inmate with an array of horns on his head was moving away from the crowd in the gallery, cutting down one of the concourses into the shadows.
“If I’m not mistaken,” the Muun said, “that’s your new champion, is it not?”
“He did win last night, yes.”
“Quite spectacularly, if I recall.” Slipher turned to Sadiki. “Where is he going?”
“Wherever it is,” Sadiki said, checking her chrono, and the most recent data that had just come streaming across Dakarai’s inflow monitor, “he won’t be there long.”
“Why not?”
She cast him a wry half grin. “You’re about to find out.”