I should’ve danced all night. Or talked and negotiated and networked, and made whatever other moves were necessary in this stupid, unavoidable game. But I was still exhausted, worse than from getting up every night with Dori. At least no one forces you to do complex social modeling while nursing a kid at 2 a.m. If I stuck around, I was going to respond to the next clever insinuation with something decidedly undiplomatic. So, massive faux pas or not, I went back to our room.
I was tired enough that I forgot to text Dinar first, but I wasn’t completely shocked to find her there already. I was surprised to find her with Adrien.
E was sprawled on one of the big velvet chairs, with Dinar on the bed; they’d obviously been talking for some time. Dinar flinched when I came in, but Adrien waved cheerfully while stifling a yawn. “We were both getting tired, so we snuck out of the party.”
Both fully clothed—so not that kind of seduction, at least. “If I’d known that was okay, I’d have come back hours ago.”
Adrien yawned again. “Officially, we’re continuing negotiations someplace more quiet. I think it’s been long enough for plausible deniability, though—I’m off to negotiate with Kay about turning off the lights and going to sleep.”
“That’s an interesting person,” Dinar said after e left.
I collapsed in the chair, still warm from Adrien’s presence. “Were you actually not negotiating?”
“Hell if I know. But e was at pains to let me know that not everyone here wants to go back to the ‘bad old days.’”
I leaned forward, or tried; the chair was a black hole. “Meaning some of them do?”
“E didn’t say that directly. But Mallory’s apparently of the party that thinks they can make the corporations fit the needs of the planet—make capitalism fit the needs of the planet.”
“You’d have to bend the definition of just about every word in that sentence.”
She shrugged. “I’m not saying e’s right. Just that maybe they’ve learned something from their mistakes. We’re stuck with the corporations in some form for the foreseeable future. Better if they’re led by people who don’t want to re-create anything from the 1980s except the fashions.”
Better not to get ourselves involved in their internal power plays at all, I thought. It would be too easy to mold yourself to fit them, if you stayed long enough. “Wait, you said Mallory thinks that way. What about Kelsey? I thought they were partners?”
“E didn’t say. Make of that what you will.”
And Kelsey, of course, was Jace’s ally. And vice versa.
I shook my head. “I’m way too tired to untangle this stuff. At least on a Dyson sphere you wouldn’t have to cross the International Date Line. I think? Would you?”
“It could be the same time of day and the same season all around the solar system. Can you help me set up the power transformer for my arm? I need to wipe the sockets really thoroughly, since I didn’t last night.”
I pulled the transformer out of the luggage and figured out the plugs, and made sure the filters were set to keep anything from coming through other than power. “Wait—you didn’t try to charge it last night without a firewall, did you?”
“Of course not. I didn’t manage to plug it in properly at all, but I’m not enough of an idiot to get malware in my own damn prosthetic.”
“Sorry.” I busied myself finishing the setup, and didn’t comment when she pointedly triple-checked my work.
She set the arm in its stand, charging lights all green, and rubbed lotion into her skin where the prosthetic sat against it all day. I could see that the spot had gotten red and irritated—between the flight and last night’s confusion, she probably hadn’t gone through her whole care routine in a couple of days. But it didn’t seem like I should say anything.
I should have taken my mesh off properly, too. But instead, I sat up sharing my impressions with the network, and scrolling through threads, and worrying, until fatigue finally overcame rumination enough for me to sleep.
At some point I must have gotten some rest, because Adrien’s knock woke me up.
“We’re off to look at the site. Better scramble, not everyone wants to wait for you.”
Out in the hall, Dinar looked the intern up and down. “Princess?”
“Close. Prince today; I don’t want to muss up a skirt.”
“Right,” she said. “That’s ‘hoi,’ ‘hom,’ and ‘hos.’ I’ve got everything figured out that far. Next question: Why are you trying to make us paranoid about these mysterious people who don’t want us there?”
“Who, me?” Hoi batted hos eyes. “Making insinuations about people too high-ranked for me to denigrate directly? Never. But don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll give themselves away on site.”
“Well, that’s something to look forward to,” I muttered. I could get dressed well enough in five minutes, but I was desperate for a leisurely breakfast and copious amounts of tea. “If you can’t tell us who doesn’t want us there, can you tell us who does? Did Kelsey and Mallory both send you to fetch us?”
Adrien led us toward the elevator. “In this case, yes. They both want you in these talks.”
“Can I ask why?” I really needed that caffeine; I felt all sharp edges.
Adrien shrugged. “It’s always better to talk with people than avoid them. If you’re talking, you’re winning.”
Today’s ride was big and open, able to accommodate the Ringers and a shit-ton of humans. Another intern passed around fruit and pastries, and I tried to wake up and appreciate the morning.
Zealand wasn’t built for the unforgiving light of a southern day. Buildings that loomed like monumental spotlights at night seemed drab, flashing screens washed out to bare visibility. Greenery peeked somberly from rooftops, but even the trees at street level seemed too small, too immaculate. This was a habitat, as Cytosine had pointed out. And I doubted they had Cytosine’s careful science of ecological niches. Nor had the aisland’s designers had access to the various biolibraries from which the watersheds still labored to restore decimated microbiomes and insect populations, all the things that made leafy canopies thrive.
I thought of the night-blooming garden, combining flowers from a dozen ecosystems. “Who founded Zealand, originally?” Asterion was a more recent merger, I vaguely recalled, the result of some alliance among former billionaire lineages.
Adrien shrugged. “One of the old information brokers.” Deliberately vague, and I dropped a note to the network to try and find out. The creation of the aislands wasn’t as well-recorded as anyone would like. Not that it mattered much—they’d all been vampires of one sort or another. This one must have been more self-aware than most, to build a city that would thrive in the dark. Either that, or they’d expected the world to grow hot enough to make people nocturnal, an idea that had been weirdly popular in some corners. Maybe it was true here; Zealand at sunrise was barely busier than Zealand at 3 a.m. But then this was no hub city like DC, fed by a continent’s worth of railroad. Except for a few converts and visitors, they had only the descendants of the people who’d arrived with their founder—allies and employees who’d prioritized fleeing apocalypse over creating community to stop it.
Cytosine and her kids talked quietly with the associates. Glycine was asking questions about the ride’s autopilot. Carnitine and Manganese craned limbs out the window and scarfed breakfast. Humans did much the same; Dinar was among those gazing up at the pale screens and ad-camouflaged solar panels.
Rhamnetin would’ve gotten to the heart of the city by now, asking questions that cut through everything Adrien chose to tell or withhold. Carol would’ve sat with me in silent intimacy, or whispered commentary in our long-shared shorthand. Instead I felt alone and disconnected. I wished for the warmth of familiar skin, the draft of mint-scented air spilling from our foyer, the show of chickadees darting around our feeder: a world I knew how to read.
Part of home, at least, I had with me. I opened threads from the night before, starting to scan the wash of speculation and second-guessing around the conversations I’d recorded at the party. Not comforting, exactly, but connected. It was after midnight in Maryland, but I sent a non-urgent message to Carol telling her I loved her and asking after Dori. I sent a slightly more urgent ping to Rhamnetin: We’re on our way to check out the proposed site—do you want to peek in on the stream?
Toward the northwest side of the aisland the towers vanished, and the buildings grew squat and functional. My mesh helpfully offered me the track and strength of the last five seasons of cyclones, and it was no surprise when we reached the fenceline and found a broad lot bounded with a ten-meter seawall. On the satellite images we’d seen at home, the paved landing pads and packed earth had looked solid. As we got out I saw regularly placed drains, caked with salt, opening into the depths below. Even here, storms would be the biggest strain on infrastructure. I imagined floods surging down labyrinths of pipe, spilling out of the cliffside like waterfalls.
Up close, it was obvious that most of the runways had fallen into disuse. Pavement was cracked, or stacked with rusted girders and other detritus from old construction. It could doubtless be cleared easily enough, but wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted near runoff sites, even under ideal conditions.
Kelsey glanced at me, but then focused on Cytosine. “Back when flights between the aislands were more common, this was our secondary landing station. It’s almost never used these days. We could clean it up in a few days, and it’s rated for the weight of dozens of aircraft—it should work perfectly for the specs you showed us. And unlike a natural site, we can show you the blueprints for the structure beneath it, all the way down to the bedrock.” Given the Ringer belief that the natural world was too complex to trust, I feared they’d find that last point particularly compelling.
Better to remind them that the fundamental complexity of a planet didn’t go away because you were standing on a manmade structure. “How are your weather forecasts?” I asked. “It looks like this side of the aisland gets the brunt of storms?”
Kelsey nodded easily. “And the Chesapeake gets hurricanes. Corporate satellites keep our storms fairly predictable—Nicky?”
Another member of the Asterion staff stepped forward. From their subdued dress—by corporate standards—and focus on their palette, I guessed this was one of the fabled “techies.” “Current forecasts are ninety-five percent accurate to five days out, eighty-five percent accurate to ten days. We can see cyclones forming further in advance, though of course predicting the path is challenging. Ten days out we could certainly spot any significant risk that one would hit Zealand. We catch the edges of at least one cyclone a season.”
“What about fourteen days out?” asked Carnitine. “That’s how long we’ll need to build. It should be able to withstand winds of…” She made a series of humming whistles, and a discussion among the Ringers followed, ending with the conclusion that the ansible antenna could probably handle anything up through a Cat 3, but that a Cat 4 or worse might well tear the thing apart.
“We’re just moving into hurricane season in the Chesapeake right now,” I said. “That means less than it used to, but your odds of a catastrophic windstorm are considerably lower in the northern hemisphere than the southern for the next couple months.”
“But more predictable here,” said the techie. “We have better satellites.”
Can NASA share satellite readings with the network during ansible construction? I sent to the network, flagging Mendez. I suspected St. Julien would be open to negotiation; she made a more comfortable ally than anyone here.
“Our models are nearly as good,” I said. I laid out figures from the network crowd, and the discussion quickly turned technical.
Rhamnetin messaged me at last. I’m up. What have you seen so far?
I passed along the data. I think Cytosine likes Zealand because it reminds her of a habitat. But it’s out in the open Pacific and vulnerable to storms, even leaving aside the trustworthiness of the corporations. And I met someone who more or less gloated about the malware. I wouldn’t let them near your hardware, if I were you.
They might have a teeny bit more trouble undermining our equipment. It’s not exactly running Windows.
I blinked. Not doing what?
Don’t you watch your own movies?
Not as many as you have, I admitted.
Our operating systems don’t work on the same principles as your computers. The hardware is half organic. The ansible is about as likely to get the flu as human malware—at least until you learn our equivalent of programming languages. But I’d rather build the antenna near people we can trust, too. Everything’s compatible with physics.
I hesitated. Do you trust us?
There was a pause on his end—as plausibly an issue with connection speed as a deliberate hesitation. I trust you to do what you think is right. That’s how I trust most people.
I pondered that. Even the worst of the corporate staff were probably doing the right thing, by their own standards. They’d built whole ethical systems around the moral imperative for profit, the assumption that acting selfishly would eventually bite its own tail and be the best thing possible for humanity.
Then again, I often failed to do what I thought was right, even when I could figure out what that was. Maybe the world would be saved, or already had been, by some intern deciding to act generously and be damned.
Or the world might be lost, because someone was too reluctant to follow through on what they believed. The right thing to do lay heavy in my pocket.