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While the ship Taia had traveled here on shuddered out of Martian atmosphere, Elys slept for minutes at a time between attempts to talk herself into leaving her comfortable chair near the airlock. As far as she could tell, nobody had hidden any dream pods in this room to chemically affect Elys’s experience here. About a dozen people in the same light armor as Taia passed through the room individually or in small groups, giving Elys space each time. Nobody dropped anything that small and cube-shaped, so if they were using dreams, they were hiding them well.
Taia’s hand on her shoulder made her jump. “...didn’t get food?” Taia said. “Do you want that first, or a shower?”
“Cleaning up sounds good.” The food did too, but Elys had eaten more recently than she’d found something clean to wipe the dust off with.
“Okay! I’ll show you our room. The other comms specialist needs to get their stuff out of it still, but then it’ll be you and me in there for the next week. Two beds, one bathroom. Is that alright?”
“Sure.” It was irrational to be even slightly disappointed that there were two beds. That didn’t stop Elys from feeling slightly disappointed.
“Oh, city save us, I forgot to...” Taia took a deep breath. “This is an Alyansan vessel under the command of an Alyansan crisis response unit. That’s us. Everything that happens on this vessel is publicly archived, including activities in bedrooms, bathrooms, storerooms, and cupboards. The city is delaying publication to keep you safe, but you’ll appear in the secure archive no matter what is published. What questions do you have about that?”
Alyansan. From Alyansa, the sole station on Mayari, a planet that’d stayed independent from the Republic mostly because their star was as far from the Sol system as it was possible to get and still find populated planets. And Taia was not smiling like she’d just told an obscure joke.
The planet Alyansa appeared in searches for relaxing vacation spots, communities that relied on robotics, and real people doing embarrassing things in sight of the station’s public surveillance system. Every kid had giggled through at least an hour of footage of Mayari people in bathrooms. The Mayari never seemed to care who saw them doing what.
“I have a lot of questions. But, sure. Free porn for someone, I guess.” And unlike in Amberson, Elys wouldn’t have to interact with the people who claimed to get off on memories of her body.
“Most Alyansans don’t watch like that, Elisabet.”
“Your dossier or whatever didn’t tell you I go by Elys? Rhymes with ‘jealous,’ if you need help remembering.” Although Taia’s accent differed enough from Elys’s Martian/Reznikovan combination that her standard reminder might confuse Taia more than it helped.
“Sorry, Elys.” The short name sounded lovely in Taia’s voice. “We’ll make sure it’s on the profile the city makes for you.”
The bedroom was even smaller than the typical cabin on a ship this size. Warm lighting and the carpeted floor made it cozy instead of cramped. Outlines in the walls showed where to fold out a table and attached chairs.
Someone had folded out one of two beds. The blue bedspread matched a physical painting on the wall that showed a beach on a sunny day. The painting must’ve hidden some of the room’s cameras.
In the hall, Taia said, “I’ll make some food. I’m almost as tired and hungry as you look.”
“Rude.” Still, the observation made Elys chuckle. Her black hair stuck out in tufts all around her head, like it always did when she couldn’t get it cut. People commented on that, or the way her clothes wrinkled within minutes of taking them out of a drawer, before they talked about her looking hungry.
The bathroom mirror revealed her tufty hair more clearly than the shatterproof mirrors in Amberson would’ve. Her reflection looked strange without the prison uniform. Dirt, bruises, and exhaustion stained all the olive-toned skin outside her stolen clothes.
Taking the clothes off exposed more bruises and Martian dust ground into her pores. The numb parts of her hands looked unsettlingly normal. The bruises from the cuffs could’ve been smudges of dirt.
Ten luxurious minutes later, she stepped out of the waterless shower. The stall buzzed as it sanitized itself. Somebody had left folded clothes on the counter.
This bathroom door might’ve had a lock on the inside, and Elys hadn’t even thought to use it. The clean set of sweatpants, long-sleeved shirt, and underwear, all in shades of navy blue and gray, fit her better than anything she’d worn in years.
When Elys emerged from the bathroom, the bedroom smelled like food. That might hide any scented dream pods, but a couple sat unopened beside stacks of small white cooker boxes on a shelf folded down from the wall beside the door. Chemical persuasion was literally still on the table.
Taia, in sock feet and with no weaponry in sight, had unclipped a small table from the wall and sat on its attached bench with a white box in front of them. They stared at the table like they were reading or watching something digital.
When Elys came closer, Taia looked up and smiled with compassionate approval. “Help yourself. It’s all made from fresh ingredients. We figured we’d try eating like our ancestors did, since they came from around here.” Just like everybody else’s.
“And we weren’t sure what you’d like,” Taia continued, “so we made a lot.”
Elys took her time choosing a box of food while she read the dream pod labels. The soft dream pod cubes’ labels described them as typical appetite enhancers that improved the taste of bland or rotten food. They came in packs of seven, but someone had used three already. Elys left them on the shelf and chose a box from the middle of the stack that smelled spicy. A spoon stuck to its side.
The last time the RIS invited her onto one of their projects, they’d sent a couple serious people in suits. Whatever problem they needed her to solve this time must be dire, if they bought her dinner before telling her about it and let her choose whether or not to use a dream with it.
Maybe Taia just wanted Elys conscious for the sitrep. Elys limped on her newly braced ankles to the little table.
Even with food right in front of her, Elys couldn’t take her eyes off Taia long enough to open the box. The bedroom lamps lit Taia’s face better than the lights in the rest of the ship had. Elys looked past its rectangular shape, distracted by the kind expression in Taia’s golden-brown eyes. They wore their dark brown hair short on the sides and longer on top, complimenting a strong jaw that matched their physique. They held themselves in a confident, welcoming way Elys had never seen before.
This was ridiculous. She focused on opening the box, a more difficult task than it would’ve been when her thumbs worked. “Thank you for... All this.”
“Of course!”
What kind of a thing to say was that? Taia had gone to a lot of trouble to acquire Elys, as the bruise on their cheek attested to.
With an expression of growing concern, Taia watched Elys struggle to open the box. “So,” Elys said to distract them, “Vatirah said you go by ‘they’?” She pointed at the bare photophores on the back of her neck. “I can’t tell.”
Taia posture went stiff, eyes wide like they’d just realized something disturbing. “No pickup means no profiles. That’s got to be confusing. It’s ‘they’ while I’m on duty and ‘she’ while I’m not, but... She’s fine.”
The damn box opened. The steam that poured out of it made Elys’s mouth water. The box crackled as its sides heated to keep the contents warm.
She pried the spoon off the side and dug in. The chili inside smelled as good as it looked, without even a speck of bitter dust mixed in. Across the table, Taia was eating at a more measured pace, but smiling. Whatever had been bothering her a moment ago must not have been that big a problem.
The bench Elys sat on took the weight off her sore ankles, and it was... too comfortable to relax. Three hours ago, Elys had been looking for a clear path to the spaceport, a ship with a pressurized cargo hold, and a crew that cared more about money or sex than rules. Now she was clean, warm, relatively safe, and eating something seasoned to perfection, with potable water and a gorgeous person and a bed in her line of sight.
Elys was in danger of crying into her chili. Time to find out how much truth Taia had told her, and how she expected Elys to pay for all this. “So, what kind of crises do you respond to, what city do you keep talking about, and what’s the job?”
Taia squinted at Elys over her box of vegetables, rice, and sauce. “The job. That’s... An agreement on trading money for services over time, right? I’m sorry, I didn’t explain who we are, did I? We’re not used to all this off-world stuff. Alyansa is Mayari’s biggest populated station, and the city is what we call the MCAI we need your help with.”
There was an answer that made much-needed sense. Leading the development team for the Republic Information Service’s MCAI — massively complex augmented intelligence — had gotten Elys into this mess. Now that she was thinking about it, Mayari was known for one more thing besides surveillance and affordable vacations: running station operations with one of the largest MCAIs ever created.
That eliminated Elys’s first guess as to who Taia worked for, but she had to be sure. “What does the RIS want with Mayari’s MCAI?”
“What does the... What?” Taia blinked brown eyes with short black lashes. Oh, the confused innocence on that gorgeous face... A person like Taia would never work for the RIS.
“The Republic Information Service.” Elys stabbed her spoon into her food like the chili was an RIS agent’s eye. “They take information they have no business knowing and turn it into military operations and terrorism to prop up the rest of the Republic government on every planet it exploits, when they’re not acting as secret police.”
“We’re a crisis response unit from Alyansa.” Taia spoke as slowly as she had to the bounty hunters on Mars. “We have as little to do with the Republic as possible.” Wasn’t that a nice option to have.
Elys set her box down. The spoon fell out and clattered onto the table. Did Mayari have... Soldiers? Spies? Whatever Taia and her allies on this ship were. Perhaps Taia had avoided the police on Mars because her team’s presence on the planet broke Republic laws.
“And you thought we were part of the RIS? Why did you come with us if you thought we did all that?” Taia’s smile held fascinated, confused amusement that Elys wished she’d evoked on purpose.
“Whatever you’d do, you wouldn’t take me back to Amberson right away. If that’s what you’d wanted, you’d have let the bounty hunters to do it for you. Besides,” Elys added more honestly, “I saw what you did to that Vatirah woman.”
Taia’s expression was twisting into something like appalled sympathy, so Elys returned to their previous disagreement. “But Mayari’s a vacation destination. Magazines call it ‘exotic, remote, and charming.’ You can’t expect me to believe you’re from there.” Even though the “charming” part fit Taia well.
“Why not?” Taia set her box on the table and offered Elys a napkin to help her recover her spoon. It would be really useful if Elys’s thumbs started feeling things again.
“Every vacation magazine I’ve ever seen talks up locations in Sol with huge military bases in them,” Taia said. “Nobody’s surprised about that.” She watched Elys get her spoon back into her food before returning to her own meal. “We train to deal with anything that puts people in danger, and everywhere’s a little dangerous. Unit 548 — that’s us — is certified in domestic crisis intervention. We stop physical, emotional, and mental domestic abuse, in other words. The city said we’re the best choice to come get you, so here we are. I feel like what you experienced was government abuse,” she said gently.
Taia watched Elys like she was waiting for an argument. When Elys kept eating, Taia said, “Like I told your bail enforcer, we need your help with the city, Alyansa’s MCAI. City Support saw you’d just... Become available.” Elys snorted at the euphemism for her escape. “And we thought you might make a trade. You help us fix the city; we keep Republic agents away from you.”
Legal contracts bound almost everyone with experience creating and rebalancing massively complex augmented intelligences to governments or major corporations. Unless the industry had changed a lot in the two years Elys had been out of it, she was one of the few freelance MCAI experts in the universe. And she’d only left Amberson...
A week ago? Something like that. Time got stranger the longer Elys went without sleep.
The point she’d been thinking toward was... None of the other MCAI engineers were hiding from the Republic government. No matter who Taia worked for, that gave her leverage.
Elys limped to the shelf by the door to retrieve a box of water, since she didn’t trust her gurgling digestive system with anything more complicated on top of the chili, after two years of prison food and maybe a week of scavenged trash. “How did your MCAI find me?”
“The city’s good at identifying people. Your best choice was to leave the planet, so we started pinging everyone between where the city last saw you and the nearest spaceport until we found people whose pickups didn’t ping back. One of those was you.”
Elys thought she’d avoided cameras. How an MCAI on Mayari got anything close to real-time records, and how Taia located people without tracking their pickups... Even with the most efficient interstellar communications protocols, that sounded technically implausible, and illegal.
“So, if your MCAI can do all that,” or cooperate with a person providing the access, “what’s it doing wrong?”
“It’s delaying crisis response unit dispatches. Nobody knows why, and City Support usually knows everything.”
Despite the worry all over Taia’s face, her answer drew a dark and tired laugh from Elys. “You’re saying you came all the way here, found me, beat up a couple of bounty hunters, and you want to smuggle me out of Republic space, because your MCAI is making your cops take a little too long to arrive?”
Taia cocked her head at “cops,” but her digital assistant must’ve defined the term. “People have suffered preventable injuries.” Taia emphasized the last three words the way anyone normal would’ve said “died.”
“Half the time in the Republic, police cause the...” Actually, Taia’s proposition amounted to a free trip to an independent planet with no extradition agreement with the Republic, in exchange for a quick optimization study. It was Elys’s best chance of getting to work with an MCAI again. Why was she arguing about this?
“No, you’re right.” Elys’s spoon scraped the bottom of the box she must’ve emptied while she'd been thinking. “Sounds like a serious issue. Sure, I’ll help.”
Taia grinned in what looked like exhausted relief. “Thank you so much, Elisabet. Sorry, Elys. I promise we’ll keep you safe.”
“So, the city, huh?” Elys stood to select another box from the shelf by the door. Hope came with a bigger appetite.
“When we say Alyansa, we’re talking about us. The people, the physical structures on Mayari, everything inside the atmosphere containment systems. When we say ‘the city,’ we’re talking about the AI.”
“What does the city say is wrong?”
Taia frowned. “It hasn’t said anything’s wrong, that I know of.” A bad sign, but if the MCAI could diagnose itself, these people wouldn’t need Elys. “I haven’t taken any of the City Support coursework, though. You can ask them about it.”
And “the city” was making Elys a new profile for her supposed new life in an idyllic, independent station. Maybe even outside the Republic justice system’s reach, for as long as the Mayari needed her help. Whether or not things came out the way Taia described, Elys would love to visit Mayari and learn more about Alyansa’s MCAI.