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In a little over an hour, Elys completed her fastest hospital stay ever in the Port district on Mayari’s surface. She returned to its lobby with self-consciousness over her Republic accent, a meal replacement bar, and a new and elaborate brace for her left ankle and foot, which had cracked into more pieces than the right ones. When she looked at the brace, it connected with her pickup to highlight the breaks’ locations and list how many days and hours it estimated each would take to heal. Even though Elys flinched in anticipated pain when she stood, the combination of the brace and pain medication didn’t hurt to walk on.
The brace was too wide to fit in her shoe and covered the bottom of her foot, so she put the shoe in the toiletry bag Taia gave her. When she stepped on the brace it produced a hydraulic whine. In the hospital, the ambient noise made the whine fade in and out of Elys’s hearing.
As soon as she reached the street outside, the whine vanished into air mixed by the station’s environmental controls. She’d braced for Mars’s ever-present dust, but the air was perfectly clear. Lamp arrays hidden somewhere in the atmosphere containment system overhead lit the station as bright as daylight on Earth, complete with a stylized sky in an unexpected shade of bluish purple.
If the Mayari took this much control of their tiny part of the planet’s environment, they must impose a day-night cycle too. This was too detailed – too beautiful – to be the work of the lowest bidding terraforming corporation.
Walking people filled the roadway, some with mechanical assistance, some without. Elys’s pickup highlighted a section of the street designated for car traffic that’d drop down from the elevated track to let people in and out. Pedestrians walked over that too, until a car approached at a speed that gave pedestrians time to move out of its way. A red fence rose to keep them away from the moving vehicle.
The car stopped in front of Elys. Taia opened the door from the inside. The empty vehicle didn’t have a driver’s console, which made it one of the most expensive cars Elys had ever stood so close to. The bright green vehicle sat six, or four and Taia in her armored suit.
After a very short ride, the small vehicle stopped at an elevated mass transit station. Elys’s pickup labeled the larger buildings, including the hospital she’d just left, as Taia led her toward a rail line. “To the city center next?” Taia asked.
Elys maneuvered her way around a small crowd of chattering teenagers. “Where the AI engineers are?”
The teenagers focused on Taia’s armor and walked away fast. “In City Support’s headquarters, yes.” Taia’s eyes moved like she was reading something on the inside of her helmet while she walked. “A lot of them actually work in the headquarters building, so it must be nice there. We’ll ship some stuff to your apartment, so when you’re done at city central you can put away whatever the bots can’t find a place for.”
“The standard relocation package?”
Elys meant that as a joke, but Taia smiled a little sadly and said, “That’s right.” At least the attempts on Elys’s life hadn’t been over anything personal. The betrayals Taia rescued people from were as personal as they got.
A train stopped at their platform, disgorging some passengers and accepting more in one of the more normal urban interactions Elys had seen on Mayari. The passengers all had breathing space. Bots trundled around under the seats and along the walls, cleaning up after the crowd.
Even in her armored suit, Taia found an empty bench seat big enough for her. The nearest passengers moved to other seats, some even closer to each other than they’d been sitting to Taia. They must’ve recognized the threat the armor posed after all.
Elys wished she could put more distance between it and her too, but she had questions to ask. “Does the city control these trains and cars, too?” she signed.
“Yep.” Taia ended the sign by thumping the padded palm of her glove on the train car’s wall like a proud owner patting a large pet.
“What about the environmental system? The lights? All those bots out there?” Elys pointed to a stream of drones in a huge variety of shapes and colors flying parallel to the train line, occasionally darting into nearby buildings.
“Those too. And the cargo trains underground, and coordinating orbits for everything in our space, and everything else people don’t have to bother with. It gets all of those talking together and coordinated so we don’t have to.”
All while the city managed profiles for every Alyansan, too. If the same system that coordinated emergency services ran all that at the same time, and it’d been doing so for over a hundred years... The field needed a new category for the Mayari AI. It wasn’t just massively complex, it was Kafkaesque. This would be why City Support had been searching for outside help.
Elys had been expecting Taia to say something else, but she was staring straight ahead, looking at something digital that made her eyes widen and her breathing hitch. “What’s wrong?” Elys asked.
Taia muttered something that melded into the train’s hum. When Taia refocused on Elys, she grinned while she signed “I just got a new assignment, and you just got a personal liaison.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I’ll be keeping an eye on you and answering your questions about Alyansa and what the city does for us.” Nisse created hovering text to translate Mayari signs Elys never saw in the Republic. “Kind of your official guide, instead of your unofficial one like I was planning on.”
Having Taia around as a resource would be... Fantastic, actually. “Will the rest of your CRU be okay with that?”
“Oh, yeah. The other communications specialist has the same credentials I do. Besides, it’s not a permanent change, just until you get used to how we live here.” Although Taia’s CRU would still be out in the station somewhere, protecting vulnerable Mayari with one less protector than usual. Taia glanced around at the train’s other passengers. The ones who weren’t staring at something digital were glancing worriedly back at her. “But I’d like to stop and take my big boots off.”
Elys reactivated Taia’s profile. It still listed her role as Public Servant. “Did the city just change your assignment?”
“Yep! Getting the right public servants to the right places at the right times is a huge part of the city’s role.”
Elys added that to a growing list of questions for Nisse, although really she’d be asking the city, the people who supported it, or the public records. How could Elys find a single error in a system this enormous? A system that dug so deeply into millions of individuals’ skillsets and desires?
The shadow of a brown stone and metal archway passed through the train car. The rough stone columns looked like someone dragged them in from Mayari’s surface and propped them in the archway yesterday. Shivery white text materialized over the window: Now entering Volontaire District. Nisse had reacquired Elys’s preference for text alerts instead of audio.
The streets in Volontaire district are public, like in Port district, Nisse added in smaller text, still in its calming colors and round font. Everything that happens outside a building and most things that happen inside are archived.
“What’s with the French district names?” Elys’s broader and slower signs would tell Nisse and Taia both that she was asking Taia.
“Do you speak French?” Taia looked excited about the possibility.
“No, I’ve just heard and read some.”
Taia nodded. “Me too. It’s such an obscure language. The two organizations that put the most resources into building Alyansa were from Canada and the Philippines on Earth, and everything used to have three names. Now there aren’t many fluent French speakers here, so French names are...” Taia frowned and made a beckoning motion with both hands, like she was coaxing the description toward her. “If it’s got a French name, it shows you want people to stop and notice it. Which can get very silly very quickly, but with architecture they mean it to be serious. Sorry, we have a citizenship course that explains that kind of thing better.”
“And that’s the practice in... Ten districts, five privacy levels, all with their own rules,” as Elys had read in the overviews of Alyansa that Nisse had found for her. “What makes Volontaire different?”
“Well, I live here, for one thing.” Taia winked at her. That expression on a masculine face usually made Elys warier than ever. With Taia’s real face hidden underneath, it made Elys smile. “I shouldn’t have told you that, but you already know my name and all. Which I also shouldn’t have told you, you just... Seemed like you needed to know. Don’t be a creep, to anyone, not just me. Your assistant can tell you the rest.”
It sounded like Elys and Nisse would be talking a lot over the next few days. That’d be an opportunity to find out what her assistant could do with the Mayari MCAI supplementing its abilities. Assuming the MCAI still had the capacity to supplement anything with regularity, despite its mysterious error.
––––––––
Taia kept calling their destination “city central,” but the car she and Elys caught from the dispatch office where Taia changed out of her armored suit stopped outside a technology campus near the station’s atmosphere containment equipment, which occupied Alyansa’s physical center. A massive energy web over the station protected its air from erosion, the residents from radiation, and its heat from leeching into the brown stone of Mayari’s cold side.
The environmental controls must’ve funneled in heat from other station systems. The Mayari kept their whole station hotter than any cold side station Elys had ever heard of.
Elys lifted her pickup off her neck. The bright blue-purple sky remained the same, nothing like the orange haze over Mars or the airless void outside this station. Putting the pickup on did not change the illusion. The sky’s beauty wasn’t a Hochberg visualization, then.
The field generator was big enough to see it from any point in the station, like the space elevator and Union Tower, as Elys’s reading called the station’s tallest residential building. Beside the generator, the City Support campus looked flat and small. Considering the storage space their MCAI needed, the campus had to have a larger presence underground. Half the campus space visible from the street consisted of a lush garden with paths connecting the buildings. Little birds and bots zipped through the air at unpredictable intervals.
A couple of adults lounged under one of the trees, either looking at something on their own pickups or watching huge white clouds, thicker and brighter than the wispy Martian ones, or the dust-colored clouds above Reznikov, where Elys grew up. The puffy clouds here might’ve been hiding the station’s lamp arrays.
Nisse added a text reminder that since they’d entered Renforcé district, everything Elys did would be publicly archived. For once, Elys didn’t mind. The garden, the architecture, the lack of walls and obvious guards around the campus... Elys had never seen a more beautiful home for an MCAI. The flat images of the interior which most articles about the Mayari MCAI included did not do it justice, either.
“How are we doing on time?” Elys asked, although if Taia had given her a time this meeting started, she’d have remembered it, or Nisse would have.
“They said they’d be talking among themselves and we could come in any time after noon, so we’re good.” That was a huge window of time for the people who maintained the MCAI that ran the whole station. If all their scheduling was like that, it’d take some getting used to.
Taia held her gloved hand over a sensor on a door into the main building, keeping the door open for Elys to walk through. “I’m following a map to them,” Taia said. “I’ll get you there and tell you how to find anything you need that’s not technical. City Support are going to want to talk to you, though, not me.”
“Sure.” Elys must’ve been too quiet on the trip here.
To determine why the city was delaying emergency services, Elys really would need the support personnel’s help. The Mayari had allowed this MCAI to become so enmeshed in the station’s basic functions that flailing around in it with only documentation as a guide might cause the kind of harm the Mayari brought her here to prevent.
Skylights and windows optimized the amount of artificial sunlight that made it inside city central. With Nisse’s newly competent help, Elys pinged each door lock she passed. The assistant reported that the doors would unlock for specific pickup-transmitted IDs.
Eventually, Taia stopped at a door. She raised her hand to knock, but paused. “Relax your face,” Taia signed to Elys, presumably so the message wouldn’t carry through the door. “Every time I’ve watched you meet someone, you look at them like they stepped on your foot on purpose.”
That might’ve gotten Elys off on the wrong foot, so to speak, with some people in prison, too. Had she always done that, or did she develop the habit in Amberson? While Taia tapped on the door, Elys smoothed sweating palms over her wrinkling blouse and attempted to relax the muscles in her face.
The person who opened the door stood a few centimeters taller than Elys, with a tawny complexion, a stiff posture, and a frown that looked worn into their face after days of use. Their dark blue profile, the same color as everyone else’s Elys had met today, confirmed their pronouns and announced them as Jules West-Gevorgyan, City Archon.
The profile listed more information about where they lived and how to contact them. She could just go to the home of the person whose name appeared in every article about Mayari’s MCAI. Elys asked Nisse to save Jules’s long list of qualifications, licenses, certificates, and awards for her to read later.
“Kundakçı. Welcome.” Jules’s gaze cut to the side, where Elys’s profile would appear. The archon nodded in a formal sort of way and touched a hand to their chest in the same gesture Taia had greeted Elys with on Mars, but they turned away while Taia was repeating the motion and Elys was imitating it with limited success. “Let’s get started.”