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On the street outside the gallery, Elys asked Taia, “What was that about?”
“Mediators remind people that Alyansans balance freedom and safety.” Taia led them into a light crowd of foot traffic moving along the street. “Complete safety would be living in a padded hospital room tended by bots, right? So if you see a mediator, then somebody’s hurting, and it’s not us.” Taia tapped her gloved knuckles on her chest, where her jacket’s armor-grade material failed to give at all. “We get associated with some sad things.”
“With those big armored suits you people wear, you can’t blame folks for being nervous.” That would be why mediators never appeared in Mayari’s promotional material. Nobody wanted soldiers all over their vacation destination.
Taia blinked. “The armor protects us. We don’t... Hit people with it? Is that what you’re thinking?”
Actuators in armored suits gave the wearers a lot of creative ways to hurt people. Republic soldiers had demonstrated plenty of those on Reznikov. If the city kept as complete a public record of mediators as Taia claimed, Elys could search it for instances of abuse. Someone must’ve done that already, in fact. She set Nisse on the task with small, quick signs Taia would know weren’t directed at her.
“You must sometimes,” Elys said. “When you...” What might a well-intentioned armor wearer do with it? “Break up a fight? Or stop someone running away?”
“Okay, people don’t run forever and we can see where they go, so we don’t risk anybody’s safety stopping them unless they run somewhere dangerous. And when we break up a fight, our goal is no hitting, so we don’t add to the problem, right?” Judging by Taia’s expression, Elys had distracted her from her own regrets by talking like an ignorant, violent freak.
It’d take a special person to work in the station’s emergency service system when they could’ve been playing Stalwarden or failing free college courses or doing whatever the Mayari did for fun. And people avoided Taia for it, Taia, who seemed happy to talk to anyone for as long as they wanted.
Instead of making herself sound more like a dangerous foreigner by pursuing that topic, Elys said, “So, the city decides what to do with the records your mobile recording system sends it. Does the city know your work schedule?”
“Usually. It offered to let me hand you off to somebody else about an hour ago, but I asked it not to.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.” Taia grinned. “I can’t wait for you to see your new home! Let’s go there next.”
First, this confirmed that the city managed individual Alyansans’ schedules. Second, it handled the complexity of indefinite time “on” with the expectation that when Taia’s shift ended, someone would be available to replace her. And third, Taia chose to spend extra time with Elys.
“This has been the best shopping trip with the best company I’ve had in...” An amount of time which would be socially inappropriate to specify. Elys cleared her throat and focused on the shapes drawn into the street they were traversing. Every object in Alyansa was stylish, and it all functioned as well as every cheap, plain piece of a Republic station. A cleaning bot drifted among pedestrians, sweeping dirt and dream residue out of decorative patterns in the pavement. “So, when does your record enter the archive?”
They chatted about the difference between the city’s operational archive and the public archive that sourced clips for the bathroom video compilations Republic citizens laughed at. “How do we change privacy levels, anyway?”
“Your assistant and the tourism bureau can tell you how.” Taia paused to sign “Clear a path” to some people nearby, who moved out of the way to give someone in an assistive exosuit a clear path to the building they’d been aiming for. “I’ve heard off-worlders should apply for level five no matter what. It’s easier to change down than up.”
Nisse dropped a list of mediator abuse cases into her inbox. The list was much shorter than Elys expected. If she found the time, she’d look for evidence of tampering or missing records.
A physical window decal bore a logo for a show she recognized. “You folks are into Top Avian?”
Taia shrugged. “Some people are.”
“How do you get it here?”
“Somebody asked for it, the city thought it was worth getting and asked a diplomat to work out what to trade for it, and...” Taia stopped walking, her eyes focused on something in front of her.
Nisse appeared, a dark and seething orb on the otherwise sunny street. “Elys,” it said, rather than wrote, which used to mean something important was happening. “The Republic just announced it quadrupled the reward they’re offering for your capture. The timing suggests that they published the increase to retrieval specialists ten to thirty hours after you left Mars.”
Elys opened the document Nisse brought her. This would not have been Elys’s choice of ways to learn that Nisse had gotten much better at interpreting text. A bench beside the road looked like a less embarrassing option than sitting in the middle of a street which now seemed crowded with potential threats.
Taia sat next to her. “Did your assistant tell you—”
“Yeah.” People like Vatirah could make a year’s salary in reward money if they hauled Elys to the nearest Republic jail.
“You’re safe here.” Taia’s armored jacket made her hand a solid weight on Elys’s shoulder. “Bail enforcers and bounty hunters aren’t welcome in Alyansa. Do you think they only just realized you weren’t in the Republic anymore?”
“No, Nisse — my assistant — says they told the professionals about the increase while we were still in Republic space. Maybe they’re trying to scare me into running to another independent station. One with an extradition treaty.”
Taia started into an explanation about Alyansa’s security measures while they walked, but Elys would have to ask Nisse to find the public record of Taia’s conversation later. She had to think.
The massive reward increase might’ve been a standard procedure when someone escaped a Republic prison and wasn’t caught within the first week. She asked Nisse, who’d removed its visual presence at some point, to bring her records on that procedure. Or, an alternative that made her shoulders hunch and her hands find her pockets like that’d make her harder for any observing RIS officers to find: Jules’s hostility, even though they’d brought her to Alyansa, could mean that they brought her here as cover for their intentional or accidental sabotage of the city.
Vatirah had almost taken her back to prison. Maybe Jules had tipped Vatirah off, using the same tracking techniques that Taia had used to locate Elys, and Elys was never supposed to reach Mayari. And then Jules blamed the Republic for everything.
Of course, they might be right to blame the Republic. The RIS would have some intricate plan of their own for sabotaging the city and taking advantage of the resulting upheaval, if they were involved. Elys would’ve expected a more damaging attack from them.
But what would Jules get out of sabotaging the city? More to do? More power in their city archon position?
“Elys?”
“Hmm? I was thinking.”
“What about?”
“Say Jules is right, and somebody intentionally introduced the error into the city’s systems.” And if Jules did that, why call attention to it? Maybe Elys was being paranoid, but the people after her had caught her once, and they had every reason to keep hunting her. “The archons talked about intruders, and Jules thinks it’s undercover RIS officers, secret agents or spies or whatever. Who else would get something out of disrupting CRUs, or the city?”
“You remember how I said that some people think archival decisions are simple?” Elys didn’t but she nodded, so Taia continued, “There’s a group called Honesty Alyansa who believe everything should be publicly archived. Since some CRU activity isn’t, they might be trying to change that. But now that you mention secret agents... They’re not much of a secret here.”
“Oh?”
“Here, the list is public.” Taia sent it. Each name on it linked to a profile on a yellow background like Elys’s. The profile notes included annotations that these were off-world agents, including which governments they represented.
“The yellow background doesn’t mean ‘spy,’ does it?”
“It just means they’re not citizens. These people can’t be.” Taia paused to watch a dragon the size of a large dog, so blue it seemed to glow, flap mechanically out of a building and into the colorful bot traffic under the elevated rail line. “They’re clearly going to make choices against Alyansa’s best interests. Every once in a while we decide they shouldn’t even live here, but that always gets rolled back. And everyone deserves to know if they’re talking to a government representative. We don’t get surprised very often anymore. The city’s learned to identify them, and it doesn’t publicly archive how it does that.” Assuming, of course, that the city’s erroneous behavior didn’t extend to identifying foreign agents.
In addition to agents from independent stations Elys had never heard of, the list included over a hundred Republic operatives. “So, if I ran into one of these people on the street, their profile would say ‘I’m a spy?’”
“Yep.”
“And you let them live here?”
“We’d rather have spies we can see than spies we can’t.”
If a foreign agent showed up in a public location like city central, the city would record what they did. And nobody would give them enough access to change the city’s behavior at a distance. Jules’s idea about a Republic spy sabotaging the city seemed even more unlikely now.
A name on the list made Elys feel glad she was sitting down. She read it twice. The name stayed on the list.
Elys was breathing too fast and making herself dizzy, and she forced herself to count seconds as she breathed in and out. Why, out of the hundreds of populated planets, did he have to be here? Was he following her? Did he have something to do with the reward increase?
You’re assuming he’s here because of you, Nisse pointed out in blue text against the springy pavement in front of Elys.
Which she hadn’t said or signed. Nisse must’ve guessed her thoughts from what she’d been looking at. It did that sometimes. But why else would he be here?
Taia’s gloved hand squeezed Elys’s shoulder. “Elys, are you alright?”
“I know one of the people on this list. Winoc Krebs, from the Republic.” Elys drew in a slow breath and let it out in a shaky laugh. “Is the punishment for sabotaging the city getting launched into your sun, by any chance?”
“It is not. You know an RIS agent?” Taia sounded surprised.
The list of foreign agents stopped scrolling as Elys reached its end. Her name wasn’t on it, and she let out a relieved breath. The secrets she told the RIS she’d keep might still be secret, then.
But the Republic had imprisoned her to cover up Krebs’s incompetent management of what should’ve been a powerful MCAI. The RIS had tried to kill her in prison, twice. The government incentivized who-knew-how-many violent people to return her to the Republic against her will. Would an official death sentence for treason make her life any more dangerous than it already was? And why was she keeping secrets for people like him?
Elys looked through Nisse’s map to her new apartment, following at a geometric design in the pavement. “That MCAI I developed for the Republic government... The RIS was the client. Krebs headed up the project on their side.”
Taia glanced between Elys and the listed names hovering above the street in front of them. “You... I...” Taia took a deep breath and let it out with audible slowness. “Thank you for telling me about your experience with the RIS. I’m just surprised, because our diplomats usually tell us about things like that, especially when we’re responding to a crisis involving an off-worlder. And... You shared some strong negative opinions about the organization when we met.”
“I was just a contractor. I don’t belong on this list.”
“Why did you contract with them, if you think they’re no better than terrorists?”
Her family’s similar questions had made Ramadans and Eids awkward, back when Elys’s parents still asked her to visit. “The project was unique. Besides, if the Republic government taps you for a project, you don’t always get to say no. And I didn’t really understand what the RIS did at the time. Krebs showed me that.” Him and some very specific design requirements.
Taia and Elys walked in silence, following their assistants’ path to her new apartment building. “I wish I could pin some sabotage on Krebs,” Elys said, “but he doesn’t have the skills to do something so clever that City Support hasn’t found the damage and fixed it yet.”
“If he’s on this list, he doesn’t have the access, either.” Taia lifted her feet to let a street-cleaning bot roll under them. “These people are under really strict role and location limits. Anytime they come within a hundred meters of city central, the city tells a CRU to go redirect them.”
“Those detectives who are looking into everyone in City Support should check Krebs out anyway, and everybody else on this list. Sabotage is a real possibility, even if the Republic isn’t responsible. While tests are running, I want to talk to someone with MCAI experience from Honesty Alyansa. I’m guessing there’s at least one. And a hobbyist who knows the local scene, and Krebs, and Jules, to start with.” So much for the simple optimization study Elys had expected when Taia first described the city’s error.
“Jules again. Why them?”
Elys ticked reasons off on her fingers. “They’ve got the access, the familiarity, and the skill to change the city and hide evidence. They’re persuasive. And they’re angry I’m here and angry about the city’s behavior, but in a weirdly personal way.”
“Look, my investigation training is current, and forgive the reminder, but you don’t have any.” Taia stopped near Nisse’s round shadow. “You need more information. You won’t get far by implying you suspect the people most essential to the circumstances of the original harm, without evidence.”
“I just want to talk to them. We don’t know enough about the situation to have evidence yet. People call MCAIs ‘massively complex’ because ‘complex’ was already in use and ‘incomprehensibly complex’ was too depressing.”
In small and abbreviated signs, Elys told Nisse to develop summaries of what Jules and everyone on that foreign operatives list were doing before the city’s error manifested. One of them might’ve planted a disruptive routine that’d activate on a timer, or it might trigger with something the city rarely encountered. She also asked Nisse to assemble a list of non-citizens this group had interacted with the past five years.
After a moment’s consideration, Elys had Nisse search for associated influxes of off-world currencies and goods, which might be bribes or payments for services rendered. Since Nisse just accepted those instructions without requesting clarification, Elys asked it to look at these people’s past twenty years of visualizations and pull out any nefarious interactions with the city.
Nisse materialized on the street in front of her and slowly blinked its blue cat eyes. “That will approach your data usage limit for this month. If you go over it, you’ll have to request an exception.”
“Make the request if you need to,” Elys signed, and Nisse accepted order that too. It had to be using the whole city’s language interpretation system. Finally, somebody had made an MCAI’s resources available to everyone.
“So, Krebs,” said Taia. “He’s in and out of Alyansa all year ‘round. My assistant says he applied for residence six times, whenever the off-world immigration agreements changed so they might’ve let him stay. He’s here now, in fact.”
The hairs on the back of Elys’s neck stood up. “During my trial, there were rumors about changes in the RIS. Krebs made a lot of lateral shifts before then, from what I heard, so I didn’t think much of it. But if the RIS didn’t finish moving people around until, say, eight months ago, that’d explain why they ignored me for so long before they tried to kill me.”
“Wait, the Republic wants to kill you?” Taia grabbed both of Elys’s shoulders, to study her face, apparently. Before Elys got lost in Taia’s golden-brown eyes, but after she started worrying that she might, Taia said, “Off-world Affairs only told us they wanted to arrest you. I thought that was just like the containment procedure we do here.”
“Yeah,” Elys said. “I mean, two people who otherwise seemed fairly sane attacked me with no provocation. And they both got sent to higher security afterward. They lost a lot by attacking me, and I don’t see anything they stood to gain unless somebody offered them something to do it, which is exactly the RIS’s style. Besides, I’m the only member of their MCAI’s development team who has a good reason to tell people about its shortcomings and vulnerabilities. Of course they want me dead.”
Elys’s laugh sounded a little unhinged. “Even if the RIS weren’t involved, that escape earned me a triple sentence in high security. I wouldn’t risk that if I was just tired of the food.”
“That all sounds terrible to live through, but nobody’s going to catch you here. Can I hug you?”
“Sure,” Elys barely had time to say before Taia used her grip on Elys’s shoulders to pull her into an embrace that physically manifested the firm strength Taia exhibited in her official role. It made Elys smile more genuinely, despite everything.
She expected Taia to offer a calming dream or some kind of follow-up comment, but Taia’s expression had gone distant while she considered something digital. Maybe spending a few hours with Elys had convinced Taia that Republic MCAI architects weren’t that interesting after all.
A few seconds later, Taia refocused on Elys. “Vatirah Hashimoto is in Port district.” The bounty hunter from Mars had found Elys again.