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The tiny Volontaire apartment was a reflection of Elys’s Renforcé one, complete with another welcome box of rice, soothing dreams, and chocolate coins outside the blue door. She did the rice carrying and coin scattering Taia had told her about the day before, which she was fairly sure Taia would’ve approved of if she’d been there. Besides, Elys could use some good luck.
Rituals concluded, Elys set her crate of clothes on the bedroom floor. For a second, she thought someone had forgotten to give her a bed. Like so much other Alyansan furniture, it was folded into the wall, which was the only way to make space for the drawers in the opposite wall to open.
She pulled the bed down to sit on it and scan active Volontaire district proposals. She recused herself from voting. None of her messaging systems showed any evidence that Taia had contacted her since their argument on the mountain.
The single advantage of that was that Elys could interview Krebs without Taia sitting beside her, judging them both. She sent him a meeting invitation while she folded the bed into the wall and unpacked her clothes. As she placed each item in the drawer, she envisioned shutting away the emotions that would distract her during the interview.
Anger with her new shirts. Dread with socks, since it made her feel cold. Fear of giving the RIS a new reason to drag her back to prison: in with the pants, of course. She shut the drawer hard enough that her new neighbors must’ve heard it.
At her trial, Krebs had lied about why the RIS MCAI had given such cruel and ineffective strategy recommendations. Although he’d run the RIS MCAI project and its maintenance team and advocated for following its recommendations, in court Krebs took no responsibility for the missing, dead, and injured Republic citizens. He’d smiled with his pale lips pulled in over his teeth while he blamed Elys for everything.
His reply said he’d meet her virtually. Nisse had arranged the meeting with his assistant, giving Elys enough time to shower, drop a calming dream in the little indentation on the side table for it, and change into her business suit.
Maybe if she read enough about what Krebs had been doing while she was in prison, the upcoming conversation would be less intimidating. While Elys waited for him to connect, she and Nisse dug into Alyansa’s public records. Her brain roiled with worst case scenarios. She read the same paragraphs over and over, activated subtitles for the records with audio, and pushed through.
Nisse materialized beside her on the couch. The assistant’s presence was a comfort, even while it presented a graph of Krebs’s time in Alyansa, organized by privacy levels.
The graph confirmed that Krebs had been in Alyansa almost a week before the city started slowing down CRU deployments, and remained during the short period before City Support discovered the problem. But the records went back a decade, and he’d spent almost a third of every standard year on Mayari.
Nisse found records of him attending several l’Assemblée Tordue meetings, which was more interest than Elys would’ve expected him to pay to technical matters. She’d have to ask the city how many off-world government agents l’Assemblée Tordue had accepted to see how strange that really was, but Nautilus had been willing enough to see what Elys had to offer, even after xe’d learned about her involvement with the RIS MCAI.
That meeting of l’Assemblée was the closest Krebs had come to interacting with Jules and the rest of City Support, too. He’d gone to a few Honesty Alyansa events too, although he also seemed to have attended meetings of all the other activist groups in Alyansa at least once. And the archive contained only brief conversations between Krebs and other off-worlders. Not even small talk in the space elevator.
Another note from Nisse joined the public records on Elys’s living room wall: Krebs set alerts on your behavior within three minutes of your arrival in the marina.
“That was fast,” Elys muttered. It supported Nisse’s earlier assertion — the city’s, really — that the RIS had known she was headed for Alyansa.
The temptation to leave Krebs waiting went to war with Elys’s desire to get this meeting over with as soon as possible. Out of spite, she took her time shoving clutter off visible surfaces and making herself coffee. She sat on her couch and joined the virtual meeting three minutes late, according to the timestamp Nisse provided. On the couch beside her, her assistant made a gargling yet comforting purr that only Elys heard.
Despite the apparent reality of Hochberg visualizations, Elys thought she remembered a slight removal from the reality of whatever she visualized. But sims came in sharp and clear in Alyansa, and it’d been a long two years since Elys had seen one.
Winoc Krebs appeared in her living room with shadows where her brain expected them to be, at the precise height he’d stood in the courtroom. He might’ve even been wearing the same suit. The visualization rendered every spot on his pale face and each wispy blond hair in exquisite detail.
Elys forced herself to stay seated. He couldn’t touch her. The yellow profile beside him confirmed he had no sway over Alyansans. And as Taia had said it would, his profile listed his role as Officer of the TFR’s Information Service. Essentially, “I’m a spy.”
He’d appeared in the process of making that Alyansan hand-to-chest-and-nod greeting gesture. This time, Elys remembered to return it. “Mr. Krebs, thanks for taking the time to talk.” Her voice sounded normal, if farther away than she was used to hearing it.
Krebs smiled like his face was rotting, lips pulled in over his teeth, the same way he had in the courtroom. Elys swallowed down nausea with a scalding gulp of coffee. If she hadn’t dropped that dream pod on the table earlier, she would’ve ended this conversation on instinct.
“Nice to meet with someone almost on time, for a change.” After days among Alyansans, Krebs’s Republic accent was jarring. “One of the few Alyansan quirks I’m not fond of is their persistent lateness. I’ve been meaning to look you up. I kept expecting someone else to beat me to it.”
“Yeah, they couldn’t stay to chat. Bounty hunting’s illegal here.” Consciously selecting words just wasn’t happening at the moment. Some part of Elys’s brain seemed to be doing alright without her input, while she concentrated on breathing evenly.
“You should really turn yourself in. It would go easier for you, if you did.”
“Easier for you, you mean.” Krebs had no reason to let her survive an arrest. If she were dead, she couldn’t remind anyone that his mismanagement of the RIS MCAI’s maintenance team had made its first year incredibly destructive to the less loyal stations in Republic territory.
“Well. Here we are now.” Krebs’s gaze hung on Elys’s bruised forehead, which had turned colors that matched the blue and black business attire she’d put on to boost her confidence for this meeting. “I hope you’re not taking all this too personally.”
“It’s my life.”
“Is it, really? The Service demands more from us both, I should think, particularly after your last project so thoroughly missed its objectives under your leadership.”
The Service, and what a pretentious way to reference the RIS that was, had made ending her life so she didn’t share any more information about their MCAI one of their objectives. Humanitarian disasters which the RIS viewed as inconvenient mission shortfalls were not what Elys brought Winoc Krebs into her apartment to talk about. “Which Republic agent is fucking up the city’s CRU deployment process?”
“Even if one of ours were causing the city’s difficulties, the Republic’s quite a large place. Not everyone who lives there talks to me, thank goodness. And as I’m here on vacation, I’m especially unlikely to be looped in.” Krebs sighed in apparent contentment. “Lovely place, Alyansa, with just the perfect amount of isolation from the rest of the universe’s problems. Is this chat part of your official investigation, or are you simply curious?”
Searching for potential saboteurs seemed like the most productive thing Elys could do while City Support finished running the current round of tests. “I don’t speak for anyone else in Alyansa.”
“I see. The city is what makes this place so unique, you know. And the people’s trust in it. They truly couldn’t manage without it, and they don’t even realize that’s a weakness. One the Republic doesn’t have, but then, they don’t have the wine Alyansa does, either, even on Earth. Do you know there’s an indoor vineyard in Armistice district? I recommend the tour. It’s as small as everything else in the station, but the products are delightful.”
Elys was losing what patience she had left for this man. “If you like this station so much, why don’t you help keep it safe?”
“It’s not my business to. Besides, it can’t last. The Republic embraces all stations in time, as our more effective system of government requires. Even those that reject its polite invitations to join.” Elys wished she could demand that Krebs explain just what the Republic’s government was supposed to be so effective at doing, but if he kept talking about Alyansa, he might say something valuable.
Krebs sighed, his expression more wistful than guilty. “I plan to enjoy Alyansa’s unique atmosphere while I can. You should do the same.”
“So you admit the Republic is a threat to Alyansa.”
Krebs frowned like she’d said something rude. “Perhaps the vineyard’s charms would be lost on you. The northern swim center in Volontaire has a beautiful little beach. It’s just like Bora Bora, but, of course, smaller.”
That must’ve been another Republic station Elys had never heard of. They’d spread themselves over so many planets that it’d take days to memorize all the stations they claimed. But Alyansa had something for everyone, even RIS middle managers.
“You’re saying you don’t know anything about the city’s error,” Elys snapped, “and you don’t care.”
“I try only to care about what I can affect.”
“Most errors are reversible.” The RIS MCAI’s development process had demonstrated that often enough. Even the MCAI’s tendency toward recommending kidnap, torture, and murder of dissidents would’ve been reversable, given enough space and feedback. Elys sipped her coffee while she searched for a more productive line of questioning. “When I find this one, I’ll tell City Support where to look, and they’ll fix it. Everything will go back to normal in Alyansa.”
Nothing in Krebs’s demeanor suggested that he felt any responsibility. “Then you’d better tell City Support where to look, hadn’t you?”
“If you were in charge of maintaining an MCAI struggling like this, what would you do to fix it?” Elys snapped.
Krebs gave her another disapproving frown. “Rely on the expertise of properly qualified engineers who are also maintaining the MCAI, naturally. And perhaps contact its architects to tell them to correct their own errors.”
Blaming Elys for his mistakes, again. Although as Taia reminded her, she did enable the RIS MCAI to cause the suffering it did. “So you’re saying the city’s problem comes from a design flaw?” The question came out too hostile and harsh to be polite.
Krebs shrugged. “It might. How would I know?”
Maybe if she said something incorrect, he’d feel compelled to tell her how it really worked. “A Castillo confirmation series would tell you.”
Instead of correcting her, an alarmed expression flashed across Krebs’s face. He replaced it with a politely amused expression. “Would it, now?”
Elys stopped herself from smiling. Making him squirm for a change was refreshing. But what was alarming about the Castillo series, or the city’s efficiency?
New MCAI developers learned to run a Castillo series among their first tests because it measured efficiency across all of an MCAI’s subsystems. It’d make sense to run on a small, new MCAI. On something as huge and old as the city, it’d take far more memory resources and City Support attention than it was worth to assess the efficiency of its responses.
“I’m just wondering why you wouldn’t have used that first,” Elys pitched the statement to imply that any competent tech would’ve started there.
“The city has been somewhat inefficient lately, but it’s a generalized test, you know. And this error seems awfully specific.” But why was he concerned about City Support running the series?
Even though Krebs had demonstrated basic knowledge of MCAIs, nothing he’d said suggested he sabotaged the city. Still, his bored expression somehow made Elys feel like she was the one who didn’t know what she was talking about. “You haven’t asked my advice,” Krebs said, “but I’ll offer it anyway. If you feel that you may have wandered into an RIS operation, it would be best for you to find your way out of it, quickly. Bad things happen to people who interfere.”
Elys was exquisitely aware of how easily she could join the ranks of people the RIS MCAI sent to be executed or shipped to work camps. She ended the conversation with what dignity and brevity she could.
Taia ignored Elys’s conversation request, so Elys finished her coffee and recorded a message instead. “A person should double-check that all the foreign government operatives on-planet are accounted for. If the city is making one mistake we know about, it’s entirely possible it’s making other mistakes we haven’t noticed yet.”
Long term, that level of caution would make Alyansa find other, less efficient methods of managing their affairs rather than fixing their MCAI. Elys, and City Support, had to find the error before that happened. Losing such a beautiful system would be a tragedy.
A red light in the corner of Elys’s vision meant she was still recording her message to Taia. “I’d like to know what you think of Krebs’s statement, if you have time.”
Elys sent the message and the record of her talk with Krebs, then started searching for contact information for Zahra Wirth, founder of Honesty Alyansa. If she or her followers had decided they’d have to take direct action to get all Alyansans into level one privacy protection, that could’ve caused the error. Feeling less safe might drive people to demand more surveillance, or a higher CRU presence, including the recording rigs in their armor. The public record showed that Zahra Wirth, at least, had the skill to do it.
Elys found Wirth’s contact information and requested a meeting. While she was at it, she sent an invitation to Jules, too, and a request for City Support to run a Castillo series.
She checked the progress of the active tests, which assessed the MCAI’s energy management while making CRU-related choices, then switched to reviewing the list of detectives the city had assigned to investigate suspects in City Support. The majority of the detectives’ credentials made them well-qualified to find anyone in City Support who’d been acting suspiciously when the city first began delaying CRU deployments. Most of them had technical credentials in addition to their detective ones. Only a few had detective credentials and no technical background.
The city had decided they were the best choice for the job, and Elys didn’t have time to second-guess it through official channels. She sent the detectives without MCAI development experience a message, introducing herself and asking them to contact her with questions.
Jules’s response arrived in Elys’s inbox, with Nisse’s high-priority paw print beside it. They’d be available to talk as soon as Elys could get to city central, but they also said, “If you think we have time to run a Castillo series alongside everything else we are working with the city on today, then you don’t understand what we’re doing here at all.”