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The next day flew past as Elys supervised city testing, fielded questions about harmless MCAI maintenance tasks from detectives clearing City Support personnel of sabotage, ignored Alyansans’ commentary, advice, and overly personal questions, and studied the Alyansa citizenship course material. The mining operation that owned the MCAI she’d hoped to have help from refused to offer it. Worse, Taia and Zahra Wirth continued to ignore her. Not even the apology Elys spent way too long recording for Taia merited a response.
As progress on the modified Castillo series crawled forward in minutely documented steps, Elys searched for more information on Zahra Wirth. Unless Elys figured out what she was missing that had made Krebs so anxious about the Castillo series, the Wirth’s involvement was just about the only angle Elys had left to study.
Wirth spent almost all her time in low privacy districts, but from what Elys read, she had the skills and MCAI experience to disguise anti-city activity as something else, and the faith in her cause to justify it. Just like she’d had a reason to make Elys’s apartment a level one privacy area as... A prank? A threat?
Maybe she didn’t do it, or she didn’t do it herself. Or she took a jaunt into Certitude district to do it. The city would’ve only documented her entering and leaving, which she did occasionally.
The activist had ignored all Elys’s invitations to talk. Running into her on the street would be impossible if she didn’t want to see Elys, thanks to proximity alert options in the low privacy areas Wirth frequented. Records showed her promoting an Honesty Alyansa symposium scheduled for later in the month, and caring for a young child. Even if she’d wanted to talk to Elys, finding a good time would’ve been tricky.
If Wirth had nothing to do with the city’s error and no idea who else might know about it, then Elys was running out of ideas to find it. Which meant she needed to become an Alyansan citizen, fast. She’d skipped to the course’s section on station-wide agreements to confirm that citizens could never be extradited to the Republic. Alyansa didn’t even exile its citizens off-world. As a citizen, what protection the city offered Elys wouldn’t be contingent on her finding the error.
Not that she was giving up on her search. She and City Support had only proven that the error had originated somewhere other than the systems they’d tested. City Support needed her to give them more aspects of the city to test. But what?
At this point, it was easier to think of human motives for reducing CRU deployment effectiveness than it was to think of ways the city might’ve done it by accident. What Alyansa lacked in crime its citizens made up for in disagreements and insults in varying severity, according to the public record. Someone had to be plotting something they didn’t want a CRU to witness. And some Alyansans might be afraid enough of the mediators to try to reduce their presence throughout the station. Although, the city’s data showed all of that happening about as frequently as it had before the error.
When her brain refused to think any more about that, she studied the citizenship course. Today’s module explained her late menstrual period, something about Mayari’s composition and Alyansa’s air purification system combining to stop a variety of biological processes which relied on a particular set of hormones. Finally, she had an answer for something, in as much detail as she cared to read.
While Elys was in the Volontaire district hospital getting the braces taken off her ankles, she sent Taia yet another futile conversation request. Less than a minute later, Taia accepted it.
Elys grinned. “Do you mind if I talk to someone while you do that?” she asked the doctor examining her ankles. They said something in affirmative tones.
When Taia’s image materialized standing by the padded table Elys sat on, her smile looked genuine, not polite. Relief hit Elys hard enough to knock her over if she hadn’t been sitting down. Taia wore her real face, and her short hair was a little more tousled than it’d been the last time Elys had seen it.
She was gorgeous. And watching Elys like Elys had done something amusing, when all she’d done was sit and stare.
Elys had instigated the conversation, so she’d better start it. “Hey, no sling!” Elys pointed at the arm that the explosion in the space elevator base had injured, then asked Nisse to include her surroundings and the medical professional checking her ankles over. The doctor accepted the invitation to Elys’s conversation and waved at Taia’s visualization. If they had to listen to Elys, they might as well have both sides of the conversation. “Good for us, right?”
“It is!” Taia slowly lifted and lowered the arm without any sign of pain.
Happy as that made Elys, and ignorant as she was about medicine, that kind of recovery seemed like it should’ve taken at least a week. Amazing. Like a lot of painful things, what Alyansans didn’t skip over, they shortened.
Taia’s gaze shifted from Elys’s eyes to her bruised face. “How’s your head?”
“Hurts less today than it did yesterday.” That was also amazing.
Using a request for help with Elys’s own job as an excuse to contact Taia may have been slightly disingenuous, but it’d worked. Elys listened to the doctor’s basic-sounding recommendations to stay off her healing ankles, which she’d do unless she needed to stand or walk to find the city’s error.
In the hall, Elys dropped the doctor from the conversation and told Taia’s visualization, “Sorry I was short with you the other day. I don’t get how you function with so much personal information available to everyone.”
“Thank you, but we don’t look at it all the time. That’s an unhealthy habit.” Taia’s smile faded. “That wasn’t why I needed some space, though. It seems to me like Republic life is built on lies and hiding important information until it has to come out.”
“That makes it sound more dramatic than it is.” Elys pushed off the wall she’d been leaning on to walk toward the exit. Whatever Taia had decided about the RIS MCAI’s disastrous guidance and Elys’s involvement, she must’ve realized it was a more complicated situation than Nautilus made it sound.
“If the media your people make is accurate, then it is dramatic.” Taia floated down the hospital hallway in front of Elys and talked over Elys’s disbelieving huff. “But I feel like I watched a learned behavior and made some conclusions about your character that I shouldn’t have. I’d like it if we could talk somewhere more private, where I can figure out how much of that is a Republic social requirement and how much is... you.”
“You’re welcome to try. I’m told I’m not a particularly open person.” That felt more embarrassing to admit here than it would’ve been in the Republic. “Maybe that’s why Wirth doesn’t want to talk to me. That was what I... Well, I thought you’d have a better idea of how to reach her than I have.”
Taia cocked her head. “Are you asking me in my role as your liaison?”
“Would that be more convenient than asking as a friend?”
“If you’re asking as a friend, I’d prefer to talk in person. If this is official, I’m back on duty tomorrow, and your assistant can refer you to your current liaison.”
“As a friend, then.”
“Tell me as soon as you’re home, and I’ll come right over. Garbage goes in the recycling chute, laundry goes in drawers, dishes go in kitchen cabinets, everything else goes in the cleaner. Don’t mix up the cleaner and the recycling chute!”
Taia must’ve seen the food wrappers and clutter in Elys’s apartment during the brief time everyone in the universe could’ve seen it. When Elys returned to her apartment, she rushed around putting things where they belonged. Elys didn’t mind a mess, but Taia sounded like she did.
––––––––
Taia knocked on Elys’s apartment door about half an hour later, in a loose shirt in a burnt orange shade more muted than a lot of Alyansan fashion. The shirt hung open in a V which just about hypnotized Elys before she could say “Hi.”
Grinning, Taia gently shoved a basket of snacks and sweets into Elys’s hands on her way in. The two mediators standing guard outside eyed the basket with evident envy until the door shut. She really must’ve decided Elys didn’t mean the city harm, if she’d brought all this.
On top of the food lay a red flower with layers of round petals and a short stem. It was a different kind than the flower Taia had picked for her during their first day in Alyansa, but Elys put it behind her ear anyway.
“I told you I’d bring you a new one in the hospital,” Taia said, “but I wasn’t sure you’d remember.” Elys didn’t, but Taia was grinning while she watched Elys stammer over the gifts, so that was alright.
“And this is ‘housewarming’?” Taia said, saving Elys from her attempts at thanks. “That’s a nice tradition. We don’t do it here because it’s hard to get people housewares they like and don’t already have. Food allergies are on profiles, so that’s easy. We should do this in Alyansa too.”
When Taia put a pair of sturdy-looking slip-on shoes in the cubby by the door, she grimaced. “City save us, you need an air warming gift, too!” Her thin socks wouldn’t provide much protection from the floorboards.
“Sorry. And thanks.” Taia liked the housewarming idea too much for Elys to spoil it by telling her that this was the first housewarming gift Elys had ever received. She cleared a spot in the remaining clutter for the basket. While she muttered “Match the temperature in here to the temperature outside” to Nisse, Elys picked up the last of the wine boxes she’d ordered after her solo suspect interviews and showed Taia the label. “Want some?” Elys asked over the hum of all the apartment’s windows opening at once.
“Yes please.” Taia made herself very comfortable on Elys’s couch, with her good arm resting on the back of it, her hips settled forward on the cushion, and her legs casually spread. Elys had to focus on pouring so she didn’t cover the kitchen counter in wine.
Elys brought the basket back to the living room and used her foot to pop a table out of the floor for the cups listed in the assembler catalog as Alyansans’ most popular wine containers. When Taia accepted her cup, her smile warmed Elys more effectively than the air from the open windows. The couch was as small as everything else in the apartment. Even at the other end of it, Elys felt extremely close to Taia, and she had no complaints about that.
Taia took a sizable bite out of something she’d unwrapped from the basket. “Okay, there’s one more of these in here. Make sure you eat it before I do.”
Elys found and extracted the second of what appeared to be a sticky biscuit with coconut inside. “Thanks.”
“Now, three less fun things. To start with, I’m sorry about what happened with your apartment’s privacy levels. That was really weird, and I wish we had more detectives free to work on that kind of thing, but finding anybody who might’ve caused the city’s problem is important to everyone.” Elys just nodded. She wouldn’t be the only person whose problems got sidelined to give experts time to search for the city’s error.
“Next thing.” Taia folded a pastry’s recyclable wrapper and set it on the table beside Elys’s crumpled one. “If you’re going to keep interviewing people about the city, I have to give you some advice. You ready?”
Elys got napkins from the kitchen to contain the stickiness. “Sure.”
“You have to ask more open-ended questions, and you have to talk to people for as long as they’ll let you,” Taia said. “I know it’s hard with people you’ve had bad experiences with, like Krebs, or who keep really busy, like Jules. And you don’t have a scripted guide like we do because your topic is so new and unusual. But you’re not a mediator. People don’t know what to expect from you, which means they won’t tell you what they think is a secret if you don’t talk through all the basics of the situation for as long as you both can stand. Now, there is an upper limit to useful conversation length, but you’re nowhere near it.”
Elys had expected an entry level criminal justice lecture, not gentle criticism. “You’ve given this advice before.”
“New mediators sometimes come in talking to interviewees like they talk to the city. People are not machines. They’re not going to spit out an answer you need to the first question you ask.”
Neither did most machines, in Elys’s experience, but growing up here must’ve been... Different. “So, talk longer, ask open-ended questions. Thank you. What do we do if they don’t want to talk to me at all?”
“Like Zahra Wirth, yes.” Taia sighed. “I asked around about her. Rumor is, Honesty Alyansa causes a lot of minor harm. They don’t appreciate incremental steps toward goals, and they’re very shaky on the concept of consent.”
“Ah.” Elys sipped her wine. Out of spite, she had gotten it from a different vineyard than the one Krebs had talked up. The stuff was so sweet it curled her tongue, but it went well with Taia’s gift basket. “You don’t mind saying all that where she can hear you?”
Taia snorted. “She’d prefer I say it in public, but Volontaire district is level three, remember? She can’t hear us in here.”
“She could’ve yesterday.”
“Well, yes. Sorry. That was really strange. If she won’t talk to you and you have evidence she’s involved in whatever’s going wrong with the city, a mediator would go with you to talk to her. Usually one of us just standing around makes the conversation a priority. But you don’t have any proof she’s involved, right? She just makes enough noise about how the city works to be suspicious.”
“Her credentials and city usage records suggest she might know how to make a change to the city without drawing attention to it, and she has the drive for it, I think. She’d have to, to start and run an organization like hers. If nothing else, I want her take on it to see if anything she says points toward whoever did this.”
You’re assuming someone did something, Nisse said in text. It’d missed a lot of Elys’s unsupported assumptions. What had made this one stand out?
Taia said, “You can try knocking on her door. Her address is as public as everything else about her. If you can’t get her that way, Honesty Alyansa’s list of members is public too. And in the meantime, detectives are working hard to find any suspicious activity members of l’Assemblée Tordue, Honesty Alyansa, and City Support might’ve been involved in during the period right before the delays started.”
“I know,” Elys groaned. “They keep asking me questions about that. They’ve made it through about seventy percent of the group members with no results, other than Jules, Wirth, and Nautilus all remaining on the ‘Not Yet Cleared’ list.”
“Nautilus brings us to the last thing I wanted to talk to you about.” Taia set her cup on the table. “I understand why you’d be ashamed of what the RIS’s MCAI did. It can’t be easy to talk about. But it’s important. And... I feel like, if you and I are going to spend more time together, I have to understand why you let that MCAI hurt all those people.”
Elys took a moment to assemble something like a coherent explanation. “It’s like... We were caught between this beautiful potential, and reality, and the reality was we were making it for the Republic government. They wanted it to have the ability to recommend courses of action we hoped it never would. Even though I’ve seen the damage Republic soldiers can do, we gave it those options. It was the only way to approach its potential.
“With the resources the RIS gave us, that MCAI should’ve given the Republic diplomatic solutions too, economic ones, R&D recommendations so they might not even have to... We taught it all that too. Some other team lead might’ve done better, or they might’ve done worse. I took the unique chance to make something amazing, and it could still be amazing, but it became... What Krebs gave it room to be.”
Taia watched Elys for a long moment before she nodded. “Thank you for telling me that. I don’t think I would’ve put anything’s potential above people’s actual experiences, but you thought the Republic would hurt those people whether they had an MCAI’s help or not. I can understand that, I guess.”
Taia took a deep breath and smiled. It only looked forced for a second. “So, we have steps to take, the detectives are going to keep doing what they’re doing... Is that a plan? It sounds like a plan.”
“Sure.”
“Starting tomorrow.” Taia had worn makeup, Elys just now realized, that made her eyes even deeper and her smile even warmer.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” Taia said, “but I wasn’t expecting to miss you so much, these last couple of days.”
Elys shrugged and resolutely did not take the statement as an insult. “I’m part of your job. You deserve breaks.”
Taia wiggled the fingers on the hand she’d had in a sling the last time Elys saw her in person. “I don’t need any more breaks. Listen, I don’t know how things work where you’re from, but in Alyansa we really try to use words to communicate when we want to be more than friends with someone. Like I want to be with you.” Her tone made it sound like Taia had been waiting for Elys to make the first move, and she’d gotten tired of waiting.
“You just said it.” Elys grinned. “I’ve spent a lot of nights wondering how bad it’d be to ask if you were interested when you weren’t on duty.”
“Not bad at all.” Taia tilted her head toward Elys, looking through eyelashes which were very dark red this evening, instead of her natural black.
The wine cups rattled as Elys and Taia shifted closer at the same time, and somebody bumped the table. When their lips met, a current sparked from Elys’s mouth to her spine to the tips of her toes. The soft-firm press of the contact made Elys want to feel that touch everywhere, now.
Taia pulled away a little, letting Elys catch her breath. “Is this okay? Words, remember. And ‘no’ is a word.” Taia smiled like she saw exactly how difficult she’d made talking.
“It’s perfect.” Elys did not follow that with you’re perfect. That would’ve been too much truth when she’d only met Taia two weeks ago.
It was not the last check-in Taia made that evening, even though she never asked about anything dangerous. Apparently she just liked to hear that her partner was having a good time. Elys was happy to oblige. The photophores on the back of Taia’s neck flickered crystalline blue in the dark.