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The propriety around keeping mediators anonymous meant that Elys took a car from Certitude district to Taia’s apartment in Volontaire, and Taia traveled by train. Elys stood outside Taia’s door with her mediator bodyguards until Taia arrived to let her in, wearing the clothes she’d left Elys’s place in that morning.
Her apartment layout was almost identical to Elys’s new one, although little moving visualizations of people and animals crowded every wall and surface of Taia’s home. Individuals, except for Taia herself, rarely repeated. The color scheme ran to amber and dark wood. Dog toenails scrabbling on the faux wood floor announced the arrival of the apartment’s other two residents.
Elys patted and fussed over both dogs until they let her take off her shoes in peace. “So, what did the other mediators have to say? And how did they know where Vatirah was?”
“It’s not a crisis anymore, so the mediators are keeping the scene clear for as long as the detectives need it and calming down upset folks until experts arrive to take care of them. About Vatirah, though...” Taia sighed. “It’s not easy for Alyansa to stay independent. The city watches publicly available streams, and I feel like it has an archive for those too. We also make deals with a lot of places to receive their records, and we archive those as securely as they do, so if it’s not public there, it’s not public here. That’s the kind of deal we have with Iskamaisanyi.”
If Elys hadn’t run across that much foreign data already, then the city was processing it separately from Alyansan data. That was good. And really, she couldn’t imagine Jules bringing her to Alyansa and then not giving her access to everything they thought she needed to find the error. Unless Jules had been lying about their relationship to that error all this time.
“Sometimes we need to know what people are doing elsewhere in the universe, if it’s going to affect Alyansa, and it’s not all public knowledge,” Taia said. “That’s where people like Bencivenni come in. According to the secure records, he spent years at a time in the Republic, sending that essential information back to Alyansa.”
Elys had more questions, but someone knocked on the door, then opened it. Taia had a clearer view of the hallway outside than Elys did. She stood with her usual relaxed and friendly posture. The dogs ran for the door with their ears up and their tongues hanging out of canine smiles.
“Mama!” said Taia. “Hi!”
“Hello, everyone. Oh, just two?” Taia’s mother’s head only reached Taia’s chest, although she had Taia’s same wide nose, brown skin, black hair, and golden brown eyes. Her eyes sparkled with much more mischief than Elys had ever seen in Taia’s. Both the Nadal women were beautiful, in their own ways.
Taia stood and waved at Elys to get her standing too. “Mama, this is Elys Kundakçı, my, uh, friend.”
“An uh-friend, really?” Taia’s mother offered that hand-to-chest-and-nod greeting. The citizenship course had confirmed that Alyansans only did that for first-time in-person meetings.
Elys returned the gesture the way the course indicated. “Pleasure to meet you.”
The smile on the older woman’s face softened. “I’m Rosela. Taia has such good taste in uh-friends, but her others weren’t so... Republic.”
“Mama,” Taia groaned. She’d talked about Elys to her family? “I told you, she’s in Alyansa to help us with the city. Hasn’t Talexi Reyes or said something about her on one of your shows yet?”
“Talexi might’ve mentioned her,” Rosela allowed. “But you can’t blame me for wanting to meet her in person.”
“I can’t.” Taia winked at Elys in a way that Elys wouldn’t have in front of anybody’s parent, especially her own.
“Well, I just came to see how you were doing with all this. And to say hi to these two.” Rosela patted Mighty and Troll.
“No you didn’t, but okay.” Taia gave Rosela a hug. “We’re sad, but we’re alright, Mama.”
Rosela studied Taia’s face, nodded, and put her shoes on. She clipped Taia’s dog containment box to her dress’s sash. Someday Elys would make time to learn how that box worked.
“Alright.” Rosela waved from the doorway. “Be good.”
“We’re working, Mama, love you, bye.” Taia watched the door close behind Rosela and the dogs, then sighed. “‘Just two?’” Taia mockingly imitated her mother. “She saw us in the hallway. She lives a couple units down. Are Republic mamas this nosy, or are Alyansan ones special?”
“Mine didn’t start out Republic.” That came out more bitter than Elys intended, and she took a breath to focus on making her answer match Taia’s tone. “She wouldn’t ask if I was handling an event well.”
“Let’s see if mine sends the siblings to interrupt us too. If she doesn’t, that’s how you know she likes you.”
“How many siblings do you have?”
“Three, all younger than me.” Taia sounded proud of that. “Mama’s qualification scores were in the top seventh percentile.” And the city would have something to do with that parental qualifying process, the way it did with all the other official activities in Alyansa. Elys would’ve been impressed, if not for the difficulties it’d been having with CRU deployment. “What about you?”
“Just the one sister. We think one of us was an accident, but we don’t agree on which it was. People can have kids on Reznikov without the medical intervention it takes here. Might be the only thing we had that Alyansa doesn’t.”
“Well, Mama adopted a couple of us out of other independent stations, but, no, it can’t happen by accident, either way.” Taia sighed. “So, back to Bencivenni.”
Elys’s face must’ve been showing her feelings about the earlier topic. The error’s new body count had been depressing enough without bringing up her family, too. “You were saying he was a spy, right?”
“No! Well, I don’t know his exact role. I only know where he’s been and what he’s been doing because what happened required a really thorough autopsy. Officially he died of a heart attack, which is just... I wouldn’t have believed it if... The detectives say it’s easy to make a murder look like a natural heart attack. I don’t know how they walk around Alyansa like everything is fine when they know things like that.”
“The same way you do?” Elys said. “Just because the people whose crises you intervene in don’t always try to kill each other doesn’t mean they aren’t doing terrible things.”
“That’s the truth.” Taia slumped onto her couch. The fabric’s cream and brown pattern matched, and mostly concealed, a thin layer of dog hair. The front door opened just wide enough to let the dogs bound over to join Taia on the couch, with a great deal of squirming and half-hearted growls.
“CRUs know what to do with a heart attack.” Taia petted Troll’s head with enough pressure to keep him from bruising her jaw with his skull in his ecstatic delight at winning his spot on the cushion beside her from Mighty, who seemed to be scowling at Troll from the corner he'd squished her into. “If the one the city sent had gotten there within the first five minutes after he went down... I mean, even I would’ve had a good chance to save him, if I’d been there in time with the right equipment, and I don’t do much extra emergency medical training. It was the responding unit’s specialty. The city picked a good one. It just didn’t get them to Bencivenni until twelve minutes after someone called for help. That’s too long.”
“So the mediators could’ve gotten to him sooner?”
“That’s the talk among the CRUs. There are two dispatch centers in Certitude district. One’s got mostly mediators prepped for reserve rescue, and the other’s urban rescue. Urban rescue should’ve been eight minutes away, max. I know it doesn’t sound like much of a difference, but with heart attacks, four minutes matter.” Taia sighed. Mighty sighed too, and hopped off the couch to lean on Taia’s legs. “Mama’s on medication that messes with her heart. It could’ve been her, you know? This can’t go on.”
––––––––
Taia, Elys, and the dogs spent most of an hour on Taia’s couch. While Elys checked on all the active city assessments, Taia watched Alyansans emotionally melting down across the station. She dabbed at her nose and eyes with recyclable strips of absorbent cloths that every Alyansan room seemed to have a dispenser for.
Alyansans were filling Elys’s message inbox, and presumably all other citizens’ inboxes too, with new station-wide proposals meant to protect people from whatever happened to Bencivenni, even though investigators hadn’t released many details. Calls to finish personal projects Bencivenni left undone were resolving into organized public efforts. Elys would appreciate that when her time came. Songs sympathetic musicians claimed to have composed and recorded that day accompanied the messages and news coverage.
In the meantime, she saw no evidence that the city was mixing Alyansan data with data from other stations. The way City Support organized the streams, they’d effectively made two separate systems. As impressive as that was, it didn’t shed any light on the CRU dispatch error.
“I should be down there,” Taia said.
In the visualization she’d shared with Elys, hundreds of people converged on a memorial garden in Bencivenni’s home district. Candles, real and digital, were so abundant that the cameras above the garden recorded and transmitted the smoke scent along with visual, audio, and environmental data. A digital rendition of Bencivenni, ten stories tall, ghostly transparent, and a decade younger than his public record depicted him, strode among the mourners. One of the new songs about him played for anyone who wore a pickup within eight blocks of the garden, according to an article about the memorial in progress.
“We should both be down there.” Taia stood to put on her shoes. The dogs bounded around the space between, less exuberantly than they might’ve if Taia weren’t so sad.
“I’m pretty sure I’m doing more good looking at the city analyses. I can do that at my place, though.” Even if one stranger’s death had been enough to upset Elys, she preferred to mourn alone.
She stared at the grieving Alyansans in the visualization without really seeing them. When she’d gotten stuck in city function visualizations lately, she’d been working on another project. Taia wouldn’t be her confident, happy self until City Support found and fixed the city’s error, but this might help a little. “Before you go... Just a minute.”
Elys reached into a large pants pocket and pulled out a stack of folded fabric made with the red squares pattern she’d caught Taia admiring on Elys’s first day in Alyansa. “It’s cooler at night. I thought you might want this.”
Taia looked too surprised. This was the wrong kind of gift, or the timing was bad, or Elys needed to give her more presents. When Taia unfolded the fabric, it fell into the triangular shape Elys had selected from the assembler catalog.
“Oh, it’s beautiful!” Taia squeezed the shawl in both hands. “And so soft! What is this made of?”
“Blanket yarn, I think it said?” The catalog had suggested several materials for baby blankets, and Elys had the assembler make and recycle at least ten copies of the shawl before she chose this one.
“Of course you’d pick yarn for some other project and it’d turn out beautifully.” Taia swept the shawl over her shoulder and pulled it up around her chin to press the soft fabric against her face. It hung on her shoulders better than it had on the catalog model. The dogs sniffed it but seemed to understand that biting it would upset their human. “But I didn’t get you anything!”
Elys shrugged and concentrated on not smiling too widely for the circumstances. “You got blown up for me, and I really appreciate that. I mean, please don’t do it again, and also, thank you.”
“I wish we had an occasion to celebrate, but... It’ll be good to have something soft to hold onto.”
They rode the elevator down together. Just as the door opened on the building’s lobby, Taia kissed Elys, and then strode toward the street with Mighty and Troll on either side of her. Elys stood in a pleasant daze watching them walk away. The elevator doors slid closed and she had to mash the Open button to leave before it returned to Taia’s floor to pick up Elys’s bodyguards.
And Taia acted like that intimacy was part of everyday life. She’d just kissed Elys and walked away, and it felt... Good. Like Taia had plenty of affection to spare. Like that could happen here.
On her walk back to her own apartment, Elys watched a popular compilation of Alyansans’ shocked reaction to this single death of someone most of them did not know. An RIS officer’s death wouldn’t even make the Republic news. Here, everyone seemed to care about Bencivenni. Mediators’ white armor spread throughout the crowd in Soutien district, gravitating toward the most upset mourners.
The CRUs could retrain to be less reliant on the city. The training regimen Taia kept talking about would make that simple enough. But Alyansans longed to believe in the city. That was clear on every outraged face in the visualizations.
Elys believed in it too. She wouldn’t mention CRU retraining again until there was no other option.
––––––––
During the night, a message notification from Zahra Wirth floated across Elys’s citizenship course material. She’d been expecting an update from Nisse on City Support’s hyperparameter testing, which focused on elements that controlled the city’s training algorithms. It’d been years since City Support had run those tests last.
The message notification wasn’t from Nisse. Elys ignored it for at least thirty seconds, until the sender’s name filtered into her consciousness. When it did, she flailed around locating and putting on pants, at which point she realized the message was a recording, not a conversation invitation. Choosing a clear piece of wall, she played the message.
The city, through Nisse, added text beside the message warning that it was in full simulative format. That kept Elys from thinking the background sounds and smells that came with it were emanating from somewhere in her own apartment. She activated the message as soon as the option appeared.
In the message, Wirth leaned against Elys’s wall, copper skin glowing in professional lighting. Small rings in her nose and ears caught light in a warmer and brighter spectrum than Elys chose for her apartment. Her long, wavy, dark hair was shaved nearly to her scalp on one side. Beneath clear glasses which either offset a Hochberg mutation disorder or made an ostentatious fashion accessory. Makeup done in the slightly uncanny shades popular in Alyansa accentuated the serious expression on Wirth’s face.
“Alright, off-worlder,” she said. “It’s time we talked.”