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As it turned out, Elys would have as much company during her interview with Zahra Wirth as it was possible to have. In addition to Taia’s official presence, Wirth wanted to meet at The Lens, a bar in Renforcé district that turned its level one privacy status into a tourist attraction. Visitors could activate visualization hooks throughout the establishment to see what was happening in the bar’s other rooms, or a randomly selected public area elsewhere in Alyansa. The visualizations acted as unmissable reminders that Elys was meeting with a societal openness activist.
The citizenship course had shown Elys how to find the oversight list of people watching her in any public location, without relaying its contents through Nisse. When Elys’s and Taia’s car entered Renforcé district, later than Elys had hoped to but apparently close enough to on time for Alyansan events, Elys glanced over her list.
It had been long while Elys was in the other districts’ public streets. In Renforcé district, the count nearly doubled. The list’s inclusion of most of her observers’ full names didn’t make her any more comfortable with that many people judging her in real time.
Keeping the details of her investigation a secret from any potential city saboteur would’ve made it easier to catch them. What bothered her was the idea of people commenting how she looked at Taia in her bulky mediator armor, what Elys was wearing, what she was saying and how it all marked her as an outsider. People would’ve been doing that ever since Elys arrived, but it’d been harder to stumble over those conversations before.
The Lens was public, so Elys asked Nisse to make a map to Wirth’s reserved table near the center of the packed bar’s second room. The armored mediator Elys didn’t know by name stopped beside the bar’s front door. Taia’s work face in her helmet smiled and said “Thanks” as she passed the mediator on the way inside, so that arrangement must’ve been standard procedure. Maybe they were minimizing the anxiety that mediators invoked in most Alyansans, despite how carefully they handled even obvious aggressors, like the bounty hunters who’d come after Elys.
Nisse added a visual stream of Wirth ordering an alcohol-free fruit drink in an artistically curving glass. Elys shared the map with Taia, although her assistant must’ve done something similar for her. A wall separated the second room from the first, but its hazy, semitransparent material obscured facial features of the other room’s occupants. Bright overhead lights revealed enough of their clothes, hair, and accessories to differentiate them even before their full bios appeared when Elys entered conversation distance.
The Lens augmented its visualization with flat physical displays. Anyone without a Hochberg mutation could still enjoy the atmosphere here. A third of the flat visualizations showed Bencivenni’s mourners.
One visualization was counting down to a public ceremony for the formal dissolution of Bencivenni’s digital assistant. According to the text beside the countdown, half of Alyansa was sending thoughtful messages to the assistant before the city reabsorbed it. The thought of Nisse dissolving that way made Elys wish she could hug her assistant’s swirling shadow mass to her chest.
A media invitation from the bar connected Elys to the sound system. The song playing as they walked to Wirth’s table clarified itself from the surrounding conversation. Its steady beat was a little slower than Elys’s natural gait, and she caught herself slowing to match it.
Taia’s CRU armor still drew wary looks from the Lens patrons as she passed, some of whom had to move so she could get past them. The music’s lyrics began repeating a phrase, so Elys disconnected from it and let it return to the cluttered audio landscape in reality. Anyway, loud music would make it hard to hear Wirth.
The blue profile beside Wirth listed her role as Citizen, like Nautilus’s had. Also like Nautilus, the section she’d composed about herself was longer than Elys had time to read now.
From behind stylish glasses, Wirth gave Elys a long head-to-toe stare. The bruises on Elys’s forehead had turned greenish brown and her clothes had gotten rumpled, even though they’d looked fine when she’d pulled them out of her apartment’s drawers/cleaners. But if all Wirth used to form opinions about people were their clothes, that was her problem, not Elys’s.
Elys followed Taia’s lead to offer the nod-and-chest touch greeting, but Wirth just gave them a nod. Taia’s pursed lips suggested that although just nodding wasn’t a significant insult, it might’ve been a minor one. “Off-worlder, mediator, have a seat.” Wirth waved at two empty chairs, which Taia’s armor would not fit into. Nisse must’ve caught Elys puzzling Wirth’s words out, because it added a text transcript to the table in front of her.
“Wouldn’t you rather address her by name?” Taia moved a chair so she could put her suit in a seated configuration at the table without breaking furniture. “Don’t names share more information than just a couple of facts about us?”
“Everybody knows her name, and it’s not the most important thing about her.” Wirth grinned, quick and sharp.
“But her name is what she’s asked to be called.” Taia’s serious tone implied that anything else would be an insult.
“Fine,” Wirth sighed. “Kundakçı.” To Elys’s surprise, Wirth only mispronounced the A in Elys's family name. “I’m not staying here all night.”
“Right.” Elys watched a raucous table on the other side of the room finish shouting a story and laughing about it. “We’re here about the slow CRU deployment situation, which I’m sure you already know. What do you think about the idea that someone in Alyansa is causing the problem?”
“Off-worlder, you can’t pull off the tough detective role. You just look vexed to be here.”
“That’s how her face is.” Taia turned to Elys to demonstrate a more approachable expression through her helmet. “Relax your brow a little.” Elys attempted to. It felt like she’d opened her eyes a bit wider instead.
Wirth snorted. “You two are kind of cute together. Luckiest off-worlder in Alyansa.”
Taia leaned back a little in a quiet clatter of armored plates, frowning at Wirth talking about Taia’s personal life while Taia was in uniform. Elys said, “True,” which made Taia smile again. “So, the sabotage?”
“You’ve got me convinced it’s a possibility. You and those tests City Support’s run on the subsystems.” Wirth leaned back in her chair and folded her hands on the table, beside her drink. “Could’ve done a full reconstruction, couldn’t you?”
So Wirth did know enough about MCAIs to be dangerous. Elys shook her head. “The test environment is huge, but the city’s much bigger. City Support would have to build it more physical space, and probably run a dedicated power cable in from the hot side of the planet. If we’re still hunting down this error next month, though, they might as well start building.”
Wirth nodded. “Yeah, alright.”
“But what do you know about whoever’s doing this to us?” asked Taia.
“We’ve left so many places for people who mean us harm to hide, it could be just about anyone, couldn’t it?”
Before Wirth got too deep into the lecture she was introducing, Elys said, “It has to be someone who can manipulate the city’s data or decision-making without access to its hardware, and without leaving a trace in the public record or in the city’s metarecords. Well, not one we’ve found, anyway. We’re still looking.”
The number of useful tests Elys and City Support hadn’t started was in the single digits. Several of those were new or modified ones Elys had created for the city, to address how effectively it applied its minute observations of Alyansan behavior to its choices. City Support was still in the process of mapping them, since they changed almost as often as Alyansans’ district agreements. The new tests would begin as soon as the tests currently running concluded.
“And I’m on the list of people with the skills?” Wirth smirked at one of the bar’s garishly lit cameras on the wall behind Elys. “Thanks. Shouldn’t we also be considering off-worlders with applicable skills, whose MCAI’s have a body count?”
“Aside from the fact that I didn’t have access to a pickup, let alone the city, when the problem began, my previous project is the Republic’s MCAI.” And Elys couldn’t time travel back to stop her team from giving it violent enforcement options.
In crime fiction, detectives discussed all their theories in private. That had to be easier than what Elys was trying to do. “As you said, many people have the required skills and opportunity. I don’t know Alyansa or its tech scene well enough to find the saboteur on my own, so I’m here asking for your help.” Maybe Elys could use the openness of her investigation to her advantage. “We talked to Nautilus too, if that makes you feel any better.”
Wirth huffed. “Oh yes, this disaster is definitely art to ask the artists about.” Her tone heavily implied that it wasn’t.
Elys had to stop herself from smiling at how angry that’d make Nautilus when xe heard Wirth say it. “You don’t think Nautilus could’ve done this?”
“Oh, xe could’ve.” Wirth listed other names which Nisse would provide when Elys asked for them later. She could compare them to the list of people the detectives were looking at and maybe, finally, find someone responsible for the problem.
The way Wirth’s eyes moved like she was reading some names off the glasses, which meant they were accommodating a disability instead of just magnifying her eyes. “They all could. And I’ll expect, if I looked, I’d find off-worlders with the right skills who were visiting here for a few days, and who knew somebody with city access willing to help them. Like the city support archon’s RIS agent ex, for example. Not that they knew at the time.” Detectives hadn’t found any of that. Before Elys could ask where Wirth had heard it, Wirth said, “A better question is, why would they?”
“The Republic asked them to, or paid them to,” said Taia.
“Or they want something to change because they see the need. You don’t really think Alyansa is perfect, do you?” Wirth made a different breathy noise, this one more incredulous than the last. “Have you heard Les Conlen talk about how CRUs should be involved in more emergencies than they are?” The name of the — journalist? comedian? — who’d blamed Elys for the bounty hunters coming to Alyansa to kidnap her made her hands clench into fists under the table, no doubt captured on cameras under there for Wirth’s enjoyment later. Or now, if she hooked into its feed.
Taia’s eyes widened. “More emergencies? We’re already responding to almost all of them.”
“You’re not.” Wirth glanced meaningfully between Taia and Elys. “But Conlen has a point. CRUs are invulnerable and their mobile recording suite keeps them honest. Nothing can escalate so far that a mediator isn’t equipped to handle it.”
“There aren’t enough mediators to do all that and specialize sufficiently to help everyone.” Taia breathed deep and spoke at a quieter volume and slower pace when she continued. “Talking people through crisis takes a lot of training, never mind operating the armor safely. Most people do not want to spend that much time training. They want to specialize in skills they find interesting and important, and then get proficient with those as fast as they can. The city would burn out all the people in the big boots, sending them to deal with every minor argument and stubbed toe.” Although the wistful way Taia said that made it sound like she’d like to help with the minor arguments too, if she had the time and energy for it.
Wirth was pulling an impatient face at the camera on the wall again. If she made the city delay CRU deployments, would she even try to keep it a secret? And was the show she was putting on actually persuading Alyansans that she was right?
Although, if Wirth were sufficiently motivated, she’d find ways to hide what she did. But Conlen’s potential involvement was news. At least Elys would have something new to investigate after this conversation.
When Elys refocused on Taia’s and Wirth’s increasingly loud argument, Wirth was saying, “Conlen is the perfect Alyansan news entertainer. His whole purpose is to elevate topics that get Alyansans worked up.”
Taia bit both her lips like she was physically stopping herself from shouting. “Elys, is there anything else you want to ask?”
“Not right now.” Elys stood and Taia joined her so fast she bumped a chair behind her, scraping it against the floor. “Thank you for coming out to meet us,” Elys said to Wirth.
Wirth gave her that sharp grin again. “I’ll be watching to see how this all turns out.”
“Why aren’t you helping us find out what happened?” Taia’s strained tone suggested she was still expending a lot of effort on not shouting. “People are getting hurt. We need all the help we can get.”
“For one thing, nobody invited me to. Until now, I suppose, and aren’t I helpful?” Wirth grinned wider. This time Taia must’ve noticed Wirth’s provocation, because she just took a deep breath and stayed quiet.
“You’ve received a number of invitations, from me.” As annoying as this game was, Elys kept her tone of voice level.
After a beat in which Elys and Taia refused to offer another outraged argument, Wirth said, “Well, I just dabble in AI. It’s Elys’s whole life.”
That made it sound like Elys never thought about anything else. Aside from daydreaming about Taia’s smile and her careful strength, survival had taken up a huge amount of Elys concentration recently, like a sad kind of hobby.
But that did remind her of one more thing she wanted to ask Wirth. “In your dabbling, did you ever forge a judge’s ruling to make my apartment public?”
Wirth threw back her head and laughed. “So you did figure it out.”
“It’s not funny to take people’s choices away from them,” Taia snapped. “I thought your organization wanted people to choose to live in level one privacy.”
“We do! But sometimes you have to show people why they should make that choice. And nobody said a thing about it to you, did they?” Wirth asked Elys. “Because you live just like the rest of us. Boring gray undies and all.”
That was one question answered, and nobody in Alyansa had mocked Elys for what they’d seen her wear and do at home. It’d be a lovely search result for any future clients, if she survived long enough to have any. Besides, someone who would invite the whole universe into a stranger’s home might very well be willing to damage the city’s emergency response capabilities to make a point.
“How did you make the city think the judge had really submitted that ruling?” Elys asked.
“I intercepted the document after I sent it and changed the ID markers. With the right tools, it’s simple.”
The right tools, and knowledge of where to find the markers and how to change them such that the city could still read them and ID checkers wouldn’t sound alarms. If Wirth knew how to do that, she could make other small but disruptive changes to the system which would be hard for the city or City Support to detect.
Wirth sipped her drink while making an exasperated expression at the camera in the wall behind and above Elys. “City Support should look into that, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” Elys said. Now that Wirth had suggested it in public, they would. Elys hooked her arm through Taia’s and led her out before Taia made another attempt at guilting Wirth into revealing information she had no intention of discussing.
––––––––
While Elys and Taia stood outside the Lens waiting for a car to arrive, two mediators walked up to them, making more eye contact and unheard conversation with the mediators following Elys around than with Elys herself. Taia muttered something that might’ve been “Finally.”
One of the new mediators held out an arm to guide Elys and Taia away from the path to the Lens’s door. “Mx. Kundakçı, do you have a few minutes to tell us about your home’s change in privacy levels?”
Elys sighed. “Yeah, but I don’t want to do the whole mediated conversation thing with Wirth.” It wouldn’t change Wirth’s mind or make Elys feel any less exposed.
One mediator went into The Lens while the other walked Elys and Taia outside. A single person in all that armor could arrest, detain, or do whatever mediators did with the offending parties. The one who stayed asked Elys to share anything she wanted to about the event, even though the city had archived it.
“Because this is a stationwide agreement violation,” said the mediator who’d stayed with Elys and Taia, “we’re going to have all the district representatives weigh in on the outcome, along with the judge Wirth impersonated. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to discuss the incident with her tomorrow, or later this week? We can host a virtual conversation if you’d rather not conduct it face to face. Mx. Wirth is willing to speak with you.”
“I’m sure she is,” Elys grumbled. This mediator and the one talking to Wirth must’ve been comparing notes digitally.
Taia’s gloves made the touch on Elys’s arm feel heavy, but still gentle. “I’d be happy to be your support person.”
“No, I need to focus on the city,” said Elys. “The districts should do whatever they have to do, but... Leave me out of it, alright?” Having her apartment exposed to the whole universe for a day had been an unexpected embarrassment, but people had seen most of Elys herself in city central bathrooms. Seeing some trash on her floor shouldn’t have been such a big deal.
The mediator reviewed the resolution process from the citizenship course, the record of events, district and station agreements Wirth had violated, and Wirth’s statement up to the minute, although she was still talking to the other mediator. “We’ll be working with Mx. Wirth and City Support to assure Alyansans that this incident won’t be repeated,” the mediator said. “In the meantime, what do you feel is needed to repair the harm she’s done to you?”
“She knows enough about the city to help us find information about the error, or the person who caused it, if it was intentional damage,” Elys said. “Can I ask her to help us look for it?”
“That’s a reasonable request.” The mediator’s gaze unfocused while they updated their digital notes. “We’ll propose it to her as a public service option to make amends. That will be in addition to anything the districts and the judge need from her.”
“Get her to show City Support how she did it,” Elys said. “That would save them time they could spend on the dispatch delay error.”
Behind their helmet’s faceplate, the mediator frowned very slightly. “District representatives will review this conversation as part of the resolution process.” Which sounded like You’ve asked for enough compensation, thank you, although Elys’s hearing wasn’t entirely reliable. “An outcomes adviser will contact you with the others’ decisions and Mx. Wirth’s progress. Your assistant can direct you to any other resources you may need.”
If the consequences of Wirth’s prank, or whatever making Elys’s apartment a level one area had been, forced her to find something important about the city’s error, that’d be worth the populated universe seeing a few bad angles of Elys in her underwear. She felt less embarrassed about the experience. Maybe there was something to this mediation thing after all.
Elys called a car, which arrived almost at once with four people chatting animatedly in the front of the vehicle and two open seats. The other mediator following Elys around said, “I’ll take the next one.” Elys and Taia made their way to the back two seats while the car’s other occupants crowded against each other to make room for Taia’s armor.
Elys used the car’s shared destination map to suggest a Volontaire district bar as her and Taia’s next destination. Taia sighed and selected the option to go wherever Elys said she was going. While Elys was formulating a distracting question about Taia’s dogs, Nisse put a text notification in Elys’s field of vision. The serialized initialization routine from the test environment had finished.
Just like everything else she and City Support had checked, the test revealed a few minor optimization possibilities and no major errors that might cause the CRU deployment delay. The city had proven itself capable of metacognition when it talked to Elys through Nisse about testing. What must it think of all these people’s concern over its judgement? Requests for reviews of its decisions were on the rise. Thousands more Alyansans than usual, inside and outside City Support, were questioning the city’s judgement.
The car stopped in Volontaire district to let out the group of four. “Let’s skip the bar.” Taia eased her armored suit out of the vehicle.
She walked off in the direction of the CRU dispatch building where she’d leave her armor, and Elys headed for Taia’s apartment and got the cooker working on everyone’s dinners. If not for the combined scent of air-filtered doggy funk and a different sanitizing agent than her apartment’s cleaning bot used, Elys could imagine herself living here too.
She’d like that. Not that she’d say so anytime soon. If she acted too clingy, she might scare Taia off.
The front door snapped open to admit rapid motion and noise. Elys ran toward the bedroom to put a door between her and the faceless bounty hunters.
But dogs were bouncing around with their ears perked up. Taia was taking her shoes off with her back to the door. The mediator’s armored elbows stuck out a little on either side of the doorway, close enough to the floor that they must’ve had their suits in the seated configuration.
Elys leaned on a wall while her heart pounded. Some night, bounty hunters would be in that hallway, or the one outside her apartment. Her nightmares explicitly demonstrated how they’d take her back to the Republic if she didn’t find the city’s error before they found her.
“Are you alright?” Taia stood in the kitchen, frowning while she watched Elys catch her breath.
“Just jumpy. Four minutes until dinners are done.”
Taia described who she and the dogs had met that evening over her customized-recipe chipotle orange jackfruit and rice. Nearby, the dogs ate a version she’d customized for them too. After Elys put everyone’s dishes in drawers to be cleaned, she said, “I haven’t seen much of Conlen’s show. Is he always as terrible as you said?”
Taia rolled her eyes. “He’s obnoxious. He’s just a summarizer, and he always says he’s not a journalist, but he also goes out of his way to record his own perspective in public areas and acts like he’s delivering news and facts when he’s really just... Oh, here, I’ll put him on, you’ll see. Only flat, though. I don’t want to think about him sitting in the living room with us.”
She invited Elys to her visualization. Like Elys, Taia had kept the wall in front of the couch empty for things like this. When Elys accepted the invitation, the wall became a window into a bar much smaller than The Lens. The visualization suggested using a dream that inspired “attentive vigilance.”
Taia glanced at Elys. “You don’t like dreams, do you?”
“I’m more comfortable with my own chemistry.” Elys didn’t want to drag all her bad experiences with them into this otherwise tolerable moment.
In the visualization, the bartender shimmered, then settled into the shape of a lovely woman with Taia’s coppery sunset complexion. Considering how accurate the city’s customization algorithms were, Elys wouldn’t have been surprised if it’d reproduced Taia in her entirety. Apparently Elys’s subconscious was still stuck on the shorter and lither people Elys usually ended up dating.
Before she spent much time worrying about how much Taia’s bartender resembled Elys, the man in the hoodie sitting at the bar turned around and said, “My friends, you made it to Les Conlen’s Truth Hour.” He’d worn the same hoodie while he blamed Elys for attracting the bounty hunters who’d come to Alyansa to kidnap her. “Come in, sit down, let’s talk news. And the only news me and everybody else are talking about is the death of Oron Bencivenni.”
Conlen and the bartender froze in place. “This isn’t live,” Taia said unnecessarily. “See how he just implied that everyone thinks what he thinks? He does this in every episode I’ve... Stumbled on by mistake.”
“You do not hate watch the Truth Hour. Got it.” Elys pretended to quail under Taia’s half-serious glare.
The bartender resumed standing around looking attentive while Conlen reached for a can of something with a bright blue logo. He reviewed the facts the reporter had told Elys about how Bencivenni died, using more graphic and dramatic details than the journalist had. “Now, some of you have — yes, Amifer from Unité district, that’s what I’m talking about! Some of you are saying that we don’t know everything, and I think you’re right. Here’s why.”
He added a table of dates to the visualization. “All these dates? Bencivenni was off world. And you know how he got off-world? He hopped on ships like these.” A small image of a passenger liner appeared on Conlen’s other side, opposite the dates.
“Oh, where is he going with this?” Taia muttered.
“You don’t take that ship on a ride to Iskamaisanyi. That is a ship bound for Republic space.” Conlen added a column to the date table showing long strings of numbers and letters. “When me and the city compared these ship IDs, do you know what we found? Lots of destinations in Republic space, that’s right. So our man Bencivenni was a public servant, but he wasn’t doing all his service for Alyansa, was he? What I’m saying, what I’m just waiting on confirmation from those who know, is that Bencivenni was a Republic spy.” A dramatic orchestra chord punctuated Conlen’s announcement. “Every time he left Alyansa, he took ways to hurt the city back to—”
“What the fuck.” The bar scene disappeared from Taia’s blank wall as she disconnected from the visualization and Elys did too. “What the fuck?!” Although she was angrier than Elys had ever seen her, that word in Taia’s mouth was both delightful and distracting. “I can’t believe this stasher said that about an Alyansan who just passed on! That selfish, arrogant...” Taia made a wordless noise of fury, attracting the dogs’ worried stares. “How does he think Oron’s family will feel if they hear him say that?” Her closed fist pounded on the table, rattling dishes and startling the dogs.
Mighty’s face conveyed dignified reproach even without Nisse’s offered translation: I was comfortable. Now you’re loud and mad for no reason. Troll ducked his square head like Taia had yelled at him.
“Sorry, babies, I’m sorry,” Taia told them. “I shouldn’t watch Conlen. He makes me so angry.”
“I can see that,” said Elys. “But Wirth acted like he was related to the error, so sometime, not now,” Elys raised her hands to ward off Taia’s ire, “I’m going to have to see what he said about the city and the CRUs. Wirth wouldn’t have mentioned him if she didn’t think he had something worth listening to, and I can’t afford to ignore a potential cause of the city’s error because I don’t like talking to the people involved. I don’t have to tell you about it.”
“I’m not sure either of them ever say anything worth listening to,” Taia said.