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Elys returned to her apartment to watch more Les Conlen Truth Hour episodes. Aside from dedicating time to viewer opinions even more inane than Conlen’s own, his technique for sharing news seemed to be weaving approximately four facts into an unlikely story which pit the average Alyansan, and sometimes the city, against one of several conspiracies. Off-worlders, as an undifferentiated group, were a common antagonist.
While Conlen ranted in an archived episode about the bounty hunters who’d injured Elys and Taia, Elys checked on a test she had cobbled together for determining whether the city’s “compatibility factors,” which described how effectively the city expected a given expert to work with the Alyansans who needed help, was slowing down CRU deployment. The city had been calculating compatibility factors in every dispatch decision made in the past eighty years. It was taking longer to do that now, but not significantly longer than any other stage of the delayed dispatch process.
After this, she had two tests left running, and the Castillo series. The new environmental understanding test or the one focusing on expected deployment behavior would find the error, or the Castillo series would highlight the subsystem causing the problem. Elys might have the answer by the end of the night.
She opened a drawer where she’d found mild alertness dreams and dropped one on the floor beside her, where she’d probably forget it and step on it later. Increased alertness didn’t always translate into increased attention to what happened around her.
“Nisse, where are we on the remaining tests?”
Nisse paused Conlen to add test progress reports mid-air in front of the living room wall. The environmental test and the behavior test were proceeding without any errors developed or found. The second Castillo series still had hours to go.
“...off-worlders are always trying to take advantage of us,” Conlen said. “The city is constantly defending us from them.” The audience conversation flooded with transcribed messages of agreement.
Elys was rooting for it too, and not just because her continued stay on this planet relied on its improved performance. The city, and the City Support personnel who’d brought it this far, deserved better than to be ignored out of fear.
A notification from Nisse appeared beside Conlen’s show, updating Elys on Zahra Wirth’s Honesty Alyansa activities. The group was spending the evening on a protest and recruitment drive in Soutien district, where Bencivenni had lived. A lot of people were announcing that they’d joined.
Nisse appended articles regarding Bencivenni’s death. Nobody with facts had disputed the heart attack cause of death, but many articles implied the death was a nefarious plot by some enemy targeting Bencivenni in particular. That would be more comfortable than acknowledging that anyone’s frail body might betray them at any time, and the city might not be able to save them.
The environmental understanding and behavior tests finished. Nisse put the results on the wall. The output read as more jumbled and lower level than the older tests, since Elys had practically no time to refine these before implementation.
“Okay,” she said to Nisse, who hovered near the floor under the report. “This means the Castillo series will find the subsystem with the error.”
You’re making an assumption, said Nisse’s text.
––––––––
Two hours and thirty-two minutes after Elys lay down for some chemically assisted sleep, she woke up enough to put her pickup on and ask Nisse for a progress report for the Castillo series. City Support had finished it while she slept. They found no efficiency impairments in any of its subsystems, even with the modifications Elys had recommended.
In every other MCAI catastrophe she’d evaluated, a test had eventually told her what mistake the MCAI was making. Now, every test had failed to locate the city’s error.
Despite the comfortable temperature in her apartment, Elys stank of sweat. She threw off her blanket and sat on the edge of the bed. Dizziness bent her almost in half. Her heart pounded so hard her chest hurt.
She’d forced herself to sleep with the unsettling knowledge that at least she was proceeding down the logical path, checking every known cause of any error, not just the types that might cause the dispatch delays. And now, overnight, she’d failed.
There was nothing left to test. Either some skilled individual was manipulating the city without leaving any evidence of their intrusion, or the city, in its massive age and sprawl, was making an error no MCAI had made before. People spent their whole lives exploring problems like that.
Elys didn’t have that kind of time. With the city still delaying CRU deployments, bounty hunters would catch up with her. Escaping had added years to her prison sentence, which would give the RIS all the time they needed to kill her with the degree of anonymity they preferred, or to injure her so severely that she wouldn’t be able to share any secrets she had left.
Her breath came in shallow gasps. If her pounding heart killed her now, wouldn’t that be better? That had to be what was happening. She couldn’t get enough air. A dark border was forming around the edges of her vision. All she heard was frantically beating heart.
Nisse materialized between her feet. Blue cat eyes formed near the center of its shadow-thread tangle to gaze up at her. “Elys, you may be having a panic attack.” The assistant’s gravelly voice, generated in Elys’s mind, cut through the pounding of her heart. “It’s temporary and it’s not fatal. The city’s deciding who to call to help you.” It didn’t bother asking if she wanted a dream. Even calming dreams would only make this worse.
She’d never had help with a panic attack in the Republic. The city could’ve activated the mediators outside her door. Why hadn’t it? The error, or some Alyansan policy, must’ve prevented it.
“In the meantime,” Nisse said, “could you try closing your eyes and—”
Elys shut her eyes tight. Sweat trickled over her temple and down her neck. “Ask Taia to come, Nisse, please ask her.” Elys would’ve been more grateful for the city’s honesty if she didn’t feel like she was about to pass out.
Nisse sat silent between her feet for a very long second. Elys had gotten used to its quick responses in Alyansa. “I’ve asked her,” it finally said. “If I show you where she is in Alyansa, will that make you feel better?”
“Let’s try it.”
“I’ll ask her if that’s okay. In the meantime, look at this.”
Nisse produced a map of the section of Volontaire district that separated Elys’s apartment and Taia’s. A circle icon with an image of Taia’s smiling face, her real one, marked a position in Taia’s apartment building. She couldn’t just leave, of course. Elys was waking her up and taking her away from her dogs and her work and her friends and whatever plans she had for the morning.
That was assuming she decided to come. Given that Elys had done nothing but disrupt Taia’s life since she’d arrived, Taia was not exactly incentivized to drop everything and help her. Again.
“Taia confirmed that she’s coming here, Elys,” Nisse said. “And she said it’s okay for you to watch her on the way.”
Nisse didn’t reveal a simulative stream of Taia’s trip, although it could have. That would’ve been too much additional stimulation for Elys to handle. Instead, she watched Taia’s smiling face drift ever closer to Elys’s apartment building on the map, picking up speed as Taia presumably summoned a car.
By the time Taia arrived, Elys was still a sweaty, shaking mess, but she no longer breathed like she was running for her life. Even though she’d watched Taia’s image enter the building on Nisse’s map, the knock on the front door made her jump. Elys ran her hands through her hair to stop it from sticking up all around her head.
When she opened the door, Taia stood there smiling just like the picture Elys had been watching, although she looked more concerned than the image had. She wore soft-looking loose pants and a simple shirt with a gold bird printed on its front. The fact that she’d come dressed in pajamas, possibly, not armored against a physical threat, was calming all on its own.
“Hey, there,” Taia said, almost too quietly for Elys to hear her in the apartment building’s morning soundscape. She raised a thermos in each hand. “You want water or tea? I recommend the tea, personally.”
“Sure,” Elys said without giving the choice any thought. The thermos Taia handed her was warm, as was the gentle kiss she placed on Elys’s lips.
“Come on, let’s sit down and just breathe for a few minutes.” Taia toed her shoes off and nudged them into the rack by the door. “When you’re ready, you can tell me what’s going on.”
The tea was floral and tangy. Elys and Taia sat on the couch, a couple steps from the front door. Before prison, Elys never got claustrophobic. She should add some images of the outdoors to her walls; make her little apartment feel less like a cell.
“I. Um.” Elys swallowed tea and a bit of her panic. “What happened...”
“It’s okay. We can sit for a moment. You’re hyperventilating. That means breathing too fast. Let’s... Breathe... Slowly.” Taia’s green shirt was cut beautifully for a breathing demonstration. The gold bird’s rising and falling wings really added to her soothing presence.
Once Elys’s breathing slowed, Taia listened while Elys recounted the test results and drank tea. “I’m missing something,” Elys said. “Obviously. I’m not finished looking for what’s causing the delay. Do you think they’ll understand that?”
“They who? asked Taia.
“Jules. City Support. Mediators. Alyansans. Whoever decides who stays on-planet and who has to go.”
“Alyansans realize that the city is complex. City Support training courses are open to everyone. Lots of people start the introductory course and quit because it’s too complicated.”
“Can I get a list of who’s taken the Support courses in the past year, say? Any one of them might’ve gotten the access they needed to do something to the city, right?”
Taia frowned. “You could see level one and two participants, and ask individuals at higher privacy levels to tell you if they completed it. If you want more, you’d have to show a judge evidence that completing the course was all it took to be capable of damaging the city. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen evidence like that so far.”
“We have looked at all the likely causes of this error, and the unlikely ones too.”
“And you’ve found a lot of potential Alyansan... Suspects, basically?” Taia sighed. “I still hate that an Alyansan could be doing this. Didn’t the big reward for your capture getting announced right after you started this investigation mean that the Republic did this to us?”
“That, and Jules has had something against the Republic since before the city started slowing down.” Jules, who had spent all their most useful hours in the public city center building, searching for the same error as Elys, with the same lack of results. And they hadn’t drawn any attention to their efforts, so praise and thanks seemed like an unlikely motivation for sabotage.
“If the technical stuff isn’t showing you anything you can use,” Taia said, “let’s take another look at the people who might be involved. And then we can work on your citizenship course. I think you’ll have a lot easier time solving the city’s problem if you’re not worrying that Alyansa will banish you if you don’t solve it fast enough.”
Elys frowned at her over the thermos of tea. “You think they won’t?”
“Alyansans understand that intentions matter. I also believe that Alyansans know the difference between a real threat to all of us, like a broken city, and bounty hunters who are looking for one person.”
“Believe” wasn’t “know.” But Taia’s complete faith in her people looked too comforting for Elys to risk damaging it with argument.
Between the two of them, they turned up a few Republic ties among City Support members, all of which the detectives working on the potential sabotage angle had already investigated. Some of Nautilus’s hobbyist friends had played harmless games with the city’s responses to particular stimuli, but the city had rebalance itself within hours of all but two of those, which it reported and got City Support’s help to resolve.
Zahra Wirth and Honesty Alyansa never came up in any of their additional reading. Because of Krebs’s role in the RIS, his inquiries about the city’s capabilities appeared in the records. Other off-world government agents’ names came up for similar reasons.
“Are you reading about that Republic official again?” Taia must’ve caught Krebs’s name in her and Elys’s shared visualization.
“Yeah. He hasn’t come back to Alyansa, I know.” Elys had set about thirty alerts to tell her if Krebs re-entered Port district, which he’d have to do if he were returning to Alyansa legally. “But he’s a genius at covering up his mistakes and he’s got enough connections in Alyansa that he could get an invite to Nautilus’s hackathon events if he wanted one. If we’re looking for a Republic connection—”
“They’d still have to be here to hurt the city. Otherwise it corrects itself, right?”
“Yeah.” Given the volume of specific and applicable data the city had at its disposal, and all the tests City Support had run, any errors should’ve been bright and blinking signs first to the city, then to the people who worked with it.
Taia stood and stretched, which involved bending in several interesting directions. Elys lost her place in the document she was reading. “Twenty million people live here, and it still sounds like you suspect all of us,” Taia said. “You can’t live like that. How about we do something else for a while and come back to this?”
“Something other than what you infiltrated Republic space to bring me here to do?” Elys forced her tone to lighten, but Taia had sacrificed more to keep Elys safe than any other Alyansan.
“Yep. I’m thinking you’ll have a different perspective on us if you finish your citizenship course. Show me where you are in that. Then we’ll get back to accusing people of betraying Alyansa, I promise.”
As Taia pointed out, Elys had made more progress in the citizenship course than she’d thought she had. It was also more progress than she’d made finding the city’s error, which Taia kindly did not mention. “Once you’re a citizen, the diplomats will negotiate to lower the reward for you.” Taia put an arm around Elys’s shoulders and squeezed. “That might take some pressure off you, right?”
Elys tilted her head until it rested on Taia’s arm. “If violent teams of kidnappers were less incentivized to break into Alyansa and drag me back to the Republic, yeah, I might be less stressed.” The odd angle she met Taia’s eyes with was probably what made Taia smile this time.
By the time Taia went home to take the dogs for a late morning walk, Elys could explain eighty percent of the course material and make logical guesses about everything else. She spent a few more hours studying, to make sure she’d learned enough.
When she passed the final exam, she stared at the result in the visualization for at least ten minutes. It was the first “no major errors found” test result that she’d been happy to see since she came to Alyansa.
As an Alyansan citizen, all the CRUs, not just Taia’s, would fight for her as hard as they fought for any other Alyansan. This was her city struggling, her station, her home in every way that mattered. Her first home that the Republic hadn’t poisoned with its life-wasting rhetoric.
She hadn’t expected to feel this ownership of it after less than a week on-planet, and less than an hour as a citizen. And it would now be much harder for anyone to remove Elys from Alyansa before she found the city’s error.
Looking at the new dark blue background for her profile, the other half of the Alyansan flag color scheme from the yellow that’d warned others of her off-world nationality before, a sudden certainty confirmed that she wanted to stay in Alyansa. She wanted to stay with Taia, and she wanted the city to keep them both safe.
By the time she’d read the test results and congratulations yet again, she felt like she’d spent the whole morning running for her life instead of sitting around her apartment. She slept for a couple hours. When she woke, she composed a request to Alyansa’s Off-world Affairs and Trade Archonate.
In a pitiful mix of formal language and abject pleading that heated Elys’s face even though nobody but the city read over her shoulder, she begged for help getting the reward for her capture lowered. It was in every Alyansan’s best interest that the Republic quit contracting people to enforce their laws outside their territory.