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As often happened while Elys was embroiled in a project, she’d spent hours sitting in about one square meter of her apartment. The walk to city central felt interminable. The outcomes adviser interrupted it, although she kept moving while they listed things the districts wanted Zahra Wirth to do to make up for impersonating a judge. Wirth had agreed to help search for the city’s error, which was all Elys cared about. She got rid of the adviser as quickly and politely as she could.
City Support personnel echoed the other Alyansans’ welcome. Today’s meeting included not just the archons, but as many people as the organization could spare. At least a hundred of them were gathering in the garden Elys and Taia had walked through on Elys’s first day in Alyansa. Nearly a hundred more connected to a shared visualization space. Every few seconds, more people joined that stream.
If this many people were attending a meeting, then who was watching for the inevitable missteps of any MCAI this integrated into a station? The longer the search for the error continued, the more mistakes would slip past City Support, while the city did less for the people it was designed to serve. Citizens would devote more and more of Alyansa’s resources to fixing the city’s mistakes, until their whole system of living became untenable.
The garden represented an enormous investment of water and space on such a remote planet, but it was a beautiful place to talk about an ugly problem. Reznikov could never have afforded a garden this big, before or after the invasion. Even Mars, near the economic center of the populated universe, only found resources for gardens in well-off neighborhoods.
Maybe, if the Republic had left Reznikov to develop on its own... But she’d never know how that would’ve turned out. Alyansa had even larger parks than this one. Elys was here to help them keep it.
Despite the scenery and the unremittingly lovely weather the city had scheduled, nobody looked happy to be here. Even if the rest of the city worked perfectly, it was hard to take pride in their work when someone had died due to an error City Support couldn’t find. Only the children playing at the group’s edges looked unaffected.
Elys sat on the low wall by the street-side exit, where the mediators following her around and reminding her of the city’s failure to protect her had plenty of room to stand. She’d only been there a few minutes when a new mediator sent one of her escort members away and vaulted over the wall about a meter from Elys, wearing the face Taia wore on duty. The armored boots thudded into the grass and startled Elys, but the mediator’s profile bore Taia’s ID number, so Elys relaxed. Several City Support people moved to stand or sit farther from the armored suit.
“Hey.” Taia locked her suit legs into the seated configuration. “Sorry, I meant to be early but I started a conversation that got deeper than I expected.”
Elys very much wanted to kiss her, but aside from the helmet in the way, this was as close to a workplace as her mediator role came. “That seems like something that’d happen to you a lot.”
“It does.” Taia’s gaze shifted to the side, where Elys’s profile would appear. “And hey, congratulations, citizen! You don’t need a liaison anymore, but the city said I ought to be here anyway.”
Another odd level of interest in an individual. “Did it say why?”
“Nope! I’m sure it’s got a good reason.”
“Well, it has good taste.”
Either Taia’s work face blushed more easily than her real one, or Elys needed to learn what to look for on Taia’s actual face, ideally through extensive exposure via flirting in a variety of environments. Elys would miss Taia’s company as her liaison, but her mediator work was important to her, so Elys would cope.
“Alright,” said Jules as another crowd of physical attendees entered the garden, “let’s get to it.” The audio in the shared visualization made Jules sound like they were just a person or two in front of Elys, although many more people stood between her and them. “The update, which you don’t really need because I know you’ve all been working as hard as I have—”
“Not true,” signed one of the people sitting on a low tree branch. A text translation appeared in the visualization almost in real time.
“You talk like you have an interesting home life, but you’re here now, so which is it?” Jules’s tense smile did not reach their eyes. Some people laughed. Others whispered to their neighbors before dropping soothing dreams on the ground by their feet.
“The update is,” Jules said, “according to all our assessments, the city should be performing as well as we can possibly expect. And we know it isn’t. Yes, that’s hard for us to deal with. All of Alyansa is dealing with it too, and we feel responsible because we’re out here trying to fix it while everyone else watches and worries, right? People are worried.”
Taia caught Elys’s eye and made the sort of sympathetic cringe that said without words, “They’re not very good at this, are they?”
“Alyansans are worried because we can’t keep up with agreement changes like we used to, and because of the latest incident,” Jules said over arriving stragglers greeting their coworkers. “The one involving Oron Bencivenni. So we’re going to study that today, all together. I know it’s disturbing. Some of you can’t help us on this one. But we’re going to do our best for the next hour, and then we’ll talk to the CRU who tried to save him.”
The visualization space filled with data and records of the city’s actions in the period immediately preceding and during the call for help to save Bencivenni. Elys joined many people in the garden breathing a sigh of relief at working with data, not the tragedy they represented. The ambient dream mixture they all breathed in tended toward calm focus, again. Alyansans liked that kind even more than Elys did.
“...if you have questions about CRUs or Alyansa,” Taia whispered under the volume that would’ve gotten included in the group conversation. Since Jules was still speaking in the visualization and other people around them were talking too, Elys lip read some words and inferred others. “...citizen... liaison... I’m... come up with...” Nisse – and the city – must’ve caught Elys struggling. They boosted Nisse’s Taia-specific audio filter. “...to ask that CRU when they get here.”
In the shared visualization, Elys asked Jules, “I assume we’re looking for details of the city’s response which aren’t in its self-reports?”
“That, and anything else which might point to a cause of this specific delay,” Jules said.
The visualization timeline indicated that Bencivenni was alive and a target of as much attention and resources as the city could bring to bear in Certitude district. The city’s focus on him without identifying any signs of distress made this scenario different than any of the previous scenarios Elys had studied. The city couldn’t even “see” Bencivenni in Certitude district, but as soon as he crossed its border with Soutien district, the city raised the importance of anything related to his name, his ID, even his family and associates.
Republic law enforcement should’ve done the same thing. But where they would’ve been highlighting unusual behavior that might’ve been evidence that Bencivenni was doing something harmful, or marketable, the city was attempting to protect Bencivenni by watching for signs that he needed help.
Three minutes after Bencivenni entered the coffee shop for his mysterious meeting, the city put an urban rescue CRU on alert. It drew connections between behavior of other individuals and objects it had recently observed, drawing the predictive results into its decisions about Bencivenni. City Support’s tests had shown it predicting citizens’ actions and reactions as accurately now as it ever had.
City Support personnel expanded the timeline with journalist and entertainment show reports. Nobody was making any new comments on this first run-through, but somebody needed to point out what Elys did: “After all the tests we ran before this, and all the attentive maintenance you do, I hope you all realize that we did everything we could to prevent this.” City Support personnel directed grateful looks her way. A wave of empathy-wracked messages arrived in her inbox.
“This is not a naturally occurring error. The tests would’ve found that,” Elys said into the visualization as she confirmed it to herself. The other alternative, that the city was experiencing a unique error state it’d take years to uncover, if anyone ever did, wasn’t worth discussing yet. The timeline marched toward Bencivenni’s death. “Let’s keep looking for the error. And after we find it, Alyansa will find the person who did this to us.”
––––––––
By the time the CRU that responded to the call to help Bencivenni was scheduled to join City Support’s review of the incident, nobody had turned up anything new in the data. The only commonality between this incident and all the others over the past few weeks was the city’s hesitation to send the CRU to the scene.
If Elys had that mining MCAI’s assistance, she’d set it to work on this pattern recognition task. At this rate, even the simple algorithms City Support had analyzing data might find something before the people involved did.
“CRU #396 is here,” said a voice identical to Taia’s mediator voice, loud enough to carry across the garden outside city central without Hochberg amplification. Elys jumped, as did a few other City Support personnel.
Jules welcomed the CRU. The mediators added their profiles to the group visualization. One of the communications specialists wore the same face as Taia, which still made Elys a bit uneasy. Unit 396’s commander had the same middle-aged, brown, feminine face that the other units’ commanders did.
Taia shared a list of questions with Elys. Elys skimmed them and shrugged. “Would you like to ask them?”
Taia nodded and asked her questions in the visualization space. Although pertinent, they didn’t produce any actionable insight. When the unit commander responded to one with, “You know, this reminds me of a recent situation we were called out for...” two City Support people headed for the nearest buildings.
About fifteen others distracted everyone else by making their way toward the buildings after the first two. Of course the person with the woman’s face and voice was okay to walk out on, when they’d stayed while the people with more masculine presentation talked. Or maybe Elys was projecting Republic problems on them, and people were leaving during what they hoped would be an inconsequential or unrelated story.
As visualization opt-outs and real-world chatter rose, Elys focused on the text transcript. She caught herself leaning toward it and Nisse enlarged the text. “...cow in the pedestrian walkway,” the unit commander was saying. “Wasn’t even that big a cow. And there we were, in all our big boots, watching her stroll down the street behind her owner on a halter and a lead. What were we supposed to do?”
Elys had to drag her mind away from wondering where someone would keep a cow in a station where she had yet to see a living space larger than an apartment. “Did the city say why you were summoned to that incident?”
“The city keeps detailed records on—” Jules said as if the whole group hadn’t been looking at records like those for the past hour. At the same time, the CRU commander said, “We figured it was because—”
Jules signed “Go ahead” at the commander.
The commander nodded their acknowledgment. “The city didn’t tell us why it sent us and not, you know, a veterinarian. We figured it was because the animal was so big. Vets don’t usually qualify for big boots. Armor, I mean. But they all know a lot more about cows than we do.”
“The city sent you to a crisis, and you were not the best people send?” Elys asked.
“I mean, there was no crisis. The cow was just walking there. We told the people who’d asked for us that they needed to look at the section of the Armistice district charter about large pets and decide whether they wanted to change it, because right then the cow and her owner weren’t hurting anybody, and they weren’t doing anything the Armistice charter said not to do. So we ran a mediated conversation with the people who’d asked for us, but trainees or mandatories — mandatory service personnel — could’ve done that.”
Mandatory service didn’t sound like anything Alyansa would support. Elys asked Nisse for more information in abbreviated signs. The agreements it retrieved carried the same language as others about how Alyansans “expected” children to participate in the education system. The population also “expected” older kids and young adults to accept a public service role for a year after they completed basic education qualifications. A footnote indicated that mandatory service was a potential mediation outcome for Alyansans who caused harm, too.
“TechComms got somebody a date out of it,” said one of the CRU #396 mediators while Elys was reading, “so it wasn’t a complete waste of our time.”
The mediator whose profile identified them as one of the CRU’s communications technicians gave the first mediator a surprised and amused look and signed “Shut it” at them.
Elys had Nisse bring her documents about the “compatibility factors” the city considered when selecting experts to respond to calls for help. A small part of the city’s calculation included personality matching between individuals defined by predictions for, among other metrics, minutes spent together, count of seconds of some particular type of laughter, which the city categorized in more detail than Elys had time to read now, and count of touches to each other’s face. And hadn’t Nisse, powered by the city’s observations and resources, been the one to tell her Taia might be romantically interested?
The city was... matchmaking. She glanced at Taia, but Taia was focused on the mediators who were speaking and didn’t appear to have reached the same conclusion as Elys about her CRU’s selection to rescue Elys on Mars. It was a little creepy to have that introduction made without her knowledge, but she couldn’t argue with the result.
The mediators in the garden had said something more important, though. “Excuse me,” Elys said. “The people who asked for you. You mean, the ones who reported the crisis?”
“Yeah, they asked the city for a CRU, specifically. That’s what they told us. Because a calm cow walking down the street is a crisis now.” The commander shook their head.
“City Support,” said Elys, “does the city consider people’s requests for who they want to help them?”
City Support erupted into overlapping conversation. A couple of people walked returned from the surrounding buildings. Elys skimmed the scrolling visualization transcript.
Somebody put a huge table of input weights into the visualization. Elys had seen that before. Like the rest of City Support, she’d spent hours studying and discussing how the most heavily weighted factors in CRU deployment decisions could be causing the dispatch delay. Other City Support personnel added filters and comments until the table showed only items related to individuals’ intentional input into the emergency response process. Taia said something Elys missed in both the busy transcript and in noisy reality.
“As the table’s starting to show,” said someone in Data Analysis, according to the transcript, “The city does consider requests for specific types of experts responding to a crisis, with caveats.”
“And you said this affects its prediction processes too?” Elys asked.
“Once a CRU or one or more qualified experts are assigned, the city turns all decision making on the incident over to them,” Taia said.
“Correct,” said the Unit 396 commander. “The city tells us what agreements the district citizens operate under, and it won’t take any further action on the incident unless we ask it to.”
City Support had tested every system and subsystem involving the city’s prediction processes. In terms of rational functioning within the bounds Alyansans set for it, the city was doing as well or better than expected. “Does anyone think they can get anything new out of this Bencivenni situation?” Elys asked. When not even Jules replied in the positive, Elys said, “Can we look at another incident?”
CRU 396 left the meeting, as did at least twenty City Support members. As some people searched for another incident to review, more meeting attendees left. Eventually, the archons selected a leak in the Port district atmosphere containment system, a fall in the park near the trail Elys and Taia had taken to meet Nautilus, and several other incidents.
In the record playing in the shared visualization space, a judge arrived on an incident scene to address someone’s demand for removal of a delivery bot in Ouverte district. The bot’s designed might be modern art, or possibly a faceless vampire staked through its bleeding heart while hovering in midair. Metallic paint and lack of detail at crucial points made the design unclear.
The person who’d called for help seemed certain of the intended shape. “Why did the city send you?” the person demanded of the judge.
Elys asked the group, “Does this man know the judge personally?”
“They don’t see who makes the face and voice,” signed a someone in City Support’s internal hardware archontate.
“Judges use assigned faces on duty, just like mediators.” Taia frowned at the stopped visualization. “Which doesn’t give either of them an excuse to be rude.”
Elys got the visualization moving again. The person who found the bot problematic flailed at it while saying “The city should’ve sent a CRU to... put a blanket over this thing and take it away! I asked for a CRU.”
“Well, the city sent me.” The judge went on to review the Ouverte district bot design requirements, none of which forbade flying, bleeding vampire delivery bots.
“We select design contest winners every year, and each district has to vote to allow them,” Taia said, probably for Elys’s benefit since nobody else looked surprised to hear that. “No design has ever gotten one hundred percent approval in any district. But look, this guy doesn’t even live in Ouverte district.”
“He works there.” Jules highlighted part of the complainant’s blue profile with a yellow outline. “Look at his role. Almost all medical research takes place in Ouverte district.”
The members of City Support who’d been highlighting parts of the weights table lit it in a blue outline to show that they’d finished with it. The city weighed district regulations heaviest, as Elys had expected. A slew of predictive success factors followed that, and then victims’, experts’, and neighborhood feedback. Perpetrators of harm, when involved, also offered feedback which the city considered but weighted very lightly in comparison to all the other stakeholders.
In the visualization, the angry medical researcher crossed his arms over his chest. “Seriously, please leave me alone. I want a CRU here to put an end to this travesty.”
Taia was frowning. “This isn’t a crisis. Nobody’s in danger. This person is upset but he’s not exhibiting early trauma reactions. He’s just annoyed. We could do some behavioral analysis on this record to prove it.”
Elys changed the hug she wanted to give to a pat on Taia’s armored shoulder, since Elys was not supposed to know any mediators intimately. “I believe you.”
Taia’s amused smile suggested she was used to being believed. “Thanks. But yeah, that judge can rule on sight to confirm the bot design. I mean, it wouldn’t have won a place in the design competition unless it met all the districts’ standards, but if the standards changed and that bot didn’t get recalled somehow, the judge could’ve fixed that. But that’s not what happened.”
“Are all mediators bot design experts too?” Elys asked.
Taia blushed again, pink and obvious on the fake face in her helmet. “Just the ones who entered a design idea in the contest once.” If Taia’s design had won, she’d have said so. Smiling, Elys returned her attention to the next incident. Later, she’d have to ask what design Taia would’ve had flying around Alyansa, delivering mail.
In the next incident, the record showed an activated CRU in their airship, on the way to the incident location. One mediator spoke while performing some kind of function check on their suit arm. “Think it’s really worth our time, or is it another one for the mandatories?”
“Mandatory service mediators get their own units,” Taia told Elys while the mediator commander in the visualization said, “Whether it is or it isn’t, the city said we’re up, so we’re up.”
Elys had come to this meeting because there’d been nothing else left to try. Now a single spark of hope glimmered among the data.
“Can we get more information related to CRU deployment speed on the mediators’ side of things?” she asked.
“Checking with the city now,” said someone in City Support.
“Are you suggesting,” Jules said slowly, “that the crisis response delays are not the city’s fault?”
Every City Support person who could turned toward Elys. Most faces looked hopeful. Taia was still frowning at Elys and Elys hoped this wasn’t about to spark their second fight.
“The city’s interactions with Alyansans creates a very complex system,” Elys said. “But we’ve tested everything we can think of on the city’s side of that system. The tests all say the MCAI’s functioning as well as it ever has. The scenarios we’ve seen here today show some factors, ones that are interpersonal and outside City Support’s control, that the city is weighing heavily in its CRU deployment decisions, especially regarding future events. They change the city’s model of what Alyansans need, and the city factors them into all its CRU deployment decisions.”
More people were leaving the meeting. Maybe Elys’s speech had convinced them that this wasn’t their problem. Maybe it wasn’t. But Elys finally had new questions to ask so that she, and City Support, could find out.
The remaining City Support personnel started work on the next incident for analysis, now with more of the mediators’ response metrics included. In the visualization, a couple of electricians and their construction bot took almost half an hour getting out of their workshop to respond to a call for help. One told the other, “They’re just going to yell at us for not being mediators.”
“Why?” Taia thrust both hands out in front of her, gloved palms turned up as if preparing to catch an explanation. “All the training we get about electricity is ‘tell the city to turn off big machines before you reach into them’ and ‘if a machine’s on and acting dangerous, move it off its power pad.’ If nothing’s on fire and nobody’s hurt or about to be, then they don’t need a CRU.”
“Got it,” Elys said. When the electricians got to the building with the electrical fault apparently caused by someone imitating a comedy skit about making perfect toast with a homemade contraption, the attempted toast-makers who’d asked for help sent the electricians away. “I didn’t know they had that option.”
“Yeah, but keep watching,” Taia said. “They’re going to get another group of people with the same role as the first two.” Sure enough, the city dispatched a different pair of electricians, who also took their time and grumbled about CRUs.
Elys signed to Nisse, “Get an analysis on the experts’ response times. Exclude CRUs, if they’re in that category.” Aloud, she said, “So people can send away experts.”
“That eliminates those individual experts as an option for that individual scene response,” Jules said. The City Support crowd in the garden had thinned, although most of the digital attendees were still connected. “There are scenarios when that doesn’t happen, but they’re rare. They require the aid recipients to go into more detail than these folks did about why they don’t want these experts at this time. Or a judge will get involved. That doesn’t happen often either.”
“And the log shows the city re-evaluating its expert selection process every time an expert is rejected,” Elys said. “Are rejections up lately?”
“Yes...” Jules’s tone lacked confidence, though. “Let me look up by how much.”
“Rejected experts were not on any of the crisis reports I’ve read. Have I missed them on any of the other reports we’ve been studying?” City Support’s silence was telling.
“I missed all of this,” Taia whispered.
Elys separated herself from the visualization to focus on Taia. “While you were looking for me?”
“And keeping you in Alyansa despite the Republic’s best efforts, yes.”
When Elys reconnected to the visualization, City Support was reviewing the park fall incident the archons had selected earlier. A person dangled halfway down a cliff by a leg wedged between a boulder and the cliff wall. Even in the hazy simulative reconstruction, white bone showed through leg fur matted with blood. Elys couldn’t tell where the person’s knee was, or where it was supposed to be. The City Support digital attendance dropped as people registered what they were looking at.
Taia studied the visualization, showing none of the disgust on the City Support personnel’s faces. “Now, that’s a crisis. Nurses are not going to have the equipment to get him out of that mess safely.”
Her confident tone dragged Elys out of her thoughts. “You’re talking like he’s going to get a bandage wrapped around that leg and be fine.”
“Look at the date.” The city’s timestamp said it recorded the incident four days ago. “If he fell all the way to the ground, we’d have heard about it. He will be fine.”
Elys opened her mouth to argue that nobody without a family fortune would be the same after that bad a leg break. Since her healed hands, ankles, and head proved her wrong, she shut her mouth again.
She added the archived record of the responding wilderness rescue CRU. The mediators collected their gear at a measured pace and exchanged exasperated “here we go again” comments while they climbed into their airship.
“What’s the matter with them?” Taia leaned forward a little. Pieces of her armor clacked against each other. “Why aren’t they looking at their incident stream? It’d show what a mess that guy’s gotten himself into. He could fall any second.”
In the record, the airship rose from the CRU facility’s roof. An icon representing them and a map showing the distance between them and the person in trouble appeared between the two visual records. “Alright,” a mediator said, “pull the stream up and let’s see how long this guy’s hangnail is.”
When the CRU received the same public record of the incident site that City Support had now, the mediators swore with impressive range, including a few choice Republic terms. In seconds, they recovered and started strategizing about how they’d get the man down.
“Who reviews CRU performance?” Elys asked Taia.
“The city keeps statistics on us,” Taia said. “How long it takes us from alert to activation to actually getting there and resolving the situation. Those are major numbers for us. The crisis response archon sets expectations too, and then there are advanced trainers, basically, who tell CRUs and individual mediators whether they’re meeting those expectations. And then there’s feedback from all the people involved, like you saw earlier.”
Elys, via Nisse, asked the city for CRU statistics from across Alyansa for the past three months. City Support had focused on what the city controlled: time between when the city received a request and when it assigned an expert, especially when it dispatched a CRU. That had been increasing, but only after the experts began taking longer and longer to respond to their assignments. The current data showed the experts’ response time as even more delayed than the CRU responses, on a trend to get worse.
Jules’s gasp set off a clamor of questions and explanations among the City Support personnel who’d stayed in the meeting. “The experts are confused!” someone said.
Beside Elys, Taia had gone very still. “Are you saying that the delays...” Taia paused for a deep breath. “Are you blaming us for this?”
“We’ve just seen one new connection.” Although that looked more probable the longer Elys studied the graphs. “We need more information.”
Taia stared at the grass, her expression blank and as pale as Elys had ever seen her fake face. “I didn’t know. I spent so much time with you that I didn’t see us mediators doing that.” She waved at the dip, gradual but visible, in expert response time that extended minutes beyond the city’s dithering about whether and when to send a CRU.
As they watched, somebody broke the graph out into a different category set. In the new version, the CRU response time hadn’t changed as significantly as many non-crisis responders’ dispatch times had. The average CRU response was still minutes longer than it had been before City Support noticed the error. And in those minutes, Bencivenni had died on the street in Certitude district.
“It wasn’t your job to track that data,” Elys said. “You’re responsible for your own behavior. The city’s tracking and reporting on it.”
“That’s true, but...” Taia sighed. “I should’ve known.”
“No, Kundakçı is correct,” Jules said over the visualization audio. The rest of City Support went quiet. “It’s the city’s responsibility to collect and analyze outcomes. We haven’t been studying its output as closely ourselves, lately, because we’ve been so focused on what it’s doing wrong. It’s time we review what it’s been doing right all along.”
Even Elys had been ignoring Alyansans’ accumulated feedback on the city’s performance since she arrived. Some people would always find problems which were actually design decisions, some would fail to use the system as intended despite copious instructions and tutorials, and everybody else would complain about how slow CRUs had been to arrive.
In other words, she and City Support had assumed they all knew what the feedback would say. That assumption might’ve cost Bencivenni his life.
The visualization filled with new graphs. “Does it look to you,” Elys asked City Support, “like most people have been asking for CRUs in all situations, and they’ve been complaining whenever some other expert came to help instead?”
After a long moment, Jules said, “That’s what I’m seeing, yes.”
Exclamations, arguments, and counter arguments overlapped each other until Elys muted her audio. In the transcript, someone said, “There’s always been people who insist on a CRU for every inconvenience.”
Someone else said, “Why is this all happening now?”
That show host, Les Conlen, had claimed that every uncomfortable situation required a CRU. “Nisse,” Elys muttered under the visualization audio, “can you get the archived list of people who’ve submitted feedback saying they should’ve received a CRU and didn’t, and tell me what they’ve been watching during the past month?”
The cat-sized ball of shadow and blue twine materialized on the grass in front of Elys. “I can do that for those in levels one and two now, but two won’t be entirely accurate because it’s location based. You can request this information from the rest of Alyansa. Would you like me to show you how to do that?”
“Yeah.” Elys had been one of these people for less than a day, and on the planet for less than a month. Did her intention to identify the city’s error justify asking for something so personal as people’s digital history? Nisse saved the instructions so Elys could find out later.
“Jules, I need to talk to you.” Elys couldn’t think while so many people reacted in her visualization stream to what she said.
“Alright. I’m muting everyone else in five... Four... Three...” Jules finished the countdown. City Support’s cacophonous discussion went silent, doubtless continuing in message format. “Everyone, let’s stop for today. We’ve found out a lot of interesting things, and we should all take time to bring it together in our minds before we talk about it again. Thank you all for your participation. This is what makes Alyansa home.”
Jules crossed the garden to Elys, past people heading for the street or into city center buildings. She’d expected Jules to end their speech with something about how Alyansa was better than the Republic. No matter what the Republic thought, though, Alyansans were not competing with anybody. They just wanted someplace that felt like home. Elys did too.
She and Taia stood to meet Jules. “Alright, Kundakçı,” said Jules. “What have you got?”
Elys described the data she wanted, and why. After a minute, she had to focus on a spot on a tree trunk behind Jules. The incredulous expression on Jules’s face was too distracting.
“And you want me to ask people to share this?” Jules shook their head. “They’re going to hate it. They’ve been saying it’s our fault and this looks like we’re trying to turn it around and blame them. We need more evidence to convince them of this.”
“Not everyone will hate it,” said Taia. “The mediators will... appreciate knowing the truth, eventually. And Honesty Alyansa will be happy. So will the big believers in civic participation and science, and all the show hosts who want the data.”
“Oh hey,” said Elys. “That’s perfect.”