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The city archon met Elys in front of the city central campus. “Hey, Jules.”
“Elys.” Before Elys had time to appreciate the most familiar address Jules had ever offered her, they turned and walked toward the building they’d just exited with quick, stiff steps. Elys had to extend her own to keep up. “I wanted to update you on some things, since you like gathering more information while people are talking.”
Elys couldn’t always interpret people talking. “I read annotated transcripts of what you’re saying.” As much as she might like to ignore the archons’ handwringing, that wouldn’t help the city. “But, go for it.”
“First, the education campaign you suggested is coming along well. Demands for CRUs have fallen to the levels they were around the first week of CRU dispatch delays. The trend indicates that will keep falling. I’d be happier if we told people to stop trying to guess what they need, because they don’t know, but this isn’t causing harm at the moment.”
“How’s the city rebalance going?”
Instead of walking through the central garden to the usual meeting room, Jules’s route took them through hallways with walls that occasionally became windows into stylized labs and storage facilities. “The rebalance is... trickier. The sudden reduction in CRU demands has been almost as disruptive as the sudden surge was.” Since the city had thrown out its previous definition of “normal” CRU deployment, that made sense.
“But now that you pointed out the true origin point of the city’s CRU dispatch mistake,” Jules said, “we’ve spotted the beginnings of a second problem. It’s at about the stage where the CRU deployment situation was when City Support first began registering delays.”
Elys caught herself holding her breath and let it out in a question. “What’s happening now?”
“The city’s been evicting residents from their homes.”
She’d really believed the crisis was over. Sure, there’d be months of cleanup to recover from the CRU deployment error. Years, if the first rebalance didn’t take. But this could be a wholly different error.
The evictions didn’t put people in as much physical danger as the CRU deployment problem, but they made more people acknowledge the city’s failings, and it’d take at least as many days to get people to stop contributing to the problem as it had to stop the deployment delays. Elys had expected the Republic to try another manipulation trick like this, but she hadn’t expected them to do it this fast.
The eviction error could be just as damaging to Alyansans’ trust in the city as the CRU deployment one had been. The rest of the universe mocked Alyansans’ reliance on their MCAI, but that reliance freed Alyansans to create more, discover more, to pursue what they loved. Elys thought she’d restored their confidence in it after the revelation of Republic sabotage, but maybe she hadn’t.
And the city was doing its absolute best to accommodate these changes and, despite its overreaction, largely succeeding. All the tests had proved that. Nobody had caught it falsifying its test results. Had Elys let it down?
“You said you found the housing error because it developed the way the CRU dispatch one did,” Elys said. “Are show hosts pushing a new message about housing? It’d better not be the same nine as before.”
“We don’t know that yet.” Jules’s eyes unfocused while they opened a door. Despite it being a different conference room, the thirty or forty City Support archons from Elys’s first day in Alyansa watched her and Jules take their seats.
This time yesterday, Elys had thought she could stop worrying about the city and explore her new home, with Taia beside her. Now she stood before the same confused City Support archons, while Taia was busy dealing with the tragedies in her normal professional life.
Elys joined the group visualization and Nisse added a transcript without Elys having to ask for it. A flat rendering formed above the table, showing someone interviewing a tearful family surrounded by blue and yellow crates like the one Elys had moved from Renforcé to Volontaire district in. A text bullet point beside the interview indicated that someone had assigned the family a new home, but the psychological damage had been done.
Jules waved Elys to a seat and then paced along the table with their hands behind their back. “Thanks to Elys here, we have a good idea of what the short-term solution to this error is, and it begins with us. We may even have all the data we need to identify any show hosts which might be spreading some new brand of nonsense to make Alyansans lead the city to unhelpful conclusions. So we’ll have mediators convince the show hosts to stop while we rebalance the city’s erroneous assumptions.”
“Somebody needs to change the qualifications for hosting shows!” said someone down the table.
“I’m not sure there are qualifications at present,” said Jules. “That’s not part of the service you pledged to the city. Write up a proposal on your own time.”
While the archons discussed other non-technical aspects of the new error and lamented how it would erode people’s trust in City Support and the city itself, Elys read what information City Support had on the new error. Now that she knew what to look for, her search criteria yielded immediate results.
Over the past week, there’d been a sharp increase in new off-worlders applying for Alyansan housing. At the same time, Alyansans had been arranging to move to different districts within the station at an abruptly rising rate. That would throw any housing management system into disarray, not just one helmed by an MCAI.
Just like the CRU dispatch slowdown, the evictions were happening because of a change in Alyansan behavior, not an error in the city’s reasoning. There was no physical or digital sabotage Elys could offer a solution for. Until Alyansan behavior stabilized long enough for City Support to rebalance the city, she needed to keep thinking about longer term solutions to this type of issue.
“Elys?”
Jules was frowning at her like she’d missed something. She added the city’s transcript of this conversation to the table in front of her so she wouldn’t miss anything else. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“We were wondering why the city’s off-world analysis systems didn’t identify patterns in Republic governmental behavior leading up to this interference, or the prior one. Any insight?”
“Two points of data would not come close to persuading an MCAI that anything important had changed,” Elys said. “And it only has these two incidents to consider. My guess is that the fact that no other civilization in history has relied on an MCAI to the extent that yours — ours — does is leading it to draw overly narrow conclusions. You’ll have to guide it through this incident and create thousands of simulated Republic operations for it to study.” And as much as Elys would like to help with that, it’d take her months to get to know this MCAI as well as City Support did.
“Even then,” she continued, “you’ll be watching it for years to make sure it doesn’t miss something. This is why you have people in Off-world Affairs, not algorithms. We evolved to make survivable decisions without sufficient data.”
“Whereas we designed the city to collect enough data to make reliable decisions,” Jules said, more to themselves than to the assembled City Support archons. “In forty-nine hours, the test environment will reflect the current state of the city. We’ll have rebalancing procedures ready to test by then.”
There didn’t seem much point in telling City Support that the Republic’s civilization-destabilizing tactics might very well start this way. City Support was doing all they could to mount a digital defense, and they wouldn’t be on the physical front lines of an invasion. That would be the CRUs, and Taia.
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Elys returned to her apartment and lay on her bed in the dark. After the shaking stopped, she sent a conversation invite to Lan Huang, the kid in Off-world Affairs who’d been investigating ads for the show hosts who’d popularized demanding CRUs for every problem. The visualization warned her in large text that the conversation would be archived in real time.
“The Republic is destabilizing Alyansa in the cheapest and most effective way they know how.” Anyone from Reznikov could confirm that, but Elys was the one in Alyansa to say it. “They do this as the first step in a military invasion.”
The kid pursed their lips, so yeah, they knew. “Well, now you’ve said it in public. You could’ve told me what you wanted to talk about.”
“Don’t you think Alyansans deserve to know?”
“This isn’t the first some somebody’s threatened us. We can defend ourselves.”
“From the Republic,” Elys said and signed with precise movements, in case Lan had misheard her.
Lan talked about Mayari’s anti-spacecraft defenses, but they wouldn’t matter. If the Republic didn’t have a technical attack that’d wrest station control away from the city, their military could bury Alyansa’s physical defenses in bodies or pound them into the planet’s core from a distant orbit. And they could do it next week, if their ships left Republic space today.
But Elys had come here to investigate and advise. She’d investigated. She’d given advice. Now it was up to everyone else to act on that.
At least Nisse had brought her a City Support announcement that they’d found entertainers causing the housing error. Elys didn’t recognize the names. But even if nobody had made the same mistake twice, a lot more Alyansans seemed open to bribes than Taia would like Elys to believe.
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Elys’s undecorated apartment echoed when she sneezed, so she went to Taia’s. Taia was on duty today, training at the Volontaire district CRU dispatch center unless someone got into the kind of trouble her CRU got people out of.
City Support was too busy working to prevent more death and displacement to teach Elys the organizational context she’d need to help rebalance the city. She sent them her recommendations for recreating the hosts’ persuasiveness in the city’s test environment, which should help confirm that the rebalance would work as intended, then spent the afternoon completing an introductory City Support course, interspersed with playing with the dogs.
Today, Troll put extra effort into bouncing down the hall after a toy. When he brought it back, he nearly always managed to run into Elys’s legs, which made her laugh. Mighty refused to let Elys win a tug of war with her toys.
Something’s changing, Nisse translated for Mighty. Let’s be ready.
Elys wished she could ask Mighty what she meant by that. Even in Alyansa, the translated messages only went one way.
The neighbor across the hall, one of Taia’s cousins, apparently, took Troll down to the park behind the building. Elys and Mighty played tug of war until Taia’s door lock clicked open and she stormed into the apartment. Mighty ran to greet her and get underfoot while Taia took off her shoes. Elys followed at a more measured pace.
“Hey, hi, hello,” Taia said to both of them. Only Elys got a kiss on the lips, though, and she got hers before the dog. “Troll’s down in the park?”
“Yeah.”
Taia huffed a sharp sigh. “Sorry. The CRU’s been helping out with the unnecessary evictions all day and it’s just infuriating. It’s so disruptive to Renforcé district families that we got called in to help. People are so afraid. First the CRU and expert delays, now this...” She looked closer at Elys. “You’re not even mad about it, are you?”
“About the families getting evicted?” By the end of the day, every evicted family had a new place to stay. And as for it being a second attack... “You know the scorpion and the frog story? This is the Republic’s nature. They take whatever they can and do whatever they can get away with. And if nobody stops them, they get away with a lot.”
“In that fable, didn’t everybody involved drown?” Taia threw herself on the couch with her head on one padded armrest and her knees draped over the other. “They’re frightening Alyansans and kicking us out of our homes for what, the chance they might steal something from us? It’s pointlessly cruel.” She glared up at Elys. “You should be angry too. You’re one of us.”
If Elys thought much more about the consequences of this new error, she might be, but... “If I’m angry, how can I think of ways to make us a harder target than they expect?” Elys went to the kitchen and set the cooker making tea the way Taia liked it. Mighty leaned on Taia’s legs. “That public education campaign has almost got the dispatch time back to normal. After City Support and whoever your educators are make the same adjustments for the housing issue... Maybe the Republic runs out of bribable show hosts? Or maybe not. That’s a bigger problem than the evictions.”
Taia frowned. A second later, Elys got an invitation to Taia’s visualization. In the center of Taia’s living room, a couple of older women had their arms around a third, even older woman. The oldest woman gazed at the boxes and furniture bots were stacking around them, and the armored mediators talking to the old folks, in evident confusion.
“We just moved in,” the oldest woman croaked. “We just... Why are we leaving?” Nisse added text labels showing the time and the intersection in Renforcé district where this was taking place, before Elys thought to ask for that information.
“They moved to that apartment two years ago,” Taia said. “All their stuff gets collected to go to storage a few minutes after this, but if you explain that to Gloria there, it’ll be out of her head before you’re finished talking. That is not right, Elys. That’s happening to people all over Alyansa and it’s just not right.”
“Yeah.” Elys’s hands clenched in her pockets. As expected, she’d thought more about it and now she was angry, and all she could do was what she’d been doing before she got upset, slower now that body chemistry was distracting her.
Taia didn’t seem to let her emotions slow her down that way. When Elys first heard the term “mediator,” she’d envisioned someone who’d stay calm in all circumstances. But if Taia ever hid her emotions, she did it too thoroughly for Elys to notice, and the rest of the time she felt, in front of everyone. With everyone.
In the background of the scene, before Taia disconnected from the public record, someone watching the spectacle said, “What if the city keeps doing this? What will we do?”
The Republic changed targets from CRU dispatch to housing so easily. Those were very different systems. It was a good thing they hadn’t found a way into transportation yet. They had to be looking for one. And between the Alyansan shows imported ones, and the many and varied ways to reach the Alyansan people, the Republic would have more opportunities to refine their methods.
The cooker announced that tea was ready, and Taia’s cousin returned with Troll. “It’s such a shame about the city’s housing assignment problems.” The cousin paused to say hello to Mighty, who’d trotted over to join the gathering near the door. “I’m thinking about volunteering to help if they have to get people to do the assignments until the city’s sorted out. Taia, I know you’re busy. Maybe you’d have time, Elys?”
The city should be more effective at managing housing assignments than any number of well-meaning people. Today, even this cousin could tell that it wasn’t living up to expectations. And the cousin thought the most helpful thing Elys could do was the job the city had been made for.
“I’m already doing what I can,” she said.
After the cousin left, Taia started the cooker on dinners for humans and canines. She pressed its start/stop button with more force than required, thumping the machine against the back of its nook. “Dalitso is a dancer. Their groups’ been working on a new routine, and now they’re thinking of throwing out two months of practice to do something City Support said the city could do. And I hear the eviction situation is slowing down our immigration process, and our reproductive limitations make immigration essential, never mind that offering people homes when they need them is the right thing to do.” The Republic would love that. It would mean fewer people on planet to subjugate when they invaded.
“If the city keeps getting twisted around like this, Taia said, “we’ll lose so much more that makes us who we are.”
And if City Support had to keep double checking the city’s work at the incident-by-incident level forever, then they’d already lost. Alyansan culture aside, Elys was not going to let the RIS mismanage yet another beautiful MCAI.