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Beside the flattened remains of folded boxes the soldiers had stomped on in the course of clearing the camera lens holes in the cell walls, Elys lay on the padded piece of floor with the hose nozzle between her teeth. Time to see if she was still talking to herself. Out of the night that covers me...
The nozzle fell from her mouth on the third or fourth word. She might’ve started reciting the poem aloud from the beginning after she’d thought through most of the first line. Krebs had talked like he was responding to her thoughts.
And she couldn’t hear herself. She snapped her fingers and she heard that sound fine, which let her relax a little. She wasn’t hearing any worse than she usually did. Krebs hadn’t found a way to take that.
Either the drug made time strange too, or it was wearing off. Or both. Biochemistry was as fiddly as an old AI.
The pickup reported that its recording function wasn’t available. Instead, she bit the corner of her lip until it hurt and recited the poem in her head again. The pain eased after the fourth word. She could do that test with her hands attached to the chair in Krebs’s interrogation room.
Krebs was no doubt hoping the city would send her valuable intelligence through her new pickup. What he might’ve forgotten was that the pickup’s basic functions would be a huge improvement to her empty cell. The pickup’s clock read 06:46 ship time. Krebs had gotten up early in the morning to bother her. According to the calendar, she’d been on the ship, in this bare and isolated pocket of air in the bare isolation of space between populated worlds, for two days.
The local storage contained the pickup’s manual. Now she had something to read, or to listen to if she felt the need for another voice. If she could just stop talking to herself every time she had a coherent thought, she might be able to make the device more useful.
Nisse flickered into view. Elys’s heart leaped at “my assistant’s here, everything will be fine now” and fell to “no, it will not” in the same second. Nisse’s shadow and string body flattened against the floor. Its blue eyes stared unblinking and dull at a point to Elys’s right. The oozing strings of its body made her nauseous.
“What device option are you searching for?” Nisse’s growling voice might’ve been comforting, if it’d had the capacity to remember that Elys preferred text.
“Can you ask the ship’s AI to open this door?”
“Specify the door.”
The city would’ve known what door Elys was talking about, by eye focus analysis if not by identifying the nearest door to her. Elys pointed.
“You don’t have permission to communicate with the ship’s AI,” said what was left of Nisse.
Shuddering, Elys dismissed her assistant and set the pickup on the floor beside her. Nisse looked like a zombie version of itself. Without the city’s voice analysis, it wasn’t much more helpful than a zombie would’ve been, either.
It took an hour and a half for Elys’s uncontrollable talking and visualizing to stop, during which she covered the camera lens holes in the wall and remade the folded boxes. An intense headache replaced the talking and visualizing. It hurt even more whenever the blast of sound played over the cell speaker. The headache’s prickly pain concentrated itself as a line of discomfort from the backs of her eyeballs to the base of her skull.
Now that she wasn’t speaking her every thought, she used the pickup to reach out to the shipboard AI. Her request to confirm her account permissions within the network went unanswered. So did every other question she had related to this pickup’s account, or the crew’s mission.
Whoever locked this pickup down might’ve been the same person who’d been feeding Krebs technical questions. He hadn’t asked anything specific about the algorithms that’d caused the error in the course of accommodating Alyansans’ new behavior. And he’d called it “the Mayari MCAI” instead of “the Alyansan MCAI” or “the city.”
Krebs had spent enough time in Alyansa to know the correct terminology. Any Republic scientist or engineer he’d brought with him probably didn’t. Krebs had been concentrating so hard on repeating the unfamiliar technical terms that he’d ignored the incorrect term he understood.
Whoever had given him that question would be the person reviewing what the city sent Elys, to see if it was useful for manipulating Alyansans further and causing more damage. Or to watch the station for signs of instability significant enough to make a Republic invasion easier. That might also be the person monitoring Elys’s pickup activity.
The device’s messaging function was “not available.” Neither was developer mode. It was dependent-locked, but there was no unlocking option. It might’ve had a biolock to tell who was using it, but it wasn’t telling her when it checked her photophore pattern.
With this level of oversight, Elys wouldn’t risk trying to activate the transmitter in her chest. First, the shock she’d gotten when she came onboard must’ve damaged it, and it might electrocute or burn her. Second, she’d rather not let whoever was watching her pickup activity know it existed. The idea of them digging it out of her without her consent made her shudder.
And, third and most importantly, she hadn’t found the Republic invasion plans she’d come here looking for. She couldn’t leave yet.
After another four blasts of grating noise, her headache had spread behind her forehead and temples. Visualizing anything required focusing her eyes, which felt like slowly tearing her eye muscles out of her skull.
She took the pickup off. It’d been at least forty-eight hours since she lost contact with Alyansa. Maybe Taia and Off-world Affairs were looking for her. For now, Elys would get as much sleep as the awful noise allowed.
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Soldiers ordered Elys to put her pickup on before they took her out of the cell later that day. After hours of failing to get the device to do anything useful while she grew hungrier and thirstier, she’d dropped the device on the padded section of floor that passed for a bed and turned her back on it.
In the hallway, Elys tested the pickup’s dependent controls by reaching for a connection to the shipboard AI, then the city, then the inept intermediary she’d negotiated for connection through on Mars. She didn’t care if Krebs saw her do it. In fact, it would’ve looked more suspicious if she hadn’t tried to ask for help.
The pickup blocked all her attempts. Krebs had given her a useless device. She had multiple days to make it functional, or find a better one, before the ship reached any of the Solar planets, although by then taking the propulsion systems offline wouldn’t do much for her.
And, as Nisse would tell her if the city were still supplementing it, that was assuming the ship was heading toward Solar. If Krebs wanted to hide her somewhere remote, she might have less time to find information that’d help Alyansa defend itself.
Krebs asked a few new technical questions and repeated ones he’d asked before. He told her nothing interesting in return. He claimed she sang all the verses to an anti-military-recruitment song from Reznikov.
In her cell, she felt... different, although she couldn’t say how. Something inside her was changing, or had changed. Not in a good way.
Nothing hurt more than the expected headaches and exhausted numbness and hunger. Nothing felt too heavy, or too hard, or too soft. But something, something physical she was almost certain, was wrong.
Or maybe she’d been alone in that cell too long, far enough from Alyansa that even if that transmitter under her collarbone worked, it wouldn’t be strong enough to reach them. Her brain probably didn’t count conversations with Krebs as healthy social interaction.
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“I can’t do this again.” Elys sighed dramatically. “You’ll keep sending bounty hunters. I’ll keep running. There’s no end to it.”
“What ‘this’ are you referring to?” Krebs leaned forward in his comfortable chair, which Elys envied after days chained to hers.
“I can’t stay on Alyansa like I’ve been saying I would. They’re too trusting. Even if hunters didn’t talk their way in again, I’d lose my mind there in a year or less.”
Krebs nodded his weirdly convincing sympathetic expression up and down. “They are too trusting, aren’t they.”
Elys tried to work more moisture over her tongue. Whatever they stuck her with at the beginning of this session dried her mouth out. Or maybe that was the ship air. If the mic in... No, not thinking about that, or she’d say it aloud. If Taia heard her, she’d feel terrible.
“I’ve got to get back to the Republic. Home,” Elys forced herself to say. Poor Taia. Poor Nisse, even though it lacked the ability to remember what it’d been in Alyansa, let alone miss functionality.
“Back up a moment. Taia’s the mediator who escorted you around Alyansa, yes?” Krebs grinned at Elys’s horrified stare. It was so inappropriate for Krebs to link Taia’s name and mediator role verbally, and he had to know that. Combining all the vacations he’d spent in Alyansa, he’d lived there longer than Elys had.
“The mediator who you know by name. And are fucking.” Krebs leaned forward, looking far too interested in that last topic. “Is she the one who broke you out of prison?”
Elys ignored all the reasons she shouldn’t answer that, so she wouldn’t talk about them. “Why did you do it, anyway? Convince everyone that the MCAI was recommending those attacks on political dissidents because I told it to.”
“Aside from your responsibility in allowing it to make those recommendations?” Krebs allowed Elys a moment to roll her eyes while he smiled like he knew he was lying and getting away with it. “The Service is where all the action is. Like Alyansa’s mediators, they expect a certain level of performance from their officers. That first year of crackdowns on dissidents sparked eleven major uprisings, you know.” That was what the RIS was really upset about, not all those dead and traumatized Republic citizens.
“Unlike the mediators,” Krebs continued, “the Service is somewhat imprecise about how that performance is achieved. Have you learned any of the mediators’ practices which aren’t in the public record?”
If Elys had, she didn’t want to tell him about them. How did that anti-recruitment song start? Me and my cousin, one Allie McBride?
“Very well.” Krebs’s gaze shifted focus, looking at something digital to Elys’s left. “How are you thinking of avoiding all those bounty hunters, should you persuade me to let you free?”
“You’ll have to drop the charges to something I can live with, and I’ll come in on my own.” What would Taia think of that? Nothing good. “I’ll do whatever you need done. I’ll go back and send you information from Alyansa for a while, if that’s the price, but I can’t stay there anymore. I’m not built like that.”
“Taia’s in your past, either way, I should think,” Krebs said. Elys must’ve been talking up a storm about her. “Much as I wouldn’t mind hearing the details, since you kept yourselves rather boring in public, if we sent you back to collect information we couldn’t have her catching you at it, could we?”
“Sure.” Elys focused her eyes on a spot on the wall by Krebs’s head. This was her giving up.
“To be fair, you gave that MCAI a lot of leeway. I’m not sure I would have.”
“MCAIs need leeway to learn. Yours in particular. To do what the RIS wanted, it had to try things out quickly without running simulations by everybody in the system for approval. I told you to give it enough sim space and time before you applied any of its analyses to reality, and you didn’t. And don’t lie, not here, not about that,” Elys said over whatever protest he was offering. It felt good to say this to his face.
“If you had given it the sim space it needed, it wouldn’t have started a war between the RIS and the Republic people.” Elys’s voice was getting louder. “You could’ve let it sim out options while you slept, but it needed more space. I told you exactly how much space it needed.”
“What’s the point of having something that can’t offer realistic solutions, I wonder.” Krebs sounded as unaffected by Elys’s tirade as he’d been by anything else she’d said. “You know, everyone thinks they can be a ‘double agent,’ A key feature of the role is effective persuasiveness, a skill in which you are and always have been severely lacking. Undetected information gathering within one’s home agency is not just a mentally challenging task, it is a social and emotional challenge you, and your media-consuming compatriots, will never be up to. Frankly, you embarrass yourselves by claiming otherwise.”
Elys sighed. Krebs was right, for once. She was losing her mind just dragging it back to safe thoughts she could talk about when she couldn’t hear herself speak, although... She bit the corner of her lip and, yes, she was still talking. She felt more exhausted than she’d ever been.
Krebs sipped what appeared to be the last of his tea and stood. “I should’ve eliminated you after you rushed the timetable on curing the Alyansan people of their overreliance on their city. You and I could’ve enjoyed at least another two years of the Alyansan life, if you’d shown any ability to act subtly at all.” A life which would’ve become dangerous and difficult as people took on tasks they currently relied on the city to do. “Well,” Krebs’s fingers twitched in a sign that’d close all his open digital resources. “It’s a mistake I won’t repeat.”
“What?” The word sounded too high-pitched, too loud for the small distance between them. Was Krebs going to shoot Elys, right here in this interrogation room? The weapon he carried would kill her, but it’d take multiple minutes to do it.
“No, I’m not going to shoot you. You’ve drunk enough leovostik omnipirin since you came aboard that that won’t be necessary.” Elys spit the water bag’s nozzle out, even though Krebs was implying that she was far too late. While he walked to the door, he said, “You’ll feel tired, then sick, and then dead of shockingly undiagnosed cancer by, say, next week. If you remember what’s in you by then, I’ll be surprised, but where we’re taking you, no one you tell will know the drug’s name or believe you about our involvement. It’s high time the RIS stop contracting your death out and end this security risk ourselves. The things protecting the Republic requires of us...” Krebs shook his head, looking disgusted. “It’s for the good of all, as they say. It had to be done.”
“No.” More denials piled up on Elys’s tongue. That wasn’t enough time to do what she’d come for, let alone to live the new life Alyansa promised her.
This would be the third time the RIS tried to kill her without making their involvement obvious, but they hadn’t forced Krebs to do it. It was still his choice. He could still stop.
“This won’t hide anything. Who else has cancer-causing toxins nobody’s ever heard of?” Elys’s voice was still too high and panicked. Krebs scoffed at her criticism of his plans. “There has to be a way to reverse the process.”
Krebs walked past her chair without looking her in the eyes. “Goodbye, Elys.”
When she’d boarded Krebs’s ship, she had so many ideas for finding information for Alyansa to defend itself with. Now those ideas were useless. She had less than a week to get the few facts she’d learned to Taia, and she still hadn’t contacted the ship’s AI or talked Krebs into revealing anything actionable, let alone found a way to ask the RIS MCAI to send what it had on the Republic’s plans. The pickup Krebs had given her barely connected her with anything outside her cell.
Elys would die without getting Taia or Alyansa the information they needed to protect themselves.