On the hopper from New York to Manchester Lydia listlessly flicks through her feed, not opening anything, just looking at an endless stream of headers, previews and images.
@JUICELINE / Why Gen ((O)) Teens think your favorite Transformers film is problematically cyberphobic / TR91
@SKINNYDIP / We got a sneak peek at the new G17 human rights reform bill! SPOILERS AHOY / TR86
@DEADPLANET / What the fuck lives at the heart of Australia, and why? This zoologist has answers that may surprise you / TR77
What’s that last one doing there? Her truthiness filter is meant to be set at 80, regardless of whether a post has a good Chime score. The bloody thing always resets to default if you don’t keep an eye on it. She corrects her settings and then flicks to her personals.
@Dubi80Du / Got a hyperwave nutrient bath installed in my bed and it has CHANGED MY LIFE / TR82 / SPONSORED
@Agger4nn / Disappointed by the reaction to my apology yesterday so yeah I’ll be closing down this identity and opening a new circle / TR84
@NemoZemo62 / making a cinnamon babka LIVE here in 20 mins, mirroring it on the veearr if you want to try some for yourself! / TR94
She hasn’t seen anything about the Anders incident since yesterday, which means either no one is talking about it anymore or the filters she set up are working: she doesn’t care which. As she scrolls she wonders when she last saw anything from someone she’s met in hardspace. Back home she really valued her hardspace connections on account of her interface nausea syndrome—those were the people who’d remember to include her and not do everything in veearr. But she’s not made any friends like that in NYC (she can’t even find any INS support groups, which seems nuts), and her friends from back home have drifted to the edges of her circle and rarely get pushed at her anymore. The other connections she’s accumulated are people she can happily talk to on main, but doesn’t feel she could ask any of them to talk on private. And if she doesn’t feel like talking on main, she doesn’t exist—so her interactions have become very superficial.
The feeds aren’t giving her the distraction she craves, so she tries books, vids, pods, actives—she even attempts to lose herself in that cube-stacking puzzle game she wasted whole days on as a kid. (Once she placed #4 on the daily global leaderboard. She was eleven years old, and nothing has ever felt as satisfying since.) But her brain is still snagged on going over the events repeatedly as if this will change them. This is a waste of time and energy, because it will not change them, but try telling her brain that.
So she attempts to get drunk—properly drunk, on complimentary booze. She only has to double-tap the armrest and the runner comes down the aisle with the tray: the perks of going first class. Fitz paid and she didn’t ask how much it cost. She never knew anyone who could afford intercontinental travel when she was growing up. She’d known a few who’d come from the tropical deadzones—but none of them could afford to go back, or would have wanted to.
She can’t remember the last time she got drunk—when she gets a night off, she prefers to spend it sober—so she expects her tolerance for alcohol to be very low. Yet she feels barely anything. She wonders if something in her biology has changed in the course of her work and she can no longer get drunk. But then, she also heard something once about how the hopper companies put a sobering drug in the air-conditioning to stop you getting lairy. So you can down as many free drinks as you like but after a point it stops having any effect.
Lydia tries to sleep, but cannot. Her brain goes through the events again in the hope they’ll turn out differently this time.
The day after the Anders incident Lydia had a horrendous hangover, naturally. Translation hangovers are different from alcohol ones. It feels more like having a mild flu—drained of energy and full of weird aches. Also the body doesn’t know how to react, because human bodies were never meant to do any of this, so it produces excesses of various chemicals in an effort to cope, and you have to deal with all that going through your system too. On top of this she’d been doing &. This was the state Lydia was in while trying to come to terms with what she’d done at the reception.
Surprisingly there was no note from the agency about it when she woke up. She expected one to arrive sometime in the morning, but it didn’t. She blocked all her other feeds without looking at them, a display of extraordinary willpower on her part: news of the incident was bound to be doing the rounds to some degree. She decided to pretend it was one of those hazy dreamlike memories, adopting the demeanor of a child who wasn’t really aware of having done anything wrong. Perhaps everyone else wanted to forget about it too. Perhaps no one would mention it, and if they did she could act all surprised before going Wait, it’s starting to come back to me … oh god, I can’t believe I did that! Etc, etc.
In fact she remembered the incident vividly. The moment before she punched Anders she felt very drunk, but when her fist connected everything jolted into crystal clarity. And while she felt bad for having embarrassed herself and Fitz and caused a scene, she didn’t feel bad about the act itself because Anders was totally asking for it. If she’d punched him on the street at night and no one had seen, she’d have felt satisfied and gotten on with her life.
In the immediate aftermath Lydia was ushered away and the haze of drunkenness slid over her perceptions again, leaving the punch as a point of perfect focus in her impressionistic mental image of the evening. She dimly remembered telling one of the staff what a lovely event it had been as she and Fitz left the restaurant. She didn’t much recall arriving back at the residence.
Lydia lay in her room at the residence throughout the morning and into the afternoon, afraid to get up and face whatever awaited her. Around two o’clock, three people—two human, one Logi—arrived at the residence. She recognized one of the humans, who was from the local branch of the translation agency. The Logi was a member of embassy staff, the other human was her translator: Lydia had met them both before but couldn’t remember either of their names. The translator was called … she wanted to say Ben? She’d failed to make friends among the other translators. Lydia sensed some resentment, like they all preferred her predecessor and blamed Lydia for her absence, though none of them ever said this or even implied it. Some said her predecessor was the best student the New York School of Thought Language ever had, so Lydia avoided raising the subject because it made her feel a total fraud, a mediocrity stepping into the shoes of genius. She couldn’t imagine how disappointed everyone must be in her after this incident.
Lydia waited to be summoned downstairs to explain herself.
But the call never came and she realized they weren’t interested in hearing her explain herself. There was nothing she could say. The meeting went on for quite some time, which surprised Lydia because if they were discussing her dismissal she’d expected it to be a short conversation. Eventually they left and Lydia watched them go from the window, trying vainly to read the outcome of the meeting from their body language.
At this point she accepted she was going to be sacked. She deserved it. She’d spent much of the day trying to put a positive spin on the situation, but the plain truth was she’d screwed up very badly. When she accepted this she actually felt better. It simplified everything because she didn’t have to make any decisions. She ordered in some pancakes, figuring it was her last chance to do so before she got booted out of this town for good: they were droned direct to her window and she ate them lying on her bed.
Shortly before four o’clock, Fitz sent a message up. Like all his messages it was written on premium-weight, headed notepaper and delivered by the domestic, a robot roughly the size and shape of an upturned wastepaper basket: It held the note in one of its white-gloved, eerily human-looking hands. The message requested Lydia’s presence in the downstairs study at her earliest convenience.
Well, this was it.
Lydia changed out of her pajamas and into a dark gray skirt and white blouse, because that outfit went with her favorite boots, the ones with the black and white spirals coming up from the ankles. She went down to the hallway, where she found the study door closed as always. Fitz never left the study door open: if he was inside on his own, he’d be working; if he was inside with someone else, he’d want privacy; if he wasn’t inside, he’d keep it closed to stop dust getting in.
She mentally pinged Fitz through the study door to let him know she’d arrived. (The proper term, which she’d learned at LSTL, was presenting, but Lydia hated it for some reason and always thought of it as “pinging.”)
Yes, please enter, came the reply.
Fitz’s study was one of the largest rooms in the old brownstone house, all done out with fitted mahogany bookcases that had been here long before the building had been acquired for use as the cultural attaché’s residence. Many of the shelves didn’t fit his books, because Logi books tended to be taller and wider than books made on Earth, but he’d filled the smaller shelves with books accumulated while living here: books in English, Mandarin, Spanish, French, Japanese, Urdu, Portuguese, Russian, German and more. (The concept of one species on one planet speaking so many different languages fascinated him—the Logi’s own language had slipped into standardization long ago—and his lack of progress with learning to read human languages was due to his inability to focus on one at a time.) He had a desk by the window and a long, deep sofa against the back wall. There was little space for pictures, but the area above the sofa was filled with a morphing canvas he’d brought with him from Logia, which generated images based on the mood of the room—it responded to Logi, but also to humans who could speak Logisi. At that moment it displayed a sunrise on Logia. Sometimes it showed Fitz’s family and friends back home, sometimes spectacular vistas, sometimes phrases in Logisi which Lydia couldn’t read but suspected might be motivational slogans. One time she entered the study looking for him and he wasn’t there and the canvas was displaying what looked very much like erotica. She was too embarrassed to mention it and could never decide whether it had anything to do with Fitz or if whatever intelligence drove the canvas had a mischievous side. Lydia knew little about their technology—not through ignorance on her part, the Logi were careful not to bring too much of it to Earth or explain how it worked, and had complicated protocols about this—but she understood much of it was organic and could, in some sense, think.
Fitz was on the sofa, reading a coffee-table book of Scandinavian landscapes, holding it easily in one huge hand, fingers splayed to support its four corners. He closed the book, put it to one side and gestured for Lydia to sit in the high-backed padded chair. It was designed for someone of Fitz’s height and Lydia always found her legs dangled down, making her feel like a small child sitting in Daddy’s office (not that she had ever actually done that). She sat on it cross-legged in the hope this would make her look very slightly less foolish.
Lydia was going to start by apologizing to him. But then he apologized to her instead. He’d put her under too much strain, he said. Expecting her to translate the entire play for him and cope with the reception afterwards, at the end of such a busy week, was too much. He should have scheduled more time off during the festival and departed the reception earlier.
No no, Lydia replied. I was totally up for it and I—
But Fitz just held up a hand and said, I’ve taken full responsibility for what happened.
Lydia wasn’t sure he could do that, legally, if Anders pressed charges. What about the bloke I punched? Is he happy with that?
I’ve told him I’ll sponsor his event.
His devised theater thing?
Yes.
Oh. Sorry.
It’s fine. It sounds quite worthwhile.
So he’s not going to take it any—
No.
This was all being presented to her very lightly, but Lydia knew Fitz had put himself on the line for her and she wasn’t sure she deserved it. But he genuinely wasn’t angry: She’d have known if he was. It was impossible for him to outright lie to her in that way, and vice versa for that matter: their true feelings would always filter through.
I saw someone from the embassy was here, she said.
Yes. Her name’s Madison. When Fitz said this, Lydia realized he’d mentioned her before—possibly not by name, but there was a tang of animosity she definitely recognized from previous conversations about his dealings with a colleague. He didn’t always have to use someone’s name for Lydia to know who he was talking about.
Was she very cross?
Fitz flexed his fingers in what Lydia had come to recognize as a dismissive gesture. Madison and I have never got on. She thinks I let myself be influenced too much; I think being influenced is an essential part of my job. She’s using this incident to lobby for me to be reassigned. This isn’t really about you.
This made Lydia feel worse. You mean I could have got you fired?
His fingers flexed again, faster this time. No no. There was never any danger of that.
Lydia looked up at the canvas. It had changed to an abstract piece in yellows and greens: It often did this when she was in here, especially if she was having some work-related stress, and she didn’t like it. There used to be a print exactly like that in her tutor’s office at LSTL, and Lydia always found it irritatingly distracting, and the canvas must have taken that image from her memory, picking up on how she associated it with feeling inadequate.
I think you need a holiday, Fitz said.
But we just had a holiday. In May they’d spent three weeks in East Asia, first staying with the cultural attaché for that region, who was based in Shanghai, before moving on to Incheon, Seoul, Kyoto and Tokyo. It was an extraordinary trip but exhausting. At LSTL they had explained to Lydia she’d feel like this: having spent the first two decades of her life barely moving outside the town where she grew up, she’d find new places and experiences tiring. At the time Lydia felt this patronizing, but annoyingly it turned out to be accurate—during her first couple of months living in New York she spent a lot of her downtime just staring into space, too exhausted to process anything else.
Our trips aren’t holidays, Fitz replied.
This was true. All his holidays were working holidays, since he was always absorbing new aspects of human culture, and if she was with him she was working too.
You haven’t been home since you started working for me, he went on. Maybe that would do you good?
She told him her bag was already packed.