Lydia’s sleeping on the sofa when Gil rolls in from the pub, waking her up. He flops in the armchair: he’s done a late shift at the inkworks and that metallic smell permeates his clothes. He asks how her flight was. All he wants to hear about is the flight, he doesn’t ask about work: maybe he’s steering clear of work deliberately, figuring she won’t want to talk about it. So she gives him what he wants and tells him about the flight in as much detail as she can recall. Gil has always wanted to take a hopper. He doesn’t even seem that interested in going to other countries, he just loves the idea of seeing Earth from orbit while getting served free drinks. He’s jealous Lydia got to go at all, and he’s insanely jealous she got to go first class.
“Here,” Lydia says, reaching into her bag. “I wasn’t hungry when they brought this round so I saved it for you.” She hands him a tube of sushi with the hopper logo on it.
Gil is thrilled, tells her she’s the best, and unwraps and noisily eats the sushi. Lydia wonders if she used to eat like that. They always told her at LSTL she needed to improve her table manners, which annoyed her because she never thought she had a problem with it. But maybe she did.
She asks Gil if he’s picked up or fixed up any cars lately—if she’s honest that’s all she wants to hear about from him—but he just shakes his head. “No time. Working like a bastard at the moment. We’re short staffed.”
“How can you be short staffed? There’s tons of people out of work.”
“Turnover’s bad. They’re not training people properly. You should tell your boss about it.”
The inkworks was founded, when Lydia was a kid, specifically to produce books for export to Logia. This is the foundation of Earth’s trade with the planet: the Logi have an awkward relationship with digital, which they regard as chaotic compared with the clarity of mind-to-mind communication. Coding is anathema to them, and their technology is altogether more organic, operated via direct mental commands. They do use imported digital technology in a limited way, but few of them really understand it, and so the vast majority prefer physical books. After making contact with Earth, the Logi were fairly cool on the relationship until they discovered how much cheaper it is to make books here: the plant matter usually used for this purpose on Logia is trickier, and slower, to cultivate. The rougher texture of Earthmade paper has taken some getting used to, but the Logi put up with it for the sake of the huge cost savings. (Lydia knew a lot of this already, and the rest she learned when helping Fitz research a paper about the parallel development of the book in different cultures.)
This activity has led to a minor resurgence in printed books on Earth, which means the inkworks does make some home market material. But this is really only an offshoot of the business they get from the Logi, so Gil blames his working conditions on them, saying that as they’re the major customers, they ought to insist on better standards.
“He’s not in charge of that stuff, Gil,” says Lydia wearily. “It’s not like they all know each other.” In fact Fitz probably does have the influence to bring such issues to the attention of someone who could potentially do something about it, but (a) she doesn’t want to speak out of turn and (b) she’s quitting. “You want to go out for a drive tomorrow?”
“I’ve not got a car at the moment.”
“Not even the Umu?”
“Sold it.”
“No!” Lydia is horrified. “You should’ve told me—I’d have bought it off you and kept it here, you could’ve gone on using it—”
“That’s the problem, nowhere to keep it. Jadon won’t let me use his garage anymore. Only a matter of time before someone nicked it off the street.”
“That’s what I was looking forward to most—it’s been ages since I’ve had a drive.”
“Sorry. I can ask around, see if anyone’ll give you a lend of theirs—”
“What will you do?”
“What d’you mean, what will I do?”
“If you’ve not got one either? What will you do about driving?”
“I told you, I’ve no time for it. Taking all the shifts they can give me. And I worry, y’know—if I broke my leg or ended up in a coma or whatever, I worry what’d happen to Mum.”
“She earns alright from her streams, doesn’t she?”
He sticks out his lip. “Alright, but it’s pin money really. Barely more than she’d get from the Credit Office. So I shouldn’t take stupid risks.”
“Well, if you’re not driving there’s no point me going anyway.”
“Sorry.”
Lydia sinks back into the sofa. “I loved that Umu. You taught me to drive in that car.”
“I remember.”
Since Lydia was twelve she and Gil had been modding old cars: removing the Smartsteer, fitting decent manual steering and transmission, adding other funky touches. After a while Gil left the modding to her because she was better at it, while he focused on finding cars and sourcing parts—he didn’t have a job back then. It could’ve been a proper business if there was more of a market for it: only rarely did they make a decent profit when selling a car onto another manualer. But even though she was able to strip an engine and put it back together by the age of sixteen, Lydia couldn’t actually drive.
Gil could have taught her but Mum would’ve thrown him out of the house: She didn’t approve of manualing, said it was dangerous, said there wasn’t a person alive who could drive better than a Smartsteer. Mum wouldn’t get in a car with Gil under any circumstances. One time she fractured a wrist at home and needed to go to hospital, and Gil insisted he could get her there quicker than an ambulance: Mum turned him down, saying that was exactly what she was afraid of.
But Mum finally accepted she couldn’t stop Lydia learning forever, and she’d be as well to do it with Gil. So that summer after Lydia turned sixteen, every day for a month, he took her out in that dark maroon Umu to the crumbling retail park on the edge of town (which wasn’t a village for the homeless then) and taught her everything he knew. They tried not to get into traffic because other cars would instantly detect the slightest infraction of road regulations and report it: instead they stuck to deserted areas, of which there were plenty. Gil taught her emergency maneuvers, cornering, stopping distances. He taught her doughnuts, handbrake turns, drifting.
Eventually Lydia was good enough to race with Gil’s mates, usually out at one of the abandoned villages like Todmorden, where no one would see them. It was technically illegal but no one ever did anything about it: they weren’t endangering anyone except themselves, and as they were unemployed, no one cared if they died. Lydia did the Longfield run in under forty seconds once, taking the big corner at fifty miles per hour. Those days in the Umu when Gil taught her to drive might be the happiest she’s ever had.
Lydia’s set her presence to dark, so she doesn’t register on any of her old friends’ feeds and they won’t know she’s in town. She’s not sure they’d look her up even if they knew. During her first couple of years at LSTL, whenever she came home she’d do a blitz on her presence and make an effort to see everyone. She was keen to show them (and herself) she was the same person she always was, until it started to become clear she wasn’t. They’d comment mockingly on her clothes and how she talked and the things she knew, and she would try to laugh along self-deprecatingly, because what else can you do? Over time it started to feel like more and more of an effort, and the outcome didn’t seem to justify the effort, and it became easier not to bother.
The most awkward one was Emma, who—five years ago now—had been the one who suggested they go along when the translation agency sent their mobile testing center around. It didn’t come here; they had to go to Sheffield. Lydia felt sure she wouldn’t be suitable: she’d seen the list of common indicators (good at art and maths, able to focus on one person talking in a noisy room, synaesthesiac) and none of them applied to her apart from the one about having INS (prolonged veearr use does her head in after about an hour, which is how come she developed an interest in fixing cars instead). But Emma assured her they’d test anyone, and you got to go to the language school for free and there were great jobs at the end of it, much better than anything around here, and Emma didn’t want to go on her own. The test indicated Emma was unsuitable, and she just shrugged and laughed: it was a long shot, about one in a hundred thousand. Lydia lied and told Emma she’d failed the test too.
A week later Lydia secretly traveled down to London for the next round of testing, figuring she was bound to fail that one so there was no point upsetting Emma by telling her. When she was offered a place at LSTL she told Mum and Gil straightaway but didn’t put it on her stream for ages, because she was putting off telling Emma. When she finally did, Emma pretended to be pleased for her, and Lydia made a weak attempt at softening the blow by telling her the school wasn’t really free, you had to pay it all back when you got a job at the end.
“Oh,” Emma replied. “Yeah, that’s not so great.” Then she asked if Lydia was going to accept the offer.
“Probably, yeah,” Lydia said. She’d already accepted three weeks ago.
Lydia wants to get a sense of the local mood, so while Mum cuts her hair in the late morning, she tells her glasses to narrow her feed’s geo range. But nothing much comes up, so she tries lowering truthiness and raising Chime:
@DALEDIGGER / City councilman found dead at home, AI had been attending meetings on his behalf “for months”—did it PLOT to KILL him? / TR62
@LONGVOICE / Firefighters respond to criticism of satellite heatmap tech, saying it’s cut fake callouts by 88%: “We were getting swamped” / TR76
@FEEDCHURNER / Barnsley: The new global capital of Scientology? We go beyond the walls of their compound / TR51
Bloody hell, who reads this garbage? Some of her old friends used to set their filters low, saying they didn’t really believe the junk, it was just entertainment—but bits of it seeped into their conversation anyway. Some didn’t trust the truthiness ratings and inevitably claimed it was all just a way of suppressing inconvenient information. Lydia sometimes worries it’s naive of her to set so much store by the TRs, and yeah they probably are manipulating her to some extent, but she needs some way to make the whirlwind of crap manageable. The world has enabled so many bullshitters. It’s exhausting.
Lydia closes her feed and goes back to working out how she can manage her future while Mum tells her to hold still so she can check if the sides of her hair are even. If she quits the agency she’ll still owe them most of the money for her education. She currently pays it back at the rate of 8.5 percent of her salary, and she’s been in the job for only ten months: she still has six years to go. The terms state she has to pay it off only when she’s earning, and if she gives up translation and moves back here she doesn’t expect ever to earn again—the assessment process at the inkworks classed her as having medium to low suitability for any of the roles there, and there’s sod all else.
So she’s looking at living in debt, in Halifax, for the rest of her life. But that’s fine. She’ll go back to watching old vids on her scroll and reading whatever books Gil brings home: the inkworks realized years ago they lost fewer books to theft if employees were allowed to take as many as they liked, killing the illicit thrill. She could get back to fixing up cars, maybe convince Gil to get back into it. Mikhaila would have to move out, of course. That might be tricky.
She’s stared this in the face before. There was that time at LSTL when everyone was talking about the new translation technology that was being developed in California. Lydia remembers gathering around a scroll with her fellow pupils to watch a demo. The device looked rough and unfinished, but a Logi was wearing it like a helmet, loose cables connecting one part to another, and one of the dev team was speaking into a mic. The helmet could receive the speaker’s words and, via an organic component made of cloned tissue from the brain of a translator, reprocess them into a signal the Logi could understand. It worked both ways: the helmet could receive the Logi’s thoughts and a speech prog spoke them aloud. The demonstration was very impressive.
Lydia was distraught. They all were. They were due to graduate soon and it was all for nothing: this helmet would come on the market and all the Logi would get one and no one would need translators anymore. They were no longer special or useful and they’d all be in tons of debt. Some of them cried. Others watched the demo over and over, trying to convince one another (and themselves) that the thing didn’t really work, that it had all been faked in order to raise investment, or something.
Their tutors told them not to worry about it and to continue their education. Lydia couldn’t see the point, but she had nothing else to do.
A few months later it emerged that during subsequent tests the helmet had created a feedback loop, causing the wearer to uncontrollably repeat what they heard, effectively turning them into a transmitter. This proved a most unpleasant experience for any Logi who used it, filling their mind to the exclusion of all other thoughts. The developers insisted they could eliminate this malfunction but the damage was done: The Logi insisted emphatically they would not use the helmet, it would be commercially nonviable, and they took a dim view of any further development. The project was abandoned.
The LSTL pupils had a party in the dormitory the night they heard: they got drunk (properly, on actual booze) and Lydia had clumsy sex with Maybelline, the girl from the room next door. In retrospect that was the closest she ever felt to her fellow pupils.
Gil’s friend Jank calls around before work and sits and chats to Lydia while Gil hauls himself out of bed. Lydia doesn’t want to chat: she’s trying to color her hair. Jank has already told her he dislikes the new color, an opinion he was not asked for. He’s one of those people—she runs into them quite often—who asks questions about her job with a tone of bemusement and rather you than me.
“People say they don’t really need translators, the aliens,” he says.
“Who says that?”
“Apparently it’s all a big grooming ring.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Jank says with a leer. He used to send Lydia nasty messages back when she lived around here, until Gil told him to stop it. He’d deepfake vids of them fucking, stuff like that, the most basic sex trolling you could imagine. He’s not changed much.
“You must’ve seen them using translators on the feeds though.”
Jank shrugs. “Yeah. So?”
“So … that’s obviously bollocks, isn’t it.”
“Maybe not everyone who went to your school got a posh job like yours though. Maybe the ones who don’t get jobs end up doing other stuff.”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
For a few blissful seconds Lydia thinks Jank might shut up, but then he asks: “What sort of stuff do they think about then?”
“It’s not like that.”
“What is it like, then?”
Lydia sighs. “There’s stuff he says to me, which I can hear, and there’s stuff he just thinks, which I can’t. And he doesn’t know what I’m thinking either.”
“Probably just as well you don’t know what he thinks. You probably don’t want to know.”
“You’re a fucking idiot, Jank.”
Why did she come back home? She could have told Fitz she wanted to visit London for a few days. He’d have agreed to that. Probably booked her a nice hotel. She could’ve looked up Leif or Tregan, or one of her friends outside LSTL like Esme. Or even Maybelline. Like, it’s nice to see Mum and Gil, but she’ll have loads of time to see them when she moves back. This might have been her last chance to be somewhere other than here, and she’s pissed it away.