Spark and Tether, page 23
More dancers had arrived and were clearing a circle in the small crowd. Sacheri took the opportunity to pull Jin into a shadowy alcove, bringing them so close he could no longer see the crowd behind them.
“I owe you an apology,” he said. “I should have talked to you about it. I’m sorry.”
“Paradis talked to you, did she?” They let him move them closer.
“It’s not about what Paradis said. Though she was right and I told her so. I knew I should talk to you and I didn’t. I was scared. I’m sorry. I will do better.”
Jin’s smile was faint but real. Sacheri traced the curve of their neck with his fingertips. “Thank you,” they said. “I felt left out, not angry.”
“You were left out. I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you.” They touched their forehead to his. “Want to dance?”
Sacheri let Jin pull him back into the crowd. An unseen auntie laughed behind him, and Cord played one of his favorite songs; they danced late into the night, until Neta made a slow circuit of long goodbyes and Cord’s boisterous dance songs became sleepy ballads. The crowd thinned, and as Jin hugged their hosts goodnight, Sacheri realized that the three of them had probably been planning something like this for several cycles, waiting for the right reason to spring it on him. He bade Cord and Neta good night and let Jin lead him up the stairs by the hand. He was asleep before they slid into bed beside him.
He woke the next morning with more energy and optimism than he’d had since returning to Semiz. He slipped from the bedroom and asked the house to keep the bedroom silent while he made breakfast. Neta had pushed several wrapped dishes into their hands the night before, and Sacheri knew something delicious would be in them. He opened the cold storage and began to dig around.
An alarm sounded, faint at first, but increasing in volume and pitch until he had to back out of the cold room and close the doors, thinking there was something in the building. He asked the building fai what was happening.
“I don’t register an alarm,” it told him. “Would you like me to alert another resident or the building owners?”
“No,” Sacheri said, turning slowly in place, as if that would reveal something more about the sound in his head. “Never mind. Thank you.”
The contract is over.
Sacheri shuddered. The voice was frail and furious at once, equal parts terrified and enraged. He desperately wanted to help, but could not see the speaker.
No one is coming.
He didn’t ask the house to identify her.
“Can I help you?” he whispered.
Don’t leave me here.
Sacheri closed his eyes. The voice was in his head. Not the mild reverberation of an implant or internal audio—those had been modified over time to place voices in the ears, as it had been discovered over the first few iterations of implants that humans did not like voices in their minds, sometimes intensely so. Sacheri suddenly understood why, and missed his synplants more than ever: by design, they protected against that kind of intrusion.
I won’t, he promised without thinking, and then remembered his conversation with Paradis.
Like the experience of the storm while he was in bed, he was again in two places: his kitchen, with a bowl of Neta’s spicy fruit salad in his hands, and …elsewhere, where he was staring up into the stars, desperate to see any light moving toward him, knowing there would be none.
Chapter 29
Sacheri’s new credentials were processed remarkably fast, as least compared to his other COR experiences. He was surprised to find his first several assignments were, in fact, more training; he was going to spend a cycle tethered to a display.
“No one warned me about this,” he grumbled. The archives with the answers he wanted were on the other side of receiving his I&R medallion, and yet here he was, stymied behind ridiculous bureaucracy.
Jin snickered. “Maybe if you’d mentioned to any of us that you were planning to enter I&R… oh, wait. There was no plan.”
Sacheri glared at them, only to get a wink and a kiss on his forehead. He did not mention that his previous trainings, thanks to his synplants, had been a simple rapid transfer and auto-integration. He avoided any mention of synplants, lately, and Jin did not ask. Paradis had stopped checking. He assumed they both believed, like him, that the possibility of repair was no longer open to him, and he did not wish to discuss it. He didn’t want to admit that he did have a plan, and he just hadn’t shared it with them. He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.
Jin disappeared into the bedroom and emerged a moment later with a packed bag. “It feels strange to leave you,” they said, wrapping their hand around the back of his neck as they moved in to kiss him for real. “Are you sure you’re ready?”
“Neta already has the city keeping tabs on me,” Sacheri answered. “Between her and these data modules, I won’t have time to miss you.”
“Hm,” Jin said. “We’ll see about that.” They leaned in closer again, brushing his forehead with a careful kiss. Sacheri shivered. “Maybe I’ll need to remind you what you’re missing,” they said.
Sacheri pushed them away. “Get out, before you miss your transport.”
“I will miss you,” Jin said, backing away.
“Good,” Sacheri answered. Jin kissed him one more time at the door, and he felt keenly the real edge of nerves under the banter and flirtation. He had not been able to hide his disorientation, the last few times he’d been overcome with those strange, not-his-memory flashes. And the worry was probably warranted, if he was honest with himself, but he also knew that after a half-standard year on Semiz, Jin was long overdue for a run off-world. Sacheri had encouraged them to take it when it was offered, and even promised to check in with Paradis and Neta daily to make it easier for Jin to relax into the work.
“I’ll be good,” Sacheri said, and closed the door before Jin could answer.
Sacheri completed the I&R trainings quickly even without active synplants and was soon bored. Neta was meeting a shipment across the park, and Cord was happily feeding half the city at his stall. Sacheri would have been welcomed by either of them, but he told them he needed to train and rest.
He accessed several sets of finding aids for archives newly open to him, careful to pull records connected to the training modules delivered to him, and meandered through as many systems as he could reach, familiarizing himself with their categories and hierarchies and quirks. It might not lead him anywhere useful, but it was much better than staring over the trees at an ominous sky, while his systems either repaired themselves or not.
Records and archives were an enormous part of Investigations and Restorations. Jin was an expert, but they’d focused their career on the creation and maintenance of records and they were less experienced in historicals. Few COR personnel had access to any records connected to Oversight, but Sacheri would be one of them—as soon as he finished the training modules and gained a few first-level credits on assignments.
He scanned the archives documentation that was required of all new I&R recruits; he’d gotten through Orinus and Macinus rather quickly, as they were the standards the rest of COR relied upon and their stations were run through the same controls as planetary operations. Other worlds had more complicated divisions which maintained separate political structures between COR in orbit and their dirtside populations. Population mattered less than the agreements between COR and local governments. Danae, Semiz, and a dozen other worlds fell into that group.
And then there were the independent worlds, which allowed COR personnel access under certain specific conditions. Bolis was the largest of them, and the only one he was concerned with for now; none of the other independents were wealthy or old enough to have funded terraforming anything beyond themselves. Bolis shared as little as possible with COR, notoriously so, but as the child of Bolisian citizens, he held certain rights. He might have another route to gaining access.
Sacheri had not shared any of this with either Jin or Paradis and did not plan to. It felt necessary to keep quiet, even from them, though he could not articulate exactly why. If anyone discovered his activity, he could truthfully claim he was being thorough in his preparation for his new professional trajectory.
It was deep into the night when he pulled back from his display and released himself. He found three small dishes carefully wrapped on his counter, still steaming. He hadn’t heard Neta come in, and she had not disturbed his work.
He ate on the balcony, staring out at the sky, and wondered if this was how Adda had begun her search, and if so, where, and which records she might have found.
Halfway through Jin’s assignment, Sacheri admitted to himself that he was, in fact, sad and lonely. He’d tried a few tried-and-true favorite immersions, but without synplants to boost sensations it just left him tired and bored. He went for walks through the park, down to the water and back, but the constant polite hellos of passersby wore him down, too. He retreated to the balcony and felt sorry for himself.
A few days later, he received notification that the full reports of his scans were ready, if he wished to review them. Paradis had suggested he open them with her and Jin present for support, but the thought made him queasy.
He missed Jin, who was going to be in either travel hibernation or security sequester for the duration of the assignment. It was almost like the early days of their relationship, with long stretches of time with no contact, except it was nothing like them, as he was reasonably confident Jin would return. He sent timed pings, so they would know how much he thought of them, but not so many that he sounded desperate. He hoped.
They would want to be with him, when he scanned the data. He debated with himself which would be worse: answer, no answer. Jin, no Jin. Waiting seemed worse.
He requested the records.
The first several files were identical to the findings from Oversight’s initial scans. No damage detected, no concern for deterioration. He was fine. The synplants’ non-responsive state was a mystery.
Deep in the report was another batch of scans labeled debris, with no explanation or description of the contents. He expanded the data to examine it better, confused when his implants refused it and sent it to the house display, where it opened in jagged, uneven bursts.
Sacheri couldn’t understand any of it. He sat at his station, fuming at the display, which continuously scrolled through data forms he could not even identify. He stared at it for several minutes, trying to figure out if this was an error or a joke or more COR bureaucratic absurdity—had he neglected to specify some detail in his request?
He sent a ping to Paradis, who did not respond. He stared at the scrolling code, feeling like something should have been familiar; they’d pulled it out of him, after all. What next? He did not trust himself to request anything from COR, and Oversight hadn’t even mentioned this debris scan in their evaluations.
He sent ping to Lumen on Meritor: Did you get a debris scan, and what is one supposed to do with it?
Sacheri asked the house fai to alert him at once if an answer came. He left the work room, stood at the kitchen counter in a daze for a few minutes, and then took a handful of plums out to the balcony, where he ate them in two bites apiece as he stared into the sky.
Debris. Something about the word itched in his mind, like something he should know. He tried again to read it with his implant, and then searched the archive listings for any similar packets. He wondered if the fai would answer, and then, because it was there and available, he ran the fai’s updated packet against the debris scan, looking for commonalities.
The sky spun and everything washed over violet; Sacheri fought for breath as the air left his lungs and he fell forward out of his chair, trying to escape the shrieking grind of metal in his ears.
When he looked up, the night sky was clear through the window at the top of the control station, and he gave thanks for the drones that had kept it so clean—one of a thousand tiny kindnesses they’d shown. Count them with me, said the voice, and he felt her sorrow when there was no answer. They had not responded in many days, but it was the last hope she held.
He knelt before the window, found a guide star, and sent a prayer. Her three standard contract had stretched to five and then silence as systems failed around her. She had accepted that no one was coming; they’d been abandoned, the three of them— moon, fai, and human alike. There was no hope for rescue or deliverance.
Sacheri could feel the stone floor of his balcony under his knees, but the rest of him was elsewhere—with her.
Show me, he said, desperate to hold on; he knew where she was and what she was doing. The familiarity of it was both terrifying and a reassurance.
She reached through her synplants, slowly and with tremendous effort—he was shaking, retching, the top of his head pressed tight against what he knew was stone and clay but what felt like metal holding him in. It had been a long time since she had tried, but she pushed through, out into the stars, seeking any connection that might find her.
On the balcony, Sacheri wept as the wave hit him.
Chapter 30
It was hard to stay calm.
He came back to himself on the balcony floor, wedged between a chair leg and the wall, drenched in sweat and memories that belonged to someone else. He crawled inside to the bedroom and fell into a fitful sleep on the wool rug beside the bed. But he knew a little of what had happened.
Explaining it was going to be something else.
He pinged Paradis again. She did not respond.
He spent the next days in a fog, finding himself coming back to awareness with no memory of how he’d come into that room, or how long he had been asleep, or how the house displays had all been turned off. But it settled, and he found that he could call up experiences in a more organized and less invasive way, and he felt more hopeful than he had since waking up in the med suite going back to Danae.
When Jin came home, Sacheri met them at the door with an embrace that was just shy of desperate. “I got the COR scans. They explained everything.”
He burst into laughter at their bewildered expression. “I couldn’t wait to tell you.“
“The COR scans explained everything,” Jin repeated slowly.
“I can explain. I know what happened. Oh, wait.” He paused. “I’m sorry. Let me take your bag. Why don’t you settle in for a minute? It can wait until you’re comfortable.”
Jin studied him with mild alarm.
Sacheri took another deep breath. Excellent start. Go full breakdown as they walk in the door. Very cool. Not alarming at all. “I’m okay. I missed you. I have a lot to tell you, when you are ready.”
Jin raised an eyebrow.
Sacheri grinned. “How was your run?”
“Uneventful,” Jin said. “I missed you, too.”
Sacheri took Jin’s bag and nodded toward the chairs in front of the kitchen. “I’ll put this away and make us something,” he said, turning to put the bag on its shelf in the workroom. He felt their eyes on him as he moved into the kitchen and mixed their favorite re-entry drink—a nutrient-boosted puree thinned with a smooth nut milk that Sacheri had never liked. They took the glass from his hands, thanked him, and sat on the edge of one of the larger armchairs.
“What did you find out?” Jin asked.
Sacheri took a deep breath. “The syn and the fai on that moon were abandoned there. There was a message, but it…degraded over time, maybe because of conditions. The fai on Meritor had another piece.”
They were so careful to look unconcerned. “Lumen?”
“I think there are more pieces. I think Adda knows at least some of it, and there are more pieces out there, and it’s—” Sacheri stopped when Jin’s expression closed off. He knew he must sound completely irrational.
When Jin spoke, it was careful and slow. “How do you feel?”
“I feel like I’m getting somewhere,” he snapped, and then closed his eyes in instant regret. When he opened them again, Jin’s expression had not changed. Sacheri kneeled in front of them, putting his hands on the arms of the chair, and reminded himself to stay calm.
“What did Oversight say?”
“I haven’t updated them. I can’t reach Paradis. She’s been out of touch for days.” He realized, as he said it, that he was not sure he trusted Oversight anymore. Or COR. Or anything. Someone had abandoned one of them on a dying moon. The agony of it slid through his nerves, threatening to surface with every word.
Jin’s careful expression gave Sacheri the distinct sense that they were more concerned with every word. “This is bigger than me,” he said. “I can’t risk sharing with the wrong people.”
Jin frowned. “I’m more concerned about your safety.”
Sacheri leaned back on his heels and dropped his hands to his knees. It was hard to look at them, but he forced himself to do it. They had to hear him.
“I believe you,” Jin said. It was not reassuring. “It is bigger than you, and there have to be others who know more.”
“Then where have they been?” he asked.
Jin dropped their eyes to the floor, and Sacheri relaxed a little.
“I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense. There’s so much that’s… internal.” And he could not translate, without the synplants.
“It was code. You’re saying you were infected with code.”
“Yes.” Sacheri watched as Jin’s lips thinned. The concern on their face irritated him. They were so close to understanding but so focused on the wrong pieces. His first real breakthrough deserved a little more celebration than this. “It’s not like—”
Jin rubbed a hand over their face. “Can you start from the point where you received the report, please?”
