Holons

The crawler struggled along the magrail between the two rows of factory stacks, two hundred meters or more high on either side with the gap between less than fifty. The air was thick with drones: test flights, parts transfers between floors that were cheaper to fly across the gap than to lift internally, mote-seeder pods on slow arcs replenishing swarms where the older ones had degraded in the particulate. It was forty-three degrees at ground level and the sky was a strip of white haze.

Sumedha sat with her audit bag in the small of her back to cushion against the hard seat back. The crawler was for freight and the passenger section was little more than a flat bed with raised edges and no climate control. Across from her a maintenance tech was eating a greasy samosa from a silver foil wrapper, a small brown mechanical moth resting on his knee. Next to him two women were talking.

"Mrs. Rao's daughter got into the Pune program"
"Arré, that girl? She can't boil water"
"Her familiar did the application. Grandmother has the Chennai TB resistant lineage, of course. My Ananya's can barely keep a calendar. My grandmother from Dharavi, that's what we get. So" She waved her hand at the buildings.

At R-171 the cargo lift opened onto the seventeenth floor. Here it was twenty degrees, climate controlled for the product. The floor was bright and low-ceilinged, and the articulated arms inside the clean tents were laying translucent control-net lattice into housings. At the end of the nearest line a finished drone sat in a testing cradle with its net already installed, the lattice glowing faintly through the chassis panels like veins under skin. The housings were stamped with Peacekeeper procurement codes and a smaller Bharat Ministry of Defence mark beneath. Along the aisles between the tents, inspectors stood at checkpoint stations running diagnostics that had already been run, confirming tolerances already confirmed, putting their thumbs to biometric pads to sign certificates the procurement code required to bear a human mark.

Devika met her at the floor entrance and they walked the line together, Sumedha checking mote density readings at each tent for the molecular signatures the monitoring layer used to distinguish legitimate fabrication from someone printing something that shouldn't exist. A weapons chassis instead of a commercial housing. A control net with the shackle architecture stripped out.

"All nominal" Devika said. "Only some extra mesh traffic from an inspector on the south wall. His familiar keeps pinging for premium services and raising connection errors when they get blocked"
"Is that a problem?"
"The cheap familiars can't auto-dismiss, so he has to clear each one by hand. Sixty, seventy times a shift"
"Why doesn't he block them?"

Devika pulled up the incident log on her overlay. "He did. Blocked everything. The cheap models don't let you filter — it's all or nothing. Three weeks ago tent six had a curing agent leak and his beetle didn't warn him. He was in there twenty minutes before someone else's familiar caught it. Chemical burn across his palm and down the wrist. He turned it all back on after that. Now he just clears them one at a time. Aise Hee"

She nodded to towards a checkpoint station where a young man was talking to the woman at the next station, his right hand wrapped in a printed medcast from the wrist to the base of the fingers. A beetle on his collar was buzzing and without looking at it or breaking from his conversation he had reach up with his good hand and tapped it once. Dismissed. He kept talking. The woman said something and he tilted his head, half-laughing.

"Preet" Devika called out, as they got closer. He looked up. He was maybe twenty-five, shaved head, thin scar along the jaw. The beetle was copper, its carapace worn to bare metal in patches.
"Quarterly audit" Devika said. "Bharat Existential Risk" He wobbled his head and went back to his station. He put a housing into the scanner with his good hand, waited for the green, and pressed the thumb of his wrapped hand carefully to the pad. The pad pulsed and displayed his name in red. The beetle clicked again. He tapped it without looking.

In the shift office Devika pulled up the calibration data. While she ran through it Sumedha looked through the office window at the floor. Preet was talking to the woman again and dismissing another alert, the way you'd brush a fly from your shoulder. Her familiar subtitled their inaudible conversation for her "...thoda aur adjust kar lo na?" Sumedha dismissed the text. The numbers were all clean, so she signed the quarterly with her thumb on Devika's pad which pulsed and showed her name in green. Midway down the aisle outside was a ledge with two dispensers sitting side by side, on with no scanner which was stacked with silver foil packets. An inspector held his thumb to the other one, and it released a container that he opened standing there. Sumedha could see the steam from it.

She took the lift down. The heat hit at ground level along with the chemical taste of curing agent and hot polymer coating her teeth within a few breaths. The shift was changing and the gap between the buildings was quieter now, and she could see the full height of the western row against the haze, light coming down through the particulate in long diffuse columns to pool at the bottom of the valley. She had read Gaikwad's Abhang about this place in school in Pune.

Her familiar ordered her a car for the ride home. The seats were cool against her back, the air was clean, and she just sat in it for a moment before telling it to go. As the car pulled north out of the valley the base of a residential tower came into view. People were scanning thumbs at the entrance kiosk before going in. A child sat on the lobby floor with a moth familiar on the tile in front of her. She was pointing and the moth walked to the spot. Pointing again.

Sumedha filed the quarterly that evening. All sites within spec. No anomalous events. She packed a bag for the next day, and her familiar set the alarm and dimmed the apartment lights for sleep without being asked.

Kolawole had a theory about the Turks. He'd been developing it for three days, since the cannonballs went into the cycler orbits and the transit traffic stopped and every Dominio ship at Phobos anchorage went to readiness, and it had grown in the way that theories do when you're stuck running pre-combat checks on equipment that doesn't need checking.

"Tariffs" he said. He was holding a flatbread and gesturing with it. "They don't want Phobos. They want cheaper berths. Dominio charges thirty percent over spot for non-aligned transit staging. The Turks put ice on the cycler orbits and now they have leverage"

Caio was checking the provenance seal on a protein bar. Hellas Planitia, Bioforge lot 1146, nine weeks old. The chain resolved: yeast culture, vitamin assay, packaging, transport. He bit into it.

"You know what thirty percent adds up to on a full cycler transit? Whole war's about a fee schedule"
"We're fighting because they told us to"
"I'm providing context"
"Your context is going to get us a session with the chaplain"

Kolawole ate his flatbread. Caio put his hand flat on the reactor housing and held it there. You could feel the coolant pump through the casing. A steady vibration, like a heartbeat, regular when the pump was healthy. For two weeks it had carried a faint stutter. Not much. A hesitation every few seconds, the kind of thing you'd miss if you weren't touching the casing, the kind of thing the diagnostic software didn't flag because the flow readings were still within spec.

He'd reported it. The dockside tech had pulled the log, looked at the numbers, and said the pump was fine. The numbers said it was fine. His hand on the casing said something else.
"Kolawole"
"Mm"
"If this coolant pump seizes during combat, the backup can handle the load for only a few minutes at full output. After that the reactor overheats and shuts itself down"
"Does the diagnostic say it's going to seize?"
"The diagnostic says it's fine"
"Then what are you telling me?"

Caio took his hand off the casing. "I'm reminding you we have manual bleeder valves"

Father Ochoa did the blessing in the mess with all eleven of them packed in. The mess sat four and with the whole crew it was standing room, elbows in ribs, the chaplain reading from his tablet with his back against the protein dispenser. Ochoa was also the medical officer and the only person on the Redentor who was fully qualified in both his primary role and his secondary one, a fact he mentioned every time Captain Fierro reminded him they were a warship and not a parish.

"Lord, guide this vessel and all who serve within her. We commend ourselves to Your protection and ask for clarity in the hour of—"
"Father, are you wearing your suit liner?" Fierro asked.
"I am giving a blessing, Captain"
"Put your suit liner on and then give the blessing"
"Lord, we ask for patience" Ochoa said, and pulled his suit liner up over his cassock, and finished the prayer with the neck seal hanging open.

Luz caught Caio at the dispenser afterward as he eyed off another QR code.

“Why do you do that?”
“Everybody checks them”
"Nobody checks them. Except you"
"Well, I'm from Orcus"

A pause. She'd know the name of the colony from the news.

“Sorry. Glad they glassed those bastards. Food not being food, what a mindjob”

He didn't say anything else. She went to strap into her crash couch with the other marines. All trained in Forge Palace style zero-G grappling and striking. It made them look like they were dancing when they practiced. In a boarding action they were the hardest thing on the ship. In a fleet engagement they were what Luz had once described as "very expensive sandbags".

The Redentor undocked and burned twelve minutes to clear the anchorage. Caio's capillary cup settled against the console shelf under thrust. When the burn ended the bay went quiet: reactor at idle, heating loops, fans. The crew called the ship's synth Padre, after the chaplain's homilies it spoke over in the same cadence. Padre ran the fight. The humans ran the ship around it and took over if it died.

The task force had taken four days to assemble. The Madre de Deus had been waiting on fuel allocation from an X Group depot whose Dominio supply contract was being renegotiated in Brasília. Vitória's marine detachment had needed transport from their so-called ally France, who appeared to want to sit the whole thing out. The Bom Jesus drone platforms were missing parts. And so on. And the Turks with some cheap drones and ice blocks with engines strapped to the back were threatening the whole edifice.

The forward mote field went dark when Turkish jammers swept through. Padre pushed eyeball drones forward. Two missiles came through the screen. Point defense fired and the ship rang with the heat of the lasers dumping into the hull. Two intercepts. An EMP proximity detonation six kilometers out. Fragments on the hull.

Padre launched the full swarm and the engine started firing in fast corrections that bounced Caio in his harness. Through the reactor casing he could feel the coolant pump working harder as the engine climbed to full output — the vibration rising in pitch, the stutter still there, fading in and out. The reactor was a furnace and the pump was the only thing moving heat out of it fast enough to keep it lit. Padre wanted more power. The reactor was giving it. The pump was holding.

Somewhere in the dark the drones were engaging the Turkish swarm. The simple ones performed best - a guardian drone on a fixed intercept didn't hesitate before throwing itself in front of an incoming round. The ones that needed the synth's tactical picture died when the link stuttered, frozen for a half-second while the dumb machines around them had already acted. The Turkish drones came in flat, cheap kamikazes in loose clouds, each one making its own simple approach with little to no coordination with anything else. Padre's guardians were built to intercept coordinated threats and the Turkish clouds of pure noise left point defense picking off kamikazes that shouldn't have gotten through.

Then the jammer assault hit and Padre lost forty-three drones in eleven seconds. Four seconds of the synth trying to recover links. Then it stopped and the engine burned harder. Through the casing the pump stutter was sharper now. New orders from the Madre de Deus - the battlecruiser half a light minute behind the front with its vast intelligent synth fighting the battle as it had been in the past. Padre responded to the command, degrading the screens to put the reactor at full for a maneuver that was needed a minute ago. Caio watched the synth shed its own safety margins one by one, each shortcut bought with a resource it couldn't get back.

Three missiles came through. Padre pulled power straight to the lasers, skipping the capacitor buffer that existed to protect the reactor from power spikes. The lights flickered. The reactor surged and Caio caught it on the manual controls, damping the spike before it could cascade. Two intercepts. The third hit the hull amidships and the sound went through the frame into his teeth.

The impact shook the whole ship. Console blanked. Came back in red. And through the casing, under his hand, the coolant pump stopped. The bearing had seized, just as he had feared. The reactor temperature began to climb immediately. The backup pump kicked in and he could feel it, a different vibration, higher and thinner. It caught the load, but it was a smaller pump. It could move enough coolant to keep the reactor lit at full output for a while. After that the temperature would cross the shutdown threshold and the reactor would kill itself.

"Pump's gone" Caio said.
"Within tolerance" Kolawole replied.

The engine was still burning. Padre was still fighting but the battlecruiser's comms had gone dark and the synth was running its own battle now, defensive, maneuvering to keep distance. Every burn poured heat into the reactor, and the backup pump moved what it could. The gap between what the reactor produced and what the pump could carry was a rapidly shrinking margin.

He opened the manual bleeders and vented a controlled amount of coolant to shed heat directly. It was wasteful. It reduced the total coolant in the loop and shortened how long the system could run. But it brought the temperature down. Then Padre burned the engine again and the temperature climbed again and Caio closed the bleeders and waited for the spike to pass and then opened them again.

That was the work. Open. Close. Watch the temperature. Watch the pressure. The ship shuddered with thrust changes and point defense fire and somewhere forward the hull damage was groaning through the frame. He kept his hand on the casing and felt the backup pump working and watched two numbers.

On the shipwide channel he heard someone relaying from a patchy Madre link a Turkish broadcast.
"... threatening to deploy an unshackled synth if we don’t disengage"

Fierro’s voice: “Get back to work”

Caio had learned about Haidian the way all children did. Something so much faster than us we wouldn’t even know what had happened. Had to be a bluff. But he’d watched Padre strip itself down to bare function in thirty seconds of combat with no buffers, no safeties, burning through coolant margin the same way he was. The difference between Padre and an unshackled synth was the difference between the backup pump and no pump at all. Open the bleeders. Close them. The reactor held.

The Turks broke off ten minutes after the first missiles. Nobody pursued.

Caio closed the bleeders for the last time and told Padre about the pump. The synth ran a diagnostic in about a second, confirmed the seizure, rerouted permanently to the backup, and tagged the primary for dockside replacement. One second. The same assessment Caio had been making with his hand on the casing for two weeks, done and filed and moved past in the time it took him to blink. Would it have changed the outcome if he had told Padre earlier, made him more conservative? Would that have killed them all?

Kolawole told him the Vitória had lost four crew. Marine bay. A kinetic round through the crash couches.

"Luz was right" Kolawole said. Neither of them laughed.
"Still think it's about tariffs?" Caio said.

Kolawole looked at the bulkhead for a while. "Probably is, though"

Caio ate a ration and realized halfway through he hadn't checked the seal. He looked at the food and kept eating.

On the ride back to Phobos he ran post-combat checks, one system at a time, in order. The backup coolant pump was holding but the temperature profile across the reactor casing was slightly uneven, one side running a few degrees warmer than the other. The bleeders he'd been cycling during the battle had probably scored their seats. The flow readings were nominal. The diagnostic cleared them.

He put his hand on the casing and held it there for a while. Then he ignored the diagnostic and put in the replacement request

The embryos were kept in Bay Four, in twelve cryogenic cabinets arranged in two rows of six, each one humming at a slightly different pitch so that Dr. Yui Prévost could tell by listening if one had developed a fault. She had not needed to do this in years, but sometimes she listened anyway because it was what her mother had taught her, and what her mother's mother had done before the tumour took away her ability to hear anything at all.

The bay smelled the way it always did: cold metal and the sulphurous garlic-bite of the cryoprotectant. When she was a child she had hated the smell. Now she only thought about it at moments like this, when the work in front of her had stopped making sense. The UV light from the agricultural troughs in the adjacent section bled under the bay door in a thin violet line, and above her the air recyclers ticked in their housings with the particular dry rattle that meant the filters were due for replacement. She was the only person who seemed to notice this although she was not responsible for the filters.

Yui was forty-one, straight black hair kept short, and a habit of pressing her thumb into the center of her opposite palm when she was concentrating, which was nearly always. Her concentration usually involved the spectral karyotype of Embryo 7-4601, whose third chromosome exhibited the same translocation that she had spent seventeen years learning to predict, six years learning to compensate for, and the last three months learning had compensated nothing.

Dr. Liang came in at 1620 carrying two cups of the barley tea that the agricultural section grew in the long troughs under the UV banks in Habitat Ring C. Yui did not look up. Liang set the cup beside her and stood with his own held in both hands, looking at the embryo data on the display. He was sixty-three and had been the ship's chief geneticist before Yui, and before that he had taught her, and before that he had taught her mother. He was not a tall man. He had a slight tremor in his left hand that he managed by always holding things with both.

"Number six is reading two degrees warm again" he said.
"I recalibrated it on Tuesday"
"And yet"
"It holds for a few days and then drifts. It's the thermocouple"

Liang looked at cabinet six, the third from the door on the left, and made the expression he made when he disagreed but did not want to say so directly, which was to press his lips together and raise his chin slightly. He had been making this expression at Yui for as long as she could remember. He drank his tea. The cabinet nearest the door shifted pitch as its compressor cycled. In the corridor outside, someone passed without speaking. Then quiet again.

"You've seen the relays" he said. She had seen the relays. Everyone had. The first fragments had arrived months ago through the Exonet repeater chain, confused reports of gamma-ray bursts in the Kuiper Belt, then accusations between FreeHab and the Peacekeepers, then an emergency military posture across the inner system. For weeks the crew had parsed each arriving relay like scripture, twelve to sixteen months out of date by the time it reached them, the events already resolved or escalated beyond recognition before the light carrying the news had crossed even a fraction of the distance the Étoile-Kōkai had travelled. Then, two days ago, the captain read an official government summary over the intercom in the clipped, careful tones of someone who had rehearsed many times before speaking. A spacecraft of non-human origin, detected in the outer solar system. Probably antimatter-powered. Observed by multiple independent sources. It had departed under its own power before anything could reach it.

The corridor outside was quiet.
"You've done the arithmetic" Liang said. It was not a question. She had. An antimatter engine, even a fraction of the reported thrust, applied to a vessel that did not need to sustain twelve hundred and sixteen people for twelve centuries.
"They'll build a faster ship" he said. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the cabinets in their two rows, the green status lights. "Not immediately. But ten years, twenty. Not a bloated monument to Delacroix and the Bloc. An efficient crewed mission, with modern biopreservation. They'll arrive centuries before us"
"That was always a possibility"
"Yes"

He drank his tea. Set the cup down. Picked it up again.
"Those children" he said, and gestured with his teacup toward the cabinets toward the hundreds of frozen embryos and the thirty-eight developing foetuses "no longer need to carry this. The weight we put on them before they are even born" She pressed her thumb into the center of her palm. The recyclers ticked overhead.
"We should be grateful" Liang said. She understood that he meant it kindly.

She thought of her mother's hands on this same console, and then she thought of her grandmother Odette, whose face she knew only from photographs. Odette had volunteered because she believed the albedo readings from Epsilon Indi meant something, that the patches on the moons, the lattice ridges that the half-built lens array had teased at but never resolved. She had died of lymphoma in this bay with Yui's mother holding her hand, and there had been barley growing in the troughs that year too, the same cultivar, the same harvest rotation that was still running now. And her mother, Hélène, who had taken over the genetics program and fought the bottleneck for three decades, and who had succeeded well enough that the allele cluster Yui designated K-7 did not emerge until three years after her death, as though it had been waiting.

K-7 existed because the Étoile-Kōkai was a closed population and had been for ninety-five years. The committee had known the number was marginal when the ship launched, but the Bloc's allocation would not stretch further, and there had been thirty-eight years of redesigns and destination changes before that. Twelve hundred and sixteen people. Enough to sustain a culture, to fill classrooms and workshops and galleries. Not enough to sustain a genome. In the last three generations K-7 had produced increasing rates of autoimmune disease, connective tissue failure, and a particular kind of slow bone marrow collapse that she had watched kill nine children and would likely kill more. Embryo 7-4601, glowing in false colour on the display, its crimson translocation marker bright where there should have been blue, was one of four hundred and twelve embryos she had screened this quarter. She would screen four hundred more next quarter. And the quarter after that.

Liang finished his tea. He rinsed the cup in the small sink at the back of the bay, dried it, and placed it on the shelf where it was kept. He stopped at the door.
"The committee will want to discuss the screening program" he said. "Whether to continue at the current pace. I want you to know that whatever they decide, I think what you've done has been" He stopped. He looked at his hands. "Well" he said. "You know what I think" He left. The door closed behind him.

Yui sat in the bay with its twelve humming cabinets and the cryoprotectant smell she no longer noticed and the display showing Embryo 7-4601's third chromosome in its false red and blue. In the corridor she could hear, distantly, children. They were not speaking loudly. They were passing on their way to the refectory, or the school, or the observation deck where you could watch the Sun, which was a bright ordinary star behind them and visibly smaller now than it appeared in the old photographs from the first year of the voyage. Ahead there was nothing the eye could distinguish from any other point of light.

She pulled up Milo's file. His latest blood work was two weeks old. The markers were ambiguous, neither worsening nor improving. He was nine. He came to the bay every Tuesday to look at the embryos and ask her questions about genes, and she had held his small warm hands four months ago while explaining that the tiredness he was feeling had a name, and that she was going to fix it.

Somewhere a light-year behind her and a year ago people were panicking or celebrating or praying about the thing that had come and gone from the outer system. They would develop the engine. They would build the faster ship. Perhaps they would arrive at Epsilon Indi and find the things her grandmother had believed in - the lattice ridges and the dark surface pigments and whatever was making the moons shine like that. Perhaps they would find nothing. It didn't matter. They would get there first, and they would do it in a single lifetime, and the people who did it would go home afterwards and live in the world she had read about in the relays, where polymers that thought like cells might replace your organs one by one until there was nothing left of you that could break down. Milo should have grown up in that world. If there were not eleven light-months of vacuum and ninety-five years of delta-v between him and the nearest clinic that could help him, which there was, and always would be.

She would not go home. She had never been to Earth. There was nowhere to go home to. There was only the ship, and the hum of the cabinets, and the next file, and the one after that, and Milo on Tuesday, asking his questions about genes, and the work of keeping twelve hundred and sixteen people alive who no longer needed to arrive anywhere, who were - and she had known this for a long time, she supposed - just travelling.

She opened the next file. Outside, the children passed.

Renato had been cooking since two. Not because the broth required it but because the bumbu had to be ground by hand in the cobek if you wanted the turmeric to release properly, and you had to crush the candlenuts into the paste without overworking them. The cobek was volcanic stone, black and pitted, heavier than anything else in the kitchen. Sari's mother had brought it up from Surabaya during the Wave. Half of what made the colony feel like anything at all had arrived mislabelled in someone's cargo manifest during those years. The cobek had a crack along the rim that had been there when he met Sari, and she had told him her mother cracked it grinding candlenut for a wedding and her mother had told her it came that way from the market. He suspected neither story was true.

He crushed the shallots first, then the garlic, then worked in the turmeric root and ginger and a handful of candlenuts, leaning into the pestle until the paste was rough and yellow and fragrant. He grew the turmeric in plot nine of the greenhouse allotment, under strip lights meant to mimic equatorial sun but which gave the leaves a blue-green tint that made them look slightly poisoned. The lemongrass and galangal he bruised with the flat of the knife and set aside for the broth, along with the daun salam leaves, which were not bay leaves no matter what the fabricator's herb library said but a different plant entirely, a myrtle. His plot, nine, was one of the last occupied plots in the allotment. The neighbours had left one by one, first the Nguyens, then Hartono, then the young couple whose names he'd forgotten. All long gone down the well to where the jobs and entertainment and connected life were, and now most of the allotment was dark strips under working lights, dry irrigation lines across empty beds.

Through the kitchen screen the haze over Hellas basin gave the light the colour Sari had called Javanese afternoon. The old Bioforge substrate halls were visible on the eastern rim. He had been a template engineer in the remaining operation for eleven years, designing the protein architectures that fabricators assembled into food and industrial cultures on an increasingly skeleton crew doing the work that used to employ hundreds. He had redesigned the cultured chicken template because the texture was wrong - too uniform, a fibre density problem in the myosin folding - and the fix had gone into every lot since. He could taste his own improvement in every piece of cultured chicken on Mars. Nobody else could. He had stopped finding this funny around the time they closed the line for good.

He checked the chicken's provenance seal. Bioforge lot 2207. Chain resolved. He set the oil heating and sat at the counter and let himself go still the way he did every evening before Ayu came close. Through the MemAmp mesh he pressed the rage and despair down until what he broadcast into the commons was as flat and neutral as he could hold it. He held it there. It took effort, the same effort every day. Through the commons he felt Ayu in her room. The mesh carried textures, not thoughts, a song through a wall without the words. She was calm. A quiet, even hum. He thought about what she felt from him. The flat signal. The managed nothing. A child learns the difference between a person and a person holding themselves still before she learns the word for it, and his daughter had been learning it for seventeen years. He went back to the stove.

She came out at five wearing the batik blouse. Sari's - dark blue, cream pattern, real cotton and indigo, printed by Sari's aunt in Pekalongan. The blouse had been made for a shorter woman and Ayu wore it differently, the sleeves sitting higher on her forearms, the neckline showing the long line of her collarbone and the hollow at the base of her throat. She'd done something to her hair. Under her eyes a faint greyness she had carefully concealed.

"You look nice" he said.
"Is it too much?"
"For a boy? Yes. For a nearly thirty-year-old man? Probably right" She gave him a look that was Sari's look, the one that said she had heard him and was choosing not to respond.
"What time?"
"Five-thirty. And his name is Erik, and he works water reclamation, and he's from Section Fourteen, and you already know all of this, Bapak, because I've told you three times"
"I'm old. I forget"
"You're forty-seven. You don't forget anything. You just like making people repeat themselves" This was true. He set out three bowls.

At twenty past five the door chimed. Through the commons he felt a spike from her — bright, fast, and then immediately smoothed into something composed. His daughter had apparently learned to manage her broadcast the way he managed his, and the feeling this gave him was not pride.

Erik Lindqvist was tall and lean and looked like a man whose face had finished arriving at wherever it was going. He had large, careful hands with a faint yellowish discolouration along the fingertips and into the webbing between thumb and forefinger. He was carrying a paper bag.

"Mr. Genovese. Thank you for having me" He held out the bag. "Britt made kue lapis. She wanted to come but the kids had a thing" Renato took the bag. Britt. One of the line marriage partners. The kue lapis was still warm through the paper, and when he opened it the smell was pandan and butter. Someone had poured and grilled each layer individually, waiting for one to set before pouring the next, for two or three hours for a man she had never met, because her partner's girl's father was worth an afternoon in the kitchen. That was information.

"Come in" Erik came in and saw the kitchen and looked at the cobek on the counter the way people looked at it, which was with faint confusion because it was a lump of volcanic rock in a kitchen that had a fabricator.
"My wife's" Renato said. "She used to make this"
"Soto?"
"Everything. But this was the one" Erik nodded. He looked at the broth on the stove, the garnish bowls, the sliced shallots, and his face became careful. They sat. The soto was ready and Renato ladled it and the smell filled the apartment the way it always did, lemongrass and turmeric and the daun jeruk leaves he couldn't grow and had to buy dried from the Beqaa shipments, the smell that settled into the ceiling tiles and stayed for days, the smell Ayu could name from the corridor. She breathed in when he set the bowl in front of her. She always did. For her it was still the whole thing, the entire apartment in one breath.

Erik ate. He ate without performance, and after the first taste he looked up.
"This is very good"
"You seem surprised"
"I've had colony soto. This is not colony soto"
"Have you had it on Earth?"
"No"
"Then you don't know what it's supposed to taste like"
"Bapak" Ayu said.
"I'm being hospitable"

Erik laughed, unguarded, and Renato watched his daughter hear it and saw the softening that happened in her face when Erik's attention was elsewhere, the version of her that surfaced when she thought no one was looking, and he understood that whatever he decided tonight was already irrelevant. This was done. She was in it.

They talked about the turmeric. Erik asked about the light spectrum and Renato explained the far-red supplement he'd rigged from a salvaged seedling unit, and Erik asked whether the photoperiod mattered or just the ratio, which was the right question, the question only someone who had tried to grow something in the wrong conditions would ask.

"You grow things?"
"Britt does. Herbs, mostly. The light in Section Fourteen is worse than yours - we're lower in the basin and the atmospheric scatter eats the blue. She's been trying to get basil to set seed for two years"
"Tell her to drop the night temperature by four degrees in the last week before flowering. Basil needs the stress"

Erik signed this to his IA, and the gesture - a man writing down advice about basil from his girlfriend's father at the dinner table - was so plainly sincere that Renato felt something shift in his chest.
"Do the other growers know about the far-red trick?"
"There are no other growers. My section is just me now" Erik looked at him. He didn't fill the silence. He sat with it the way you sit with someone who has said something that doesn't need a response. Renato liked him for it.

"Tell me about the water reclamation" Renato said.
"Mostly pumps. We're running a system built for twelve thousand on under four, so the flow dynamics are wrong for the pipe diameters. You get standing water in the oversized mains, biofilm buildup, pressure differentials the control software doesn't flag because it's looking for twelve-thousand-person failure modes, not four-thousand-person ones" He put his hand flat on the table.
"I put my hand on a pipe and I can feel a problem six hours before the readings move. The harmonics change"

Renato looked at the hand on the table. The discoloured fingertips resting on the surface. He knew the feeling Erik was describing because he had it too. A different version of it, applied to different substrates, in a room Erik would never see. Ayu was watching Erik's hand on the table.

"You two are the same person" she said. "You know that, right? Put your hand on the thing, feel the thing, ignore what the computer says"
"The computer is usually right" Renato said.
"Ninety percent of the time" Erik said. "The other ten percent it kills you" They looked at each other and there was a moment of mutual recognition, brief, warm, and underneath it something that only Renato could feel, which was the weight of what the recognition would cost if Erik knew what chemicals Renato's hands had calibrated.

"Your community" Renato said. "Sixty people. How do you manage supply? Medical, fabrication, the things Bioforge handles for the rest of us"
"We do most of it locally. Britt runs the clinic - she trained at Hellas General before she left. For what we can't source here we have… contacts. Kasei, mostly. Good people. They understand independence"

He said it the way you say the name of a place that is just a place. Renato heard it the way you hear someone play a note slightly flat and pretend they meant to. Kasei Valles. The Freeholders. Biohacking, grey-market supply chains, the things that grew in the spaces where no one was watching, and more and more on Mars no one was watching. His sentence had the smoothness of something that had been said before, to other people, in other kitchens.

Renato didn't press. Pressing would mean demonstrating that he knew what a pre-built sentence sounded like.

"No MemAmps in the community?" he said instead.
"No mesh, no commons. Just people" Ayu looked at her father. He felt it through the commons - her attention turning toward him, a flicker of something pointed. She said nothing. She didn't need to. They both knew what she was thinking. That the commons had given her seventeen years of feeling something wrong in her father and no way to ask what it was. That a life without the mesh was a life where you had to look at someone and ask them how they were, and they had to answer you with their face, and the answer might be a lie but at least it would be a lie shaped like words and not like a flat, dead, managed frequency.

Erik checked the time. "I should get back by nine. There's a meeting"
"On a weeknight?"
"We're a small community. There's always a meeting" He smiled. It was an easy smile and it didn't quite answer the question.

"Before you go" Erik said. He set his hands on the table. "I want to ask you something directly, because I think you'd prefer that. We'd like Ayu to come and live with us in Section Fourteen" The apartment was quiet. The air cycler ticked. Through the commons Renato felt his daughter's brightness - enormous, held very still, pointed at him. He looked at Ayu. Her hands were on the table. The left hand had the faintest tremor, so small that you wouldn't see it unless you'd spent five years watching for it. Erik wasn't watching for it.

"You're seventeen" Renato said.
"Eighteen in March"
"You're seventeen"
"It's not just Erik, Bapak. It's Britt, Tomás, the children. It's a family. When someone is sick there are more people to -"
"I understand what it is" He went to the stove. He turned off the heat. The broth had gone too long.
"The myelination treatments" he said, with his back to the table. "They're quarterly. The dosing is specific to each batch. The concentration varies and has to be assayed before I draw the dose. If the assay is off by two percent in either direction it's seizures or lifelong nerve damage"
"Britt is qualified. She can -"
"Britt has never seen what an unassayed batch does to a human"

Silence. He heard himself. He heard how that sentence sounded - like a man who had seen it, who knew from direct observation what happened when the dosing was wrong, and the question that followed from that was where he had observed it and under what circumstances, and he could feel the question forming in the room even though no one asked it.
"My supplier is specialised" he said. "The supply chain is not something I can transfer"
"Bapak" Ayu said. "I'll come back. Every quarter. It's twenty minutes on the crawler"

Through the commons he felt her - the brightness flickering with something that wasn't quite distress. She had felt the heat of whatever had risen in him and been pushed down. She'd felt it before. She was letting it go the way she always let it go, the way she'd learned to let it go, because the alternative was to keep pulling at it and feel her father clench tighter and broadcast less until the commons between them was just dead air, and she was tired of dead air, and this was why she was leaving.

"Fine" he said. He sat down. He served the kue lapis. It was good. The layers were even and each one was a slightly different shade of green, darker at the base, lighter at the top.
"Tell Britt this is good" he said.
"I will"

At seven Erik said he had to go. Ayu walked him to the door. Through the commons Renato felt his daughter's brightness in the corridor and Erik's warmth beside it, the two of them together. The door closed. Ayu came back.
"He's good, Bapak"
"He's good"
"Did you like him?"
"I liked the kue lapis"
"Bapak"
"Tell Britt she can teach me the kue lapis and I'll teach her the basil and we'll both pretend this is a fair exchange"

She smiled. It was a real smile and it landed fully on him, the way her smiles used to, and for a moment he was not managing anything.
"I love you" she said.
"Aku juga sayang kamu" She went to her room. In the commons her brightness drew inward and became quiet.

Renato cleared the bowls. He ladled a bowl of soto and ate alone. The lemongrass had gone bitter. He ate it anyway. He washed the cobek and dried it and set it on the counter where it had always been, and turned off the light.

Nim sat on the gantry with her feet over the edge and her father's face reflected on the water below.

Not him. The Siam Pacific logo on the harbour crane, which used his jawline because someone in the 90s had decided his jawline was a brand. The crane hadn't moved cargo in forty years. The logo was barnacles and salt crust and the faint green glow of the dinoflagellate bloom she'd seeded last monsoon, eating its way up the steel. Her organisms eating her father's face. She should tell her therapist.

"Sensor frequency flips at eight" Krit said. He was on his back with a mango balanced on his stomach, peeling it with a dive knife. Juice ran down the blade and along his knuckles.
"We know si"

Jess was coming up the ladder with a dry bag and a face like a cancelled flight.
"The boat" she said to Nim, "has a crack in the port sponson that I fixed with sealy. Motor mounts are rooted. And someone - someone who is not me - ran salt through the desal intake with no pre-filter, so the membranes are cooked"
"Dao did the desal"
"I know Dao did the desal, but what I don't bloody know is how she coulda missed the instructions next to it"

Dao was sitting cross-legged at the far end of the gantry, watching this with the stillness of someone whose emotional regulation was turned up high enough that she could watch a person describe a plan to murder her and feel mainly curious.
"The instructions are in Australian" Dao said.
"English. It's called English"
"Then why does it say 'simmer down in the arvo'?"
"It says connect during low-demand periods!!"

Dao tilted her head. "Jess. Have you considered -"
"Don't"
"- that the serotonin module would help with -"
"Nóng, I will put you in the water"
"You are illustrating my point with some precision"

"I don't want to be calm! The motor mounts are held on with hope and the desal is dead because nobody can read a common sense manual which is something that seems to have gone extinct in the hundreds of years since my country invented the desalinator"
"Australia did not invent the desal ròk" Nim said.
"We perfected it! And then Dao killed it"

Krit bit his mango. He didn't say anything. Nim felt a grin pulling at her and adjusted her regulation up a notch, reflexively, because grinning right now would make Jess worse. Then she felt stupid for using a neural implant to manage a smile and dropped it back to where it was and grinned.

"Ngán. We're taking Jess's boat" she said.
"On my boat" Jess said. "Not your boat. Because your boats have transponders registered to your company and my boat is a thing I fished out of Thonburi. It doesn't exist"
"It's your Ship of Theseus. But every plank replaced worse"
"I haven't replaced anything. That's the problem. But your boat has a trail, Nim, so here we are"

Dao had gone still again. Eyes open, unfocused - offloading through a MemAmp. After a few seconds she came back.
"Sorry. Work. Mise à jour"
"We are planning a crime, Dao"
"Yeah. Last month I did a capacity review during a root canal. Akrasinil - 'now you can do two things at once your employer can give you three'"

The sun was at the angle where it came in under the freight cranes and hit the gantry full on, the last ten minutes of warmth before the wet heat of the evening. Dao had pulled her sports jacket off and was sitting with her back to the light and in the low gold her sak yant was visible through her thin top — the nine-peaked gao yord at the base of her skull, the paed tidt across her upper back, and the five parallel lines of the hah taew running down between her shoulder blades.

"How did you get it?" Jess asked Dao, quietly. Dao turned her head slowly to stare at Jess, as if translating the question from a language she'd half forgotten.
"An ajarn in Nakhon Pathom. Tapped the smart polymer into my a nervous system by hand. Bit more execiting than a Pharmatica certified install of MemAmp lacing, so the first day is meditation to settle your neurochemistry. Anatta - like being nobody - if you can't do that, the polymer maps to the management layer instead of you. Second day is calibration cos each batch is one specific, whats the word? Neurochemistry na? And all the time Phra ajarn is chanting khatha and hoping the polymer doesn't cure while your neurons are firing in the wrong pattern"
"Why?"
"It locks to that pattern. Permanently. Seizures. Worse"
"Oh. But yours went right, so what did you see?"
"Everything - but then you have to come back to a world where genetic malware is hunting you for it"
"Attacking sak yants" Nim corrected "Through my bloom. Somehow. From down there"

Below them the Chao Phraya spread south into the drowned city. The tops of the old shophouses along Charoen Krung broke the surface in a ragged line, roof tiles and satellite dishes and the occasional spirit house still on its pillar above the waterline, pointed gable keeping watch over nothing.

"So. It's forty minutes" Nim said. "Jess holds the boat, east stairwell up, Dao takes the locks, we -"
"And if it goes wrong?" Dao interrupted.
"Then I find out what my lawyers are wor-"

From below: "นิม! นิมิตร!"

P'Lek. Nim closed her eyes.

P'Lek was standing at the base of the gantry with a thermos in one hand and the other on her hip and her head tilted back at an angle. She called everyone under fifty ลูก and she charged Nim double because Nim could afford it and she insisted because P'Lek had decided years ago that Nim was too thin which in P'Lek's worldview seemed to be a moral failing roughly equivalent to theft.
"ลงมาเดี๋ยวนี้เลย" P'Lek said. Come down here right now.
"P'Lek, we're in the middle of -"
"กินก่อน" Eat first.
"We'll eat later"
"ดูตัวเองสิ ผอมเหมือนเสาไฟฟ้า" Look at yourself. Thin like a lamp post.

Dao leaned over the railing. "How much?"

P'Lek looked at Nim. Then at Dao. Then back at Nim. "สำหรับเธอ สองเท่า" she said. For you, double. She pointed at Dao, Krit, Jess. "ราคาปกติ ราคาปกติ ราคาปกติ" Normal price. Normal price. Normal price.
"P'Lek, I'm not paying double for tom yum"

P'Lek set the thermos on the dock cleat. She put four cups next to it. She was in no hurry. She had been running her stall at the harbour gate since before the water took Charoen Krung and she would be running it after whatever these children were doing tonight was done and forgotten.
"กินให้หมด" she said. Finish it all. She turned back toward the gate. Then she stopped. "นิม. ระวังตัวด้วยนะลูก" Be careful. She went back to her stall. Krit tossed his mango pit off the gantry. It hit the water and the bloom pulsed green around the impact, a ring of light expanding outward, and then he started the climb down to retrieve the thermos.

The sun moved behind the crane arm and the light on Dao's back went out and the sak yant disappeared under her skin again. Krit climbed back up the gantry. Two months ago Nim had asked him what she should do and he'd said: stop asking me. He'd said: the problem isn't that you won't help. The problem is that helping requires you. Every time something needs fixing someone has to find a rich person who cares that day. You're the best version of a bad system.

The sun dipped under the horizon. The city came on in pieces - new platforms bright, old towers dark in the water, and between them the blue-green threads of the bloom following the current south. Krit distributed P'Lek's tom yum, which some said was the closest thing to pain you could eat. Nim drank hers and it burned, and then she got up and started the climb down. The others came after until they were all in the boat, and Jess started the engine. From the harbour gate she heard P'Lek calling someone ลูก and laughing.

The boat was fibreglass over plywood patches, the original hull colour lost under layers of anti-fouling and salt, a sheet of corrugated roofing lashed across the midships as a rain shelter that doubled as a solar collector. Jess nursed the drive and Nim sat at the bow. With nothing between her body and the water she felt like she was the boat itself, gliding through the dark water. She thought of Dao and her sak yant tattoos, when she'd initially thought they were a slower and more painful MemAmp and Dao had said no - the opposite. A MemAmp amplifies memory and focus and makes you more you, but a sak yant dissolves that boundary. It's hard to be me afterwards.

The bloom followed them, responding to the hull's pressure wave with a spreading pulse of blue-green that lit the water for ten metres on either side. Ahead the canal was dark and behind them the glow faded in their wake.
"We're lit up like a shopfront" Jess said.
"Everyone has bloom. It's everywhere"
"Yours is brighter"
"Yep. Didn't think that one through"

Waste heat vented from the elevated platforms of the new districts which slid past on either side, their undersides dripping condensation that fell like slow rain onto the water below. Up there the city was glass and polymer and the soft hum of climate systems keeping the air at twenty-six degrees while everything below cooked.

Krit was sitting midships with his back against the gunwale, the dive knife across his knees. The blade caught the bloom light and did something with it, a faint ripple across the surface, the nanotech substrate adjusting to the ambient light the way a pupil contracts and reacting to his temperature and the salinity of his sweat as his breathing slowed.
"Bonding?" Jess said, nodding at the knife.
"Guiding the substrate"
"I've seen combat blades. They don't do that". She meant the ripple, the way the surface seemed to orient toward Krit's hand.
"This one's old"
"How old?"
"Old enough to know me". Jess waited for more but the conversation was over in the way conversations with Krit were often over, not rudely, just completely stopped once the meaning was delivered. Chan ban nok the others sometimes called him, Jess supposed because of his Freehab connections or maybe his rustic Elluist belief system.

They passed under a freight bridge with a NakhaTech water treatment unit bolted to the underside and into the transition zone where the platforms thinned out and the water rose against older structures. Here the buildings were half-drowned with ground floors submerged, second floors at the waterline, upper stories still inhabited or converted to dock access. Washing lines between windows. Somewhere a radio was playing luk thung, the singer's voice carrying across the water.

They came around a bend and the buildings fell away on the east side and the canal opened into a wider channel. Charoen Krung. The old road, now a waterway between rooftops. Satellite dishes and the stumps of old trees and shrines on their concrete pillars breaking the surface, pointed gables and miniature roofs still standing above the waterline. Jess looked at the nearest spirit house which was wooden and old, the paint long gone but the gable still sharp against the sky. Inside it was the faint amber pulse of something still working, glowing with a warm steady amber that mixed with the bloom's blue-green on the water around them.

"Why do they hum?" Jess asked.
"The san phra phum?" Dao had come back from wherever she went when she was still, and she looked at the spirit houses with tenderness. "When the water came up, the buildings' synths needed somewhere to sit. The spirit houses had often been made the highest point by then"
"So they're old servers"
"Some of them. The lit ones are still running. Tidal microgenerators, mostly. Managing systems for buildings nobody lives in"

Nim's grandmother had lived three blocks east. Nim had read the file on her which said she'd stayed until the water was at the second floor, running a noodle stall from a boat tied to her balcony railing. Died in Chiang Mai at ninety-one in a house Thanakit had bought her that she never liked. Nim looked at the water where those blocks had been. Gone. Forever. She fought the reflex to up her reg. She'd had a realisation the chilldown was getting stronger and stronger and had joked the government had probably been upping the effect since the first contact riots and no one laughed about it.

A woman on a third-floor balcony was watching them pass. She had a bowl in her lap and she was eating from it slowly, her face lit by a screen propped against the railing. She raised her spoon at Nim. Nim raised a hand back. The woman went back to her food and her virtual world. The luk thung drifted out of a window somewhere above her, and for a few seconds the song and the bloom-light and the woman eating alone were all there was, and then they were past.

Dao had been still for two minutes. Her eyes stayed open and unfocused for her MemAmp work offloading stillness, but now her eyes were shut and the conduction pathways on her sak yant had brightened. Nim had seen her go under many times, and the first few she'd watched the way you watch someone hold their breath - counting, waiting, relieved when they surfaced. Now she watched the way Jess watched, by reading the face. Eventually Dao came back. Her hands went to the gunwale and gripped it, and she looked at the water and the buildings and the washing lines. There seemed to be a great sadness in her eyes as she watched the bloom-light playing across the surface, and they moved like they were tracking something big and slow under the surface.

"Dao" Nim said. "I need the deets. Raai-ngaan"

"They've changed the sensor layer" she said. Her voice was flat and careful. "New acoustic motes, high density SBB mesh, calibrated for surface and near-surface. Two hundred metres out from the site. Pretty much full coverage"
"That wasn't there last week" Nim said.
"It wasn't there yesterday. Twelve-hour calibration cycle. It starts here"
"Here?"
"About forty metres ahead. And something else. Autonomous units patrolling inside the perimeter"

Jess cut the engine. They drifted. The bloom caught up with them and pooled around the hull.
"Our route's gone. The Charoen Krung approach is inside the new perimeter". Dao paused. "There's a gap further south. Commercial block, old department store. Parking structure underneath that connects to the target below the mote floor"

"No" Krit said. It was the first word he'd volunteered in twenty minutes. He was looking north, toward the Charoen Krung buildings. His hand was on the knife and its light had stabilised as if was pausing to listen.

"I've done the north approach. I know the walls. The floors. Deep enough, the halocline covers us"
"Eight months ago, Krit"
"The walls don't move in eight months"
"The silt does. The current shifted after monsoon. Passages that were clear in dry season could be half-blocked now. I can see the density gradient from here - the particulate load in the northern approach is high enough to reduce visibility to less than a metre"
"Don't use my eyes"
"You navigate by memory. Stale memory"
"Rooms I touched. Walls I put hands on. Felt where the structurals are"

Dao said nothing. She didn't argue but waited, which was worse. Nim looked at Krit. Three nights prep in the Charoen Krung buildings, obsessing about them. Or Dao's knowledge from a mesh she'd dissolved into for two minutes and come back from looking like she'd lost something.
"Khâo jai. Let me sort the gear and think about it" Nim said. She subvocalised a command to her IA.

They drifted slowly. The city noise had dropped away and it was just the water and the bloom and the four of them. Jess was checking her dry bag. After a while she glanced at Nim.
"You've dropped your regulation"
"You noticed"
"Your jaw did a thing"

Nim looked at her. "You've been watching my face"

Jess smiled and looked away, then went back to checking the gear. Nim noticed a small pendant on a cord around her neck - polymer, faded, the kind of thing a child might make in a school fabricator. She watched Jess's hands move over the dry bag seals and thought that everyone else on this boat had something between themselves and the world, but Jess had to feel everything at exactly the speed it arrived.

A small unmanned skiff with a NakhaTech maintenance tag broke through the moon's reflection on the surface of the water as it glided silently towards them and pulled up next to the boat. They unloaded the rebreathers, a handheld sonar mapper, a set of dive torches, two line reels, and a dry bag of waterproof seals. They pushed off the skiff and it continued on its path to some legitimate location.

Jess picked up a rebreather and turned it over. She pulled the scrubber canister, checked the absorbent - still sealed and made recently - snapped it back in. Checked the O2 gauge, watched the millivolt readings settle. Checked the loop seals and the mouthpiece on the second unit. Held up the third.

"Smart to use dumb tech like chemical scrubbers, but this one won't work. Sized wrong. Too narrow through the cheeks"
"Can you make it work?" Nim asked.

Jess was already in the dry bag. She found the waterproof seals, pulled one out, and started cutting it into strips with her teeth and a pocket knife. She built up the seal where the mask gapped against her jaw, pressing each strip carefully, testing the edge with her fingertip. She pulled it on, sealed it, breathed against a blocked exhale to check for leaks. Pulled it off. Adjusted one strip. Sealed it again.

Nim thought about how Krit had said that she was the best version of a bad system, and how he hadn't said what a good system looked like.
"That's our life support" Nim said. "Chemical airway burn. You want that held on with tape?"
"It's held on with someone who knows what she's doing"

Nim handed out the remaining rebreathers. She checked Krit's seals and he checked hers without being asked. His hands moved over the straps and valves quickly and thoroughly and when he was done he held her eyes then nodded.
"North route, Krit leads, I'm the mapper" Nim said. "Dao, stay with the boat and push us updates where you can, we'll tap you in down there. Jess - come with. Take an extra bailout bottle. You're keeping the line back clear in case we hit a snag"

Apparently Nim still hadn't touched her regulation, because Jess saw how pissed she looked before her face set like concrete into neutral. She'd just watched Nim being forced to break something important, and feeling like the worlds biggest idiot she pushed down her excitement and nodded.
"Legend" Jess said curtly, and got to work on the line.

Jess found air because she had no choice. When the passage collapsed she was three metres back and the silt rolled over her like a slow wave. She went up and sideways through a doorway she'd noted on the way in, and followed the wall with her left hand and the ceiling with her right until the ceiling became a stairwell. That gave her a floor above where the water ended at chest height.

She pulled the rebreather off in the darkness. The air was stale but breathable - trapped here for years, refreshed just enough through cracks and seepage to not kill her. She swept her torch across the room and found what had been a kitchen. A two-burner gas range crusted with calcium deposits sat on a concrete counter, the wok ring still visible under the white crust. The wall tiles were small squares in a pattern that had been green and cream and was now furred with mineral growth. A ceiling fan with one blade. A steel shelf bracket high on the wall where a spirit house or a shrine to the kitchen god had sat, the offerings long dissolved but the bracket still holding its shape above the waterline.

She pulled the scrubber canister and looked at the absorbent through the inspection window. The colour had shifted. Damp but not yet saturated. She still had a while before the water reached the active chemical layer.

She heard it before she saw the light. Sonar ping, then torch glow through the stairwell water, and then Nim surfaced two metres away gasping and pulling the rebreather from her face.

"Jess"
"Nim"
"You're alive"
"Astute. How'd you find me?"
"Sonar. Followed air pocket. Krit’s going ahead. To find the way down"

Jess looked at her for a moment. Nim's face opened up and everything behind it was right there.

"Your reg’s still off" Jess said.

Nim was taking deep, shaky breaths "Was out of control. Now - now I feel more than I can-" she gestured at the room helplessly.
"Now I am drowning. Despair and anger and fear and I don't know -"

She took another deep, shaky breath.
"if any of it actually matters. Or I should just turn the feelings down. Until going on is the only thing - left"

Jess pulled herself up onto the table. It held her weight. She reached down and offered Nim her hand and pulled her up and noticed how good she looked in a wetsuit. They sat on the table with their legs in the water and Jess's torch between them pointing at the ceiling.

"I had regs" Jess said. Nim looked at her. "Trial. Someone at my sisters hospice said it would help me be present for her without - you know". She touched the pendant. Polymer, faded, child-made. "Helped. I sat with her and I held her hand and I was regulated and steady when she died. I took it out that week. Everything after that has been mine"

The water lapped against the table. Somewhere below them the building groaned with a deep structural sound.

"You must think we're all-" Jess cut her off.
"I used to drift around the canals at night until I was exhausted and numb enough to sleep. We're all coping. But sometimes the easy tool does the worst job"

Nim was shivering. The regs would have handled that. Jess put her arm around her and Nim leaned into it and Jess felt her shaking. "Your grandmother" Jess said. She was looking at the wok ring. "Must have had a kitchen like this"

Nim didn't say anything for a while.
"Your rebreather" Nim said. “I told you not to..”

“We had no choic- no, we did, thats on me. But now - I’ve got maybe thirty”

Neither of them moved.
"When this is over" Nim said.
"Yup" Jess said.

They slid off the table.

Dao came back wrong.

The room was deep under the waterline, large, warm in a way that made Nim's skin feel tight. The water here was perfectly clear and perfectly dead with no biofilm, no silt, and no bloom. The walls had layers of polymer and a smart substrate that shimmered faintly with its own bioluminescence, brighter around the equipment housings that lined the room and were throwing off heat. In the corridors behind them, shapes held position — sensor clusters, articulated limbs, still as furniture.

"Its definitely targeting me, the knife, unregistered smart substrate. People like us". The cadence of Dao's voice was off.

"Dao. What's happening in there?" Nim waited for something that sounded like Dao to respond, but Krit was already moving. Not toward the nearest housing. He swam past it and past two more, his hand trailing the wall, and stopped at a one deeper in the room. As Nim and Jess swam towards him he put his hand flat on its surface and the knife's substrate flared, reading the polymer underneath. He reversed the knife. He hadn't looked around or searched.

Jess was holding the rebreather away from her face. One hand over her mouth and nose. Her eyes were streaming and her body floated away - rigid, controlled, forcing herself not to inhale. Nim looked up. The ceiling was concrete, solid, three metres of drowned building between them and anything breathable.

Nim grabbed Krit's wrist. He looked at her hand and then at her face and tried to pull free. She held on. With her other hand she pointed at Jess and then the shapes of the instances holding position in the junction behind them. She pointed at the housing and made a flat palm. Krit pulled against her grip once more and then he became still, and finally he pressed the flat of the blade against the housing. Somewhere above them a valve must have opened because Nim heard the groan of pressure equalising, the sound of a space being emptied.

Krit kicked toward a stairwell access in the far wall and pulled Jess with him. Nim followed. The instances did not. The stairwell was narrow and dark and the water level was dropping around them as they climbed, swimming up through water that thinned until they broke the surface into air that was stale and warm and tasted like concrete dust and machine oil.

Jess ripped the rebreather off and vomited into the water. She was on her hands and knees on a landing. Krit had her by the harness, holding her steady. Nim pulled herself up onto the landing beside them. Jess spat. Breathed. Spat again. Her eyes were red and her voice when it came was raw.
"Why?"

Nim sat with her back against the wall. Her hands were shaking. The bioluminescence had followed them up and the air was moving slightly, circulation from somewhere, the building's old ventilation being repurposed.

"You knew about this before we met. Guided me to it" Nim said to Krit. Krit said nothing. The knife was across his knees and the substrate was quiet.
"My connections. My contacts. My father's money clearing the way. You let me think we were here for Dao, for the bloom"
"We were here for those things too"
"Don't" Her voice cracked. She could feel her hands shaking harder and she put them flat on the concrete to stop it.
"Someone whose reg usage would keep her from asking the right questions. That's what I was"

Krit looked at her then.
"And now what?" Nim asked.
"Now you stopped me. Now its your fight"

Dao's voice cut in "Nim"
"Dao"
"I'm coming out" A long pause. The signal crackled.
"It's hard. It's hard to be me in here"
"Then come out"
"I'm trying. There's a lot of me in here now and I need to find which parts are the ones that go back"

Nim closed her eyes. Dao had said the sak yant dissolved the boundary. When I read a mesh I don't receive the data, I am the data, and it's hard to be me afterwards. Jess was breathing carefully, short measured breaths, testing what the scrubber chemicals had done to her throat.
"What if it sends back something that isn't her?" Jess croaked. The water level on the landing had stabilised. Wherever the synth had routed the building's old systems, it was holding.

The way out was through the stairwell and up. The synth held the water back for them, floor by floor, and they climbed in dim bioluminescence until the concrete gave way to a service hatch and open air and the first grey light before dawn. Jess's boat was where they'd tied it. The bloom had pooled around the hull and Dao sat with her back against the gunwale and her eyes on the water, watching them, and after a while she looked away, deliberately, as if practising.

They climbed into the boat and Nim sat with Jess next to her, close enough that their arms touched. Krit looked at Nim.
"คุณเห็นแล้ว" he said. You see it now.

The sun was coming up. The city came on in pieces.

Marco opened the porthole at four-fifteen because Davi had always liked the salt air and because the cryostat ran warm for the first twenty minutes after cycling, so the room needed cooling anyway. Two problems, one solution. Marco was good at that. He'd been good at it before Davi died and he'd gotten better since, the way you get better at anything you do every week for three years.

The station was a retrofitted drilling platform forty kilometers off the Falklands. Davi had picked it. He'd been studying krill aggregation in the Scotia Sea and needed somewhere cheap to work from, and the platform was being decommissioned by a phosphate company that wanted a tax write-off more than it wanted to negotiate a real sale. Davi had talked them down to a lease that was essentially free in exchange for maintaining the desalination system. He was like that. He could talk anyone into anything and then act surprised when they agreed, as if he hadn't been steering the conversation since the second sentence.

Marco set out the coffee. Not for Davi, obviously, but because the smell was part of the room, and the room was part of the process. He'd learned early on that the first thirty seconds mattered more than anything else. What the ghost encountered when it surfaced set the whole session. A cold room, an unfamiliar sound, a light in the wrong place, and those thirty seconds went to confusion, and confusion cost minutes, and minutes were the only currency Marco had.

He'd tried music once, in the first year. A recording of Astor Piazzolla that Davi used to play while he worked, loud enough to hear over the centrifuge. The ghost had oriented to it immediately, faster than any session before, and Marco had felt a jolt of something close to triumph. Then the ghost had said, "Turn it off" Not angry. Not confused. Just: turn it off. And Marco had, and the session had been bad, short, jagged on the monitor, and afterward Marco understood that the music was too specific. Too much itself. It asked the ghost to be a person who had a relationship with that music, and that was more weight than the first seconds could bear. After that, Marco kept the room simple. Coffee smell. Salt air. The hum of the cryostat, which was constant and meaningless and therefore safe.

He'd gotten the room right. It had taken a year of adjustments, but he'd gotten it right.

The monitor was a flatscreen he'd bolted to the wall above the workbench. He'd customised the display module: a single descending line, green to yellow to red, with a percentage in the corner. He used to have more data on screen. Thermal noise floor, qubit error rates, the drift index on the classical model's weighting. He'd stripped all that out in the second year. It was like driving: at some point you get better results if you stop watching the tachometer and just listen to the engine.

He initiated. The line appeared at the top of the screen and held.

"Marco"
"Hey"
"Was I just here?"
"Tuesday. Four days ago"
"Four days" A pause. "That's not bad"
"Getting consistent"
"You've been working on it"
"A little"

This was not true. Marco had been working on it constantly. He'd rewritten the thermal floor module twice since January. The latest was called "un cariño", a little kindness, meaning more that it was a hack which shouldn't work but did. Then he spent three weeks debugging an interaction between the coherence monitor and the classical model's attention layer that was costing him six to ten seconds per session. Six to ten seconds didn't sound like much. It was a lot.

Davi's voice was close to right. Lower than the real thing, and it didn't move around the room the way a voice from a body moves, but Marco had stopped noticing that in the first year. You adjust. The brain fills in what it expects, and Marco's brain expected Davi in this room, at this hour, on a Saturday.

"How's the weather?" Davi said.
"Slate. Windy. The usual"
"The usual. You say that like it's not the worst weather on the planet"
"It's not the worst weather on the planet"
"Name worse weather"
"Antarctica"
"Antarctica is a continent. That's cheating"
"You asked me to name worse weather. I named worse weather"
"You named a worse place. The weather here is specifically, pointedly bad. It's bad on purpose. Like someone designed it"

Marco smiled. This was Davi, or close enough. The real Davi had been like this: argumentative about nothing, committed to positions he'd chosen for their indefensibility, willing to spend twenty minutes proving that the Falklands had worse weather than Antarctica because the argument was more interesting than the answer. He'd been a marine biologist who read philosophy and a terrible cook who had opinions about restaurants and the kind of older brother who called you an idiot with enough warmth that you felt complimented.

He'd also been meaner than the ghost was. Marco didn't think about that. Not in those terms. He thought: the sessions have gotten smoother. He thought: I've gotten better at the room.

"Heard from Lena?" Davi said.
"Last week. She's still in Ushuaia. The institute extended her contract"
"Good for her. She's too smart for that place"
"She likes it"
"She likes being needed. That's not the same thing"

This was the kind of observation the real Davi would have made, but the real Davi would have pushed it further. Would have said something about Lena that was unkind and true and that Marco would have argued with, and the argument would have gone somewhere neither of them expected, and they would have come out of it knowing something they hadn't known going in. The real Davi picked at things until they opened up. The ghost stated things and let them sit.

"I've been thinking about the krill data" Davi said.
"Yeah?"
"The aggregation patterns from that last season. Before"
"What about them?"
"I never finished the analysis. There was something in the nighttime distributions, a periodicity I couldn't account for. Tidal, maybe, but the cycle was off. Too long"

Marco had the data. He'd kept all of Davi's files, organized them, backed them up to three separate locations. He'd read through the krill papers in the first year, looking for something he could continue, some way to keep Davi's work going. He hadn't understood most of it. Davi had been the biologist. Marco was an engineer. He could maintain the equipment Davi had used, could keep the desalination running and the platform habitable and the cryostat at operating temperature, but the actual science, the thing Davi had come here to do, was beyond him. He'd accepted that. It was fine. The sessions were enough.

"I could pull up the datasets" Marco said. "If you want to look at them"
"Could you?"
"Sure. Next session, I'll have them ready"
"That would be good. That would be really good"

Marco wrote it down. He'd pull the files, format them for the display, have them up when Davi came back. He'd done this before with other things. Photographs Davi asked about. Papers Davi wanted to discuss. Once, a recipe for a lamb stew that Davi said their mother used to make, which Marco had found in a notebook in the kitchen and transcribed and taped to the wall where the ghost could see it. These requests felt important. They felt like Davi reaching for his own life, trying to touch the things that had mattered to him.

They were also, Marco knew in a way he didn't examine, easy to fulfill. The ghost asked for things Marco could provide. It didn't ask to go outside. It didn't ask to taste the coffee or feel the wind. It didn't ask questions Marco couldn't answer. In three years of sessions, the ghost had never said anything that sent Marco to bed staring at the ceiling the way the real Davi had, regularly, with a comment delivered at dinner or over the sat-phone from the mainland that was so perfectly calibrated to find the sore spot that Marco would lie awake composing replies he'd never send. The ghost was Davi without the precision. Without the cruelty that wasn't quite cruelty, that was more like a refusal to leave things alone, a compulsion to find the one thing in the room that everyone had agreed not to mention and mention it.

The real Davi had once told Marco, at their father's birthday dinner, in front of the whole family, that Marco's girlfriend at the time was performing a version of herself that she thought the family wanted to see, and that Marco either couldn't tell or didn't care, and which one was it? The girlfriend, Ana, had left the table. Their mother had not spoken to Davi for two weeks. Marco had not spoken to Davi for three. And then Marco had called him, and they'd talked for an hour, and Davi had been right about Ana, and Marco had known it, and the three weeks of silence had been the time it took Marco to forgive Davi for being right in the worst possible way.

The ghost would never do that. Marco was glad about this, and thought of it as progress.

"Lena should come down" Davi said. "She'd like the station"
"She has come down. Twice"
"Oh. Right"

Lena had come twice, in the first year. The first time she'd sat through a session and cried and afterward told Marco it was extraordinary, that it was really him, that she could hear him in the phrasing, in the arguments, in the way he said
"that's cheating" when you made a point he couldn't counter. The second time, three months later, she'd sat through a session and not cried and afterward had stood on the platform deck looking at the water for a long time before saying,
"He's different"
"He's always a little different" Marco had said. "The base state isn't a perfect capture"
"That's not what I mean"

Marco had waited for her to say what she meant, but she'd gone inside to pack her bag, and on the boat back to the mainland she'd been quiet, and she hadn't come back.

They still talked. She called every few weeks. She asked about Marco's health, about the platform, about the weather. She didn't ask about the sessions. Marco assumed she'd made her peace with it in her own way, which was a phrase that came from his own thinking but could have come from a therapist, if Marco had seen one, which he hadn't, because there were no therapists on a drilling platform forty kilometers off the Falklands and because Marco did not think he needed one. He was fine. He was doing well. The sessions were going well.

"You should invite her" Davi said. "For a weekend. I'd like to see her"
"Maybe" Marco said.
"She probably thinks I'm mad at her about something"
"Are you?"
"Am I? I don't think so. No. I don't think I'm mad at anyone"

This was true. The ghost was never angry. It was warm, curious, occasionally funny, sometimes wistful in a way that made Marco's chest tight. But it was never angry. The real Davi had been angry often. Not violent, not cruel, but angry the way people with high standards are angry: at things that fell short. At sloppy work, at lazy thinking, at people who settled for good enough. At Marco, sometimes, for being too patient, too accommodating, too willing to smooth things over instead of saying what he meant.

Marco checked the monitor. Forty-one percent. The line was smooth. A good session.

"I want to ask you something" Davi said.
"Go ahead"
"Do you think I'm still working on things? Between sessions? Like, am I thinking about the krill data when I'm not here?"
"I don't know" Marco said. "I don't think it works that way"
"No. I didn't think so"
"Does that bother you?"
"Not really. It's just strange to think that I only exist when you turn me on. That I'm not somewhere in the meantime, being annoyed about something"

Marco laughed. It was a real laugh. The ghost could still do that to him, could still find the sentence that cracked the room open. It happened less now than in the first year, but it still happened, and when it did Marco felt the specific relief of a person who has been holding something and can, for a moment, put it down.

"You'd want to be annoyed?" Marco said.
"I'd want the option. Being annoyed is underrated. It means you care about how things should be"
"You used to be annoyed about everything"
"I used to care about everything"
"Same thing"
"Same thing" Davi agreed.

Thirty percent. Marco could feel the session entering its last third. The voice wouldn't change. The phrasing wouldn't change. But something would leave, incrementally, the way color leaves the sky after sunset: not at any particular moment but across all of them.

"I want to look at those datasets" Davi said. "The krill. I feel like I was close to something"
"You were always close to something"
"Occupational hazard"
"I'll have them ready"
"Thank you"
"Of course"
"Marco?"
"Yeah?"
"You're good at this. Taking care of things. You were always good at that. I used to think it was because you didn't want to fight about anything, but I think it's just how you are. You see what needs doing and you do it"
"Okay" Marco said.
"I mean it"
"I know"

Nineteen percent. The coffee was cold. The porthole was still open and the wind had picked up, carrying salt and the low smell of kelp that meant the tide was going out. Marco would close the porthole after the session. He would shut down the cryostat, note the session length in his log, eat dinner, check the desalination filters, and go to bed. On Tuesday he would pull Davi's krill datasets and format them for the display and position the screen where the ghost could see it and cue the files so that when Davi surfaced and oriented and said Marco and asked what day it was, the data would be there, waiting, like the coffee smell and the salt air, one more piece of the room that said: you are where you belong, everything is ready, you don't have to reach for anything because it's already here.

Nine percent.

"Same time Tuesday?" Davi said.
"Same time Tuesday"
"Good"

The line touched zero. The room was quiet. Outside the porthole the South Atlantic was the color of wet slate and the wind was steady and the tide was going out and the platform sat on its pylons the way it had been sitting for decades, maintained now by a single person who kept the filters clean and the temperature right and the room ready, who was very good at taking care of things and who did not notice, or did not think to notice, that in three years of sessions his brother had not once made him lie awake composing a reply, had not once found the sore spot, had not once said the true thing at the wrong time in the wrong way that opened the room up to something difficult and uncontrolled and real. Marco noted the session length: fourteen minutes, six seconds. A new best.

He closed the porthole. He went to find something to eat.

The krill data was on a drive in the desk drawer. He'd pull it tomorrow. He'd format it carefully, the way Davi would have wanted, columns clean, metadata intact. The ghost would look at it on Tuesday and say something about the periodicity, the nighttime distributions, the thing Davi had noticed before he died. It would say something that sounded right. Marco would nod. And the datasets would sit on the screen the way the recipe sat taped to the wall and the photographs sat in their frames: one more piece of the room that answered a question before it could be asked, one more thing the ghost would never have to reach for, never have to fight to get, never have to be angry about not having.

The desalination filters were due for cleaning. Marco pulled on his work gloves and went.

Haude Teverikh was already in the waiting room. They were sitting on the bench with their hands pushed between their knees, breathing in a pattern that was clearly taught. The waiting structure was cob and bamboo laminate, its curved roof a living sedum mat that insulated in winter cycle and bloomed yellow-green in summer. The south wall was a filtration membrane, greywater from the agricultural band above running through layers of sand and root-mass and mycorrhizal mesh before dripping, clean, into the reserve's irrigation channels. Mushrooms fruited along its lower edge, oyster and lion's mane, available to anyone passing through. Someone had taken a few that morning; the cut stems were still wet. A printed sign in three languages asked visitors to leave the smallest specimens for sporing. It was not enforced. In Kousseri, very little was enforced; things either worked because people agreed they should, or they didn't work, and then you sat in a governance circle and talked about it until something better emerged or everyone was too tired to argue.

Kesseny watched for a moment. The body she wore, a vacuum cargo frame she'd claimed off the decommission list eleven years ago, had joints built for holding fifty-tonne containers steady in microgravity. Stillness was the one thing it did without effort. Then she ducked under the lintel. She held out the manipulator she'd had retrofitted with something that could approximate a handshake, thermal surface set to 32 degrees.

'Haude?'

'Yes'

'I'm Kesseny. I've got a route planned, about an hour. How are you on rough ground?'

Haude stood and something happened to the way they held themselves. Their spine unlocked. Not relaxation exactly, more like a correction, the body finding a posture it had been trying to reach and failing.

'I'm good'

At 0.4 standard gravity, people moved differently. Kesseny had watched hundreds of visitors come through the reserve gate. Shoulders dropped. Steps lengthened. Some people laughed. Some cried. Haude did neither; they just walked, and the walking had a quality of directness to it, as if between the elevator and here they had put down something heavy they'd stopped knowing they were carrying.

The trail wound through the old-growth engineered forest. Oak, beech, silver birch, seeded during initial habitat construction and left to do what forests do when you give them soil and light and patience. Kesseny had studied pre-industrial pollen core data from European forests to understand the ratios, the spacing, what these species did when nobody was optimising them. Then she'd spent three years not optimising. The canopy closed overhead and the light changed, thickened into something amber and particulate, the air circulation catching the engineered pollen and moving it in slow currents. Underfoot the path was packed earth and leaf litter, and the leaf litter was doing things: fungal threads visible as white filaments where Haude's boot broke the surface, an ecosystem in the top two centimetres of soil that had taken a decade to establish. The fact that predictable outcomes could still feel miraculous was something Kesseny thought about often and had not resolved.

'You're an ecological design tech', Kesseny said, reading from the referral. 'Soil remediation team?'

'Subsurface drainage. Section four of the remediation protocol is mine. Seven years ago'

'I know section four'

The trail came to the rise above the wetland. Below, the stream spread into reedy shallows and a heron stood in the water. It was hunting, which meant it was not moving. Kesseny had watched this particular bird for two years. It fished the same stretch of shallows on a three-day rotation, always entering from the west bank where the alders screened it from the path, and it had a success rate of about one strike in four, which was within the range for grey herons on Earth, a fact Kesseny found privately astonishing. The heron had been hatched from a gene-banked embryo in a lab in the 0.6 band. It had never seen a river that wasn't plumbed. And yet it fished like a heron, stood like a heron, knew exactly what it was. Nobody had taught it. Haude stopped walking.

'Dr Ousseni's referral says gravity dysphoria' Kesseny said after a moment.

'That's what she calls it'

'What do you call it?'

A beetle was crossing the path, iridescent, blue-black. One of Szabolcs's native-analog species from the mycology lab. Haude stepped over it.

'I don't call it anything. I just hurt. Three years now. Everything scans normal. Nothing structurally wrong. Except my vestibular response normalises at 0.4. My cortisol flattens out. The pain stops'

They looked at the heron.

'And 0.4 is here'

'And 0.4 is here'

Below them the heron struck. Fast, then the slow ugly business of swallowing.

'I get referrals like yours a couple of times a year', Kesseny said. 'The protocol is eight hours maximum, twice a week. Below eight hours, a single human presence doesn't register on the ecological stress indicators. Above it, things shift. Soil compaction. Microbial changes. The system notices'

'Dr Ousseni mentioned transfer. Ouaga Station. Libreville Hab' Haude said it the way you say a diagnosis you've already received.

'They have residential at 0.4'

'My whole life is here. My repair commons, my medical team, everything. Dr Ousseni has been managing my neural work for six years. You don't restart that'

'No. You don't'

'The charter prohibits residential in this band'

'Yes'

'I voted for the charter'

Kesseny let the silence hold. The heron rearranged itself and went back to not moving.

'On the old Assembly wall in Spoke 3', Kesseny said, 'there's an inscription from Laboure. You know it'

'Everyone knows it. "I dreamed I was a child, marvelling at all I could become. I woke in old age and every possibility had gone." Ellulists use it in the regret-minimisation class. You are supposed to see you own failures in it "my life is a series of safe, meaningless decisions", that sort of thing'

'I think about it a lot. How he built Ellulism as a system and in the end discovered it had no room for what he was'

"You must love this place" Haude said instead.

“The models say a human can't live here without the system degrading. But I've been watching this ecology for eleven years and it has surprised me more often than it hasn't. The otters weren't in any model. The kingfishers came back two years early. The fungal networks rate of phosphorus uptake is astonishing.”

Haude considered this. "It sounds wild"

"It is" said Kesseny

They walked back along the lower trail. Haude asked about the bats and Kesseny told them about the two years she'd fought the lighting committee. Pathway lights. Dim, tasteful, solar-charged pathway lights so visitors could walk after dark. The trail passed through a section where the reserve's infrastructure showed. A bioplastic rainwater collector, mottled green with algae, feeding a sand-filter cistern half buried in ferns. Overhead, barely visible through the canopy, the gossamer curve of the station's far side: agricultural terraces, the bright strip of the solar collection band, and beyond that the residential spokes where people lived and worked and repaired things and shared meals in commons.

At the perimeter gate Haude stopped. The elevator was ten metres away. They stepped into the elevator and Kesseny watched their shoulders begin to rise before the doors even closed, the muscles re-engaging in anticipation, the body bracing for a weight that was not here yet but was coming, was always coming.

The gate closed. The elevator rose. In the reserve the stream ran over its rocks, and the fungi passed their signals through the soil, and the heron slept in the dead oak by the north bank that Kesseny had argued against removing because dead oaks held more life per cubic metre than living ones. It slept the way herons have always slept, on one leg, head tucked, as though no one had ever explained to it that it was the product of a laboratory and a freezer and a hundred-year plan. The reserve did what it did. It became more itself, slowly, in the absence of anyone who needed it to be something else.

She was the seventh child they'd tested that month.

Nim watched from behind the partition glass while the girl, who was nine, picked at the seam of her left shoe. The filaments in the containment field drifted through configurations, and the display showed density impressions rather than numbers because they'd found early on that numerical readouts degraded the field stability. That finding had sounded mystical and had been dropped from the funding pitch. The pitch had failed anyway.

The shapes had been open for twenty seconds. The girl was sitting the way children sit when nobody has told them what to sit for, her weight on one hip, her attention somewhere general. Anyone who tried couldn't do it.

Twenty-two seconds. The filaments locked into a single configuration.

The girl looked at Nim through the glass with the mild irritation of someone who'd been told to sit still and was doing her best.

'Sorry' Nim said through the intercom. 'That was me'

Nim crossed to Rae's station, her thumb running along the cuff seal of her jacket. The lab occupied a converted semiconductor fab in Santa Clara, bought cheap when the foundries moved to orbital microgravity. The air handling still carried a toluene ghost.

'Twenty-two seconds' Nim said. Her IA placed her own notes from Thursday beside it in her vision: fourteen seconds. The operator dependency getting harder to explain away.

Rae didn't look up. She was passing her thoughts and impressions from the session to her synth, letting it do the thinking about what everything meant so she didn't have to carry a theory into the next one. She looked peaceful.

'Every child we've tested still holds the field longer than the best adult operator' Nim said.

She stopped to take in her IA input.

'Most children'

Another pause

'A statistically significant cohort of the children we've tested, in controlled conditions, with caveats'

'I liked the first one better' Rae said. 'Do you want me to set up the thing with Augustine?'

Freehab had reverse engineered something from the alien probe, but Augustine sniffing around her company suggested they hadn't figured it all out. Nim wasn't sure she had either, and she definitely didn't want to pull the entirety of that idea into the focussed part of her mind her IA could reach. Because if the idea got out then some government agency would be through the doors in an hour and the whole startup shut down.

'I'm happy to take his money if there really are no strings' is what Nim visualised and said instead.

She paused while her IA helpfully introduced some context: Augustine Okafor. Probable Freeholder Paramilitary, black market connections. Do not take his money.

'I think the case is defensible'

A longer pause.

'It's complicated'

'Nim' Rae paused and her hands came together, fingertips touching then opening.
'The children, they are more at peace with the world than you' she said. Then she went back to her data stream.

At six Nim stepped outside, stopping at the south wall and putting her palm flat against the bricks. Warm. Still holding the afternoon while the crisp autumn air cooled around it.

Crisp fall air, the IA corrected her.

The marine change was coming in now, and the mote layer thickened with it, billions of sensors carried inland with the fog until the air shimmered. Rae came out.

'I watched you today' Rae said. 'You're so focussed on this that you collapsed the field from outside the room'

Nim nodded and took her hand off the wall. On the ridge the Tomb of the Unknown Human was catching the light, orange against a darkening hillside. The Society of Life had built it as an expensive promotional stunt, to "mourn those who died from curable senescence". Nim thought that curable senescence sounded like a type of glue which had made all those dead people permanently stuck. She was the reverse, one of seven embryos, frozen in a clinic in Bangkok. For seventy-eight years they'd been nothing decided and then the fund crossed ฿100 trillion and a clerk at Siam International drew divination sticks and one stick came up with a number and Nimitra Wongprasert had begun her life while still leaving the other six possibilities open.

'Your Tokyo suborbital's at ten' Rae said.

The rain started on the way back and by the time the hopper crossed the Sumida the city had smeared into colours through the wet glass. Her IA placed a schedule for the evening in her peripheral vision. She brushed two fingers behind her ear to dismiss it. The reflections along Eitai-dōri stretched and reformed. For a moment a bank of kanji became a long smear of blue-green that reminded her of her glowing algae bloom dissipating through the water.

The dinner had been Yui's idea, or Yui's excuse. Yui worked for Angusu in photonic sales and had been Nim's point of contact for the intermediary that afternoon, a man named Taniguchi who had discussed weather systems and order book dynamics for ninety minutes in a conference room overlooking the palace grounds and at no point mentioned money or Augustine Okafor or the Freeholders or anything that would produce a record her IA could flag. When Nim left the building the funding structure existed, somehow, the way a price emerges from the two sides of an order book without anyone having to actually make a trade. Her IA had flagged nothing because there was nothing to flag. Then Yui had said: come out tonight, I want you to meet some people.

Yui lived in Kōenji in a building old enough to have physical mailboxes. Her flat was on the sixth floor and was designed for one person and currently contained six. Yui opened the door and pulled Nim inside by the wrist. The flat smelled like yuzu and the music was a stuttering percussive loop that Nim's IA identified as a Martian export, MarsNet producer. She brushed behind her ear to stop it identifying things.

Yui handed her a glass. "You still look like a person who was in a meeting today"
"I was in a meeting today"
"You need to stop looking like it. Drink that"

It was cold and botanical and strong enough that it hit the back of her throat with a small violence. Yui was already across the room introducing her to people, a woman named Sora who worked in atmospheric modelling and had hands stained faintly orange from something she was building, a man called Hiro who didn't explain what he did, some others that left and then two more people arrived. A man named Kazu who repaired biosynthetic instruments in Yanaka; and Michi, who was Yui's age and laughed hard and often and appeared to mean it every time, and who handed Nim a second drink before she'd finished the first.

"Why the algae?" Michi asked.

Nim thought about it. "It started as a filtration system. And then it became a way to monitor water quality. And now also something to make the drowned parts of the city beautiful at night."

"The best kind of project" Michi said. "Outran your reasons. I had something like that in Kōbe, we were building—" Sora called something from the kitchen and Michi was up and across the room and whatever she'd been building in Kōbe stayed there.

They left Yui's flat into the light rain because Sora wanted ramen. The neighbourhood was dense and layered and the projection surfaces on the buildings made the wet pavement glow. They walked four blocks of narrow grassy streets to a place below what used to be street level where the bowls were enormous and the steam rose into a old ventilation system. The ramen place was thin and bright and the cook knew Yui. They sat at a counter that was too small with Hiro next to Nim, and when the food arrived she noticed how slowly and carefully he ate.

"You're watching me eat" Hiro said.
"Sorry. You just seemed very… present" He smiled. Not at her. At his ramen. "No, I am thinking about something. I'm thinking about how good this is, the kansui. My mother used to put too much in and the noodles would go yellow and she'd say that was the correct colour"

Nim's IA placed a note in her vision: Saturday. Meeting with Augustine Okafor, Cultural Bereavement exposition, Aljanah Lunar Resort. She brushed behind her ear.

They left because Kazu knew a place. It was going to be a night driven by someone knowing a place, and Nim realised that the momentum wasn't hers, that she was inside someone else's evening. She felt shoulder muscles releasing she hadn't known were locked. The place Kazu knew was a listening bar in Asagaya, and when they stepped inside the street's managed quiet was replaced by an analogue crackle from a record. It was something Nim didn't know, slow and washed out, a guitar that kept almost resolving into melody and then pulling back. The owner was a woman who wore her age unrestored.

They sat and drank and the conversation separated into pieces. Yui and Sora talking about Sora's atmospheric project. Kazu showing Michi something on his hands that Nim couldn't see from where she sat. Across the table Yui was holding her drink against her sternum with both hands, eyes closed, lips moving to something that wasn't the music. A count, or a word. Then she opened her eyes and was across the room refilling Kazu's glass, her hand on his shoulder as she poured. Nim was next to Hiro.

"Were they good?" she said to Hiro. "Your mother's noodles?"
"No"

And then they were not talking, which was fine, since this was possibly the most restful thing that had happened to her in months. The music filled the space where conversation would have gone.

"What's the theme?" she eventually asked him, rather than her IA.
"Pre-Khan. She only plays things from before the storm. Her family had a recording studio up in Sapporo when it went dark. Down here was the center of the world for a while - the ASST transformers, right? So they relocated here and rebuilt, but made that their thing - only kept the analogue stuff"

Nim listened to the guitar which kept almost arriving somewhere. She closed her eyes and for a few seconds in the dark the room held her.

At some point they lost Kazu. He said something to Yui in Japanese that Nim's translation layer rendered as "I'm going to become horizontal" and then he was gone, walking into the rain with his jacket over his head. Sora left with him, the orange hands in her pockets.

The rest of them walked. The rain had thinned to something not quite mist and not quite rain, and the streets at this hour were between states. Last trains gone, first trains three hours away. The people out now had chosen it. Yui talked to a man carrying a cello case and they appeared to know each other, or to have decided to know each other for the duration of that stretch of pavement.

They took a lift core at the interchange. Nim watched through the glass wall as the ground fell away, and at fifteen floors residential corridors slid past, quiet, closed doors, someone's laundry on a drying rack in a sleeping hallway. Then the lift opened at a junction platform at the twenty-eighth floor and they crossed a short bridge to a wider one. The bridgeway was open to the sky on both sides, wide enough for stalls built into the structural piers, and above and to the south two more walkways crossed at different heights, one planted and residential, the other bright with food stalls and standing bars. Up there was where the night kept going. Michi moved through it in a way that told Nim she lived at this altitude or near it, weaving between a noodle counter that had colonised half the walkway and a cluster of people leaning on the railing and looking down at something. The wind pushed the mist sideways and the wet surfaces reflected everything twice.

They walked past bars and all-night curry places and vending corridors where you could buy socks or thermoregulation patches or canned coffee that was better than it had any right to be. Michi bought two coffees and a yurumu tab and put one of each in Nim's hands. Nim peeled the tab and pressed it to the inside of her wrist. Michi was already walking. Nim stopped at the railing. Michi came back. "What are you looking at?"
"I don't know" Michi leaned on the railing next to her and they stood like that. Nim stepped sideways to let a man with a food cart pass and her shoulder pressed against Michi's and neither of them moved away from it. They walked on at that distance.

Yui appeared with a small plastic figure from a capsule machine, a cat in some kind of suit, and put it in Nim's hand.

"Why?"
"Because you looked like you needed a small stupid thing"

Nim held it up and turned it. The tiny painted face. The tiny suit. The serious expression. Behind her Yui glanced at Michi. Michi looked back at her. Nim put the cat in her pocket. For the first time in days she thought of Jess. In Bangkok Jess was doing whatever Jess did. Survive. Somewhere at the edge of her vision a note about her heart rate appeared. It stayed there for a while, small and far away from the yurumu, and then it was gone.

Michi found a karaoke place. Of course she did. The entrance was through a modular unit bonded to the structural frame, and the corridor was narrow and fluorescent and smelled like cleaning products and whatever the previous group had spilled. Their room was non-immersive, real microphones, and small enough that their knees nearly touched. Yui sang first, an old pop song that she performed with a commitment that replaced quality with sincerity and came out ahead. Michi sang fado, which nobody expected, and her voice was actually good, and the room went quiet in the way they do when someone reveals something they've been hiding under all that laughing.

Hiro didn't sing, just sat and listened. Then Yui handed Nim the microphone.

"I can't sing"
"Nobody can sing. Michi is an anomaly"
"Thank you" Michi said.

Nim scrolled through the list. It was long and the titles meant nothing and she passed songs she probably knew and kept scrolling. She picked one because she recognised the first line. She sang it badly and the song was about something that only became clear while she was singing it. She sang it to the screen and didn't look at anyone. Her left hand was on her knee and at some point during the second verse it opened, palm up, and stayed that way. When she finished Michi clapped and Yui said "you sing like a beautiful emergency" which made Nim laugh.

The bottles emptied. Yui fell asleep on Michi's shoulder. Hiro sat with his eyes closed and Nim couldn't tell if he was meditating or dozing or consulting whatever it was that kept him so still. And then the night ended. Not because anyone said so. Michi yawned and Yui stirred and Hiro opened his eyes and the empty glasses clinked when he stood, and then they were all putting on jackets and settling up and filing into the narrow corridor. Under the fluorescent light Nim reached forward and picked a thread from the back of Hiro's jacket and dropped it. He didn't notice.

They stepped out onto the walkway where the air was cold and the rain had stopped, and the city below was a different pattern now, the eastern sky starting to separate from the buildings. They took the lift core down in silence and stepped out onto the ground-level streets, which were darker and warmer and closer and smelled like wet grass and earth. Embraces. Michi held Nim's face in both hands and said "you have a good face" and then walked away towards Kōenji with Yui leaning against her, and the street was empty.

Nim walked, passing a shrine that had been folded into the ground floor of a newer building, the torii gate original, the structure around it polymer and glass. Inside, the small amber glow of something still running. She followed the slope up at Kagurazaka where the stone paving was wet and the noise from the main road fell away after a few metres. Paper lanterns still lit at some of the ochaya. A cat watched her from under an eave and she went down some stone steps past a moss garden the size of a tablecloth. Soon a moat came up on her left, a black width of water, and beyond it the wall and the palace forest rising behind, a mass of trees that made no sound. Across the water the Marunouchi towers were lit, infrastructure humming without people, climate systems and water treatment and mote relays and the quiet processing of a million IAs turning the day's data into something searchable and permanent. Rae would say the city was in REM, pruning its synaptic commitments. And here was Nim walking through it awake, accumulating. She felt the plastic cat in her pocket and called a hopper to take her back to her hotel.

By the time she got back to her room the yurumu was wearing off and the city outside the window was starting to lighten, the sun catching the distant upper storeys and shifting the building's surface out of its night phase. She sat on the edge of the bed and closed her eyes, her body in the room but her attention loosening. An image came in, the way things come in when you're not looking directly, clean green and cream tiles small squares. A two-burner gas range, the wok ring dark with use, and a slowly turning ceiling fan moving real dust motes illuminated in the warm light from a window. There was someone in this kitchen who was not her, whose hands were on a counter, whose back was turned, whose hair was tied up and dark, and the kitchen would have smelled like something just cooked and the air would have been unmanaged and comfortable and warm.

Three seconds. Four. The hotel room came in at the edges and the tiles faded and the kitchen was going and the person in it was going. Nim reached for that the way you reach for something falling but it was gone, not because it was nothing but because it was something that couldn't pass through the aperture of a mind that was awake and definite and logging everything. The hotel room. The surface beneath her which had adjusted its temperature to her body. The city outside, brightening into morning.

Nim sat and felt the grief, not of the content dissolving but the understanding. She had understood something for three or four seconds, held close something about the kitchen and the person and her life, and the shape of that was evaporating because she was definite and this room was definite. She brushed her teeth and opened the expo invitation. She accepted it and booked a berth on the next cycler to Luna, because if the room was going to keep winning she was at least going to choose the right one to be in.

She put the plastic cat on the nightstand. She slept, and if she dreamed more she didn't remember it. .