Under a new and brillian.., p.11
Under a New and Brilliant Sky, page 11
The deaths and disappearances, and what Elys had suffered after, stopped the situation from amusing her. Her scowl might’ve made it a little less funny to Nautilus too.
“Let’s get back to l’Assemblée’s technical activity, please.” Taia didn’t need heavy armor to intimidate. Elys hoped the others would mistake her flush for the beginnings of heatstroke.
Nautilus rolled xir colorful eyes. “Before cloning got popular, we had a little gang looking for holes in the wall over in IMS’s stations, last year. They found some, naturally. Redecorated the place, but you’ll be disappointed. Nothing violent or dangerous happened.”
Nisse put a map on the rock between Elys and Nautilus. The assistant had highlighted Iskamaisanyi, the nearest planet to Mayari with full-time residents, in another star system. It was well outside real-time communication range with Alyansa. Alyansa’s social support system gave unemployed people the time and resources to explore other stations’ digital infrastructure, with a huge time delay, for fun. If Elys didn’t live here, she’d be envious.
Of course, she’d managed to move to Alyansa without getting much of its fabled free time, not that that bothered her much when she worked in service of such a marvelous MCAI. After the mediators stopped the bounty hunters attacking her and Taia, she didn’t want to do anything that’d make Alyansans kick her off their planet.
Yesterday she’d worried about whether the Alyansans would let her leave. Now she was afraid they would force her to.
If she made herself valuable enough, they’d let her stay. It might be in her best interest to search for the error for as long as the Alyansans would tolerate her lack of results, to make it as hard as possible for the RIS to reach her. But the city, and the Alyansans, deserved better.
While she’d been thinking, Taia had been listing agreements regarding coordination with Off-World Affairs which l’Assemblée Tordue should’ve followed while contacting other stations. “Look,” Elys interjected, earning another mischievous grin from Nautilus. “There’s a guy I would love to be responsible for this. He’s not in l’Assemblée Tordue. And I don’t think you want anyone in your group to have caused the error either. So, can you think of anyone who’s been unduly interested in the city over this past month, someone who could’ve been involved unknowingly, even?”
“We’ve looked into it ourselves, you know. If we’d found someone doing something they shouldn’t, we’d have told City Support. It’s always fun to surprise them.” Nautilus took a deep breath of air that smelled earthier, not fresher, than in the rest of the station’s air. “Now, I think I’ll stay up here and meditate for a while. Bring us something interesting, virtually next time. Maybe somebody’ll want to play with the great Elys Kundakçı.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
About a second after Taia and Elys had walked downhill of Nautilus’s hearing range, Taia turned her scowl on Elys. “Nautilus was telling us the truth most of the time xe was talking, but you lied to xir!” Taia’s two dogs stayed closer than they had on the hike up the mountain, watching her with their heads down like they understood that she was upset.
Elys stopped to lean on a tree. The bark left a green smear on her palm. She’d thought the plants in Alyansa’s park would be as fake as its sky. “Can this wait until we’re in a bathroom, where people we’re suspicious of might not hear us?”
“What do we have to hide, Elys?” Taia’s accusatory tone took the joy out of hearing her use Elys’s short name. “Except thousands of missing people. But they’re not even really missing, are they, because the RIS knows if they killed them or just... kidnapped them to use them like bots. What did that other MCAI do?”
“The RIS hired me to develop it to make life and death decisions, but not to walk it through its first year. What did I lie about, exactly?”
“You acted like you didn’t suspect them of hurting the city when you do, and that was after you didn’t... You should’ve told us what that other MCAI did. What right did you have to teach it that? Or to let the RIS let it decide on, on... People! Who gets to live or die?”
If Taia had imagined the MCAI making recommendations on which of the survivors got to keep all their fingers and functioning joints, she would’ve been even more furious. Elys’s team had trained it on those scenarios too. Most of what they’d prepared the MCAI to do was weigh different kinds of misery against each other.
“It wasn’t... I could’ve said no and gotten arrested, because if I knew all that then I’d have known their plan for the MCAI’s strategic analysis subsystems. Then you wouldn’t have anybody to look for the city’s error with new eyes, would you?”
Taia opened her mouth to argue but Elys talked louder to stop her from pointing out Elys’s lack of progress on that front. “The first year of an MCAI’s operation is delicate. That’s when it...”
When it got thousands of people disappeared by their own government. But after the RIS got rid of Elys for refusing to participate, they would’ve just hired someone else who might’ve led it to even more inhumane conclusions than Elys’s team had.
“The first year is when MCAIs learn from their mistakes. Mistakes people in the RIS had to act on to actually hurt anyone, by the way. They could’ve ignored its recommendations.”
“But you made that MCAI think it was okay to tell people to kill each other.” Taia raised both her hands above her head, like she was holding an invisible sign that said You’re wrong. “How that not your fault?”
“The project lead brought in a separate maintenance team which took over from mine. During the first year, an MCAI needs constant attention until it’s mapped out its specialty area sufficiently to operate on its own, and that’s when the RIS MCAI started advocating all that violence. Stopping people from acting on the MCAI’s exaggerations was the maintenance team’s job, not mine.”
Krebs’s team had ignored the RIS MCAI or made very poor reinforcement choices, then failed to give it enough room to simulate long-term outcomes. Either might’ve caused the RIS MCAI’s obsession with short-term results, and Krebs had neglected to send a project summary to Amberson for Elys’s review.
“Do you even know how many people that MCAI got killed?” Of course that’s what Taia would care about, not the fact that the MCAI’s recommendations resulted in the opposite effect of what the RIS had built it for.
“The RIS killed them. And it stops sending progress reports when your part of the project’s over.”
“Why didn’t you leave when you realized what they were going to use it for?” Taia demanded.
The development team had brief conversations about the ethics of it all, around puzzling out how to give the RIS what it hired them to create. But... “We had everything we needed to make the most effective MCAI the universe has ever seen. It had to know a lot to make anything approaching useful strategic recommendations, you know. The project timeline even gave us the time to do it right.”
“And look what you did instead.” Taia didn’t sound like she’d listen to another explanation of how MCAIs needed more simulative space to learn than Krebs’s maintenance team gave it.
She patted her thigh twice to attract the dogs’ attention. “If you really get stuck and your assistant can’t help you, tell someone who’s on duty.”
She jogged effortlessly down the mountain trail. The dogs bounded along beside her. The armored mediators watching for bounty hunters after Elys had to step into the plants by the trail to get out of Taia’s way.
Elys had broadcast her suspicions to the whole universe, collected dubious information from Nautilus that she’d have to verify before she took it seriously, and angered her strongest and most beautiful ally. Oh, and she and Nautilus had spread gory details about the RIS MCAI all over the universe, too.
Since she’d finished the only task she’d had planned for the day, she took her pain medication. It couldn’t make her much more careless than she’d already been. And maybe Taia was right to be angry that Elys hadn’t quit and accepted the consequences after she realized she’d be teaching the RIS MCAI that murder, kidnapping, and threats thereof were viable ways to tell people to deal with each other.
Elys limped down the lush but lonely mountain, past happy hikers who gave her a wide berth on the trail and flying insects which didn’t. She pushed herself until sweat trickled down her back and her pickup locked itself, buzzing against her neck as its photophore scanner failed to recognize her pattern. That annoyed her enough to step off the trail and catch her breath.
A short break let her skin cool and her photophores shrink to their usual pattern. The pickup unlocked, allowing Nisse to appear with new City Support test results. They’d finished the anomaly handling series with no sign of the error delaying CRU deployments.
City Support had also checked a huge list of the city’s intermediate conclusions. Those outputs should’ve been fine, since the verification sequence City Support started with went normally, and these tests confirmed that. Not a single one offered a clue to the error’s source.
The airlock shut and rumbled as it separated Alyansa’s urban area from its parkland and replaced park air with the regular station air. Elys took off her pickup and wiped the sweat off with her shirt hem. When she put it back on, Nisse delivered a priority message from Alyansa’s Off-World Affairs archontate.
They had a long list of questions about the Republic MCAI. While the airlock cycled, Elys answered as many questions as she could with brief signs to Nisse, prefacing most of them with a warning that the MCAI’s maintenance team should’ve made changes while Elys was in Amberson.
By the time Elys shuffled out of the airlock and onto the street beyond, the pain medication was kicking in. The slight grogginess it might’ve added, in addition to exhaustion after much more walking than she was used to, distracted her less than the pain. She should’ve taken it sooner.
Nisse’s new message alert no longer startled Elys, but they did interrupt her. A woman with the sharpest eyebrows Elys had ever witnessed formed in front of her, overlapping the hiker ahead of Elys. The woman’s shoulders shifted as she drew a breath to speak, like a person, not one of the lesser AIs people used as messengers.
“Elys Kundakçı, I’m a judge here in Alyansa. I reviewed your appeal of the city’s level two privacy decision for you, and I’ve decided that level three would be appropriate. I didn’t grant level five as you requested because off-worlders seem to be drawn here to do you harm. Given the city’s difficulties with deploying CRUs, you, your neighbors, and the city deserve the best chance of a timely warning if more violent off-worlders find their way into Alyansa.”
On the urban side of the airlock, Elys stepped out of the flow of pedestrian traffic to check her pickup’s security settings. Most had updated their defaults to the options level three offered. The few that hadn’t included more inconvenient biometric checks, which Elys activated.
She might as well move to one of the higher privacy districts she now qualified to live in, too. No sense inviting saboteurs, Republic or otherwise, to follow her through the city’s cameras whenever she left her apartment. Maybe by the time she finished moving, Taia wouldn’t be angry at her.
Although, that would likely require action on Elys’s part. Were they close enough friends for apology flowers? Then again, plants weren’t an efficient way to communicate “Sorry for not telling you the biggest project of my career made the RIS institute violent countermeasures against political dissidents.”
The person currently talking about Elys hosted the Les Conlen Truth Hour, a popular Alyansa-focused show. Conlen was white and about a decade younger than Elys. In what was apparently a common Alyansan media style, he talked over cut-together public archive footage, merging into simulative presentation to emphasize his points.
Elys sat in a car headed for Renforcé district with five people who’d agreed to risk Elys’s potential Martian contagions, listening to a stranger commentate on her assault and kidnapping. The surreality made her bruised head ache even more. Messages from former coworkers, her sister, and her parents would sit in her inbox until she could stand to discuss this very incident.
Conlen inserted himself into the right side of the visualization, wearing a black sweatshirt with a white “Truth Hour” logo on the front. Instead of looking at the kidnapping, he talked to whoever was watching. Elys shifted back in her seat. The visualization moved with her.
“Look at these people!” Conlen pointed dramatically to the bounty hunters.
The view zoomed in with unlikely clarity, which confirmed Elys’s guess on why the mediators never asked her to recount the attack, the way police in the Republic would have. The city must’ve recreated details its camera couldn’t record.
Only blurred outlines of the two hunters’ faces had made it through Elys’s concussion. In the square visualization space, their features were crisp and clear beside Past Elys’s shoulder. One hunter, Maddi something, was built like she modeled an edgy, hard-drugs-implied clothing line. The other...
The other one slammed Elys’s head into a car just like the one she was sitting in now. Elys jumped in her seat and turned off the visuals. The person next to her glanced over, looking concerned.
“My friends, just look at the kind of people she brought to our station!” The visualization’s audio made Conlen easy to hear and impossible to ignore. “Listen to them talk, you can hear the off-world aggression in every word they say. Do we really want to welcome people like her? Where’s the vote on this? Start writing your proposals on what to do about these dangerous off-worlders bringing violence into Alyansa.”
Elys didn’t attract bounty hunters. The Republic government announced it’d pay them to bring her back, which necessitated going to where she was first. And if Alyansans thought she controlled the Republic government, then they were operating on a flawed mental model of it. If it were happening to someone else, Elys would’ve laughed.
“I’m being told that Elisabet Kundakçı is watching now!” Conlen added vowels to the first part of her family name and ignored the last half. “Kundakçı, tell your assistant to hook up with mine, let’s talk! You have some explaining to do.”
Elys disconnected from the show, silencing Conlen. Her stomach heaved and she shut her eyes and pressed a hand over her mouth, willing herself not to throw up in front of this car’s courteous passengers. She couldn’t talk to anyone about the attack while her head still throbbed and remembered hands still gripped her arm.
And she couldn’t think of any new ways to find the city’s error while she packed her Renforcé apartment into crates the city delivered, either. She was too busy listening for sounds of the mediators outside her door defending her from more attackers. According to Nisse, the mediators at the top of the space elevator had turned away two more groups of hunters today. Those were just the ones the mediators caught.
If the RIS thought Elys would find proof of their involvement in the city’s malfunction, or that their MCAI inciting violence which post-incident research concluded made political unrest worse, not better... Either might be reason enough to increase the reward for her capture to the astronomical size it’d reached. Nisse had confirmed that Amberson had never offered a reward that high before.
Maybe Jules was right about RIS involvement. It would make sense for the Republic to raise the reward and get someone to capture Elys before she spilled more RIS secrets.
She stopped packing. She’d come to Alyansa with almost nothing and assembled a few clothes. The apartment she was moving to was furnished just like this one. She put most of what she’d packed back where she’d found it and dropped the empty crates into the mail chute by the door.
When she walked out the door and past her mediator escort carrying a single crate of clothes, one of them asked, “Can we help you with that?”
As she was about to say no, Elys glanced at the brace on her broken ankle. Despite the relatively low-level ache emanating from the joints, the hike to meet Nautilus had added hours to the brace’s estimate of how long the injuries would take to heal. “Sure, thanks.”
By the time they were walking behind her along the street to Volontaire district, clearing a path through the pedestrian traffic in front of Elys with their mere presence behind her, she’d enrolled herself in an Alyansan citizenship course for Republic immigrants.
A few minutes later, her new building came into view, several blocks away from all district borders as per her request. Nisse finished downloading the first part of the course, but in the same notification it warned her that yet another summarizer was talking about her. Once Elys became a citizen, it would be a lot harder for those summarizers to convince people to kick her off the planet.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The tiny Volontaire apartment was a reflection of Elys’s Renforcé one, complete with another welcome box of rice, soothing dreams, and chocolate coins outside the blue door. She did the rice carrying and coin scattering Taia had told her about the day before, which she was fairly sure Taia would’ve approved of if she’d been there. Besides, Elys could use some good luck.
Rituals concluded, Elys set her crate of clothes on the bedroom floor. For a second, she thought someone had forgotten to give her a bed. Like so much other Alyansan furniture, it was folded into the wall, which was the only way to make space for the drawers in the opposite wall to open.
She pulled the bed down to sit on it and scan active Volontaire district proposals. She recused herself from voting. None of her messaging systems showed any evidence that Taia had contacted her since their argument on the mountain.
The single advantage of that was that Elys could interview Krebs without Taia sitting beside her, judging them both. She sent him a meeting invitation while she folded the bed into the wall and unpacked her clothes. As she placed each item in the drawer, she envisioned shutting away the emotions that would distract her during the interview.
