Chapter Two

“Señorita Castillo?”

Sofia looked up from her game board to see a man in a red pinstripe suit standing in the doorway. She wasn’t expecting visitors, but whatever credentials he held had allowed him to enter the station without her approval. That, plus the Control-fleet craft that had come in to dock a few minutes earlier (registered by her on-board software), put her at ease that he wasn’t any kind of intruder, so she took the time to finish her move. Placing a stone over a small red shell, she looked at him properly and smiled. “I am.”

“I’m Agent Miguel Acosta of Control Anomaly Correction, Human Division.” He flashed an ID card, and his credentials blinked into view, magnified by her on-board.

“Yes,” she agreed. “You’re here to identify the source of an anomaly.”

“Ah, now. Is that conclusion experiential or heuristic?”

“I don’t know that it’s useful to say.” Sofia broke into a grin, offering him a seat opposite her. He was tall, officious, and had a little grey hair coming in on his crown. He was not unattractive; not her type, but presumably somebody’s.

Visitors to her monitoring office were few and far between, but she wasn’t just being evasive with the agent. She genuinely didn’t know what anomaly he was investigating. Her base on Tenerife was quiet and lonely, which was as she liked it. She worked here to detect signals from beyond the solar system – evidence of extra-terrestrial life. Her machines hadn’t made so much as a peep for five months – of course, even that was a false reading, an errant transmission from elsewhere on Earth. Ever since the invention of the internet (in 1805) the world was blasting out data at incredible rates, and with machines as sensitive as hers they had to be judicious about what they did or did not ping. It was a long time to spend in silence, but somebody needed to be on call at all times of the day, just in case. Against the pale grey walls, she had set up star projectors which now glinted off both their faces. When she tired of books, she turned to games.

Agent Acosta looked down at the circular board between them. Most of the spaces were filled with grey-brown stones, each with a small divot inside to hold a different colour shell. Some shells were exposed – most red, but some yellow and some green. His left eye twitched slightly. “Red to win in six turns?” he asked.

“Yes, I think so. But then, I doubt you would have known that without your on-board, right?”

He smiled, caught out. “I wouldn’t have even recognised the game. How did you know I had an oculus?”

“To quote a much older game,” she said, “Snap.” She gestured at her own left eye, and the tiny, matching scar on the outer rim that marked the on-board’s location.

Sofia was surprised to hear him refer to it as an oculus. The term originated back when the ideas contained within the technology were proprietary, as a branding exercise. Biotechnological advancements in the last eighty years had slowed, and consequently most scientists in the field had looked to other disciplines to maintain their interest. Naturally, this had the effect of slowing biotech further, but while everyone understood both the cause and the effect, nothing substantial changed.

The oculus came at the very beginning of that decline, originally marketed as the Extri Oculus Pro. It came in a non-Pro package too, but there was no question the Pro was best; near-instant visual analysis from over five thousand data sources, all collated using Extri’s hypercompression algorithms. Despite all that, it didn’t sell well, for the same reason nothing sold well back then. Inflation and disillusionment with the mechanisms of capitalism (which had been called “late stage” for far too long) had finally reached every echelon of society before the echelons broke down altogether.

Once Control absorbed Extri they began producing non-branded oculi, but few chose to take the modification. It didn’t interest those who wanted improved physical forms, as it couldn’t make you run faster or lift heavier objects. And for everyone else, the “in-chips” Control had been producing for several decades by then did almost everything better. They may not have had their own visual scanners, but they could jack the optic nerve directly to get the same sense at a higher quality. Indeed, for all but a few cases, the oculus was considered a quaint curiosity.

She wondered if Agent Acosta was older than he looked.

Like her, he seemed deep in thought. After a few seconds he said, “Is there anyone else I could talk to here? So far, my impression of you suggests that we won’t get on well.”

“I’d reached a similar conclusion,” she admitted. She didn’t take his comment personally; some people just didn’t click with her. Besides that, she and Acosta both clearly came from parts of the world that valued rational straightforwardness. Some would have called them both blunt – she thought of it as conversational efficiency. “Unfortunately, I’m the only full-time member of this station, and we’ve had to cut our part-timers down to two days a week. It’s just me – organics-wise, anyway. I hope that won’t be a problem.”

“Not a significant one, I’m sure.” he said cordially, with a smile. “So, what’s the game?”

“It’s called Serrien,” Sofia said, waving a hand over the board. It saved her place and reset the pieces, the holoforms lifting to show the shells underneath each piece. “You have to be able to identify every shell still on the board, but they’re always changing.”

Agent Acosta prodded experimentally through the shell. The image shivered around his finger. “But you always know your own pieces?”

“Not exactly. You can change places with any other player, and you only retain their game-memory. The rest is wiped. I started as Blue here, but I don’t remember what pieces I played. I have to make a psychological profile of myself to get an estimate.”

“So,” he said, “You have to guess?”

“More or less. But it’s me I’m playing against, and who better to understand myself?”

“I suppose so,” he mused. “May I return to matters of business?”

“You may,” she said, quietly amused by his formal tone. That was the way of Control agents – a lack of imagination was practically a qualification. At least he hadn’t kicked up a fuss about Serrien’s memory alteration tech. The rationality committees had had a long hard think about the Serrien family of games when it was first released but had concluded that the technology wasn’t significantly different from mainstream education patches. All the same, even with the official ruling, there were plenty of older citizens not willing to conform to the consensus view.

Agent Acosta set down a black box on the table and ran a finger over the surface. A red light within began to pulse. “I’ve come from Madrid to inspect your E-level monitoring station, in accordance with Control Recommendation 102721.” He reeled off the numbers in a clipped staccato tone, clearly reading them off his retina projection. “That same Recommendation affords me the right to ask non-invasive questions of any personnel operating stations of that class including yourself. The transcript of this conversation will, with our respective review and consent, be made available to Control immediately following its recording and, in twenty days’ time, to the general populace. Do you understand?”

Sofia said that she did.

“How long have you operated this station?”

“Almost six hours.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “And how long have you worked as an operative on this station?”

“Ah. It’s been about two years.”

“And you work a standard six-months-on six-months-off pattern, I understand.”

“You understand correctly.” When it came to table-setting questions like this, Sofia had a habit of being overly literal. The star projections behind each of them continued to whirl.

“Have you noticed anything unusual on your terminals recently?”

Sofia gave a frown, looking towards the machine banks against the windowed wall. “Like a malfunction?”

“Not exactly.”

“Agent, you’re going to have to give me a little more to go on.”

“Have you had any indication that your machines have found something, and failed to alert you or your staff?”

Sofia was too stunned by his implication to clarify that the part-timers weren’t her staff. “Found something? You mean, a signal?”

“That’s right.” Agent Acosta pressed on, but Sofia could tell he didn’t want to say it. “We have reason to believe your machines have received transmissions from a foreign body.”

“Agent Acosta, if the machines in this office had detected any kind of transmission, it’d be worldwide news. Control would make sure of that. On top of which, it has been our mission for the last forty years, and I live on this station for half the year. We are pretty sure the lights are working.”

“Yes. As I said, it’s not a question of a malfunction. These machines have been maintained exceptionally. Despite their obsolescence.” He clicked his tongue slightly. She wondered if he was making fun of her. It was true that the machines here were old, but they still executed their tasks perfectly in both detection and analysis. She sometimes felt like she was the only person on the planet who didn’t constantly need the next best thing. With the Surplus project nearing its endgame, it was seen as a positive trait to be always thinking forward, focused on the future. Sofia wasn’t against that, but she thought there was a good word to be said about the present too.

“Impeccably maintained, yes,” Acosta continued. “My concern – or rather, the concern of my department is that the machines might not be willing or able to give up the information, as it were. Some kind of an algorithmic flaw.”

“You’re wrong,” she told him. “These are good machines. They don’t lie.”

“They do receive a significant quantity of information every day, don’t they? It must be quite a task to filter through it all.”

“Of course, but it’s a task they were literally designed to do – designed, in part, by Control, I might add. How would you know anyway?”

“The Recommendation that led me here was released by Control’s ThreeMind subtask.”

Sofia didn’t think anything else could surprise her. A certain portion of Control’s processing budget was devoted to experimental subtasks that pushed the boundaries of what was considered possible with machines. These subtasks were the main source of AI research, since the creation and cultivation of artificial intelligence had been highly regulated by Control ever since its own inception. ThreeMind was one such subtask, and maybe the most out-there of them all. Its purpose was to predict future events using information about human behaviour. “ThreeMind sent you here?” Sofia let out a laugh. Acosta was essentially claiming to know the future. “This is ridiculous.”

“I don’t see a practical reason to convince you of what I think.”

He was right – that conversational efficiency rearing its head again. Despite her disbelief, he had power that he would exercise here whatever she said. “Then perhaps you should just make your checks and leave.”

“Indeed.” Agent Acosta hunkered down at a terminal, and called back over his shoulder, “What is the name of the head machine, please?”

Sofia rolled her eyes. Looks like he did need her after all. “Sai?” she called out. A second later, the spinning stars against the back wall were replaced with the icon of Sai – three white squares in a row, each giving a small pulse in turn. From speakers in the corner, Sai spoke.

“greetings señorita. this guy bothering you?” Sai’s artificial voice was mischievous tonight. They were probably glad to have something to do.

“Yeah,” she played along, “Can you activate the ejector seat real quick?”

Sai hum-laughed, while Agent Acosta looked down at his seat nervously. “You’re kidding, right? Sai, is she kidding?”

“activating anti-intruder turrets in three, two… what can I do for you, agent?”

“Sai, have you been listening to me and Señorita Castillo talk?”

“i have the logs, but i haven’t accessed them yet. over the last four minutes i’ve been running analysis on some startling data.”

“Really?” he jumped up. Sofia stayed put, waiting. “What data?”

“that suit. red pinstripes is a really bold choice.” There it was. She couldn’t help but burst out into laughter.

“Oh, I see, you two are a little double act? Very cute. Okay, Sai, sorry about this – go static, please. All personality traits disabled.”

“Hey!” Sofia cried, standing for the first time since Agent Acosta had come in. “You can’t do that!”

“static – confirmed,” Sai said. Sofia hated hearing Sai use words like ‘Confirmed’.

“This’ll just take a second,” Acosta said, barely registering her distress. “Sai. Give me everything you’ve got from the last two weeks coming out of the greater continent.”

“six thousand plus results. shall i apply filters?”

“Sure. Apply no-content and no-military,” Acosta said. Sofia wondered how often he spent talking to machines like this.

“four thousand plus results. shall i apply filters?”

Acosta thought for a second. “Apply no-Sydney-pickup.” Whatever he was looking for, he had already tried OSCA’s sister base in Olhemaroa. But Sofia wondered just what the greater continent had to do with all this. Nobody there was sending out any transmissions worth tuning into.

“one thousand three hundred ninety one results. shall i apply filters?” Acosta sighed. However much time he spent with machines, he wasn’t adept at filtering. She wasn’t either, but she had some tricks up her sleeve.

“Sai?” Sofia interrupted. When Acosta looked at her, she said to him, “Just wait. I’ll find your mystery transmission.”

He waved his hand, inviting her to continue.

“Sai, apply all possible filters. Please.”

“zero results.”

“Okay. Now, set a loop. Apply and remove each filter you have available and record the number of results between them. Provide a list of filters in order of result quantity ascending.”

“processing.” Another word Sofia didn’t like to hear. Sai would normally say “Sure thing,” or “You got it,” or some other affectation. They didn’t strictly need to say anything, but Sai did. The three squares pulsed as they applied the loop she had described.

“Smart,” said Acosta.

Without looking at him, she said, “You would’ve got there in the end,” and then wished she had said something else. Being short with this man didn’t feel right anymore. She wondered, for the first time, whether she would be in trouble. She hadn’t hidden anything, after all – she didn’t know what Control or Acosta were looking for, but it was her job to calibrate Sai and the other machines to determine when they did and didn’t notify Control. Agent Acosta didn’t seem to have any actual authority – few people did, in the old sense of the word – but he could likely get her into trouble if he wanted to. She only had to hope that there was nothing too exciting in the hidden transmissions.

“function complete,” Sai chirped. “two active filters. one result.”

“The unique filters hit the same thing?” Agent Acosta got ready to order Sai to list them, but she butted in.

“Take them off static before anything else.”

He looked for a second like he might ignore her, but she knew he wasn’t quite that petty. After a moment he said, “Come on out, Sai.”

“well,” the machine half-huffed, “that was no fun at all.” Static didn’t hurt a machine, but it certainly wasn’t comfortable. More poetic machines than Sai had described it as paralysis. “i certainly hope you got what you wanted, agent.”

“Almost,” Acosta said. “You’ve got a couple of filters open there, what are they?”

“let’s see, one of them reads “bite me”, wow, that’s weird, the other…”

“Sai,” Sofia stifled a laugh, “Tell him. Then he can go.”

“alright, alright. but before i do, agent, i want you to know that i’ll be filing an official report with control as soon as you’re gone. that was an abuse of your privilege.”

“Yes, it was,” Acosta agreed. He seemed genuinely regretful.

“okay. great. here it is, then. first filter to return one result is unknown-point-of-origin. that’s not that it has a hidden poi, you understand. it’s got one on some scale or another, we just don’t have any way of working out what it is. see, agent, these are the nuggets of insight you miss out on when you static me.”

“Your point,” Acosta was bristling now, maybe not realising that Sai was teasing him, “is taken. So it doesn’t have a location?”

“no, no, it does. it’s just not clear what device recorded it, or how it was transmitted. it has a last-known location, which is where i picked it up. utah – that’s out west.”

“Right. And the other ping?”

“looks like its…huh. it’s latin. anyone speak latin?” Nobody said anything, so they carried on. “it triggered the auto-translator for latin, with a fifty-percent certainty. that’s low for these guys – it’s, like, weird latin. want to hear it?”

“‘Weird Latin’?” repeated Sofia. “What were you just saying about insight?”

“Were you hiding this from us, Sai?” asked Agent Acosta. With a sinking feeling, Sofia remembered why he was here in the first place.

Sai’s three-square icon rotated and merged in a gesture Sofia recognised as indignation. “no, agent, you know that’s not possible. this was picked up by an aerial drone off the coast of the greater continent eight hours ago and is currently in place three thousand and sixteen in my queue of files to process. we pick up a lot of junk here.”

“So Sai wasn’t hiding it, they just hadn’t had time to alert anybody yet,” Sofia said with relief. She didn’t know what she would have done if Sai was lying to her. Then another thought came to her. “Did you say eight hours, Sai?”

“sure.”

She turned to Agent Acosta. “You said you’d come from Madrid, that’s at least a three-hour journey. Not to mention receiving the report in the first place.”

“Yes,” Acosta nodded, his face impassive.

“But you didn’t rush straight here. You’d already been to Sydney.”

“I got the report three days ago.”

“But…”

“the transmission hadn’t even been sent by then.” Sai finished.

“I already told you. ThreeMind sent the report.” Sofia wished she could be something other than slack-jawed in the face of this man who claimed to be predicting the future. “Sai, can you please play the transmission? As is, for now.”

Sai obliged, a pulsing blue holoform springing up in the room’s centre. It certainly sounded like language. Sofia didn’t know the first thing about Latin – it was one of the main roots of Castilian, which she spoke just as well as anyone, but the older language had been dead for millennia. And because neither she nor Agent Acosta had an in-chip to translate, they could only go off context clues.

It was a woman’s voice. Professional but clipped. Underneath, music played, but it didn’t sound like any music Sofia had ever heard. She sounded like she was explaining something, but the way her voice rose at the end of each sentence suggested she was asking a series of questions. At the end, the music swelled and the woman gave a triumphant laugh. Then it was over.

Sofia exchanged a glance with Acosta. He wasn’t moving.

Predictably, Sai broke the silence. “the translation is rough, but i can give you the gist if you need it.”

Agent Acosta had gone pale. “That’s a voice. A voice on the greater continent.”

“Could be a clean-up team went wrong.” There were normally fifty or sixty clean-up teams circulating the greater continent at any given time, working to pick up anything that might be of historical or scientific value. There wasn’t really anything to stop a team from leaving their designated path except plain common sense. If she had her geography right, Utah was just east of Nevada. Nobody would be stupid enough to get that close to Nevada.

“A clean-up team speaking Latin?” Acosta said.

“With a hidden point-of-origin?” she half-countered, half-conceded. Their earlier spat forgotten, the two of them were working together, trying to build a consensus through debate.

“Right, on an unmeasurable device. Not to mention the music. That music…” he trailed off.

“do you want to hear the translation?” Sai repeated.

Sofia was the one to respond. “Why don’t you send it to the Agent privately? I’m sure this isn’t something I need to hear.” She waited for him to agree, but he didn’t say anything. Was he shaking? “Agent Acosta?”

Finally, he snapped himself out of it and turned, looking her in the eye. He seemed to have reached a decision about something – even now, there were things he wasn’t telling her. “No. Play it, Sai.”

“you got it.”