Xan was sleeping. Or resting with his eyes closed, which was probably the same thing from where Elvi sat. Cortázar, at his desk, scowled at the two of them—Cara and Elvi, leaning against different sides of the clear plastic cage like girls comparing lunches at university. He went back to eating a sandwich with an air of disapproval.
“Is there anything you can tell me about it?”
Cara frowned. Even that had a moment of extra processing that went into it. Like the girl, or the thing that had been a girl, needed to remember how to make movement first. Or maybe it was more like a kind of gross motor stutter. Elvi really needed to get back to that line of research at some point…
“It does… record?” Cara said. “That’s not the right word. It’s not like memory, exactly. It’s more like everything all at once? Like the way a film is all the pictures that tell the story, and they’re all there even when you only see one at a time? I’m not explaining this right.”
“A gestalt,” Elvi said.
“I don’t know that word,” the girl said.
Her hand terminal chimed at the same moment that Cortázar’s system threw an alert on his monitor. Trejo informing them of an emergency meeting in his offices in half an hour.
“Problem?” Cara asked.
“Too many masters, not enough time,” Elvi said. “I’ll be back when I can.”
Cortázar was already heading for the door. She had to trot to catch up. A driver waited for them outside, managing to look obsequious and impatient at the same time. A cold wind was blowing in from the east, stinging Elvi’s earlobes. It was her first winter on Laconia, and she understood it was likely to get a lot colder for a very long time before the warmth came back.
In the back of the car, Cortázar folded his arms and scowled out the window. The city was glittering, and there were banners up for some kind of cultural celebration. Elvi didn’t know what it was. The streets they passed had people rushing down them in thick coats. A pair of young men ran alongside their car for a moment, hand in hand and laughing, before a security guard in Laconian blue waved them off.
It was hard for her to remember that a whole population—millions of people—was spread across the planet, living lives in a new environment while she tired her head in reams of data. In that, it felt a lot like pretty much every other city she’d spent time near.
“I heard you talking to the older subject,” Cortázar said.
“Right?” Elvi said. “This is awesome.” She lowered her voice, roughened it, and put on a fake Martian accent. “We thought it was two cases, but it’s been the same case all along.” Then, when Cortázar didn’t respond. “Like Inspector Bilguun? How he and Dorothy were always on different investigations, and it turned out they were related?”
“I never watched those,” Cortázar said. “I’m concerned about how you’re treating the subjects.”
“Cara and Xan?”
“You treat them like they’re people,” Cortázar said. “They aren’t.”
“They aren’t rats. I’ve worked with rats. They’re very different.” Again, he didn’t get the joke. Or didn’t think it was funny.
“They are mechanisms created from the corpses of children. They do some things that the children did because those are the parts that the repair drones had to work with. Eros was only different in scale. The nature of the protomolecule and all the technology related to it has the same logic. On Eros, when it wanted a pump, it co-opted a heart. When it needed tools to manipulate something, it repurposed a hand. This isn’t different. Cara and Alexander died, and the drones made something out of the dead flesh. When you talk to that girl, she isn’t there. Something is, maybe. And it’s made from parts of a human, the way I could stitch together a model catapult from chicken bones. You’re anthropomorphizing them.”
“Is it a problem?”
“It’s inaccurate,” Cortázar said. “That’s all.”
At the State Building, an escort led them to a conference room where Trejo and Ilich were already sitting. Ilich looked worse than usual, and the way things were, that was saying something. Trejo, on the other hand, seemed almost at ease. He gestured at the chairs, and Elvi and Cortázar sat. A display on the wall showed a map of the system—sun, planets, moons, and ships—like a virtual orrery. It seemed to her like it had a lot of ships in it.
“The research?” Trejo asked curtly. “Where do we stand?”
“Making progress. Steady progress,” Cortázar said.
“Do you concur, Major Okoye?”
“We’re finding new connections,” she said. “You don’t really know what’s critical and what’s just nifty until after the fact, but sure. Progress.”
“We’ve had a development,” Trejo said.
“What’s up?” Elvi asked.
That was how she learned that the underground had launched a full-scale invasion. Trejo brought them up to speed as quickly as he could, then opened the floor to comment.
“The thing I care about,” Ilich said, “is what they know that we don’t. That’s why this is a problem.”