Red Noise
Page 36
Yasira had belonged to Aletheia as a child, probably. Back when she’d loved science with her whole heart. She wasn’t sure where that heart was now.
Did the priest somehow know that? Had she been talking about Yasira? No. Probably not. There was no meaningful glance in Yasira’s direction. The words were the same words Yasira suffered through every week.
“In your deepest hearts, friends, what spurs you to action? Do you truly thirst for knowledge, or beauty, or the lifting-up of others? There are no lies in Limbo. The God who consumes you once you’ve been run through Their algorithm will be the God you deserve to be part of.”
Yasira wondered, as she always did, what God that was. Probably not Aletheia anymore. Not Techne or Philophrosyne. Definitely not Arete. Probably one of the wishy-washy Gods. Peitharchia, the God of doing what’s expected. Eulabeia, the God of cowardice, if today’s panic was any indication. And there were, of course, worse Gods than those.
Everybody knelt, briefly, with their eyes to the ground. “So be it,” said the priest.
“So be it.” Even Yasira mumbled it back, grinding her teeth.
Finally Yasira stood up and faced the auditorium, to polite applause. She drew the small radio out from the sash of her dress.
“Everyone ready?” she said into the device.
“We’ve been ready for half an hour,” came the core team leader’s voice through the static, not amplified enough for the audience to hear. “What’s the hold up?”
“Priest stuff,” said Yasira, and then someone handed her a microphone.
“Shien Reactor online,” she said, “in ten, nine…”
It was a stupid job, even if the whole population of the station was watching raptly. Some glorified phone operator should be standing here counting down, not Yasira. She should be there in the generator room. With her baby.
At least she trusted the people who were doing the important part. Turning the generator on or off was a multi-step process: all sorts of huge switches would be flipped in preparation, while Yasira counted, before the spherical chamber ignited and the Talirr-Shien Effect itself came to life.
“…two, one.”
The auditorium held its breath.
There was a brief flicker of the lights, and then nothing. There wasn’t meant to be anything more than that, really. Yasira and her team leaders had designed the process so that the Shien Reactor would take over smoothly from the conventional generators, causing no fuss at all. The conventional generators would be kept on standby until the team verified that everything worked correctly.
“Shien Reactor online,” said the team leader on the radio. “Looks good so far, Dr Shien. Starting the first runtime test battery.”
Yasira did not feel particularly relieved. It really was like nothing had happened, like nothing had even turned on. She forced her face into a sunny smile. “The Shien Reactor is online and running,” she repeated to everyone, like a glorified phone operator.
Then, just for a moment, the whole room shifted.
It was a sort of shiver in the room’s dimensions, subtle enough that Yasira could have mistaken it for a brief unfocusing of her eyes. The room went slightly convex, like a breath. In and back out.
Just for a moment, Yasira could not speak with terror. All the nerves of the whole day turned to ice and adrenaline, because she recognized this–
Then it was over. And the audience was applauding like nothing had happened.
Yasira looked wildly from one corner of the room to another, willing it not to happen again. The auditorium was perfectly rectangular like always. The walls were solid steel. It was perfectly normal. Nobody had even noticed it.
No. Nobody had noticed because nothing had happened. It was nerves. If anything had really happened, the audience would be panicking, too. Besides, she’d never seen walls breathing before; she wasn’t even sure what it was that she’d thought she recognized. Déjà vu, she thought. Random brain firings. Meaning nothing.
She looked out at the crowd. Wide smiles, abject boredom, and everything on the continuum in between. No terror. Tiv beamed adorably, bouncing up and down in her seat.
Nothing had happened.
Which did not stop Yasira from twitching in fear, tapping her fingers nervously against the fabric of her dress, all through the interminable ending of the ceremony.
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The Fallen by Ada Hoffmann