“Okay, I’m at trap 510-1311. It’s empty, and you’re going to love this.”
“I don’t love anything about this,” Mira said distractedly as Ivester leaned close and asked a quiet question.
“It’s busted open, nibbled away just like the extra legs on this waldo.”
“Busted. Open?” Ivester asked, sharp divisions between the words. Mira repeated the question so that Bright could hear.
“Affirmative.”
“Okay, record everything, then move to the next trap.”
“Affirmative.”
The queasy, crawling feeling was back. Helen typed in a question and sent it down to Mira’s screen.
“Operator Bright, please make sure you get an electron micrograph shot at that trap. Molecular-scale, if you can crank down that far.” Ivester made that request and Mira passed it along without question. Ivester asked Mira a second question, and she just jerked her thumb over her shoulder at where Helen was standing behind the glass. He turned and frowned.
“Ms. Vectorovich, I was told you were still in recovery.” His message scrolled out across the touchwall. Inside the Fishbowl, his lips barely moved. Neat trick, that.
“Officially, yes, sir. Keller sent me down to observe.” Helen spoke aloud to her empty room, relying on the microphones to carry her response through to the Fishbowl. His look turned pensive and he nodded.
“I’m sure you know not to distract the NAV on duty, Ms. Vectorovich. Carry on.”
“Yes, sir.”
Helen heard the door behind her open. She cast a glance over her shoulder as Keller entered. He gave her a thumbs-up and threaded his way through the disorganized seats, distracted by something on his own comm tablet.
“Got ’em.” Bright responded to Mira’s earlier instruction. Helen saw the micrograph shots appear in the manifest and checked the estimated download time. “Okay, moving to the next trap. This one’s got a green light, must be full of something.” The OP continued his roll.
“That one’s dead to me. Bright, get everything you can,” Mira responded.
“Want me to relink the trap to the Golfball’s computer or give you direct access?”
“I’m showing backup arm two on the waldo still working. See if you can get me direct access.”
There were always a handful of physical redundancies built into any waldo. As a rookie, Helen had been unimpressed by the extra cables and multi-purpose tools. After she’d saved a few missions with those “unnecessary” extras, she had changed her mind.
“Got it.”
“Okay, connecting the controller to the trap. You should be getting access in three . . . two . . .”
“NAV, are you whistling?”
Helen had used those exact same words. Helen’s heart felt like it had come to a stop and in her mind she was back in the waldo, listening to the noise building along the communication circuit. She backed slowly away from the glass window, stumbling into the freestanding seats as she unconsciously tried to put distance between herself and what was coming next. A last glance at Mira through the glass showed the NAV bolt upright, face nearly touching the half-dome of control screens. Long fingers curled into fists, arms pulled back against her body, Mira looked like she was struggling to escape something. Helen closed her eyes against the wave of unreasoning panic that followed.
“NAV, there seems to be some kind of interference.” Bright’s voice came down the line alarmed and confused.
Helen forced her eyes back open. Forced herself to move through the remembered interference in her head. She could see the inside of the waldo around her, a bizarre replaying of the last few moments of her own mission overlaid on the real world like a pale and sickly hologram. She forced herself to reach for the touchscreen on the wall before the screaming fear could catch up with her decision and stop her. Helen’s fingertips skidded across the interface, seeking the abort button three menus deep as the NAV in the room beyond started to convulse.
“Helen, are you . . .” Keller grabbed her arm, but she had already keyed in the abort sequence.
On the other side of the glass, the room went nuts.
“WHAT. THE. HELL!” Ivester’s voice exploded over the speakers.
Mira collapsed. Bright, fresh red trickled from under her helmet and down to the point of her jaw.
“Mira, what the hell happened? I’ve been kicked.” Bright’s anger and confusion rang out over the speakers as the EMTs rushed the room.
Keller pulled Helen back, half supporting, half insisting, and shoved her into the closest chair. Helen took one deep breath, then a second, afraid to look, afraid to see what had become of Mira. She had been aware, in the abstract sense, that Ted had been badly injured, but she hadn’t been able to see what happened. She hadn’t been able to connect with that idea until Bright had repeated those four words. NAV, are you whistling?
“Helen? Operator Vectorovitch.” Keller caught her shoulders, turned her to face him. “I’m getting you back to Hofstaeder.”
“No, wait.” Ivester’s voice came from the back of the room.
“Aren’t you . . .” Keller started, shocked.
“What? Going to take command? Get in there and start second-guessing my people? My job is to stay the hell out of their way right now. I want to hear it from her first. Why the abort?”
Ivester’s presence gave Helen something else to focus on, a new checklist to tick the boxes off. The CTO moved to the touch-wall and started pulling down data faster than Helen could read it. She could just imagine the whispers in the air as it exchanged information between his personal computer and the Far Reaches server.
“It was the sound,” she began, then paused, mind racing to figure out what it was that Ivester wanted to hear.
Screw it, I’m fired anyway.
“Bright mentioned a sound,” she continued, “but there’s no interference on a quantum link, there’s never anything other than what we put in there.”
“How do you know?” Ivester pressed.
Helen was taken aback for a moment, forced to collect her thoughts, to look at the problem differently. “Bandwidth. Every bit has to be accounted for so we can push enough information as fast as we can. That’s why we prioritize the audio Feed to the NAV over the images Feed to the Fishbowl. I picked up the same thing, just a few seconds before Ted . . .” She had to pause a moment, take a step back before emotion caught up with her. “Before my NAV started seizing.”
“The analysis team determined that was an anomaly, probably due to the eenie overrun on the Golfball on the other end of the line,” Ivester pressed on.
“There are no recorded instances of any kind of interference on the quantum link ever. Not even in the earliest research. It doesn’t work that way.” Helen held her ground.
“So it’s not chance, you’re suggesting.”
“Once might be a chance.” Helen waved her hand at the EMTs clustered around Mira. “Twice is a coincidence . . .”
“Science doesn’t do coincidence, Ms. Vectorovich. If we cannot maintain a connection to the Golfball, we are going to have a pro-blem.”
Helen risked a glance through the glass at Mira. The NAV looked shaken and pissed, but was still upright and ready to argue, from the scowl on her face.
“So both times the NAV gets affected,” Helen suggested, grasping at something to work on, something that would let her keep control of the chattering-whispering noise in her head. “What if we run an AI NAV? We use them for minor assignments now; more than a few of us know how to work with them.”
“The AIs have to be tied in to James. We don’t know what this interference is yet, but if it Feeds all the way back into Far Reaches’ big computer, it could be catastrophic.”
“So it’s got to be live people.”
“For now. Until we can find a solution.” Ivester gestured at the window. �
�I think, however, that I owe you thanks. You might have made a mess of our mission, but you may also have kept Operator Mira from taking a trip to the morgue.”
The morgue.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Well,” Hofstaeder said curtly. “That was hardly the outcome I was expecting when Keller took you out of here this afternoon.”
Hofstaeder’s inner office was dimmer than the outside halls. Near-white paint coated the walls from floor to ceiling and lights stayed at half brightness. Here in the depths of the psychologist’s inner office, the focus was on comfort. Thick rugs muffled the unfeeling concrete. The chairs were littered with mild-patterned cushions far better suited for a personal space. The entire office, in fact, was dead to the outside. No connection to Insight, no hum and buzz of day-to-day operations. The stillness should have been unsettling. After Helen’s near-meltdown at the Fishbowl, the separation of mind and machine meant a place to hide while she collected herself.
“I needed to be there.” The panic attack, if that’s what it had been, had subsided, step by careful step as Keller walked her back to the office. Hofstaeder had been waiting, perched in the chair behind the desk like a vulture in a sharply pressed lab coat.
“That’s for damn sure. What I want to know is why you pulled the plug. Ivester sent over the room footage. You picked up on something going wrong well before anyone else did.”
“I don’t know,” Helen said.
“Yes. Yes, you do. What was it? What have you not been telling me?”
“I don’t . . .”
“Don’t. Bullshit. Me.” Each word was neatly clipped short as it left Hofstaeder’s lips. “If you ever want to see the inside of a coffin again, you will not bullshit me. This is now the second Line Drive mission with a body count—well, very nearly a body count. Mira Reseda’s going to pull through, but this is a very important point. Waldo operations don’t kill people. Psychosis, dissociative breaks, occasional blackouts, bedwetting, sleepwalking, none of these are ideal side effects, but they can be managed. Not one of these things gets you dead and none of these things ever happens to a Navigator.” The psychiatrist fixed flat brown eyes on the Operator. “Once could be an operational glitch. Twice . . . there simply is no twice. So the question I put to you, Helena Vectorovich, is why did you abort the mission?”
Helen sat stunned. She’d been ready for professional platitudes, for encouragement and soft-shoeing around the edges. She had not been ready for shock and awe.
“No.” It was the first answer that came to mind. Helen didn’t know what else to say in the moment. She needed time to process, time to get her bearings. But she knew that she was already on thin ice. If she said something, if she presented her alien theory without proof or plan, she was done. Red-carded off the mission and off rotation permanently. Done. What she didn’t get was why Hofstaeder didn’t understand that as well.
“I don’t know anything else.” Helen softened the no, instinctively ceding authority to Hofstaeder without revealing anything new. “Look, you know Ted and I heard something out there. That’s on the report. When Bright said he heard something, I paid attention.” Helen shrugged by way of finishing the sentence.
Hofstaeder steepled her fingers and stared, unblinking, over the tips at her patient. Helen, having committed to her course of action, stared back. Despite herself, Hofstaeder blinked first.
“Bright’s description of the sound, and its effects, matches up with your reports,” the older woman conceded.
“I’m not sure that makes me feel any better.”
“It should. It changes your diagnosis, or at least eliminates the idea that whatever you heard was all in your head.”
“Ted heard it too.”
“Ted can’t provide corroboration,” Hofstaeder murmured. She started to reach out a hand, then stopped and returned to her clinical demeanor. “Now that you’re not the only one, how do you feel about that?”
“I think it’s a little soon to know how I feel, but my hot take is that this was a very expensive way to figure that out,” Helen responded bitterly. The chattering in the back of her head started up again; even in the stillness of Hofstaeder’s office, she couldn’t escape it, only allow it to slide by, ignored.
“That’s why we need to know everything. Especially now.”
“I don’t know. . . . Wait. The pictures . . .”
Hofstaeder shook her head. “Nothing. All the data was corrupted.”
“Not your pictures. Mine. The ones on my personal drive would have been downloaded over the uncorrupted OP’s connection.” Helen had put them out of her mind, waiting for James to finish crunching the data.
“Pictures?”
“I take screencaps on every mission.” Helen gestured at her temple. They were more than screencaps; they recorded bio-response data. Ever since Ferguson’s Asteroid, she’d taken memento shots on every mission. “Personal record, like a diary without the smelly-pens and cheap golden locks.”
“You know we can’t touch those. Personal drives are off limits. Union rules.”
“Hands off for you, but you put me on the analyst team. I can put my personal experience to use.”
“We put you on the analyst team because Dougal has a degree in psych and could keep an eye on you,” Hofstaeder said and pursed her lips—not quite a sneer, not quite a scowl. “The Almighty Ivester insisted we allow you to remain active against my advice.”
“Well, now that we have confirmed I’m not actually crazy, let’s put it to use, since I’m already there.”
“You’re looking at a precedent the union might not be all that happy with. If you give us access to that personal drive, you’re opening a can of worms bigger than one loose waldo mission.
“I didn’t say I was going to give you access. I said I was going to see if I have anything I can make personal use of as a member of the analyst team. You’re going to have to trust that I’m being accurate. I can tell you what I know, where to look, then you can go find your own proofs.”
Hofstaeder frowned. “So there are things about the mission you haven’t divulged?”
Helen caught herself. She’d gotten too close to the line, felt a little too safe.
“Doctor, I’ve divulged everything I know so far, but I don’t know what those pictures will show.”
“I’m still not convinced that’s true, Operator Vectorovich.”
Helen shrugged, back on her guard. “All I’m asking is for you guys to let me do my job. If you’re not going to put me into a waldo, at least let me use what I have on the analysis team.”
“You do realize I’m trying to help you, right?” Hofstaeder’s frustration was becoming palpable.
Helen didn’t care. She’d retreated again, choosing to protect her tenuous grip on the chance at getting back into a waldo.
“Fine, Helen. I can’t help you if you won’t trust me. You’ve been through a trauma. If today’s incident doesn’t put the punctuation on that for you, I don’t know what will.”
“Look, Doc,” Helen replied. “I have one goal. Getting back out there. I’ll do any therapy you like, but other than that, you, they . . .” Helen’s expansive gesture included every part of Far Reaches’ operations. “They all know everything I know, right here, right now. If I remember or discover anything new, I. Will. Tell. You.”
The chatter, which had stayed in the back of her mind a low, staccato hum, suddenly faded out, leaving her alone in her own head.
“I want to solve this as much as anybody else. In fact, I want to solve it MORE than the rest of you assholes because Ted was MY NAV, he was MY friend and I had to sit out there, a billion miles away, and listen to him die while you decided launching the payload was the most important thing.” Helen got to her feet and placed her balled fists on the desk. “So, no, I am not hiding anything, NO, I am not deliberately withholding information. The sound I
heard in the Feed was not some kind of coping mechanism to deal with the fact that my partner, who was supposed to have the SAFEST part of this goddamn job, got killed on the highest profile mission that Far Reaches has ever run. I am trying to get back out there to FIX this SHIT.”
The sound of water droplets hitting the desk clued Helen to the fact that tears were streaming down her face. She was shaking and, just for a moment, she felt like she might put those balled fists to work.
Across the desk, Hofstaeder was smiling.
“I think I believe you.”
Helen sat back into her chair with a thump, all the angry, nervous energy draining away.
“I don’t fucking care.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The lab was abuzz in the aftermath of Mira and Bright’s Golfball run. Every screen was alight, every member present, time zones be damned. Helen walked into an empty room, but as soon as her glasses shook hands with James, the space erupted with the virtual avatars of people on a dozen different landmasses.
“HELEN! You made it! I wasn’t sure Doc was going to let you out in time!” A real-life Dougal appeared out of the press of imaginary bodies.
“Where did all these people come from? I thought your team was just three?”
“That was before this latest entanglement.” Dougal shook a finger at the puzzled operator. “That signal showed up twice now, two different times, which means what we are looking at is not an anomaly. This is something completely new.”
“This is something completely lethal,” Helen cautioned, wanting to take the edge off the analyst’s dangerous delight.
“Yes, but not inescapably lethal. We’ve got a lead on that too. C’mere!”
Helen allowed herself to be dragged around the room. Normally everything in the imaginary room was flexible, but with so many people using it all at once, it had become as rigid as a real-world office space.
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