Chapter 1
ON THE DAY the dreaded notification arrived, Katla was checking the instruments at the top of the tallest volcano on Arkhide, so her wristcom pinged first. Soon the whole planet knew they had been found out
Katla had jumped at the chance to trudge up Mt. Awala to check on the monitoring arrays. The seismic sensors suggested an eruption was imminent, but the GPS, gas, and thermal sensors did not agree. Arkhide’s elders also did not agree. Drone images and satellite readings through cloud cover were not conclusive. Somebody had to go look.
A long day’s hike, in the warm rain and the mud, treading through a gritty dusting of old ash, was bliss. Even digging up the stubborn soil to change monitor batteries and clean off sensors wasn’t a chore. The usual steam and belches, the mild sulfuric smells, didn’t seem like enough to put on the rebreather. Awala might be rumbling, but it was probably just indigestion.
Katla had been cooling her heels here on Macadere Island, following her mom around from political event to to quasi-political meeting to yet another political event. Mom Sofia already had a most able assistant, and now that Sofia had retired from active service she really didn’t need another. The only thing Katla could add was her gift for languages, but since most everybody had a communications implant that did adequate in-the-moment translation—even tone, pretty well—there wasn’t much for her to do.
But she had spent one of her career rotations with the volcanologists who monitored this always active chain along the equator belt, so why not just have her go check out the odd readings? No need to bother the local volcanologists. They were all a half-day away, gathered on the isthmus between two volcanoes actually erupting, eagerly observing and debating how the process was dfferent when it was twinned.
Katla followed their new theories and debates in the evenings, safe from the rain in her waterproof dome tent. It didn’t matter out here that it took her longer to read and listen to it all. Or that she needed a screen to do everything. Or that she couldn’t eat and respond to comments at the same time.
Most humans on Arkhide received a series of implants as adolescents: communications, network access, wayfinding, improved memory, and a range of more specific enhancements. Arkhide had been founded as a world where enhanced humans and synthetic humans could live without prejudice. A bare two thousand people on the planet did not enhance at all, following their own beliefs, but Katla was not one of them. Her implants had failed.
She had failed.
Her parents did not put it that way—no one did, to her face. But she wasn’t going to change the world like Mom Sofia, or coordinate network-wide projects, like Mama Claire. It was exasperating to hang out with people her own age, because half their conversation was in-head. She missed all the context. It was easier with synths, who thought all humans slow and Katla just a little bit slower.
But it was best to be alone.
By the time she’d reached the wide lip of the crater, it was clear that the seismic readers had been off. Too much corrosion on the wires. The sulfur here stung her eyes—the rebreather didn’t let it reach her lungs—but there was no rise in levels of lava and no changes in rim configuration, no dome. Just as hot as ever, no more.
Arkhide was such a young planet, with such a thin crust, almost every island experienced some activity. The town Katla had been born in was now half-buried in slowly cooling lava. Maybe her grandkids could move back there, and take advantage of the newly fertile soil.
Maybe her friends’ grandkids could.
She didn’t want to go back down. Face the blank faces and glassy stares of people accessing data online while you were standing right there in front of them.
But this was a good assignment. Was there such a thing as one-off assignments specialist? She could take her little sail-hopper and putter off to eyeball suspect volcanoes, or to repair distant facilities. She could hike through jungles, up hills, across black-desert sands.
She’d need new boots. She’d definitely need to find tastier meal-packs.
She was deciding how to frame the question to her moms when her wristcom pinged. Barked, more like. Emergency alert.
Wasn’t much she could do about it up here, Katla decided. She turned away from the rim and its gassy belches and headed back to her last camp, a short half-hour away. She’d write up the report, send the last of the data, and then pack up and go. Maybe she could find an anomaly that would require her to collect another day of data. Maybe she could make the trip down last four days instead of three. Tradeoff was she’d have to eat that last, horrid mealpack—what was it?—mixed fish and beans in gray gravy. Nobody should have to eat that.
As she pressed send on the data, her wristcom chimed with Mom Sofia’s melody.
“Kay, where are you?” Sofia sounded like a general mustering her troops. She fell into that mode so easily even now she was supposed to be retired. Katla sighed.
“On Mt. Awala. What’s up?”
“Where, exactly? Turn your locator on. Someone’s coming to pick you up.”
“Too dangerous. I’m right at the top and it’s windy and raining.” It was sprinkling, but maybe could start pouring at any moment. “I’ll go down to the platform tent base. Everybody knows where that is.” Katla hated having people watching where she was all the time. She used the excuse that the GPS and other locators wore down the batteries on her devices too fast so she could keep them turned off. The devices were powered by her movements, just like implantable ones, but less efficiently. And even implanted people turned theirs off sometime. Her friend Olve almost always had his off.
“No time. We need to get you down here and ready in two hours.” Sofia’s voice trailed away. She must be reading something. “Hopper’s ready.”
Katla enabled location on both her tablet and her wristcom. “What’s the hurry?” What could anyone possibly need from her?
“That message, did you get it?” Sofia didn’t wait for her answer. “The Cooperative has ‘discovered’ us. They know we have a space platform, and they want to talk to us. Now.”
“Okay?” Wow, that was terrible. The worst. They’d expected to be found someday, hopefully a century from now. So soon was not ideal. But still. “Why me?”
“They won’t talk to anyone who has any kind of enhancement. They cut the signal off from the platform once they realized that only synthetic humans were there.”
Typical. That was why all the synths in this part of space lived on Arkhide in the first place.
Still.
“So why can’t they talk with the representative from Sankofa?” One of the two islands inhabited by a sect of people who preferred to never enhance.
“He isn’t cooperating.” Which meant the representative wasn’t eager to do whatever Sofia wanted.
Was Katla?
“They see you,” Sofia said. “Thirty minutes out.”
Chapter Two
They landed directly in front of the sandcrete-and-glass offices serving the Greater Assembly of Arkhide. Someone took Katla’s pack, while she was whisked away to wash, primp, and prep for camera.
She’d seen other people put through this process but never experienced it herself. So many distracted people pushing and prodding, shower too hot, hair gel too smelly—and too thick, having to work mightily to tame the frizz of her hair after a week of no product. The best tailor in Macadare City—a synth named Seela—sewed a new tuck into someone else’s formal tunic as Katla wore it, with Sofia casting a critical eye on the whole ensemble. Sofia, of course, looked perfect: beautiful rows of twists coursing down the back of her closely tailored tunic in brilliant blue.
"We’re trying to get decent shoes for you. Last resort you can wear mine.” She tsked. “You didn’t bring any formal sandals?”
Katla had wrecked them at the last political gala. She’d had to twist out of the way of some diplomat whose thoughts—and gaze—were elsewhere. She’d fallen into one of the ponds with the colorful fish, who apparently thought sandal straps were super tasty. By the time she’d pulled herself out, one sandal was on by just a strap, the other hopeless. “Didn’t see you there,” the diplomat said. “Your presence is … minuscule,” he said wonderingly. Her presence on the net, he meant. Her corporeal form was average feminine human. Soggy human.
Katla shook her head, which shook her hip, which earned her a tiny poke from Seela’s needle. “What do you want me to do?”
“Play for time. Don’t agree to anything. Whatever they want, say you can’t do it without consulting the assembly, and it will take a while to gather them all together.”
“They’re right here.”
“The Cooperative doesn’t need to know that. If you can, try to find out what they already know about us. The news clip was vague.” Their monitor bot, which regularly caught and forwarded much of the Cooperative’s broadcasting, had flagged one short segment on the interesting discovery of a human-made object far out in edge space.
“Can I see the clip?”
“On your comm.”
Katla woke up her wristcom and pulled up the clip. One of the Co-op’s usual newscasters, so this was an official announcement. Blurry image of their solar system, with an arrow pointing to a tiny blob that was the space platform. A chilling closing line: “We look forward to welcoming our new friends into the Cooperative soon.”
“Doesn’t look like they know much at all,” she said.
“That they’re saying for public consumption,” Sofia said. The primpers turned Katla to face her mom, who looked her over, frowning. Then she hugged her, careful to avoid the makeup. “Perfect. My brave girl.”
Katla let the lavender and love calm her a little. Not much—she was more dazed than nervous. She waited for Sofia to pull away first. Her mom had stopped with the hugging when Katla was a surly teen, and she’d hadn’t managed to find a way to tell Sofia she missed it.
* * *
Katla was ready, shoeless but with a lectern in front of her that bore the seal of the Greater Assembly of Arkhide: two silvery hands clasping at the wrists with a sun over water in the background. An army of lights surrounding two camera lenses beamed at her, washing out the dark drape of fabric behind her. A drone camera hovered just inside her peripheral vision. A screen that would show the Cooperative official was set up directly behind the camera, helping to guide Katla’s line of sight into the lenses.
Outside the light, in the large communications center, it was nearly silent. Dozens of people were in here with her: comm techs, assemblypeople, the synth with the annoying facepowder puff. It felt to her as if they all were holding their breath.
The moment to connect came.
And went.
Someone brought a chair for Katla, outside of camera range. The ring of lights clicked off, their buzzing ceased. Sofia crowded her from the back, and the present Speaker of the Assembly, a synthetic human from the South named Aimee Five, crowded her from the front.
“Do you know what you are doing?” Aimee Five said, her voice lilting as well as cutting. She had modified it to sing in a trilling operatic style. It really suited her, with her fine lithe shape and taste in ornamentation, Katla thought, all other thoughts fleeing under the onslaught.
“Yes, madame speaker,” she said. She pointed at her earpiece. “I hear you fine, and I will pause to be sure I understand before I speak.” In fact, she would hear both Sofia and the Speaker, as well as the cameraperson, and they would all hear one another. Katla really, really hoped everyone would keep the line clear. They might forget that she wasn’t used to a lot of simultaneous cross-talk.
Sandals came, but the lectern remained. A good hour or so later, the communications tech lifted her head.
"Signal’s coming in.”
Katla stood, shaking out her tunic. No wrinkles, good. She submitted to another patdown of her hair, and more face powder. She stepped up to the lectern, gripping its sides outside of camera range. She nodded.
***