Chapter Text
Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled–
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing–
that the light is everything–that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.
-"The Ponds", Mary Oliver
When we came into the outer range of the communication satellite, my feed was abruptly flooded with message packets. My first thought was that I had fucked up my settings somehow, because everything had the alerts turned on. But it wasn’t just me. Iris, who was sitting at the table eating noodles, dropped her chopsticks and sat up straight. ART didn’t stop watching our latest serial—a ridiculous fantasy mystery series called Crime After Death about the ghost police—because even the flood of messages didn’t put a dent into its capacity—but I could feel some of its attention shift away. (I just paused it because I couldn’t keep watching and sort through all the sudden mail at once.)
I had one electronic message marked urgent from Mensah, fourteen direct messages marked to override my do-not-disturb settings from Arada, several sets of data packets from Gurathin, a voice recording from Bharadwaj, four successive messages with attachments from Pin-Lee, and eighty-seven pings and one direct message from Overse. The last scared me the most and I opened it first. The pings were all from Overse’s interface and routed from a transit ring called Trans-All, the kind of ping that was just are you in range – are you in range – are you in range. It was a call for help and it fucking terrified me, because I was answering it way, way too late.
It caused a flood of adrenaline from my organic parts, which was actually fucking useless because there was nothing I could immediately do . We were still a full cycle out from Preservation, but at least were in range of the satellites, so we could get messages back and forth in about ten minutes. That time would gradually shrink until we’d get into the Preservation Alliance’s actual feed range and it would become near-instantaneous.
In the meantime and because it would take ten minutes to get there anyway, I packaged up a quick message that told them we were in-system, I’d gotten their messages, we were reviewing the data, send status and current requests for assistance immediately. I passed it to ART to send, who encouraged/bullied the local satellite to prioritize it over all its other traffic.
It could do a lot more at once than I could, which included starting a feed meeting with its crew immediately and commandeering the Argument Lounge for in-person gathering. That wasn’t technically necessary, but at least I liked the idea of having the humans in one place right now until I could figure out what the actual threat level was. My threat assessment was going crazy, by the way, because it knew something was wrong but didn’t have any data to make a real calculation. So that was fun.
The message that Overse had sent after all those pings, by the way, hadn’t helped at all. It was the subvocalization-to-text with no editing that you got from someone who was obviously pretty distracted at the time and included three apologies, an acknowledgement that I was on ART and in another system somewhere, and included I don’t know what to do four times. And Overse is calm under pressure, normally, so I knew something was really, really wrong. About the only thing I got from it was that she was on a transit ring called Trans-All and was running through it as she was sending the pings from slightly different locations, and that something had happened to Ratthi.
Who, by the way: hadn’t sent me any messages. (Or, actually, he had, I found out later when I manually checked my inbox, but they were all from pre-crisis and totally useless.) So that little detail sent my performance reliability straight down to 96%.
“What is this about?” Seth was saying in the feed. He, Iris, Martyn, and Tarik had already logged on. Matteo and Turi were asleep and ART had reluctantly conveyed it was not, at this time, necessary to wake them; Kaede and Karime had pinged that they would be there shortly. I opened Mensah’s message and read it which meant I knew what ART was going to say before it summarized.
Dr. Ratthi has been taken captive by a corporation known as GrowStar while attending an academic conference on a transit station known as Trans-All. It provided a star map with the location highlighted. Overse was also in attendance but has been retrieved safely . Legal proceedings are underway, but the motive for this attack and the status of Dr. Ratthi are currently unknown.
“Have they asked us to take any specific action?” Seth said.
We have been warned to take additional precautions in the event this is connected to the past conflict with Barrish-Estranza, ART said. That hadn’t been my first thought, but it was definitely possible because they had met Ratthi. It’s just that they’d also met a lot of my other humans, and me, and Ratthi had probably caused them the least inconvenience out of all of us. This was on account of the fact that Ratthi is a biologist and mostly really nice.
Actually, though, Ratthi had interviewed Tarik in that documentary we made for the colonists. Not that we’d spread that around outside the colony—it was pretty poorly made, for one thing, and for another it was only useful for the colonists because they were totally naïve and didn’t already know the Corporation Rim was terrible. But it was theoretically possible that had gotten from Barrish-Estranza to somebody else, or that Barrish-Estranza was behind the whole thing and out for revenge, or the colonists (who as far as I know were moving pretty slowly but some of them were leaving at least) had spread it around for some reason…
I threw it in there as a search term on the stuff ART was pulling on GrowStar, anyway, but nothing immediately pinged.
Iris and Tarik, who’d both arrived in the Argument Lounge and were making hot beverages while the discussion went on, were having a variant of this conversation. Tarik was running his hand through his hair, which I knew indicated distress. He and Ratthi had once had some kind of Thing Going On, but it had stopped for a while and I’d made it a point not to notice when or if it resumed. I knew they interacted socially, which could have accounted for it regardless.
To be fair, Ratthi had spent a good amount of time with ART’s crew in general and none of them were happy about this news. Iris was having a private side conversation with ART simultaneously with her Tarik discussion, ART was breaking down all the messages we’d gotten and briefing the main channel, and Seth was asking questions and drafting a message to Preservation. I started sorting through Gurathin’s data dump, the only thing I hadn’t scanned through yet although I knew ART already had, and then one of my keywords went off and I realized Martyn was addressing me.
I played it back. “SecUnit,” he said. “Do we know what Dr. Ratthi was working on? If he was presenting anything at the conference?”
Martyn was a biologist, like Ratthi, although I’d said something like that at one point and Ratthi had tried to clarify they were different kinds of biologist. Regardless, it made sense that he’d be the one to think of it. “Uh,” I said. “He looks at extraterrestrial fauna.”
He presented a paper on the interaction between clonal colonies of flowering flora and rodent populations on a survey planet , ART said. It sent Martyn the paper, and then for good measure it shared a data packet of all of Ratthi’s papers.
“Do you think it’s related?” Kaede was asking. I had missed her logging on, but she’d done so simultaneously with entering the Argument Lounge. Iris handed her a hot beverage.
“I don’t know,” Martyn said. “But it happened at a conference, which is a data point if nothing else, and it would be a reason to target him instead of someone else at Preservation.”
Seth said Martyn could start looking into that and asked Tarik to work with me to look at the data we had on what had actually happened to Ratthi, since he had some first-hand experience with how the corporates operated. It made sense, but it was extremely shitty because it was like doing a security analysis but after the bad thing had already happened.
Gurathin may be an asshole but he isn’t stupid, so his data packet had pretty much everything I’d want to get started. It included the map of the station, all the information about the academic conference including the agenda, the list of attendees, all the papers being presented, the hotel block map, the security analysis on Trans-All that Preservation security had run before they sent Ratthi and Overse there (which was inevitably not very helpful because the determination had been that it was safe), all the information we’d gotten from Trans-All station security, copies of all the messages that had been sent to GrowStar, Overse’s video debrief—I scanned through that with gritted teeth, because her expression was hard to look at—and a memo from Pin-Lee about the legal actions she was going to take.
Which—right. I flipped back to Pin-Lee’s messages. The attachments were all legal filings, which I know nothing about because it turns out Sanctuary Moon isn’t that accurate.
Tarik had opened up the security analysis, too, and was grimacing at it. He said, “I think we need to do our own.”
That wasn’t a bad idea. We had one advantage that Preservation’s security team hadn’t had, in that we actually knew where the threat was. We just had to see where it arose. I started writing code to compare the academic papers to the publicly available information about what GrowStar did. Tarik got started on the list of names, running them against ART’s information database for affiliation info. He got a hit before I did—one of the other attendees at the conference did Research and Development for GrowStar. Dr. H. Acevedo. He hadn’t submitted a paper so I didn’t have any other information on what he was doing. I started running a broader search for information on him, but it was going to take a bit because ART would have to run it through the local satellite for me.
I asked Tarik, because he was supposed to know, “Is it weird that he was there?”
Tarik hesitated. “Only a little,” he said. Apparently it was pretty typical for corporate researchers to go to academic conferences and very normal for them to go as attendees rather than present papers. The academic world was a lot more information-share-y than the corporates, who treated everything as proprietary until proven otherwise, so it was a good way for them to keep up with research happening outside their companies and try and get an edge on other corporates. This was a relatively small conference that wasn’t in the Corporate Rim, so it wasn’t a given that there’d be corporates, but it wasn’t super threatening that there were, either (except in the sense that the corporates are always threatening).
What was weird was that my search wasn’t turning anything up yet. GrowStar, it turned out, developed terraforming engines. They’d done some terraforming themselves, especially in their early years, but it turns out that production of terraforming engines makes you a lot of money with a lot less risk than developing colonies, so now they mostly did that. And terraforming has a lot to do with biology—or it can. But it doesn’t—as far as we could tell—have anything to do with clonal colonies of flowering plants and tiny mammals. The closest match we got was a paper from a Dr. Llewelyn from a small university three systems over, who was looking at oxygen levels and a kind of small organism that lived in bodies of water. But ART took a closer look and said that the conclusion actually said it didn’t really have an impact on the thing she was measuring, so it probably wouldn’t be that useful to GrowStar.
Also, if it had been useful to GrowStar, presumably they would have been busy kidnapping Dr. Llewelyn rather than Ratthi.
I tapped ART and felt it slide into our private channel. What do these mean? I flagged the legal filings that Pin-Lee had sent.
Preservation sent a demand letter to GrowStar for Dr. Ratthi’s immediate release. GrowStar responded that they had arrested him for assault of a GrowStar employee. Preservation responded that GrowStar had no authority to do so and that they could release him into the custody of Trans-All Station Security if that was what they were alleging. Also Pin-Lee requested evidence and heavily implied they didn’t believe them. GrowStar said they needed time to respond but would not be releasing Dr. Ratthi, and Pin-Lee filed in court accusing GrowStar of kidnapping three minutes after Preservation received that response.
Is that it? There had been a bunch of legal papers. Why are there so many?
Because Pin-Lee filed a case alleging kidnapping as well as a request for an emergency release order of Dr. Ratthi into the custody of either Preservation or the station on which the incident allegedly occurred. The other two files are notices of service.
I was stuck on the custody request. Why the station? Preservation, fine.
Because if there was a legitimate incident, then Trans-All would have jurisdiction and it makes Pin-Lee look reasonable.
I didn’t care about looking reasonable, but that was why I wasn’t a lawyer. What happens next?
Pin-Lee and counsel for GrowStar will appear in court and present their case to the judge.
When?
That information is not yet available.
I had another thought. What if GrowStar doesn’t show up?
Since they have been corresponding with Preservation, that is highly unlikely. However, that would be very good for us. That last sentence was in the feed equivalent of ART’s villain of a long-running mythic serial voice.
What happens then?
Pin-Lee would get a default judgment and, should they fail to comply, we would be justified in conducting the retrieval ourselves.
So if GrowStar doesn’t play nice in court, we can go get him.
Technically, ART said, if we can determine where he is and how to retrieve him safely, we can go get him regardless.
I liked that idea a lot more than sitting around. How do we do that?
We need to determine where he was taken, ART said. We will need to retrieve additional data to ascertain that. Data that I would have hoped Preservation already had, except presumably Gurathin would have sent it if they did.
The ten-minute mark had passed and we were getting messages back from Preservation. Mensah was talking to Seth, but she sent a note to me telling me she was glad I was okay and to please be careful. I had no idea what she was talking about, because I was stuck on ART and wouldn’t know where to go to do anything dangerous anyway. Overse sent me an apology for her panicked messages, which I responded by saying Calling me when you are in danger is the right thing to do . Even if I hadn’t been in the system.
(This was also when I found the messages from Ratthi, because that reminded me that Ratthi hadn’t called me, which meant he either hadn’t thought about it—which I didn’t like the idea of—or he hadn’t had time—which I liked even less. But Ratthi only has an external feed interface, so it’s actually pretty easy to disconnect him from the feed. I mentioned this in my private channel with ART, who instantly sent back a packet it had put together for its humans on why internal augments were great, actually. I should have known it would have already thought about this and tried to get its crew to be accessible at all times. I should have thought of it sooner.
The messages were about the latest season of Sanctuary Moon, which I’d already watched twice, but which Ratthi was still moving through extremely slowly. He was sending me his impressions as he watched; I’d written a code to link the time stamps of the show to messages as he wrote them so I could match it up exactly, and he was very good about running it.
I found it surprisingly upsetting to look at, and I marked it all unread for when we got Ratthi back. None of the messages said anything about weird corporate scientists or being afraid or anything like that.)
They also told us they had a court date for the morning of the following cycle, so we’d be back in time. I sent back a message saying that I was going with Pin-Lee. Twenty minutes later (ten for her to get my message and another ten for it to get to me), she said absolutely not . I sent back that we had no idea why they’d taken Ratthi and this could all be an elaborate trap for Pin-Lee, specifically. Pin-Lee responded (an excruciating twenty minutes later) that they had thought of that, but that they had indicated that risk to the court when they’d filed and they were implementing full security protocols. This meant, first, that bringing our own SecUnit was going to be a no-no since GrowStar weren’t being allowed any guns/weapons/security/etc. Also, generally speaking, showing up to court with a killer construct is a bad look.
(Pin-Lee actually said none of this, but I inferred it.)
I’m going back to the station to pull all the security footage and find out what happened , Gurathin sent, simultaneously. You can come with me .
Oh, joy. But there was absolutely no chance that I was letting any of my humans back on that station without me, even Gurathin.
Fine , I said.
Nothing else interesting happened before we got back into realtime comms range. The second we did, I pinged everyone, got an immediate wave of welcome back messages, and got added to the group discussion feed.
ART started transferring over all the work that we’d been doing on the ship, which had some overlap but not as much as you’d think, because Preservation’s data banks and ART’s data banks do not exactly line up. Gurathin started looking through the information we’d pulled on GrowStar and Acevedo. Pin-Lee was mostly in a separate workspace, presumably with Mensah and whoever else does legal stuff for Preservation, but she occasionally dumped in information into the main workspace whenever we got communications from GrowStar or the court or she filed something.
I started backreading everything, which took a while. At first it was mostly just panicking, and then once the first communication from GrowStar came through everyone settled down. Also once Overse was safely off the station, which didn’t happen quite as fast as I’d have liked but had at least happened pretty quickly. There were periodic lulls in activity which I realized matched up with human rest cycles. (Ratthi had been gone for almost two cycles at this point and most of the humans had slept in the intervening period, except I thought maybe not Pin-Lee.)
Arada had said yeah right at the accusation that Ratthi had assaulted someone. Pin-Lee said it was a transparent excuse—she was already writing court documents at that point, simultaneous with the messages that they better give Ratthi back or else. She was also requesting video footage from the station, which was being unhelpful probably because they didn’t want retaliation from GrowStar, but they said that we could come back and look through it if we wanted, which explained why Gurathin was doing that. Pin-Lee had already gotten transit records, but they hadn’t been able to tell which transport Ratthi might have been on because we didn’t know where they’d taken him from, where they’d taken him to, or how long they might have held onto him before departing Trans-All.
That was what the camera footage would hopefully tell us.
There was also a ton of speculation on why they might have taken Ratthi. They’d thought of the Barrish-Estranza thing, obviously, but there was no indication (yet) of their involvement. They’d also—and this was a good idea I hadn’t thought of—started running a search on whether that documentary we’d made had gotten around anywhere, but it didn’t seem like it so far. There was a long digression about the potential relevance of the clonal-colony-rodent thing that didn’t go anywhere, because even the other scientists seemed to think that the grand conclusion of Ratthi’s paper was that it was weird and cool, but not really related to terraforming or anything you could make a profit off of. I nudged the analysis into the Perihelion crew workspace just in case they saw something that the Preservation team had missed—because they’re not great at thinking like corporates—but I also tagged it as low priority because it was a long shot.
Also, there was a discussion about what had happened to Ratthi’s feed interface, which we didn’t have. We wanted it, because it would have given us a lot more data on what Ratthi was working on and thinking about and doing, but we didn’t have it.
All I knew was that he’d gotten through episode six of the new Sanctuary Moon season, which I didn’t add.
There was a separate thread that was mostly just Pin-Lee and Gurathin having a serious discussion about the odds that Ratthi was dead. Pin-Lee’s position was that there was no legal benefit and a lot of legal downsides—it was going to be a lot more expensive for them if they didn’t return him. Gurathin pointed out that none of their actions made sense in the first place and since there was clearly a motive we were missing, we didn’t know if there was some reason to want Ratthi gone permanently. Pin-Lee wanted to know why bother arresting/kidnapping him if they just wanted him dead, which Gurathin agreed was odd. They were coming down on the side of more-likely-than-not alive, but not much more. The whole conversation was so upsetting that I felt my performance reliability drop a whole two percent.
It was a separate thread for that reason, I guess; neither Arada or Overse were in it. I promptly tagged it for ART to monitor for me and left it, too.
The last conversation I had with Ratthi was the day before we left. I went down to the planet for it, because I needed to say goodbye to everyone before being gone for two months, and because Ratthi had found a live performance with a script by a writer I’d liked before. Ratthi doesn’t have any augments and I know he doesn’t process data the same way I do or even the same way someone like Iris or Gurathin does, which means he probably looked this stuff up specifically. So he’d sent me the information and asked if I wanted to go, even though it was on the planet, and I had said yes.
I had liked the performance. The plot was interesting—it was a mystery about this group of people who are taken somewhere in the hold of the ship, in stasis like the Preservation founders had been, but something happened and the crew died. The in-stasis people wake up and they escape from the cargo and have to figure out what happened and where they were being taken and what to do next. There was a romantic subplot, but it wasn’t too terrible and—this was something I liked about live performances—didn’t have any sex scenes.
We’d talked about it afterwards and walked around the garden. Ratthi had bought some variation on protein-in-bread from a cart and had eaten while we walked. We’d agreed it was an interesting play and talked about the character who was secretly a surviving crew member.
When we walked back to the shuttle hub so I could go back up and meet ART, Ratthi had thanked me for coming with him and said he’d miss me.
“Sorry,” I had said, awkwardly. I was glad we were walking so I didn’t have to find something else to look at.
“Don’t be!” He waved his hands. “I’m really glad you’re traveling with ART. It makes you happy.”
It did, and I didn’t bother asking Ratthi why he thought that. Ratthi is good at knowing things about me without me saying them.
“I’ll see you again soon,” Ratthi said. “It’s normal to miss people, SecUnit. It just means you like them, and you’ll be very glad to see them again.”
I knew that, obviously. Still.
“Tell me about where you’re going,” Ratthi requested, which I knew was to change the subject for my sake, but I talked about it anyway—the research parts, at least. We got back to the station with seven minutes before the next public shuttle, and we stood in comfortable silence until then.
I waited until the shuttle doors were open and said, “I’ll miss you too,” right before I got on. I didn’t look at him, but my drone camera was still trained on his face, and I saw him grin.
I reopened the Sanctuary Moon messages from Ratthi, saved them for later, and sent back We are going to save you .
Obviously, I didn’t get a reply.