Chapter 44: Chapter 44 - What It Costs
Chapter 44 - What It Costs
The filtered air hit him in the upper hatch.
He had noticed this before, the transition, how the air changed at the precise seam between the maintenance corridor and the upper-level access point. The smell of it, which was not a smell so much as the absence of one: the metal and cooking and electrical residue of the lower levels gone, replaced by the managed nothing of climate-controlled upper-deck air. He had noticed it before. Tonight it was sharper.
He stood in the hatch for a moment. His hand was still on the lever. Eric had gone through ahead of him and was waiting in the corridor.
He went through.
His quarters were as he'd left them. Carpet, which he had not thought about since he was seventeen and the carpet was simply the thing that was on his floor. The ceiling at the calibrated height. His bed, which was a bed and not a cold floor in an observation bay, which was a distinction that had mattered less four hours ago than it seemed to now.
He lay on top of it without getting in. He was still in his clothes from below. He should probably change. He looked at the ceiling and thought about changing and did neither of those things.
The ceiling was the wrong color.
He could not have said what color it should be. He could have said, precisely, that the ceiling of the observation bay on Deck 11 was a gray-white composite surface with a scratch running from the starboard corner toward the center, and that the drive glow through the viewport made it blue-white during the main part of the evening and something darker toward the edge of the shift. He could have said that. He did not know what the ceiling of his own quarters was made of or when it had last been maintained.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he closed his eyes.
He thought about Jazmine. Then about Eric's laugh. Then about Anastasia's mouth corner, that small movement, the thing he'd seen and was keeping. He thought about James's hand at Eric's shoulder.
He fell asleep.
The breakfast hall was fully occupied at the upper cycle hour. The light in it was warm and even and came from above in the way upper-deck light came from above: distributed, sourceless, designed to be pleasant. The air smelled of something that was very close to coffee but was not coffee, had not been coffee in a hundred and forty years, and everyone called it coffee anyway.
His father was at the near table.
This was not unusual. His father was frequently at the breakfast table during the upper cycle hour: it was one of the organizing habits of his father's day, the breakfast that functioned as informal governance: who sat where, who nodded at whom, which council member's son was having a visible and approved morning in the approved space with approved posture. The theater of normalcy, performed daily, by people who understood that normalcy was a performance worth maintaining.
His father looked up when he came in. Nodded. The nod was warm.
"Nathaniel."
"Father."
He sat. He got his coffee. He drank it. His father talked about the biometric log in the way his father talked about things that were technically concerns but were being offered as information rather than accusation: gently, reasonably, with the implication that reasonable options existed for reasonable people.
The biometric log had flagged irregular sleep patterns. Three weeks of irregular sleep patterns. The wellness coordinator on Deck 2 was, his father mentioned, extremely good, and there was no stigma in the consultation process, and these things were entirely routine.
"That sounds helpful," Nathaniel said. "I'll look into it."
His father nodded. He was satisfied with this. He had offered the option, Nathaniel had received it with appropriate openness, the social contract was intact.
Four minutes. The conversation lasted four minutes. He had timed it without trying, which was a thing he was now apparently doing.
He watched his father move to the next table, the next conversation, the next measured beat of social architecture. His father was very good at this. He had been watching his father be very good at this his whole life, and he had understood it as a skill, and had developed his own version of it, and had never before sat at the breakfast table thinking about what it cost.
Not his father. His father moved through this like someone who had arrived at terms with their world and found the terms acceptable, which was either wisdom or a kind of erasure, and Nathaniel did not know which.
He finished his coffee. He left.
The corridor outside his quarters ran east to the communal module, then back toward the governance wing, then toward the access cluster where the patrol drone ran its rotation. He had not thought consciously about the patrol drone since coming back through the hatch. He thought about it now, because he was in the corridor, and the drone was at the top of the rotation and due at this end in approximately twelve minutes, and he knew this the way he knew the route through the maintenance tunnel: his attention had been tracking it for weeks and had not been asked to stop.
He stood in the corridor for a moment, counting forward in his head.
Then he stopped.
He was standing in the upper-deck corridor counting the drone rotation. This was not a thing upper-deck residents did. This was a thing you did when you were maintaining operational awareness of a surveillance schedule because you were regularly in spaces where the surveillance schedule mattered.
He had brought it back with him.
He had not noticed until now, which meant it had become automatic, which meant it had been automatic for some time. He thought about what that meant. He looked for a version of it where it was fine. He could not find one. That felt important.
He walked to his quarters and stayed there until Eric came by.
Eric had his comm in his hand when he came through the door.
He sat down in the chair at the desk, not the couch, the chair, which meant his internal posture was in work mode. He turned the comm toward Nathaniel without speaking.
The query was on the screen. Junction J-7 Sub-2. The same junction. Upper-deck clearance level. Timestamp: three days ago. Status: closed without action.
Nathaniel looked at it.
"Same clearance level," Eric said.
"Yes."
"Third query in eight weeks."
Nathaniel had not known it was the third. He had known about the one Anastasia had told him about, and the one from further back. He had not had a count.
"Leila has been logging them," Eric said. He said it like this was information he had just received and was still placing in the model. His fingers were moving on the desk surface, not aggressively, the thinking motion, the one that meant he was building something. "She didn't tell us about the first one. She flagged it internally and said nothing because one query is noise."
"Two queries with the same parameters on the same junction."
"Is a pattern." Eric put the comm down. "She's known about this since at least the second one and has been running her own assessment."
Nathaniel thought about Leila sitting on the crate in the observation bay. Her right eyebrow. The fact that she had looked at all six of them that evening and had known this while she was doing it.
"Closed without action," he said.
"Yes."
"That's not the same as dropped."
"No," Eric said. "It is not."
They sat with that for a moment. The room was quiet the way upper-deck rooms were quiet: the ventilation system running at a level calibrated to be imperceptible, no traffic noise from outside, no structural hum, no pipes working in the walls. The silence was managed, like everything up here was managed. It did not feel like absence of sound so much as absence of content.
He thought about the drive vibration through the hull in the observation bay. The way the sound came up through the metal and through the floor and through the soles of your feet when you were standing in a room that was not designed to pretend the drives weren't there.
He thought about the biometric flag. The wellness coordinator. His father's reasonable voice offering reasonable options.
Eric said: "How long do you think we can keep doing this?"
Nathaniel looked at the corridor through the viewport. Clean, calibrated, the drone at its current position in the rotation, not due on this end for another eight minutes, two minutes less than last count.
"As long as we want," he said.
Eric blinked once, slowly. The slow blink that did not require follow-up because the follow-up was already there in the room. "That's not an answer."
"I know."
Silence. The managed silence.
Eric turned the comm over in his hands. He looked at the query on the screen, then set the device face-down on the desk. His fingers were still on the back of it. He was doing the math, Nathaniel could tell that much; where the math had landed was harder to read.
"The thing is," Nathaniel said, "I don't actually want to stop."
Eric looked at him.
"I know that's also not an answer."
"It's actually the start of one," Eric said. He said it carefully, in the register he used when he was being precise rather than dry. "The question is whether wanting to continue and being able to continue are the same question."
They were not the same question. Nathaniel knew this. He sat with the not-sameness of them for a moment and did not try to make them the same.
He thought about the conversation he was going to need to have with Anastasia. The one she had told him he was ready for, and he had told Leila he was ready for, and which now had a third closed-without-action query sitting at its edge.
Ready, he thought, was also apparently not the same as prepared.
"We need to talk to them," he said. "All of them. About the query. About what Leila knows."
Eric nodded. This was not new information to him. He had known it since before he came through the door, probably since he saw the timestamp on the query and started the count and got to three.
"Yeah," Eric said.
They sat there for a while longer. The drone came past the viewport on schedule. Neither of them looked at it.
He was awake at 2am.
The ceiling again. The wrong color in the dark, which meant it was no particular color, which meant the wrong color was in the quality of it rather than the shade: the ceiling of a room that was calibrated for everything. The drone was at the far end of its rotation. He had done the count without noticing and could say exactly where it was.
He looked at the ceiling and thought about the scratched polycarbonate over the observation bay viewport. The engine glow through it. The blue-white light on five other faces.
Jazmine saying that was absolutely insane, with the satisfaction of someone who had been right about something she wanted to be right about.
The query. Closed without action. Not dropped.
He thought about his father at breakfast, reasonable and warm and offering the wellness coordinator, and how easy it had been to perform the response. How automatic. He had smiled and said that sounds helpful and meant none of it, and the nothing he'd meant had not shown on his face, and the absence of showing had not cost him anything.
That was the thing. It had not cost him anything. Not yet.
He thought about what "not yet" meant.
The ceiling gave him no information.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep and found the observation bay behind his eyes instead, the cold floor and the engine glow and six people in a room that wasn't designed for comfort, and somewhere in that, eventually, he went under.