Chương 1: Cold Shift

I was three meters down a coolant crawlway with my arm in a junction box when the world ended, which was about right for my career trajectory. The broken part was a Veyr regulator, the cheap kind. Maintenance bought them by the crate, because the people who ordered them never had to crawl down and change them. I had the casing off and two fingers on the bad clamp when the lights changed. Down here, a power cut means the lights go out. These didn't.

They turned blue, a color I'd never seen down here, and a low hum started up underneath, almost like how a speaker hums right before someone talks. Then the announcement. [SYSTEM ONLINE. Habitat reclassification in progress. Compliance is mandatory. Non-compliant assets will be processed.] It hung in the air a hand's width from my face. Blue, boxed, polite. I did what you do with a readout that shouldn't exist: I looked for the projector. There wasn't one.

Just the words, the cold, and my own heartbeat, loud in a crawlway gone dead quiet.

"Okay," I told the dark, because there was no one else to tell.

"Okay." I'm not proud of okay. I climbed out onto Maintenance Sublevel Nine. The first thing I heard was screaming. Then it stopped, which was worse. I'd walked this corridor ten thousand times. Now it was lit that same blue, a glowing box over every door, like a price tag on everything. Down toward the fab bays, something was moving through the shift crew. Slow and steady. Clearing them out the way you'd clear a clog from a pipe. I'd love to say I ran toward it. I didn't.

I ran the other way, into the dead-end nook by the old water reclaimer, and put my back against a tank that hadn't held pressure since before I was born. The right call, right up until the thing came around the corner anyway. It had been shaped like a person once, or built to look like one: dull gray plating over something that pumped like a piston when it walked, and a port in its chest. If you were as tired as I was, it looked like a grille smiling. A box popped up off it as it turned. [Compliance Enforcer. Non-compliant asset detected. Processing.]"That's me," I said.

"I'm the asset."

"You're the asset," a voice agreed,"and the asset has about four seconds, so this is a poor time for introductions. I don't choose my hours." My first thought was that I'd finally cracked, and the voice was the sound of it. The voice found that funny.

"I'm not your nervous breakdown. I'd be a better one. Mark-Two warden. See the seam on the forearm, where the plating doesn't sit right? We used to route maintenance complaints through this class. They never read them." A pause, while the Enforcer's arm came up and the air filled with the whine of something charging.

"Aim for the inbox. The grille. And move. It has to cycle between shots, you get one gap, and you're spending it standing still like a requisition form." Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Here's the thing about being nobody. You spend your life with your hands in machines built fast and cheap by people who'll never fix them, and you learn to spot the corners they cut. The seam on the forearm. The clamp turned three-quarters.

The charge-whine that climbed, then had to stop, because whoever built the Mark-Two put its capacitor too close to the actuator, so it couldn't fire and step at the same time. It fired. I was already inside the gap. The shot punched through the reclaimer tank, and seventy years of nothing let go in a flat bang. I drove the regulator clamp, the bad one, still in my fist, into the grille that looked like it was smiling. I'm a maintenance tech. I don't do pretty. I do this is loose, now it's looser.

I drove the clamp in, twisted it three-quarters the wrong way, and a cheap part behind the grille snapped from one piece into two. The Enforcer came apart. I didn't. I sat down hard in the runoff, ears ringing, blue light flashing, and found I was laughing. It wasn't a good sound. The voice in my head, dry as a blown fuse:"That shouldn't have worked. A three-sigma event: don't expect me to budget for it twice."

"What are you," I said.

"Underpaid." Then, when I didn't laugh:"Later. Right now you take the core. It's worth more than your life, and given your afternoon, that's saying something."

"Take the what?"

"The chest assembly. The smiling part. The System wipes its dead inside a minute and takes that with it, and you'll never afford another, because they don't sell them to assets." A beat.

"Reach in. Mind the edges." I should have run. More of the cull was already turning toward the noise. Instead I knelt in the wreck of the thing built to process me, put my hand in the hole I'd made, and pulled. It came out wet and heavier than it should have been, a lump of dark ceramic, still warm with whatever passed for the Enforcer's life. A box popped up to tell me what I already knew I'd keep. [HARVEST: Enforcer core fragment. Incompatible with host architecture. Salvage window: 40s.]"Incompatible," I read.

"With your architecture. With your particular and specific genius. We'll see. That's a Mark-Two complaints processor, and you're an unfiled complaint. You've got more in common with it than the System would like." Then a smaller box, colder, and somehow worse than the Enforcer. [Anomaly profile: 2/100. No clearance class on record for this asset.] Two. I read it twice. Down here, no clearance class on record was supposed to be a good thing: too small to count, off the books, invisible.

I'd built a whole life out of being nobody's line item. And the box had given me a number. You don't get a number for being invisible. You get a number when something has started counting.

"It's counting," the voice said.

"That figure's the only ledger you'll ever get: no class, no levels handed down from on high, just the one number, climbing the wrong way. Heat, call it. Everything loud you do, every piece you pry off them, it rises. Stay low, you stay a rumor. Let it climb, and you stop being a rumor and start being an appointment." The corridor light stuttered. Far off, the cull changed course. And I knew, the way you only ever know bad news for sure, that something had just looked at me.

"They're coming back," I said.

"They are. You're holding a piece of one of their things, in a body they have no record of, having done something a Registered asset can't." The voice had gone quiet, and there was nothing kind in it.

"So. We can stand here and be processed correctly. Or we do the other thing." I closed my fist around the core. The worst option on offer, which lately was the only kind I got.

"Obviously," I said, and ran.