Chương 51: Through the Process

I came at it low, along the gantry's lip, and stopped where the floor stopped being a floor. Below me the line ran: feed, sort, drop, cradles riding a belt out of the dark and back into it. The Operator's flat sure voice was still somewhere in me, telling me what my Heat would cost the people near it, and I had come up here to do something about that instead of stand still and listen.

"Whatever you're about to decide," Errata said, "decide it somewhere that isn't the edge." The edge was the only honest place to read it from. The line had a beat I felt in my teeth before I understood it: a working quiet, the same length every time, the half-second of nothing between one cradle and the next. Nobody ran it. It ran itself, and it would go on running with me beside it or with me in it, and the difference between those was the whole problem. The far conduit was where I needed to be.

The sanctioned catwalk over it answered to a clearance I'd never have, and the works had eaten the gap underneath: belt, arms, then the side I wanted, and nothing built for a person in between.

"So read it for me," I said.

"I'm reading it." A pause that wasn't doubt; it was counting.

"It indexes on a cycle. Feed at the top, the sort arms come down, the cradle drops a station, and for about four-tenths of a second nothing on this line is moving toward killing you. That window is when you exist. Outside it, you're stock." Stock. The line had no enemies. It had inputs, and it would handle me with the exact nominal motion it handled everything, no spite in it, which was worse than spite. Spite you can read for a seam. A schedule. No, a rhythm.

A machine keeping its own working time, and I'd read a hundred builds for the gap and never once read a thing that wasn't trying to do anything but its job. So I read the job. It came the way the good ones did, all at once and then obvious. The arms worked in threes: two short strokes and a long one, the long stroke carrying the cradle down a station, and the whole line leaned its attention into that drop. Four-tenths of slack, top to bottom, traveling down the belt one station at a time.

"Third stroke," Errata said, clinical and calm, the voice she kept for when everything was on fire and getting calmer was the only help she had.

"Not the first, not the second. The long one. I'll call it. You go on my count and you do not improvise: your improvising is a gift, and this is not the room for gifts."

"Noted."

"Carole." Flatter.

"On my count." I went on the third stroke. The first cradle I rode the slack of, onto the belt in the half-second it forgot me, off before the arms swung back. The belt was warm and patient under my boot. I made myself part of its count (feed, sort, drop, and me in the drop; feed, sort, drop, and me a station further) and the bad thing, the thing I'd turn over later if there was a later, was how little it asked of me: no strain, no fight.

I fit the line's time like I'd been cut to its tolerance, and some cold back room of me knew the rhythm from the inside as though it had always been mine.

"You're half a beat early," Errata said.

"Don't anticipate it. Let me keep the clock; you keep the feet." I rode it. Halfway across, the line changed under me. A run of heavier cradles came through, fuller and slower off the drop, and the four-tenths I'd been trusting closed to three. I caught it a station too late, one boot already committing to a window that was shutting. Errata's count broke clean across mine.

"Hold. Hold. Not that one. The heavy ones run long; they steal the slack off the next stroke. There. Now." I came down where it said and not where I'd meant to, and the arm I would have walked into swept the air my shoulder had just left. Reading it once hadn't been reading it. I had to keep reading it, stroke by stroke, the whole way down. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. Three stations out, a cradle came up the belt carrying something that wasn't stock.

It sat too clean, too deliberate: a squat unit seated where the line's own timing lived, the part that told the arms when to fall. Errata saw it the half-beat before I did.

"Oh," she said, with the greed she only ever had for parts.

"That's the sequencer for the sort gate. That's the thing keeping this whole line on its beat. Rip it."

"I'm mid-line."

"And the part is mid-line, so (hear me out, and I want it on record this is a good idea) don't fight the works to reach it. Ride the cradle that's already bringing it to you. Worse footing, better odds, and you were going to do something reckless anyway. Let it be the efficient reckless." So I stepped into the cradle on the third stroke and let the line carry me: toward the arms, into the part of the works no person was meant to be inside, the sort gate breathing open and shut a hand's width from my shoulder.

The sequencer was bolted in four places. I read the seating as I'd read the rhythm, found the two bolts doing the real work, and put everything I had into them while the long stroke came down and the window held. It tore loose in my hands as the cradle dropped its station. [HARVEST: Operant Line-Sequencer. Incompatible with host architecture. Installation risk: 71%.] The line stuttered. Not much: one cradle's hesitation, one stroke landing a breath late.

But I'd taken the thing that kept its time, and a machine that runs on its own beat does not forgive losing the beat. The next window came short. Errata felt it before I did.

"That's wrong, the count's wrong. Go, the gate's closing early." The arm came down where my arm was. I got most of me clear. The long stroke caught the trailing edge of my coat and a fistful of the shoulder under it and tried to index me down a station like stock, and for a quarter-second the line and I disagreed about whether I was a person or an input.

I won it ugly, going limp, letting the works strip the coat instead of the arm, and then I was off the belt and onto the dead lip of the far side, the conduit under my hand at last. The sequencer was still in my fist. Banked, not worn: seventy-one percent was a number I'd wear on a quiet day with both hands free, not bleeding on a gantry with the line still re-learning its count behind me.

"You're across," Errata said, quiet now.

"You spectacular idiot. You rode a cull-line for a spare part with your shoulder hanging open." A beat.

"… The shoulder. Hold still and let me see it." I held still. I let it look. Nothing I carried had gotten me over. The Auditor discharge would have been a confession the second I lit it; the lattice rode cold at my ribs the whole way, a Hunter's worth of power that couldn't read me four-tenths of a second of slack. The read got me across. It always had. The part in my fist was just the rent. [Anomaly profile: 49/100. Process interference logged for Operator review.] Forty-nine.

One short of the number Errata wouldn't say out loud, the one where the Stratum stopped flagging me and started spending real things to find me. I should have moved. I was looking at the line instead. Down at the bottom of its run, past the arms, the cradles tipped their sorted weight onto a second belt. That belt carried it off into the dark the line had come out of: neat, indexed, going somewhere on the far side of a wall I had no reach to read. I didn't let myself wonder where.

Wondering kept your eyes in the wrong place. A light came on across the gantry. Then a second, swinging: a warden's plate waking to a line that had skipped a beat, turning its blank face toward the only thing on this level that didn't belong.