Chương 85: Processing

The processing-node was almost a relief. A node doesn't hesitate. It doesn't sweep your face and file what it finds, and it doesn't care what you're carrying or why. A node just counts, and counting is the one language I have never once misread. I came up out of the service throat glad of it. Then I cleared the last bend and saw what the counting was for, and the gladness went out of me like heat off a cut. The line ran the length of a hall I couldn't find the end of.

Sealed grey consignments rode a rail up out of the dark, one every few seconds, each about the size of a coffin and shaped close enough to one that the System hadn't troubled to pretend otherwise. Cull-units worked them as they passed: squat four-armed sorting frames bolted to their own tracks, reading each consignment, stamping it, kicking it on up the climb. They didn't hurry. They had no reason to. The line set the pace and everything on it kept the pace, units and freight both, a rhythm fixed and unarguable.

"There's your hazard," Errata said.

"It isn't the units. It's the tempo. Step into that hall off the beat and the line reads you as a thing that turned up unscheduled, and an unscheduled thing on a sorting floor is only freight nobody's catalogued yet. It will itemize you. Courteously. While you're still using the arms." One consignment rode past close enough to touch. Grey wrap, sealed seams, a stencilled number where a name would have gone on anything that had ever been asked its name.

The wrap had molded to what was inside, close as cloth to a shape, and the shape was a person, knees drawn up, the posture of someone who had been afraid at the end and not of me. I read it fast and flat and filed, and I kept my tempo, because the alternative was to stop, and stopping on this floor was a thing I could not afford to mean. Errata's voice came in low, not unkind.

"Don't. Whatever you just did with your face. Not here. There's no room on the beat for it."

"I know."

"I know you know. I'm saying it so that someone in this partnership is on record as having said it." I had no way around. The throat I'd climbed fed this hall and nowhere else; the only road up the chain ran straight through the counting. And there was a part on those frames I'd wanted since the second I watched them move, the core that kept them synced to the line, the metronome the whole grim orchestra played to.

"Oh, that's a cycle-core," Errata said, and the connoisseur's hunger came up under the words before she could file it flat.

"Consignment-class. The one thing keeping three hundred sorting frames thinking in time with each other. Rip it before the line counts it as stock. A core like that doesn't come off a kill. It comes off a theft, and we are, at heart, thieves." So I read the machine as I read anything that meant to kill me by accident. Three clatters to a cycle. The first was the rail-stamp. The second a seal-check that looked like a gap and wasn't.

The third the hand-off, and after the third a half-second of nothing while the next consignment loaded, the only true opening in the works.

"Third clatter," Errata said, dropping into the flat clinical calm she keeps for the work that kills me if she gets a word of it wrong.

"Not the second. The second looks like your opening and it will shut on your wrist. Wait for the third, then move, and for the sake of every regulation I ever filed, keep the tempo. You do not cross this line. You join it." I went in on the third clatter. The first unit never finished reading me.

I took it on the down-stroke of its own stamp, the kinetic core in my arm driving through the seam where its coolant ran a finger too close to its spine, a Veyr habit, lazy, the corner the System cut a thousand frames at a time. It folded onto the rail without breaking rhythm, because I broke the rhythm for it, on the beat, and the line never felt one of its own go quiet. [LEVEL 30.] Two more on the next cycle. Same gap. Same seam. I was killing in time with a metronome and the metronome had no complaint to file.

The hall climbed as I worked it. The rail ran upward at a grade and the consignments rode it past me one after another, grey and sealed and patient, while I killed the things that sorted them and stayed in step with the things I killed. That was the trick and the horror of it at once. I couldn't fight the line. I could only become a thing the line expected to see, a frame doing frame-work, on schedule, raising no flag.

The longer I held the shape the better it fit, which was a sentence I refused to finish thinking while a stamp the size of my head came down on the beat beside me. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Then I got greedy with the count, exactly as she'd warned me not to, and went on the second clatter because the gap looked open and the next frame stood right there.

The seal-check came down where my wrist had been a quarter-second before and shut on empty air with the flat clap of the stamp it was. I was already past it, heart going hard, back on the true beat and furious at the half-step. A silence, very even.

"That was the second clatter. I would like it noted that I said the words out loud, in order, before you improvised."

"Noted."

"Good. Now try the part where you also listen." The frame with the cycle-core came up on the fourth cycle. I let the third clatter fall, stepped inside its reach as its arms swung wide to stamp, and put my hand into its chest as she'd taught me to put a hand into anything I meant to rob: fast, sure, already leaving. The core came free hot and humming, still keeping time in my fist, counting a line it no longer answered to. [HARVEST: Consignment-class cycle-core. Incompatible with host architecture. Installation risk: 84%.]"Eighty-four," Errata breathed, reverent and appalled at once.

"It would fight you for a month and might win. Bank it. We are not yet brave enough to wear that one." A pause.

"You. You are not." I banked it. The appalled half outlasted the reverent one — it always did, once a core was actually off the body — and then she filed it flat, the way she filed everything she didn't want read. The hum went into the dark against my spine to join the rest of the pantry the floor couldn't see. The frame went down a beat late — my doing, the missing heart — and for the first time the line noticed the hole in itself. A stutter ran up the rail.

Three hundred frames went hunting for a metronome that was now inside my coat. [LEVEL 31.] That was my cue to stop being on the beat and start being gone. I came off the line into the up-throat as the stutter became a stammer, became the particular hush of a machine working out that it has been robbed. Behind me the units quit sorting and started looking, every reading-arm swinging off the freight and onto the hall, hunting the unscheduled thing that had walked their tempo and lifted their heart.

[Anomaly profile: 68/100. Unscheduled interruption to active processing. Correction class under review.] Errata read it for exactly what it cost.

"An hour ago you were a rumour up here. Now you're the reason a shift ran late. That was loud, Carole. That was loud." Sixty-eight. I didn't run. Running on a sorting floor is how you get sorted. I walked, clean tempo, unhurried, a consignment that knew precisely where it was going, and the line, robbed and stuttering and hunting, let me walk, because walking was in time and the line trusted time over its own alarm. Errata's voice dropped to the register she keeps for when one wrong step ends us both.

"Slower. You're carrying its heartbeat in your coat and it can feel the gap where the beat should be. Don't give it your hurry on top of that. Bore it. Be the most boring thing on this floor."

"I'm trying."

"Try at the speed of a frame with nowhere it needs to be." A pause.

"There. That. Be that all the way to the door." I read the leak off the hall's own record as I went, the floor murmuring to itself in the quiet clerical voice it used this deep, where the nearer you came to the machine's heart the less it troubled to shout. [Processing cycle nominal. Units cleared this cycle: 4, 210. Throughput within tolerance. One line unaccounted. Logged, deferred. Within budget.] Four thousand two hundred and ten, one hall, one cycle, counted and stamped and sent up the climb while I robbed a metronome and called it a win. The single line it couldn't square, the unscheduled thing, the rumour with a stolen heart in its coat, it had already filed under deferred and folded back inside within budget. It folded everything. It would fold me too, the day I gave it the cycle to do it. I had crossed that floor by moving exactly like the thing that worked it. On the beat. In tempo.

For the length of the hall the machine and I had wanted the same thing in the same rhythm, and it had not been able to tell us apart. The worse part was that for ninety seconds, neither had I.

"Your cadence locked to the line," Errata said, and the dry was working a shade too hard over the thing beneath it.

"All the way down. You moved like a unit and the units believed you. I am logging it as efficiency." A pause, shorter than she'd have liked.

"It wasn't efficiency. Get off the floor." I got off the floor.