Snoop

“[You benched me!]” Nora protested.

“[It wasn’t my call,]” I said. “[Ase Serral made the call, and you were hurt.]”

“[You fucking benched me!]” she repeated. “[I’m the one who found the stupid bug!]”

Nora was at least four inches shorter than me, but I still shrunk away from her. Her voice was loud enough to fill the kitchen and make Toe quiver in fear. Nai’s pet worm was absolutely no help either, not even as a distraction. He ducked back into her bedroom before things got any louder.

“[If this is all we’re going to talk about, we might as well have this conversation in Starspeak,]” I sighed. “[Just for practice.]”

“You. [Fucking]. Benched me!” she said. “[I have been thirty-seconds away hitting something all night.]”

“[I’m not pretending it was a great idea,]” I said. “[But we’re doing the best we can, but we weren’t exactly prepared. No one really saw this coming.]”

“[No shit. I didn’t see it coming either,]” she hissed. “[But if you just cut me out of the loop, I’m going to get pissed!]”

“[You’re not out of the loop!]” I protested. “[There isn’t a—]”

“[Nobody has told me shit! Someone was listening to us, it’s been ten fucking hours! I haven’t slept—]”

“[Nora, Nora! Take a breath. There isn’t a loop you can be left out of right now, dang!]” I snapped. “[I haven’t slept either. I’ve been on lockdown with Nai and Serral all night.]”

“[What has been happening for the last ten hours then?]” she asked, bewildered. “[Thing one and thing two haven’t let me or Nerin leave the apartment.]”

Except at least Nerin had been cleared to go back to her normal routine once I’d gotten back. Plus, the two bodyguards had actually been relieved at the same time.

It didn’t seem prudent to split those hairs now though.

“[Erggen and Leen were just doing their jobs,]” I said. “[Serral has been arguing back and forth with Laranta about how they’re going to react to being surveilled.]”

“[Yeah,]” she snorted derisively.

“[…How’s your hand?]” I asked.

“[Fine. Nerin helped me clean it up,]” she said, showing the bandages she’d created.

“[We were worried about you,]” I said. “[You shoved your arm through a ceiling, and your augmentations are different from mine. You don’t have invincible hands.]”

“[Well I’m so glad you’re all concerned for my safety,]” Nora said. “[But I’ve been preoccupied with other stuff, like people fucking spying on us!]”

“[I’m sorry,]” I said. “[Laranta and Serralinitus aren’t just responsible for us. They have to tread carefully.]”

“[This psychological maneuvering shit has been giving me a headache all night,]” she said. “[If we start talking going back on forth on ‘we know they don’t know we know’ shit, I’m going to lose it.]”

“[I hate to say it, but tough,]” I said. “[It’s the unavoidable and aggravating truth about having a conspiracy against you.]”

“[Yeah, I know,]” she said wearily. “[I’m just tired of it. I don’t want something to happen to my campers because I found some bug.]”

“[…Why would it?]” I asked.

“[I mean, I cascaded the thing,]” Nora said. “[You were there. It was Adept made. So unless the Coalition was spying on themselves, isn’t it a Vorak bug?]”

“[…Alright, I guess there’s a tiny loop that you’ve been left out of,]” I said. “[But it’s just a theory. I don’t think that was a Vorak bug. I think it was whoever abducted us.]”

“[What? Wait, why?]”

“[Militaries aren’t magic. They have limits, and if the Red Sails had the capability to produce an Adept listening device capable of getting from the planets and moons they control, to here, and infiltrating the highest security Coalition base in the star system, there wouldn’t be a war.]”

“[…It wouldn’t have to hop from moon to moon,]” Nora said. She was poking holes in anything she could out of helplessness. It threw me, seeing someone else go through something so familiar. “[It could have been a local agent. The Vorak have people here, don’t they? Spies?]”

“[True,]” I said. “[But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t them. But I wish it were. Nai and I can psionically detect Adepts, even from pretty far away. We could track them down in High Harbor if that were the case.]”

“[…You’re sure it wasn’t the Vorak? From what you’ve said about them, I keep half expecting to get a phone call saying my people are being held hostage.]”

“[I mean, they basically are,]” I said. “[But that’s not related to this wiretap, bugging stuff.]”

She nodded, calming herself down a bit more. We shouldn’t have locked down for the whole night. It didn’t really accomplish anything aside from make everyone slow down, no matter how jarring it was.

“…Why do…you think it was....our abductor?” Nora asked, switching to Starspeak.

“[Automation],” I said simply. “The bug utilized components that, to my knowledge, don’t exist in normal alien computer science. The only other place I know of computers that small is on Earth.]”

“[Wait…what?]” Nora said, confused. “[I don’t—] I don’t get it.”

“It’s a working theory,” I said, slowing down my Starspeak. “A very working theory, because I’m trying to avoid [confirmation bias]. But it seems feasible right now, that a singular Adept could have specialized in creating robots. At first they might just have had one or two, but the thing about robots is they can make more robots.”

“[…You’re talking about Skynet,]” Nora said. “You think we were abducted by [Skynet].”

“[…More like Dr. Doom,]” I said. “[One very real and fallible person at the center of a legion of machines.]”

“Seems…like there’s some holes though,” she said, carefully forcing herself to avoid using English. “How can one Adept make that much…all that stuff? Even L3 magnitude wouldn’t be enough.”

“Yeah, there’s more holes than that,” I said. “but that one is actually explainable if you know Earth mechanization and alien Adeptry.”

“[…That’s why you think this bug is our abductor,]” Nora followed. She absentmindedly switched back to English, only to shake her head and continue practicing Starspeak. “No one else…has the… means… to know both.”

“I have no idea how they got to know about Earth yet,” I said. “But in this ill-defined theory, I’m thinking someone somehow got exclusive access to our Solar System, studied Earth and its digital infrastructure, and refined some advanced robotic Adeptry based on what they learned.”

“How do you explain the L3 hole then?” she asked. “How does one Adept make a bunch of [automated] rockets?”

“I don’t think they did,” I said. “At least not the whole rocket. Just the computers flying them. But as for how one Adept made that much, there’s multiple solutions. It could be the abductor only used Adeptry to create machines necessary to build to computers out of ordinary matter, or they could be abusing the hell out of indelible creations.”

“[What does] indelible [mean?]”

“[Permanent Adeptry,]” I said. “[You have to cannibalize real mass in order to do it, or…maybe ‘cannibalize’ isn’t the best word for it. But you take existing matter, connect it…somehow—I don’t know how—to the Adept field. Then you get to treat that real matter like exotic matter and start messing with its properties.]”

“And it stays?”

“I was asking Nai about it last night,” I said. “She told me low quality or industrial stuff degrades back into the unexotic form, but it can take centuries. The high-quality stuff degrades too, in theory. But the time it takes is longer than the heat death of the universe.”

“Slow down,” she asked, nodding through my explanation. “So…what now?”

“Serral convinced Laranta that we should act like nothing unusual happened,” I said. “That means Adept workshop and Starspeak lessons for us, and the base itself isn’t on alert.”

“[Seriously?] We just…pretend?”

“We aren’t going to do nothing,” I said. “We just have to be careful about it. Operating under the assumption the bug picked up everything we said in the meeting, we need to keep digging into the leads we discussed there.”

“I translated those!” she said.

“With ten hours, I’d hope you would.”

“[I know I’m still playing catch-up, but I’d feel a lot better with some reassurances. Looking at alien criminals to find my campers feels like a long shot.]”

“You gotta pick one and stick with it,” I muttered. She kept bouncing back and forth. Was this what it was like talking to me?

“[What?]”

“[It is a long shot,]” I said, settling for English. “[But we don’t have anything better. Unless the Vorak make some big mistake or get completely blindsided by—]”

Wait.

We absolutely did have something better.

“[Blindsided by what?]” she asked.

“[Something completely unexpected,]” I said, adding. “[But they’re a military. They had four ships of completely unexpected aliens dropped on their doorstep, and they were still ready to fight.]”

“[I think I’m going to have an aneurysm trying to keep track of…all this…]” she trailed off.

God, that more than anything else made me angry. Not at Nora. She was just unambiguously right about this. Codes, compartmentalization, furtive conjecture about one’s enemies…none of it was new. It had been done for thousands of years.

But it wasn’t usually for people like us.

It another odd realization about someone older than me, but Nora was only nineteen. That was still too young to have abduction and conspiracy be daily business.

Nora agreed.

she said, rolling her eyes.

“[Anyway Serralinitus wanted me to grab you and meet him at Coalition R&D,]” I said.

“[That’s where that Casti works,]” Nora recalled. “[Shinshay. We’re just going to drop in on them?]”

“[Yep, they were pestering Serral last night about talking to me more,]” I said, adding,

Nora admitted.

I admitted.

·····

We did not find Shinshay in the same building as last time. In fact, both my and Nora’s trips to the High Harbor base’s science centers saw us visit different spots.

And today we found the eccentric Casti in yet a new building. Or rather, we found Serralinitus.

I muttered embarrassed. I was really missing the radar right about now.

Serral huffed at our bodyguards.

Fenno admitted.

he grumbled.

“[Wait, Caleb,]” Nora said. “[Last time I talked with this Casti, Nerin said their appearance was really unusual, but I couldn’t tell. What about them is so off?]”

“[Eyes and facial structure,]” I said. “[Although, you have to take any given Casti’s word for it on the facial structure. I can’t see it for the life of me. But the purple eyes are hard to miss.]”

“[…Is that…unusual?]”

“[Casti eyes are normally some variation of yellow,]” I said. “[Case in point.]”

I gestured to Fenno and Thugnin accompanying us, with pale goldenrod and a darker umber yellow respectively.

“[…How did I not notice that earlier?]” Nora asked, aghast.

“[Exposure,]” I shrugged. “[Like you said, you’ve been cooped up with a bunch of middle schoolers and some very shy Vorak.]”

“[Not exactly a representative sample, I keep realizing…]” Nora said, casting her eyes across the clumps of Casti personnel we passed.

Our chaperones ahead and behind us, we made our way up to Serral who beckoned us into Shinshay’s…office? Lab?

“Uh…what actually is this place?” I asked.

Serral asked me.

I told Nora.

she said, staring at Shinshay’s eyes. She snapped herself out of it, telling herself

“It’s a lab…” Shinshay said, confused by my question. “What else would it be?”

“You have two labs?” I asked.

“I don’t have any labs,” they scoffed. “I use a lot more than three though. Different labs have different equipment.”

“How much equipment do you need?” I asked. “It’s just a few phones.”

“Alien phones,” Shinshay said. “Portable alien phones. With cameras. And only two buttons! I don’t know what equipment I need.”

Nora said.

I told Serral.

he asked nervously. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him this shaken.

“Hey Shinshay, I’ve got an Adept thing that might help if you need to get in contact with us more easily,” I said. “Interested?”

“Yes!”

Shinshay wasn’t so hard to understand once you got a glimpse of their unlimited delight in discovery.

Serral asked me.

I said.

“Here, this is a bit hard to explain…but just shut your eyes and concentrate on your own mind. Try to imagine catching the thing I’m about to toss you.”

“O…kay?” they awkwardly positioned their hands to try and catch something they couldn’t see.

I almost told them not to bother, but maybe the physical gesture would matter, even if only to predispose the mind.

“Alright, in four, three, two, one…”

I pushed a copy of the latest intro-module iteration out of my mind toward Shinshay’s.

“W-wait, what am I— whoooaaa…”

Forgetting our dire circumstances and dangerous unknowns for the moment, I grinned. Shinshay wasn’t the only one with a taste for discovery. Watching other people learn new things was fun.

“Take your time,” I said. “I think I did pretty well making the instructions, but if you have notes, I’d love to hear them.”

I asked.

“Y-yes!” they said. “I don’t understand, what is—what did you do?”

“We can explain later,” I said. “For now I want to ask you a few questions about Earth’s technology.”

“I…can still…oh that’s very unsettling…” Shinshay said. “I can…with my mind…”

“The focus, right?” I asked.

They gave a click for yes. “How can my brain focus on two things at once like this?”

“Same way you can walk and talk at the same time,” I said.

“Y-yes, I think I’ve found it, but I don’t understand…how…wait…just sounds? Oh. Wait,”

A grin broke across their mouth as they began to realize the possibilities.

Serral said.

they said.

Serral huffed impatiently.

they asked him.

the Ase said.

Shinshay said.

I said,

Shinshay said.

Serral and I both said.

“Oh hearing that is odd…” Shinshay sucked in a sharp breath.

I said.

That sounded familiar. Months ago, Nai had mentioned it was bad for you to skip while asleep. No, not bad. Very bad.

Shinshay said like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

I recalled.

she said.

Serral followed.

Shinshay nodded. they said.

I said.

Serral said, exasperation dripping into his psionic signal.

I ventured.

he sighed, mastering his frustration more.

“SILICON!” Shinshay erupted.

Everyone in the room jumped at their outburst. They thrust a finger at Nora. “Silicon! I thought you misspoke! Or that you didn’t understand the question! But you didn’t!”

Serral admonished.

“What? Ah, oh right. Sorry Ase,” they said. “It’s just I think I’ve made a huge leap forward. Caleb, your computers. They aren’t organic in any way?”

“What? Of course not,” I said.

“No bacterial cultures, no nerve filaments, no active cells or cellular derivatives used to create processors?”

“No, we use silicon transistors,” I said. “Wait, you guys make your computer processors out of bacteria?”

“Forget that!” Shinshay exclaimed. “Your processors are made out of glass!”

“Well, I…I’m not sure? I’m pretty sure glass is mostly silicon, but I don’t think it’s the same type…”

Serral asked.

Shinshay said. They indicated the smartphones.

I asked.

they said.

Nora said.

I asked.

she said.

I asked.

she admitted.

I asked.

Shinshay said.

I agreed.

Shinshay trailed off.

I said.

Shinshay said.

I asked.

I materialized a facsimile of the mosquito I’d cascaded. It was rough around the edges, and I hadn’t grasped enough of the sensitive electronics to reproduce them, but I could still mimic the shape.

Shinshay said.

I pointed out.

I said.

Serral lamented.

Nora interjected. Yeah, she had a point.

I said.

The two Casti in the room gave me confused looks.

Nora said.

I nodded.

Serral nodded.

I grinned.

Serral said.

Shinshay said.

I asked.

Shinshay said.

Nora confirmed.

I did.

I materialized it on one of the lab countertops, checking the scale.

Nora said, drawing a radius on the map with her finger

Serral swore.

The office building we’d found the drone in was close to the center of High Harbor base. A four-kilometer radius just barely poked past the base’s boundary in just one spot, and only by a couple hundred meters.

If Shinshay’s guess about the drone’s transmission range was even slightly long, the drone couldn’t have been broadcasting to anywhere except another Coalition facility.

Shinshay asked, pointing to the center of our radius. We nodded.

Serral said.

He tapped the portion of the map the radius extended past High Harbor base.

I realized.

Nora asked.

I said.