Page 24 of Tracked and Taken

Just in Case

Natalie

My office at 1847.

Door closed. Monitor wall up. Detention report open. Half-written. My hands have been on the keyboard for three minutes and have produced, so far, two words.

Good work.

Not in the report. The report says DETENTION — HARKIN, T. — BAY 3 CORRIDOR, 1743 INITIATED. Good work is in my head, looping on thirty-second repeat while the cursor blinks and my hands sit on the keys like a pair of very expensive paperweights.

I delete the DETENTION line. I retype it. I delete it again.

Morrison has said good work to me more times than I can count, and I did, for a while, count. Ardent says it maybe once a month on a good week. The CO I punched said it the day before I punched him, the afternoon he signed off on the operational priorities memo that buried three people in a cargo hold. Two words. Professional. The baseline currency of fifteen years of uniform.

Nobody has ever said those two words to me in the register Tael Vosk said them in a service corridor at 1806 this afternoon.

The problem is not the phrase. The phrase is a phrase. It goes on performance reviews. It is the single most boring commendation in the station’s administrative vocabulary.

And Tael Vosk stood in a corridor with our fingers on the same regulation field vest and said it like he had been holding a different word in his mouth for nine minutes and substituted this one in transit.

I know he substituted. I know because the circuit my body lit up on under that two-word delivery was not the one that lights up when Morrison signs a commendation; it was a different circuit entirely, and it had been waiting.

I stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Pace the two meters between my desk and the monitor wall. My reflection in the dark glass is a woman in a regulation braid with the expression of someone who has just discovered a wiring diagram of her own nervous system she has been pretending did not exist.

Option A: I am furious he did it.

Option B: I am furious I heard it.

Option C: I am furious that a phrase I have heard from the woman who trained me and from the deputy who calls my braid a cry for help has just been retrofitted, by a male with silver eyes and a tail problem whom I met the day before yesterday, into something my body will apparently now be routing through a new filing system for the rest of my natural life.

Option C. Escalating. Filed under Personal. Do Not Open.

Four years of the uniform doing the thinking for me. Bunk-alone, up-at-five, forms-in-triplicate. The career is clean, and the career is good, and the career does not explain why a male in a borrowed vest saying two words has just rerouted my pulse.

I sit down.

“SENTRY.”

“Yes.”

“The corridor audio from 1758 to 1806. How is it classified.”

“Professional: Acknowledged, per protocol.”

“Is that your personal classification.”

A pause. The particular pause of an AI calculating what its user has actually asked versus what its user is willing to admit it is asking.

“The file is archived, Torres. Per protocol.”

“Archived accessibly?”

“…The file is archived.”

I hate this AI. I love this AI. I have never been so grateful to be surveiled by a piece of software in my entire professional life.

“Delete the local cache.”