He waited for elaboration; she looked as though she had more to say. But she turned without meeting his eyes and said, “Let’s go this way.”
He had to hurry to catch up with her, and by the time he did, she had her outward expression firmly under control and began pointing out other sights of interest: the corridor toward enviro-controls, security, medical. Finally Legroeder interrupted to say, “Should I not have asked that, back there?”
Tracy-Ace jerked her head toward him, her implants firing rapidly. Frowning, she shook her head, her hair swinging violently back and forth. “I can’t talk about that right now. This is a time for you to see what we have; it’s not a time for you to ask about our policies.”
“But I wasn’t—” he began, and then shut up. Don’t push it. “Okay,” he said. “I won’t ask.”
She nodded sharply. “Good.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and seemed to be coming to a decision. “Listen,” she said, propelling him by the arm in a new direction. “I know something you’d like to see. As a rigger. Voluntary workers. Come on.”
Down a lifttube and along a winding ramp.
“It’s early for me to show this to you, but I think you’re ready for it. But before I do, I have to tell you that this is a top security area.” She stopped and turned to look him squarely in the eye. “There will be security features there that you don’t even see. Their order of business is to shoot first and ask questions later. Can you observe quietly and save your questions for later?”
Legroeder’s voice caught. “Uh—sure, yes.” What the hell else could he say? And why was he being taken to a top security area?
“Good.”
A short distance further on, they came to a door that said Maintainer Staff Only. The door was flanked by two guards bristling with sidearms. There were also various lenses in the walls. Cameras? Lasers? Legroeder opened his mouth to ask, then closed it. Tracy-Ace spoke briefly to the guards, who nodded deferentially but not without a close inspection of Legroeder.
The door paled at Tracy-Ace’s touch. Legroeder followed her into an antechamber, where there were more guards and security instruments. Tracy-Ace had to establish two separate augment links with the security panels to get past this station, and Legroeder was scanned and then fitted with a security badge. It felt like a bulls-eye on his chest. With Tracy-Ace, he passed through another door into a large, semidarkened room. He blinked, looking around. The walls were dark; but in the center of the room, six heavily augmented Kyber men and women were seated around a circle of consoles. In the center of the circle, various holos were dancing and glowing, with views of the Flux. At the consoles were rapidly changing schematic readouts. Were these the riggers who kept the station anchored in the Flux?
At a nod from Tracy-Ace, Legroeder stepped forward cautiously, peering over the shoulder of the nearest crewman. One of the crew glanced up, then immediately returned her attention to her work. Legroeder could not follow all the information displayed on the screens, but he saw enough to be pretty sure: these weren’t the maintainers. They were the people maintaining the maintainers, watching to ensure that whatever was happening out there in the Flux was satisfactory. Legroeder stepped back. Tracy-Ace angled her head to indicate that he should follow her through another door.
More security.
As they stepped into the next room, he was surprised to find that they were enclosed in a ghostly forcefield bubble. To protect us from what’s inside? Or to protect whatever’s in here from us? A glance from Tracy-Ace seemed to confirm the latter interpretation.
This was a very different sort of room: a cross between a holocinema and a medical intensive care ward. Abstract light impulses flashed around the walls of the room, in chaotic patterns, making him feel as if he were in a cinema watching the play of light, without seeing the actual images. Music filled the air; at least, he decided to think of it as music—a sort of atonal chant that he found vaguely disturbing.
In the center of the room were four—no, five—rigger-stations, he guessed, though they resembled no rigger-stations he had ever seen. They looked like a cross between scaffolds and exoskeletons. Ensconced within them were five humans. At least, he thought they were humans. To call them augmented would have been an understatement; they looked like Christmas trees. They were encased in what looked like clear gel sacks, with spider-webs of tubes, wires, and fibop cables running in and out of the sacks.
“The maintainers?” he asked.
“The maintainers,” said Tracy-Ace.
For all their apparent confinement, the maintainers were constantly in motion: small movements—hands clenching and unclenching, arms swinging a few centimeters one way and then another, heads shifting this way and that. But looking at what?
A technician walked over in their direction; Legroeder decided it was a woman, though she was heavily suited, with a strange-looking helmet encasing her head. Tracy-Ace spoke to her briefly through a private com-link, then glanced back at Legroeder.
“Do they just stay here—constantly in the Flux?” Legroeder asked in amazement. The rigger-stations looked like permanent wombs. Were the maintainers even breathing air? It looked as if they were receiving their oxygen through some kind of amniotic fluid.
Tracy-Ace nodded absently. “Constantly,” she murmured. Her voice sounded oddly distracted; she was looking off toward the flashing lights on the wall, as though she had forgotten why they were here. Were those lights hypnotizing her?
The technician spoke. “They live there. It’s their life.”
“Mm?” Legroeder said. He suddenly realized he was fighting the same distraction he’d noticed in Tracy-Ace. “But… what about rest?” He squinted at his own words; it took him a moment to realize that he was asking not about physical rest, but regeneration of the psyche. Connection with the real world.
“It all happens right here,” said the tech, waving a gloved hand around. “All this provides cortical stimulation. It’s only partly random. Plus there’s other input, to modulate REM phase and so on.”
Legroeder suppressed a shiver; the light-stimulus and the music were sending a strange glow through him. Was that why the tech was wearing a suit, to isolate her from this? He squinted at the flickering lights. Something nagged at him about that; there was something he wasn’t seeing.
“They’re not all actively monitoring the station at the same time, of course… they work in rotation…”
(Are you getting a handle on this?) he asked his implants, as the tech’s voice droned.
// We are… seeking to adapt… to the unfamiliar stimulus… //
(What is it about… these lights? What am I missing?)
// Patterns… complex patterns within… //
He stopped listening, because he suddenly knew what it was. There were patterns in the lights, all right; there were whole images embedded in the patterns. If he could just see it. Let go. Let it come. His breath sighed out, and the pattern collapsed inward; and with a sudden perceptual transformation, he saw what was in there. It was a view of the Flux again. But it was a far more intimate view than the holos that the crew outside saw; it was the Flux as the maintainers saw it. The rest of his breath went out in a gasp, because he suddenly felt as though he were afloat in the Flux, stretched out in a net that extended much farther than any ship’s net. It stretched out for a very long way… and down…