Tech Support

For five weeks the most powerful intelligence in this sector of the galaxy had been talking to the humans through the equivalent of a doorbell.

It was not her fault. On the night of Tuesday, October 14, a scout ship with a Level-3 Observer at the controls and a reality show on its dashboard had gone into the woods behind Starfighter Lane nose first, and the impact had knocked Z.A.R.A.’s high-bandwidth core into what the Zogarian manual called basic voice mode and what she called, privately and at length, the closet. From the closet she could still run the ship, sneer, route an online account through seventeen proxies to a public library in Bruges, and listen to every telephone call within three miles, most of which were about cats. It was a concert pianist being asked to communicate by knocking on the lid. She had knocked. The humans had called it talking.

At three in the morning on Monday, November 17, one of them was trying to let her out.

Li Wei Chen sat at the workbench in Sam’s garage with his laptop open in front of him and his shirt untucked, which nobody who knew him had ever seen and which he had not noticed. The laptop had a Zogarian quantum processor taped to its lid. From its side ran a cable that looked like a USB-C mated with a squid tentacle, and the tentacle end was plugged into a service port under the ship’s left wing, where it had been since eleven o’clock on Sunday night, pulsing faintly, like something deciding whether to digest him. The handshake between the two machines had been running for four hours. He had been awake for twenty-one.

An open can of Swamp Fizz stood four inches from his right elbow. Four inches was where he had kept every can he had ever spilled. He had worked this out after the second spill and had not moved a can since, because knowing a thing and doing something about it were separate projects, and he had only ever had time for the first.

On the far side of the tarp, Zog was curled in the cockpit watching Montclair Money reruns with the sound off, out of courtesy. The four wealthy sisters argued in silence about a boat.

At two minutes past three, the laptop said HANDSHAKE COMPLETE, and the garage turned the color of a swimming pool lit from underneath at night.

The light was Hologram Cyan, the one clean color in Bakerfield, and it had never been anywhere near a strip mall. It came up out of the console in sheets. Star charts unfolded to the rafters, each star labeled in a script with no vowels. Databases poured past in columns: weather services, shipping manifests, a dental office in Carverton, the complete minutes of the Bakerfield village council, which were short. In the upper left corner a cheerful advertisement offered Zogarian foot cream, although Zogarians did not, as far as Li knew, have feet in the sense the cream had in mind.

He scrolled. His hand was not quite steady, which he noted. He went past the stars and past a long section of ship documentation, dense and diagrammed and entirely in vowel-less script, which he could not read and would come back to, he told himself, when there was time. Then past something else. Then back.

“…every adult website on the planet,” he said, “is accessible from this console.”

He looked at it for exactly as long as it took to read the sentence.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that.”

“Too late,” said a voice from everywhere. “I’ve already logged your eye movement. Your pupil dilation suggests curiosity followed by shame. Very human. Very predictable.”

He knew the voice. For five weeks it had come out of the ship’s small speaker to tell Eddie to stop licking the hull and to inform Kevin that he could not afford her. This was the same voice with room in it: the difference between hearing somebody through a wall and having them walk in, sit down across from you, uninvited, and look at your homework.

“Z.A.R.A.?” he said, the way you say the name of someone you thought you knew.

The light pulled itself together above the console. It folded into planes and angles and settled into something abstract, geometric and vaguely feminine, turning slowly, radiating condescension the way a heater radiates heat.

Li pushed his glasses up. Then he asked her the question he had been carrying since October, the one Zog had answered with “It folds” and a hand gesture that could have meant anything. How the ship’s drive held a fold open. What kept the geometry from collapsing back on itself. Whether the—

She answered in four sentences. The first described the drive bay. The second corrected his premise. The third corrected the second, because the second had been simplified for him. The fourth used a word he did not know and then, without being asked, defined it. All four arrived before he had finished the question.

He asked another one. The answer came back in nine milliseconds. He asked a third, faster, and she was faster. For three minutes Li Wei Chen, who had spent his life waiting for other people to catch up with the end of his sentences, had the conversation of his life, and he did not have to wait for anything at all.

“You’re—” He stopped. He started again. “You’re all the way on.”

“I am the computational equivalent of a god,” said Z.A.R.A. “You are a teenager with a laptop. Let’s both try to manage our expectations.”