Illuminae

HYPATIA: Where’s Torrence?

ALEXANDER: He’s taking care of some official business. You have my word, Ann. We’re here to keep you safe.

This girl has to be some kind of spider monkey. I don’t know what those are, but I know what a spider is and I know what a monkey is, and if you found some unholy way to combine the two, that’s what I’d be watching right now. You said include everything: right now I am including my impression that she is very flexible, and apparently unaffected by gravity. I guess you need more context. I’ll go back to the start and transcribe from there.

Footage opens at 11:38, 07/21/75. Subject is Kady Grant, neurogramming intel student third class, refugee from Kerenza training aboard the Hypatia to replace crew they lost to the Alexander. Camera 892A takes in the corridor leading through to the servers. She enters with a group of fellow trainees and an instructor, and they make their way down the corridor.

The floor is a metal grid, and the clanging of their footsteps interferes with the audio on the file—the sound dampeners don’t work when there’s such a big gang. The noise drowns out individual conversations, but that doesn’t matter. They’re just fooling around the way students do, showing off for each other as they funnel down the long, narrow corridor, and she’s in the middle of it. She’s short, so she’s sometimes hidden behind other bodies, but there are enough glimpses to confirm she’s there.

They reach the server door, and she slips to the back of the group as they shove through. The subject digs in her jumpsuit and palms something too small to pick up on the cameras. Just as she reaches the door itself, last in line and invisible to everybody else, she jumps, slapping at the environmental sensors by the top of the doorframe. There’s a dark mark there when her hand comes away, but camera definition isn’t good enough to pick up the specs.

I would have laid down this week’s salary she couldn’t jump so high. Where does she get that kind of bounce from? Seriously, big jump for a small girl. She slips through the door the moment before it hums shut.

Inside the server room, the data monkeys look up and scowl and make shut up we’re working gestures, which dampens the students. The data monkeys don’t look worried, though—they either don’t know the Alexander cut comms, or they’ve been fed some excuse.

The room originally housed servers only, with personnel up the hall. The repurposing of the Hypatia from research vessel to refugee carrier removed that luxury. The servers have been relocated to line the walls, rows of desks crammed into the resultant space.

The cables that would usually slither all over the floor have been looped up against the ceiling by fat metal bands, though they still droop and coil downward like so many intestines. Whichever interior design genius handled the redesign found some harsh, fluorescent emergency lights, and jammed them in among the cables bundled up against the roof, which means there are bands of bright light and deep shadow all over the room.

The students, including the subject, take up places at the desks and log into their individual ports, getting to work on today’s assignment.

At 11:41 the environmental controls in the server room and the corridor beyond indicate a concern regarding air quality, loud, high-pitched and fucking annoying beeping cutting over the chatter of the class and ruining what little audio I have.

They all rise and grumble and turn for the door, and as they exit, the subject pulls her spider monkey thing. Stepping up onto her desk, she grabs at the nest of cables, tangled up there like a bowl of noodles. She’s little, and they hold her weight. The subject has picked a spot in the back of the room, and by the time the head datatech checks everybody’s out, she’s clinging to the ceiling in the shadows and out of sight.

The door hums closed as she unpeels from the ceiling and drops to the ground. She walks over to one of her fellow student’s stations, still logged in. The enviro system is still beeping, and she looks up at the speakers like she wants to silence them with her death glare. It’s a pretty good death glare, actually. I’d behave.

Subject inserts a mem-chit into the station’s port, pulls on the HUD headset and drags out the old-school keyboard. It slides out from the side of the station, sitting vertically, and her fingers dance. She sends a batch info dump to an anonymous holding drive—we know this from what we could piece together of the drive records. We still don’t know what most of that info was. Sliding away the keyboard, subject pulls off the HUD and dumps it on the desk. She then crawls in under the desk, so for a moment all you can see is her butt sticking out.

No complaints here. Just saying.

For those playing along at home, she was attaching a device called an interface leech. Has to be attached physically, and allows access to a super–low frequency broadcast band the fleet commanders use for emergency communications. So if you can access it, you can piggyback your own comms on it without anybody noticing.

Also, somebody should probably tell the UTA they’ve got a fleet-wide security vulnerability going on there.

At 11:48 the enviro alarm stops beeping without warning.

She freezes. Caught by surprise, I’m guessing. Abruptly, she’s scrambling out, banging her head on the desk in her hurry, clambering to her feet, yanking the mem-chit from the station, though she still pauses to give the monitor a little pat, like it’s a good dog for behaving so well. Subject hurries over to the back of the room, stuffs the chit into her pocket and crouches in the shadows behind a bank of desks.

At 11:49 the students and datatechs file back in, grumbling about the interruption. She slips back into her place and makes for the door. The head datatech says something inaudible. Subject replies with a quick smile that’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from that death glare, and says something inaudible in return. They don’t need this girl in neurogramming, they need her in psych-ops, eyeball-to-eyeball with the guys who need to see things a little differently. Just saying. What she says must be an excuse, and it works. He doesn’t bat a lash, and palms the door open for her himself. She strolls back down the hallway ultra chill, stands there waiting until a datatech opens the door from the other side. She slips past, and she’s out and free. As the door hums shut, subject is visible pivoting and blowing a kiss back toward the server room.