Jason huddled with his group. A tall Anglan Scientist offered exactly the legitimacy they needed. "But we won't have to."
Engaged in a battle of virtual starships with Kitna, Rolf wrote his question slowly, almost afraid of the answer.
"Did they incite the riot in the southwest?"
She deployed a ship before answering. "I don't know."
"What's their plan?"
"I don't know… but their plans have been pushed up by the riots and the dropping Peak. They had a bigger plan, but now they have to resort to something to do with a refinery. My contact didn't go into detail."
He began typing out an alarmed response, but Elizabeth came up to him with Dierk and Jason in tow.
"Hey, we've got an idea, and we're going to Factory Six to try it."
He blinked, trying to suddenly shift mental gears.
"We could use a programmer to help with setting up the machines," she said, visibly excited.
"I've got Kit here and all…" he thought aloud. "I can program from here."
She shrugged with masked dismay. "I guess you can, yeah."
"Let's go," Jason added, standing on the other side of Dierk. "Every second counts."
"Right."
Rolf watched the three depart, feeling strange and torn in a way he didn't quite understand.
"Forget her!" Kitna wrote, attacking his starbase. "In case you haven't noticed, this isn't the alley. You're not stuck with her anymore."
He played his delaying action with a sigh. "You've got to find out what their plan is. I don't like where this is headed. I'm not going to protect some grand cause that might just get us killed as collateral damage."
"That's not how you felt yesterday."
"I think I was a little drunk from the Hangout." He grabbed a profile at random from the riot in the southwest, following the woman's timeline backwards, skipping to a shouting man, traveling further back in time to the arguments that had angered him… tracing effect-and-cause, he found the young Nord man who'd been the first to bring the topic up - seemingly out of the blue.
"He played Starships II after the near-riot here," he wrote, not sure whether to be angry or afraid. "And his game generated a checksum error."
She passed her turn, unable to take any action. "They told me they've managed to cause false positive errors in a systemic manner to cover their tracks."
Standing, he began crossing the solar factory floor, heading back out into the main quadrant. "So it's impossible to be sure. I figured as much, I've seen it in the code. I actually spoke to the old caretaker who installed that sabotage. He did it under the guise of a failed attempt to fix the error itself." He checked the old man's data. "But he's dead now…"
"Starved?"
"Yes."
She lowered her head for a moment of respect.
He found his way to the East Residency wall and sat next to her again. "Who are your contacts?" he wrote.
"Nobody important."
Running through the possibilities, he checked Ragni's history. The old man had seemed to hint that he'd been chosen for this project for a reason… but there were no games in his recent history… scrolling back, he frowned.
"There was a spike in popularity of this game about forty years ago," he wrote, focusing his breathing to keep his heart from pounding. "It's… all the older Scientists…"
"Why does that matter?"
"They know!"
"They know about the private communication bug? How?"
Suddenly, Ragni's talk about social movements and overthrowing the Tyrant in his youth seemed incredibly relevant. "Because they've used it before…"
"But why now? Why is it throwing errors now?"
He looked back across patch logs. "A system-wide security update last year. It added a new layer of checks. But I guess nobody was worried about obscure errors in a hundred-year-old computer game, and the still-living revolutionaries sure weren't going to tell anybody."
She leaned against him. "What have we gotten into?"
"Nothing, yet… we could still just stay out of it, do nothing. The guy that started the riot down south ended up dead himself very quickly. I'm not putting us in that kind of danger."
His thoughts raced endlessly over boundless vague possibilities. The Undermining could be virtually anyone, a small group of wishful thinkers, a large group of dangerous zealots… how could he possibly know?
Running a search, he came up with a list of over a million people that had all received checksum errors in the last eighteen months playing games of Starships II.
"Worthless," he wrote. "There's no way to tell who's involved."
She laughed, squeezing his hand. "I think that's the point…" Taking her turn in the game to keep up the pretense, she sighed. "Let's go."
He played his action, immediately wary. "Go?"
"Let's find some corner of this godforsaken Stonework and hide."
"There is nowhere to hide."
"You know what I mean. We just need to get out of the way. It's this place, the Main Hub. Something horrible will happen here, whether we want it to or not. The Scientists won't just sit by and let the revolution happen, so they'll undoubtedly be dealt with. And, like she said, can't you work from anywhere? 'Cause I sure can."
He watched the crowd for a minute, noting only passive or negative glances as people saw him watching. It didn't seem right, abandoning the Scientists without warning them… but he seriously doubted anyone would protect two Subians from whatever was coming.
She squeezed his hand again. "What do you want, Rolf? Why are you here? Why are we surviving at all?"
"I honestly don't know."
She stood, pulling him up alongside. "Let's start saving up calories."
He groaned. "Not this again. Come on."
"I'm serious. Between your Scientist pay and the bets on my team, we can scrape up enough, I know we can."
He tried to pull away, but she kept his arm held fast.
"You left," she wrote, her expression fierce. "But now you're here, and so am I. I know you, and I know you think about it."
"I never think about it."
"Fine, tell me to my face that you don’t want a kid. That you don't want a family."
He kept his face neutral. "Maybe I do, but we've been down this road before, and we just don't work."
"You have any other Subian girls on call?" she wrote back. "Do you know any? Have you ever even seen another Subian girl? Not just on some search, but in person."
"Don't play that card with me." He pulled away harder. "We can't base a relationship on lack of options."
She caught his gaze - his real gaze - and refused to let him go. "I mean that we'll make it work, idiot. Because we're alike, because we care about each other in a way nobody else can."
Forced to consider painful concerns he'd purposely kept buried, he felt completely off-balance. "I don't know."
"Then think about it," she insisted. "Let's just get out of here! We can't be here when it happens!"
A rising murmur circled the crowd, rising to shouts of dismay and horror.
He stared around, wild-eyed, but the riot was elsewhere.
"They're fighting up north!" one layabout to their left said to her friend.
He grabbed the link they'd exchanged, watching the riot happen in real time. Men and women fought at the northern edge, burning sands visible in the distance between gaps in the buildings. A sea of people clashed furiously and randomly, many with makeshift weapons, but most with fists and the power of pent-up fear.
And there it was - food being looted from the injured and dead. There was no united mob to enforce the killing of thieves… a swarm of angry rioters pushed at a Rail car, trying to topple it and break inside.
A text arrived, interrupting his wide-eyed viewing with a rare system warning symbol. "All Scientists please meet in Forum B."
It was Ragni, calling an emergency discussion.
He turned to Kitna, grabbing her hand and conceding the game in a sin
gle motion. Whatever they might have between them, good or bad, she was right about one thing. "We have to get out of here."
Leaning back from his microscope, Og blinked, fighting strained eyes to enter the forum in question. The other Scientists near him in the white-walled lab followed, visibly worried.
The conversation was already in progress.
"The unrest is only rising. The Peak is the lowest it's been in a decade, and, worse, we've got a lot of young people asking questions."
He wondered if they meant him.
"Well why shouldn't they question?" someone else posted. "Nobody decided any of this. It's all just cultural inertia."
Taking a moment to look for his friends, he realized that Elizabeth had already left the Main Hub, and Rolf was heading for the main entrance. Confused, he wondered why they'd both left without saying anything, and he began to write a message -
"Mjögen, what do you think?"
He froze.
An older Scientist two buildings down had addressed him directly in a post. "Well come on, you're at the center of all this, what's your opinion?"
Put on the spot, he realized he wasn't sure what his opinion was. He hadn't spent enough time thinking about it. The major issues at hand had always seemed distant; had always seemed someone else's problem.
Ragni interjected before he was forced to admit he had no idea. "It's fine if people want to question, but this all comes down to our agreed definition of social good. Right now we tell each other that total individual freedom is best, but look at the result. Zombies are twenty percent of our population, living on some charity, yes, but mostly information work that doesn't require physical movement. That, or they fight over industrial job openings. The world we've built is brutal."
"How is that related to these riots?