"You can't just walk into Sector Communion," A-6 said, falling into step beside me with the practiced ease of someone who had spent centuries adjusting their pace to match mine without ever appearing to do so. "Not without a transit profile. Not without a cover designation."
"I'm aware."
"You are the Administrator. Your face is not unknown."
"My face is entirely unknown," I said. "I made certain of that a long time ago."
A-6 considered this. We moved through the lower transit corridor of the administrative core — a long, featureless passage that connected the dimensional anchor point to the public transit infrastructure of the civilization. Most Council members used dedicated channels when they needed to move through the city. Private coordinates, sealed transits, the kind of arrangements that announced importance even when they were designed not to. I had always preferred the public network. Not out of sentiment. Out of information. You learned things about a civilization by moving through it the way its citizens did.
"Cover designation," A-6 said again. Not a question this time. A prompt.
"Foundation oversight inspector. Mid-level. Non-threatening." I adjusted the collar of my coat. "I do this occasionally."
A-6 stopped walking.
I continued for three steps before stopping also. I turned. A-6 was standing in the corridor looking at me with an expression I had not seen A-6 wear very often — something adjacent to surprise, which for A-6 was a significant production.
"You've done this before," A-6 said.
"Yes."
"You've walked through the city. In disguise. Without telling me."
"Without telling anyone. That was the point."
"How often."
"Regularly."
A-6 stared at me for a long moment. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because telling you would have made it a security operation. I didn't want a security operation. I wanted a walk." I turned and continued toward the transit platform. "You can come with me or you can wait. But if you come with me you come as yourself and you don't hover."
A-6 caught up in four strides. "I don't hover."
"You hover."
"I maintain proximity."
"With intensity," I said. "It reads as hovering."
The transit platform opened ahead of us — a broad, curving space built from pale composite materials that caught the overhead light and distributed it evenly, the kind of architectural decision that had been made by someone who understood that people spent a great deal of time waiting in transit spaces and that the quality of the light while they waited affected the quality of their mood in ways that compounded over a lifetime. The platform was busy. Mid-cycle on a standard work day in the administrative district meant the platform carried a particular cross-section of the civilization — clerks and analysts and foundation staff and maintenance workers and the small, dense population of people whose function in the city was to keep every visible surface of it running without the people who used those surfaces needing to think about it.
I stepped onto the platform and immediately became nobody.
This was the thing about the hyperpost-human civilization that most of its citizens did not fully appreciate from the inside: it was enormous. The administrative district alone housed four million people. Sector Communion, where we were going, housed eleven million more. The Council existed at a scale so far above the daily experience of those millions that the distance had become abstract — most people knew the Council existed the way they knew the energy grid existed. Foundational. Invisible. Something that would only become visible if it stopped working.
Nobody on the platform looked at me twice.
A-6, to A-6's credit, looked at the transit board with the expression of someone reading arrivals rather than someone cataloguing threats. Almost convincing.
"Platform three," I said. "Sector Communion central. Twenty-minute transit."
"I know how long it takes."
"You've never taken public transit."
"I've reviewed the transit maps."
"That's not the same thing." I moved toward platform three. A-6 followed at a distance that was, marginally, less intense than usual. Progress.
The transit car was half full when we boarded. I found a seat near the window — a habit I had developed during my early excursions into the city, before I had fully understood why I was taking them. A-6 sat two seats away and looked at a handheld display that I was reasonably certain contained actual operational data dressed up to look like casual reading.
Across the aisle from me, a woman was arguing with a child about something.
"I told you we could get food at the foundation," the woman was saying. She had the worn patience of someone who had said the same thing several times already. "We're not stopping before."
"But I'm hungry now," the child said. Approximately eight years old. Dark jacket, scuffed at one elbow. The kind of scuff that came from a fall that had been walked off without complaint.
"You said that on the platform."
"I'm still hungry."
"You'll be hungry in twenty minutes too and then we'll be at the foundation and there's food there."
"What kind of food?"
"The kind that's there."
"That's not an answer."
The woman looked at the ceiling of the transit car with the expression of someone appealing to a power higher than themselves. "It's the cafeteria food. The same food as last time."
"Last time they had the yellow things."
"They always have the yellow things."
"Do they have them today?"
"I don't know if they have them today. I have not personally contacted the cafeteria to confirm the status of the yellow things."
I looked out the window. The city moved past — towers and connective walkways and the soft glow of foundation buildings visible even in daylight, a particular shade of blue-white that the energy fields produced and that had become so associated with reanimation work that civilians used it as shorthand. Foundation light. The color of places where the dead came back.
There were a lot of foundations in this city.
That was something you understood differently from the inside of a transit car than you did from a query window. From a query window, foundations were data points. Authorization requests. Compliance records. From a transit car window they were buildings on streets where people lived their lives in proximity to the work of returning the dead, and most of those people had opinions about it that were considerably more complicated than the doctrine accounted for.
"Excuse me," said a voice to my left.
I turned. A man had taken the seat beside me at the last stop — somewhere in late middle age by appearance, carrying a case of the kind that medical personnel used for transport of biological samples. He was looking at me with the polite hesitation of someone who wanted to start a conversation and wasn't sure of their welcome.
"Yes," I said.
"Sorry to bother. Long day." He settled the case on his knees. "You heading to Communion?"
"Yes."
"Work?"
"Inspection," I said. "Foundation oversight."
He nodded with the recognition of someone who had dealt with foundation oversight and had feelings about it. "Which foundation?"
"Still determining," I said, which was true.
"I'm at Kelthane-7," he said. "Biological reconstruction. Been there eleven years." He shifted the case. "You do this route often? The public transit?"
"Occasionally."
"I do it every day. My wife thinks I should use the foundation shuttle but I like the ride." He glanced out the window. "You see things. You know? You sit here long enough you start to understand what the city actually is rather than what your job tells you it is."
I looked at him more carefully. "What does your job tell you it is?"
"Oh, procedure. Output. Throughput. How many reconstructions completed per cycle, how many vessel integrity checks passed, how many cases escalated to review." He said it without bitterness, just the flat recitation of someone who had made peace with the gap between their work and its meaning. "But out here it's just — people. Going to see someone who's coming back. Or coming from seeing someone who just did." He nodded toward the woman and the child across the aisle. "She's probably bringing the kid to see a grandparent. That's usually why you get parent-child pairs on the Communion transit mid-cycle. The foundation visiting hours."
I looked at the woman and child. The child had apparently won some version of the yellow food negotiation and was now looking out their own window with the satisfied expression of someone who had achieved their objective.
"Do you ever think about it," I said, "the work. What it means."
The man considered this with the seriousness it deserved rather than the deflection it was often met with. "Every day," he said. "You can't do reconstruction work without thinking about it. You're building something that's going to be a person. Or — back to being a person. However you want to think about it." He paused. "My colleague and I argue about this constantly. She thinks what comes back is continuous with what left. Same person, gap in the middle, like going under for surgery. I think it's more complicated than that."
"How so?"
"Because the person who left was a specific configuration of everything they'd ever experienced, every choice they'd ever made, every morning they'd ever woken up to. And when we reconstruct the vessel and the consciousness integrates — that configuration is reproduced. As accurately as we can manage. But the experience of dying and the experience of whatever happens in between, whatever that is —" He shook his head. "That's not in the reconstruction. We don't have a record of that. So what comes back has everything the person was and none of what they went through to get back. And I keep thinking — doesn't that matter? Doesn't that make them someone who is almost this person rather than this person?"
"And what does your colleague say to that?"
"She says I'm being philosophical when I should be being empirical. She says the subject reports continuity, the behavioral markers confirm continuity, and the doctrine classifies it as continuity, and if I have a problem with that I should take it up with A-7." He smiled. "I don't take it up with A-7. I've read A-7's published positions. A-7 would be in my office for a week."
I looked out the window. "Does it affect your work? The uncertainty."
"No," he said simply. "Because the person who comes back — whoever they are, continuous or not — is real. They're here. They want to see their family. They want the yellow things from the cafeteria." He nodded toward the child across the aisle. "And my job is to make sure the vessel I hand them is worthy of whoever is going to live in it." He said it with a quiet finality that suggested it was the answer he had arrived at after a long time of looking for better ones. "That's enough."
The transit car began to slow.
"Sector Communion Central," the announcement said, in the pleasant neutral voice of transit systems everywhere. "Doors opening on the left."
The man stood, collected his case, nodded at me. "Good luck with your inspection."
"Thank you," I said. "Good luck with the reconstruction."
He smiled — genuinely, briefly — and moved toward the doors.
A-6 materialized beside me with a smoothness that would have alarmed anyone who had been watching. "Interesting conversation," A-6 said quietly.
"He works at Kelthane-7."
"I know. I ran his foundation ID from his case tag while you were talking." A-6 paused. "Should I not have done that?"
"You were always going to do that."
"Yes."
We stepped off the transit into Sector Communion Central and the city received us the way cities receive everyone — without ceremony, without acknowledgment, with the simple ongoing fact of itself.
Sector Communion was older than most of the city. You could feel it in the architecture — the way the foundation buildings here had been built into the existing structures rather than replacing them, so that the blue-white light of reanimation work leaked from windows that had originally been designed for something else entirely. Street level was dense with the particular commerce that grew up around foundation districts. Small restaurants that stayed open through the night because foundation staff worked night cycles. Courier services that specialized in biological sample transport. The quiet, specific businesses that existed to serve the families of people who were waiting — waiting for someone to come back, or waiting to find out if they would.
I stopped at the edge of the central plaza.
"The energy signature places the building in the northern administrative zone," I said. "Approximately eight blocks from here."
"We're walking," A-6 said. Not a question.
"We're walking."
We walked. The streets of Sector Communion had the specific texture of a district that took its purpose seriously without taking itself seriously — there were children's drawings in one foundation window, paper ones taped to the inside of the glass, the kind of thing a staff member had allowed and management had never bothered to remove. There was a man selling food from a cart on the corner of the third block who called out to everyone who passed with the cheerful persistence of someone who had been doing this for years and still found it worth doing.
"Foundation workers!" he called as we passed. "You look like foundation workers. I have the good stuff. The real food. Not the cafeteria."
A-6 kept walking. I stopped.
"What's real food?" I asked.
The man grinned with the satisfaction of someone whose pitch had worked. He was somewhere past sixty by appearance, grey at the temples, an apron that had seen significant use. "Depends on the day. Today I have —" he lifted the lid of the main container with a showman's flourish, "— braised protein with the grain from the northern agricultural block. Not the processed stuff. The actual grain."
"How long have you been here?"
"This corner? Twelve years. This sector?" He waved at the street around him. "All my life. Born three blocks that way. My mother worked at Foundation Verath-3 for thirty years. Quality assurance." He said it with the particular pride of someone whose family had found their place in the work of the civilization. "I couldn't do what she did. I have no stomach for it. But someone has to feed the people who do." He held out a container. "You look like you haven't eaten today."
I looked at A-6. A-6's expression communicated a complete absence of opinion on the matter while simultaneously communicating a strong opinion on the matter.
I took the container.
"How much," I said.
"For a foundation inspector?" He named a price that was entirely fair. "And tell me — is everything alright up here? In the sector? I ask because last night around the second hour there was something." He lowered his voice slightly, not from real secrecy but from the instinct to mark something as different. "A light. To the north. Not foundation light — different color. More — white. Very white. And it wasn't there long but it was there."
I held the container and looked at him. "What time?"
"Second hour. Maybe a little after." He put the lid back on his cart. "I'm up early for the prep. I saw it from my window. I thought maybe a new foundation was running calibration tests. But it didn't feel like calibration." He paused, searching for the word. "It felt like an arrival."
A-6 was very still beside me.
"Did you report it?" I asked.
"To who?" He said it without cynicism — a genuine question. "I'm a food vendor. I don't have a channel for reporting lights." He shrugged with the practicality of someone who had long ago established the boundaries of his operational jurisdiction. "I'm telling you because you're here and you're an inspector and it seemed like the kind of thing an inspector would want to know."
"It is," I said. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Come back tomorrow. I'm doing something with the yellow grain."
I paid him. We walked north.
"An arrival," A-6 said quietly, once we were half a block away.
"That's what he called it."
"The timing is consistent with when the field team was dispatched." A-6 glanced back once — brief, professional. "Huddersfield. If the subject was never dead — if they arrived rather than returned —"
"Then someone brought them," I said.
"And the light was the arrival."
"And the foundation was already there waiting to receive them." I looked at the food in my hand. Looked at the northern end of the street where the buildings grew older and the foundation light grew thinner and somewhere in the density of the district a building had been consuming energy for longer than the civilization had existed. "Someone planned this."
"Planned what exactly?"
"I don't know yet." I started walking again. "But they planned it well enough that they've been waiting sixty-three years for me to come looking."
"How do you know they were waiting for you specifically?"
I thought of the subject in the recovery room. The specific words reported by Seren Voss. The particular pronoun used.
Tell him I've been waiting.
"Because," I said, "they said so."
We walked the remaining five blocks in silence. The city moved around us — deliveries and conversations and the small continuous business of eleven million people going about the work of their lives in proximity to the most extraordinary thing the civilization had ever built.
Above a bakery on the sixth block a child leaned out of a window and dropped a paper that spun slowly down to the street and landed at A-6's feet. A-6 picked it up. It was a drawing — the clumsy, absolute kind that children made, full of conviction and no technique. A figure. Large, in the center. Surrounded by smaller figures. All of them with their hands raised.
A-6 looked at the drawing for a moment. Then placed it carefully on the ledge of the bakery window.
"Children draw the Council sometimes," A-6 said. "In school they tell them the Council keeps everyone safe."
"Do they," I said.
"You didn't know that."
"I knew it abstractly."
"That's different from knowing it from a transit car." A-6 looked at me. "Is that why you take the public transit?"
I did not answer immediately. We turned the corner onto the northern administrative block and there it was — a building that sat among the others with perfect unremarkable stillness, the same pale composite as its neighbors, no signage, no foundation light in the windows. Nothing to mark it except the fact that it was there and should not have been.
"Partially," I said finally.
"What's the other part?"
I looked at the building. At the city around it. At the eleven million people who lived their lives in this sector and fed each other and argued about cafeteria food and drew pictures of a Council they had never seen and trusted, without knowing they were trusting, that the system would continue to function.
"Accountability," I said. "You can't administer something you refuse to see."
I walked toward the door.