“Well, what language were you using?”

“Uh—Amanglic.”

“Yeah—in machine terms that’s not very complex. In fact, it’s infantile in its simplicity. You got the jail your levels of complexity merited.”

“But did you really expect me to stay put?”

“Not me, Micky. The software. This stuff is autonomic‘

“Alright, did the autonomic software expect me to stay put?”

“If you were a nine-year-old girl with a teenage brother,” she said, rather bitterly, “You would have stayed put, believe me. The systems aren’t designed to understand human behaviour, they just recognise and evaluate language. Everything else is machine logic. They draw on my subconscious for some of the fabric, the tone of things, they alert me directly if there’s an excessively violent breakout, but none of it has any real human context. DeCom doesn’t handle humans.”

“So if this Nadia, or whoever she is. If she came in speaking, say, old time Japanese, the system would have put her in a box like mine?”

“Yes. Japanese is quite a bit more complex than Amanglic, but in machine terms the difference is close to irrelevant.”

“And she’d have got out easily, like me. Without alerting you, if she was subtle about it.”

“More subtle than you, yes. Out of the containment system anyway. Finding her way through the sensory interfaces and the baffles into my head would have been a lot harder. But given time, and if she was determined enough…”

“Oh, she’s determined enough. You know who she says she is, don’t you?”

A brief nod. “She told me. When we were both hiding down here from the Harlan interrogators. But I think I knew already. I was starting to dream about her.”

“Do you think she is Nadia Makita? Really?”

Sylvie picked up her drink and sipped it. “It’s hard to see how she could be.”

“But you’re still going to let her run things on deck for the foreseeable future? Without knowing who or what she is?”

Another shrug. “I tend to judge on performance. She seems to be managing.”

“For fuck’s sake, Sylvie, she could be a virus for all you know.”

“Yeah, well from what I read in school, so was the original Quellcrist Falconer. Isn’t that what they called Quellism back in the Unsettlement? A viral poison in the body of society?”

“I’m not talking political metaphors here, Sylvie.”

“Nor am I.” She tipped back her glass, emptied it again and set it down.