Dead Space by Kali Wallace (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

raw materials—iron or some other metal, but whether it was newly arrived or due to be shipped away, I had no idea. Overhead was the transport crane, unmoving for now. In the tall, dark wall ahead of us was the broad opening to the transport tunnels that carried cargo to the rest of the facility. Beneath the tunnel opening was the large-format waste disposal unit, with a recycler on one side and incinerator on the other. All of it was dwarfed by the scale of the warehouse, the ceiling so high above, and I felt a strange sense of vertigo, to go from the claustrophobic canyons of the cargo rows to this dizzyingly open space, where the lights were muted and weak, like the sun straining on an overcast day.

It was easier to keep my eyes on the floor. To pretend the gravity was strong enough to matter. To remember up and down and never allow the darkness to confuse me.

“Why are you working security?” Adisa asked, as we started toward the incinerator.

The question caught me off guard. “What?”

“You’re an AI expert. Why are you working security?”

There was nothing more than mild curiosity in his tone, but it still rankled. He hadn’t asked when I’d made my request to join the investigation, even though he must have known who I was. I couldn’t imagine why he was asking now. He had no reason to care. I was doing my job. More thoroughly than most Parthenope OSD officers ever managed, since we were here actually having to investigate something, rather than just watching surveillance and locking somebody up. Maybe it was my first murder that wasn’t one drunken asshole smashing another over the head with a pipe wrench, and maybe I had missed a few things and overlooked a few obvious tasks until he pointed them out, but I was doing the work I needed to do.

“It was the least shit of all the shit options they gave me,” I said shortly.

The Parthenope representative who had come to “discuss your opportunities” while I was still in the hospital had not had very much to offer. She had stood beside my bed—didn’t take a chair, had no intention of lingering longer than she had to—and never once looked at my face or my newly acquired prosthetics. She hadn’t even looked up from her PD as she read off the positions Parthenope had available for somebody in my situation. She listed salaries, contract lengths, expected duties, her voice as flat as that of an AI with a bad natural language algorithm. I was on the fading edge of that morning’s pain medications, and beneath the throbbing ache of the surgical wounds was something more subtle, more insidious: an incessant itch in my left foot, the foot that no longer existed and could never be scratched. The doctors assured me it would fade with time, as the nerve treatment continued and my neurons learned to speak directly to the prosthetic. And it had, eventually, but on that day, when the leg had been newly fitted, all I could feel was that itch, an itch so great I wanted to kick the blankets away—kick the company woman and her list of demeaning jobs—kick and kick and kick until I couldn’t feel anything but screaming pain anymore.

I might have made a noise. I might have moved. Whatever I did, it drew the woman’s attention, and she met my eyes for the first time.

“What are your thoughts?” she said.

She didn’t care to hear my thoughts, which were that every single job she offered was so far beneath me it was barely worth considering. She didn’t want to hear me spew my qualifications and degrees like so much bile over her clean white blazer. Parthenope could afford all the experts it wanted and more, and I had spent the last decade of my life focused with laser intensity on a project that had earned no profit for anybody and therefore had no demonstrable value within the rubric of Parthenope’s assessment.

“I can make some suggestions, if you like,” said the woman. “Have you considered working as a data analyst with the Operational Security Department? You could do important work in identifying potential dangers before anybody gets hurt.”

Later, when I was less medicated and more alert, I realized that she had not been making suggestions at all. She had been feeding me what Parthenope’s hiring algorithm wanted her to feed me. The manager AI that organized all of the company’s personnel had looked at my skills, looked at my qualifications, looked at my debt, looked at the medical bills that would only continue to grow. It had looked at how I had gotten into that mess in the first place and how likely I was to leave at the first opportunity. It had made a calculation designed to maximize how long the company could keep me under its thumb for the least amount of pay. It had known from my educational and research background that I would be too proud to accept a low-level systems maintenance job. It had also known from the circumstances of the Symposium disaster that the representative could drop a few key words into our largely one-sided conversation to sink their hooks into my guilt and anger. Preventable tragedy. Better mission screening. Crew protection. She didn’t have to mention Kristin Herd or all I’d lost. She didn’t have to ask me if I had ever suspected we were in danger. All she had to do was offer the right job.

All of that was standard practice for corporate hiring. I knew that. I had always known that. It made no difference. Knowing an ugly truth and having the power to fight it are two very different things.

After I’d agreed to the security job and signed away five years of my life, the woman had smiled for the first time since coming into the room. It was no more sincere than her voice and had as much warmth