Nilufar

The message came on a Thursday, three weeks after the novel failure deployment.

It came through the personal device, not the station system — which meant family, or something that had not yet become official. She was eating when she saw it. She finished what she was eating before she read it.

Her cousin Nilufar was brief by habit, as she had always been: They're saying soon. The letter hasn't come yet but Kamal has seen the coordination plan. Twenty-four months from the formal notification. We knew this was coming.

Priya read it twice. She put the device down. She picked it up and read it again.

She had grown up forty kilometres from Banshtala on the same river system — the same tidal cycles, the same monsoon rhythms, the same knowledge of what the delta did in February and what it did in July and what the difference meant. Her father and Nilufar's father had been brothers, both of them men who had worked the water in different ways — one for the Authority, one for the colonies. The knowledge had divided along that line and been passed down accordingly. Priya had the mesh and the station and the twelve years of deployment records. Nilufar had the Apis dorsata and the canopy and the thing she knew about the season from watching the light move through the upper branches in August.

They had not been close as children — different villages, different schools, the family connection maintained through festival visits and occasional weddings. But Priya had been to Banshtala. She knew Nilufar's hands, the equipment she kept. She knew the way Nilufar moved through the outer margin of the buffer zone as if it were a room in her house.

She did not reply that day.

She composed three responses across the following week, none of which she sent. The first said: I know. I'm sorry. The second was longer and said more and was worse. The third said nothing useful and she deleted it.

What she wanted to say was not available in the register that messages permitted. She wanted to say: the system that employs me has read my body across two hundred and forty-seven deployments. It has used what my nervous system knows to classify things it could not classify without me. I have confirmed every reading it asked me to confirm. I did not know, until recently, what I was confirming. I do not know yet what that means. She did not send this.

What she knew, and had not said to anyone, was that the notification from the system administration — Your deployment record has been updated — and the relocation plan for Banshtala were not unconnected. She did not know how they were connected. She knew that the system that read her was also the system that recommended. That what she carried in her nervous system fed the model that had looked at the western buffer zone and found it wanting. She could not prove this. It was not the kind of thing that could be proved from where she was standing. But the system ran on data and she was data and the model had been fed and the buffer zone had been assessed and Nilufar had received the news from Kamal who had seen the coordination plan.

She filed her morning reports. She ran her calibration sequences. She attended to what the mesh was reading, doing the thing she had learned to do: not interpreting, not narrating, simply receiving.

She did not reply to Nilufar's message. She told herself she would, soon, when she had found the right words. She understood that this was not true and she let it be not true, because some things you carry without putting them down and without knowing exactly what carrying them costs.