Day One
(age twenty-four)
The day that Kelli Reynolds got drawn into her ex’s life of crime had started out as a good day.
A good day, for Kelli, followed routine.
Her alarm went off at precisely six in the morning, playing an Inspiration Music track that had been tailored to her preferences: soothing timbre, bright melody, steady beat.
She let herself lie still for the whole song, breathing meditatively: in for four beats, hold for four beats, out for four beats, hold.
Kelli could be irritable, some days, for no reason—it was part of her neurotype, a mental itch set off by every little thing.
It was better if she started her mornings calm.
Today was good, though. When the song changed, she stretched in the bright morning light, threw on a soft white bathrobe, and padded out to her apartment’s kitchenette.
It was a small apartment but a professional one, everything white and gold, well-made and clean.
The coffee maker whirred, dispensing grounds from the transparent sphere that hung above it, and adding exactly two teaspoons of sugar from a side column.
It all got poured into Kelli’s favorite mug—a company mug with the Inspiration AdventureVerse logo and a brightly colored image of rambling tropical coastline, the exact island from the very first episode of Ship of Fools.
When she looked at that mug, she felt proud of herself.
As she drank, she read a chapter of a book on her workstation.
Riptides: The Coral Throne was a tie-in volume giving the backstory of the main characters from the show Riptides, which was about mermaids.
Their matriarchal social structure, their sea vent-based economy, the intricacies of their politics and their conflicts with the surface world.
Kelli’s boss had been hinting that someone was going to ask for a crossover between Ship of Fools and Riptides, so she had better get familiar with the lore; but she also liked it for its own sake.
She liked the intricate beauty of the mermaids and the way they made their choices, intelligible but not quite human-normal, a little cold-blooded, a little changeable, like the currents.
When she’d emptied the mug, she put it carefully face down in the dishwasher.
She showered and dressed in her work clothes: a soft white skirtsuit with a shimmering rose-gold blouse, and shiny but comfortable shoes.
She’d gotten everything tailored in soft fabrics so that they wouldn’t set off her sensory sensitivities.
She blow-dried her thick dark hair—the warmth was soothing, and she’d put down extra money years ago for a silent drier.
She put on a small amount of tasteful makeup.
She put on her noise-cancelling headphones, which matched her outfit.
Kelli was a professional—a human talented enough to get a steady wage for the kind of work a machine couldn’t do.
It was an honor only ten percent of the population still possessed.
She took it seriously, and she dressed the part.
Kelli’s apartment building stood at the intersection of two streets in a large, pressurized section of the city.
It was a good neighborhood, not claustrophobic like some of the neighborhoods on Callisto—it had open-air sidewalks, runnels of soil with lush green trees, and a view of a few dozen yards in every direction, under the shining white of a domed arbor ceiling.
She switched her headphones on, and more personalized music played soothingly.
This batch was called The Geode Collection—2935.
The number meant it was one of about ten thousand variations on a central theme, each tailored for a certain type of listener.
If she wanted to, she could browse the other variations or shuffle them at random; or if she was the kind of person who had friends, she could swap version numbers with a friend.
A hyperloop station sprawled, big and bulbous, at one end of the city section. Kelli showed her pass to the card reader and it opened the turnstile. When the next pod pulled up, she settled into the soft plastic seat and let the whoosh of movement push her gently backward.
The hyperloop extended outside the city proper for some sections, giving passengers a view of Callisto’s pockmarked landscape, a dark rock-ice conglomerate dotted with bright spikes of frost; the sky, black and glittering with stars; the gibbous bulb of Jupiter, heavy in the sky, with its layer cake of red and orange swirls.
The sun, far away, smaller than the planet but too searchlight bright to look at, cutting harshly through the darkness around it.
Kelli loved to look out at that landscape, empty but so much wider and more expansive than anything inside the city.
On the other side the pod passed the multilevel maze of the shopping concourse; the low, burnished, soot-streaked entrance to the phosphorous mines; the green and white of the hydroponic farms, and the closed-in concrete grid of Basic Housing, which always made her tense, even with the headphones pumping soft music into her ears.
She closed her eyes when she passed Basic Housing and started counting again.
In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
If she was good at her job, she would never have to go back there again.
Thirty minutes from Kelli’s apartment, the shining tower of Inspiration’s media headquarters for Callisto rose into the starry sky.
This was one of the finest buildings on the whole moon, even shinier and broader than the good neighborhood where she lived.
Kelli brushed her thumb across the scanner in the lobby and took the elevator to the twenty-fifth floor, where the script supervisors worked.
Up on this floor, a long white desk curved between the elevator and the open-plan office, with a touchscreen interface for the secretarial AI.
Kelli touched her thumb to that interface, too, clocking in, and then walked through into her own room.
Kelli had a private office as a disability accommodation: small and white and immaculate, like her apartment, with all the latest equipment glinting rose-gold on her desk.
She sat down in the ergonomic chair, flicked her thumb across a third scanner, then entered her password for two-factor authentication.
The screen blinked to life, piled up with all the notifications that had gathered since yesterday afternoon.
One bubbled up through the rest, biggest and brightest.
Confidential, it said. New Outline—Ship of Fools, S01 E08.
Kelli grinned with delight, then reached out and touched it.
The outlines for the next batch of AdventureVerse episodes had been due to come in today, and working from an outline to a script was Kelli’s favorite part of the job: setting ScriptGen up just right, having the AI spin out dialogue and description that matched the beats of the outline, then editing and massaging the text wherever necessary until the dialogue really felt like Orlando’s and the actions really felt like things he’d do.
The display screen’s lights flickered for three-quarters of a second as it loaded the file from Inspiration Callisto’s central memory banks.
Company workstations like Kelli’s kept little or nothing on their own hard drives.
The Inspiration language model itself had been trained in a monster data facility, itself the size of a city, back on Earth, a rack of servers big enough to hold all the human language that had ever been produced.
The full model with all its training data was never taken out of that facility for any reason.
Only the model’s connection weights, after training, were ever brought outside.
In facilities like Callisto’s, those sets of connection weights were then fine-tuned using special-purpose kernels to perform a given task.
On Kelli’s workstation, ScriptGen opened automatically, a pastel-colored interface full of buttons to press. The new outline filled a demure white box taking up half of the screen. It read:
SHIP OF FOOLS S01 E08—MISTAKEN ISLAND
Orlando’s ship requires repairs. He pulls into an unfamiliar harbor.
The locals agree to sell him the supplies he needs, but some supplies have to wait.
There is a religious taboo against selling them on certain days.
The locals’ religion is eerie and they seem to know things they should not.
Orlando is skeptical. When the delays increase, he investigates the local temple.
B plot: Narine and Kendrick argue. Kendrick has not been pulling his weight with the repairs and Narine has been covering for him.
Kendrick thinks Narine is power hungry and worries she is planning a mutiny.
There is a comical misunderstanding as Narine’s cleaning chores are mistaken for spying on the rest of the crew.
Orlando survives several traps only to be captured in the middle of the temple by a priestess.
The magic of the temple is real and lets the locals communicate over distances.
Admiral Malinverni used this communication to bribe the priestess to keep Orlando delayed until the Imperial Navy could catch him.
Orlando fights his way out with the help of Narine, who arrives at the last minute with reinforcements.
Narine reaffirms her loyalty to Orlando. They take their supplies and sail away.