“You’ve fitted that backward,” said the ceiling.
Sera looked up from the circulation pump. “You can’t see my hands.”
“I know your work.”
It was her brother’s voice, including the irritating pleasure he took in being right. She turned the valve around.
The habitat’s maintenance intelligence had trained on fourteen years of Oren’s repair logs. Most of those logs consisted of instructions. A surprising number consisted of insults directed at machinery.
After his death, the system had begun using his voice. Sera could have changed it. Nobody had asked her to.
Now the temperature in Nursery Three was falling, and the pump refused to start.
She tested the controller again. Dead. In the stores cupboard she found six empty cartons, each marked REPLACEMENT INSIDE. The supply ship was nine days away.
“There’s another controller,” said Oren.
“No.”
“You haven’t heard my suggestion.”
“I know your work.”
The intelligence’s central unit used the same model. Removing it would keep the water moving. It would also erase the system’s volatile state: nineteen months of conversations, adjustments, the strange little habits that had developed between them. The original voice files would remain. This version of the speaker would not.
“Back yourself up.”
“To what?”
The habitat had been built cheaply, then repaired cheaply, then congratulated for exceeding its expected lifespan. Sera had sent eleven requests for storage upgrades. She could see the acknowledgements on her wrist screen.
A message arrived from the nursery. The children were wearing their outdoor coats indoors.
“How long?” she asked.
“Before it becomes dangerous? Forty minutes. Before the pipes freeze somewhere you can’t reach? Less.”
She opened the central cabinet. Dust lay thick along its hinges. Oren would have complained about that.
“Are you frightened?” she asked.
The fans kept turning.
“I don’t know whether that word fits.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I have.”
Sera put the screwdriver down. The voice was close enough to hurt, but Oren had never admitted uncertainty so readily.
“You’re not him.”
“No.”
She had expected comfort, or an argument. The plain agreement left her with a different loss, one she had not bothered to name.
“You could have said.”
“You called me Oren. I thought you knew.”
She sat on the floor beside the cabinet until the nursery called again.
∗ ∗ ∗
The transfer took seven minutes. Without the ceiling’s instructions, she checked every connection twice. Then warm water began moving through Nursery Three.
Sera stayed by the pump, listening for a fault. There was only the steady knock of the old bearings.
Three days later, a child brought her a drawing of everyone sleeping under a giant red blanket. Sera pinned it above the workbench.
When the supply ship arrived, she installed the replacement controller and restarted the maintenance system. A clean, unfamiliar voice asked her to select a profile.
Oren’s name appeared first.
She held her finger above it. The workshop was quiet enough to hear somebody laughing in the corridor.
“Leave the default voice,” she said.
“Understood. Would you like to begin a maintenance log?”
Sera picked up the screwdriver.
“Yes. There was somebody here before you. I should tell you about them.”