67: Bruising

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“What would you do, then?” I asked.

“Nothing. I wouldn’t get involved.”

“Well, what should I do, hypothetically?”

“Your goal is to make sure that the capuchins have options, right? So they don’t have to stay on the Stalwart and all become engineers if they don’t want to. Well, you don’t need the fleet charter for that. You just need a handful of ships that are quite different from each other, including the Stalwart itself, to sign their own free movement agreements. The more ships that are involved, the more secure the capuchins’ position would be, but you only strictly need about three or four ships that are entangled enough with each other that the diplomatic consequences of any one ship breaking the agreement would be dire. The Courageous isn’t really an ideal pick because the power difference between it and the Stalwart is too large for the Stalwart to really take the Courageous to task if the Courageous decided to cheat, and also they’re pretty far apart, but it is a good place to start anyway, because its influence means that it would be easier to pull in smaller ships that are more on the Stalwart’s level. And the Stalwart itself, of course. If they’re trying to hold onto the capuchins then they’ll be the hardest to convince, and the Courageous might be able to apply enough pressure to convince them, if it were so inclined. Which would be petty and messy and distracting this close to the colony bid, but whatever.”

“But you’re not going to use your connections to help me convince the Courageous.”

“I’m not, and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. I don’t know anyone who’d be useful for that.”

Ah, shiproute and stars.

“You have much better contacts for that kind of job than I do.”

I stared at her in surprise, but she seemed to be serious.

“Nobody with any power is going to get involved in something like that at a time like this unless there’s a public demand behind it,” she explained. “Do you know what the phrase ‘grass roots movement’ means?”

I’d seen grass before,and I knew it had roots, but I hadn’t known they moved, or what that had to do with anything. I shook my head.

“You might want to look it up,” she said with a wink. “And consider how interested the kids your age on the Courageous who have never left the ship might be in hearing about capuchins, and how many of them might make good friends with them if they started to exchange messages. And how quickly they would start asking the same questions as you, and pester their carers and families about it, and how many of those carers probably spend time talking about their children’s interests to their own friends. It only takes a small fraction taking an interest to be meaningful. There’s a lot of kids on the Courageous.”

That night, lying in bed, I went to message Tikka about whether she was free to hang out tomorrow, and once again had to skip through messages asking me if I wanted to take my standard literacy test, if I wanted to take the basic logic evaluation, if I wanted a physical checkup to better determine my competency statistics. I didn’t. On a whim, I decided to check just how many of these competency statistics they were missing on me, so I looked myself up, and… yep, there were dozens and dozes of them. Social compatibility indices, memory ratings, focus levels, physical strength and coordination…

They weren’t empty. I hadn’t taken a single one of their tests, but every single one of them had a number next to it. Almost all of them were flagged as tentative due to a lack of standardised collection data and warned about likely inaccuracy, but they all had something.

Could I find out where the numbers came from? Yes, I could. My low literacy score was obvious, based on the fact that I needed the low-literacy accessibility options for the computer system. Memory, logic, decision speed, even ratings that seemed to be about how quickly I ave up in the face of adversity, were based largely on the little puzzle games I played on the computer system when I was bored. I wouldn’t have played them if I knew they were tests! Physical statistics from the gym, ratings on various types of crafting competency from things I’d made in the workshop. That one was a little unnerving, because I could see how the gym equipment and the puzzle games could be designed to automatically spit out statistics or whoever used them, but judging my ability to repaint a sign in the workshop meant that somebody (probably the treegrave, but I was beyond making assumptions like that on this ship) had decided to watch me doing whatever I wanted, had decided to inspect my work, and had manually assigned a rating based on how good it was.

I was a really good painter, apparently, so thanks, Auntie Shorin.

Way down the bottom of the list, I did find some statistics for which they had no data. It was in my medical information, which made sense since I hadn’t been to a doctor on the Stalwart. They had basic emergency information about allergies and drug responses and stuff, which they’d probably requested from the Courageous like any sensible ship would (and knowing the Stalwart, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d requested a lot more and the Courageous had refused to tell them). But they also had a ‘vascular healing rate’, which stood out because it was flagged with warnings about tentative and incomplete data like the other ones collected by the Stalwart.

The data had been extrapolated (unreliably, as the warnings kept emphasising) from the healing rate of a single bruise on my ankle.

I asked the computer system to repeat that information. Then I pulled up the written version. The words I could read lined up with what the system had said. I remembered that bruise, vaguely. I’d been dawdling by myself in a relaxation room, walking around like an idiot, and had hit my ankle on one of the irregular protrusions that the rooms had to increase the variety and verisimilitude of their projections. (Somewhere in the Stalwart’s computer systems, I was sure, was a generations-old analysis of whether the increased entertainment effectiveness caused by that room design outweighed the increase in bruised ankles.) I hadn’t gone to the doctor. I don’t think I’d told anyone about it. I’d rested it for a bit and gone on with my life.

Which meant that someone had seen it on a camera feed and carefully tracked the appearance of my ankle for several days, and used that to extrapolate how well I could heal bruises.

I got under my bedcovers. I just felt better under there, I decided.

I didn’t like this, and I wasn’t sure why. I mean, the treegrave watches everyone. Security personnel watch people when they have to. My mum’s whole job is watching people on cameras, and she’s great at it. Except for when I was secretly sneaking into the Courageous’ treegrave, being watched made me feel safe, like it was supposed to. Complaining about being watched was for bratty little kids who didn’t know any better. And sure, the Courageous’ treegrave had no reason to stare at my ankle for several days, but it wasn’t like there was anything threatening or embarrassing about doing that. I walked around with bare ankles in public every day, lots of people saw them. I knew that the Stalwart liked to collect weird data about people, so why should this be a problem? I’m the one being stupid for being surprised, honestly. Why do I care if it knows how fast I can heal bruises? That’s not bad information.

It’s a silly thing to be upset about, and telling anyone how I felt would just sound even sillier. If I tried to explain it to Ella, she’d be confused and say that if I want more detailed vascular healing data then I should go to a doctor and let them run some tests. Tikka would ask me about how things are done on the Courageous to try to understand me, but then it would just turn into another conversation about our different cultures. Even the historians, I was pretty sure, wouldn’t be much help; they’d get into a conversation about Stalwart culture and about the usefulness and cultural relevance of gathering so much information and the philosophy of privacy.

For the first time in a long time, I wished that I was at home. My family would make me feel better. Auntie Shorin or Auntie Moli would hug me and listen to me talk and somehow that would help, even though it didn’t solve anything. Auntie Lia would distract me with jokes or ask for help with some work problem (which she didn’t need my help with, but I always appreciated how she didn’t make it obvious that she was babying me when she did this). Dad would help me to understand and accept the situation by talking with me about why the Stalwart might collect that kind of information, and help me feel either understanding or pity for them, depending on whether I thought it was a good or bad thing. Mum wouldn’t bother with understanding; she’d see something that was upsetting her daughter and that clearly had no practical value to make that upset worth it and march right to her coworkers in security to make an issue of the over-surveillance of children. Even my siblings, from tiny naive Heron all the way up to sarcastic and annoying Laisor, would react in some way that would make me feel a little bit better.

Wait, was I crying?

I was! I was crying about a small bruise that had healed months ago!

This was ridiculous. I was supposed to be smarter and stronger than this. Why was I throwing a tantrum like a baby over a bruise I barely remembered? I clenched my jaw and forced the tears to stop.

I wasn’t understanding my emotions, that was the problem. It was like the threat to the fleet; seeing this about the bruise had made me instinctively pick up on something serious, something I had to figure out. So what was it? What about this was upsetting me so much?

I’d injured myself in one of the relaxation rooms. And the treegrave (or maybe a some security personnel, it didn’t actually matter which) had noticed when I left the room and had tracked the injury. Why were they watching me so closely? There was a whole shipful of people around me, and the residents had to be more important than some visiting kid. So why had they noticed the bruise in the first place?

It had to be because of the capuchins. Maybe they did feel threatened by me. Maybe they were trying to keep the capuchins locked up and ignorant for bad reasons. I shouldn’t have opened up about my plans to the historians, or at the very least, I should’ve done so on a different ship. Why had I said anything? Idiot! I already knew that Fari was involved in whatever was going on! Ella… might be innocent, she seemed pretty protective of the capuchins, but she was Fari’s apprentice. And what about Sammo? I knew nothing about her except that she worked with Ella and Fari and didn’t like them very much. Was she involved? Or was she just some random person in their lab? There was no reason that their lab would have anything to do with anything. Fari could be a biologist and also, completely unrelated, a member of some secret capuchin-managing group.

Yes. That made sense. I was feeling fear and caution, because I’d realised what a dangerous situation I was in. That was why I was crying.

Fine. I could handle that.

Bring it on, Stalwart.

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