Data Interference

Elle Montgomery was fifty-four years old and had spent thirty of those years turning data into arguments she usually won. She was senior analyst for resource allocation on New Meridian, which meant that when the colony's crop yield projections came in wrong, it was technically her problem and spiritually everyone else's. She had a corner desk in the administrative hub, a chair calibrated to her spine, and a reputation for eating junior analysts alive at quarterly reviews. The affair with the visiting engineer, back when she was twenty-three, had been the last time anyone had caught her off guard, and she had spent three decades making sure nobody would do it again.

Then the colony imported Colt Stephenson.

Colt was fifty-six, an independent contractor, and the sort of man who billed by the hour and by the insult. He had been hired six months earlier to audit the colony's data systems, which everyone understood to mean auditing Elle's data systems, and he had made himself unpopular at a speed she grudgingly admired. He wore boots that clacked on the polished floors and he held opinions about her resource allocation model, and the opinions were not good ones, and worse, some of them were correct.

The discrepancy showed up on a Tuesday, in the middle of the long gray stretch of a Veridian afternoon when the ionic scrubbers cycled and the whole hub smelled faintly of ozone. Elle found it herself, which she considered important, because if Colt found it first she would never hear the end of it. A fourteen percent divergence between her projection and the field sensor data, all in the eastern grain terraces.

She traced it for two hours before she heard the boots.

"That's a sensor calibration error," Colt said, standing behind her chair without being invited. He read her screen over her shoulder, which was a habit of his she had been meaning to file a grievance about for months.

"It's a soil composition variance," Elle said without turning around. "The calibration logs are clean. I checked them first."

"Of course you did. And then you kept checking, because the numbers weren't doing what you wanted." He leaned a hip against her desk. She could see him in the reflection of her monitor, which was somehow more annoying than seeing him directly.

"The numbers are never doing what I want. That's the point of numbers." She pulled up the terraces' historical data. "The eastern sectors were regraded four years ago and the survey data was never resampled. Your precious audit missed that, by the way."

"My audit was of your systems, not your habits."

"My systems are my habits."

He laughed at that, a short bark that surprised her. "Fair. But if you want the discrepancy fixed instead of explained, we resample the terraces. That's field work. That's two people, minimum, and it goes through the central AI for scheduling and equipment."

Elle finally turned around. He was close, closer than he needed to be, with gray coming in at his temples and the particular smugness of a man who had once been right about something and intended to stay right about it forever. She had noticed before, in the clinical way she noticed outliers in a dataset, that he was not an ugly man. She had filed that observation under irrelevant and moved on.

"We'll need a joint requisition," she said.

"We will."

"I hate that."

"I know," he said. "I find it refreshing."

The requisition went through on Wednesday. The rejection came through on Thursday, and it came through loud, which was unlike the central AI, which generally communicated in the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug.

PROJECT FLAGGED: SOCIAL COHESION DEFICIENCY, the notice read. JOINT PROJECTS REQUIRING SHARED CREDIT REQUIRE DOCUMENTED COOPERATIVE RELATIONSHIP. MANDATORY SIX-WEEK PARTNERSHIP PERIOD. FINAL PRESENTATION MUST DEMONSTRATE EFFECTIVE INTERPERSONAL INTEGRATION.

Elle read it three times. "Interpersonal integration," she said to her empty office. The colony's AI had been drifting toward personality for a couple of years now, and everyone agreed it was unsettling, and nobody had done anything about it, because nobody could figure out which committee it belonged to.

She called Colt on the internal line. He picked up on the fourth ring, sounding like he had been asleep, though the colony's twenty-eight hour days made that accusation useless against anyone.

"You saw it," he said. Not a question.

"Six weeks of documented cooperation," Elle said. "With you."

"There are antidepressant dosages I'm more excited about. But we need the terraces resampled before the spring planting allocation locks, and you can't do the field work alone, and I can't run your model without you hovering."

"Then we fake it," she said. "We smile at each other in corridors. We have coffee where people can see us. We put enough logged collaborative hours in that the AI's pattern recognition gets bored and stops watching."

There was a pause on the line. "You want to deceive a system that monitors every transaction on this colony."

"I want to deceive one specific pattern recognition routine with a fixation on workplace harmony. It's not a person, Colt. It's a very nosy filing cabinet."

Another pause, longer. "All right. Coffee. Tomorrow, the place downstairs. We'll practice looking like we like each other. How hard can it be."

"How hard can it be," Elle repeated, and hung up before he could hear whatever her face was doing.

The cafe was one of the cramped dim ones off the maintenance corridors, the kind that existed because off-shift workers needed somewhere to sit that wasn't their bunks, and the lighting was kept low to hide what the local coffee substitute did to people's opinions. Elle arrived first and took the booth in the back, which had good sightlines and bad ambiance, her usual combination.

Colt came in five minutes late, which she logged, and ordered something with oat milk in it, which she logged harder.

"Okay," he said, sitting across from her. "Practicing. How was your day, Elle."

"Aggravating. How was yours, Colt."

"See, that's good. That has warmth. Well, it has hostility, but hostile familiarity reads as closeness to a pattern matcher. We've got that already. We're basically ahead of schedule."

"You're going to be insufferable about this, aren't you."

"I've been insufferable since I got here. This just gives it a budget line." He stirred his drink. Under the low light the lines around his eyes looked less like smugness and more like the simple arithmetic of being fifty-six and outdoors too much in his youth, somewhere with real sun. She resented the observation and had it anyway.

They ran through it. Small talk about the terraces, about the weather outside the scrubbers, about a colony councilor they both disliked for different reasons. It was stiff at first and then, somewhere in the second round of coffee, it wasn't. He was funny. She had known he was quick, because quickness was a professional threat, but funny was different, funny was personal, and she found herself laughing at something about the councilor's hairpiece and having to lower her voice because the booth was close and the cafe was quiet.

"You do that when you laugh," he said.

"Do what."

"Go quiet first. Like you're deciding whether you're allowed."

"I am deciding whether I'm allowed."

"Well," he said, "you are. Obviously."

The conversation moved on. She told him about the survey crew that had botched the regrading four years ago, and he told her about a colony he'd audited in his forties where the water board had been faking flow data with an animated chart, and she laughed again, quieter this time, and did not bother deciding.

It happened near the end, when they both reached to move the tray of cups off to the side. His hand crossed hers on the tray's edge. Just the backs of his fingers against her knuckles, a couple of seconds, an accident by any reasonable accounting.

The jolt went up her arm like a mislabeled data point. Fourteen percent divergence, right there in her own skin, between what she expected to feel about Colt Stephenson's hand and what she actually felt. She pulled back a half second slower than she should have. She hoped he hadn't noticed. She saw in his face that he had noticed, and that he was doing her own trick, filing it under irrelevant.

"Six weeks," she said, into the silence.

"Six weeks," he agreed.

Neither of them moved for the tray.

The trouble with logging fake collaborative hours, Elle discovered over the following week, was that the hours had to actually happen, which meant she and Colt were in the same room a great deal, and the room was never large enough.

The hub assigned them a shared workspace for the resampling analysis, on the grounds that a monitored partnership should be physically monitored too. What they got was a converted records office two floors below her corner desk, meant for one analyst and a terminal and maybe a shelf. It contained two chairs, one terminal, a shelf, and approximately a meter of unclaimed floor. The ventilation hummed at a frequency that seemed designed to erase higher thought. After three days Elle could feel it settling into her spine like sediment.

It should have been unbearable. It was, professionally. He draped his coat over the back of the only other chair and his boots clacked on the tile every time he stood to think, which was constantly, and he thought out loud, which was worse. But the work itself was good, and she hated that it was good. His audit methodology complemented her model the way his hands had complemented the tray, an accidental fit that suggested the universe had been arranging this for months without consulting either of them.

By the eighth day of the six-week period they had stopped pretending the simulation runs were urgent past ten at night. They stayed anyway. The hub at that hour was empty, the scrubbers on the skyline pulsing their slow green cycles, the corridors long and lit at half power, and the little records office felt oddly like a room outside the colony's jurisdiction. The AI watched logged hours, not late-night silences. Or so they told themselves.

That night Colt had spread printouts across the terminal's outer casing, which was against about four hub regulations, and was annotating them in handwriting far too neat for a man who ordered oat milk. Elle stood beside him to check a figure, and then they were both standing over the same page, shoulders nearly touching, and the ventilation hum seemed to get louder to fill the space where neither of them was saying anything.

"Your gradient is wrong," he said.

"My gradient is fine. Your sampling interval is wrong."

They turned at the same time. It was one of those pure geometric accidents, two people rotating around a shared axis, and suddenly his face was a handspan from hers and she could smell coffee and the faint mineral tang of the scrubber air that clung to everyone on night shift. Neither of them stepped back. She registered that fact with the detachment she usually reserved for other people's bad data, that neither of them stepped back, that this had apparently been coming for eight days or possibly since the cafe, and that the pattern recognition routine they were performing for had no cameras in this room, so whatever happened next would be off the books entirely.

"Well," Colt said, and it came out lower than his usual register. "This reads as closeness."

"It reads as stupidity."

"Those can coexist." His eyes went to her mouth and back up, an honest piece of signaling, no ambiguity in it. "I'm going to kiss you now unless you say otherwise."

"That's not how the line usually goes."

"The line usually goes however nobody says it. Say otherwise, or don't."

She didn't say otherwise. She leaned in the last few centimeters herself, so that whatever the record showed, it would show two participants, and then his mouth met hers and the eight days of ventilation hum and clacking boots and gradient arguments compressed into a single point of contact. It was not a careful kiss. His hand came up to the side of her jaw and hers fisted in the front of his shirt, printouts sliding forgotten off the terminal casing, and she made a low sound against his mouth that she would deny making if asked directly, which she would not be, because there was no record.

When they broke apart they were both breathing like they'd climbed the hub stairs instead of taking the lift. His thumb was still resting at her jaw. She made no move to remove it.

"Okay," she said. "That was a divergence."

"Fourteen percent at least." He was smiling, but not the corridor smile, the smug one. Something unguarded underneath it. "I've got a bunk in contractor housing that smells like recycled everything. You've got quarters with an actual door that locks, if I'm reading the housing allocation tables right, which I audited them, so I am."

"You're proposing we go to my quarters."

"I'm proposing we continue this somewhere the colony doesn't own the walls. Your call entirely. I can go back to annotating printouts like a man with dignity."

Elle considered the situation with thirty years of professional caution and found that the caution had walked off shift. "My quarters," she said. "And we're clear that this is physical release. Stress management. Two adults, fifty-four and fifty-six, no relationship, no expectations, and the project stays completely separate. Nothing about the partnership, the audit or your contract depends on this, and either of us can say stop or walk out at any point, no consequences."

"Completely separate," Colt agreed. "And the same goes for me, say stop and I stop."

"Good," Elle said.

"God, no relationship," Colt said, already gathering his coat. "At our ages the word alone sounds exhausting."

"Then stop talking and walk faster!"

Her quarters were eight minutes away through the empty corridors, and they managed four minutes of respectable silence before his hand found hers, and after that the silence stopped being respectable about anything.

Inside, the door locked behind them and she turned to face him in the small room, the single bunk, the one window with the scrubber light pulsing green through it, and felt the last of the day's performance drop off her like a coat. He looked around at the tidy desk, the aligned boots by the door, and said nothing, which was wise of him.

"Condom," she said. "I have some. You'll use one."

"Absolutely. Yes!" He said it without a flicker of argument, which scored him points she didn't tell him about.