Crav wakes up to too-bright daylight, not enough sleep, and a bunch of CapeLink DMs. Starts the drip filter, splashes water on her face, and shuffles back to the kitchenette swiping out replies on her phone.
Some sort of UFO sighting (purported) last night, and she’s got a reputation for rapidly picking out bullshit on those.
She wonkily slices a stale raisin and cinnamon bagel, wrangles in into the toaster, slurps coffee.
She’s been out of bed for thirty-six minutes before she glances up at the scarred machine which takes up most of the living room, at the display that says — in no language they have, on this planet —
OFFLINE LAUNCHING WORMHOLE RECONNECTION SOLVER… ESTIMATING SOLUTION TIME PER SOLVER CLASS [7/7] PICKING BEST ESTIMATE TIME-TO-SOLUTION… RUNNING SOLVER: ETS 6.8kh [3%]
Five lines. One-sixteenth of the display’s vertical real estate. The percentage has ticked up, since she crashed here; another 70-odd years to go, but who’s counting.
She’s spent so much time staring in despair at those five fucking lines; for a moment it feels like she’s having a stroke.
The display’s changed.
OFFLINE LAUNCHING WORMHOLE RECONNECTION SOLVER… ESTIMATING SOLUTION TIME PER SOLVER CLASS [7/7] PICKING BEST ESTIMATE TIME-TO-SOLUTION… RUNNING SOLVER: ETS 667.8kh [3%] PAUSING SOLVER (SAVING PROGRESS)… CATCHING PEER-TO-PEER OFFLINE DRIVEBY SOFTWARE UPDATE CALCULATING UPGRADE PATH… CURRENTLY SUPPORTED UPDATE FORMAT: FracPack 3.0 UPDATING UPGRADE INFRASTRUCTURE [100%] CALCULATING UPGRADE PATH… CURRENTLY SUPPORTED UPDATE FORMAT: FracPack 4.1 UPDATING UPGRADE INFRASTRUCTURE [100%] CALCULATING UPGRADE PATH… CURRENTLY SUPPORTED UPDATE FORMAT: FracPack-NG 1.0 UPDATING SYSTEM [100%] LAUNCHING WORMHOLE RECONNECTION SOLVER… LOADING PLUGGABLE SOLVER ALGORITHMS [34] ESTIMATING SOLUTION TIME PER SOLVER CLASS [10/10] PICKING BEST SOLVER: · Hall-Wyatt ParaSolve52: ETS 101.2kh ATTEMPTING SOLUTION SPACE PRUNING: · HALL CROSSPOINT SYMMETRY · UPSILON-FRONTIER REDUCTION · PARANOMIAL SCATTER PROFILING RECALCULATING ETS… 40.4kh RECONCILING SAVED SOLUTION PROGRESS… RECALCULATING ETS… 32.2kh HEURISTICALLY REORDERING SEARCH SPACE: Most-Likely-First RUNNING SOLVER… · SUBOPTIMAL WORMHOLE ROUTING SOLUTION FOUND [in 6h42m3s] · CONNECTING (BACKGROUND SOLVER CONTINUING FOR BETTER SOLUTION) System Data Connection Restored Downloading updates… Background updates launched… System messages: · 6356 informational · 723 urgent · 62 priority · 1 BLOCKING, READ NOW TO UNLOCK SYSTEM
Nervelessly, Crav lifts her phone, thumbs open the CapeLink UFO sighting board, opens up the thread from last night, headed with a blurry photo and filled with the usual jeers.
I think it’s real, she types shakily, and has to put her phone down and stare at the display some more to make sure she didn’t hallucinate it. If one of them is real, the other has to be; effect implying cause. She reaches out, hesitantly, and touches the READ NOW, which expands into a popup with a watermarked Corvid-emblem background.
Welcome, it says.
We understand that you have been out of contact with the network for some time. During this time, there have been some major practical and political changes. Before you can be fully retrieved, it’s necessary to brief you on the changes that impact on you and your continued service— and she has to stop to stare at the emblem behind the text.
It’s. Wrong. The various Corvid successor orgs mostly kept variations on the dot-in-broken-circle, and she’s spent most of her adult life closing problem tickets for the Crows; whack-a-moling trouble on behalf of a parallel-universe-spanning post-scarcity org was the absolute best deal that would get her off her shithole homeworld. She’s spent so long looking at the small-white-circle, stylised-white-feather-curved-nearly-into-a-circle on a black background that the Crows use — as display wallpaper, on her uniform, on walls and vehicles and in message footers. She’s seen enough, too, of the abstract dot-and-geometric-curve the Rookery use; the many Jaybird variations, the Magpies’ central starburst.
Nobody’s got the stones to assume the ancestral Corvid — actual-factual Corvid, pre-Fragmentation — dot-and-circle. But here it is. Here it fucking is: a complete geometric line, unbroken, circling a stylised planet.
As one-two punches go, the knowledge that her shipwrexile may be over, followed by what the FUCK am I even going home to? is a hell of a combo. It’s not enough to make her consider just keeping up moonlighting as a superhero on this technologically dismal mudball, but it does put her heart in her throat.
She keeps reading.
