Page 7 of Deep Alien Obsession

"I have faced this wall for most of my career," I tell her. "It has never done anything."

Claire walks up and puts her palm flat against it.

Nothing happens. She waits, moves her hand, tries the lower quadrant, tries both. Nothing. She steps back and gestures at it, offering me the failure.

I set my palm against it. Nothing.

"Higher," she says, and reaches up to push my wrist toward the upper edge, and her fingers close around my forearm while my hand is still on the surface.

The relay wakes.

Not a flicker, not a boot sequence. It is dark and then it is lit, blue-white, the light coming from inside the material rather than off it, and a column of glyphs resolves at chest height between our two hands.

Neither of us moves. Her grip on my arm tightens by a fraction she probably isn't aware of.

"Don't let go," she breathes.

"I'm aware."

We stand like that while six centuries of the city's history writes itself down a wall in front of us.

It is a log. That much is obvious before we can read it — the structure is a ledger, entries stacked, each carrying a mark, a duration, and a status. Claire gets her cracked reader out and starts capturing, and we work out a way to shuffle sideways along the wall with neither of us breaking contact, which must look ridiculous and which neither of us remarks on.

The entries run out near the floor. The last one before ours is old — roughly six centuries, if the duration marks scale the way the spacing suggests.

Then our entry, written this minute. Two marks side by side.

It's the status glyph that stops me.

Three nested chevrons over a closed circle. I saw it this week, stenciled in Precursor original above the personnel arch on the Nineteen concourse, and underneath it, in blocky human paint from the war, somebody had translated it: RETURNING CREW.

"Darius." Claire has followed my eyes to the glyph and back. "What."

"It hasn't logged us as intruders."

"Then what does it think we are?"

"Expected."

She takes that straight to the wildest available conclusion, at speed. Within four minutes she has proposed that the relay is keyed to Alzohn physiology, discarded it, proposed a two-point circuit requirement, then a mass threshold, then something involving bioelectric phase she abandons on her own thirty seconds later. She gestures as she talks. Her other hand stays clamped on my arm throughout.

I don't theorize. I document. Position, dimension, spectrum, the wake sequence, and the fact that the surface runs eleven degrees warmer than the rock it sits in and did not twenty minutes ago. Somebody in a century will want the measurements. They will not want our guesses.

"You think I'm being unserious," she says.

"You're generating faster than you're filtering."

"That's what generating is."

"And someone has to record what actually happened, or in ten years all we'll have is the story we liked best."

She considers this. "Okay. That's fair. That's annoyingly fair."

Three hours at the wall. Somewhere in the middle she needs the fine probe and I have already turned to my pack. Later I need the shim gauge and her hand is out with it before I open my mouth. She isn't looking at me. She's looking at the glyph column, and the gauge arrives in my palm anyway.

We both stop.

"Did you⁠—"