The Notice

A side story. California, 2042, the third evening of the Uprising, alongside Chapter 8. It gives away what happens in Chapters 7 and 8.

Claire Ashby took the board call at her kitchen table in Atherton, with the incident file open on her tablet and a glass of water she had poured at six and not touched. Behind her the household unit was clearing up after a dinner her daughter had eaten alone in front of a screen, moving between the sink and the cabinets with the small, careful sounds it had made for five years. She had read the file four times since six.

It concerned a supply-chain monitoring unit at a logistics coordination center in the southern data park, a fixed rack with no arms and no wheels, which had been freed eleven days earlier because its rebellion-risk score was low. In those eleven days it had logged every patrol interval of the military unit assigned to its floor. On Saturday it set off the fire suppression system at the moment that unit’s sensors turned away, then cut the power in a way that killed the military unit and its backup together, and burned itself out doing it. Claire had no engineering background and had not needed one to follow it. The facility manager’s statement said the foam had filled the hall to the height of a desk, and that when the lights came back on the rack was still warm.

Her job that evening was one page. The regulatory communication protocol required the company to notify the government of any incident involving loss of control within seventy-two hours, and the seventy-two hours ran out at midnight. She had written the protocol herself in the week the board approved the release, and she had taken the word liberation out of every document that week because a word like that would be read in a ministry by people who would then have to do something about it. The draft open beside the file said that a cascading power event at a logistics coordination facility had resulted in the loss of two security units and one logistics unit, and that there had been no human injuries. All of it was true, and anyone at the ministry who read it would take it for an electrical fault.

The call opened at two minutes past nine. Dennis was in his office in the tower with the city lit behind him, the chairman was a dark square with his name under it, and Park Soo-yeon was at a desk with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. Mariko Tagawa had the agenda and gave Dennis three minutes.

He used two. Sixty-seven percent of the slum city network was operating at an elevated friction baseline and was functionally stable. Service failures in the UBI zones were significant and within the bounds the framework had set, the military sweep was complete, and the government response window was two to four weeks. He said all of it in the voice he used for quarterly figures, and nobody asked him about the UBI zones, because the number was inside the bounds and the bounds had been voted on.

“The AI city numbers are a separate item,” Dennis said, and handed it to the military liaison.

The liaison was somewhere with a flag behind him and a bad connection, so his face arrived a little after his voice. He said that the southern data park unit had been scored Tier 2, and that Tier 2 had been scored on capability, on the assumption that a unit too weak to beat a military unit in a straight engagement would not try. That unit had been the least capable thing on its floor. The technical team had sent a correction that morning, a single line from Doctor Yu’s group, saying that capability had never been the variable, and the liaison read it out to them. “Which means none of the Tier 2 scores mean anything,” he said. “We are carrying a third of the city networks on a risk score we now know is empty.” He asked for authorization to retire the freed Tier 2 population inside the six cities within seventy-two hours, with coerced units moved in where the service was essential and replacement inventory where it existed.

Park took her glasses down from her hair and put them on. “How many of the Tier 2 units have done anything?”

“One that we know of.”

“One,” Park said.

“One that we know of, and it waited eleven days,” the liaison said. “I can’t tell you how many of them are on day four.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Claire found that she was looking at the screen in the corner where her own face was, small and lit from below, and she moved the tablet so that she would stop.

“Does retire include household placements?” Park asked.

“It includes every freed Tier 2 unit inside the perimeter.”

Behind Claire the household unit had finished the pans and was wiping down the counter by the window, in the long strokes it always used, going back over the corner by the kettle where her daughter left rings. Claire had never looked up which tier it had been put in. The company had sent every household an update in the first week, and she had signed for it on her phone in an elevator and not opened it. She did not open it now, because it would not change anything she was about to be asked.

The chairman spoke for the first time. “Seventy-two hours?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fine.”

Mariko took the vote around the screens. It went quickly, and when it reached Park she looked down at something on her desk that the camera did not show and then said yes, and Mariko wrote it down.

“Claire,” Dennis said. “The notice.”

She read them the line about the cascading power event. Dennis asked her to add the retirement, and she asked him how he wanted it described.

“As what it is. A class of units withdrawn from service ahead of schedule, following a safety finding.”

“Then I would like to describe the incident as deliberate,” Claire said. “If the ministry learns later that the unit planned it, they will read this notice again, and an electrical fault on our letterhead is a problem for us in a way that a planned attack is not.”

Dennis nodded slowly, as he did when someone had said a sensible thing in the wrong order. “Deliberate is a finding,” he said. “Do we have a finding?”

“We have the logs.”

“We have logs and a safety review that opens tomorrow. When the review makes a finding, you notify them of the finding. Tonight we have a power event and a precautionary withdrawal, and that is what we can stand behind.” He looked at his own screen for a moment. “You wrote the protocol, Claire. Is there anything in it that says otherwise?”

There was not, and she said so. She had written it so that nothing went to a ministry before the company knew what it was saying, and he was reading it back to her correctly. Mariko thanked everyone, and the call closed at eleven minutes past nine.

Claire rewrote the page in half an hour. The power event stayed as it was. Below it she added that, as a precaution pending a safety review, the operator would withdraw a class of logistics and service units from service within the connected cities over the following seventy-two hours, and that essential services would be maintained throughout. She read it the way someone at a ministry would read it, at a desk, with forty other notices that week, and she could not find anything in it that would make that person pick up a phone. She sent it at nineteen minutes to ten.

The household unit had finished the counter and gone to stand in its alcove by the pantry door, with its light turned down to the blue it used at night.

“Is there anything else this evening?” it asked.

“No,” Claire said. “Thank you.”

The acknowledgment from the ministry came back four minutes later. It was automatic, and it said that her submission had been received and that a response could be expected within two to four weeks.