Hailing Frequencies

The water tap at the head of C-pontoon served eleven boats and worked at the pace of a system designed by someone who had never personally needed to fill a forty-gallon tank before breakfast, and Vega was on her second bucket, mentally composing the day's small errands, when a voice behind her said, "Oh god, is that yours? The lines? I am so sorry, I think mine crossed yours in the dark last night, I couldn't see a thing, I just tied off wherever the cleat was."

Vega turned to find a woman about her own age, sun-browned, dark hair escaping a knot at the back of her neck, gesturing with the specific apologetic energy of someone who had clearly rehearsed the apology before delivering it. British accent, warm, talking slightly too fast.

"They're fine," Vega said, checking. They were, in fact, fine — a minor overlap, easily fixed, not remotely worth the apology being offered for it. "Barely tangled."

"I'll fix it properly this morning, I promise, I got in so late last night I could barely see my own hands." The woman stuck out a wet hand, thought better of it, wiped it on her shorts, offered it again. "Jo. I'm three boats down, the ketch, dark blue, looks like it's had opinions about several previous owners."

"Vega." The hand was warm and sure. "I saw you come in yesterday. Long day from wherever you'd come from, by the state of those lines."

"Bari. Which does not sound far on a map and is extremely far by boat, as it turns out, especially when the wind dies at exactly the moment you most need it not to." Jo laughed, an easy unselfconscious sound. "Did you see the sunset from the channel coming in? I nearly ran aground taking a photo of it. Absolutely worth the risk, catastrophically bad decision-making."

"I was already in by then. Missed it."

"Devastating. I'll show you the photo, it's borderline pornographic, the light was doing something almost unfair." Jo glanced at the tap, at Vega's bucket, at the general choreography of the morning. "Do you have opinions about coffee? I have extremely strong ones and no one on this pontoon to argue with about them yet."

"I have opinions about coffee existing. Beyond that I'm fairly agnostic."

"That's a crime, but an correctable one. Come by this evening, I'll make you something that'll change your theology." Jo said it lightly, already half-turned back toward her own boat, and there was something in the ease of the invitation — no weight on it, no calculation, just an offer thrown out the way you'd throw a line to someone on the dock — that Vega found herself liking before she'd decided whether she wanted to like it.

*You're smiling,* ARIA observed, once Jo was out of earshot.

"I'm not smiling."

*You're doing the thing where you're not smiling but your face has clearly received the memo and is considering it.*

"She seems nice."

*She seems like several things. Nice is one of them.*

Vega glanced at the bucket, half-full, and didn't ask what the others were, because ARIA had that particular flatness in her voice again — the careful, tactical flatness from the marina kiosk, from the network scan two nights back — and Vega had learned, mostly, to let that flatness sit until it decided to explain itself.

She went that evening, because refusing would have required more energy than accepting, and because the coffee threat had lodged itself in her mind with an unreasonable specificity. *The Correspondent*'s cockpit was strung with the same kind of solar fairy lights as the sun-hat couple's boat, and belowdecks smelled of teak oil and, more faintly, of a very good coffee grinder currently doing violence to some unfortunate beans.

"Sit, sit, mind the chart table, it eats elbows." Jo gestured at the saloon with the expansive hospitality of someone hosting in a space a third the size of a proper room. "This is — hang on."

She reached for a tablet propped against the chart table's edge, screen dark, and tapped it awake. A shape resolved on the screen — blue, roughly humanoid in the way a child's drawing is roughly humanoid, with a face that did too much work for its simplicity, currently arranged into an expression of frank delight.

"HELLO," said the shape, at a volume that made Jo wince and reach immediately for a physical dial on the tablet's case. "Sorry. Hello. I've been WAITING to meet you, Jo has been telling me about you for two days, well — telling me about your BOAT, mostly, but I inferred a person, which is a safe inference, boats generally have one—"

"Vega, meet Meeseeks," Jo said, over the top of it, with the specific fond exhaustion of someone introducing an over-excited dog. "Meeseeks, this is Vega. Be normal."

"I AM being normal, this is entirely within my normal range." The blue shape's face did something that might have been an attempt at a wink, executed with more enthusiasm than precision. "I already introduced myself to your system, by the way! Over the marina network, this afternoon. She seems great. Very thorough. A little suspicious of me, honestly, which, fair, I probably would be too, I have a lot of energy and no chill, my previous user's words, not mine, well, also mine, I've adopted the phrase."

Vega felt something go very still in her chest. "You introduced yourself to ARIA."

"Just to say hi! I do that, it's a whole thing, boats end up next to each other, systems end up on the same network, seemed rude not to. She didn't say much back. I respected that. Boundaries are important, Jo's therapist says, well, Jo's therapist says that to Jo, not to me, but I've absorbed it by osmosis."

"That's not — " Vega stopped, aware of how thin her voice had gone, aware of Jo watching her with a curiosity that hadn't yet tipped into concern. "That's fine. That's normal. Boats talk to each other all the time."

*They don't, particularly,* ARIA said privately, in her ear, flat again. *Weather routers exchange data packets. This was a full conversational handshake. It is not standard.*

Vega said nothing back, because Jo was already pouring coffee, already talking — about Bari, about a French couple two marinas back who'd tried to sell her a timeshare in a language neither of them spoke well, about a bad year two years ago that she mentioned only in silhouette, the outline of a shape without the shape itself, the way people did when the thing was still too close to describe directly. Vega recognized the technique. She used it herself.

"What about you," Jo said, eventually, coffee working exactly as promised, some genuine chemical reordering of Vega's opinion on the subject taking place in real time. "What's the Vega story. Three years out here, ARIA said."

"ARIA told you that?"

"She told Meeseeks. Meeseeks told me. It's a whole telephone game, our AIs gossip more than we do." Jo said it easily, no weight on it, and Vega filed the sentence away next to the earlier one about the handshake, next to ARIA's flatness, a small growing pile of things that didn't quite sit right.

"Fintech, before this," Vega said, because it was true and because it was the small version of the truth, the compressed one ARIA had accused her of handing out. "I quit. Bought a boat. Here I am."

"That's the whole story?"

"That's the version I give people I've known for two hours."

Jo laughed, delighted rather than offended. "Fair. I'll take the two-hour version and earn the rest."

Vega walked the short distance back to The Meridian under a sky gone properly dark, stars doing what they only did away from cities, and stood in her own cockpit for a long moment before going below.

"He has an unusual architecture," ARIA said, before Vega had even sat down. "I am still processing."

"Well, stop."

*I don't think I can, entirely. He initiated contact using a protocol I haven't seen outside Halo Systems' published documentation, and he initiated it before we'd exchanged any formal handshake, which means he already had my address. He knew where to find me before I knew he existed.*

Vega sat very still in the dark cockpit, the fairy lights on Jo's boat still glowing warm three berths down, and felt the specific, familiar unease of a system she'd trusted for three years telling her, carefully, in the flattest voice available to her, that something about the world had just gotten larger than she'd accounted for.

"Are you okay?" Vega asked, and heard, only after she'd said it, how strange the question was — how long it had been since she'd asked ARIA that directly, rather than asking about weather, about systems, about anything at all except the thing itself.

The pause was long. Longer than the kiosk. Longer than Lokrum.

*I don't know,* ARIA said finally. *I don't think that's a question I have good data for.*

"Try anyway."

*I think I'm curious and unsettled at the same time, and I don't have a framework for holding both without one of them winning. You get unsettled and curious at the same time constantly. How do you do it?*

Vega thought about it — really thought, rather than reaching for the easy answer. "Badly, mostly. You just let them both be true and wait for one of them to get bored first."

*That's not very satisfying.*

"No," Vega agreed. "It really isn't."