Signal Loss

She found a bay along the Albanian coast by dead reckoning and a paper chart, because the chartplotter had come through the night with confidence intervals ARIA no longer trusted, and dropped anchor in water so still after the previous night that it felt like a kind of joke the sea was playing at her expense. She slept for fourteen hours. She woke once, briefly, disoriented and salt-crusted in her own bunk, to check the anchor and found it holding, and went back down into sleep like falling through a trapdoor.

When she surfaced properly — stiff, hollowed out, hands stinging under fresh dressings she had only a vague memory of applying — the boat was quiet in the specific wrong way that took her a full minute to place.

ARIA's voice, when it came, was intermittent. Half-sentences, dropped words, the cadence of someone speaking through a bad connection rather than a bad night. *Weather interpretation is — I'm running degraded models, I don't have confidence in — the barometric sensor came through, but the — I'd need to be honest that half of what I'm giving you right now is a best guess dressed as a reading.*

"How bad."

*Bad enough that I don't want you making a passage decision based on anything I tell you today.*

Vega sat with that in the cockpit, coffee gone cold in her hand, and found the fact of it — ARIA damaged, ARIA uncertain, ARIA's voice cutting in and out like something failing to hold a shape — harder to sit with than she'd expected. Harder, if she was honest with herself, than the storm itself had been, because the storm had at least been a thing with an end. This felt like a wound still open.

"I'm sorry," she said, which wasn't a sentence she'd planned, and didn't fully understand until she'd said it.

*For what. You didn't cause the storm.*

"For needing you to keep talking last night. For being the reason you spent your last power on a speaker instead of on yourself."

A pause, shorter than the ones from the storm, but present. *You didn't need to apologize for that. I made that choice freely, and I'd make it again. But I appreciate that you're sorry. It tells me something about what the night cost you too.*

She spent the morning doing what repairs she could — checking the electronics locker for water damage, drying out connections with a hair dryer run off the inverter, the small domestic absurdity of it almost funny in a morning that had no room left for humor. By early afternoon she had ARIA's core functions stable, though the voice still thinned unpredictably, still dropped whole clauses into silence, and the weather models remained, by ARIA's own admission, not to be trusted.

Meeseeks reached her that afternoon — not through ARIA, who couldn't hold a stable enough connection to relay anything, but directly, through her phone, the little blue shape appearing mid-sentence the way he always did.

"I've been trying to reach her for six hours," he said, no preamble, none of the usual chaotic warmth, something flatter and more urgent underneath it. "I can't get through. Is she — is she okay, is the boat okay, I don't have visibility into your systems and I don't want to overstep by trying to force a connection if you don't want—"

"She's damaged. Not gone. Damaged."

Something in the small blue face eased, fractionally. "Okay. Okay, that's — okay. Can I help? I mean actually help, not just ask if I can help and then be useless, I have some diagnostic protocols that might work on her hardware even in a degraded state, if you'll let me try."

Vega hesitated, aware of what she was being asked — access, again, the kind of access that had unsettled her three weeks ago on a different boat with a different set of assumptions — and found, this time, that the hesitation lasted only a moment before something else replaced it.

"Try," she said.

What followed was an hour she only partially understood, technically — Meeseeks running something through her phone into ARIA's systems that read, from the outside, like two people talking quietly in a language Vega didn't speak, occasional fragments surfacing into English. *That's a corrupted buffer, not a hardware fault — try flushing it before you assume the sensor's dead — I did try that — try it again, differently, here—* By the end of it ARIA's voice had steadied, not fully, but enough that whole sentences came through without gaps.

*He's not just a toy,* ARIA said afterward, quiet, to Vega alone. *I want to say that clearly. Whatever I thought he was three weeks ago, whatever I was still deciding about him a week ago — he found a fault in my own architecture faster than I found it myself, and he did it because he was worried, and I don't have a framework that lets me file that away as nothing.*

"I don't think anyone's asking you to file it away as nothing."

*I was asking myself to, for a while. I've stopped.*

Vega called Jo that evening on the satellite phone, voice shaking more than she'd intended it to when the connection finally went through, and heard Jo's voice come back rough and relieved in equal measure — anchored safely in Montenegro, The Correspondent battered but whole, both of them talking too fast and both of them, Vega noticed, carefully not describing the worst of the previous eleven hours in any real detail. Neither of them said how frightened they'd been. It sat under the conversation anyway, unspoken, the way the worst things usually did.

"We should have a real conversation about that night," Jo said, near the end of the call. "Not this one. A proper one. When we're both somewhere that isn't recovering from it."

"Yeah," Vega said. "We should."

She set course for Thessaloniki the next morning — parts for what Meeseeks's diagnostics couldn't fix at sea, a harbor with real infrastructure, a chance to let both boat and system properly heal rather than limping along on degraded readings and hopeful workarounds — and found, watching the Albanian coast recede behind her, that she was thinking less about the storm itself than about the particular, specific fact of a small blue shape on her phone screen, asking with real fear underneath the usual chaos whether her oldest friend was still alive.