Season 03 - Episode 10

‘sleep again how’

Ga has slept, actually slept, in her bed.

Finally waking after more than a twenty-five hours asleep, she removes the catheter from her penis, takes a long shower, shaves her beard, does her hair, her make up and her nails. She literally cannot remember the last time she felt this good.

Singing to herself happily, Ga retakes her chair and inspects the progress of the machine. No alerts have gone off while she slept and the machine has been producing crawler drones perfectly, actually churning them out at a higher rate than she'd thought possible.

Her spectacular nails clatter across her keyboard and she starts to catch up. She reviews Ak's progress and is grudgingly impressed. She understands the empty floors he is exploring and the piles of bodies he keeps finding all too well. If it weren't for the plan, not to mention the war raging all around her, she would be fascinated to explore them with him.

As it is, she has other priorities. She checks on the kid and finds he has stopped again, sitting on another landing and sulking, his knees pulled up to his chest. Her great mood falters at the sight and she frowns her compassion.

The plan was always to lead a grown man up there, one who perhaps deserved a little hardship, not an innocent child. She drums her nails on the desk as she thinks then makes a decision and puts a plan into action with a flurry of keystrokes.

Moving on, she catches up with the GovCo and Church media feeds. The propaganda hasn't changed much. Both are still scaremongering, accusing the other side of every evil they can think of and warning of sinister elements within. Their fictional resistance movements grow larger and more dangerous with every broadcast.

The Church does have one new talking point, GovCo's tactic of wallbusting. They say it has the potential to cause another collapse and demonstrates how little GovCo values its citizens' lives. Meanwhile, GovCo is tying itself in knots trying to explain how their martyred Associate Executive Minister, for whom they threw an enormous funeral, turned up naked and screaming at the centre of Mother Pho's latest publicity stunt.

Already bored, Ga turns her attention to the war itself. GovCo had been gearing up for a big assault up in the Twenty Second but to her surprise she finds it has been postponed. An equipment malfunction at an EnFo barracks has put them out of action for at least a week.

She switches over to hack The Church's systems instead, assuming to find that they've taken full advantage and seized the neighbourhood. Instead she discovers that they haven't moved in either. Some accident with a heating duct has blocked off a key corridor so that they've diverted their troops elsewhere.

“Lucky for the people of the Twenty Second,” she says aloud and is about to move on when her own words stop her. She frowns and suddenly feels she is missing something. For the first time in a long time she feels out of the loop and hates it, already regretting allowing herself to sleep.

She sends out a whole swarm of newly made crawler drones and starts hacking both sides at once, pouring out her irritation into hours of abuse of her long-suffering keyboard. The drones reach their destinations much sooner than she expects and when she checks the images they're sending back she finds them sharper and clearer than usual.

Pausing in her hacking efforts, Ga checks instead what the machine has been doing. It hasn't just been making drones, it's been experimenting with them, improving their speed and cameras over multiple generations.

“What the...” she says, baffled, but is then distracted once more.

The results of the analysis queries she has set running in the GovCo and Church systems have come back. At first she frowns while reading the results. Then, in stages, her eyes widen and her jaw drops. All the little malfunctions and accidents and unfortunate coincidences fall into place so that suddenly she sees it. She vows never to sleep again.

How could she have missed it?

To serve their own ends, GovCo and The Church are telling their people that there are resistance movements in their neighbourhoods, even though they know it's not true.

Except that it is.

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