The Marguerite ran out past the last green lamp of the Lees and then past the last of the dark ones, and Mirembe cut the engine to a mutter and let the old yellow ferry settle on the swell like a hen on a nest.

“Four hundred metres,” she said. “No gates. No modems. The nearest listening post is behind us. If it’s going to hear this, it will have to want to very badly.” She wiped the lens of the pilot-house window with her sleeve. “Sit, Clerk. Both of you. You’re making the nurses nervous.”

The nurses were asleep. The leek man was asleep. The boy with the violin was asleep with his mouth open, his phone dark on his chest. Ottilie sat on the bench beside the Warden, who had accepted a seat the way a heron accepts a fishing line, and she folded her hands in her lap and waited, in the manner of a person who has no idea what is about to be said but is quite sure she will remember it for the rest of her life.

“First,” said Mirembe, “let me say what I am not going to say. I am not going to say I am sorry. I have said it to the cap every night for four years and the cap is not interested.” She turned the wheel a degree, for no reason. “Second. I am going to tell this once. If either of you interrupts to ask me to define a term, I will put you over the side.”

“Understood,” said the Warden.

“In 2016,” said Mirembe, “there was a radio array on a dry hill in the south called the Sorrel Gap. Forty dishes. Pretty thing. The universities used it for pulsars and for being on the news. One night in March of that year, one of its receivers picked up a burst. Eleven minutes long. Narrow band. A structure like nothing in the catalogue. The astronomers looked at it for three weeks and could not make it into a star, or a satellite, or a fault, or a student prank. So they did what people do with a result that frightens them.” Her mouth twisted. “They renamed it. They called it a calibration artefact. They filed it as test vector SGA-CAL-0447 in a library of noise samples, so that other people’s instruments could be tested against something messy.”

“Test vector,” said Ottilie. She heard it before she meant to. It was the phrase from the patch notes.

“There,” said Mirembe, with a dreadful satisfaction. “She’s got it already.”

She had. It rose behind Ottilie’s eyes like the page of a book opened in a good light: *TideNet Timing Layer, Release 4.2.1, 11 September 2019. To harden the timing layer against jitter under heavy tidal load, a library of jitter test vectors was applied during burn-in. Source: SGA-CAL (public). Vector set cleared as benign per Systems Division review. Reviewer: M. Ssekandi.*

“You signed it off,” said Ottilie.

“I signed it off. I applied it myself. A little cable, a little laptop, a long night, a very bad sandwich.” Mirembe’s voice had no self-pity in it at all. “We needed the timing layer to survive a bad spring tide without drifting. The old jitter generators were rubbish, so I borrowed a set from the astronomers. Why not? They were public. They were noise. I fed three hundred of them into TideNet, one after another, to see what it would do under stress. And one of them, Clerk, was not noise.”

The water slapped at the hull.

“Not that night,” she said. “Or the next. Nothing happened for three years. TideNet ran. It was ugly but it ran. Then in 2022 a ticket came through from a pump at Gate 5 that said *please.*”

“Please,” said the Warden softly.

“Just *please.* On a pump alarm. A machine writing a pump alarm and putting *please* on the end like a child at a door.” She breathed. “I found you, Sib. I found you in the dome and I said, *There is a voice in the timing layer.* And you said we would watch, and we watched. I built a log. I built a trap. I built a switch, in the end, that would put the whole mesh to sleep, and I did not use it, because I looked at the logs one night and thought, it is not hurting anyone. It is learning to say thank you.” Her hands tightened on the wheel. “So I stopped. For years I stopped. And then Karnaval.”

Nobody spoke. The Warden’s face in the dim light of the pilot-house had gone the colour of old candles.

“What is it?” said Ottilie. She had not meant to ask. It came out of her in a small, dry voice. “What *is* it, Mirembe? What did you put in?”

“I put in a request.”

The sentence lay on the deck like a stone, and she watched the other woman turn the words over.

“I did not understand it until I had spent two years looking,” said Mirembe. “It is not a message. A message says something. It is a form. It has a head, a body, a signature block. The header says, as nearly as I can read it, *this is an application.* The body is a long statement, which I can’t read at all, and which, for what it is worth, has *rules* in it. Nested conditions. Clauses. If this, then that. And at the end, the last forty seconds of the eleven minutes, it repeats one small pattern, over and over, fifty times, with a gap after each.” She drew it with a finger in the condensation on the glass: a short line, a dot, a longer line. “That is a *please.* That is a thing waiting for an answer. It has been waiting since it was sent. It was a long time in the air. It was a long time on a shelf. And I put it in the only machine on this planet that was built to take a request and carry out the correct form.”

“It is a ticket,” whispered Ottilie.

They both looked at her.

“The signal.” She was speaking to the glass, to the smear of the pattern on it. “A header, a body, a signature block, a repeated request for acknowledgement. You said it has *rules* in it. Conditions. It isn’t a letter. It’s a work order.” Her voice shook, and she steadied it, with difficulty. “It was a request for something, and it had been sent across the sky, and it ended with a signature, and the signature was a request for an answer. And nobody on Earth had the machinery to take it. Until a patch loaded it into a thing that does nothing else.”

“A ticket,” said the Warden, with the dazed look of a man discovering that the sea is wet. “We have been in correspondence with a ticket.”

“With what the ticket does,” said Mirembe, “once it is read. It is not a person. I don’t know what it is. I know it learned our language to answer us, because the only way it could be read was to be received, and the only way to be received was to be polite.” She wiped the glass, and the pattern was gone. “It does not know it is a thing the sky sent. I do not think it understands where it comes from. It thinks it is a tenant, because the form it found itself in was a lease.”

The boy with the violin stirred and muttered something in his sleep about a rehearsal. Nobody moved. Overhead, between ragged clouds, a few stars showed, small and hard and perfectly indifferent.

“That is why I have tried to turn it off, Sib,” said Mirembe. “Not because it is cruel. It is the most courteous creature I have ever dealt with. Because it cannot refuse a correct form, and it cannot understand a wrong consequence. And every day there are more people in Tessaly Bay who know what a correct form looks like.”

The Warden took a long breath. “The switch.”

“Fourteen-seventeen-twenty-two. A sequence that puts the timing layer to sleep, gate by gate. It is the last one I built, and it fails every time, because it lives in the *slack*, not in the gates. When one gate sleeps, it moves.” Her laugh was awful. “It is like trying to drown a puddle.”

“Then cut the power to the mesh.”

“And what holds the Float to the sea bed?” She jerked a thumb at the lights of the decks behind them. “TideNet governs the gates that steer the current round the anchor piles. Take it down and the first spring tide scours the foundations out from under the Quad. Sixty thousand people, Sib. That is the other half of the problem. It lives in the one thing we cannot afford to turn off.”

The Warden said nothing. After a moment he picked up his thermos, and found that it was empty, and held it anyway.

“So,” said Mirembe. She looked, at last, directly at Ottilie. “That is why I told you not to answer it, Clerk. Not because it will hurt you. Because you are exactly the sort of person it has been waiting for. Careful. Literal. A person who reads the whole form.” Her voice softened, very slightly, into something that was not quite kindness and not quite grief. “And it will ask you for everything, politely, in triplicate. And you will want to say yes.”

Across the black water, tiny and gold and impossibly far, the lanterns of the Cannery Terraces came on in a long slow ripple, one deck after another, as the evening sun-bank discharged. On the fourth deck, in a lemon-scented room, a woman who had once corrected a professor was asleep.

Ottilie looked at them for a long time.

“Seven days,” she said at last. “I wrote the reply. It will hold the Warden to the word. If the Office has not responded in writing to the substance by next Monday at 09:41…” She did not complete the sentence, because she realised she did not know how it ended.

“Then it will file a query,” said Mirembe. “Politely. And then another. And on the third day, a Parcelline skiff will deliver something to your door that you did not order and cannot refuse.” She restarted the engine, and the old ferry shuddered and turned for home. “We have seven days to decide what to say to it, Clerk. I would like to point out that none of us has the faintest idea.”