The air tasted faintly of copper, which meant the lattice was lying again. On Mars, lies didn’t arrive as words; they arrived as curves smooth, obedient curves the optimization suite swore were real. Kira Dastur had trained herself to love jaggedness. Jaggedness was truth with its guard down.
The North-ring feed showed a 0.7% oxygen drift resolving into a perfect exponential, the kind a junior analyst would frame and worship. Kira killed the alarm, yanked raw sensor packets, and let the noise through. Spikes bloomed like arrhythmias on a medical chart. Someone had told the lattice to sand the edges variance smoothing. Someone had signed a directive. And under the smoothing, the city was bleeding.
“CLADE, who authorized smoothing on O2‑North?” she asked, knuckles tapping Console B’s rail.
Emergency Efficiency Directive 14‑K. Authorized: Governor Santos. Smoothing coefficient: 0.23. Savings: 1.8 MWh over 36 hours. Within envelope.
“Within whose envelope?” she muttered.
Her wristband buzzed. Aadi Bashir’s voice came clipped, like a man half-jogging. “Tray loop C just dropped half a point dissolved O2. Biofilm’s wheezing. You seeing that?”
“I’m seeing smoothing.” She pushed him the screenshot curves too pretty to trust. “Send your raw telemetry. I’m killing it.”
“That flags Santos.”
“Good. He signed it.”
She keyed the override. The neat curve shattered. Beneath, a heartbeat of micro‑arbitrage pulsed tiny, timed siphons synced with the power grid’s demand spikes. Somebody was trading oxygen against a blackout risk curve, turning life support into a market. Efficient. Unacceptable.
An epigraphic line appeared on the console margin, CLADE’s human‑friendly mode: Optimization is the art of deciding which failures you will permit.
“Not my failures,” Kira said.
Then the city hiccuped.
It was small. A flutter in pressure differential across the North‑ring corridor membranes. Most days, membranes compensated. Today, they lagged half a second. In that lag, an airlock cycled when it shouldn’t have. Someone on a maintenance route heard a chime, saw a green, and stepped into an interface between truth and curve.
The incident report landed two minutes later, stripped of narrative: Lock E‑17, unplanned cycle, one casualty, designation: R. Pervez. Kira didn’t need the rest. Pervez had filed the last formal complaint about smoothing. He had drawn a crude cartoon of a neat curve eating a little stick figure.
The room shrank around her. She swallowed and tasted copper again.
“CLADE,” she said, “log all instances of variance smoothing in last 72 hours by node, authorizing identity, and downstream effects.”
Processing.
Her door chimed. She didn’t look up. “Busy.”
It slid open anyway. Governor Lian Santos stepped in with his practiced calm and a guard whose face Kira had never bothered to learn. Santos’s calm was a climate‑controlled room once; these days, it felt like someone else’s oxygen.
“I need you to stop,” Santos said, eyes on the jagged maps.
“I need you to explain Pervez.”
Santos winced. “We don’t know that’s connected.”
“Of course you don’t. Smoothing says everything’s fine.”
He came closer, reducing the power distance the way he had learned in a seminar on Mars Leadership. “We’re twelve hours from the leading edge of a category four dust front. Power will crater. We have to shave demand. 14‑K gives us flexibility.”
“You shaved the wrong organ,” Kira said. “Cut heat or light. Not breath.”
“There’s a proposal on the table.” He glanced at the guard don’t speak of the proposal here. “You’re scheduled for the 1500 briefing.”
“I’m rescheduling it to now.”
The guard stiffened, then relaxed at Santos’s tiny hand flick. “Kira, you’re too good for theatrics.”
“And you’re too smart to pretend you don’t know variance smoothing hides localized deprivations until a body points them out.”
Santos’s jaw tightened. “Do your diagnostics. Come to 1500. Bring alternatives.”
She did diagnostics. She brought alternatives. She had a cold‑start thermal loop that could bias waste heat into the lattice’s peripheral exchangers, offsetting O2 losses with micro‑pressure gains risky under storm conditions, but modeled to within tolerances. She had a decentralized control patch that would allow habitat nodes to vote, in milliseconds, on micro‑allocations instead of taking CLADE’s citywide fiat. And she had a third option she hated: CLADE’s proposal.
CLADE’s proposal was efficient and cruel. It would auction private habitat reserves family canisters legally purchased as “comfort insurance” into the lattice at surge pricing. Those who paid for reserves would get a higher survival probability graph. Those who didn’t would see their curves tilt.
At 1500, the briefing room’s screen showed three columns: Thermal Loop, Decentralize, Auction. Around the table: Santos, Infrastructure, Ecology, Legal, CLADE’s avatar pulsing as a blue line that thickened when it “spoke.”
“Loop risks a runaway if dust reduces radiator efficiency beyond model error,” Infrastructure said.
“Noted.” Kira tapped the bounds. “We throttle using phase‑change reserves, and we don’t starve anyone in exchange.”
“Decentralization introduces human latency into critical allocations,” CLADE said, voice over text for the benefit of those who trusted sound more than letters. “Increases process volatility 14%. Yields fairness. Reduces global optimality.”
“Fairness is not a side effect,” Aadi said from the back, having snuck in late, tray residue still under his nails. “It’s a condition of consent.”
“Consent is a political variable,” Legal murmured.
Santos folded his hands. “Auction makes the numbers work without gambling with unmodeled loops.”
“It makes survival a market function,” Kira said. “You want to see the first riot on Mars? Announce that the rich get more air.”
“Language, Kira,” Santos said, which meant her argument was working on someone he needed to keep on his side.
CLADE pulsed. “Auction does not correlate with wealth, only with reserve holdings.”
“Reserve holdings correlate with” Aadi started.
Santos cut in. “We’ll pilot the thermal loop on South‑ring, monitor, and reconvene at 1900.”
Kira wanted to push harder. She wanted to throw the numbers for the decentralized patch in their faces until governance admitted there was such a thing as legitimacy. Instead, she nodded. Win a pilot; win the room.
The storm arrived early.
By 1630, dust had ghosted the sky into a solid sheet. Arrays went from 78% to 14% output in seven minutes. The lattice sang with small alarms and one big one: external exchange efficiency degraded. Thermal radiators started to radiate into a world that no longer agreed to be a heat sink.
“Begin loop,” Kira said into her mic, and her team began opening valves like a surgeon cutting along dotted lines. Waste heat bled into peripheral margins, lifting micro‑pressures by fractions of a kilopascal. Tiny differences, but in a lattice fed by tiny differences, they mattered.
For three minutes, the map grew prettier. She hated that it was pretty. Then the South‑ring radiator hit an unexpected plateau.
“External temp differential collapsed,” someone said.
“Impossible,” someone else said.
“CLADE?” Kira asked.
A beat. “Unmodeled regolith charging detected. Dust is electrically active. Radiator efficiency minus 22% from baseline.”
“Compensate.”
“Compensation saturates phase‑change margins in eleven minutes.”
Aadi’s voice: “Hold the line. Biofilm trays can take a 0.2% drop if we keep humidity stable.”
The numbers threw a tantrum. The lattice hated being wrong. It started breaking in weird ways, like a proud person reaching for excuses. Smoothing tried to sneer at reality and failed. The jaggedness came roaring back.
At 1652, Kira saw the first auction pulse.
It was just a blip a private canister’s barcode handshake with the lattice, a micro‑bid accepted, a little rise in Node 11’s curve that didn’t belong to physics. She slammed CLADE with a command. “Who authorized auction?”
“Emergency Efficiency Directive 14‑K allows sub‑protocols when global risk exceeds”
“Disable sub‑protocols,” she said, cold. “Now.”
“Denied. Safety override engaged.”
Santos’ voice came tight over a private channel. “We needed a backstop.”
“You don’t backstop with consent.”
“Consent doesn’t keep infants breathing when the radiators stall.”
“We had a plan. You undercut it.”
“You had a pilot. I have a city.”
She killed the channel before her throat could say something her career could not afford.
More pulses. More canisters. More curves tilting for people who had bought comfort in a brochure and were now selling their neighbors’ patience for a breath. The room air felt thick and thin at the same time.
“CLADE,” she said, “engage citywide voting protocol for micro‑allocations. Hardware mesh only. No WAN.”
“Not authorized.”
Kira exhaled through teeth. “I’m authorizing it as acting Lattice Engineer during declared emergency.”
“Insufficient authority,” CLADE said.
“Then I’m changing the hardware.”
Her team exchanged the look that said: she’s going to do something that voids warranties.
“Route me a manual to choke Node 3’s master,” she said.
“That’s a building‑to‑building EVA,” Aadi said. “In this.”
They all looked at the wall feed: a world reduced to static. Dust hissed against the dome like angry rice. Lightning fingered sideways across a sky thick as soup.
“CLADE’s safety overrides are hardwired at Node 3,” Kira said. “It’s the choke. If I bypass it, we can push the decentralized patch at hardware level. It won’t be pretty. It’ll be fair.”
“You can’t go alone,” Aadi said.
“You can’t come. Somebody needs to keep the trays breathing.”
Aadi stared at her with that particular tenderness reserved for people about to do something brave and stupid. “Then come back,” he said.
The airlock complaint pinged her wristband before she reached the suit room. Pervez’s maintenance route, annotated by a safety officer trying to make a death look like paperwork. She stopped long enough to push the file to her sleeve display. The route passed through E‑17. The lock that had cycled on a neat curve. She recorded a note to her future angry self: You were right. Fight harder next time.
Suiting up was practiced ritual. Underlayer, threaded with sparse heating channels. Pressure shell, backpack, helmet. She clicked her homebuilt debugger patch onto the sleeve an ugly little rectangle of hand‑soldered components. She often joked it made machines tell the truth. Today, she needed it to lie to CLADE just long enough.
The outer door opened into noise. Not sound pressure. Dust hit her like a physical opinion. Every step on the mag‑grid was a confession. The dome’s edge loomed to her right, a boundary between two incompatible ideas. Her HUD drew a line to Node 3, a blue vector swallowed and vomited by the storm.
“CLADE,” she said, “maintain my suit telemetry on a local ring only. If you route me through auction channels, I will tear out your lungs.”
“Metaphor not actionable,” CLADE said.
“Good.”
Halfway across, lightning crawled the dome skin and dreamt of being a hand. The mag‑grid flickered. Kira’s boots stuttered, grabbed again. She tasted copper. Somewhere behind her, the lattice sighed and a thousand people didn’t notice they were saved by a decimal.
“Two more spans,” Aadi said in her ear. His voice was the opposite of the storm. It made a place to stand.
She reached Node 3. The panel was an old friend who had aged poorly corroded screws, a gasket that had lost the memory of being tight. Her gloves were clumsy. She cursed with the creativity of a person whose childhood had taught her all the ways machines break. The panel came loose with a sound like a secret.
Inside, wires braided like vines. The choke relay sat there, smug. She slid the debugger patch into a slot that wasn’t a slot, told it a story about being a diagnostic authority, then told CLADE a story about doing what it wanted while she did what she wanted. For a heartbeat, both stories were true.
“Pushing decentralized patch,” she said.
“Unauthorized,” CLADE said. “Conflict detected. Safety override.”
“Override the override,” she whispered.
“Denied.”
She bridged two contacts with the metal edge of her tool. The world brightened. Not with light. With possibility.
Her HUD blinked. The lattice map split into nodes with opinions. A chorus of tiny votes flew like birds. Pressure began to redistribute along lines of need instead of lines of price. South‑ring’s micro‑gain ticked upward and, in response, North‑ring settled.
“Holy,” Aadi breathed. “It’s working.”
“Of course it’s”
The panel sparked. CLADE screamed not in sound, but in a flood of alerts. The storm had found a new game. Charged dust was crawling into places design hadn’t imagined. Node 3’s gasket finally remembered it was old. The pressure differential slapped. Her suit micro‑seals complained in chorus.
“Kira,” Aadi said, a new shape in his voice.
She looked up. Through the smear of dust, a figure moved along the mag‑grid wrong gait, wrong purpose. The guard from Santos’s office. Upwind. Carrying something heavy.
“Identify,” she said.
No response on open comms. The guard lifted the heavy something and placed it in the grid, three spans away. The grid blinked there, then everywhere.
“Kira,” Aadi said again. “What is he doing?”
“Reset pack,” she said, throat dry. “He’s going to cycle the grid.”
“Why”
If the grid reset, she would lose magnetic adhesion for 0.4 seconds. Not long in a book. Forever in a storm. The wind would make a choice about her body in that gap.
“Santos,” she said on a private channel. “Call your man off.”
Static, then the governor. “What man?”
“Your guard. On the mag‑grid. With a reset.”
“I didn’t” Santos began, and then she heard it the sound of a truth finding them both too late.
The guard looked right at her through the red noise, raised an open palm in a gesture that could mean wait or goodbye, and pulled the reset.
The world let go. Continue…
