Fieldwork at Dusk
Etta Rios kept her hands in motion the way a pianist keeps theirs on the keys: not out of habit alone but because the world she tended was literally sensitive to touch. Her workshop smelled faintly of ozone and citrus lubricant; a strip of bioluminescent moss under the workbench hummed a lazy, decorative pulse that the city used as a nightlight in its narrower alleys. Outside, the street vendors folded the last of the day’s kelp-turnovers and ran their small flame-arches against a chill that the central weather band called a soft dusk—an engineered breeze that rolled in at seven and made hairline ripples in the river-screens. Etta liked that hour. It suggested an ending without insisting on it.
She was kneeling beside a single-occupant calibration cell, tracing the edge of a pressure sleeve with an instrument the size and temperament of a pastry brush. The cell’s interior was a lattice of microfans and acoustic ribbons, a tiny synthetic geography designed to make bodies feel appropriately buffered. To anyone else it might look like a particularly fussy aquarium. To Etta it was grammar; each throat of air and each harmonic seam was a sentence she had the privilege and irritation of proofreading.
Her calibration drone, a squat, polite thing with gull-wing vents and an oversize LED that she had named Kettle for reasons of private amusement, hovered with the decorum of a guest who has arrived late and apologized twice. Kettle’s latest firmware update included an “empathic apology protocol” that made its apology noises sound suspiciously like someone clearing their throat before telling a joke. Etta reached up, still on her knees, and cupped a stabilizer vane as Kettle adjusted a microstream.
A wobble. A tiny misread. For a breath the airflow under a porcelain cup at the edge of the bench lightened and the cup took a careful hop, then a surprised, dignified float, which made the moss under the bench blink faster as if it had seen something rude. Kettle blinked an apologetic cerulean.
"If you keep that up," Etta said, half-laughing as she snagged the cup and set it back down, leaving a dainty ring of condensation, "I’ll file a formal complaint with your manufacturer."
Kettle emitted a chirp that was either contrition or amusement; in the soft dusk light it was impossible to decide. Etta scrubbed her hands and stood, feeling the polite stiffness of muscles that liked movement more than stasis. She had just begun smoothing the last of the acoustic ribbons when Rafi's message bloomed on her forearm slate—a strip of light, then his rough script.
Rafi: Got a weird job. Two humans. One module. Can you swing by? Bring your stubbornness.
Etta tapped a reply with a fingertip that still smelled faintly of lubricant. Rafi’s texts usually arrived like this: half-grin, half-problem. He liked to treat near-impossible builds as a personal sport.
"Details," she wrote.
He answered with voice this time, a warm, crackly transmission that made the workshop feel simultaneously smaller and more crowded. "They’re different, Etta. Real different. Jonah—he’s all rigid harnesses and pressure gradients. Asha—more like soft fields and gentle contact. They want the same module. Said they’d rather share than be separated. I told them I’d ask you before I told them it was impossible."
Etta listened and felt the exact, precise thrum of recognition: professional challenge, yes; personal curiosity, sharper than she liked to admit. Her fingers tightened on the rim of the calibration cell.
"You didn’t tell them it was impossible," she said.
"Not yet. I was hoping you'd say you could make the impossible fashionable. Or at least tolerable."
She let a smile loosen, small and skeptical. There were ways to make things tolerable with ductwork and measured attenuation, and there were designs that required rewriting the assumptions of the stack. She straightened, dusting her knees, and peered at Kettle.
"Bring them by tonight, then, if they can manage the trek," she said. The decision landed in her like the first measured weight of something she was not yet ready to name. Outside, a lamplighter drone skimmed past, scattering printed menus into the alley—tomorrow’s special: fermented sea-apple and toasted algae—and the city exhaled its soft dusk like someone folding a page closed but keeping the book open.