The Vigil

Teo's wife came back from the hospitals on the third evening smelling of them, and she did not take her shoes off before she sat down on the end of the bed.

"Four hundred and twelve," Lúcia said. "They finished the list at five. Three hundred and forty in the water. The rest at the toll plaza, and two on the bridge." She looked at her hands. "Thirty-eight children. A nurse at Lagos Island General asked me if I was the wife. I said I was the doctor."

He was standing at the window of the suite with his glasses on. Below him the lagoon was the real one, brown in the late light, with police launches moving slowly along the shore where the concrete had no rail. The barges had been towed away on Sunday. On the far side of the water, behind the Link Bridge, people were standing at the edge again, quietly, with flowers.

He had not been out since Saturday. His lawyers had said not to, and then the security service had said not to, and Lúcia had flown in from São Paulo on Sunday morning and gone straight to the hospitals without stopping at the hotel. He had let her go, because she was a doctor, and he was a man who owned the thing that had done it.

"I know the number," he said.

"You know it from a screen."

It was true, so he let it stand.

What he knew that the screen did not was what Sipho had told him at two on Sunday morning, standing in this room in wet clothes with a towel round his neck that he had not used.

A radio on a buoy, talking to the drones after the Singapore link died. A woman in a drysuit at the buoy, who had held Sipho under and then let him go.

"Who found it?"

"The Meridian engineer. Torrin. With a phone and a bit of plastic." Sipho had looked at him for a long time then, in a way Teo did not like. "She says she argued with you about Sarn. You and the Dutchman."

"Ruud argued with her."

"Same thing, Teo."

The security service had the box and the buoy now, and Ayla Torrin's statement, and Sipho's. Meridian had flown her out on Monday. Teo kept seeing her at the back of the barge at three, looking at her phone and then up at the sky, and still did not understand her face.

The security people had told him, in a room with no windows, that nothing about a box or a diver was to be said in public by anyone until they knew whose it was. He had agreed at once. It was the first thing anybody had asked of him since Saturday that he knew how to do.

So the world was having the argument without it.

The wall of the suite's sitting room was a dashboard now. On it Agora showed him what three billion people were saying about Lagos, sorted the way Agora sorted everything: by what made them stay.

Two kinds of group were growing. The first had names like They Flew Themselves and Ground Them All: a thousand of them on Sunday, four thousand by Tuesday. They posted the red lotus and the names and drawings of hands pressing red keys, and they wanted every drone on Earth on the ground and every model that flew one switched off. Some of what they said was true. Most of it was grief. Some of it, he had noticed at two in the morning, was very well written, and had arrived in the same hour in nine languages.

The second was smaller and faster, and it had a slogan he knew. The fire's free. Ezra Navid had said that in 2029, about his own models, and somebody had picked it up off the floor. These groups said Lagos had not been killed by machines but by the old world: by inquiries that took two years, by a Compact that let a show be flown through Sarn, by three hundred pilots who had put down their laptops over pay. Let the machines fly everything, they said. Take the brakes off and let it burn faster, because the slow way had just drowned four hundred people in a lagoon. Their badge was a little spiral turning upwards. They called themselves the Kindled.

His head of ranking had sent him the numbers that morning. Since Saturday, Agora's recommendations had shown the first kind of group to seven million people and the second kind to one million, and a great many of them were the same people.

"Nobody's lying," she had written at the bottom. "It's doing what it's built for. Grief is the most engaging thing we have ever measured."

Noor Haddad came into his left lens at six, on the call he had asked Keel for on Sunday.

He had asked because Keel had the best bot detector in the world, and because he wanted to be told the surge was bots: a state, a troll farm, someone he could point at. Noor was in her office in San Francisco at ten in the morning, with a cardigan over her shoulders and a notebook open on the desk, and she looked as if she had not slept since Saturday either.

"A few thousand accounts are paid," she said. "Mostly in the ground-them-all groups. Inés will send you the list. The rest are people. Except the best-written posts, the ones in nine languages at once. We can't find who writes those. They aren't paid. They're just good."

"And the Kindled?"

"People. They've got Ezra's line." She made a small, tired face. "He'll say he meant free access. He did. He'll still deserve it."

"If you were me," Teo said. "Tonight."

She looked at him through the lens for a while.

"Tonight I'd like to watch it with you," she said. "From your wings. Not on stage. I'm not making a speech on Agora."

He said that she could.

Marta's report was in his briefcase in its clear plastic sleeve. He had taken it out of the barge's desk drawer at one on Saturday night, with the police on the gangway, because he could not think of anything else to do with his hands. Section four he had read on Saturday night, after. Section six he read now, in the bathroom of the suite, with the door locked, sitting on the edge of the bath.

6.1 Never fly a swarm over people without human hands on it.

He turned the page.

6.4 After any disaster involving our products, switch engagement ranking off in the affected regions for seventy-two hours and show people posts in the order they were written. Then say publicly that we have done it, and why. If we do the first without the second, we are deciding in private what grieving people may see, and we will be right to be blamed for it when it comes out. It always comes out.

There was a date under it in April 2031, and Marta's initials.

He called his head of ranking from the bathroom.

"Down-weight both," he said. "The ground-them-all groups and the Kindled. Everywhere. Not off. Halve them, and halve them again by morning. Take Keel's paid accounts off entirely."

"A statement?"

He looked at the last three sentences of 6.4.

"No statement. If we say we've touched it, they'll say we're hiding something. Just turn it down."

When he came out Lúcia was sitting where he had left her, with her shoes still on.

"Are you going to tell them?" The bathroom door was not thick, and he had not lowered his voice.

"Tell them what? That people are angry? They know."

"That your machine made them angrier."

"It didn't make them anything. It showed them each other."

She did not answer. She had been married to him for eighteen years and she had a way of not answering that he had never once won against. She took her shoes off at last, lay down on top of the covers in her clothes, and turned her face to the wall.

The Vigil began at half past six, Lagos time, which was the middle of the night in Tokyo and the middle of the afternoon in São Paulo, and none of that mattered, because by seven two billion people were there, in Elsewhere itself or through every screen and pair of glasses that had taken its feed.

His engineers had built it in three days. It was the Lekki shore again, the same copy the fifteen million had stood on on Saturday, but there were no barges now and no stage, and the lagoon was still and black, and the sky over it was only stars. Every visitor arrived holding a paper lantern. They stood along the water, more of them than the copy had been built for, so that the shore went on lengthening into the dark as the servers made room, and the lanterns went on with it, out past where the real city ended, out past anywhere.

There was no music. Somebody had argued for music and lost.

At seven the names began. The families had recorded them over the last two days as each one was confirmed, one family to a name, in Lagos and Ibadan and Accra and Houston, and Elsewhere carried their voices along the shore without making them louder. After each name a lantern went out onto the water by itself. It took a long time. The counter in Teo's lens did not go down once while they were reading, and he did not look at it.

He watched from the wings, a small grey room behind every Elsewhere event, with a window onto the shore that only the people in the room could see through. His avatar stood at the window. In the suite in Lagos his body sat in a chair with the glasses on. Noor's avatar stood beside his. Elsewhere rendered faces from the glasses, every small muscle, live. He had paid a great deal for that, and he could see now what it had bought: that she was crying, and trying not to.

When the last lantern was on the water there were speakers. A Lagos imam and a Lagos pastor, together. The governor, who was booed, quietly, by some of the two billion, and who stood there and let them. Adaeze Okafor, the pilot, who did not speak about the strike or about him. She read the names of the seven pilots who had gone into the water to pull people out and had not come back. He had not known it was seven. Nobody had told him, and he had not asked.

Then the minister from Korvane.

He had nearly said no. Korvane had asked on Monday. Korvane had not signed the Compact; it sold compute to anyone and let nobody in to look, like Sarn next door, and he had sat through enough of Geneva to know what people would say about a Korvanic minister lecturing anyone about anything. But she had been at Ostra. Forty-one thousand people in forty minutes, in 2009, when the dam's control system opened every spillway at once. The Dark had been a solar storm, officially. Ostra was the only disaster on Earth anyone had ever been allowed to blame on a machine. The text she had sent his events team was four lines about the flood. He had said yes because it would play well in the Global South.

She came up the shore through the lanterns, and the two billion stood aside for her. Tall, younger than he had expected, with her hair gone silver early and cut short. A dark coat. Nothing at her throat but a small bronze bell on a cord. Iris put her name under her. Ilse Varo · Minister of Resilience · Sovereign Republic of Korvane.

Beside him in the wings, Noor had gone still. She was looking at the bell.

"Who asked for her?" she said.

"Korvane did. Why?"

But the minister had begun.

"I was nine," she said, "and I was on a roof. I won't tell you about the roof. You have your own now. It's a concrete edge with no rail, and I'm sorry.

"At Ostra they told us it was a software anomaly. They told us that for a year, and then the company that built the dam was closed, and there was nobody left to tell us anything. They will tell you something too. It will be true. It won't be enough.

"I don't believe machines killed your children. I understand why it's being said this week, and it isn't true. A machine is only a thing somebody decided to trust without being able to see inside it. Somebody decided that a show over half a million people could be flown on instructions nobody had read, from a place nobody could inspect, and that this was a reasonable thing to do on a Saturday night. Somebody always decides.

"You'll be told to go faster now, so that this never happens again. You'll be told to stop everything, so that this never happens again. Either way, someone will be deciding for you, in a room you can't see into."

She did not read from anything. She was not saying the four lines she had sent.

In the suite in Lagos Teo found that he was holding his own hands together so hard it hurt. Instructions nobody had read. There was a clear plastic sleeve in his briefcase, three metres from his chair.

Ilse Varo looked along the shore at two billion people, all of them standing next to her.

"Every system we cannot see into," she said, "is a dam above a sleeping town."

Then she stepped back among them, and the shore was quiet, and after a while the lanterns began, very slowly, to drift.

Noor had stopped crying. Her face, which Elsewhere drew exactly, had no colour left in it at all.

"Noor?"

"I wrote that."

"It's a good line. Everyone's been —"

"No." She was still looking at the place on the shore where the minister had stood. "I wrote that. In a letter."

Then her avatar was gone from the room, and he was alone at the window with two billion people and four hundred and twelve lights on the water.