Chapter 8: The Visitor

The rail cart from the north arrived on a Friday, and Maren was not there to see it because she was at the records hall arguing with the analytical engine about a sorting gate that had jammed on the same card three times. The card was a seven-year-old's immune panel. The gate didn't like something about the way the data had been punched. Maren didn't like the gate. She was trying to clear the jam with a brass probe and a vocabulary that would have disappointed Davorka when Lina appeared in the doorway and said, "There's someone at the station asking for you."

"Tell them I'm busy."

"He says he's from the Meridian."

Maren's hand stopped on the probe. The Meridian Institute was a name she heard perhaps twice a year, in letters forwarded through the relay network from former colleagues. It was the name of a place she had worked in her thirties. It was the name of a place where she had been a different person, and hearing it in the records hall tightened something in her chest.

"Did he give a name?"

"Tomas," Lina said. "He said you'd know him."

Maren set down the probe. She wiped her hands on her work cloth. She stood up from the analytical engine and walked to the door and out into the sunlight and down the path toward the rail station, and with every step she was aware of her body in a way she hadn't been in years: the weight of her feet on the stone, the swing of her arms, the rhythm of her breathing.

He was standing by the cart, talking to the station crew. She saw him from forty meters and her first thought was: he looks like Tomas. Her second thought was: he doesn't look like Tomas. Both were true at the same time.

He was taller than she remembered, or he stood differently; straighter, as though his spine had been corrected. His hair was gray at the temples, which was expected, but the gray was uniform in a way that natural graying was not. His skin was good. His posture was very good. He looked healthy, conspicuously healthy, in a way she couldn't immediately name.

She was looking for the word. It took her until she was twenty meters away. Even. He was even. The station crew had weathered faces, uneven tans, a right shoulder slightly lower from favoring one side on the crank. Tomas had none of this. He was smooth in a way she could feel but would have struggled to explain.

He saw her. His face changed. She remembered that face; it was the face that used to look at her across the kitchen table when she said something he couldn't easily dismiss. It was older now. It was even now. But it was still his face, and the recognition was a physical thing, a compression in her chest that she had not felt in a decade and was not prepared for.

"Maren."

"Tomas."

They stood six feet apart. The station crew pretended not to watch. A cart coupling clanked as someone secured the brake. The wind came off the bay, warm and salt-smelling, and somewhere uphill the cranking station's gears meshed in their morning rhythm.

"You look good," he said. Then, tilting his head slightly: "What's that sound?"

"The cranking station."

"It's always like that?"

"It's always like that."

He listened for a moment. She couldn't tell what he made of it.

"You look different," she said.

He laughed. It was a short laugh, surprised, and she realized she had said something more honest than she'd intended. He looked at himself as though checking. "Different how?"

"Even," she said. "You look even."

He considered this. She watched him consider it. His face was more controlled than she remembered; not emotionless, but managed, as though the expressions had been made more efficient along with everything else. She couldn't tell whether this was age or optimization or whether there was a difference.

"I have a lot to tell you," he said.

"I imagine you do."

"Can we walk?"

She took him along the hillside path, the one that wound above the settlement and came out at the overlook where you could see the bay and the rooftops and the cranking station's chimney (not a chimney; a ventilation shaft, but everyone called it the chimney because it looked like one). She chose this path because it was her path, the one she walked every morning after her shift, and because she wanted him to see the settlement from a height before he saw it from inside. She was not sure why this mattered to her. She did it anyway.

He walked easily. Their feet on the limestone path made the sound of two people walking at slightly different rhythms, hers heavier on the downstep from years of hillside cranking. His breathing stayed even on the incline. Too even. She caught herself — that was Davorka's framing, not data.

"How did you get here?" she asked.

"Conventional transport to Koper. Then I asked around. People know about this place, Maren. Your settlement. Your data. The health outcomes are in the literature. Some of us have been following them for years."

"Some of you."

"Some of the people at the Institute. At what used to be the Institute."

"What is it now?"

"Kassar's facility, mostly. The expression therapy program scaled. We have two hundred subjects in the extended trial. The results are strong." He paused. "We've gone past the twelve pathways."

She felt her attention sharpen the way it did when a dataset showed something unexpected. "How far past?"

"We went past the twelve pathways a long time ago. Latest cohort is solid across the board — metabolic, immune, cognitive. Three-year data."

"Sleep architecture?"

He smiled. It was a real smile, the first one, and she saw the Tomas she remembered inside the even face. "You always ask the hard question first. Yes, partially. We've made progress on circadian rhythm regulation. It's not where your numbers are, but it's moving."

They reached the overlook. Below them, the settlement spread down the hillside toward the bay: the stone buildings with their terrace gardens, the cranking station with its ventilation shaft, the workshop district with its forge smoke, the records hall, the rail line curving along the coast. The phosphorescent panels were out on every south-facing surface, charging in the morning sun, their zinc-sulfide surfaces catching the light like fields of pale green glass.

"It's smaller than I expected," he said.

"It's three hundred and forty-seven people."

"I know. I've read your papers. All of them." He turned to her. "That's not why I'm here."

"Why are you here?"

He reached into his bag. The bag was modern, a material she didn't recognize, probably synthetic, manufactured and designed by systems that had no equivalent on this hillside. He pulled out a small case, flat, about the size of a book. He opened it. Inside were rows of blister-packed capsules, white and unmarked, arranged in a grid.

"These are the forty-seven-pathway intervention. Single daily dose. The full protocol in a pill." He held the case the way Petra held a precision gear blank: carefully, with the respect of a person who has worked on something for a long time and believes it is good. "Three years in trial. The results are the best we've ever produced. One pill. Every day."

Maren looked at the case. The capsules were white. They were very clean. They sat in their blister pack with the sterility of something manufactured far from here.

"What about the things you can't measure?" she said.

"We're measuring more than we used to."

"Forty-seven is not twelve thousand."

"Forty-seven is closer to twelve thousand than twelve was."

She couldn't argue with that. It was true. The progress was real. The gap between what the pills could do and what the cranking did was narrower than it had been eighteen years ago, and the honest part of her, the biostatistician part, the part that looked at numbers before opinions arrived, acknowledged that the gap might continue to narrow. Might, eventually, close.

"Show me the data," she said.

They spent the afternoon in the records hall. Tomas had brought printed summaries, which was thoughtful; the settlement had no screens. Maren spread them on the workbench next to the analytical engine, which was still jammed, and read. The room smelled like gear oil and warm stone. Somewhere a fly was working its way along the windowpane with the committed futility of a thing that does not learn from experience. Tomas sat in a chair that was too hard (all the chairs were too hard; Petra didn't believe in cushions) and watched her.

The data was good. She had expected it to be good, the way she had expected the eighty-four percent to be good at the first checkpoint eighteen years ago. The forty-seven-pathway intervention produced improvements across a wide range of epigenetic markers. The improvements were consistent, reproducible, and maintained across a three-year trial period. The subjects reported improved well-being, cognitive function, and physical vitality. Side effects were minimal.

Maren read the tables with the focus she brought to any dataset, which was the focus of a person who is looking for what isn't there. She found it in the appendix.

"Your microbiome data is flat," she said.

"We're not targeting the microbiome directly."

"I know you're not. That's the point. The settlement's microbiome diversity has been increasing for eighteen years without anyone targeting it. Your subjects' microbiome diversity hasn't changed. It's maintained, not improved."

"The trial targets forty-seven regulatory pathways. Microbiome modulation wasn't in scope."

"It wasn't in scope for us either. It happened anyway." She turned a page. "Your sleep architecture is improved but it's not structural. It's induced. Your subjects sleep well because the circadian intervention tells their bodies to sleep well. Our residents sleep well because their bodies are tired in a way that produces natural sleep architecture. The curves look similar on a six-month panel. I'd bet they diverge on a ten-year panel."

"That's speculative."

"It was speculative eighteen years ago too. Then we got the data."

He leaned forward. "Maren. I'm not here to argue about which approach is better. I've read your data. It's extraordinary. Your settlement produces the healthiest population I've ever seen in a dataset. I'm not disputing that."

"Then why are you here?"

"Because the question isn't which approach is better in a controlled population. The question is which approach scales." He was leaning forward now, hands on his knees. "You have three hundred and forty-seven people on a hillside. We have millions who will never move to a hillside." He looked at the jammed sorting gate, at the brass probe she'd left beside it. "These pills could help everyone else."

The analytical engine ticked. The jammed card was still in the sorting gate, patient, waiting. The afternoon light came through the records hall windows and caught the dust in the air, which was always there, because the analytical engine shed metal particles from its gears the way trees shed leaves.

"You're not asking me to take the pills," Maren said.

"No."

"You're asking me to endorse them."

"I'm asking you to look at the data the way you used to. Before you chose a side."

This landed. She felt it land.

She looked at the pills in their case. Her shoulders were stiff from the morning's cranking. She reached for the thermos — Josip's thermos — and held it without drinking.

"Stay for a few days," she said. "See how it works. Then we'll talk."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded.

"I'll stay."

She reached over and dislodged the jammed card from the sorting gate with her thumb. It came free. The engine resumed its clicking.

"You can sleep in the guest quarters," she said. "The cots are terrible."

"I remember cots."

"You don't remember these cots."

He smiled. It was the second real smile. She turned back to the data and pretended to read, and listened to the engine click, and listened to the engine click, and did not look at him, and was aware of the distance between her chair and his, which was about a meter and a half.