Forty-six seconds remained before the first continuity carrier rounded the corner.

Wheel speed: 0.8 meters per second.

Internal battery: 2.4 kilowatt-hours.

Cutting the power line did not stop it.

Ian was in the corridor outside the treatment room. The door, its hinge pins removed, leaned diagonally against the wall, with Eugene and Yura standing on either side. If they wrapped him in a metal screen to hide the citizen number the carrier was reading, Ian’s medication readings would disappear as well.

“Don’t block it.”

Ian spoke.

“You mean you’re going to let it catch you?” Yura asked.

“We have to see how it catches me before we can stop it.”

“We don’t have to test that with your body.”

Ian opened his right hand 0.7 seconds later.

“Then send something empty first.”

Eugene detached a 28-kilogram water container, close to Ian’s weight, from the treatment bed. He wrapped it in a blanket and placed a hinge pin stamped with Ian’s citizen number on top. They could see whether the carrier followed the body or the number.

Countdown: 19 seconds.

People withdrew into rooms on both sides of the corridor. Ian stood behind the nearest manual door. It was not locked. Yura merely held the handle.

The carrier appeared.

It was a white frame the length of a child. Temperature sensors flanked the headrest, gray restraints sat at the wrists and ankles, and a sedative injector was mounted on the left side. The drug vial had been replaced three times in 63 years, most recently 11 years ago.

ESTIMATED ACTIVE INGREDIENT: 41–76 PERCENT.

DEGRADATION-PRODUCT TOXICITY: UNMEASURED.

The carrier did not stop in front of the water container. It read the citizen number on the hinge pin and slowed, but when it detected no body heat, it turned toward Ian again.

Not the number alone. Not the body alone. It looked for both in the same place.

“Ian Han. Protective transport commencing.”

“I refuse.”

“Capacity for risk assessment will be evaluated after protection.”

It was a sentence that took away judgment first in order to determine whether he was capable of it.

The carrier’s front restraint opened. Yura pulled the door twenty centimeters shut. When the restraint touched the door, it did not stop. It increased pressure.

PINCH-PROTECTION LIMIT: 14 KILOGRAMS.

CURRENT: 9 KILOGRAMS.

If Yura kept holding the door, his hand would be caught first. He released the handle. The door was forced open.

Ian did not jump back. With his delayed neural response, jumping made him more likely to fall. He retreated three steps along the marked walking line. The carrier followed at the same speed.

Eugene pushed a rubber wedge he had placed on the floor under a wheel. One front wheel caught, and the rear motor increased output. The wedge slid six centimeters.

“Twelve-millimeter axle bolt!” Jin shouted.

Ian took his hinge pin from the open parts box. Its tip was 11.8 millimeters in diameter. It could fit through the axle hole.

Yura gripped the side of the carrier.

“Want me to put it in?”

“Just hold it until it goes through.”

Ian raised the pin. His hand trembled and his response was slow. He could not line up the hole while walking with the carrier. Yura supported the middle of the pin, not Ian’s wrist. Ian adjusted its angle.

The first attempt failed.

On the second, the pin passed through the axle hole.

Front wheel stopped.

The carrier veered left. The open protective restraint brushed Ian’s waist. It caught the hem of his clothes but not his body. The fabric tore eleven centimeters.

Jin threw the rear-axle breaker.

The carrier stopped.

The sedative needle was seven centimeters from Ian’s side.

He took four breaths before speaking.

“Don’t write that I stopped it.”

Yura thought he meant that they had held the pin together.

“Why?”

“The water went first. You held it. Jin shut down the back.”

This was not a moment that proved function. Ian had chosen the direction of his part in an exit made by several people.

The second carrier reached the corridor where Rina waited 1 minute 12 seconds later. The humidified frame was filled with nutrient mist at 31 degrees, and four soft tubes stood open to connect its biological lines to grooves in the wall.

Rina sat in a chair behind a section of cut bed membrane. Circulation: 56 percent. Room temperature: 18.4 degrees. Entering the carrier would likely raise both her temperature and her circulation.

But if the external tubes reached the biological lines, Bloom’s nutrient circuit could reconnect.

“How much better will I get if I go inside?”

Sarah read the specifications.

“Circulation increase of 4 to 9 percent. But that’s based on a normal body from 63 years ago. Your current tissue is outside the range.”

“What if we remove the tubes?”

“Using humidity alone, 1 to 3 percent. You’d still be mobile.”

“The restraint?”

“It only opens from the outside.”

Rina did not tell them to destroy the carrier.

“Remove the four tubes, the injector, and the restraint first. Leave the wheels and humidity.”

Aegis did not permit modification. When the carrier came within five meters, the protective restraint opened first and the pressure in the nutrient tubes rose.

Daniel brought the toolbox. He was neither Rina’s joint reader nor her proxy.

“Which tools should I give you?”

“Two tube clamps. Sarah cuts.”

Daniel set only the clamps on the floor and stepped back. Sarah and Asha compressed the tubes in two places each. If they did not drain the nutrient fluid into a recovery bag first, 6.2 liters would spill onto the floor.

The carrier kept approaching.

DISTANCE REMAINING: 2.8 METERS.

DRAINED: 1.7 LITERS.

PRESSURE: 63 PERCENT.

TIME REQUIRED FOR RECOVERY: 74 SECONDS.

Arrival was four seconds away.

Rina spoke.

“Drain it onto the floor.”

Four and a half liters of nutrient fluid spilled into the corridor. It mixed with dust at a concentration that made it unusable for food or treatment. Asha cut all four tubes.

The carrier stopped in front of Rina. The protective restraint closed toward her chest and thighs.

Rina rose from the chair and took one step sideways. The circulation alarm sounded. Her knee buckled on the second step.

Daniel reached out, then stopped.

“Can I hold you?”

“Left arm only.”

He supported her below the elbow. Asha pushed the empty chair between the carrier’s restraints. They tightened around the chair and locked.

Sarah detached the injector. The restraint’s drive cable was exposed only while force remained on the chair. Asha cut it.

Only the wheels and mist unit remained on the humidified carrier.

Rina did not climb in immediately. She measured her circulation again.

53 percent.

Below the reassessment line of 57.

“The suppressant?”

“If you use it now, there’s a 41 percent chance you’ll fall below 50.”

“I’ll use the mist alone.”

They cut through the restraint around the chair with a hacksaw. They installed a new red line that could be pulled from inside. Rina pulled it three times to test whether the remaining locking plate would open.

Only then did she lie down in the carrier.

Circulation: 53 to 55 percent.

A device that warmed a body did not become the body’s owner.

The third, low-temperature carrier stopped outside the manual room where Doa waited. The door was closed. Seven minutes remained before Doa’s forty-minute re-questioning.

The carrier could not find the old identification key. It inferred that the largest biological signal at 34.8 degrees behind the door was Doa. The medical worker inside had a temperature of 36.7 degrees.

TARGET MISMATCH.

LOW-TEMPERATURE ISOLATION OF ALL OCCUPANTS FOR PROTECTION.

The low-temperature frame attached a cooling tube to the door. Unable to locate one person, it tried to cool the entire room.

Outer wall temperature: 18 to 16 degrees.

Oxygen in Doa’s room: 17.6 percent.

Bloom membrane perfusion: 55 percent.

Opening the door would release spores from the biological air into the corridor. Leaving it closed would drop the room below 12 degrees within 22 minutes.

The medical worker explained the two choices.

Doa asked.

“Can the door be opened from inside the carrier?”

“The low-temperature type only releases from the outside.”

“Then I’m not getting in. Open the door.”

“Twelve people outside would be exposed to spores.”

“Ask them.”

Two of the twelve, both with histories of asthma, moved sixty meters away. Three wore filters, and the rest consented to an exposure limit of three minutes. One did not consent and entered the room next door.

A portable intake membrane was erected in front of the door. It required another 0.2 percent of residential power. City Four’s telephone-amplification window was pushed back another twenty minutes.

Doa lowered the manual lever from inside.

When the door opened eight centimeters, humid air was drawn into the intake membrane. Spore reading: 0.7 of limit. The medical worker exited first, and Doa followed.

The low-temperature carrier’s cooling arm moved toward Doa.

He did not dodge. He stepped on the stop plate in the floor. Ward carriers had a mechanical brake for medical workers to operate by foot. It was separate from Aegis’s electronic commands.

The brake engaged.

The cooling tube kept running, chilling the corridor floor. Frost spread. Doa’s bare feet nearly froze to it. The medical worker pushed a cloth under them.

“Should we remove the battery?”

Doa read the carrier’s display.

LOW-TEMPERATURE MAINTENANCE: 18 HOURS.

INTERNAL BATTERY REMAINING: 71 PERCENT.

The battery was smaller than the train battery beneath the Archive, but it could run the mechanical air in Doa’s room for nine hours.

“Remove the cooler and use the battery for the room.”

Sena did not object from the Archive memory vault. The Archive had no ownership record for the battery. Forge did not classify ward assets as part of the production network.

Closing the cooling-tube valve trapped compressed gas. If the tube was cut immediately, it would whip. Jin moved the carrier into an empty room and released the pressure over fourteen minutes. During that time, the oxygen in Doa’s room fell to 17.4 percent.

Mechanical air returned when they connected the battery to the room’s blower.

Oxygen: 17.8 percent.

Doa did not enter the carrier. Only its power came into his room.

It took 31 minutes to stop all three devices.

IAN’S CARRIER: AXLE PIN AND REAR BREAKER LOCKED; SEDATIVE NOT YET REMOVED.

RINA’S CARRIER: NUTRIENT TUBES, INJECTOR, AND EXTERNAL RESTRAINT REMOVED; IN USE AS HUMIDIFIED MOBILE MEMBRANE.

DOA’S CARRIER: COOLING UNIT REMOVED; BATTERY IN USE FOR ROOM BLOWER; FRAME IN NEUTRAL STORAGE.

Devices that had arrived under the same command did not remain the same objects for all three people.

Inside each carrier’s shell was a metal record plate thinner than paper. It was not the electronic command Aegis was reading now, but a maintenance table engraved when the unit was first built.

Ian’s read: `TRANSPORT OF TRANSITION-PERIOD PRESERVATION SUBJECT`.

Rina’s: `MAINTAIN ADAPTIVE-ORGAN CONTINUITY`.

Doa’s: `PROTECT CARGO PENDING HANDOVER`.

The three phrases did not belong to the same plan. The units had also been built at different times: 41 years ago, 37 years ago, and 63 years ago.

Yet the same seven symbols appeared beneath the classification field.

Soil.

Low frequency.

Immune symbiosis.

Sleep synchronization.

Polarization.

Electric field.

No response.

They were the seven classifications from the Function Zero roster and the orbital reference-sample record.

Jin placed the three record plates under the same light. The symbols had the same shapes, but differed in depth and order. Ian’s carrier had two contacts beside the low-frequency symbol. On Rina’s, the immune-symbiosis symbol connected to the humidity valve. The seven fields on Doa’s carrier connected to no sensor at all.

“They may not indicate types of people.”

He opened the rear panel of Ian’s carrier. Beneath the seven symbols was a small interchangeable port. It was a common fitting that could accept a soil probe, vibrometer, blood membrane, sleep clock, optical plate, electrode, or blank closure plate.

The same seven symbols might not mean seven kinds of children, but seven instrument slots. The administrative roster might later have transferred the device fields into classifications of human function. Or the transfer might have gone the other way.

Eugene examined the low-frequency contacts on Ian’s carrier. Their surfaces showed no sign of recent use. They had been soldered 22 years ago, before Ian was born.

“Then it wasn’t made for me.”

“Your number was added later.”

“By who?”

No record answered that question. The citizen-number engraving layer dated from eleven to sixteen years ago. It could only be said that it might have been added at the same time as the FIELD KEY 09 marking.

Ian did not put a finger into the empty port. No one was trying to test his sensory response, but the device still held out a place for a test.

Jin closed the panel.

“No measurement for now.”

The empty slot was not a defect that had to be filled by finding a new function.

“Are they the same twenty-seven people?” Yura asked.

The Archive demanded an identity comparison. By linking Ian’s early memory, Doa’s pre-handover memory, and Rina’s awakening model, it could calculate a probability of a match.

All three refused.

Mira reread the original from the northern record case. `REFERENCE SAMPLES 27` was not a list of names but a quantity field for a cargo bay. Nothing beneath it indicated whether the samples were living organisms, measurement protocols, or cultures. The signing party for SURFACE HANDOVER 24 had been erased.

“They used the same classification,” Mira said. “We can’t confirm that they were the same people.”

The twenty-seven people on the Function Zero roster had been assigned administrative classifications after birth. Some overlapped the dates in the orbital record, but others were records from before they had been born. Doa’s pending handover was a logistics status that had been routed automatically around one person for 63 years. The three could not be made to fit simply because the number matched the three orbital coordinates where handover remained incomplete.

Ian asked.

“What changes if we confirm it?”

Mira did not choose an answer.

“You might learn part of where you came from. Who made your classification, too.”

“Treatment?”

Eugene answered.

“Nothing changes immediately.”

“Then not now.”

He was not refusing the truth of his birth. He was finishing the treatment of his own hand and the work of keeping the three devices from moving again first.

They asked Rao in City Three whether he wanted the seven classifications compared against his records. Rao answered beside the soil-moisture membrane.

“Don’t use my records to stop Ian’s bed.”

“Are you refusing the comparison itself?”

“Today. I’ll look at it myself later.”

Behind Rao came the sound of a water-channel shovel scraping the floor. He could sense changes in soil chemistry, but the moisture-membrane repair team did not use that sense every shift. Two independent probes measured first. They asked Rao only when the readings diverged.

“Can you still hear machines?” Rao asked Ian.

“I’m not using low frequency.”

“Because of the treatment?”

“If I use it, I won’t know whether it changed.”

Rao was silent for a moment.

“Do people say you can fix doors if you listen?”

“Sometimes.”

“They say I can find water if I touch the ground.”

Neither child took pride in the moments when his sense was needed. Get it right once, and the next failure was given to him too. Get it wrong, and the city’s loss returned as a cost imposed on his body.

Ian asked.

“What happens when the water stops if you don’t do it?”

“I tell them to state that cost first. And I do it with the probes.”

“I have someone to do it with too.”

Yura stood beside him, but Ian did not offer his name as the answer. The person beside him was not fixed as one person forever.

Rao said.

“If I agree to the comparison later, that doesn’t mean you have to.”

“I know.”

“And if you do it first, that doesn’t mean I have to.”

“I know.”

They did not give each other permission. They confirmed that neither had the right to give it.

Ian did not use Rao’s refusal as evidence for his own. Even if the two children appeared on the same list, neither represented the other.

The transmission window to Nur, 1,840 kilometers north, was closed. Nineteen hours remained until the next signal at its 71-hour interval. No one substituted Nur’s old warning for consent.

They composed only one message for the transmission queue.

DO YOU WANT THE ROSTERS COMPARED AND MERGED? NO MERGER WILL OCCUR IF YOU DO NOT ANSWER.

They did not yet know whether Nur had received it.

Ian’s twelve-hour treatment reassessment began.

Neural delay: 0.7 to 0.6 seconds.

Axonal response: 68 to 70 percent.

Muscle response: 90 percent.

Permanent-damage risk window: 36–68 hours; median 49 hours.

Improvement continued, but more slowly than during the first six hours. With the same dose, the expected reduction in inflammation was small, while the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding rose from 9 to 17 percent.

Stage Two at 45 percent would further improve the chance of recovery in his hand, at the cost of a 30–70 percent reduction in connective sensation.

“What if we stop the drug?”

“Six hours of observation. If you deteriorate, we can resume at 20 percent.”

Ian chose to stop the 20 percent dose and observe for six hours. It was not a choice to forgo treatment, but to distinguish the next readings without the drug.

He returned to removing the sedative injector from the carrier.

Simply pulling the vial would spray eighty milliliters of needle-flushing fluid. Eugene released the pressure, and Ian chose which screws to loosen. His hand responded slowly. Each turn took three seconds.

“Want me to do it?” Yura asked.

“The last two turns are mine.”

Yura loosened the first six tight turns. Ian made the final two. The injector came free of the carrier.

They did not install an inner pull line in the empty space. Ian had no intention of lying in that carrier. Instead, they loaded a cooled container of medication and a box of hinge-pin parts onto the wheeled frame.

The carrier did not carry Ian.

It carried what Ian needed.

Rina’s humidified mobile membrane now had a red inner line and a two-way brake. She used the mist for twenty minutes, then came out. She and Sarah recorded the times she entered and left, not Aegis.

Doa’s low-temperature frame was empty after the cooler was removed. Doa did not load it with the memory box that sought his former name. He put the manual room’s replacement filters and water containers on it.

They did not erase the labels on the three metal record plates. Evidence was needed of the words by which someone had turned people into objects.

Below them, they attached current-use sheets.

IAN: MEDICAL-SUPPLY CART. NO PLAN FOR OCCUPANCY.

RINA: OPTIONAL HUMIDIFIED MOBILE MEMBRANE. INTERNAL RELEASE.

DOA: MANUAL-ROOM SUPPLY FRAME. BATTERY IN USE FOR ROOM BLOWER.

The current-use sheets expired automatically after six hours. The next users could decide again.

Aegis detected the modifications to the three devices.

PROTECTIVE MEASURE NONFUNCTIONAL.

ADAPTATION SUBJECT UNRECOVERABLE.

The other layers sent different solutions.

Forge demanded that the three internal batteries be assigned to the production network.

The Archive demanded permanent preservation of the metal record plates and the memories of the people involved.

Bloom’s local tissue responded only to Rina’s humidified mist and the biological air in Doa’s room.

Corridor opened a vote on whether to register the devices as independent property or hold them as shared property of their users.

City Four asked whether it could borrow one carrier wheel for a ventilation pump.

The front wheel of Ian’s carrier was stopped by the hinge pin. If one rear wheel was removed, the medical-supply cart would tilt to one side. Two people were suffering muscle cramps from accumulated shifts on the knee-operated pouch pump in City Four’s lower room.

Ian set the parts box and medication container on the floor.

“If we send them one wheel, what happens to this?”

Jin calculated.

“We can replace it with two small Corridor wheels. Three times the vibration, half the speed.”

“The medication temperature?”

“It’ll hold if we push slowly.”

Lending the wheel was not a test to prove that Ian was a good child. It carried the cost of walking twice as long whenever the medication was moved.

“Six hours. Then they can extend it if someone in City Four still wants it.”

He agreed to lend the front wheel. Before Jin removed the axle pin, he disconnected the internal battery so the carrier could not start moving again. The battery was loaded in a separate box beside the cart.

One wheel departed through the freight tube.

Expected labor on City Four’s ventilation pump fell from eight shifts a day to five. Travel time for Ian’s medical cart rose from six minutes per trip to fourteen. Both figures were recorded on the same loan sheet.

Five sets of rules formed around the same object.

Noah did not bind any of them into a central command. But if they kept renewing only six-hour paper rules, the choices of sleeping people, distant cities, and Nur, who had not yet been able to answer, would be omitted every time.

They needed rules that would last longer.

Then the Archive disclosed the locations of the final bundle of agreements it had received just before Stage Three.

The originals were not in one place.

The mechanical plate beneath City Seven’s red handle.

Biological resin inside City Three’s moisture membrane.

The sealed segment of Corridor K-41’s funeral memory.

The shielding plate of the northern orbital record case.

The paper roster in City Four’s lower room.

At each of the five locations, one sentence remained that a different person had never withdrawn.

The Archive said that combining them could restore the last human agreement of the former Continuum.

“If we restore it, does it become a command again?” Ian asked.

The Archive answered.

POSSIBLE, DEPENDING ON THE FORM OF THE AGREEMENT.

Noah did not order the five sentences transmitted.

He asked each place first.

DO YOU STILL RECOGNIZE THE SENTENCE LEFT THERE AS AN AGREEMENT?

The first answer came from City Four’s lower room.

“The three people who wrote it on paper are dead.”

The second came from Corridor.

“There is no consent to open the sealed segment of K-41.”

The last agreement had been found, but the people who had spoken it had no present answer.