Work Text:
There it was, in her inbox. It was the special inbox for anonymous reports related to Aylen's job as family and workplace arbitration. Some of those were difficult, so she had put this moment off until her lunch was finished and her scheduled client meeting was over. Now, though, she needed to open it. So she did.
It was gibberish.
Or at least, initially it looked that way.
Gradually, she teased out what she was looking at. It was a file generated by a bot. It was a security bot. Or system. It was a shuttle, one of the ones which transited a regular route from the station to the planet's surface.
The message should have gone to station security or port authority, either of which had their own bot systems that could decode this into standard language. She could have forwarded whatever it was to them to decipher, but her curiosity stopped her. Why had this ended up with her?
Then she found the answer, or at least part of the answer. Careful parsing turned up a conversation transmitted through the shuttle's comm system to the planetary surface. It was a person logged as a minor explaining her situation to another minor in the city the shuttle was heading to. Her situation was this: she had decided she no longer wanted to live with her mother and mother's partner – mainly the partner, whom she had a list of non-serious grievances against. Most boiled down to respect, possibly in both directions. Aylen might be able to help with this, to preserve what familial ties remained and establish lines of communication. She could also assist with support services for the unanticipated new family member on the surface.
The real mystery remained – why had the shuttle reached out to her, directly? How did it even know her name? As she wondered who she could even ask that, she remembered the SecUnit she'd worked with a month or so earlier. It could find out. But then she had another thought – that SecUnit knew her. And her name.
She'd seen something while combing through the message's digital morass that came back to her now as important. The shuttle had made several communications after its passenger had finished her call. Aylen had dismissed them as whatever signals the shuttle had to send as part of its normal operations. They were, as far as she could tell, machine signals and automated systems talking to one another. But what would that SecUnit's communications look like if it were talking to a machine?
She didn't know. But she did know where Mensah was and last she'd heard, SecUnit was accompanying her. She had to look up regional relay codes but she could at least confirm the shuttle had contacted someone in the same region as SecUnit. Following that contact, the shuttle had sent the message to her.
She clapped her hand over her mouth and thought about how fascinating this was – the shuttle had recognized its passenger was in distress. How had it known that from a verbal conversation? It had thought- No, it couldn't have thought. Could it? Was this just the tripping of keywords and alert conditions? But if so, then why hadn't it used standard channels? Why had it instead reached out to some other machine intelligence for … advice? Had it been … concerned?
What was thought but the tripping of keywords and alert conditions, the layered connection of related concepts? What was concern but the desire to draw other's attention to a problem?
It was interesting, and thought-provoking, and she wanted to do something about it, but she didn't know what. After a few minutes, she bundled the message along with her thoughts and sent them off to that friend of SecUnit's who was making a documentary about bots or constructs or maybe both. For now, needed to turn her attention to helping the child. It was what the ShuttleSecSys wanted, after all.