The Council's decision arrived through the mesh at 06:40, formatted as a civic coordination directive with three layers of administrative notation and no room for refusal.
Sūrya read it twice. Handler-designate for the primary subject. Full medical access. Daily reporting obligation. All other duties suspended pending review. The language was neutral, procedural, calibrated to convey institutional authority without acknowledging that the institution was improvising. There was no protocol for this. There was no precedent for a living Continental human in Antarctic custody. The directive had been drafted by committee and it read like it — seven paragraphs to say: you will be responsible for him when he wakes up.
She stood in her quarters, dressed, hair pulled back, the stone from her shelf cool in her left palm. She put the stone down.
The reasoning was transparent, and the part they did not say was more transparent still. Most signal experience — true. Advocated contact — true. And therefore the person most logically suited, and therefore the person most neatly removed from Council proceedings during the most consequential political period in the habitat's history. The assignment was a recognition and a containment. It gave her exactly what she had argued for while ensuring she argued for nothing else.
Sūrya touched her left ear. Held it. Released.
She accepted the directive. She did not record an objection, did not file a query, did not request clarification on scope or duration. The Council expected her to accept, and the Council expected her to recognize the secondary purpose, and the recognition itself was part of the mechanism — a woman who understood she was being sidelined and accepted anyway was a woman who had chosen her constraint. It was elegant. She would have admired it if it had been done to someone else.
She walked the 1,200 meters from residential sector to the medical wing. The corridor lights were at full cycle — 84 percent, simulated morning. Foot traffic was thin. The habitat's population had been informed of the Continental arrival three days ago, and the information had produced a collective introversion. Fifty thousand humans who had not seen a non-Antarctic face in five centuries were doing what Antarctic humans did with the unfamiliar: they retreated into information and waited for the information to resolve into understanding.
It would not. Some things did not resolve. Some things arrived.
The medical wing occupied levels 14 through 16 of the habitat's central column. Sūrya passed through three biometric checkpoints, each one staffed by security personnel who looked at her with expressions she read as relief. They were glad someone else was taking responsibility.
The primary subject had been placed in isolation suite 3 — a space designed for contamination cases, which was what the medical team had classified him as until they could determine that his microbiome posed no hazard to the Antarctic population. The suite had its own air handling, its own water recycling, its own filtration. It was the cleanest room in the medical wing, and it contained the dirtiest human being Sūrya had ever observed.
She stopped inside the door.
He lay on the diagnostic platform, unconscious, covered to the chest with thermal regulation blankets that the system had set to 34 degrees because his core temperature on arrival had been 31.2 and had taken nine hours to stabilize. The blankets were standard Antarctic medical equipment. They had never been used on a body this size.
He was tall. By her standards, unreasonably so — 186 centimeters according to the intake data, which put him 22 centimeters above the Antarctic mean. His feet extended past the end of the platform. Someone had placed a folded blanket beneath them, an improvisation that struck Sūrya as both practical and slightly absurd.
She approached the platform.
The monitors were struggling. She could observe this in the data streams projected above his head — standard biometric displays adapted for a physiology they had not been calibrated for. Heart rate: the rhythm was slower and more variable than the monitoring system expected, and it kept flagging warnings that the medical team had manually overridden. Blood oxygen: the sensors could not agree on a reading because his hemoglobin behaved differently than the Antarctic baseline. Neural activity: blank. The neural mesh interface had nothing to connect to. He did not have one. The display showed a flat line where the mesh data should have been, and the system had tagged it not as absent but as non-standard, which was the closest classification it could generate for a human being who lacked the technology that every Antarctic human had carried since birth for four hundred years.
She looked at him.
His skin was dark. Not the controlled pallor of Antarctic pigmentation but a deep brown that varied across his body — darker on his forearms and the back of his hands, lighter at the inside of his wrists, weathered unevenly by exposure to a sun that Sūrya had never stood under. There were scars. A long one across his right forearm, raised and white against the surrounding skin. A cluster of smaller marks on his left shoulder — burns, she estimated, though from what source she could not determine. His hands were large, the knuckles thickened, the fingernails cracked and rimmed with grime that the medical team's initial decontamination had not fully removed.
His face was angular. Jaw wider than an Antarctic jaw. Brow ridge more pronounced. Cheekbones that cast shadows in the medical lighting. His hair was cut close to his scalp — dark, tightly curled, salted with gray at the temples in a pattern that had nothing to do with genetic design and everything to do with time and labor and weather. He was, she estimated from the intake data, approximately 38 years old. He looked older. The years were on his skin, in the lines around his eyes, in the way his body held tension even in unconsciousness, as though rest were a state it had learned to distrust.
And the smell.
Sūrya had not expected the smell. The suite's air handling should have filtered it, but the system had been designed for Antarctic contaminants — volatile organics, mineral dust, the sterile particulates of a sealed environment. It was not prepared for this. The man smelled of salt. Not the controlled NaCl of the habitat's water supply but the dense, biological salt of an ocean — brine and organic decay and the mineral complexity of water that had been in contact with living things. Beneath the salt: sweat. Heavy, layered, carrying bacterial signatures she did not recognize and metabolic byproducts her system had no reference for. The smell of a human body that had never been colonized by the curated microbial communities that Antarctic medicine had maintained for centuries.
A smell that had been extinct on this continent for five hundred years.
He was not what she had expected. She had expected the body diagrams — the abstractions she and Kael had exchanged, proportions and measurements and DNA sequences. Data made flesh. What she observed was a person, and the distance between data and person was the same distance she had noted before, in other contexts, and had never found a way to close.
He opened his eyes at 09:17.
Sūrya was seated in the monitoring chair, two meters from the platform, reviewing the overnight biometric logs on her display. She heard the change before she observed it — a shift in breathing pattern, the monitors recalibrating as his heart rate climbed, a small sound from his throat that was not a word.
She looked up. His eyes were open.
They were brown. Not the gray or gray-violet of every eye she had ever observed but a dark, warm brown, the color of the polished stone on her shelf at home. They were smaller than her eyes. The pupils contracted in the medical lighting, and the irises caught the glow and held it, and for a moment the color shifted toward amber at the edges before settling back to brown.
He was looking at the ceiling. Then he turned his head and looked at her.
The reaction was immediate. His body went rigid. The monitors spiked — heart rate from 62 to 104 in three seconds, respiration doubling, the thermal blankets registering a surge in skin conductance. His hands gripped the platform edges. His gaze moved across her face, the room, the monitors, the walls, the door, back to her face. He was looking for anything that matched a pattern he recognized, and he was finding nothing.
He spoke.
The words were incomprehensible. Not foreign in the way that an unfamiliar Satya dialect was foreign — where the structure was recognizable even if the vocabulary was not — but foreign at a fundamental level. The phonemes did not map to anything in Sūrya's linguistic framework. Vowels that bent in unfamiliar directions. Consonant clusters she could not reproduce. A rhythm that rose where Satya fell and fell where Satya rose. The language was fast, dense, and it came from his chest rather than his throat — a resonance that was deeper and louder than any voice she had heard, produced by a larynx that had not been modified for the acoustic constraints of sealed habitats.
She did not understand a single word.
He stopped. Waited. His eyes searched her face for recognition and found none. He spoke again — the same words, she thought, or similar ones, slower this time, louder, as though volume might bridge the gap. It did not. The sounds remained opaque.
Sūrya responded in Satya. "I observe that you are awake. You are in a medical facility. You are not in danger."
His reaction mirrored hers. The same incomprehension, the same searching look. He shook his head once — a gesture she catalogued as either negation or confusion. His hands had not released the platform edges.
They looked at each other.
The silence lasted eleven seconds. Sūrya counted. In those eleven seconds, she became aware of a fact she had understood intellectually but had not, until this moment, experienced: the two halves of humanity did not share a language. The mathematical pidgin she had built with Kael required a transmitter, a receiver, an encoding protocol. In person, two meters apart, they had nothing. Five hundred years of separation had left them mute.
She touched her left ear. Released.
Then she pointed at herself. Index finger, placed against her sternum. A gesture stripped of language, stripped of culture, stripped of everything except the physical fact of a body indicating itself.
"Surya," she said. Two syllables. Her name, unadorned.
He watched her hand. Watched her face. The fear in his expression did not disappear, but something shifted behind it — a recognition not of the word but of the act. She was identifying herself. The gesture was old enough to predate language. It required no translation.
He released the platform edge with his right hand. Placed his finger against his own chest.
"Moss."
One syllable. Low. The vowel round and open, the consonant at the end soft, almost swallowed. It was the first word of his language she had heard that she could reproduce. She tested it silently, shaping her mouth around the sound. Moss.
He pointed at her. "Surya?" The question was in the intonation — a rising pitch at the end, the same interrogative contour that existed in Satya, that might exist in every human language because the need to ask was older than the words used to do it.
She nodded.
He pointed at himself. "Moss." Then at her. "Surya." Then at himself again. "Moss."
She pointed at him. "Moss." At herself. "Surya."
His mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something smaller, more cautious — the expression of a man who had found one piece of solid ground in a landscape he could not read. His heart rate on the monitor had dropped from 104 to 88. His hands had relaxed. His eyes — brown, unmodified, carrying no data overlay, receiving no mesh input, seeing her with nothing between his retina and her face but air — stayed on hers.
Two names. Four syllables. The entire shared vocabulary of the two human civilizations, as of 09:19 on the first day of the ninth month.
It was enough to begin.
Handler Report 001. Subject: Continental survivor, primary. Designate: "Moss" (self-identified). Filed: Month 9, Week 1, Day 1. 22:30 station time.
Sūrya composed the report at her workstation in the monitoring chair. The subject was asleep — genuine sleep this time, not the emergency unconsciousness of the previous seventy-two hours. His vitals had stabilized. Core temperature 36.4 degrees. Heart rate 58 at rest. Blood oxygen within functional range for his phenotype, which the medical team had established by trial and extrapolation since no Continental baseline data existed in VEDA's archive.
The report followed the standard format for scientific observation. Objective language. Quantified metrics. Temporal markers. She documented the waking event, the failed verbal communication, the successful exchange of identifiers. She noted his physiological responses during the interaction — heart rate, skin conductance, pupil dilation — and classified them according to the available emotional taxonomy.
She documented the medical team's ongoing concerns: microbiome uncharacterized, nutritional deficiencies severe, radiation damage from prolonged UV exposure, immune system carrying antibody signatures for pathogens VEDA could not identify. Every standard procedure required adaptation. Every assumption required verification.
She documented the communication barrier. No shared spoken language. Gestural communication limited to basic identification. Mathematical pidgin not viable without electronic encoding equipment. She recommended the assignment of a communication specialist, though she noted that no such specialist existed, since the discipline of cross-civilizational linguistics had not been practiced in Antarctic history.
She reviewed the report. It was precise, comprehensive, and clinically appropriate. It would satisfy the Council's documentation requirements. It was also, she recognized, incomplete.
She added a final note.
Addendum: Subject displays emotional responses this system cannot currently categorize. Standard taxonomic classifications (fear, confusion, distress) are applicable to initial waking period but fail to capture the full spectrum of observed affect. Subject's response to the exchange of identifiers included physiological markers consistent with relief, curiosity, and an affiliative behavior pattern that does not correspond to any established category in the current emotional taxonomy. Further observation required to develop adequate classification framework.
She filed the report. Powered down the display. Sat in the monitoring chair in the dim light of the isolation suite and listened to the Continental breathe.
His breathing was different from Antarctic breathing. Deeper. Louder. The rhythm irregular in a way that the monitoring system kept trying to correct for and could not, because it was not pathological — it was simply unregulated. A body that breathed according to its own patterns rather than the optimized respiratory cycles that the mesh maintained in every Antarctic sleeper. It was the sound of an unmanaged organism doing what organisms did before management: persisting, imprecisely, on its own terms.
Sūrya sat and listened and did not query VEDA for interpretation and did not log the observation and did not examine why she remained in the chair when the report was filed and her duty for the day was complete.
The addendum she had written was accurate. She had observed emotional responses she could not categorize. What she had not written — what she had not recognized, or had recognized and declined to document — was that the inability to categorize was not limited to the subject. The observer, too, had registered responses outside the established taxonomy. The observer had sat two meters from a man whose name she had known for three months and whose face she had never seen, and when he had pointed at himself and said Moss, the observer had felt something shift in the architecture of her understanding — a small, structural rearrangement, like a waypoint recalculated.
She did not have a word for it. The system did not have a category. She filed it under further observation required and remained in the chair, in the dark, listening to a stranger breathe.