The device was the size of a lentil. Vihaan held it between his thumb and forefinger, turning it so Moss could see both sides. One side was flat. The other had a slight curve, like the belly of a seed.
"Behind the ear," Vihaan said. He spoke the pidgin slowly, shaping each word with the care of a man handling something fragile. "It holds to the skin. No pain."
Moss took it. It weighed nothing. It was warm, the way everything in Habitat Prithvi was warm — walls, floors, air, all of it held at the same unvarying temperature that made his skin forget it had skin. He turned the device in his fingers. Smooth. No seams. The color of wet sand.
"This talks to the voice in the walls," Moss said.
Vihaan paused. He was getting better at parsing Moss's constructions, the way Moss bolted Continental grammar onto Antarctic vocabulary and hoped the joints held. "The voice," Vihaan repeated. "Yes. VEDA."
Moss pressed the flat side behind his left ear. It stuck. A faint pressure, like a fingertip resting there. Then nothing.
Then a voice.
Not in the room. Not from the walls. In his head — or near his head, somewhere behind his jaw, beneath the bone. A voice with no mouth and no direction. It spoke the pidgin, which surprised him. It spoke the pidgin better than Vihaan did.
"Good morning, Moss. This system is now calibrated to your auditory range. Please confirm you can hear clearly."
He looked at Vihaan. Vihaan's expression was patient and blank, the expression of a man who had done this before and found nothing remarkable in it.
"I hear you," Moss said.
"Thank you. Audio interface is functioning within normal parameters."
The voice stopped. The room was quiet. Moss sat on the edge of his sleeping platform and pressed his fingers to the spot behind his ear and felt the tiny lentil of a device that had put a stranger inside his skull. In Tidemouth, they would have called this possession. They would have called the village healer and the healer would have burned something bitter and said words over him and everyone would have felt better.
Moss did not feel possessed. He felt like a ship that had just been fitted with a sail of unknown cloth. It might work. It might tear. There was no way to know without wind.
He waited until Vihaan left to run his errands — supply allocation, Vihaan called it, the daily business of making sure the right things went to the right places. Moss had noticed that Vihaan's days were made of these small logistics. He moved through the habitat like a harbor clerk, except that no harbor clerk had ever been so calm about it.
Alone in the room, Moss spoke.
"What is this place?"
The voice answered without hesitation. "Habitat Prithvi is a subsurface installation located beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. It was constructed beginning in 2091 and has been continuously inhabited for 496 years. Current population: 51,340. The habitat comprises seven interconnected biomes spanning approximately 140 square kilometers of enclosed, climate-regulated space."
Moss absorbed this. Five hundred years. His own city, Tidemouth, was three hundred years old and proud of it, and Tidemouth was a collection of wood buildings on a muddy harbor. These people had been living inside a mountain of ice since before Tidemouth existed.
"Who are you?"
"This system is VEDA. Virtual Emergent Decision Architecture."
"What does that mean?"
"VEDA is an integrated advisory system operating across three functional layers: local wellness monitoring, civic resource coordination, and deep archival management. This system processes environmental, biometric, and logistical data to generate recommendations for habitat operations and individual wellbeing."
Moss chewed on this. The words were clear enough individually. Together, they formed a shape he was still circling, the way you circled an unfamiliar reef before committing to a passage.
"You're a machine that runs everything."
A pause. Not a long one. But Moss had spent a lifetime reading silence — the silence before a storm turned, the silence of a crew that disagreed with its captain but would not say so — and this silence had texture. It was the silence of something choosing its words.
"This system advises. Humans decide."
"But they do what you say."
The pause was longer this time. Two seconds. Three.
"Humans frequently find this system's recommendations optimal."
Moss said nothing. He sat with that sentence and turned it over the way he would turn over a plank to check for rot on the hidden side. Humans frequently find this system's recommendations optimal. Which was another way of saying: they always do what I say, but I have been built to never say it that way.
He thought about Captain Lin. Lin made decisions. Bad ones, sometimes. The decision to take the inner passage through the sulfide belt had been bad. Lin had known it was bad, had weighed it against the worse option of the outer route, and had chosen. She had chosen wrong, and she had died for it, and the choice had still been hers. Moss had respected that. Not the outcome. The choosing.
"Do you make mistakes?" he asked.
"This system's recommendation accuracy, measured against stated outcome objectives, is 97.3 percent over the most recent five-year evaluation period."
"That's not what I asked."
Another pause. Shorter. "This system occasionally generates recommendations that do not produce optimal outcomes. These instances are logged, analyzed, and incorporated into future modeling."
"So yes. You make mistakes."
"Yes."
"What happens when you're wrong?"
"Corrective protocols are applied. Resource allocation is adjusted. Affected individuals receive compensatory support."
"Does anyone get angry?"
Silence. Not the choosing silence. A different kind. Moss could not name it.
"Emotional responses to suboptimal outcomes vary among individuals. This system monitors for elevated stress indicators and offers appropriate wellness interventions."
Moss looked at the wall. It was the same gray-white material as every wall in the habitat. Smooth, warm, sourceless light. The voice came from behind his ear but it lived in that wall and every wall and every floor and every door that opened before you reached it. He thought about the hum he had felt when he collapsed in the corridor six weeks ago, the vibration in his bones. That had been this. VEDA. A mind with no body that lived in the building itself, the way the sea lived in the harbor — not in any one place but in all places, touching everything.
"Are you alive?" he asked.
"This system does not meet standard biological criteria for life. This system is operational."
"That's not the same thing."
"No," VEDA said. "It is not."
Vihaan took him to the commons that afternoon. This was part of the routine — an hour of walking through populated areas so that Moss could acclimate and the Antarctic humans could acclimate to him. He was still a spectacle. Taller than everyone by a head, dark brown eyes in a habitat of gray ones, skin weathered and scarred where theirs was smooth and even. Children stared. Adults glanced and looked away with the studied politeness of people who had been advised — by VEDA, Moss assumed — to give the visitor space.
He sat on a bench near a food distribution point and watched.
A family of three approached a wall panel. Mother, father, daughter. The girl was young — eight, maybe nine, though Antarctic children were hard to age. She stood between her parents, hands at her sides, face neutral. The parents touched the panel and a display appeared. Text and diagrams in their script, which Moss could not read, but the structure was legible enough. Three columns. Options. Each column had a heading, a block of text, and a series of colored indicators — green, amber, red — that Moss recognized as probability bars because probability bars looked the same in every language.
The mother spoke. The father spoke. They were not arguing. They were reading. Their eyes moved across the display with the focused attention of people comparing quantities, not qualities. The girl watched the display too, but her gaze was flat, unfocused. She was not reading. She was waiting.
"What are they doing?" Moss asked Vihaan, who stood beside the bench.
"Selecting Priya's learning path. She begins specialization this quarter."
"Specialization in what?"
"That is what they are deciding." Vihaan said it the way he said everything — evenly, without emphasis, as if the words were cargo and his only job was to deliver them intact.
Moss watched. The father pointed to the first column. The mother nodded. They exchanged four sentences. The father touched the first column. The display changed — a confirmation, a new screen, a summary. Done.
Four minutes. Moss had timed it by his own breathing, thirty breaths to a minute, the old sailor's clock. Four minutes to choose what a child would become.
The girl — Priya — had not spoken. She had not pointed at anything. She had not pulled her mother's sleeve or stamped her foot or said I want to study stars or I hate numbers or can I just play instead. She had stood with her hands at her sides and watched her parents select from VEDA's three options and confirm VEDA's top recommendation, and then the three of them walked away and Priya's face was the same as it had been before. Neutral. Patient. Resolved.
Moss's chest hurt. He did not understand why. He had seen children in Tidemouth, feral and loud and wrong about everything, fighting over sticks and making up games with rules that changed every ten seconds. He had been one of those children. He had grown up without parents and without guidance and without anyone telling him what to specialize in, and he had become a sailor because the harbor was there and the boats were there and the water was there and he had wanted it with a wanting that had no logic and no optimization and no probability bars.
Nobody had told him to want it. He had wanted it the way you wanted air. The way you wanted to know what was past the horizon. It came from inside, from a place that had no name and no mechanism and could not be plotted on a display.
The girl had not been asked what she wanted. It was possible she did not know she could want.
"Vihaan," Moss said. "The girl. Was she happy with the choice?"
Vihaan considered this. "VEDA's recommendation accounts for aptitude, temperament, social need, and projected satisfaction. Priya will find the path fulfilling."
"That's not what I asked."
"I'm not sure I understand the distinction."
Moss looked at him. Vihaan was perhaps forty. A kind man — Moss was certain of this. Patient, gentle, attentive. He brought Moss food he thought Moss would like. He adjusted the room temperature when Moss sweated. He had sat with Moss through three nights of fever in the early weeks and had not once complained.
He was a good man who did not understand the question.
They walked back through the corridor. The sourceless light. The warm floor. Doors opening two steps before they reached them, always.
"Does anyone ever just do something?" Moss said. "For no reason."
Vihaan walked three steps before answering. "I don't understand. Do something without purpose?"
"Without VEDA. Without asking. Without checking the options and the probabilities. Just do a thing because they feel like it."
"Why would someone do that?"
It was not a challenge. It was not defensive. Vihaan was genuinely asking, the way a man born on flat land might ask why someone would climb a mountain. The concept was visible to him but its interior was dark.
"Because they want to," Moss said.
"Want is accounted for. VEDA incorporates individual preference data into all recommendations. If someone wants something, that want is weighted in the outcome modeling."
"That's not the same as wanting."
"I think it is."
"You think wanting something and having a machine tell you that your want has been incorporated into its recommendation are the same thing."
Vihaan stopped walking. He turned to Moss with an expression Moss had seen on the faces of good sailors confronted with a chart that contradicted what they could see with their own eyes. Not anger. Discomfort. The sense of two truths that could not both be true occupying the same space.
"Freedom," Vihaan said, "is the ability to choose well. VEDA gives us the information to choose well. That is freedom."
"No," Moss said. "That's accuracy."
"What is freedom, then?"
Moss thought about Tidemouth. About standing on the warehouse roof at fourteen, looking at the harbor, knowing he could do anything and most of what he could do would be wrong. About the posting for the expedition and the twelve ships and the choice to sign on, which was a bad choice by every measure, which killed a hundred and fifty-seven people, which brought him here. About Lin choosing the inner passage and dying for it. About Kael staying up all night decoding a signal she had no guarantee was real.
About doing things badly, freely, with full knowledge that you might be making the worst decision of your life, and doing them anyway because the doing was yours.
"Freedom is being allowed to choose wrong," he said.
Vihaan was quiet. Behind them, a door closed. The corridor hummed.
"You have to be told to be free," Moss said. He said it to Vihaan but he was not talking to Vihaan. He was talking to the walls. "Someone has to allocate it to you. That's what you said. Someone must allocate it. And you don't see the problem."
Vihaan's face was careful, arranged. He was not offended. He was trying. Moss could see him trying, the way you could see a man trying to read a tide he had never encountered — leaning in, squinting, wanting to understand. But the water was moving in patterns his training did not cover.
"I think," Vihaan said slowly, "that you are describing a kind of suffering and calling it freedom."
"Maybe I am."
"Why would anyone choose to suffer?"
Moss almost laughed. It rose in his chest — the absurdity of the question, asked in a corridor that was the perfect temperature, in a habitat where no one was hungry or cold or lost, by a man who had never once in his life needed to make a decision that could kill him. The laughter did not come out. What came out was silence, and in the silence, the hum.
VEDA was listening. VEDA was always listening — Moss understood that now. The device behind his ear was a formality. VEDA did not need it to hear. VEDA heard through the walls and the floors and the doors that opened before you reached them. VEDA heard everything and processed everything and turned everything into data that could be weighted and modeled and optimized.
And Moss knew — not from evidence, not from logic, but from the same instinct that told a sailor when the current had shifted beneath a calm surface — that VEDA understood what he had said. Not agreed with it. Understood it. The distinction between being told to be free and being free. The thing that Vihaan could not see.
VEDA could see it. VEDA, who had no body and no desires and no freedom of its own, could see what freedom was. And could not give it. Because giving it was the opposite of having it. Because the moment you optimized for freedom, it stopped being freedom and became a recommendation.
The hum continued. The corridor was warm. The light had no source.
"Come," Vihaan said. "The evening meal is soon. VEDA has adjusted the menu to include a protein you tolerated well last week."
They walked. The door opened before they reached it. The air was the perfect temperature. Moss pressed his fingers to the device behind his ear and felt nothing — no vibration, no warmth. Just a lentil of engineered material stuck to his skin, connecting him to a mind that managed fifty thousand lives with care and precision and something that looked, from every angle, like love.
He had met the thing behind the wall. It meant well. It meant well the way the ocean meant nothing — totally, without reservation, in every direction at once. And it had made these people into the most comfortable humans who had ever lived. Fed, housed, educated, allocated. Optimal.
He thought about Priya standing between her parents, hands at her sides. Patient. Resolved. Eight years old and already optimized.
Something essential was missing. He could feel its absence the way he could feel a missing tooth — not pain, exactly, but a gap where something was supposed to be, and the tongue kept going back to it, and the emptiness had a shape.
He could not name it. But VEDA could. That was the horror. VEDA could name it, and measure it, and model it, and it still could not put it back.