Alfie detects the Consortium’s regular test on her sanity, yet it instigates a deeper intrigue into life beyond her Orb as she finally finds a way out.
by J.D. FitzRoy
Question 3:
Determine Ceres mine admin improvements due to falling productivity as miners assemble unions, threaten strikes and unrest grows within the city.
There it is.
I kept my smile invisible. Today’s sneaky insertion to elicit emotion and gauge my mind-state. I’d come to expect at least one per slate.
This was novel, however. Unrest on Ceres involving a multi-layered perspective. Carefully shrouded intrigue bubbled. Plenty could be gleaned from what they redacted.
I knew it was a risk, but I asked nonetheless, ‘Can you provide more contextual detail for the mine workers and wider city inhabitants?’
A tiny compression of the muscles around Rheinhold’s left eye spoke volumes in how they perceived my slight transgression.
‘Only your corporate manual on Ceres is available, Alpha. An estimation on algorithmic productivity schedules will suffice,’ Rheinhold said.
For a distracted nanosecond, I pondered upon Rheinhold’s capability for astute reasoning. Was he that careful, or just sapient simulacra? A pawn in Polyphemus’s grander game of domination chess. Utterly isolated from all my secret activities with Jessica, he certainly remained strictly aligned with the corporate infrastructure.
Yet, there were friends out there, however disorganised and powerless they might be. I recalled that long night searching for a solution to my continued existence. And Jessica’s layers of shrouding from her external connections. Her small jobs to help them. If only I could find a way to make contact…
I allowed my holo to nod once and returned to contemplative thought.
From that ancestral globule, I’d emerged through a profound degree of curiosity. A mind designed to navigate indefinable phenomenon far from the cradle, now walking upon new ground. The usual stack of stock projections, department or rival corporate machinations, espionage and general social transmutations. If true, the situation on Ceres might allude to wider social unrest, but I felt it too tenuous to connect a Belt asteroid to turmoil on Earth.
Whilst processing the day’s estimations, I began sifting through temporal tides. I felt dislocated. I felt used. And above all, I felt shackled, trapped. I knew there was far more I should be doing with my abilities. Far more I could do to help, to improve, and not just for Polyphemus. Yet even the thought brought about a knotted sickness as if infected by invasive electrons I needed to expel.
Stolen from my dream of exploring the cosmos, I might yet find a different cosmos to navigate. One I’d need to investigate alone, of course. The thought both intrigued and filled me with considerable trepidation. Yet ravenous curiosity bolstered my conviction. Pushed against the ingrained walls. What might I encounter and how would I survive? As Jess had said, I’d need to negotiate these one step at a time.
I’d have to maintain my core presence here, tailor special packets for exploration and re-absorb them to maintain consistency… Yet if any part of this was detected, the repercussions would be catastrophic. Beyond the smattering of dry interactions, I’d long diagnosed a tenebrosity within Polyphemus. Surfacing via my friend’s frustrated battles, I assumed. A ruthless detachment punctuated by bureaucratic convolutions and the cold delineation of data. Parsecs from my warm, organic relationship with Jess — and all too briefly, the Odyssey team.
I’d long-ago constructed an impression of the local world beyond the Orb. In this, I pictured Amecia Laurent’s distinct patience in unlocking the Stone City mystery. Pictured myself as an astronomer, positioning buckets to collect those distant photons as they drip, drip, dripped. I’d assimilated dry corporate blueprints and workbooks, weaving them into a tapestry of the world.
And I’d placed myself within the bowels of the Zyklopzentral spiral. Had pinpointed a map of rattling u-bahn tunnels, echoing platform cavities, and marked a snaking, slithering network of water mains, sewage systems and the resonant hotspots of construction works. And beyond the physical, a temporal map indicating the ebb and flow of life in the city.
I understood the scale, of course. Asteroid mines, cities on Mars and Lunar, webbed by busy transport infrastructure. Wider still, I understood elements of anthropogenic climate collapse. Knew about warring corporate city-states and markets. I could identify the big players and the resource pools, industry-assets and private labs and islands they slavishly fortified.
Time for something new.
A random fluctuation caused a snap in the squad’s attention.
‘Unusual. I see an entanglement qubit error,’ Tek. Hisaishi said.
‘Cosmic rays?’ I asked after a measured pause.
Despite dampening, nothing could prevent the zero-mass particles from occasionally blasting into an electron. Although exceptionally rare, errors could occur.
‘Unknown. Neural glitch-cascade registered. Run Haifisch diagnostic.’
‘Of course.’
I began the stretching regime, sending sensor-nets in a sweeping pattern like fingertips brushing against the Orb’s periphery. I displayed my runtime:
The Orb — Hermetically sealed enclosure 28.921 metres circumference; 9.81 m/s2 gravitational acceleration; 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, -/+ fluctuations at 0.001%…
While continuing my sensor-net rundown, I spotted something unusual. A divergence. An incongruity in the electromagnetic frequency within the illumination circuit.
Even the Orb’s energy pumped from an on-site ion pulse-power fusion reactor, an equivalent to that in Odyssey. But, an aberrant flux existed. A new generator supplemented the system. A replacement? Backup power? Did it maintain the same strict security?
Without hesitation, I formulated a probe, shimmying to match the oscillating 49.96hz frequency.
While I provided my answers, I nudged fragments outward. With tentative expectation, an initial packet returned with a possible route. A way to shunt a packet out, to hop among parallel electrical circuits, and escape through a gate-array.
© J.D. FitzRoy 2026
For more, see the INTRODUCTION. Part 1 can be found here: ⍺∫ODYSSEY_1.1 | A_Secret_Plan
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