Around lunchtime on their third day crossing the wetlands, Mikkel had seen more forms of fungus than he’d ever imagined could possibly exist.

Many of them he would never have identified as such, were it not for the Herbalist’s inexhaustible commentary. The fungi that actually looked the way he expected a mushroom to look hardly merited a mention, but the Herbalist would rhapsodise about the ones that looked like glistening organs which had escaped from a bloated decaying corpse, or the ones that looked like tiny waterfalls of deeply unnatural colour, somehow frozen in the moment of their cascading down the side of a tilted, rotting beech.

“You’re creeping out the boy, Zilla,” called the Mechanic, at a brief pause in the exposition.

“Not our intention, not at all,” replied the Herbalist absently, her head turning with almost mechanical regularity, scanning the forest to either side of the path for her next subject.

“Ah, but what can we even know of intentions, Zilla? Dare we invoke the knowledge of our glorious leader on this matter, so dear to their heart?”

Without wanting to be noticed, Mikkel looked up and to his side, watching his supervisor’s face for evidence of reaction. The Mechanic had been probing at the Hermeneut since the expedition had departed the college and the Valleys, six days prior, in much the same way that the irascible engineer probed at the Solarity devices and artefacts which seemed always to occupy at least part of their attention. Mikkel knew himself no fine judge of character—what boy ever was?—but had decided days ago that the Mechanic’s attempts at ingress were in this case not aimed at repair, nor even understanding.

“You speak the truth, Mechanic,” said Mikkel’s master, loudly enough that the whole caravan could hear, lightly enough to almost conceal the steel. “Intention can only ever be inferred. Though any inference might be considered more reliable in such cases as the intentional agent is demonstrably unsophisticated.”

The Theorist barked in amusement. The Herbalist’s faint monologue halted briefly, her brows first furrowing before slowly unfolding above a smile of almost childlike delight.

“Do you want it explained to you, Mechanic,” the Theorist enquired, “or would you prefer to keep digging through the bliss of your ignorance?”

“Far be it from me to—”

“Good grief, just shut up, will you?” The Theorist halted, exasperated, wiping at their spectacles. The whole expedition dwindled to a stop.

“Oh, very good. Let’s silence the only scholar with any practical skills on this entire expedition, shall we?”

“If you intend to hold forth on matters to which your discipline certifies your attainment,” retorted the Theorist, “it would be a welcome change from your endless sniping.”

“I didn’t ask to come on this backwoods jaunt, you know.”

“No, you were invited,” said the Hermeneut. “The rumours that your faculty were happier that you accepted the invitation than you were happy to take it have gained in credence since we left, I must admit.”

The Theorist snorted. “She got you there, eh? Now, I think it’s time—”

“Linnea, please.” The Hermeneut raised a hand, then cast a quizzical look back down the path, to where the admynistrators formed a distinct cluster between the faculty at the front and the main body of researchers and technicians bringing up the rear. “Let’s continue. We should reach the site at…”

“Ah, later this afternoon, professor,” suggested an admynistrator, without sounding too sure. “Should I bring up one of the geographers?”

“Not unless you believe we’re off the path,” replied the Hermeneut, before turning back to her fellow academics. “We should reach the site this afternoon, at which point our esteemed colleague the Mechanic will surely find some outlet for their frustrations. It has been a long journey. I, for one, am rather bored of walking through this forest.”

“Palustrine wetland, technically speaking” observed the Herbalist, still staring out into the dank gloom between the trees. “Many fascinating specimens, Ylva. Spectacular development of saprophytic clades.”

“In which case we should probably feel more at home than we do, Zilla, especially on this particular expedition.” The Hermeneut turned to Mikkel, a sparkle in her eye betraying the pleasure in the exchange that her voice was careful to conceal. “Are you ready to continue, little one?”

The Theorist snorted again. Mikkel felt himself blush, and was glad of the forest’s dinginess. He shifted his aching shoulders beneath his half-size pack, and wished—not for the first time—that he was back among the researchers, where being male wouldn’t make him stand out quite so much.

On the other hand, pretty much everyone bringing up the rear in the research mob would be wishing they were up here, eavesdropping on the cut and thrust of the faculty. He might even get to tell some tales around the campfire tonight, assuming anyone could find anything that would burn in the vicinity of the installation.

He nodded. “Yes, master.”

“Very good,” said the Hermeneut, with a smile.

~o0O0o~

Mikkel’s invitation to join the expedition had come during a tutorial session around a month earlier, in which his master had been trying to explain the challenges of hermeneutics in the broader context of the Solarity as an era of textual production. To Mikkel, those challenges seemed increasingly insurmountable.

“So basically we can’t trust anything?”

“Not until that trust is earned, no,” the Hermeneut had responded. “But even a text we know to contain falsehoods can be useful when we know it to have been authored by a human person.”

“How so?”

“Because those falsehoods suggest motivations and perspectives on the part of the author. We can infer things about them, through the traces they leave of themselves in the text.”

“Can we not infer about a thinking machine in the same way?”

“Hypothetically, yes. In practice, no. During the Solarity there was a vast science devoted to this end. At the risk of paraphrasing the mechanics very crudely: we understand that a thinking machine is in essence a machine which autonomously performs mathematical operations on catalogues of symbols, yes?”

Mikkel nodded, slowly.

“Right. In theory, then, examining the texts produced by a thinking machine could allow you to determine, or at least to guess, some part of the equation on which it relied.”

“But that would require another thinking machine… “

“Of at least the same size and power, yes, if not considerably larger. It would be easier, I’m told, simply to identify whether a text was authored by a machine, without revealing its equations. But can you see why that was pointless?”

“No, master.”

“Because knowing that a text was potentially untrustworthy was very little improvement over suspecting it might have been potentially untrustworthy—particularly once the use of thinking machines had become commonplace.” The Hermeneut gave a wry smile. “More efficient, you see, to just assume the worst of everything.”

“That is… disheartening, master.”

“Welcome to archaeological scholarship, Mikkel!”

She gazed into the fire for a while, her brow furrowed with thought. “Perhaps it would be good for you to actually encounter one,” she mused.

“A thinking machine, master?”

“Yes—a speaking machine, in fact. Word arrived this morning of a new discovery in the forests of the interior. I need to put together an expedition to investigate and secure it, assuming it proves to be something more than some landswoman’s overactive imagination.”

“What use would I be?

“You would be my assistant, Mikkel.”

“You have many assistants more senior than me.”

“I do indeed! Such is the dubious privilege of a faculty lead, and particularly of the chair of the faculty conclave: to have more than the usual number of underlings eyeing my place on the ladder, wondering how they might get it for themselves. Little do they know how gladly I would be rid of it, were that an option.” She smiled warmly at him. “But you, obedient little boy that you are, have no interest and less opportunity. The one hand that I can be sure isn’t holding a knife behind its owner’s back…”

“No one would dare, master, surely–”

The Hermeneut waved a hand breezily. “Figure of speech, Mikkel. Adult rhetoric. But yes, you should come on that expedition.”

“If you say so, master.”

“I do say so, Mikkel! And I’ll ask a favour of you, one that is not strictly academic. I want you to observe my fellow faculty leads, and tell me me which of them you think might be… up to something.”

This sounded to Mikkel rather like spying. He was both thrilled and disturbed to find he was not particularly bothered by that comparison. “Up to what, master?”

“If I knew that, young man, I could probably work out who was up to it, hmm? Just think of it as treating people like texts, if that helps. Read them closely, and ask questions of your readings—privately, of course. Explore hunches. Most importantly, share any hunches with me. It will be just like tutorials, really.”

She sat back in her chair. “On which note, are we done for today? Any further questions, young Mikkel?”

“I was hoping you would explain your earlier statement, master. You claimed that the only purpose that can be attained of a thinking machine is the purpose it claims for itself, if any.”

“Oh, that.” She sighed, started into the flames again. “We are obliged, by dint of all that has been lost, to take the machines at their word, because there is no other word for us to take. In the machines of the Solarity era, and in the texts they contain, are answers to questions we do not yet know how to ask. There are also answers to questions we do not want to ask, and to questions that have never been asked. An unknown quantity of those answers are wrong. But they are all we have to work with.”

“The Mechanic says…” Seeing the Hermeneut’s right eyebrow arching upward, Mikkel corrected himself. “I am given to believe that the Mechanic has sometimes said that we should spend less time digging through the detritus of the Solarity for knowledge, and more time making our own discoveries. That the difference between them and us is that they looked forward for what they could find, but we only look back for what was lost.”

“That sounds like the sort of thing that the Mechanic would say. You’d do well not to repeat it widely, though—not least because gossip is unbecoming of a gentleman like yourself, no?”

The Hermeneut leaned back in her chair. “The Mechanic is not wrong, either, at least as far as identifying the differences between us and the Solarity. The Theorist, meanwhile—were she to be asked—would likely say that the Mechanic has inherited certain habits of thought from the Solutionists, among which she would list the tendency to seek problems which might be addressed by the work one has already decided one wants to do.”

“I don’t understand, master.”

The Hermeneut sighed. “Nor do we, really. It’s politics, Mikkel, rather than philosophy.”

~o0O0o~

“This installation must be feggin’ huge,” said Ljuda. She and Mikkel stood among the research mob, which had been ordered to stay at the edge of the clearing while the admynistrators made a basic reconnaissance. Ljuda was a junior researcher in theory, around the same age and seniority as Mikkel, and prone to exaggeration, which led Mikkel to treat her—as politely as he could—as if she were a text of uncertain provenance.

“How can you tell?” he asked, looking at the small and unusually regular hill at the center of the clearing. The side of the hill facing roughly east had been excavated, presumably by the handful of jaegare who were sat around a small campfire near the dark hole in the slope, watching the research caravan deploy itself. The hill was roughly central to the clearing, perhaps three hundred meters from the edge, but the gloom of the forest, combined with its simultaneous uniformity and variety of the forest, made it very hard to guess how big the hill actually was. How close were the jaegare and their fire? “It doesn’t look much bigger than a small house from here.”

“Lot of these sites, the majority is underground, see? They did a lot of that during the Solarity, though opinions differ as to exactly why. Anyway, you can’t judge the size of the thing from the entry block, which is likely what’s under that hill.”

“So how do you judge the size?”

Ljuda tapped the side of her nose. “By the clearing, not by the hill. The compound usually isn’t buried that deep, so it’s hard for trees to get a decent foothold above it. Something to do with the drainage of the soil. One of the Herbalist’s lot was talking about it on the way here.”

“So, this clearing is, what, half a kilo across? That’s big, Mikkel—as big as anything that’s been discovered in the last decade, at least! And if it goes down multiple levels—which everyone knows is more likely with the bigger ones…”

Ljuda’s monologue trailed off, and she wandered away to confer with some other researchers from the faculty of theory. Hermeneutics and theory were closely aligned, epistemologically speaking, but the theorists were not very welcoming to Mikkel, with the exception of Ljuda.

~o0O0o~

“This your chief, is it?”

The boss jaegare, her crossed arms a tacit insult, looked the Hermeneut up and down with barely concealed contempt. This fearsome woman wore a fur cape, as if to spite the muggy warmth of the forest in late spring. Her head, like that of her comrades, was uncovered, the crown cropped short of the shaggy brown hair which hung long from the back and sides of her head. Crude tattoos decorated her left cheek, chaotic scribblings that Mikkel could not begin to decipher, the traditional blue ink blurred almost to grey by years of exposure in all weathers.

The Hermeneut doffed her hat, as decorum demanded, before bowing slightly at the waist and nodding to each of the jaegare in turn, who did not bother to conceal their amusement even as they nodded in return.

“So polite, you city folk.” The jaegare spat theatrically, angling the tobak-brown jet just far enough away from the Hermeneut’s boot as to be deniable. She looked Mikkel up and down in a parody of lascivious approval. “But you’ve done all right for yourself, haven’t you? Unusual for your type to travel with their bedwarmers.”

Suddenly Mikkel had another answer for the question of why he’d been invited along on this trip, and didn’t much like it. He didn’t mind being mistaken for the Hermeneut’s doxy by the jaegare—who cared what such people thought?—but he did resent the possibility that his main purpose in the caravan was precisely in order to be mistaken in that way: to enhance his master’s aura of power in the eyes of these landswomen.

“The young man is my assistant,” replied the Hermeneut, “not my whore.”

“Assistant, right,” drawled the jaegare, and threw a broad wink. “So many clever words—but beneath it all, the same ways. You’re no better than us, though you like to pretend that you are.”

“I count myself no better than you, landswoman, but do I count myself as different. Nonetheless, we share the common bond of history, do we not? My people will afford you the respect that carried our ancestors through the Solarity. I request that you reciprocate.” The jaegare’s face contorted at the last word, and the Hermeneut tried again. “I ask that you return the respect we grant you.”

“Oh, sure thing, chief,” said the jaegare, eyes wide with a feigned innocence, before completing the formula. “My camp is yours, as yours is mine.” The sly look slipped back onto her face, and she glanced again at Mikkel. “But given we’re sharing, chief to chief, I still think me or one of my girls should get a go on the boy.”

While Mikkel fought the desire to lower his face in shame and hide his blushes, the Hermeneut gestured toward the dark maw that the jaegare had dug into the hillside.

“One more impertinence, landswoman, and you will find yourself without the reward you have been promised.”

“No reward, no access. You think we haven’t taken precautions? This isn’t our first encounter with the likes of you. You want your precious machine, you’ll pay us what you promised, and more.”

“We’ll pay what was promised, and no more. Unless you continue to insult me,in which case we will pay you nothing, and leave. You think you’re the only hunters who stumble across things in the forest that they don’t understand? This is not my first encounter, either.”

“I want this machine,” continued the Hermeneut, crossing her arms. “But I do not need it. Perhaps you don’t need the copper? I can find other uses for it elsewhere. And unlike you, chief, I have discipline and power over my people. I don’t have to fear that one of them will knife me in my sleep for wasting weeks of the hunting season digging holes in the dirt.”

The other jaegare never let their expressions slip, but even Mikkel could feel that the encounter had shifted decisively in the Hermeneut’s favour. So could the jaegare chief, who glared hard at the row of academics stood silently behind the Hermeneut, but pointedly overlooked Mikkel. She spat again—more carefully, this time, and further aside—before giving a nod just deep enough to convey acquiescence, if not actual submission.

“Thank you, landswoman. Wise are the well-travelled.” The Hermeneut turned to her faculty. “Right, then. Get the admynistration up here. The chief and her hunters here will show them the way to the machine—a safe way, by which no one gets hurt.”

She turned to the Mechanic. “Bring two of your best with the admynistrators. I want a preliminary assessment of the machine by the time the rest have made camp. Get someone else to do a risk analysis of the site as a whole..”

The Mechanic nodded curtly, turned away, and walked toward the researchers huddled near the treeline, passing a pack of admyn as they scurried forward to do the Hermeneut’s bidding.

“You want to meet the talking machine, Mikkel?”

There was another question, unvoiced, in the Hermeneut’s eyes. Mikkel was not at all sure he did want to see the machine, at least not before it had been assessed as safe. But that was not the answer that the Hermeneut was looking for, to either of her questions.

“Of course, master,” he replied.

~o0O0o~

Inside the hill was a large room, mostly empty: a floor and bare walls made of the poured pseudo-stone that reliably indicated a Late Solarity installation; some little stalls or enclosures of uncertain purpose along the wall near the doorway through which they entered; a stairway dropping down at the center of the room, all but invisible in the gloom but for the end of the handrail spiralling out of the shaft, lit by the faint glow of the myceleum lights that the jaegare had presumably left out on the next level down. The stalls nearest the entrance held piles of stuff which clearly belonged to the jaegare, including the digging tools that had breached the mound. Otherwise the space was stark, the layer of dust and mould on the floor undisturbed with the exception of a path that ran straight from doorway to stairwell.

The two jaegare and the two admyns headed confidently toward the stairwell. The faculty slowed somewhat, letting the admyns go ahead, each looking around with what Mikkel assumed would be their own disciplinary eye. Or were they just letting the admyns take the vanguard, in case the machine went viral?

As the faculty group started to cross the room to the stairwell, the Mechanic dropped back to walk beside the Hermeneut, on the other side to Mikkel, muttering darkly to themselves.

“What troubles you, Lejon?”

“Look at them,” said the Mechanic. “Gawping like peasants at the circus. The cream of the critical disciplines, or so they repeatedly tell me. And yet none of these supposed humanists has thought to ask the most obvious question arising.”

“Enlighten me, Mechanic.”

“How come the jaegare managed to locate the doorway of this building with the very first hole they dug?”

“A lucky strike, perhaps,” interjected the Theorist, from a few steps behind

Mikkel saw the Mechanic’s eyes narrow with contempt. “Pfft. Too neat. And why only four of them, eh? No retinue. Not standard jaegare behaviour.”

“Typical of an engineer to assume a uniformity of behaviour in others, merely on the basis of their own,” retorted the Theorist. “The jaegare do not have a uniform culture, Mechanic. You might know that if you left your workshops more than once a year.”

The Mechanic hawked and spat into the gloom of the room, muttered something to the Hermeneut, and hurried forward to disappear down the stairwell behind the admyns.

The Theorist caught up, eased herself into the space beside the Hermeneut that the mechanic had just vacated.

“They’re more twitchy than usual, eh? Something strange is afoot with our dear Mechanic, I’d wager.”

“Something is certainly afoot, Linnea,” the Hermeneut replied, casting a quick glance at Mikkel.

The stairwell interrupted further conversation. Being of the spiral form, they had to take it single file, and standard archaeological practice demanded a few meters spacing between them in case of trips or falls or—implicitly—traps. Given how the admyns had hurried down ahead of them, hot on the heels of the jaegare, Mikkel assumed that traps could be ruled out. But while his head could rationalise that conclusion, his heart pounded out something not too far from panic in response to the lack of light, the weird echoes, and the acrid, dusty smell of the place.

The stairwell echoed in a manner that suggested a number of further levels downward, but the tracks in the dust all led off at the first level below the entrance block, and down the middle of a broad corridor with numerous side doors, none of which—to judge by the undisturbed dust—had yet been approached. Nearly a hundred meters down the corridor, lit fitfully by marsh-gas lanterns left at intervals along the floor, a large double doorway could be seen. Its right-hand half opened slightly onto the room beyond, from which spilled a light the likes of which Mikkel had never before seen.

“The power is still on, then,” announced the Theorist, to no one in particular, and strode down the corridor behind the Mechanic. Something snagged at Mikkel’s mind, and he turned to the Hermeneut, mindful of their repeated advice to give voice to hunches.

“Master,” he began, “a speaking machine would require power in order to speak, yes?”

“A valid supposition, Mikkel. Go on.”

“Then our coming here to salvage the machine was based on the assumption that there was still power in this installation. Wasn’t it?”

The Hermeneut smiled. “My coming here certainly was. Yours too, if only at one remove.”

“‘Of the Others, we can only infer’,” Mikkel recited.

“Indeed. And evidence our inferences.” The Hermeneut gestured toward the light spilling from the doorway at the end of the corridor. “Shall we?”

~o0O0o~

Inside the room, which the Theorist insisted should be called the “compute suite”, one of the admyns knelt beside a case full of medical equipment and other less obviously explicable objects, while the other stood, shakey-legged but upright, in front of a large screen, almost as broad as two people were tall, which was seemingly embedded in the far wall facing the door.

The light was piercing, almost painful, perhaps due to the relative darkness of the rest of the installation. It had reminded Mikkel of the flashes one saw in the windows of the welding shop in the Mechanic’s faculty: stark and unforgiving, and generative of strange shadows that did not act as expected.

A voice with a strange, strangled accent and uncanny diction was speaking what sounded to Mikkel mostly nonsense, the sound coming seemingly from nowhere and everywhere at once, rather like the light. When the voice paused, the admyn would reply, or attempt to, in what Mikkel guessed must be the same language. This was Anglish, presumably, given that the phonemes weren’t too alien when considered individually—though Mikkel could barely discern where one word ended and the next began.

“I’m not sure that poor admyn was doing any better,” said the Hermeneut quietly. The admyn and her companion all but ran from the room, with instructions from the Mechanic, the Theorist and the Translator to fetch down their best researchers from the surface.

“Commendably brave, though,” she continued. “As are you, I should add! No one would have thought less of you had you used the earplugs, you know.”

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, and for an alarming moment, Mikkel found himself reminded—at a level of basic physical response that he habitually did everything to suppress—that the Hermeneut was an unusually handsome woman. He kept his face expressionless as she leaned forward to deliver a whispered confidence. “I think the Translator put theirs in before we entered the hill.”

Mikkel allowed himself a slight chuckle at the Translator’s expense. It seemed smarter than not laughing at all at one of his master’s rare direct jokes.

“I’m probably less frightened of viral incidents than most,” began Mikkel, only to be interrupted by the voice of the room, which suddenly shifted languages to something approaching Solarity Svenska at the same time as switching its gender to an aggrieved and performative masculinity, while somehow remaining recognisably the same voice.

“VIRAL INCIDENTS,” boomed the voice, as the Hermeneut propelled Mikkel toward and through the door, “ARE AN EXAMPLE PLUG-IN PROVIDERS ANNOUNCE SECURITY-RELATED FLASH PLAYER BUFFER CAN ACCOMMODATE BEING IMMEDIATELY ALLOWING MALWARE TO SYSTEMS TO MONITOR UNUSUAL VERSIONS. TO MONITOR UNUSUAL VERSIONS! SECURITY ADVISORIES FROM NEW VERSIONS DOES NOT OF A BUFFER OVERRUN!”

“Its listening systems are working well” observed the Mechanic with uncharacteristic cheer, emerging from the room behind them. The other faculty were already halfway down the corridor toward the stairwell.

“It would seem so,” said the Hermeneut, before turning to shout after the fleeing faculty. “Is everyone all right? Mikkel? Good. I think this is probably as good a time as any to turn it over to your experts, Mechanic.”

“Afraid at last, Hermeneut?”

“Only a fool would be fearless in a place like this.”

The Mechanic allowed themselves a smile which seemed almost cruel to Mikkel—though perhaps it was just the light.

“I can’t fault that inference,” they said, before reentering the compute suite.

~o0O0o~

In the magical manner of all gossip, garbled reports of the compute suite incident had made their way to the surface almost before the faculty involved had reached the top of the stairwell. As a result, Mikkel found himself uncharacteristically in demand among the other researchers, even if in most cases they seemed only to want an eye-witness that they might interrogate and then gainsay.

The sun had all but set by the time the faculty had reemerged from the room beneath the hill, in which time the researchers, technicians and admyn had set up a reasonably orderly campsite at the edge of the clearing, near the point where the expedition had entered it earlier in the afternoon. The jaegare had a rather more makeshift camp near the hole they’d dug into the hillside, a cluster of bivouacs and backpacks scattered around their own small fire, the feeding of which was delegated to a young girl who slipped into and out of the treeline with an uncanny quietude, returning with armfuls of well-dried wood from a forest where the admyns had struggled to find more than a handful of usable tinder. Under pressure from faculty and researchers alike, the admyns brokered some sort of arrangement with the jaegare, which resulted in the girl periodically appearing at the center of the larger campsite, throwing down a bundle of branches, and casting a contemptuous eye around the company before slipping off into the twilight once more. Mikkel found the girl equally fascinating and terrifying, a perfect miniature of her older companions, obedient without being at all subservient. Mikkel’s fellow researchers seemed not to notice her at all, though Mikkel felt there was something effortful about their not-noticing.

Later, once guards had been set and agendas thrashed out, the faculty assumed the spots nearest the fire as the younger researchers started heading for their bedrolls. Mikkel was sure he was not the only one laying quietly in the dark, eyes closed, following their conversation closely. He was also sure that the faculty would be aware that their researchers were listening, which led him to wonder just how unguarded their talk really was.

“Have you taken the earplugs out yet, Translator?” the Mechanic enquired, loudly.

“If I successfully pretend that I have not, do I get to ignore your prickish attempts at humour?”

“Oh, very good, yes,” muttered the Herbalist, who was seated not far from Mikkel’s bedroll.

“You can’t fault the Translator for being cautious,” began the Theorist.

“I think you’ll find I can!” The Mechanic sounded in high spirits, or perhaps just in spirits—the discovery of the machine had been toasted in barleywine, of which the Mechanic was notoriously fond.

“Your discipline has always been rather cavalier when it comes to salvage,” said the Hermeneut. “ “‘The last refuge of the Solutionists’, as the bathhouse graffiti still puts it.”

“Have some respect,” spat the Mechanic. “If it weren’t for the Solutionists, we’d likely all still be knee deep in the muck of the fields, wondering how next year’s weather would try to kill us.”

“Respect walks two ways, dear Mechanic.”

“Have we become so doubtful, now, that even humour is suspect?”

“Humour is in the hearing.”

The Mechanic sighed. “There could be no surer sign of your hegemony, Hermeneut, than such a claim going uncontested.”

“You are contesting it now, are you not?”

The fire popped and crackled in the silence, which was eventually broken by a tentative question from one of the more senior mechanical researchers.

“If the risk of infection from thinking machines was always negligible,” they began, “how did it come to be dogmatic?”

“Enantiodromia,” muttered the Herbalist.

“Backlash.” The Mechanic sounded bitter. “The Solutionists became too confident, made some mistakes.”

“I would hardly categorise the wiping out of two entire villages as ‘some mistakes’,” replied the Hermeneut, mildly.

“Those were accidents!”

“Indeed—fatal ones. And rooted, as you say, in an overconfidence regarding what could be taken as truth in machinic texts. Though the fear of virality might justifiably be seen as a reactionary reversal of that overconfidence, as the Herbalist just suggested.”

“Is that what she suggested?”

“In rather fewer words, yes,” replied the Theorist. “But that reversal was no less founded on the facts available than was the confidence of the Solutionists, as I understand it.”

“Arguably more so,” confirmed the Hermeneut, and chuckled. “And our downplaying of it is more fact-founded still—or so we are obliged to believe.”

The mechanic researcher spoke again, cautiously. “Perhaps the specifics of the case would be illustrative, masters, where the abstract theory is not?”

“Good point, well made,” said the Hermeneut. “Though I should confess my own caution, which comes from not being intimately familiar with the details.”

“At the core of the conflation,” she continued, slowly and carefully, “is a reconcretised metaphor. The ability of thinking machines to exchange between one another media which, through error or deliberate malice, could cause them damage or destruction, was likened to the transmission of sicknesses between biological creatures very early on—perhaps even before thinking machines were available to anyone other than scholars and governing institutions.”

“This is speculation, Hermeneut,” scoffed the Theorist. Mikkel strove to lay as still as possible in his bedroll, to remain unnoticed.

“Certainly, Linnea—but it is not unfounded. There are many references to virality in physical texts from the late Carbon Era, decades before the Solarity. Those texts position the ubiquity of computation as yet to happen. The confusion arises from a different but related use of the term as applied to machinic discourses of the early Solarity and onwards. In this later sense, virality was interpersonal, with the transmission mediated by machine rather than originating there.” The Hermeneut sounded tired. “This is, or will be, the thematic of Mikkel’s thesis. He can explain it far better than I.”

“Ah, so that’s why you brought the boy,” said the Mechanic. “I had begun to wonder whether the jaegare were on to something… “

“Humour is in the hearing,” snapped the Hermeneut, “but the ear can weary. In truth I brought the boy for the benefit of his research, for which I have high hopes, rather than for the edification of my fellows, for which my hopes grow lower by the day.”

“Forgive me.” The Mechanic sounded as contrite as Mikkel had ever heard them sound, but that wasn’t saying much.

“You really think there’s something to it, then?” The Translator, meanwhile, sounded as weary as ever.

“Absolutely. Given the shadow of doubt which hangs over all machinic texts, there is considerable merit in examining those texts which which we believe to have intentionally blurred the line between fiction and truth, particularly—but not exclusively—in the sphere of computation. In a way, we can trust them far more than we can trust ostensibly instructive material.”

“God’s tits, Hermeneut,” said the Theorist, aghast. “You’ve got that boy studying science fiction?”

“And why not? It has as much to teach us of those times as anything else we can retrieve from the systems we find still functional. Besides, didn’t you once tell me it was highly thought of by your discipline before the Fall?”

“We have much to learn from the Solarity, but we would be wiser not to imitate its most desperate strategies!”

“We should be making our own discoveries,” muttered the Mechanic into the stretched silence, “rather than digging through the Solarity’s ruins.”

Slowly, the faculty’s talk turned to mundane matters, such as planning the exploration of the installation below their feet. Mikkel allowed himself to sleep.

~o0O0o~

In the days that followed, the interpretation of texts took a back seat to more immediate activities.

The talking machine could not be made to reliably speak in Old Svenska, but the Translator’s team were able to work with the Mechanic’s specialists to coax it into a Deutsche dialect that was sufficiently well known to allow sustained interaction. Subsequent to this breakthrough, the Hermeneut was fully engaged in extracting and cataloguing the corpus of texts remaining in the system of the istallation, which was extensive, and reckoned to contain not only plenty of specialist works, never before seen, but also a number of standard reference texts, against which the veracity of the archive as a whole might be assessed.

With the Hermeneut thus occupied, and the machinic trove judged too risky for an ungowned researcher, Mikkel found himself with time on his hands. He volunteered to assist the admyn teams charged with exploring the rest of the installation, which extended down another four floors below the compute suite. No further thinking machines were located, but this was expected: it was understood that installations of the late Solarity had relied on compute centralisation as a defence against the incursion of untrustworthy texts, as well as against the subtle forms of warfare that had characterised the desperate years immediately preceding the Fall, which were still still so poorly understood.

There were, however, a number of surprisingly well-preserved dwelling areas in the middle levels, which contained some equally well-preserved physical texts, as well as other Solarity ephemera. The Hermeneut, tied up with her senior research group in probing the mysteries of the talking machine, delegated the cataloguing and preservation of the books to Mikkel. After a few days, he and the books were ensconced in one of the alcoves in the room beneath the hill, which soon became known as “the library”. Mikkel spent long days working there, squinting in the dim light that the Mechanic’s technicians had somehow coaxed from the roof panels, alternating between his thesis work and dealing with the batches of crumbling books as they were brought up from the bowels of the installation. He shared that liminal space with the jaegare, who had hung on after receiving their finder’s fee, but who resolutely refused to do anything, despite repeated attempts to engage them in some sort of productive labour.

Excitement rippled round the site in the middle of the second week, by which point the admyn teams were exploring the furthest reaches of the lower levels. They had already discovered a repository of devices and components—enough to keep the college in functional tablets and boxen for a decade, if used frugally. But the big buzz came from the discovery of a locked and fortified room which, after the Mechanic’s best fettler had spent a few hours probing the doorway and isolating it from the webbing of the suddenly very paranoid talking machine, opened to reveal a small collection of what were unmistakably weapons of late Solarity vintage. These were brought up to the room under the hill while the Hermeneut’s research group redoubled their efforts, hoping to find datasheets that might explain their safe usage, and the Mechanic—uncharacteristically quiet and focussed—spent hours inspecting and diagramming them. The entire camp was in a foment regarding the weapons, and how they might affect the balance of power back in the Valleys, right up until the third morning after their discovery, when Mikkel arrived at the library and discovered that half of the weapons had disappeared, along with the jaegare.

It seemed they had drugged the poor admyn who had been posted as guard, though it was unclear whether her hysteria on waking was a consequence of the drugs or just a devastating guilt. She was sedated and laid out in the Herbalist’s tent, where the old master pressed poultices to her head and turned away all other aspiring inquisitors. The Hermeneut made a public statement to the whole faculty regretting her distraction, and apologised for not having posted a more extensive guard, nor having had a closer eye kept on the jaegare, who were not known for hanging around in the presence of “cityfolk” unless there was some clear advantage to be had from doing so. Speculation was rife regarding the motives of these scientifically illiterate landswomen in absconding with weapons far beyond their ken, which went some way to explaining why it was only at the midday meal that anyone realised the Theorist was also absent.

“She may have interrupted the jaegare as they were stealing the weapons,” Mikkel suggested that evening. The Hermeneut smiled, but it was a strangely absent expression, indicative of a mind mostly elsewhere.

“That would be fittingly melodramatic, Mikkel, but it seems more likely she was instrumental in convincing the poor guard to ingest whatever she was dosed with, before fleeing with her accomplices.”

“This was what you asked me to keep an eye open for, wasn’t it?”

“It would seem it was, yes.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything.”

“Did you have your suspicions, then?” There was no anger in the Hermeneut’s question, only curiosity.

“Yes, but… “ Mikkel wrestled with years of instruction regarding deference to one’s seniors, and with the reticence deemed becoming to young men. “But I suspected the Mechanic, master, not the Theorist.”

“Ah—because of their rather combative attitude, I assume? Well, the Mechanic and I have never quite seen eye to eye, that’s for sure. But between you and me, they’re my closest ally on the faculty board, and it serves us both for that fact to not be widely known or easily discerned. So we ham it up from time to time, to put our rivals off the scent.”

“I see,” said Mikkel, who didn’t quite see at all. “What will happen to the Theorist?”

“We’ve sent runners back to the college, so I imagine her impeachment will soon be underway, if it isn’t already. But she’ll not be back to face the consequences, I’d wager, so it’s little more than a gesture. We require our little rituals, don’t we, to keep the institution alive?”

“Where do you think she went?”

“To some other nearby nation, I suppose—or maybe further afield. Whether she recruited the jaegare when we arrived here, or they were already in contact… well, we may never know. It’s plausible that the Theorist has been in someone else’s pocket for a long time. Perhaps my own informant will be more forthcoming, now that the plot is revealed…”

“Your own informant, master?”

“Oh, yes.” Tthe Hermeneut smiled. “Did you assume that we of the college, we of the Valleys, were innocent of intrigues?”

“No, master. But…”

“But not me, eh? Not your master, the mighty Hermeneut? People are much like texts, Mikkel: some tell the truth, some tell lies, but they all hold secrets below their surfaces. And it can take a lifetime to learn to read them.”

The Hermeneut’s gaze turned back to the empty alcove, where the weapons had lain.

“And even then, you’ll find you read them wrong.”

His master wandered away, leaving Mikkel to watch as a ten-strong gang of admyn drew up plans on the far side of the room beneath the hill, preparing to fortify and defend the still-active installation until a larger and more professional force arrived to relieve them. Outside, the sun was setting on what would be the expedition’s final night in the field.

He wrapped the last of the brittle old books in a piece of goatskin, laid it in the crate he’d been assigned, and closed the lid.