Chapter Text
They engage in fixable problems. They can't handle anything else.
Here's a fixable problem: misinformation. Here, today, there is a small child tapping brazenly at their arm at a hatch season family gathering, interrupting a conversation Adrian's already relieved to be off-beat to. They're tiny, ten years old at most, their arms barely the length of one of Adrian's fingers.
"My friend told me that if you hit a rock that came out of a volcano three times really hard you can hear the sun-eaters," they say. It's not said like a question, but they tap twice against Adrian's arm like it is one.
One of the child's sleepwatchers rushes over, permeating the flow of Adrian's conversation with a frantic apologetic subtone as they start scooping up the child, and Adrian bow-scrapes out of the boring song about resource allocation with a zing of relief.
"That's a really good question," Adrian says, and the sleepwatcher stutters to a halt. They're young too; this has to be the first clutch they've parented. They've certainly not met Adrian before, but clearly know them from reputation. Adrian gestures to stay, and the sleepwatcher lets the child down. "Did you try it?"
"I can't hit it hard enough," the child says with authority, hopping from arm to arm. "I listened really close and I couldn't hear it."
Adrian hunkers down, shifting their arms in a pretense of muffling their voice. "You want to know the secret to hearing sub-audible sounds, right?"
The kid crouches down too, legs twitching in anticipation.
"Listen to everything here," Adrian says. They have this explanation down to a science. "Listen close, really really close. What can you hear?"
The kid straightens up, as tall as they can, and twists and tilts to hear from every angle. "A room."
"Are we on the ground or underground?"
"Underground," the child says.
"How far?"
"Uhhh. Six hundred meters."
"Right," Adrian says, ignoring that it's closer to eight hundred. This kid's carapace hasn't even hardened yet, they can't be expected to get it that close. "And you know that because all the sounds of all these really boring songs—" the kid laughs— "are bouncing off of all the walls and going deep, deep, deep into the rock and bouncing back to you. And the longer the sound takes, the further away it's gone, right? So it sounds deeper and buzzier?"
"Right."
"That's because everything in the world lives in a sea of tiny little objects. We call them atoms. Kick your closest leg to me, now, fast!"
They do it so hard they almost fall over, and Adrian waves two hands in praise.
"Woaaah! Really fast, good job. You did such a good job that you just moved quintillions of atoms through the air. And those atoms, right now, are hitting other atoms, and other atoms, and other atoms, and every time they hit each other, they move the air. When you move enough air, you squeeze it tight into a big wave, and that wave of bonking atoms and squeezed air is, right now, traveling everywhere in this room, and into the rock, and into other rooms, until the power of your leg-kick is all used up and the atoms can't go any further. Eventually, the sound's too small to hear."
"But what about the sun?" they whine.
"Great question," Adrian says. "You hear everything in the world, right?"
"Yeah?"
"Point to polar north."
The kid does it unthinkingly.
"How'd you hear that?"
They pause. "Uhhh. It kind of pulls."
"You can move atoms when you kick, or when you speak," Adrian says, "but some atoms don't make waves at all. Instead, they thrum. From thousands of miles away, the north pole is made of really really small atoms that want to thrum with all the other atoms like them, and some of those atoms are in your carapace, so they're calling out to each other to get close. Now, space is completely empty, right? But—"
A magnetic pulse buzzes in an eight-beat against the joint of their shoulder.
Adrian jolts upright, clattering away from the child in a shocked stumble.
The kid jumps back. Of the hundreds in the room, at least the nearest fifty have interrupted their songs to listen to Adrian. The child's sleepwatcher trills anxiously.
"Thrum-elder Adrian…?"
The band around Adrian's name-shoulder pulses the eight-beat again. And again.
Adrian reaches up and, shaking, clicks off the pager.
It could be a mistake. Someone leaned on the wrong switch at base. It happens, even if it's the kind of mistake that's about to send seventy thousand people into a panic. It's not, it couldn't be, it isn't.
"Excuse me," Adrian says, bowing in the elder-formal form in their daze to a completely dumbfounded ten-year old child. "I need to find a strandline."
"Um," the child says. Adrian scrapes a half-hearted goodbye on their arm and tries to walk at a less-than-panicked speed from the room. Some irritating distant relative whose egg presumably curdled before hatching reaches out for them like they're an errant runaway child, and they chitter a spiky, unprofessional warning that if anyone gets in their way they're going to have something cracked open. Everyone after that makes a path.
There's a strandline in a shoddily soundproofed booth a few corridors over, clearly meant for personal calls and gossip more than business. It's appalling security for a call like this but it can't wait. Adrian slams the booth aperture closed, pulls off the muffle, and hums into the thin taut strandline. It buzzes with Adrian's panicked tone, carrying the wave half a complex deep.
"Strandline 12 exchange," a patient voice says from the wire.
"Am I speaking to the trunkline operator?"
"They're asleep, I'm on watch."
"Are you trained to connect to a secure line?"
"...Yes."
"Elevator Base Station, Sub-Audible Thrum, Command Line."
They do it without even warning Adrian of the consequences of doing so without the right authorisation. Either they're poorly trained or something in Adrian's voice made them not want to waste time. The strandline hums with static.
The operator's voice clicks back over the wire. "The line is busy. Base Station warned that there's at least sixty calls queued already."
That would happen if it was real or not. They click to themselves angrily, turning in a circle to stay warm. Everything in this lesser-used corridor of the ancestral complex hasn't been insulated since the beginning of the Cooling, and even this deep they're starting to feel the effects now. "How'd they sound?"
"I'm sorry?"
"The Base Station operator, are they annoyed, panicked, excited?"
"I won't comment on that, I apologise."
They're well-trained. Damn them to the core of the planet and hopefully they melt there. "Don't queue me. Connect me to a bore-tunnel ticket office."
They'd packed their thrum-elder ornamentation for the hatch season reunion; it had felt stupid, and they only did it because one of their clutch-siblings wanted to laugh themselves silly.
It doesn't feel stupid now. They pull every stupid card that their seniority grants them, the pendant of resource-allocation authority hanging heavy on one arm, ordering themselves a private boretrain to Elevator Base and making unsafe demands of their speed. The operators have to reroute six hundred other trains to make the journey that quickly.
They'll pay for it in some future cross-thrum meeting if they're wrong. They don't care. That's a fixable problem.
An unfixable problem is that the ship never came back. An unfixable problem is trying to accept that everyone is dead and that nothing will ever bring their love back.
An unfixable problem, until they're damn well at base, is figuring out why their pager sent the signal that the ship's returned.