Chương 24: Chapter 23 - No Data Collected

Maren didn't move. She stood with her back half-turned, arms folding across herself, staring at the screen like it might correct itself if she waited long enough. The humming of the other monitors filled the silence where her voice should have been. Somewhere behind her, the apparatus on the bench kept bubbling through its slow, patient process, indifferent to whatever had just gone wrong on the other side of the room. Ant watched her go still and felt the old instinct rise before he'd decided to let it.

Assess the room. Find the exit. Work out how fast he could move if this went somewhere he didn't want it to go. The door sat behind him, past the bench with its bubbling apparatus — eight steps, maybe fewer if nothing was in his way. He'd learned that lesson early and hard enough that his body stopped waiting for permission before it started planning. She is thinking.

Not afraid, Mahkir said, and there was nothing lazy in it — his ears were up, tracking Maren's every small movement with the same close attention he'd given the room on the way in. I would know the difference. That helped more than he expected it to. Maren turned back around before he'd finished the thought — but not to speak. She crossed back to the terminal, fingers moving fast over the controls, and ran the scan a second time. The same four words settled back onto the screen.

She pulled a second pair of reader glasses from a drawer, an older set with a hairline crack across one lens, and checked the result against those too, as though the first pair might have been the problem rather than whatever they were both looking at. Then a third device entirely — smaller, boxier, connected by a cable rather than worn — something that read the chip's raw signal directly rather than going through the registry interface at all.

"Ruling out the reader," she muttered, mostly to herself.

"Ruling out the connection." Both checks came back the same. Whatever was happening, it wasn't a fault in her equipment. She stood there for a moment with her arms folded, working through it in silence before she finally spoke.

"I can think of three possible reasons," she said, and whatever had been confusion in her voice a moment ago had already tipped over into something more energetic — a problem, out loud, being worked.

"First. The chip's faulty. I've basically ruled that out now — it's clearly detecting something, since it's returning a specific result rather than nothing at all, and I've checked it three separate ways. A genuinely broken chip wouldn't manage even that much."

"So not that."

"Not that." She held up a second finger without quite meaning to, the gesture of someone used to lecturing.

"Second — wrong strain. The chip can't find the right branch of the registry to compare against. I'd give that maybe twenty percent. Even for something unusual, it should default to the nearest known category and work from there. It's built with that fallback specifically."

"So it should have guessed something. Even a wrong something."

"Exactly." She looked briefly pleased that he'd followed the logic without her spelling it out.

"Which is why I don't think that's it either." Ant said nothing about the fact that he had no better idea where Mahkir had actually come from than she did. That felt like a conversation for a day he was less tired and considerably less pinned to a medical table.

"And the third." Her eyes lit before she said it, the careful concern from a moment ago giving way to open delight, barely held in check.

"The most likely explanation," she said, "is that this is a Kithren nobody's ever recorded. Nothing anywhere for the chip to measure him against. No baseline, no result." She caught herself almost as soon as she'd said it, the delight tempering into something more careful.

"This is incredible, if I'm right. It's also potentially very dangerous, and I don't just mean for you. I don't know what an unrecorded classification does to the rest of the system around it. I've never had reason to find out."

"Where would something like that even come from," she asked, quieter now, like she was thinking out loud rather than actually expecting an answer.

"A Kithren nobody's catalogued. Not a hybrid, not a mutation flagged anywhere I've seen. Just—new. Or old enough that the records that would've covered him don't exist anymore."

"I don't know," Ant said. It wasn't entirely a lie. He didn't know, not the parts that would have satisfied her. She looked at him for a moment longer than the answer strictly required, like she'd caught something in the flatness of it, then let it go — set aside for later rather than dropped, he suspected. He noted that too, the fact that she'd caught it and chosen not to push. It told him something about how she operated that no amount of talking would have.

She waited, watching him, clearly expecting the news to hit harder than it had.

"So now what," Ant said. Disappointment crossed her face, quick and honest, before she recovered and dropped into the nearest chair with the particular looseness of someone settling in for a longer conversation. She reached into a small fridge built into the bench, cracked a can open, and took a thoughtful sip before continuing.

"Let's actually think the options through," she said.

"One — we wait. Let the chip keep trying to build a baseline on its own, through observation. Downside is you keep reading as anomalous to anyone who checks closely. That tends to draw attention." The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. Ant thought of the academy boys. Of Maren herself catching the anomaly within minutes of watching him fight. Attention was the last thing he wanted.

"How long would that take. Building a baseline on its own."

"Months, if it happens at all. Possibly never." She said it like she already knew which way he was leaning.

"I wouldn't recommend option one. I'm only including it because you deserve to hear all three, not just the one I like best."

"Two — we spoof it. Feed the chip a false classification, feline branch, given his build. You read as ordinary. Problem is the first time he uses a skill no cat-type has ever had on record, the mismatch becomes obvious. And the stats would be wrong regardless, calculated against the wrong starting point."

"And the third." She paused longer on this one than the other two, her whole expression brightening in a way she didn't seem to be trying very hard to hide.

"We run proper tests. Now. Find out what he can actually do instead of guessing by comparison, then enter him as a new classification, manually, from scratch. See what he can really do. Properly. Controlled." The hope on her face wasn't subtle.

"If we test him and enter him as a new classification," Ant said, "that goes into the registry. Permanently. With my name attached to it."

"It would, yes."

"Who sees that."

"Anyone with proper clearance to query the registry. Which is more people than either of us would probably like, if I'm honest." She didn't dress it up, which he'd already come to expect from her.

"I can push for the entry to log under Mahkir's classification without flagging your specific profile for review — that's a legitimate option, not a workaround. It wouldn't hide you completely. It would stop you from being the first result anyone sees."

"Do that."

"I intended to regardless." A faint, private satisfaction crossed her face, gone before it could become a smile.

"This would be the first Kithren classification I've ever gotten to build from nothing. My name goes on the entry as the researcher of record. That matters to me more than it probably should."

"If we register a new species, people are going to ask where he came from." Ant turned that over as he said it, watching how she took it.

"Not just you. Anyone who queries it later. That's a question I don't have a good answer to."

"I know." She didn't try to talk him out of the concern, which he appreciated more than a reassurance would have.

"I can't make that question disappear. I can control how much of it points back at you specifically, and I will. But the entry itself, once it exists, exists. People will wonder. Some of them will ask."

"You want to test him," Ant said, "or you want to see him fight."

"Is there a meaningful difference?"

"To you? Probably not." That got the first real laugh out of her since they'd sat down — short, surprised, like she hadn't expected to be caught that cleanly.

"For what it's worth," she added, once the laugh had faded, "wanting to see it and needing to see it aren't mutually exclusive. I can want this and still mean everything I said about controlled conditions."

"I believe you."

"You don't have to. I'd still mean it either way." She has been wanting to say that since the path, Mahkir observed, dry. I noticed. Everyone noticed. Ant considered the options with the same care he brought to every decision that could go wrong in more than one direction. He didn't want attention — five years spent learning how to not be noticed had made sure of that, and every part of him still recoiled from the idea of drawing the kind of scrutiny the first option guaranteed.

He'd rather be invisible again than be interesting in that particular way. The second option only swapped one problem for a different one — a mismatch waiting to be found the moment Mahkir did anything remotely dramatic, and given what he'd already seen, that felt like a matter of when, not if.

"If we test him," Ant said, "what does that actually look like."

"Depends what we're testing for. Combat capability, mostly, since that's what's already visible and what the chip's struggling hardest to place. Controlled conditions. Nothing that puts either of you at real risk — I'm not in the business of getting my test subjects hurt." She said it plainly, the same directness he'd started expecting from her by now.

"But it would mean you showing me things you might not want shown. Skills. Range. Whatever he's actually capable of, not what a chip guesses he might be."

"Against what. A person. A construct. What."

"Constructs, to start. Calibrated opponents, difficulty adjustable, no actual risk to anyone standing in the room. If the readings come back inconclusive, we escalate — live opposition, monitored, always something either of us can call off the moment it stops looking safe." She said it like she'd run this exact conversation in her head a hundred times before ever having someone to run it on.

"It won't be quick. An hour, at minimum, probably longer given how little baseline data we're starting from. Possibly the rest of the evening, depending what he turns out to be capable of."

"And you get all of that from watching him fight a construct."

"I get considerably more than a chip guessing from a photograph, which is essentially what it's doing right now." The corner of her mouth pulled.

"I'd rather have real numbers than a comfortable guess." I have no objection, Mahkir said, before Ant had finished deciding how to feel about it. Let her see. I would like to know myself, honestly. You don't already know what you can do? I know what I have done. That is not the same question. Fair, Ant admitted, and meant it. Ant looked at him for a moment — perched at the edge of the table, alert, entirely undaunted by the prospect of being put through whatever Maren had in mind.

If Mahkir wasn't worried, that was worth something. Not proof of anything. Worth something.

"Fine," he said.

"Testing." Maren's whole posture changed, the professional composure cracking just enough to let the actual excitement through. She was already on her feet, moving toward a cabinet on the far side of the room, pulling out a folded set of what looked like padded guards.

"We won't do it in here," she said, over her shoulder.

"There's a proper space for this. Reinforced walls, monitored the whole way through, built for exactly this kind of thing. Give me a minute to get everything sent ahead." Ant looked down at Mahkir, still perched at the edge of the table, tail flicking once in something that read less like nerves and more like anticipation. Finally, Mahkir said. I was beginning to think this city only produced conversations. Don't get used to it. I intend to get very used to it. You've been alive for a matter of hours.

And already I have opinions. Progress. That is not the word I would have chosen. Maren reappeared with an armful of equipment he didn't recognise, already talking through logistics half to herself, half to him.

"I'll need you both to come with me now, before either of us loses momentum on this," she said, checking something off against a mental list he couldn't see.

"I do my best thinking mid-motion. Sitting still for too long after a decision usually means someone talks me out of it."

"Nobody's talking you out of anything."

"You'd be surprised. My father's very persuasive when he wants to be, and he doesn't even need to be in the room to manage it." She said it lightly, though something in the timing suggested it wasn't entirely a joke.

"So," Ant said, before she could get too far ahead of herself.

"How does this stupid testing actually work?"