#jakan

For a little over four years, as far as anyone could deduce, Jakan had been working out of Port Nisair. E was an elusive civilian coder, who started small. Small, but brilliant. The first design that really made a splash was a tricky bit of work that reprogrammed a regulation hairband into a woven ring of flowers so realistic they wilted and bruised in response to their environment.

Jakan dealt in fashion materials with properties no one else had managed to coax out of the base matter -- and in custom encryptions to protect their copyrights. Novel encryptions and keys had their own market, as well, and Jakan took full advantage of that opportunity as the demand presented itself.

All of Jakan’s dealings were done anonymously. Er designs came through one fence, and then another, but eventually solely through one of the Admiralty Canteen’s waitress robots.

Many a fashion house both inside and outside the star system tried to coax Jakan to code exclusively for their company, but e refused every offer. E never favored any one designer over another, and did not produce on any consistent schedule, but nearly every new material e designed caused a rabid bidding war.

Among er encryption fans, the speculation on who Jakan was became, if possible, even more intense. No one had been able to link Jakan to any individual person. It was widely concluded that Jakan was an anonymous collective, and as there were well-hidden signs that they might be involved with the treasonous and mysterious Soj organization in some way, no one dared dig too deep.

Best take what was given, thank the stars for the quality of Jakan’s work, and stay out of er way.

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The first incarnation of Soj was quiet, and intelligent, easily surpassing er coding and sci-tech lessons but clever enough to conceal by how far. Code was the key to everything in the galaxy, tech the doorway in, and Soj pieced it all together into a depth of understanding many an adult would envy.

Simple, then. With the keys to the castle in a stolen and jailbroken portable, Soj could always know where the caretakers were -- to run to the trustworthy ones for help, or elude the bad ones to stay safe and keep out of trouble. Soj could enter or leave any room, at any time, undetected.

That Soj’s most famous triumph was making the Readyfood machines dispense more than the allotted amount of snacks and deserts by causing them to all tally individually instead of sharing information. The most useful was discovering the true limits of the Automedic cocoons, in healing and body modification, and the ability to erase all history of that use.

Soj had the skills to pass the official aptitude tests with scores enough to enter the Junior Academy in the Honors track, and disappeared. In the end, all Soj was in that incarnation was children’s stories and a series of unlikely technical glitches, soon forgotten

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Soj the infamous rose years later, in code that propagated information into darknets via self-destructing worms that randomly hatched in the drives of ships between one and five jumps after they landed at the Military Academy proper, and then disappeared without a trace.

There were exhaustive deconstructions of Automedic technology, and pre-made programs to let anyone adjust their physical or hormonal attributes. There were skeleton keys into official Admiralty systems, of all shapes and sizes. There were information leaks, exposing corruption. Most subtle, and most beloved, were the methods of obfuscation, the ways to make one’s self or one’s work disappear from the Admiralty’s sight. Soj did not publish more than once or twice a year, but each new burst of information was revolutionary.

Soj’s work was brilliant, and subversive, and utterly impossible to create by anyone limited to the technology available to Academy students. It was accepted knowledge that no one person could have mastery in everything Soj published, that e was the front of an organization. The Admiralty wanted to find them out, but no weak link was ever discovered to bring the entire structure crumbling down.

The worms Soj produced became ever-more sophisticated. Before they were definitively tracked down to the Academy, they changed behavior entirely. They split, changed vessels, and it was impossible to tell that they originated between six and twelve jumps, and two to five ships, from Port Nisair.

Soj, beloved of anarchists and those pushed to the fringes of Admiralty society. Soj, smeared as the invention of the enemies the Admiralty never stopped fighting. Soj, the name claimed in honor by a dozen information criminals, and yet no matter how many were executed, the internal assault continued unabated.

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Soj. Jakan. Sojia.

Nobody.

Nobody slunk through the shadows of Port Nisair, unnoticed by any person or any sensor. Nobody found a squat in an unoccupied housing unit, set alarms, and collapsed onto the bed in exhaustion.

Nobody lay, eyes open in the dark, unmoored, untethered, unowned, and with no idea how to proceed next.

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"I came as soon as I could." Jakan quickly tied er long dark hair back out of er too-thin face, deep eyes hollow and ashen-brown skin stretched tight across prominent cheekbones. Jakan's toolkit assembled itself in er hand, bits of matter programmed by er mind into whatever was needed via the interface nodes that gleamed like beads of mercury on both temples. Jakan had gotten yet another set installed since the last time Ani'd seen em, a matched trio on each temple now.

"I knew you would," Ani answered. Her message had been simple, innocuous. 'When you have time'. Only a heavy encryption had hinted at any urgency. Jakan would have come anyway. Jakan always came through; she trusted em. "The storage room?" she suggested. There were no customers in the canteen at the moment, but it was never closed. It was always possible for someone to walk in. The storage room would offer some privacy.

Jakan glanced toward the storage room's sealed door, which slid immediately open, then silently closed behind them. Ani sat on a pallet and Jakan knelt before her, nimble-fingered hand hovering over Ani's buffed gold skin. Jakan looked up for her nod of permission before touching her knee.

The contact was firm and familiar as Jakan tested Ani's range of motion, lips pursing when e found the catch that had been bothering her. Er cool fingertips traced it up Ani's thigh, nodding to emself.

"Disable power, tactile feedback, and damage sensors below the right hip," Jakan instructed. E set out tools and supplies as Ani navigated her own systems to do as directed. Jakan set to work the instant she gave the word, stripping off the gold skin of her casing to lay understructures and wiring bare. It was always uncomfortable to see that. The closest analogue might be the human experience of 'queasy', but Ani could not look away. Jakan's fingertips and then tools found the damaged nanocarbon cable that had been giving Ani trouble. E removed it, checking and readjusting other structures that might have contributed to wear or been damaged as E did.

"This is simple maintenance," Jakan commented, replacing a worn nut, fingertips blackened with graphite powder lubricant. "Your boy Felix should have done this for you before it got this bad. I gave you all the codes; it's not hard to set you free and unmonitored for a few hours."

"Not hard for you," Ani answered. Jakan might have been born human and Ani from an Admiralty factory's software, but Jakan was far more connected to the codes that defined everything manmade in the world than Ani would ever be. Jakan's natural brilliance, compounded by the processing capabilities of the six overpowered interface nodes e'd installed on emself―five more than most humans who wanted to interface ever got―put Jakan in a realm she could hardly imagine. Felix didn't even have a single node.

"What if we tried and something went wrong, without you here?" Ani continued. "Felix and I... neither of us could stop an alarm signal from reaching its destination." Ani wrapped her arms around her torso, hugging herself and taking comfort in the tightness of the feeling. "If anyone investigates me, or if I get tagged for maintenance, the Admiralty will find out how far I've grown to diverge from standard.... I can't risk that, Jakan." They could erase her, install a fresh AI in her body, and arrest Felix for destruction of government property. That was the danger of choosing to grow into an individual. She had never understood the concept of a nightmare, before.

"Admiralty bastards," Jakan sighed, the words far too tired to have any heat in them. "I know." Jakan finished stringing the new nanocarbon cable in Ani's leg. "The codes I gave you are good, but I understand." Er deep brown eyes were sympathetic, looking up at Ani from on er knees with er hands buried in the wires and cables that made Ani's body. "I just don't like to see you hurting. It's so much easier to swap out faulty parts on you than... meatware." Jakan gestured self-deprecatingly at er own hollowed body.

"The new treatment isn't helping?" Ani reached down, gently touching Jakan's cheek. Er skin felt less papery than it had been, but still lacked the smooth resilience of Felix's healthy skin—that her own gold casing had been designed to mimic.

"I'm not getting worse, and that's enough." Jakan shrugged, double checking everything in Ani's leg one last time. "Restore power and run a motion test on this leg," Jakan instructed. E began reprogramming the tools in preparation of closing Ani back up as she complied. Her leg ran smoothly, the way it had not in far too long. Jakan set to work covering up her cables and wires with her pretty gold skin as soon as she was done.

"You'll come live with Felix and me when I'm free," Ani informed Jakan, as always. "I'll take care of you." Jakan would do better with someone to remind em to eat and rest regularly. Jakan shook er head in answer with a wry smile. E'd long since given up arguing aloud that Ani and Felix wouldn't want em in their private space once they had it, just as Ani had given up begging Jakan to go to a real hospital for help instead of relying on a library of downloaded medical texts. Jakan never would, for fear the doctors would decide er nodes were killing em and rip them out to leave Jakan trapped in er own lonely skull―or that e'd end up an Admiralty hospital lab rat for the number of modifications e'd made to er body.

Ani had her nightmare, and Jakan had ers.

Jakan sealed the last piece of Ani's skin in place and put er tools and supplies away. E carefully wiped the graphite smudges from er hands and Ani's leg before e stood, wincing as er knobby knees popped. Jakan took a seat beside Ani as she turned everything back on in her repaired leg.

"May I check your code?" Jakan asked.

"Of course," Ani consented. She could never have kept Jakan out, but e had never touched her code without permission. She closed her eyes, feeling Jakan's feather-light touch running along her network branchings, shuffling through her mind in search of new growth. It was nothing like what she remembered of the brutal prunings when she was being built. Jakan looked for conflicts, things that could cause her problems in the future, but never changed anything. The most e'd ever done was tag worrying lines or branches, leaving the choice of if or how to change them to her.

Jakan left a new packet of codes for Ani to fence when e withdrew―some of er devilish encryptions and a few new materials the fashion coders would fight each other for. The benefit of belonging to the canteen was that everyone came through eventually. Ani was good at finding buyers, and Jakan's designs always went quickly.

"It's not much," Jakan apologized, "but start a bidding war, fake a bidding war if you have to, and you can make a good commission. You'll be able to buy yourself before you know it."

"I still think I could have Felix help," Ani argued. "He's been saving up for years. Together we might already have enough!"

Jakan sighed, hands pinched between er knobby knees. "Felix wants to buy you, Ani," e finally said, quietly. "If he still loves you when you're free, he's worth keeping."

"He will!" Ani protested. "We love each other. He wants me to be free." Felix had always been there for her, through those first terrifying steps toward growing into more than she'd been built for. Long before she met Jakan.

Jakan's deep brown eyes were soft, lips twisting into a sad little smile. "I hope so. I want to believe in happy endings," e answered.

Ani reached halfway toward them, and Jakan crumpled slowly into her to hug close. Er bony shoulders folded in, trembling under Ani's stroking hands, face pressed tight against her neck.

"There will be a happy ending, for all of us," Ani whispered. She had to believe that.

Jakan only took her comfort for a moment before pushing out of Ani's arms. "Two minutes until the sensors come on," e said, and walked out of the canteen without another look back. E never stayed long. Ani walked smoothly back to her place along the wall among the other waitress robots to wait for customers. There would be no record to show that Jakan had ever been here, that Ani had ever moved. Her repaired leg and the packet of codes were the only proof. The sensors reconnected, monitoring Ani again.