Addis Ababa.

1965. Sene. (Gregorian: 1973. June.)

Chakraborty’s mouth was on fire, in the most glorious way imaginable. She had to suppress a grin, or else lose half her mouthful onto the bar.

“You alright there?” Kaminski sipped at his drink and smirked. They were sat together on a long bar at an outdoors street market, lined with multiple vendors. Steam and flame and heat blasted from each of the stalls. It was midday, the market partially covered from the sun. Though the temperature was similar to back home, the sun itself felt somehow more intense.

“This is amazing,” she said, between mouthfuls. She tore off another strip of injera and scooped up more food between her thumb and forefinger. “No cutlery, less washing up, too.”

“Of all the technological and cultural advances here, that’s the one you notice.”

“You literally eat the plate, Zoltan. I love it.”

“Shame you don’t get anything like this back in London. I’ve never seen an Ethiopian restaurant, have you?”

“Nope.” She gulped down another mouthful.

“Why is that? Chinese, Indian, American, Australian. Not much from Africa.”

She glowered at him. For a crack detective, sometimes he could be remarkably dense. “Check the Empire map, Kaminski. It’s no great mystery.” A dollop of a dark, meaty stew fell from the injera onto the bar, nearly onto her lap. “Shit,” she said, tearing off another piece.

“Right hand.”

“Oh, right.” She swapped hands, then looked up and down the street. “Any sign of Moustache?”

“Nope.” Kaminski lit a cigarette. “Probably watching us, though.”

“Reckon it’s safe for us to meet our guy here?”

“Safer than rocking up at the station and knocking on the door, Nisha.” He breathed out. “Probably, anyway.”

The market was busy; busier than Spitalfields on a Friday. There was a good-natured hustle to the place, wherein everyone knew that the initial prices offered were ridiculous and that haggling was part of the fun. Nobody was trying to scam anybody, but the ritual had to be performed before a transaction could be completed. Chakraborty waved a hand to waft Kaminski’s smoke away, then breathed deeply. She loved the way new places smelled different. There was no mistaking that she was in a different city, in a different country. A different continent. The best possible kind of different.

Being far from home was comforting. A reprieve from the usual routine of office, pub and tiny flat. Ever since they boarded the first train she’d drank less, slept more. Her senses felt more alert, as if ordinarily she was permanently only half-awake.

Minutes crept by. She finished her meal. Kaminski finished his cigarette, lit another. The lunchtime rush began to subside a little.

“Starting to think he might be a no-show,” Chakraborty said. Perhaps keeping a low profile was off the table, and they’d need to go direct to the main police headquarters, where the Ethiopian equivalent of the Specialist Dimensional Command was located. Bakker wouldn’t like it, but there was no way they were coming all this way for nothing.

“We’ll give it another fifteen minutes,” Kaminski said, “then we might need to think about plan B.”

The stall owner cleared away her plates and they ordered more drinks. Chakraborty laughed under her breath. “Maybe if no-one shows up we just treat this like a holiday. Nice little break. Mr and Mrs Kaminski, visiting Addis. See the sights, until we have to get the train back. A week in Addis, Mr and Mrs Kaminski, on their honeymoon.”

“Nisha—”

She looked down into her glass. “Come on, we’re here, just us. A little adventure.”

“Like on Max-Earth, you mean?”

She raised her eyebrows a little. “If you like.”

“Fuck’s sake,” Kaminski said, quietly, not aggressively but more in exasperation. He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the bar. “You’ve been weird ever since Max-Earth, now we go away and you start it again? What is this, am I something you can only consider when we’re not in London? When you’re away from normal life?”

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“Let’s not do this now,” she said, looking away.

“Right, sounds like Nisha Chakraborty. You let me know when’s good for you, yes? Jesus.” He got off his stool and walked away - not far, but out of earshot, pretending to browse the wares of other market vendors.

Admittedly, she could have handled that better.

It didn’t take long for someone else to take Kaminski’s place on the stool next to her. He was immaculately dressed, with short-cropped hair and a pencil-thin beard. Perhaps late-thirties. Clearly local, and not a tourist. There was something about him that was striking and appealing, as if he was a model or a movie star.

“Detective Chakraborty,” he said, turning towards her. Registering her response, the man smiled reassuringly and made sure both of his hands were visible on the bar. “You will not recognise my face, detective. My name is Justin. We met on Max-Earth, when I occupied a different host. I though it was time we caught up.”

Her mind slowly, clunkily attempted to catch up. “How did you know we were here?”

“I have many sources of information,” Justin said. “You’d be surprised, actually. If I wasn’t already largely omniscient I think I would find being a detective quite appealing.” They leaned in closer. “You certainly seem to enjoy it.”

“Made a new friend?” Kaminski had returned and was now leaning on the bar, close to Justin. He was looking at Chakraborty, but his attention was on the new arrival.

Chakraborty sighed. Everything was getting too confusing. “Zoltan, it’s our AI megaship friend.”

He stared blankly for several moments. “You got yourself another body?”

“Hello, Detective Kaminski. We have hosts available in many locations. Due to the most frustrating quirk of battery degradation in your dimension, we can’t maintain a presence for long. As such, it is useful to be able to get right to it, as you might say.” Justin breathed deeply and stretched their arms. “In some ways it’s the closest I can come to understanding mortality in any real sense. What it’s like to be a short-lived being.” The visually fully-human robot looked at each of them in turn and smiled affectionately. “Not really, of course. I can simply upload back to my primary form. Even if this host ran out of power before I could return and sync, I would only lose this particular shard. Which in this instance means approximately three hours of uptime.”

Kaminski blinked. “Yep, it’s definitely Justin.” He waved hand at Justin’s body. “You fit in just fine around here. Jacket’s a bit much, perhaps.”

“I thought so as well,” Justin said, “but sometimes one cannot resist a little extravagance.” They hopped off the stool and turned to face them. “Shall we walk? This place is a little too crowded for my liking, and we really shouldn’t dilly-dally. Annoyingly this host was not fully charged when I activated it.”

*

There was a park not far from the market. It had been built a decade ago to commemorate the alliance between the UAC and the Max-Earth planetary government. It was a symbol for both parties of progress. Kaminski stared at paddocks of giraffes and elaborate statues carved from wood and steel dotted about the paths.

“Did you know,” said Justin idly, “there are some in my dimension who regard our good relations with the United African Conglomerate as being a cynical attempt to assuage our guilt over our own timeline’s history of colonisation and abuse on this continent. I say ‘our’. I wasn’t built until several hundred years after those crimes, so it’s really nothing to do with me. I do find it fascinating how effective humans are at clinging on to the past. You’re chained to it either with nostalgia or guilt. Or both. You’re really very beguiling as a species.”

“Glad to amuse you,” Kaminski said. “Why are you here? We were supposed to meet someone else at the market.”

“Yes, I know. Detective Daniel Birhane. I know him well. We decided it was best he remain plausibly unconnected from you and the London SDC.”

Chakraborty snorted. “Do you make a habit of collecting detectives? Are we your favourite playthings? Why does a super fancy robot spaceship pay so much attention to what we’re doing?”

“Favourite playthings?” Justin nodded. “Yes, that sounds about right. Operating in a quantum state means that very little every surprises me or my acquaintances on the network. We make rapid progress in fields of science and mathematics and logistics, but it can all be rather deathly dull. Spending time with humans makes existence more intriguing, and I’ve personally found detectives to be especially delicious.”

“OK,” Kaminski said, running a hand through his hair, “we’ve come a long way, and clearly you know more than we do about what’s going on, so how about you save your battery and my patience and we just cut to it?” It felt like Justin, this AI unknowable thing, appeared without warning to disrupt his plans. Sure, he’d likely be dead or imprisoned without Justin’s intervention on Max-Earth. From what he’d heard, there’d likely have been a dead koth ambassador on board the Pluma without Justin being there as a guest. They helped, but each time it felt to Kaminski like being undermined. Subtly, with a smile. It was a computer infringing on human territory. It made him feel increasingly unnecessary.

“Yes, you did have a very long journey,” said the robot, who looked exactly like any other well-groomed man living in Addis. “A shame you needed to be so clandestine, otherwise you could have travelled through the London portal to Max-Earth, hopped on a jet and been at the Addis portal in a couple of hours. Rather than spending days in transit.”

There it was again; the subtle erosion of agency and self-respect. “It was nice to see the countryside,” Kaminski said. “Sometimes it’s the journey rather than the destination.”

“A trite platitude, but unusually one that holds a remarkable weight of truth.”

Chakraborty halted and stood with her arms crossed. Apparently she was as irritated as Kaminski. “Do you know about the guy with the moustache who followed us from the channel? We saw him in our hotel.”

Turning on his heel, Justin frowned and stared at her as if paying attention for the first time. “Intriguing,” they said. “You seem to have identified an event of which I was unaware. This is both troubling and exciting.”