Infrastructure

Infrastructure #### by Charlie Forêt A short story set in the Integration era, approximately fifteen years after Signal Zero. ©2026, by Charlie Forêt, all rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. ---- The designation distribution chart had been running for six minutes, which was four minutes longer than it should have taken, because the dataset was large. Naleth had requested a sample of 140,847 individuals: civilian-registry confirmed, non-military employment on record, residing in settlement zones Four through Seven. The Integration Assessment Office had given her access to the anonymized cohort eighteen months ago when she'd signed her contract. She had been looking at these numbers, in various configurations, ever since. The chart resolved. She looked at it for a while without writing anything down. Outside the research module's single porthole, the station's running lights swept a slow arc across the dark. Night cycle aboard a military platform had a specific quality of silence: not quiet, exactly, but all the sounds were the wrong register for human voices, which gave the illusion of solitude without providing it. The research staff went home...