Noise Floor

by Charlie Forêt

A short story set in the Integration era.

The piece she was working on was eighty years old and almost certainly irreplaceable, which was why Reva had told Danel she'd eat later.

"You have to eat," he'd said.

"I have to finish this pass first."

"The recording will survive without you for forty minutes."

"The recording has survived eighty years. That's not the argument." She adjusted the input frequency without looking away from the waveform display. "I lose this thread and I lose it. Forty minutes is too long to hold a thread."

Danel had looked at her with the specific expression of a man who had been losing this argument for three years and had never once found a new angle on it. He left. She didn't look up until the outer door of the archive lab had closed.

The recording was an acoustic capture from the Helix Colonial Survey's early-era fleet. It was one of the original pre-Integration archives, before the system made transmission encoding reliable. Seventy-two minutes of audio logged on a medium that had spent eight decades degrading in an improperly sealed storage unit. Someone in records processing had noticed it still existed and routed it to her. She had been peeling layers of degradation off it for six weeks. She was now, finally, close enough to the underlying signal to hear fragments of voice in the noise. Human voices. People talking, eighty years ago, on a ship that no longer existed.

Her overlay marked the time in the corner of her vision: 12:34. It also marked her Integration Level and designation, as it always did, and the small unfilled stat-pool indicator she mostly tried not to think about. She'd been IL 2 for three months and hadn't decided what to do with the two unspent points sitting in her allocation queue. The system would wait. The recording wouldn't.

The skill worked like an extension of what she'd been doing since her first apprenticeship. The system called it Acoustic Analysis, which was accurate enough. It sharpened her perception of signal patterns, helped her isolate frequencies from noise, gave her the overlay notation she needed to tag anomalies in real time. She'd had it since her first level-up. She used it every day and tried not to think too hard about the fact that the system had looked at a decade of audio restoration work and designated her a Specialist.

She was a conservator. She conserved things. Specialists, per the system documentation she'd read once and mostly forgotten, were ranged combat fire support. The designation mismatch was one she had neither the time nor the inclination to contest.

The waveform display flickered.

...

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