The inspection department did not look like an enclosed place.
Anesh noticed it as soon as the vehicle passed under the metal arch and the dawn light disappeared behind him. He had expected a dark workshop, full of smoke, violent noises, hammers, sparks, men shouting orders over the roar of engines. Instead, he found himself inside a vast space, as tall as a gorge carved into the mountain, crossed by walkways, suspended platforms, mechanical arms folded along the walls, and blades of light descending from above without revealing their source.
It was not silent. In Yantra, silence seemed not to exist. But every sound had its place.
There was the deep breathing of machines in waiting, the rustle of panels opening, the dry ticking of small automatic tools, the controlled rolling of carts, the hiss of compressed air, the regular beat of something being calibrated lower down, perhaps beneath the floor. No noise truly drowned out another. Even chaos, in there, seemed educated.
The mobile workshop advanced slowly along a lane marked by luminous lines. Its large dark wheels left four traces of dust on the light surface of the floor, immediately sucked up by thin slits that opened at its passage. On the platform, the closed crates vibrated slightly. The folded arms, the hooks, the side supports, and the moving parts of the upper deck were crossed by a series of rapid flashes, as if dozens of invisible eyes were scanning every edge, every joint, every dent.
Anesh remained huddled in his niche, arms around his knees. No one had told him to get off. No one had told him to stay. The city seemed to proceed without needing to address him.
This gave him a strange, almost humiliating feeling. He was not a prisoner, but neither was he welcomed. He was an element to be read.
Above the lane, a sign lit up, composed of technical symbols. Some Anesh did not know, others he guessed from context. The vehicle slowed further. A signal descended from above and positioned itself in front of the platform like a small suspended grid.
Autonomous mobile workshop vehicle.
External origin.
Route reconstructable: partial.
Guidance unit: absent.
Repair systems: active, but not declared.
Cargo: non-compliant with city records.
Organic presence: one.
Secondary organic object: function not identified.
Anesh read the last line twice.
Secondary organic object.
For a moment, he did not understand. Then he felt the light weight of the basket against his side and tightened his fingers slightly on the strap.
Ku.
For Yantra, Ku was a secondary organic object. Not a creature, not a presence, not a sign, not a question. An object. Secondary. Without function.
He should have been angry, perhaps. Instead, he felt a subtler discomfort, because he understood that the city did not mean to offend her. There was no contempt in that classification. Only an inability to see anything else. Yantra did not deny Ku: it simply did not know where to put her.
The luminous grid changed shape.
Incomplete classification.
Manual assisted verification required.
Sending to operational anomalies department.
The lane under the wheels shifted to the side. It was not the vehicle that turned: it was the floor that carried it. Anesh felt a slight sliding beneath him, then the mobile workshop was taken by a system of invisible guides and transferred towards a more internal area of the department. Other vehicles were stationary on similar platforms, some as small as reconnaissance carts, others enormous, covered with damaged plates and deformed wheels. From one of them, a thin column of steam was rising; around it, three robotic arms worked with slow movements, while two youths checked data on a transparent panel.
Anesh looked at those youths.
One was perhaps sixteen, no more. He wore a short-sleeved suit, hair shaved on one side, and a series of tools attached to his forearm. The other, younger, was kneeling near an open hub, inserting a probe into a metal cavity with the concentration of someone tuning a delicate instrument. An adult watched them from a few steps away, without intervening.
They did not seem like students, but neither did they seem like adult workers. They were something in between. They were learning inside the world, not before the world.
Anesh kept watching them as his vehicle moved past.
He felt again that pang he had felt entering the city. In Altaluna, young people were questioned about the meaning of things long before their use. They learned to recognize the phases of the sky, to keep stories, to distinguish silence from absence, to read the shapes of rocks and stars as if the world were an unfinished text. There were exercises, but they often seemed directed inward. One could spend an entire morning observing the shadow of a stone and then discuss whether time was what changes or what allows change to appear.
Anesh had loved all this.
Or at least he had believed he loved it.
There, seeing a girl only a little younger than himself inserting a probe into a real engine, he wondered if he had spent too much time seeking meanings without touching things enough.
The platform stopped.
In front of the mobile workshop, a wide work area opened, bordered by thin arches and columns of instruments. On the left were mechanical arms folded like insect legs at rest; on the right, a long bench full of modules, sensors, coiled cables, plates, lenses, small black cylinders, wheel parts, metal fibers, and closed containers. Above, suspended in midair, a transparent structure showed the three-dimensional schematic of the vehicle. The image rotated slowly. Some parts were green, others yellow, others still remained gray, as if the system could not complete their reading.
A voice came from an indeterminate point in the workshop. It was not a human voice, but neither did it have the coldness Anesh would have expected from a machine. It was clear, neutral, polite.
“Unregistered autonomous unit. Security check initiated. Organic presence, remain in position until identification is complete.”
Anesh stayed still.
Organic presence.
That was him.
Not Anesh. Not son of anyone. Not boy from Altaluna. Not traveler. Not a person who had seen a light fall from the sky and had found a butterfly where no one should have found anything.
Organic presence.
The definition was so poor it was almost comical, but he did not feel like laughing.
A thin arm descended from above and stopped a few spans from his face. At its end was a dark lens, surrounded by small luminous dots. Anesh resisted the urge to draw back. The lens moved slowly from side to side, then down to his chest, hands, knees, dust-stained clothes, the strap.
When it reached the wicker basket, it stopped.
Anesh held his breath.
The lens remained still longer than necessary. Then a second, smaller arm approached from the left. It did not touch the container, but followed its closed profile, the shape of a small hut, the weave of the fibers. A thin light passed through it from the outside. The wicker lit up for an instant, showing the irregular pattern of the material, but not what was inside.
The suspended panel changed.
Secondary organic object.
Material: woven plant fiber.
Internal volume: partially shielded.
Content: not determined.
Function: not determined.
Risk: not determined.
A third, smaller signal appeared.
Human operator requested.
Anesh felt the basket vibrate slightly.
It was a minimal movement. Perhaps only the machine’s arm had moved the air. Perhaps the vehicle, stopping, had transmitted a final oscillation to the strap. Yet he knew that Ku had moved.
Not much.
Just enough to say: I am here.
The workshop’s voice resumed.
“Organic presence, state name, origin, and function.”
Anesh opened his mouth, but did not answer immediately.
Name was easy.
Origin, less so.
Function, impossible.
He looked around. No one was watching him directly, yet everything seemed to be waiting for him. The suspended arms, the lights, the panels, the platform, the large schematic of the vehicle rotating above his head. Yantra was not asking who he was. It was asking what he was for.
“Anesh,” he finally said.
The voice waited.
“I come from Altaluna.”
A brief luminous pulse crossed the panel.
“Function?”
Anesh hugged his knees tighter.
He could have lied. Said apprentice. Said messenger. Said passing technician. Said any word that would have recognizable weight in that place. But none came naturally.
“I don’t know.”
The panel remained still for a moment.
Then it updated the classification.
Organic presence: Anesh.
Declared origin: Altaluna.
Function: not declared.
Status: pending.
Anesh felt his face grow warm.
It was not full shame, not yet. But it was something close. Seeing his own uncertainty turned into data made it harder, more external, almost official. As long as the doubt remained inside him, it could still resemble a mystery. Here, instead, it became an empty box.
Function: not declared.
An empty box in a city that seemed built to leave none.
The floor made a soft sound. Someone was coming.
Anesh looked up.
From the side walkway, a girl descended with a quick step, without running. She wore a dark work suit, marked by light inserts on the shoulders and technical stitching along the legs. At her belt she carried small, heavy tools, neatly attached; on one side she had a rigid glove, on the other a narrow case from which three flexible probes emerged. Her black, curly hair was poorly gathered at the nape, as if she had tried to tie it and then decided it wasn’t worth insisting. Some locks fell over her forehead. On her nose she wore a small dark piercing that caught the light with every movement of her face.
She looked young, but not uncertain.
Anesh immediately understood she was not an adult technician. There was still something unfinished in her gestures, a not entirely tamed quickness, a way of looking at things as if every object could contradict her and she was ready to accept the challenge. But she did not seem like a simple student either. She walked in that department like someone who had already been entrusted with real mistakes.
The girl stopped in front of the platform and looked first at the vehicle, then at the suspended schematic, then at Anesh.
She did not smile.
“Are you the undeclared function?” she said.
Anesh did not know whether to feel offended.
“I think so.”
The girl shifted her gaze to the small wicker container.
“And that’s the undetermined function.”
Anesh instinctively brought a hand to the strap.
“It’s not a function.”
She raised an eyebrow slightly, as if that answer was interesting only because it complicated her work.
“Here everything has a function. Even when we don’t know it.”
She stepped closer to the vehicle and placed a hand on the side, not on the spot indicated by the sensors but a little further ahead, near a dark joint. She stayed like that for a few seconds, motionless, fingers spread on the metal. Then she closed her eyes.
Anesh watched her.
All the panels said the problem was elsewhere. The yellow lights marked the rear arms, the guidance modules, a secondary axle under the platform. She, instead, kept her hand on an area the schematic showed as stable.
When she opened her eyes, she did not look at the data.
She looked at the vehicle.
“It has run a lot,” she said.
Anesh did not answer. It seemed an obvious statement.
The girl tilted her head, as if listening to something others could not hear.
“But not like when following a route.”
She ran her fingers along the joint, then down the side, brushing a line of dust trapped between two panels. She gathered it with her thumb and looked at it. It was a light, almost silvery dust.
The system suspended above them flashed.
Unclassified mineral residue.
The girl smiled slightly, but not at Anesh. She seemed to smile at the system, or against it.
“Of course it’s unclassified,” she murmured.
Then she finally turned to the boy.
“I’m Zena. They’ve assigned your vehicle to me.”
“It’s not mine.”
“You’re on it.”
“It brought me.”
“Then for now, it’s yours.”
Anesh found no reply.
Zena turned again to the platform, made a quick gesture with her hand, and two small drones detached from the nearest column. They positioned themselves above the vehicle and began to descend slowly, one towards the folded arms, the other towards the large front tires.
“Don’t touch anything,” she said.
Then she looked at the basket.
“Especially that.”
“You couldn’t have touched it anyway.”
Zena looked at him for the first time with real attention.
It was not a kind look, but neither was it harsh. It was the look of someone who has encountered a piece that fits nowhere, and instead of throwing it away, decides to see if the design is wrong.
“We’ll see about that,” she said.
Anesh felt Ku move again, softly, inside the small closed nest.
It was then that, for the first time since entering Yantra, he felt that the city did not know everything.