Thrum

Thrum came to Eden Space Habitat in a sealed transit burrow, in the luggage of a Chthonari fold-scaffold engineer posted in on a two-year Engineering Corps rotation, and did not leave with her. The paperwork on that is thinner than anyone has wanted to examine closely: a vessik is not livestock, not a companion animal under any Compact schedule, and not a Smart Pet, so there was no form for bringing one aboard and consequently no form for taking one away again.

A vessik is a burrow commensal from the Undersong Belt — small, low, six-limbed, and built on the same physical principle as the people whose tunnels it lives in. It has no ears worth the name. What it has is the vibration-sensing arrangement common to a great deal of Undersong life: it reads the structure it is standing on, continuously, without deciding to. Chthonari settlements tolerate vessik in the walls for the reason humans once tolerated cats in a granary, and for one other: a burrow whose vessik have gone still is a burrow with a stress fracture in it, and every Chthonari child learns to check that before they learn to read.

On Eden, Thrum lives in the service voids off the Deck 7 galley approach, comes out for warmth, and drums.

What It Cannot Do

Thrum cannot hear a voice. It cannot read a face, because it has never in its evolutionary history had any reason to develop the apparatus for reading one, and Eden's faces are not made of rock. It does not know when it is being spoken to kindly. It does not know when it is being spoken to at all.

It follows that none of the things people do to each other to get their way work on Thrum. It cannot be coaxed, flattered, guilted, or gently talked past. A hand held out to it is a mass moving at a rate; a smile is nothing whatsoever. Where a cat weighs a person and a person weighs a cat, Thrum simply does not participate, and has no idea that it is failing to.

Agent Barsik's file on this — unofficial, because Thrum is not agency issue and cannot be made agency issue — puts it in one line. The vessik is not resistant to social pressure. It is unaware of it. Those are different properties, and only the second one cannot be worn down.

Character Notes

Thrum's alarm is a hard, arrhythmic drumming of the forelimbs against deck plate, and it carries through the structure for most of the length of the deck. In the Undersong Belt this means a fracture. On Eden it has meant, so far, a coolant line, a loose stanchion, twice nothing anyone could find, and once something else.

Deck 7's crew are fond of it in the way people are fond of a thing that is unmistakably not theirs. Bubochka has been assigned, as a training exercise, to record what Thrum drums about and what turns out to have been there; she has filled most of a log with the twice-nothing entries, which Barsik has told her is the correct rate of progress and the more interesting half of the record.

Superintendent Oyelaran's bureau has no view on Thrum, having never been given one to hold.

Open Question

Nothing in Eden's welfare framework covers a vessik. It carries no cognitive subsystem, so the certification and re-certification regime that governs a Smart Pet does not reach it; it is not cyber-enhanced, so the Warden's Custos persona has no remit over it either. It is an animal on a habitat, with the same standing as the habitat's air — which is to say, everyone assumes somebody's framework has it, and no framework does.

This is the same gap that leaves Barsik's and Bubochka's welfare formally outside the Warden's habitat-level authority, one step further out. Nobody has asked anyone positioned to answer.

One consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is the only clean measurement anyone on Deck 7 has. Where a Smart Pet's non-response to Muffin is a refusal, and can be argued about, Thrum's is not a response at all. Nothing is attempted on it and nothing is recorded — which makes it, in a file otherwise built entirely out of what people did not do, the one entry that could never have gone the other way.

See also: Agent Barsik, Bubochka, Muffin, Chthonari, Smart Pet, Predatory Entities.