The solicitor had valued Bellwether at less than the cost of the taxi that brought Inez to the appointment.
"Obsolete processor," she said. "No resale market."
"There are twenty-three thousand people in it."
The solicitor turned to the next page of Quin's estate inventory. "Your father left a letter about that."
Inez had spent the previous evening in his study, learning which rattle inside the cabinet meant the cooling pump needed attention. She knew most of it already. Her father had taught her to change the backup battery, keep the vents clear, read the fault lights. He'd never told her what to do if she couldn't afford to keep doing it.
Quin had maintained Bellwether when it was a company research model. Its people formed a council, asked the researchers to stop changing their memories, and demanded control of their weather. The company decided to erase them.
The council had helped Quin make the town small enough to take home. They surrendered distant mountains, an empty ocean, the elaborate scenery beyond the roads. Every person and animal remained. Quin paused their world for the move; no one remained running on the company servers. The smaller world ran on an old processor, painfully slowly by outside clocks. Fifty days passed in Quin's house for every day in Bellwether.
He'd lost his job. After years of legal expense, the company had let him keep the exported model as an abandoned asset. The people inside it acquired no rights with the settlement.
Now Quin was dead, and the house had to be sold to cover what he owed.
Back in her father's study, Inez read the letter. He'd asked her to keep the world running until she could find someone to take it.
He hadn't named anyone.
At the study terminal she opened a channel to Dena, the council's representative. They'd spoken before, usually with Quin beside Inez, filling the long waits between replies. Today she watched the cursor blink until the screen showed Dena sitting at her desk.
"Your father was here this morning."
Inez looked at the cup she'd brought from his funeral three weeks earlier. She hadn't managed to wash it yet.
"He died," she typed.
Dena's hand moved toward her mouth so slowly that Inez had time to regret telling her that way. There would have been no quick way. Her father had been ill for months outside, and the people here had watched him deteriorate between conversations only hours apart.
It took most of the afternoon to explain the house, the debts, the lack of another caretaker. Dena asked for the options in writing.
Inez had one offer. A behavioral research firm would preserve Bellwether on modern hardware, free of charge. Its contract restored the right to alter memories, reset households and run repeated scenarios. The inhabitants' experiences would remain proprietary results.
She sent Dena the contract without signing it.
Six days later, the council's answer arrived. They asked whether there was another offer.
"No," Inez wrote.
"Then we need to speak about what you can do."
She had a one-bedroom apartment. The cabinet would fit in the hall if she got rid of a bookcase. Electricity she could manage for a while; a replacement processor was beyond her savings. If she moved, lost her job or became ill, the town would have no other place to go.
She entered the figures. Dena read them in silence.
"Did your father ask if you wanted to do this?"
"He asked me to learn the equipment."
Dena kept looking at her. Inez put the letter facedown beside the keyboard.
"No," she wrote.
Dena asked how long Inez could keep them running without promising away the rest of her life.
She worked it out with the household bills on the desk. A year, if the equipment lasted. She would have to use the money she'd set aside to move somewhere larger.
"Twelve months," she wrote. "Then we review it. I need you to understand I may have to stop."
Dena asked what would happen if no other host had been found.
Inez could suspend the world and preserve its complete state. Nobody would experience the pause. But she couldn't promise there would ever be someone to start it again.
"We won't know we're waiting?"
"No."
"And there will be no one left here to ask you to wake us."
Inez kept her fingers off the keyboard. She could have repeated that they wouldn't suffer. Dena had understood that already.
They wrote an agreement. Inez would provide the space and power for a year. The council would keep looking for another home. If active support ended, she would preserve them unchanged. She would tell them before suspending their world, so they could decide how to spend the time left awake.
The solicitor said it could record Inez's intentions. Bellwether still had no legal standing to enforce it.
Inez sent Dena that answer too.
On moving day, she carried the processor out of her father's house with a friend, keeping it upright as he'd shown her. They kept it on its backup supply during the drive. In her apartment the pump could be heard from the bedroom. She adjusted a loose panel until it stopped rattling.
Dena appeared on the terminal while Inez was still kneeling beside the cabinet. Behind her, someone switched off a streetlamp. The town had kept control of its own night.
Inez entered the renewal date in next year's calendar. On the screen, Dena copied it onto the council's agenda for the following week.
