Machine

by Elizabeth Bear

  So who was doing the maintenance? Was the crew… hiding?

  We found bunk spaces, cabins, and apartments. We found dining halls and science labs. We found recreational facilities, kitchens, and parks. We found what looked like a running trail around what seemed to be the entire exterior rim of the wheel, in case anyone wanted to run a marathon in .37 gravity. We found absolutely nobody using any of those things.

  We found a lot of indications that the ancient hull was under stress, and that material had been scavenged from it for… mysterious purposes. It was still intact, but it was thin. And I wouldn’t have wanted to rely on it for my life and well-being.

  Big Rock Candy Mountain was not the sort of place where you took a nap without a space suit on. Not if you were me.

  “Want to chase that thermal signature?” Tsosie sounded as frustrated as I felt.

  “Point me at it.”

  Sally uses a magnetic resonance imager built into the hardsuit helmets to stimulate our visual cortexes and induce controlled hallucinations. They’re vivid, and you can’t ignore them. She makes them look a little cartoony, to be sure you know they’re not real. Linden, the Core General wheelmind, can pull the same trick.

  In the absence of AIs, Tsosie tapped into the same functionality and used dramatic shades of magenta to outline a distant blotch and give me an idea of the path of hatches and corridors that would take us there.

  “This ghost ship stuff is starting to creep me out,” Tsosie said. “I didn’t sign on to recon the Flying Dutchman.”

  “Even if everybody is gone, this is a valuable source of archinformation,” I reminded him.

  “Well, I didn’t sign on to excavate the Flying Dutchman then.”

  “Worse things happen at sea,” I joked.

  He reached back—he was a half step ahead of me at that point—and rapped me on the hardsuit pauldron with his fingertips.

  I waved at the structures still rearranging themselves in waves around us. “What if everybody got disassembled and made into tinkertoys?”

  “Then we’re next,” he grumbled. “This ought to be the hatch we’re looking for.”

  It irised open as we approached, which none of the previous hatches had done. They’d all worked when we asked, but this one seemed to be anticipating us. Beyond it, we could glimpse an even more colorful thicket of pegs and keepers, and behind that fretwork… something moving. Something that seemed to be replicating the pieces.

  It was glittery and holographic and refractive, like the tinkertoys, and caught the light like them. It seemed to be curved, though it was hard to tell through the lattice.

  We stepped up to the hatchway. I called, “Hello?”

  The lattice furled itself up like a series of stage curtains being drawn open, and we found ourselves face-to-facelessness with a humanoid form like a shaped bubble of inexplicably golden mercury.

  CHAPTER 3

  AS IT STARED AT US, and we stared back, I realized that my first impression had not been perfectly correct. The shape had a face, or at least the suggestion of a face. Hollows where the eyes would be; a smooth tapered bulge for a nose; the tilt of cheekbones and the shadows beneath. A pointed chin.

  The shape of the body was stereotypically human and feminine, despite having no actual external genitalia or nipples. The torso swelled and tapered into enticing curves and valleys, flaring into breasts and hips that could serve no biological purpose. The figure stood and seemed to watch us approach. It—she?—did not move except for a curious little tilt of the head like a cat tracking prey up a wall.

  I wished I hadn’t thought of that particular comparison. I also wanted to roll my eyes violently at the engineer who had designed her.

  Sally was still nowhere in the senso. I pinged Tsosie to let me deal with the contact, and stepped around him. He stood very still. I turned my suit speakers on and stopped myself halfway through asking Sally to translate my words into language from about a millennian before.

  We’d seen signs in archaic English and Spanish and Chinese, so I was extrapolating. I spoke some English—I’d taken a course back home, when I’d had a lot of time to kill and couldn’t get around very well—so it seemed worth giving it a try. I didn’t know all the words. Rescue specialist and lead trauma specialist were mysteries, for example.

  But I knew some. And maybe—

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Dr. Brookllyn Jens. This is Dr. Paul Tsosie. We’re crew from the… the ambulance ship that has matched velocities with your ship. We are friends. We come from a hospital called Core General. We’re responding to your distress signal. Do you have casualties?”

  There was a pause, and I swear it blinked, though there were no eyes and no eyelids to blink with. Its gestures reminded me of techniques I’d been shown in school by a friend studying to be a puppeteer. The tilt of a head, the inclination of a shoulder—those could give the watcher a picture of emotion and focus as clearly as any words.

  It made a garbled sound: not speech, but like a lot of audio information compressed into a very tight space, laid over itself again and again. I recognized the timbre of Sally’s voice in there, and Tsosie’s, though I could not make out words. And what could have been my own voice, changed the way voices are changed when you don’t hear them from inside your own head.

  Then it spoke, in stilted but correct Standard, in a smoky contrived alto that made me flinch.

  “I am Helen,” the android said. “The distress signal—yes. There is a distress signal. And there are casualties. Please, come with me.”

  * * *

  Helen? I asked Sally silently, forgetting for a moment that she wasn’t there. Who names their shipmind Helen? We followed the android through more of the ship’s habitation areas. She said she was taking us to a cargo area, which didn’t bode well for living casualties.

  Tsosie heard me, though. We still had our local connection, even if the uplink had failed.

  I’m not sure she is a shipmind, he replied. You could ask.

  I was still contemplating the options when Tsosie said, “Helen, are you the shipmind?”

  Helen did not look back. Her shimmering golden body preceded us, and I did my best not to stare at her shiny metal ass. What can I say? It was very distracting.

  She said, “I’m Helen Alloy. I was made to wait.”

  Helen Alloy.

  Because some engineer thought he was funny. And between the smoky voice and the shiny metal ass, I will bet you whatever you care to name that the person who built her was a he.

  Tsosie apparently was right there with me, as his voice came over our direct link: There’s a Trojan horse joke here, and I’m not going to make it.

  I sighed out loud. One benefit of the hardsuit: I could be kind to myself and those around me and decide not to mike my exasperated sound effects.

  “Wait for who?” Tsosie asked, when it became plain that I was ignoring his joke and that Helen wasn’t going to elaborate without prompting.

  “Wait for you.” She shook her head, as if indicating confusion. “Wait for whoever came to save us. To maintain the ship and keep the crew safe until somebody came. It’s been a long time.”

  “Does the shipmind still exist?” Tsosie asked. “How about the library?”

  “There’s a library,” she said. “And there’s Central.”

  “Central?” I asked, deciding not to remind Tsosie that I had been going to do the talking. I was a little distracted: without Sally to keep an eye on my pain levels and help coordinate my exo, I was still doing those tasks myself. Keeping abreast of it wasn’t a problem, but it used up a few cycles. “Who is Central?”

  “Central,” Helen said, “isn’t a person.”

  “You’ve been here alone?” I was beginning to understand why the whole ship was filled with bot toys. Helen must have been incredibly bored. I hoped she’d at least been programmed to be interested in astronomical data, because that was the only source of intellectual stimulation for parsecs.

  “I
’m not alone,” she said. “Here are the passengers.”

  She pressed a metal palm to a pad beside an irising hatch. A big hatch: this must be one of the promised cargo bays. Sally’s map and my own sense of dead reckoning told me that we’d come up on the side of the spinning wheel. That made sense: cargo bays would serve as valuable radiation shielding, though this one seemed to be oriented away from the wheel’s direction of travel.

  She stepped through and gestured us into the airlock with her. We went. Helen cycled the lock. The door in front of us came open. A pale light flooded past her, shimmering on the curve of her hip and thigh.

  I peered over Helen’s shoulder. The hold was filled with rank after rank of caskets.

  * * *

  Coffins, or cryo containers? It was hard to be sure, and given that the cargo hold was cold as space and held no atmosphere, the only functional difference was going to be whether the people inside could be resuscitated.

  Whatever the objects were, there were a lot of them. I did a little quick mental math and figured that there must be a thousand of them in this bay alone.

  They might be alive. Or at least, aliveable.

  “Bet you two standard weeks of kitchen duty that this isn’t the only hold,” Tsosie murmured.

  “No bet.” My heart sank at the size of the job ahead.

  Sally still wasn’t there. So I had to ask Helen about the history.

  “Helen,” I said, “how good was your people’s cryonics technology?”

  She looked at me and shrugged a fluid, rippling shrug. “In comparison to what, Doctor?”

  “Do you know what your revival success rate is?”

  “They are my crew,” she said. “They must be all right.”

  Her program was focused on protecting her crew’s well-being to the point of being dangerous to herself or bystanders. It was a common problem in early model AIs: they were geared toward maximum preservation of human life in the very short term, and because their algorithms weren’t flexible, they had occasionally created a hell born of trolley problems.

  Worry feels like somebody doing crochet with your internal organs. I subvocalized, Tsosie, are you seeing this?

  “I am,” he answered, without turning on his suit speakers. “We’re going to have to salvage the whole ship, aren’t we?”

  Suddenly, Sally was with us again. “Don’t panic,” she said, as if those words were ever inclined to keep one from panicking. They came with a nice dose of anxiolytics, though, which helped. “The crew is all fine. We’re dealing with a technical problem.”

  I shot her a hard feeling.

  She sighed. “A little damage came to light. We’re making repairs.”

  How could you have damage and not know it?

  The ambulance is, in a very real sense, Sally’s body. For her not to notice damage would be like me having burned my hand and not realized it: indicative of a far bigger problem.

  “We’ll talk about it when you’re not so busy.”

  But— Tsosie began.

  I knew what he was about to say, and I was totally with him. What, exactly, had been damaged? He was the mission commander, and I was the rescue coordinator—

  But Sally was the shipmind. She shushed him with the electronic equivalent of a squelching stare, and we both subsided.

  “We’re not going to salvage the whole ship,” she said, as if she’d been a part of the conversation all along. “The engineering is intractable. We don’t have the facilities to grapple it, and even if we did it’s been accelerating in the wrong direction since Earth was all humans knew, and it’s fragile. It’s too big for a salvage tug to pull through white space. The best approach is to take the people off, if they’re alive, then turn it around and send it back to Terra. It should only take it another six hundred subjective ans of constant braking to get there. If the Synarche lasts that long, we can park it in orbit and turn it into a museum.”

  “If not, it will serve as a nice surprise for whoever comes after.” Tsosie sounded… bitter. As if something about this was hitting him personally.

  “Well, somebody is going to have to come get it,” I said. Out loud, but with my speakers turned off. Then I turned them on again, before realizing that if Helen was linked to Big Rock Candy Mountain, it and she were probably monitoring our radio transmissions and nothing we were saying was encrypted. The evidence supported me, because she seemed to have taught herself Standard by listening to us before we met her. Our coms channel wasn’t translated, but I had to assume that any AI worth its salt—even a primitive one—could handle unpacking mere centians of linguistic progress.

  Screw it, I thought, and spoke so Helen could hear me. “Let’s inspect those cryo chambers, shall we? We probably won’t be able to tell if the ones that are still working contain people who can be brought back. That will have to wait for the hospital. But we should be able to tell if any of them have failed.”

  “None have failed,” Helen said. “I’ve done my job. I have maintained the machines.”

  I wondered, pityingly, how long Helen had been alone. I wondered if being alone bothered her. Certainly the tinkertoy constructions had an aspect of neuroticism to them, if she was responsible for those. AIs left for too long without input could become fragmented and compulsive. Especially if they’d suffered damage to their hardware.

  But Core General cared for artificial intelligences as well as biological ones. We didn’t make a distinction regarding the kind of life we treated, though the doctors for those patients had different specialties. The hospital had several excellent cybersurgeons.

  (I was told they were excellent, anyway. Their CVs were certainly impressive, though I didn’t have the expertise to judge. Sally did, and I’d never heard her say anything derogatory.

  And believe me, if there is anything centian-long space flights are good for, it’s gossip.)

  Digressions aside, I thought our best strategy was to bring Helen back with us, along with a full load of cryo chambers—if we could manage to keep them powered while transporting them. That would be the tricky part. As soon as we got close enough to a beacon, we’d send out a request for cargo haulers to meet another rescue team, and some salvage experts, and let them sort out what to do with—conservatively estimating—ten thousand or so only provisionally not-dead people.

  As for us, we might even get back to Core General with our quota before our message did, if we legged it, and we could warn the hospital that it needed to gear up isolation wards and massive amounts of powered cargo storage to be ready for a slow-motion mass casualty situation.

  You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. It’s been a truism of emergency response for close to a millennian, and it’s no less true now than it was when they were hauling people out of frozen lakes on the homeworld. It applies doubly to cryo accidents. And we’re a lot better at fixing brain damage these diar than we had been then.

  “I’m going to go look,” I told Tsosie, Helen, and Sally.

  “None have failed,” Helen insisted. Behind us, the tinkertoys that had followed us into the airlock rustled as if in response to her emotion. Tsosie’s head turned. I felt his shock of unease through the senso, felt him tune to calm himself and refocus on the task at hand.

  If the peripheral—if that’s what Helen was—freaked out, how were we going to restrain her, exactly? She obviously was linked to her microbots, and she was probably linked to the ship as well. I foresaw problems if she decided that she needed to personally escort all the cryo chambers. Especially as we’d need to divide them into groups in order to move the people in them to safety. Or, I should say, to move those people to the potential of safety, if any could be saved.

  Maybe Helen could split herself into multiple parts. But I suspected that wouldn’t be good for her, in her already-fragile state.

  I called on all my victim-soothing skills and hoped Helen’s homebrew language-learning was up to the challenge of following what I needed to say. “I believe you. But I need to
assess the technical challenges of moving your crew. We need to know what kind of power we need to supply, at the minimum.”

  The tinkertoys clattered. Yes, there was definitely a link there. If I didn’t want to be the first paramedic beaten to death by building blocks, I was going to have to come up with a way to calm Helen. Fortunately, defusing difficult situations with distraught and sometimes panicky people is part of my job.

  “Move my crew? You can’t move my crew! It’s contrary to protocols. I have to protect them!”

  “We are responding to your distress call,” I reminded her gently. “We are here to help you.”

  I could see the program conflict, manifesting as anxiety. Helen was a sentient, too, and I did not want her to come to any harm. It wasn’t her fault some frustrated engineer had designed her to look and sound like a sexbot.

  “Oh, I know that.” It came out torn between a moan and a growl. “Why can’t you help them here? They’re my crew. They belong here.”

  Tsosie bumped me warningly with the elbow of his hardsuit. Not that I needed it.

  Helen wouldn’t have come equipped with all those cryo units. Big Rock Candy Mountain was designed to be full of living, breathing crew. Not sleepers.

  I was pretty sure that cryo hadn’t even been properly invented when Big Rock Candy Mountain had left Terra. Which meant that they had developed their own, in parallel with the Synarche, which was probably why these coffins didn’t look anything like a proper cryo tank. That meant the crew had built them—or the ship had built them, or Helen had built them.

  Which meant I could at best guess at the mechanisms by which the coffins worked. Assuming they worked at all.

  “Helen,” I said carefully, “how is it that your entire crew came to be in cryo?”

  This ship was meant to be a home. A habitation for an entire tribe of humanity. Not merely a vehicle.