Machine

by Elizabeth Bear

  You can always get one more out.

  Until you can’t. And it’s not easy to know where the line between “saving one more” and “dying yourself” is.

  We could have left once we had a full load of patients. Could have—Helen wasn’t capable of stopping us as long as Sally had her in restraint. But we waited for the additional relief ships to arrive, because to do otherwise would have amounted to the extremest mental cruelty to Helen and to the machine.

  And we were all curious, and wanted a look at that docked, silent methane ship. Even though she wasn’t answering our hails, there might be people on board her, also. It was such a huge rescue job that we couldn’t do everything at once and had to prioritize. Triage.

  With Helen’s help and Sally’s override, part of the microbot machine was packed up in boxes and loaded in external holds; Sally told us that its personality core was both integrated with Helen’s and distinct from her. It was quite nonhuman in its construction, and while Sally didn’t seem to have any problem communicating with it, she also didn’t seem to be able to easily translate its concepts and logical processes for us meat types.

  She did say we’d gotten enough of its processing power to preserve its personality core. If anything should happen to the rest of it, it would be able to reconstruct itself.

  What can I say? AI medicine is weird.

  The human patients were going to have to stay frozen for the time being. Though I wanted to thaw them out. And Hhayazh really wanted to thaw them out.

  But all we needed was a virulent influenza from six hundred ans ago that nobody has any immunity to anymore, or something similar. I know we all have diar when we’re tempted to take definitive action… but wiping out humanity with a primitive plague wasn’t on our agenda. Neither was killing a lot of ice people because we couldn’t wait to defrost them until we got someplace with the most advanced medical technology in the galaxy.

  The pods were decontaminated, and they would wait to be opened until we got back to Core.

  Rhym tried to argue me into letting them do the EV to the methane ship, since we had no patients suitable for them to operate on. They maintained that Tsosie and I still needed rest. I pointed out that I still had the ayatanas loaded. We could have been caught in a stalemate for a standard month, but Sally pulled up the drone surveys and showed us a ship interior more suitable for long lanky types than squat broad-circumferenced ones, thereby resolving the argument in my favor.

  She did insist that I eat and let my exo and hardsuit both finish full maintenance cycles before I went out, though. The exo was nearly done, and Camphvis, good to her word, had set up the hardsuit. But I suspected that Sally had conveniently not remembered to trigger the disassembly and reprint, in order to keep me indoors for another few hours.

  I mean, sure, it’s supposed to be on my checklist. But she’s the AI.

  I was halfway through breakfast—no coffee, drop it all down the Well, because coffee smells terrible to most syster species, so I was making do with tea—before I remembered to ask her what had gone wrong the previous dia. “Sally. When you lost contact with us. You said you would explain later. What happened?”

  Sally paused, which is a thing AIs do when they’re communicating with humans, because it makes us more comfortable if they operate at our speed. Then she said, “I’m not precisely sure.”

  “But you fixed it. I mean, you got back in touch with us.”

  “I routed around it,” she said. “With Loese’s help. And then I forgot about it.”

  That, in conjunction with the delay on maintaining my hardsuit, made me sit upright. It’s a good thing we weren’t in free fall, because I dropped my spoon and nobody likes oatmeal floating into their hair. Things did not slip Sally’s mind.

  “I think I better have a look at this,” I said, trying to ignore the chill of unease I felt.

  “Get Loese to show you,” Sally said. “She looked at it yesterdia.”

  * * *

  I got Loese to show me.

  She was around in the control cabin, which is mostly where we congregated when we weren’t sleeping, eating, or working. I had to make a halfway circuit of Sally’s circumference to get there, so it took me a whole two minutes. Maybe ninety seconds. Sally is big for a starship, but that doesn’t make her big.

  Loese had black hair and unusually pale skin and a butch presentation. I found her bent over panels, her afthands immersed in their interface while she worked course calculations. Loese is a spacer by upbringing, and has the usual spacer mods: it must be seriously irritating to her to be stuck on Sally with her constant simulated spin gravity.

  On the other hand, maybe it’s fun to zip around the galaxy on an ambulance. No speed limits for us, except for physics. And nobody makes Loese buy her own fuel.

  “Hey,” I said when she looked up. “When you get a break, can you take me to see whatever went wrong yesterdia? Sally said you hadn’t fixed it yet.”

  “Sure,” Loese said. “We can go right now. Just let me pause this. And since we’ve got functional coms back, I wasn’t going to fix it until we got back to Core. To preserve the evidence.”

  “The evidence,” I said, startled enough that it didn’t register with me that I ought to be asking a question. I was repeating the words that didn’t make sense, in an experimental fashion.

  Loese looked at me. “Sally didn’t tell you.”

  “Sally told me it was an equipment failure and sent me to bed. What didn’t Sally tell me?”

  “Come see for yourself,” Loese said. “Sally?”

  “Here, Loese.”

  Loese led me farther around the ring, and aft. We opened a hatch that led to a little room too small for both of us to enter at once. It was an equipment access and storage space, and we wound up unclipping and moving a few duffel crates of things we used too regularly for it to be worth printing them every time we wanted them before we got to the back of it.

  When they were out of the way, I could see scorch marks in the ship’s grippy interior sheathing. Somebody had scored the material and peeled it back to expose the workings underneath. Sally was supposed to be self-healing, but either she’d shut it off or that function was compromised.

  “You opened this?” I asked Loese.

  “There’s a superconductor path under here,” Loese said. “A lot of electricity wound up going places it shouldn’t have.”

  “How is that possible? It’s not live, is it? And why isn’t it healing?”

  She moved back so I could step past her. “Sally can’t find it. Based on what you told me, it sounds like she can’t even remember what’s wrong.”

  “That sounds like brain damage,” I said, and had a sudden unsettling memory of Helen talking around the programmed blocks that didn’t allow her to see what a part of her own… self… was doing. “But how—”

  “Sabotage,” Loese said, succinctly and reluctantly.

  “The docked ship?” I asked. “Wait, Helen?”

  “No,” she said. “Nothing out here. It must have been in progress before Sally made any contact with Helen or the machine on Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

  She seemed to realize that her revelation would trigger a whole cascade of questions, because she continued, “And I don’t think any of you did it: I think it must have been put in place back at Core. I think somebody hid a device with a timer or some other kind of trigger in Sally, so that she lost coms with you and Tsosie while you were outside. And then put some kind of worm or logic bomb in her code so she would not be able to tell what was happening.”

  I stared at her. There were words in my head, but they all seemed to get jammed in the pre-verbial door trying to get out at the same time. She’d only been our pilot for a few standard months, but I’d come to rely on her skill and calm. And the nervous twitchiness I was picking up from her was… deeply worrying.

  Loese, watching my expression, shrugged. “If Rhym hadn’t sensed smoke… well, their tendrils are a lot more sensitive than
a human olfactory system. We could have been in much more trouble by the time we were found.”

  But how could she be sure that none of us were behind it?

  “This was sabotage.” I had to hear it in my own voice to internalize it, I suppose.

  “Yes,” Loese said. “I am confident in that assessment.”

  “But how could Sally not notice? How could she not detect the damage before it happened? How could she not feel the device?”

  “That troubles me as well; thus my theory of the logic bomb. Sally is running a self-diagnostic, and we’ve been unable to find signs of any other time bombs ticking away, but a definitive cyberpathology report will probably have to wait until we get home again.”

  “Should we abort? Run for home?” I asked.

  Her lips pressed together. “We’re not in any more danger here than we are running home, really. We can do the diagnostics perfectly well right where we are. Our patients need us. And if something were to go catastrophically wrong, the next wave of rescue vehicles has a better chance of finding us here than they do somewhere in white space. I also wonder what the purpose of it was. It wasn’t enough damage to really endanger Sally. It just left us out of contact with you for a while.”

  “Tsosie and I have been replaced by predatory, shapeshifting aliens,” I said. “You caught us. If you throw water on us, we’ll melt.”

  I must have nailed the deadpan, because Loese blinked at me for at least three seconds before she laughed.

  I said, “Even if Sally were totally disabled, or Tsosie and I got stuck on the generation ship, there’s a small fleet right behind us.”

  “I know.” Loese shook her head. “The good news is, none of this is critical to life support or propulsion. And we’re looking for it, should anything happen again. When we get back, maybe the master chief will have some ideas about what happened.”

  Master Chief O’Mara wasn’t in the Judiciary anymore, but everybody mostly still used their old title and not their new one. Core General’s ox dockmaster—really, they were the head of the Emergency Department, ox sector—was an old acquaintance of mine from the military. They were also a total badass.

  I was kind of looking forward to the detonation when I told them somebody had busted one of the ships in their care. They would take it personally, and they treated invective as an art form.

  I could look forward to a colorful performance.

  “Can you run down whatever’s blocked Sally’s awareness of the event? I… what are the odds that that’s evidence of… that worm, or something that’s still messing with her functionality?”

  “Working on it.” Loese waved me out of the cubby and sealed the hatch. “Really, really working on it. Now go do your job.”

  * * *

  Unsettled, I went to get a nice warm mug of creatine, anti-inflammatories, and caffeine from the gallery for breakfast. I sat down across from Tsosie, who was spooning porridge. He grunted a hello; I slurped my beverage. It was faintly lemon-flavored and a little spicy from the capsaicin and curcumin it contained. I hurt a little less than I had before I rested, and this would improve things even more.

  “Loese tell you about the… damage?” I asked.

  He nodded, lips flexing. He wasn’t what you’d call a handsome man, I didn’t think—though what did I know about what made men handsome? His cheekbones were wide over a sharply triangular chin, and his deep-set eyes seemed to rest behind them like caves on stark ledges. That gaze held a sharp intelligence, and it assessed me. “You worried about it?”

  I slurped again. “A little, yeah.” That was an understatement. But hysteria is contagious, and even if you’re scared, you do the job in front of you, and then the next job after that. And you trust the other professionals around you to do their jobs, too.

  That’s how you get through dangerous situations. That’s how we were going to get through this one. Sally’s injury—the sabotage—was her problem, and Loese’s, to deal with and repair. My fluttering at them wouldn’t help the situation, so I would do my own job and stay out of their way.

  Maybe I should admit to Tsosie that I did, after all, have a little faith.

  Tsosie pushed his bowl away and reached for his own mug, which smelled like chocolate. “You never get scared. You weren’t even scared back on the generation ship, walking out into that cargo hold with the machine following you like a pissed-off guard bot.”

  “What was there to get scared of? There’s just a job to do.” I wrapped my hands around the mug. The heat helped the ache.

  “Oh,” he said, “fembots. A ship that’s taking itself apart to become macro-programmable matter. Mysterious, sourceless sabotage damage to our own vessel. The incapacitated, silent Synarche ship you’re about to go enter?”

  I held a hand out, flat, and wobbled it from side to side. So-so. “What else you got?”

  He laughed at my ironic bravado and batted my hand aside. Gently, because Tsosie is always gentle. “You’re that dedicated to Judiciary.”

  “I couldn’t care less about Judiciary. I left Judiciary when I got the chance to be a doctor full-time.” The drink was starting to taste metallic as it cooled. I swilled the rest of it. “I’m that dedicated to saving lives.”

  “Sure, you’re an angel.” He shook his head and laughed harder: my expression must have been something to behold. “No, I know you are. This job is your life.”

  “Maybe that’s why I’m not scared,” I said. “Maybe it’s that the job is all I have to lose.”

  Tsosie stopped laughing.

  “What?” I said.

  He frowned at me, inspecting my face as intently as Loese had inspected the scorched bulkhead.

  “What?” I said again.

  “I believe you’re telling the truth.” He finished his chocolate and stood, sweeping his utensils together. “I hope you find more again, somedia.”

  CHAPTER 5

  HAVING FINISHED HER DRONE RECONNAISSANCE of the docked ship, Sally called a shipwide meeting. It wasn’t hard, since there were just the six of us—Sally, me, Tsosie, Camphvis, Rhym, Hhayazh. And Helen, if you counted Helen. And a chip off the machine, and the frozen crew members from Big Rock Candy Mountain.

  Those last weren’t included in the meeting, though. None of them got a vote. Neither was Helen, technically, but the only way to keep her from hearing us on a ship that small would have been to hold the meeting entirely in senso while trying to keep our faces straight.

  Well, we could have sent her out an airlock and strapped her to the hull. But that sounded like an even more terrible idea, and somewhere in my oath of service there’s a line about “compassionate.”

  When we were all floating comfortably, each armed with bulbs of whatever our species considered appropriate refreshment—except for Rhym, whose species did not engage in recreational eating—Sally said, “As we know, it’s a methane ship—”

  “That’s what’s driving me down the Well. Why would they even dock? What would they hope to accomplish?” Tsosie’s voice trailed off as he contemplated the improbability of it all.

  “I believe I agree with the sentiment my esteemed colleague is expressing,” Rhym said politely, when the silence had stretched for a while. “Why would a crew with utterly incompatible environmental needs go to all the trouble to couple to a ship that doesn’t even have standard airlock design?”

  Utterly incompatible was putting it gently. Explosive combination might have been a better phrase.

  Loese had big eyes under the thick dark forelock that kept drifting across them. It seemed like it would get in her way piloting, but I suppose modern pilots didn’t really use their eyes for much. The interface was all senso. She pushed the hair back out of those eyes now, narrowed them grimly, and said, “You’re kidding me about going in there. We don’t have cryo tanks, or any power left over to run them with. What are we supposed to do with casualties, splint them?”

  “Can’t use a standard ox cryo tank on methane types anyway,” Hhayazh
said. “It’s too hot for them. The methane types melt.”

  “So,” Tsosie said. “How are we even supposed to help those people?”

  “Very carefully,” I answered.

  He glared at me, which seemed unfair. Nobody ever glared at Hhayazh when it made sarcastic jokes.

  “Our hardsuits can handle the environment in there.” Barely. But he knew that. To change the subject—and because I wanted to know—I asked Sally, “It might all be irrelevant if this one doesn’t have a crew, either?”

  “It does,” Sally said. “They appear to be alive, inasmuch as I can determine with remote sensors. They’re superficially similar to other methane species, in that their apparent environmental needs would be compatible with units on Core General. I still believe they’re the assigned crew of SPV I Bring Tidings From Afar (Afar is his call name), which makes them”—she made a ringing sound, like somebody running fingers along the bowls of a glass harmonica—“and therefore a known syster species, albeit one that doesn’t have much to do with ox types. But they seem to be in some kind of stasis or hibernation state. Which I’m going to assume is either natural for them, or medically or pathologically induced, because they don’t appear to be receiving life support.”

  “So nobody popped them into cryo chambers?”

  “Nobody popped them into cryo chambers. And I don’t have enough medical files on this syster to know if this response is considered normal for their species. They might estivate, for all I know.”

  Tsosie folded up his glare. He rubbed his temples with his forefingers and thumb. “Dr. Jens, can you load some ayatanas for—Sally, is there a name for these folks I can pronounce with my vocal equipment?”

  “Darboof,” she supplied cheerfully.

  “I’ve already got it loaded,” I said. “They don’t estivate.”

  “Checking my registry—which is comprehensive—the Synarche Packet Vessel I Bring Tidings From Afar is a fast packet, which means he is one of the rare vehicles that could keep up with us. But the shipmind—Afar—is also nonresponsive.”