Machine

by Elizabeth Bear

  Mostly, mail gets around the Synarche by piggybacking on a series of transponders located at the waypoints where ships drop out of white space to visit stations, or just to change direction. They exchange data with any passing ship, and eventually information propagates to its destination—faster than light, but not as fast as a fast ship flying straight. Fast ships flying straight are much more resource-intensive, however.

  Fast packets like Afar also carry FTL message beacons with their own tiny white drives, which was how word that this crew needed help had reached Core General. They’d converted one into a distress beacon and sent it to us with whatever crumbs of information they had regarding what they’d found… and we’d come at a run.

  Most of us looked at one another. Especially Camphvis and Hhayazh, each of whom could look in several directions at once.

  “We still haven’t figured out what a fast packet is doing all the way out here to even find these folks,” Loese said.

  “Delivering a message?” Hhayazh said.

  Tsosie pressed his palm briefly over his eyes before he looked up again, squaring his shoulders. “It seems unreasonable to have two ghost ships to explore.”

  “Well, this one is a lot more modern. And I wouldn’t say that it’s abandoned—” I glanced at Helen’s eyeless face, which turned toward me. She didn’t look accusing, I told myself. I was projecting. “—any more than Big Rock Candy Mountain turned out to be.”

  “Ghost ship?” Camphvis asked.

  Loese said, “Like the Flying Dutchman. Or is it the Mary Celeste? I always get those confused.”

  “I will look up Flying Dutchman,” Camphvis said mildly. It would take more than three unruly humans to get her eyestalks in a twist.

  “As Llyn said, it would be unfair to say that this ship has been abandoned,” Sally pointed out with a tone I always thought of as strained reason. AIs dealing with organic intelligences must dump a lot of processing power into patience. At least we’re rightminded. Imagine how bad it would be if we were baseline.

  I never ask Sally to imagine that, though. I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me that it would be insensitive to point out that I know how annoying organics are and not do anything to fix it. She probably wouldn’t space us all, because she’d just have to pick up the bodies.

  Tsosie anchored himself with one hand and made an irritated conversation-cutting gesture with the other. “What’s the differential?”

  Sally said, “We are already here, and can intervene four diar before the next closest rescue ship. Which is Ruth. She’s coming in with the other crews and the Judiciary ship full of archinformists and archaeologists. They’re all ox crews, because we thought we were coming for a Terran ship. We can get some methane types out with the next wave, but it will be… a while. Somebody will have to go back with the news that we need them.”

  Four diar would seem more like three for these ships, traveling as fast as they were. But the time dilation of relativistic speed wasn’t enough to make a real difference in the decision whether to risk ourselves—and the crew of the other ship—trying to stage a rescue with all the wrong equipment.

  He sighed. He looked at me. It wasn’t my call whether we should commit to the rescue: that was his. My command started when the rescue began. But he was asking what I thought anyway.

  “Sally,” I said, “can you show us what you’ve got on the interior?”

  “Copy,” she said. “There’s some cargo that I don’t understand, also. It looks like they were printing some heavy equipment in one of the bays.”

  She slid us highlight feeds of her drone reports. I found myself in Sally’s distributed perspective, floating down a cold, cold corridor in a space with nothing I would consider visible light at all. Somewhere inside me, all the methane-breather ayatanas seemed to take a deep breath and relax.

  For them, home was covered in hoarfrost.

  Nitrogen-methane atmospheres such as those used by the Darboof tend to be transparent in the red and infrared, though opaque on the blue end on the spectrum. Methane-breathing systers see. But the manner in which they see is not very much like ours at all, and they tend to be profoundly vulnerable to heat and radiation in what we would consider the visible spectrum.

  Methanogen worlds are brutally cold and dark by human standards: they have to be, to sustain liquid methane. Instead of intaking the kinds of “organic” (carbon-based) molecules we use to build and power our bodies, methanogens metabolize hydrogen, ethane, and acetylene—and exhale methane, as we exhale carbon dioxide.

  Methanogen systers use electricity and chemical reactions to move and to think, just as we do. But the mechanisms by which these operate are quite different. Some have incredibly slow metabolisms. Others, like the Darboof, have adapted to the cold of their environments by evolving bodies that are supercooled superconductors.

  Afar was under gravity from the spin of the generation ship he was docked to, but it was obvious that he was not designed to spend much time that way. And because I was trying to track several perspectives at once, I couldn’t get an accurate count of the crew members.

  If Sally’s—and the drones’—ability to register the faint, regular, painfully slow respiration of Afar’s crew hadn’t told me they were alive, I would have thought they were dead. They were utterly motionless—and very beautiful—crystalline icicle sculptures. They would have been radially symmetrical if they had not been slumped in awkward poses, limbs folded under their bodies, frost-flower spikes jutting at regular angles from carapaces.

  They lay against what were obviously designed to be zero-g bunks and acceleration couches, crystalline bodies padded by what I took to be some kind of low-temperature aerogel. The material technologies are so utterly different from ox-based ones that there’s no comparison. In what they consider room temperatures, the oxygen and carbon dioxide of our atmosphere would precipitate out of the nitrogen as snow. And methane would puddle in lakes.

  Going in there scared me. Space is cold, too—but in space, there’s no convective or conductive cooling. A methanogen environment (even though the atmosphere, like mine, would be mostly nitrogen) would suck any heat it could reach out of me, and then use that heat to kill the people I had come to save.

  We couldn’t bring them back to Sally. She had environmental chambers, but nothing that could manage this syster’s needs.

  “I’m willing to try it,” I said. “A fast packet? How many crew, four?”

  “Five,” Sally said.

  Helen said, “You will not endanger my crew.”

  “No,” said Tsosie. “We will not. Anyone else have any comments?”

  “We’ve got ayatanas for that species,” Rhym said.

  Do you ever get the sense that nobody is listening to you? “I know,” I said again. “I’m wearing one.”

  Rhym continued, “I, too, can wear one, and can operate by remote if necessary.”

  “It would be most efficient to leave them on their own ship and tow them in,” said Hhayazh. “No, wait. Slave the drive and bring them in that way, since their ship can keep up with Sally. Sally, you said you could not contact Afar at all? Even emergency protocols? A consciousness ping?”

  “That is correct,” Sally said. “We’d need to hardwire in an override panel.”

  “I can do that,” I said. “Pass me the solder that’s still good at negative 190C.”

  Loese leaned back in her chair. “It’s feasible.”

  “And somebody has to set up life support to keep the crew alive while we’re in transit.” I checked my Darboof ayatana for more physiology. “Unless Rhym wants to use drones to do it?”

  “As I offered, I will also load some Darboof ayatanas,” they replied. “Then we can decide whether their own metabolic processes are protecting them enough to get them back to Core General alive. They can be slowed down, if I recall; the environment they evolved in is so cold that their strictly chemical biology moves at a very slow pace.”

  “They’ve only su
rvived this long because their metabolisms are seriously depressed. That’s why they’re still breathing,” I said. “It’s only electrical signals that keep them functioning at anything like meat speed.”

  I stole a glance at Helen again. She still sat completely silent, but she seemed to be aware. I took a breath and said, “Isn’t it odd that two ships in the same place, with very different architectures and design histories, both seem to have lost their shipminds?”

  Sally cleared her nonexistent throat. “To say lost is factually inaccurate.”

  “Granted.” I didn’t roll my eyes because Sally would know what it meant. And because Helen was sitting right there, and I’m not a complete jerk. “Of course Big Rock Candy Mountain’s shipmind is not missing. Considering my question idiomatically, is it odd?”

  “Yes,” Sally answered. “It is.”

  “I wish we could know if they suffered damage in similar ways,” Camphvis said. “It seems very unlikely; modern AI architecture is quite dissimilar from what your species used in the sublight age.”

  “Right,” I said. “Sally, are you planning to take direct control of Afar? I guess we need to cut him loose from Big Rock Candy Mountain and remotely bring him home.”

  “I’m concerned about contagion,” she said, “given that we have two shipminds damaged by possibly connected phenomena. But since I’m already in contact with the machine, it may be closing the bay door after the pirates have flown in to worry about viruses now. And the alternative is to physically grapple him.”

  “It’ll be easier for me to get over there if he’s not whirling around with the wheel, having made that jump already. But it’s your call. I can undock him manually.”

  “No,” Sally said. “If you’re willing to take the risk, I can plug in a drone and make things nice and easy with matched velocities. You don’t even have to go over and, as you so kindly offered, solder on a panel. Just handle a life-support setup for the crew while we’re in transit.”

  “You’re very accommodating,” I joked. “What if Afar is contagious?”

  “I have a personality core backup on archive at Core General,” she answered. “And I have good firewalls. If you meat types are willing to take the small additional risk, I am. The worst I stand to lose is a few diar of memories. You could wind up drifting forever in the interstellar darkness.”

  I laughed.

  But maybe a little nervously.

  * * *

  Our IR scanners and the drones showed Afar was cold—cold, cold, cold—but that didn’t mean the crew was dead. Cold was the only habitat methane breathers could endure.

  I got Sally to give me two more ayatanas from Core General staff who belonged to Afar’s crew species. As Sally had previously demonstrated, the Darboof’s name for themselves sounded like the chiming of glass bells; their sensorium experience was foreign to mine. Even though I unloaded a couple of the antique human ayatanas first, downloading and integrating the recorded memories of two more from the Darboof strained my capabilities enough that I found myself looking at the brown squishiness of my own fingers with disgust. I was revoltingly unlike the clean, crystalline purity of the methane breathers. Wet, dangerously hot, full of terrifying caustic fluids…

  Right. I tuned myself to manage my increasingly catastrophic endocrine response and felt the pulse rate of my (hot, caustic-blooded) heart slow.

  Better living through brain implants!

  Calmer, I settled in to research in my borrowed memories. Since the ayatanas in question were those of medical professionals, I was able to find the information I needed fairly quickly.

  That infrared reading suggested they hadn’t gotten too hot: their climate control was still working. The vessel’s hull seemed intact per visual inspection and the drone report, so there probably hadn’t been any impacts. And, I reminded myself, the drones said the crew were alive in there, just in some kind of suspension.

  Which led me to the least reassuring detail I learned from my recorded passengers. I reaffirmed my earlier impression that the Darboof did not, in general, exhibit a hibernation response to trauma, though there was some evidence that one could be induced in them by the right combination of interventions. That would require the equivalent of putting me in a cryo tank, though, so I didn’t think it was what had happened here.

  The Darboof were physically tough, able to withstand more gs than squishy little critters like myself, and they didn’t demineralize in free fall, either. Lucky. Being under simulated gravity for however long they had been docked—not too long, since they were still alive and respiring, per the drones—wouldn’t have harmed them.

  Neither would lack of gravity on the way back to Core General. And they could survive the transition from the former to the latter unrestrained except for their acceleration couches, which they were conveniently already slumped upon.

  “All right, I think this is a go,” I told Sally, staggering onto the bridge with one hand braced on the wall. We were back to maintaining position over Afar, whipping around the rolling wheel of the generation ship on a following curve, and pulling some extra g because of it. Sally’s rotation meant that we endured successive waves of feeling lighter and heavier as the accelerations interacted. It was profoundly disorienting, but if Sally had stopped her rotation, anybody on the other side of the hub would have been sitting on the ceiling. Awkward.

  Loese was sensibly strapped into her chair, both sets of hands buried in her console. I popped myself down next to her. We watched a stabilized screen rather than trying to follow the action through a viewport, which would have been nauseating—as I’d learned before my last jump.

  I was already doing enough tuning to compensate for my inner ear’s opinions about the vector situation without compounding the problem, thanks.

  Tsosie and Rhym were strapped in to watch the show, as well. I clicked my own belts into place and lay back on the acceleration couch with a sigh.

  It helped.

  “All right,” Sally said. “I have control of Afar’s nav systems. Here goes nothing.”

  Nothing on the bridge changed, at first. The swelling waves of acceleration washed us; Afar clung like a barnacle to the vast curve of the generation ship. Then a seam appeared in the adaptive collar that held him to the airlock. It peeled away and vanished back into Afar’s hull. In the normal course of events, the materials would have been salvaged for printing into another tool as necessary. I wondered, with the ship and crew disabled, if it would be cluttering up the airlock like a giant pile of parachute cloth when I went in.

  Because of the collar mismatch, Afar had not shot his docking bolts. He clung to the outside of the generation ship with emergency grapples, and because the airlock had not been seated to Big Rock Candy Mountain, there was no puff of escaping atmosphere.

  Afar retracted his grapples evenly and instantly shot free of the generation ship, no longer bent to her curve but not deprived of velocity. He vectored off as fast as he had been spinning. The pings of one of the two distress beacons went with him.

  We followed, the swell and release of acceleration replaced by a pressure that would have leaned us aft if we hadn’t been strapped down.

  I rubbed my hands. All the liquid inside me was sloshing around, and my joints had opinions about it.

  Localized pain, you can tune out pretty safely and easily, up to a point. The systemic stuff is harder to manage without numbing your entire body or getting stoned enough on your own endorphins to alter your judgment more than might be wise when you’re about to do something as finicky as a solo rescue mission in a profoundly hostile environment. I could push some anti-inflammatories, though, so I fumbled them out of my breast pocket and dry-swallowed them. The rest of the pain… it was just pain. I didn’t like it, but it wouldn’t stop me from doing my job.

  Tsosie noticed. He caught my eye, but he didn’t say anything. Just as well, as it saved me having to invoke privacy, or bite. Metaphorically speaking. Biting a colleague is probably grounds for dis
missal, even—especially?—in a massively multispecies, massively multicultural work environment.

  We bore down on Afar with all the majestically slow urgency of space rescues, accelerating to close the distance between us and match his trajectory. He wasn’t gaining velocity, so we didn’t have to burn hard after him. Big Rock Candy Mountain receded in our aft screens. My heart sped with the excitement of the chase.

  I hoped Helen was all right.

  The lack of anything else productive to do griped me, in my adrenalized state. “I’m going to hail them.”

  Tsosie grunted assent. Technically I didn’t need his permission for this, and I had not asked for it: I was the rescue specialist. But I didn’t point that out to him, because I am reliably informed that part of being a successful team involves making allowances. And observing the niceties of interpersonal politics. And sending thank-you notes and such.

  “Sally, patch me through, please?”

  There was a snap of connection. No crackle of old-fashioned static this time. Sally had given me a tightbeam laser cluster.

  “Synarche Packet Vessel I Bring Tidings From Afar, this is the Core General–affiliated Synarche Medical Vessel I Race To Seek the Living. I am her rescue coordination specialist, Dr. Brookllyn Jens. We are responding to your distress signal. Do you copy?”

  Silence followed. I had a weird sense of someone listening, but if there was, they didn’t speak. Most of those spooky experiences are just your tempoparietal junction getting confused.

  “Afar, please acknowledge if you can hear me. We’re requesting permission to board in response to your beacon.”

  My fox—and the AI or the fox of the person on the other end—would handle any necessary translation through our senso. Assuming there was anybody listening. The connection stayed live—Afar was receiving us—but there was no response.

  I hadn’t actually expected one. But now we could check the box on the paperwork about asking politely before we broke in.