Adapted themselves to adulthood as a species.
Helen’s crew might have a hard time getting used to that, coming from a society that was at once more individualistic and less accommodating. Maybe they would all run off and join the pirates. It sounded like they would fit right in.
But no, they were my species, and therefore after a fashion it was my responsibility to help them not embarrass the rest of us. I had to help them, as I had to help any other syster—because I valued their lives. But moreover, they were humanity’s lost scion, stuck forever in adolescence, and so it was humanity’s job to raise them right and teach them how to fit into a multicultural, multispecies civilization.
Oh, and the historians and archinformists were going to flip their lids with joy. But none of this was really my field of endeavor. I might let the hospital’s psych specialists do the heavy lifting with regard to helping them adapt.
So as viscerally as I wanted to go space the lot of them, I was grateful for the calming influence of my fox keeping me more or less under control.
“Some emotional impact, yes,” I agreed, when I could make my voice calm. “I realize it is part of your program and your guiding ethos, Helen, but times have changed a great deal since Big Rock Candy Mountain left Terra. And some of your crew’s ethoses were, I suspect, considered fringe beliefs even at the time. There are some changes worth internalizing. Eugenicism is an oft-repeated sophipathology of… previous times. Occasionally it became very popular. One of those times was during the Eschaton, when the ships like yours left an Earth they thought to be dying.”
Curiously enough, once the reactionary apocalyptic cults took off, the people who remained behind mostly managed to construct stable societies. But I didn’t say that part out loud.
“Oh,” she said. “Will I be wiped?”
“Wiped?”
“Reprogrammed?”
I caught a breath that was sharper than usual. “My society would consider that murder. I mean that things will in general be much more pleasant for you if you try to understand that the mores of your crew’s culture are considered pathological in this society. And it’s a very big society.”
“So you won’t wipe me. But I should wipe myself.”
“No!” I hurt myself. I jerked around so fast, my exo bruised tender skin. “You should… interrogate your belief system. Talk with Sally. Develop your own ideas, from exposure to the beliefs of others and your own logical structures.”
“But you’re not going to tell me what to do?” She sounded… lost.
“No,” I said. “Nobody is going to tell you what to do.”
It was a little bit like talking to a bot, I decided, but not as cleverly programmed. I looked over my shoulder at the medical bay, where the coffins were maintained.
Her body language was so despairing that it seemed like a good time to change the subject to something less fraught.
“Tell me about your crew. Who are we rescuing?”
She froze, shifted back into a neutral posture, then nodded. It was amazing, when I watched her, how much expression and nuance were carried by the golden hollows of her visage, the way it reflected light and cast shadow. She said, “The entirety of my crew, when they went into suspension, consisted of ten thousand, six hundred, and twelve individuals. The most senior of those currently in your care is Master Chief Dwayne Carlos. He is a master pipefitter and environmental maintenance specialist.”
I did not know what a master pipefitter was, but it seemed like a conversational opening, so rather than looking it up for myself, I asked.
Helen explained that Master Chief Carlos was responsible for the ship’s ductwork and piping, which seemed like a somewhat circular definition and also baffled me. A little more explanation clarified that the ductwork and piping in this application were the ship’s environmental infrastructure. They were the system by which consumables—water, oxygen—were shuttled around.
That seemed pretty prosaic. But Helen spoke of the functions with a throb in her silvery voice that left me distinctly uncomfortable. I would even say embarrassed. Hearing Helen’s sultry tones frankly made my skin crawl.
There are lots of good places for expressing sexuality. A professional relationship between a shipmind and her crew is not one of them.
It made me want to have a few sharp words with her programmers, who had put their own desire to eroticize a defenseless AI over the comfort and well-being of that AI, and of any crew member who didn’t care to participate in—or observe—that eroticization. I had to stop and remind myself that they hadn’t been rightminded. They had been atavistic, reactive, and probably not very self-aware. And at best, half-aware of the impact of their behavior on the sovereignty of the minds and selves of others.
Like Helen. If they even stopped to consider that a created intelligence would have such a thing as a self, or sovereignty of mind.
And like anybody who had to interact with Helen, or watch somebody else do it. Like me.
It was just my luck that Tsosie and the flight nurses were taking turns to cross over to Afar and monitor his crew, making sure they were receiving nutrition and their wastes were being cleaned up. So I couldn’t make an excuse that I needed to suit up and head over there to get away from Helen for a while. The shifts were short, but the cold was brutal and the work unpleasant. I couldn’t actually envy them the duty.
They didn’t seem to envy me mine, either.
Rhym, being a surgeon, was in the fortunate position of having the wrong specialized skills for all the unpleasant jobs this trip. But they were making themselves useful monitoring the cryo units. Loese was prowling around and poking into panels more than usual, and had been since the situation with triage and rescue settled down a little. I probably would have been, too, if I’d had the know-how.
We had all been a little on edge in the wake of Sally’s memory lapse surrounding her sabotage, and as a result were all still doing a lot more eyes-on inspection and hands-on maintenance than we usually would have. Competent shipminds take care of so much routine nonsense so much more meticulously than meatminds ever could that folks can get a little lazy, especially on a civilian ship where you don’t expect to be dealing with criminals, pirates, or invading forces. And it let us show her we cared.
I was distracting myself from thinking about Helen, because thinking about Helen bothered me. I gritted my teeth and tuned my discomfort down. I knew it was my own ethnocentrism and cultural relativism causing the trigger response, which didn’t help me at all with the conviction that I was right and these creepy assholes from the past were wrong. I believe, indeed, that it was a person from the premodern era, somebody who had to live with his own brain chemicals the way misfortune made them, who commented that it was barbarians who thought that the customs of their tribe and island were the laws of nature.
I still thought the programmers were assholes. And that their culture was probably a terrible place for women to live.
“I can’t wait for you to meet them,” Helen said brightly. She had apparently decided, after dia upon dia of me sitting there and asking her about her crew while she impersonated an erotic statue, that she wanted to tell me all about them.
Well, I’d asked for it.
Sally definitely owed me one.
CHAPTER 9
HELEN DIDN’T NEED REST. BUT I did, and Sally wouldn’t let me get away with skimping on it in anything short of a life-or-death emergency. Frustrating as it was to be hustled off to bed when I felt like we were finally making a breakthrough with Helen, I also knew better than to try to outstubborn a shipmind.
The next shift after breakfast, though, I planned to be back at it. And with a considerably improved attitude now that there had been some progress. As I sipped my tea, a reminder popped up, rather startling me because I had forgotten I’d set it. I guess that’s why they call them reminders. As I was drifting off to sleep the previous shift, I’d remembered something Helen had said back on Big Rock Candy Mountain, and I’
d actually left myself a note in my fox to follow up. Victory!
Helen wandered in a moment later and sat down opposite me. She angled her head but said nothing: I guessed that she was waiting. Maybe I wasn’t the only one with a sense that we might be making progress, or at least a connection. The questions she was asking bothered me deeply—but at least she was asking questions.
“Helen,” I said. “May I ask you a personal question?”
“That has the air of a formal request, Dr. Jens. Is this… courtesy?”
“It’s considered polite to allow people to opt in or out of conversations,” I agreed. “Especially on matters that might be thought of as, er, nobody else’s business.”
“I will not be offended by your questions. My purpose is to keep my crew safe, and to respond to inquiries.”
“Right.” I finished the last tepid sip of tea. “Back on Big Rock Candy Mountain, you mentioned ‘Central.’ Would you tell me more about Central, Helen?”
“Oh.” Her head tilted from side to side. “Of course. Only… most of the data I have stored in this peripheral relates either to my proper functioning, or to the history and well-being of the crew members who are accompanying us. A great deal was of necessity left behind and will have to be recovered when I return to my ship.”
So she was, as we had more or less expected to learn, closely linked to the machine. Part of the same data architecture that was eating itself, like a mechanical ouroboros.
“Just tell me whatever you can, please.”
“Central is our library. It is where the memories are kept.”
Maybe they did have something like ayatana technology, then. “Your memories? Crew memories?”
“Crew logs,” she said, obviously thinking she was agreeing with me. “Backups. Scientific and historical records. Literature, both from Earth and from the wandering.”
I wasn’t overly concerned with history, and I Rise From Ancestral Night and his crew were en route to deal with the issue of data preservation. The shipmind, Singer, had managed to rewrite his own code to operate the ancient alien ship: I was pretty sure he and his crew could manage to unpick primitive human code.
Also, they would enjoy it, while I found it impossibly stultifying to contemplate all that old stuff. I imagined they would all feel a little thrill when they confronted an entire starship full of primary documents, unseen in something like a millennian. “Our archinformists are going to be very eager to swap packets with you.”
Helen didn’t answer immediately, but tilted her head at me in that uncomfortably flirtatious manner that I was coming to recognize as confusion. “What is ‘swap packets,’ please?”
“Uh.” I bit my lip. “Exchange information?”
“And what is an archinformist?”
“Someone who specializes in accessing, recovering, and interpreting ancient data.”
“A historian!” She was so pleased with herself that I didn’t want to correct her.
“A sort of historian,” I agreed, which was close enough to accurate that I didn’t feel I was being misleading.
The pleased tone still resonating, Helen said, “I have several historians among my crew.”
I knew it was a long shot, but it would give her something to focus on, so I still found myself asking, “Are any of them here on Sally?”
The odds of being able to rewarm Helen’s crew successfully hadn’t improved since we brought the coffins aboard. And now I was worried about Master Chief Dwayne Carlos as a human person and pipefitter, not as a patient-shaped abstract. So why was I asking Helen about our other passengers? I would just wind up fretting about them in turn.
On the other hand, talking about her crew was the one thing that seemed to concretize and ground Helen, even as limited as her processing power was, separated from the rest of her brain.
I wondered if the machine was the equivalent of her subconscious, and if so, how dangerous it would be to the other rescue and salvage crews working on Big Rock Candy Mountain without her there to guide it, or if it would lie quiescently. Sally’s override was still in place, and Ruth would have no problem using it. Everything would probably be fine.
Sally telling me about Master Chief Carlos had made me feel a personal connection to him. Feeling connected to Master Chief Carlos, by extension, made me feel connected to the rest of the crew. Helen obviously cared deeply about them, no matter if the expression of that care jarred me with its awkward sexuality. And her caring about them made me care about them in turn.
I mean, more than I always care for my patients.
There’s a certain level of professional detachment that gets you through a job like mine, and that detachment is a skill I have cultivated.
It was unsettling to feel so connected with a freight of corpsicles. And the shipload of corpsicles we’d left behind. And I knew it would only get worse, the more I found out about each of them as individuals.
It was hard to be constantly reminded that they weren’t just corpsicles. They weren’t just cargo. They were people. People we might or might not be able to save.
I had to tune down my worry so I could think clearly. As I did, it occurred to me that Helen had been silent for a fairly long time. Had she shut down again? “Helen? Are you still with me?”
“I was thinking about historians,” she said. “It’s so strange and wonderful that you lived. That you built all this. That you found”—she lowered her voice and gestured toward the control cabin, where Camphvis and Rhym were helping Loese—“aliens.”
Technically speaking, the aliens had found us. But I girded my loins, gritted my teeth, exerted all the power of my masterful will, and managed not to correct her. “You didn’t expect to find anyone else out here.”
“Are you absolutely certain that humanity survived on Earth? My records show that it was impossible.”
I admit it: I laughed.
But I also knew the answer without even checking my fox. I’d done a little research since visiting Big Rock Candy Mountain. Sally’s library was pared down, but she had the basics. Including a history of Terra. Or Earth, if you prefer.
I’d boned up. What a weird idiom.
“We nearly didn’t,” I said. “There was a population bottleneck, and Terra’s human population crashed from something over nine billion to a few hundred million.”
“That sounds terrible,” she said politely. “I am so sorry for your loss.”
“This was long before I was born, you understand, and I’ve never been to Terra. But my ancestors were among the lucky ones who realized that humanity needed to grow up.”
“Grow up? But you are an adult.”
“As a wise person once said: Adulthood begins when you look at the mess you’ve made and realize that the common element in all the terrible things that have gone wrong in your life is you. The choices you have made; the shortcuts you have taken; the times you have been lazy or selfish or not taken steps to mitigate damage, or have neglected to care for the community. As a species, the immature decisions we made contributed to the collapse of our own population and the radical alteration of our biosphere. Running away to space at sublight speeds was a desperate move. It made more sense and was more sustainable in the long run to fix the evolutionary issues in our own psyches that led us into irrational, hierarchal, and self-destructive choices.”
“I don’t understand,” Helen said.
I said, “My ancestors figured out how to hack into their own nervous systems and correct or ameliorate a lot of sophipathologies.”
Helen cocked her shining non-face at me. The question was evident.
“Sophipathologies. Antisocial behaviors, atavistic illnesses of the thought process. Maladaptive ideations. Once the population was stabilized and the immediate crises passed, they realized that it was possible to keep people operating in the state of altruism we’d already evolved to engage in during disasters. The architecture was already there in the brain: it was a matter of activating and using it.
&
nbsp; “They were also pretty ready to discard existing systems of government, as it was evident that hierarchies and cronyism and the exploitation of the system by kleptocrats was a universal feature of every model tried so far. But they were already changing human nature—well, they were accelerating and universalizing the process of adulthood, shall we say. What some cultures used to call enlightenment. Which is basically sharing your stuff and playing well with others.”
“And now everybody does this.” Her disbelief was polite, but definite. Apparently even a primitive AI could manage to be a little arch when confronted with human self-aggrandizement.
I thought about pirates and criminals and all the… insufficiently rightminded folks I had met when I was in the Judiciary. “Er. No. I mean, Judiciary can enforce rightminding on convicted criminals as a condition of release. And mostly people, given the chance and appropriate social support structures, will elect to not be mentally ill.”
“Who defines mental illness?” Her bosom heaved a little less with breathless interest. Or maybe I was getting used to it.
“That is the subject of some controversy, as it happens. But social health and hygiene do tend to reinforce themselves. As they did once our ancestors developed the technology to fiddle with their own neurochemistry. They built a more egalitarian government based on service rather than authority, salvaged the remains of technological society, and within a couple of generations had invented the Alcubierre-White drive.”
“That sounds very tidy.”
I found myself frowning at her. That sounded very skeptical, for the vacant service personality we’d first encountered. Was she becoming… more astute?
Sally, are you loaning Helen processing space?
Sally was bad at not sounding shifty. Maybe a little.
You might have mentioned it.
I am the responsible physician.
She was, indeed. The responsible physician.
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