I said, “In the process of exploring the galaxy they eventually met up with the Synarche, which used a more refined and advanced but grossly similar governmental model, and we became galactic Synizens.”
“That’s brainwashing,” Helen said dubiously.
“That’s what acculturation is,” I answered cheerily. “Tell me about your historians?”
After a long pause, Helen settled into herself, shimmering faintly, and admitted, “I have gaps.”
“I won’t judge.” I’d made it through the conversation on eugenics without tossing her into space. What was the worst that could happen?
“It’s not considered an essential primary.”
I rubbed the back of my hand, feeling dry skin and the slick rise of my exo over it. I needed to exercise better self-care. And moisturize.
With that same supreme effort of my masterful will, I managed not to make any comments about history and the repeating thereof. I waited, and Helen seemed to be thinking hard, so I didn’t interrupt her.
Finally, she said, “There’s Specialist First Rank Calliope Jones. She’s a systems architect, and she secondaries as a historian. She’s very bright. I think you will like her.”
I might never get to meet her, but I didn’t say that. Filtering my speech for Helen was becoming second nature. Even if Specialist Jones survived rewarming, the odds were not in favor of my finding myself on her treatment team. I’d be back out in space again, zooming around the Core with Sally and the rescue rangers.
I didn’t think Helen needed the reminder that the continuity of our relationship was not assured. So I asked, “Is she with us?”
“She is,” Helen said. “Chamber 8186-A. I could show you!”
“Maybe later. Why don’t you tell me about the rest of the crew we’ve rescued? That will give me a much better idea of who they are than I can get from looking at the outside of a cryo unit. But first let me get some more tea. No, you stay there. I can handle it.”
* * *
Helen’s account of the life of Specialist Jones was more than a little garbled, but since I was mostly trying to get her to talk, stay oriented, and begin processing her new environment, it didn’t matter. I got her to tell me the life stories of all our corpsicles, and tried not to let myself get attached to any of them.
She told me about Patrika Thomas, who was a systems engineer trainee; and about Joseph Meadows, a manufacturer; and Lyndsay Bohacz, in biosystems; and Call Reznik, a medic. She told me about their families, and their hobbies, and their aspirations—as much as she recalled.
I did notice that Helen’s memory gaps seemed to have patterns to them. It reminded me of organic brain damage, except instead of seeming like she had damage to certain aspects of processing speech, or parts of her visual field, the damage asserted itself in recall about a particular crew member’s service record, say, or their love life.
But I kept her talking. This was all fine. Well, not fine. But part of the job. What was a lot harder to deal with was the awkward family dinner that followed. Tsosie and Hhayazh had gone over to Afar while we were out of white space, changing vector, and they needed to rewarm and rest; Camphvis would be heading over to take a turn monitoring our remote patients after we ate. Rhym, who found communal meals incomprehensible, was on rest shift, and we were all sitting around staring at each other while the printer/cooker did its thing.
I wasn’t physically tired, but an entire shift of drawing somebody out of their shell is exhausting. But no matter how much emotional labor I’d done, I wasn’t going to make Tsosie pry his still faintly blue-tinged fingers from his hot chocolate mug. I stood up when the cooker dinged.
“Oh no, Doctor,” Helen said, appearing through the doorway. “Please allow me.”
She bustled to the cooker, interposing herself between me and the device so that I would have had to body check her if I wanted to serve myself, Loese, and Tsosie. She unloaded the cooker and turned, balancing the plates gracefully overhead on fingers grown long and stemlike to support them.
“Doctors,” she said cheerfully, doling the plates out. “Pilot. Would anyone like something to drink?”
Whiskey, I thought, but kept my mouth shut.
Camphvis’s eyestalks twined in amusement. Hhayazh already had its food and was crunching green and orange stalks between its mandibles, an operation I did my best not to observe closely. The busy gnawing hid its own arachnoid amusement.
“Thank you,” I said to Helen. “You should go check on your crew now.”
She made a little curtsey and scuttled back out.
Tsosie gave me a sidelong glance and shook his head sadly, the hint of a smirk deforming his mouth.
“Don’t you even,” I said.
“She likes you, though,” Loese said. Helen had gotten our plates reversed. Loese had my steak, and I had her salad. I like salad, but I grew up on the ground and expect real plants with the texture of real cell walls and water and sucrose inside. Printed plants are horrible. Printed steak is fine.
“Give me my damn food.” I swapped the offending plates and picked up a strip of steak with my chopsticks. The juices, soaking into the polenta underneath, smelled delicious. I stuffed the steak into my mouth. Not as good as vat-cloned, but still spicy and salty and rich enough to take my mind off how irritated I was.
“It wouldn’t be the first time a human has fallen for an AI,” Tsosie said.
I swallowed and drank water. The systers were keeping out of the human banter for once. Thank the Interventionist Bodhisattvas for that one small kindness from the universe.
“They designed her as a sexbot,” I answered, keeping my voice low. “It’s horrible.”
Tsosie, realizing I was really unsettled, raised a hand. “Sorry,” he said. “I know it’s not your fault.”
“Sally,” I asked, “is there anything we can do to tune down the flirtatiousness?”
Sally cleared her throat. “I’m a shipmind, not a psychologist.”
“I’m going to throw this steak in your air vents, computer. Technically, you are a psychologist. Or an AI doc, anyway.”
“I am an AI doc,” she agreed. “And you’re a human doctor. How comfortable would you be trying to rightmind a Neanderthal, even if you had a language in common?”
“Oh,” I said. “I’d be really concerned with breaking them.”
“And if they were already broken?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I see.”
“We’ll be home soon,” Camphvis reassured me with a friendly shoulder pat. I was only wearing a tank top—it can get warm in Sally—and Camphvis’s suckers stuck to my skin, releasing with a gentle pop. Banititlans are very tactile, as a rule. “Oops, sorry about that. And once we’re back at Core General, there are specialists standing by. You don’t have to solve this on your own.”
“What a mess,” said Loese.
I picked up another strip of steak. “You’re telling me.”
CHAPTER 10
IN AN INFINITE UNIVERSE, WHAT’S the single most important thing?
Well, I can tell you. The most important thing in the universe looks like a vast, leafy, lumpy oval, a greenhouse in space. From the outside, it’s the galaxy’s biggest terrarium: a semitransparent jewel embraced by a setting of rare metals, the filigree of jet and platinum threads, catching and softening all the lurid light of the Core’s crowded sky into the warm, precious glow of life.
So much life, crowded into hundreds of levels and dozens of biomes. An engineering challenge for the ages; a triumph of ingenuity and collaboration; a symbol of everything right about the Synarche and a rebuke of all the things we still don’t have figured out.
I’d told Tsosie I didn’t have a relationship with faith, but it occurred to me that that wasn’t entirely true.
I believed in this thing.
It was a good thing, Core General. It was good through and through, top to bottom, coming in and going out. Unreservedly good.
Difficult to navigate sometimes, absolutely. Full of
creatures so accomplished in their trade and so confident that they could help that no one would have been able to rightmind away enough of the arrogance to keep it from occasionally permeating the atmosphere and straining the enviro filters, sure. You needed a certain amount of arrogance to slice somebody open and try to fix what’s wrong with them.
And Core General was not immune to mistakes, failures of protocol, and plain glitches.
Not perfect. Nothing is perfect.
But I believed with all my heart that Core General was good. That it meant well.
What did we do here? We saved lives. We alleviated suffering, and I’ve lived with enough suffering to know that any time you can take the edge off it, repair it for even one creature, you are creating a net good in the universe.
Not because the universe cared. The universe was vast and didn’t even care enough to be called implacable. But because life cared, and life had ethics and morals and obligations to one another.
Core General was the concretization of those ethics. It was a place where we ameliorated tragedies, healed victims, comforted survivors. It was a place where we told them not to count the cost in resources, because the Synarche believed that there was no price on a life.
You could never know in advance what a person might become or accomplish, given time. And even if they accomplished nothing, their life was still a life.
It wasn’t our place to judge them. It was our place to save them.
I believed in that so hard it choked me up. And I’d never admit it to Tsosie. But when I opened my eyes to compare the image on the screens to what Sally was feeding into our foxes from her own enormous sensorium, I caught him grinning at me. Just a little.
I shook my head and sighed. He rolled his eyes.
Core General. This vast habitat—the largest constructed biosphere in the galaxy—seemed strangely inevitable against a brilliant and bottomless night. There was no darkness in space here. There was no velvet black between the stars for this small artificial world to rest on as if it were a tumbled aventurine.
There was, in fact, virtually no “between the stars” to speak of. The Core was a gigantic, claustrophobic stellar cocktail party. If there had been any darkness, it would have been lost in the glare of the Saga-star’s accretion disk. The disk alone, though distant, wiped out a swath of the sky. It was so huge and fast-spinning that I could clearly see the redshift sloping along the trailing side. From the slight elevation of my perspective—above its equator—the blueshift along the edge that was rushing toward me glowed bright and true.
The Saga-star’s jets angled and flashed as it spun, whipping about in a terrible turmoil that only seemed stately because the scale was so gargantuan. Everything constructed in the Core required extreme radiation shielding. The couple of planets here that supported life had notoriously powerful magnetic fields and thick atmospheres, not to mention radiation-tolerant biospheres. Even the Delyth—little leggy systers composed mostly of animate metallic structures, who obtained their metabolic needs by soaking up radiation and who treated refined uranium like snack chips—had to use protective hardware in the Core, lest they die of overeating. And they were so hot that if I were to stand next to one, unshielded, my skin would redden and then bubble off after minutes of exposure.
Some of the photosynthetic systers had similar problems relating to too much light among all these stars: it could cause uncontrolled growth, even cancers. It’s not always as restful being a plant as you might imagine. And it’s definitely not easy to be an extremophile. Though honestly, every species is some kind of extremophile by somebody else’s standard.
Afar was well-shielded against the death rays that, from the perspective of his crew, saturated all of space. We still kept Sally’s bulk between him and the Saga-star. She was well-shielded, too, and a little bit extra couldn’t hurt.
We closed with Core General at a good but respectful clip, staying in the shipping lane. Sally didn’t run the emergency transponder: this was a routine approach even though we were full to the gills with casualties. We weren’t coming in hot and covered with ichor for once, and I was content with that.
We were all strapped to our couches in the command module—even Camphvis, whose rest period it was. Sally let her get away with it: nobody wants to miss the first glimpse of home. Sally had halted her spin for docking, so for the time being we had no rotational gravity.
Helen was with us, sitting on the spare couch. She wasn’t strapped in, merely holding herself in place… but she was an android, and acceleration really didn’t seem to bother her.
She was twisting her hands together so hard the golden material of her fingers creaked. It surprised me that an android could manage to register that much anxiety. A lot of people don’t realize that AIs aren’t built to register emotion only in order to make the evolved types feel more comfortable around them. They’re built to feel because, as far as anyone can tell, emotion is a critical part of cognition, and trying to build A-life without it never results in emergent sapience.
So her having emotions didn’t surprise me, antique though her design was. What surprised me was that she was as deregulated as I would expect an unrightminded human to be.
I guess the expectations of reasonable behavior were different back then?
A tug came out and relieved us of Afar, pulling him around toward the chill and dark of the methane section, which was located behind the bulk of the hospital, relative to the Saga-star and the Core. We zoomed along on another vector, toward our assigned ox airlock in the Emergency Department. It was all so terribly, weirdly routine.
A private ambulance zipped past us on a priority course. Sally changed vector to accommodate. Tsosie made an irritated noise.
“It could be a critical patient,” I said.
“I suppose that happens occasionally,” he replied, with a significant expression.
It happened more often than not, but I didn’t feel like arguing with him. We were currently nonemergency traffic, which meant other traffic took priority. Though Tsosie wasn’t wrong that some nonemergency traffic was more equal than others: the Synarche guaranteed everybody a humane subsistence, care, and an income, but it didn’t promise to allocate resources beyond that unless you could show societal benefit for that allocation, potential or real.
If you had a needed skill, you might be required to enter service for a while—but if that happened, any debts or resource obligations you might have accrued from additional allocated resources would be forgiven at the end. If you hadn’t accrued an obligation, the Synarche would assume one toward you that you could claim at a future date.
Say you were a pilot, and you wanted to operate a private ambulance, for example, like the one whose taillights were glowing blue as it turned into dock ahead of us. If you had served, your obligation for the resources—the equipment—would be paid off in advance. At least some of the equipment, anyway. A private ambulance was probably a lot of resources.
And if you had a private ambulance, that counted as a needed resource, and the Synarche might call you back into service on a short-term emergency basis fairly frequently. The sleek silver ship with the massive white coils that was nuzzling up to the hospital’s spinning flank might be full of plague victims, or running vaccines under government contract.
The Synarche governed itself by datagen and simulation: game theory and models, run by both AI specialists and us slowbrains. Some people made playing the simulators a full-time service position, though I didn’t think it ranked very high on the resource-allotment scale. Those models, when compared, led to governance by emergent consensus.
The Synarche mandated a certain return on its investment in society and infrastructure from those who isolated a significant amount of personal resources from the community. My species hadn’t quite been there on its own, though before we’d connected with the Synarche we’d already largely adapted ourselves to a more commensal lifestyle than the one we’d developed in the Before. This process was
helped along by the fact that the lifestyle we’d developed in the Before had led to the Eschaton, and to people fleeing Terra en masse in glorified soap bubbles like Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Rightminding, like the concepts of Right Thought, Right Action, and Right Speech that had preceded it, wasn’t such a bad system for correcting some of evolution’s kludges. A lot of kludges were trivial to fix now, such as shoulder joints and spines that didn’t cause constant pain after the age of thirty-five, and so on. But despite rightminding, some Synizens still managed—through ingenuity, drive, or uncorrected sophipathology—to hoard more resources than they had any imaginable use for. But some of that also came back to the Synarche in the form of assessments, and those assessments went to bolster the public good. The resources from those assessments built things like—ta-da—Core General.
And my exo, for that matter, which benefits me and my quality of life almost exclusively. Although it also makes me capable in my chosen career.
As you can probably tell, I’ve had this argument with Tsosie often enough to manage both sides of it quite fluently by now.
So if a rich person was cutting us off, well, we weren’t in a hurry right now anyway. And if we had been, we would have had priority. They might have a legitimate medical emergency on board all the same, something that a routine flight could make way for.
I kept sneaking sideways glances at Helen. This wasn’t routine. She wasn’t routine. We were bringing home a piece of history. Nothing in the human galaxy would ever be quite the same again.
Sally and Loese didn’t bother the rest of us with the coms chatter, leaving me free to look down on the hospital with all my usual feelings of awe and appreciation. Core General had been built by the combined resources of the entire Synarche, all the thousands of syster species. Well, fewer than that, I guessed, because it was built decans ago and was constantly being updated. But that didn’t stop the sheer scale of the project from flatly amazing me.
It was a gobsmacking accomplishment. Not only was it huge, it was intricate. Different systers had different environmental and gravitational needs, and environments were stacked from hub to rim of the spinning station to accommodate them. The apex of the enormous station was pointed toward the Core; the nadir lay in sheltering shadow.
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