Machine

by Elizabeth Bear

  “If it had bearing on a medical case, could you look up some information for me?”

  “I could,” he said, judiciously, “try. It might take a while.”

  “My whole lifetime?”

  “A noticeable percentage. But not a large one, assuming you maintain good health and you continue to exercise due caution regarding the risks of your profession.”

  Fantastic. Everybody needs an actuarial AI.

  Well, I’d asked.

  “Fantastic,” I said, forcing myself to feel and sound bright and cheerful. “I need any background you can get me on the Terran generation ship Big Rock Candy Mountain. Especially her crew roster and build details on the AI known as Helen Alloy.”

  “Such a clever name!” Mercy enthused.

  I closed my eyes. There had to have been somebody other than her designer who would think naming a sexy metal android with a metal-based pun on Helen of Troy was a good idea. It was my luck that the other one was a colleague.

  “Dr. Zhiruo said you’d already been working on Helen?”

  “Since you’re her care liaison,” Mercy said, “I can tell you in confidence that her substrate is badly degraded. I’ve been patching her personality core with predictive algorithms. We’re rebuilding the substrate with modern materials and integrating the new core into her existing build as much as possible, to preserve continuity of experience.”

  “Zhiruo said you had her using some external storage.”

  “She already was, after a fashion.”

  “The machine.”

  “Yes. It’s semiautonomous. Not really a part of Helen, but also not really not a part of her. It might be more intelligent en masse, but the sample we have is built on reactive algorithms rather than being on the road to true consciousness. It’s possible that Helen started using the machine as external storage as her own systems degraded, and its lack of flexibility—for lack of a better word—infected her processes. I suspect it was intended to be a tool, and not autonomous. Helen was designed to have access to an external storage core—”

  “Central,” I said.

  “Yes. I’m not certain of the timeline. I theorize a potential sequence of events in which her captain ordered Helen to construct cryo pods and then ordered the crew into them before destroying the ship’s library and main computing core. Or perhaps he took it offline: I won’t know for sure until I have a chance to speak with the archinformists who are working on the generation ship itself and see what they have found. Helen must have been nearly quiescent at that point, as she’d been ordered not to access Central. The captain, well. You found him.”

  I swallowed. Indeed we had.

  “At some later time, possibly as an outgrowth of the evolving conflict over following the captain’s orders versus following her core values and caring for the crew in the pods, Helen hit on the apparently weird solution of converting a bunch of the ship’s remaining material into—”

  “The machine.”

  “Yes. The storage she needed, and a friend. Of sorts. And she hadn’t been specifically ordered not to do it. She was pretty well degraded into sophipathology at that point, though.”

  I remembered the microbot pseudopod taking a swipe at me, and shuddered. “Well, tools are dangerous when used improperly. You can cut your finger off with a circular saw.”

  “Indeed, one can.”

  “So where do we start looking?”

  “The generation ship itself might still have some or all of the data you’re looking for, despite whatever damage the library—Central—sustained. That is what we have archinformists working on it for.”

  I began to see the problem. “But the generation ship isn’t networked, and its AI is corrupted.”

  “The library might be salvageable. The archinformists will make duplicates of whatever they can retrieve from the files. They’ll bring those back to the Core. That information will be useful,” he said. “Also, I should warn you that every archinformist and journalist in fifteen light-ans is inbound in hopes of interviewing Helen.”

  “Is that my problem?” Little space fishes, there were things I cared less about than history. And one of them was wrangling historians.

  Humor tinged his disembodied voice. “As her care liaison… yes.”

  * * *

  Before I left the library, I checked in on Helen’s status—still recompiling—and then with Sally to see if she or the Core General mechanical teams were making any progress with the walker. Sally said that it was still crouching there with the door open.

  Like some sort of ambush predator buried in sand, except for its gaping maw. Her turn of phrase, not mine. Sally has a colorful vocabulary.

  They hadn’t managed to get a drone or even a passive probe past its door defenses, and drilling into the thing from the outside was as much of a failure as it had been when I tried it. I felt a little gratified that even people whose core proficiency was in breaking stuff weren’t managing any better than I had.

  O’Mara had come down and looked at the thing, pronouncing it the equal of any military-grade hardware they’d seen. On their recommendation, the hospital stood ready to jettison it if it suddenly became aggressive.

  Sally also told me that her repairs were nearly complete, but that she had not yet been cleared to return to duty. She expressed worry that I would not be available when she was released. I expressed my concerns right back, tuning like hell so I didn’t start crying.

  I’d cry later, if I had to.

  I told Sally that it was going to take quite a while to rewarm Helen’s crew. And I might be… grounded… until all that was well underway.

  “Is that what you want?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “I want to keep you.”

  That left me feeling a warm glow that was something of an antidote to all my recent frustrations.

  The next logical step for me was to check on Afar and his crew, who—being in the methane section—were much less physically accessible to Cheeirilaq, Rilriltok, Helen, and I. Well, honestly—I didn’t know about Helen. Possibly she could walk into a methane section like it wasn’t anything. Possibly it would speed up her processing to be superchilled.

  Or maybe she’d freeze solid.

  I should ask, once she was feeling well enough for visitors again.

  Rather than suiting up and tromping through the methane section, with all the attendant risks and nuisances, I met up with Rilriltok and we removed ourselves to a remote observation lounge. The lounges were usually used by residents and doctors on a training rotation to watch treatment in sections they were not biologically suited to—but they were open to anybody with an interest. Teaching hospitals are great.

  Monitors and holopresence units along two walls gave us a mediated view of the ward where the Darboof crew members were resting. It was, by human standards, pitch-black in the actual ward, but the lounge translated the Darboof’s homey, comfortable IR into wavelengths my visual receptors could process.

  A patient care specialist of some description moved around the beds. Having given up the Darboof ayatanas, I did not know if the person manipulating their crystalline limbs and administering medication or nutrition was the equivalent of a nurse or filled some other function. They were, however, remarkably efficient, and I left myself a note in senso to find out who they were, so I could request them for my own patients in future, if needed.

  We were barely getting settled when Tsosie walked in, followed by Cheeirilaq. Tsosie seemed as surprised to see us as I was to see him in the company of the Goodlaw. Or maybe he only noticed me. Rilriltok was suddenly blending into the upholstery again. I hoped it didn’t get sat on. That would be an embarrassing incident report to have to fill out.

  Greetings, Dr. Jens, Cheeirilaq stridulated. I was certain it noticed Rilriltok, by how politely it kept its triangular face pointed toward the observation windows.

  “Oh,” Tsosie said. “Are you checking on our patients?”


  “Not ours anymore,” I said. “Technically.”

  “I’m not busy while we’re grounded.” He walked to the monitors on the side of the room at right angles to the ones I had been observing. The new bank lit up in its turn with a different angle on the enhanced images of Afar’s crew. “Loese is volunteering in the nursery, she’s so bored. I’ve gotten involved with retrofitting the gravity generators into key areas. It’s grunt work—”

  He sighed.

  Of all the people I thought would enjoy spending time around children… well, Loese wasn’t one of them. It goes to show how stereotypes can mislead.

  “I didn’t know you knew anything about gravity generators.”

  “I played around with them a little in my downtime. I like techy stuff.” He grinned.

  From here, we could have accessed senso from the care team—filtered, so we didn’t wind up with their love lives.… Did Darboof or any of the methane breathers even have love lives? Hastily, I canceled the request for info that my wondering had automatically generated, before the answer chipped away any more of my battered innocence.

  Accessing the senso would have come with partial immersion in their alien sensorium, however. Having worn Darboof ayatanas, I wasn’t in any hurry to experience that again so soon. They were too different to fit comfortably over my skin. For one thing, their nervous systems depended on supercooled superconductors to move electricity around. They thought with electrons—same as Sally, same as me, same as Rilriltok—but they thought awfully fast. And moved awfully slow.

  Their experience was a particularly ill-fitting suit, for a human.

  They probably would have felt the same way about me and my weird, hot, bright life. Although there were hobbyists who liked to try on other species recreationally. The more exotic and extremophile, the better. Not that I judge, but some subcultures are odd.

  “I’m bored, too.” I had plenty to do, but none of it was what I loved doing. I contemplated my thumbnails, and the moonstone gleam of my exo against the skin of my hands. I was tempted to tell him about my conversations with O’Mara and Starlight. Did he know about the extent of the sabotage on Core General? Rilriltok had been cagey but informed. But from O’Mara I’d gotten a sense that they were keeping it quiet, and all I’d heard through the grapevine since I got back was a bit of muttering about unlucky happenings—or, depending on the personality of the mutterer, poor maintenance.

  Cheeirilaq must know, being a Goodlaw. And Rilriltok had suggested I speak with it, though I hadn’t nerved myself up yet. I wasn’t sure it would want assistance from outside of its chain of command, especially assistance foisted on it by a former Judiciary noncom who now worked for an entirely different organization.

  Its role was not quite judge, jury, and executioner, but beings that achieved the status of Goodlaw in the Judiciary were trusted by the Synarche to exercise reliable judgment in ethically complex frontier situations, when they could not rely on communication to higher authorities. That was a level of responsibility that went beyond solid rightminding and into strong personal moral development—not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of legal precedents.

  I trusted Sally and her crew with my life. But somebody had sabotaged Sally. And although it didn’t seem likely, I found myself circling back to consider the possibility that it had happened after we left Core General. So where did that leave me? Wondering if I could trust Tsosie. Wondering if I could trust Cheeirilaq enough to confide in it.

  I refused to wonder about Rilriltok.

  But as implications I had been sort of glossing over in a haze of busyness unpacked themselves, my heartbeat seemed to pulse in my belly rather than my chest, and my hands grew cold. I was suddenly rather scared.

  “I’m still intrigued by the mystery,” I admitted. Then I rolled my eyes in irritation. “Oh, Void. I should have asked Zhiruo about Afar. I got distracted by Helen and all the discussion of corpsicles.”

  Mystery? Cheeirilaq’s head bobbed forward, framed by the collar of its little blue jacket. Do you mean the potential law enforcement problem I am investigating?

  “Maybe? You haven’t explained your interest in Helen and her crew. Is it acceptable to ask what your intentions are?”

  As I formed the question, I realized that it had seemed natural to encounter the Goodlaw because we had been talking about it, so I hadn’t questioned the coincidence of it being interested in our historical and medical mystery.

  Helen, her crew, Afar, and his crew, also. Allow me to set it forth thusly:

  First, why and how was Big Rock Candy Mountain moving so quickly?

  Second, why was Afar docked with the generation ship?

  Third, why was Afar transporting—I should say, smuggling, because it does not appear on a manifest—what appears to be a privately designed and manufactured combat walker? Or a really overdesigned environmental suit, perhaps, because it does not appear to have weapons.

  Fourth, who sent Afar, and where was Afar en route to?

  Fifth, what incapacitated Afar’s crew?

  “Wait,” I interrupted, connecting some dots that had seemingly been too apparent to the Goodlaw to warrant expositing. “Arms smugglers?”

  It would appear so. Shall I continue?

  There was more. Of course there was more. “Be my guest.”

  Tsosie had his arms folded and was watching with an expressionless mouth and a little line between his eyes. The expression was familiar, and boded ill for somebody.

  Not, I hoped, me. Or Cheeirilaq.

  Cheeirilaq buzzed softly.

  Sixth, what incapacitated Afar?

  Seventh, if the thing that incapacitated Afar is not the same thing, what is causing the generation ship’s shipmind or shipminds to malfunction?

  “I might have some answers on that one, actually. I’ve been talking to Mercy.” Quickly, I relayed what he had reconstructed from Helen’s information about the captain freezing his crew, incapacitating the shipmind, and then eventually dying alone—old age? illness? suicide?—in his command chair. I was aware of Rilriltok leaning close and listening intently, and the moment in which it buzzed and coruscated with excitement vibrated my jaw.

  I might have some information to contribute on that front, it said. Our preliminary scans of the rescued patients indicate that many of them are infected with a human influenza-type virus. We will be vaccinating human hospital staff against it, and we have antiviral treatments available for the patients as they are rewarmed.

  We all looked at one another in silence, humans and Rashaqins. Tsosie breathed out, an eloquent sigh.

  “Out of curiosity,” I said, “was Specialist Jones one of the ones infected?”

  Rilriltok hesitated, with the air of one consulting senso for its notes. She is not.

  Cheeirilaq stretched its lime-green wing coverts wide, cocked its head, and continued, I have one more question.

  “Let’s hear it,” Tsosie said, as if relieved for the break in tension.

  Eighth, how can rock also be candy?

  I blinked. Tsosie snorted. I pointed a finger at the Goodlaw, realizing too late that that might be seen as a very aggressive gesture by a species whose forelimbs were cavalry sabers.

  I folded the finger back into my hand. “Was that a joke?”

  Honest curiosity.

  “Rock candy is crystallized sucrose,” Tsosie said.

  Rilriltok’s antennae peeked over the back of its chair. Ninth, it interjected, how did an anomalous cryo pod wind up mixed in among the rest?

  That should have been first, the Goodlaw said. I’m slipping.

  Rilriltok was obviously terrified, but nothing as small as mortal peril could inhibit that vast curiosity and intellect.

  Most doctors don’t get to serve at Core General. A few might come here for an exomedicine rotation or a residency. Only the very best are invited to stay. Any given attending physician here is, in general, among the galaxy’s best in their specialty.

  I can say that withou
t embarrassment because I got in by having a very narrow and unusual specialty. And I have an advantage in that my background in the military—Judiciary Search and Rescue—is why I serve on Sally. I’m a rare subspecies of doctor: I started my medical training by ministering to people who were already in difficult and dangerous situations, and my treatment goal was getting them out of those difficult and dangerous situations in no greater number of pieces than I had acquired them in. So rescue ops hold no terrors for me.

  By contrast, Rilriltok did not obtain its position through any sort of special standing. It’s just a really excellent cryonics doc—a really excellent doc in general. This fact, I found reinforced in my understanding as it launched itself from the chair, buzzed up to the window, and rested feathery forelimbs against the monitors.

  I stepped up beside it.

  It asked, What kind of technology do Darboof use for senso, emotional regulation, and translation? Is it something like a fox? They think with electrical channels, don’t they?

  Rashaqins had more distributed neural networks than humans did. Those tiny heads held a cluster of ganglia and sensory processing equipment, but their neurons were spread throughout their thorax and abdomen in addition to the head. I happened to know, because Rilriltok was such a good friend, that their fox design wasn’t that different from a human’s. Just more spread out. Rashaq and Terra had at least grossly compatible biochemistry.

  Compatible enough that it could have eaten me without indigestion, though I imagine it would have felt bad, afterward.

  I had gotten rid of the Darboof ayatanas. But I was still carrying around my friendly hospital engineer, and they knew a few things. “They use a fairly standard cold-methane extremophile model,” I said. “The fox circuits are etched in, kind of like a smart tattoo—oh.”

  “Oh,” Tsosie agreed. “You think they’ve been rendered dormant by electrical interference in their foxes?”

  It is the only thing that makes sense of a shipmind and all his crew being simultaneously comatose without multiple proximate causes in evidence.

  “We should talk to Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo,” Tsosie said, making less of a hash of the good doctor’s name than I usually did. My accent for blowhole noises is terrible.