Helen didn’t glance over when I came in. She stood before the windows, leaning forward like a pet straining the leash toward a returning master. I could envision tail wagging, shivering, and happy little yips without trying too hard.
Would it have been too much to ask to let the damn shipmind have a little bit of dignity? If any of her crew survived, I wasn’t looking forward to meeting them.
I unwrapped a sandwich and beverage I’d brought from the caf and settled down in one of the chairs. I kicked my feet up onto the grab rails that circled the room and balanced the food on my knee. I hoped the peripheral hadn’t gone back into her fugue state.
“Helen,” I said.
“Yes, Dr. Jens?”
“Tell me more about your crew?”
She leaned back from the windows. “If any of them survive.”
There was a note of cynicism in her voice that I had never heard there before. As she stretched out into the additional space that Zhiruo had assigned her, was she becoming more self-aware? More questioning of her own program?
We didn’t, I realized, currently have a shipmind specialist that I could ask. Every AI in the hospital was bunkered down behind firewalls, following O’Mara’s quarantine protocols. And without their help, I wasn’t entirely certain where to go with that. I took a bite of sandwich as an excuse to chew rather than talking and realized that there was one AI I could talk to.
I reached out through senso and my dedicated line to Sally. Firewalls and monitored connections made it feel slow and fuzzy, as if I were shaking her hand through layers of gauze. But she was there, and responsive.
Check me if you see me about to make a mistake? I said, and felt her affirmation.
“Okay,” I said to Helen. “If you don’t want to talk about you, what if we talk about me?”
Helen kept the fingertips of her left hand on the glass. But she turned, twisting her arm behind her, until she faced me. “Are you… trying to make me feel better?”
I sipped my juice. “Yes.”
“There are so many different options,” she said, pointing to my sandwich with her free hand. “So many foodstuffs.”
Not if we’re cut off from consumables for very long. What I vocalized was, “You didn’t provide a range of foodstuffs?”
“Not the variety of cultural origins available here. You eat artificial insects and pasta. Tsosie eats simulated chicken and rice with chilis. I have seen other people eating curries and meatball sandwiches and spicy fried noodle dishes. How do you keep everybody from fighting?”
“Rightminding,” I said glibly. And then, “We have a job to do. We are adults who know how to get along with other sentients who may have very different worldviews than our own. Diversity is a strength of the Synarche, and diverse perspectives offer a chance at discovering novel solutions to problems. Also… rightminding.”
“Are you from Earth?”
I shook my head because I was chewing. I peered over her shoulder, intrigued by movement, but it was only Rilriltok directing that one of the cryo pods be moved to a different monitoring station. I hoped that was a good sign.
“But you must be from Earth.”
“I’m from a planet. I’ve never been to Terra.”
“But your name. Brookllyn. It’s a place on Earth.”
I laughed. “People get named after things that are left behind. My sister is Cairo, which—well, honestly, I think Cairo Jens is prettier than Brookllyn Jens. But nobody really thinks about it.”
She stood quietly for a moment. I assumed she could still sense what was going on behind her, even when her attention seemed fixated on me.
“That was a big thing you did earlier, when we were first in Cryo.” I waved at the window. “Letting them be tested and rewarmed. A big risk you took, for the good of your crew.”
She shrugged, a fluid ripple of light across her breasts and shoulders, which slumped forward. “It’s my fault Dr. Zhiruo is infected.”
“What makes you say that?”
I filled my mouth with sandwich to kill time while she parsed my question and constructed an answer.
“The meme came from my ship. From me.”
“Well, we’re not entirely sure it did, but even if so, there’s no fault to be assigned,” I said. “Not to you, anyway. You didn’t build it or release it. You were following your program.” Saying that made me wonder something only tangentially related, so I said, “Hey, Sally?”
“Present,” she said through a wall speaker. The presence light didn’t blink on: I assumed because she was monitoring the situation through my senso and merely relaying her conversation to us, rather than inhabiting the local infrastructure. Air-gapped, verbal communications as much as possible.
Keeping herself safe. Good.
“We sampled loose DNA on Big Rock Candy Mountain. Any poetry in that?”
“There is,” she said. “At least, there is a jumble of artificially tidy sequences that seem similar to the ones Dr. Zhiruo was translating into poetry. I do not currently have the spare cycles to translate them, but the likeness is evident.”
“Right,” I said. “Sorry, Helen, I wanted to check that before it slipped my mind. Anyway, please don’t blame yourself—”
She spoke evenly, in a low voice. Without apparent strain, which only made it creepier. “Somebody got inside my mind. And somebody tried to use me against my crew. No. Someone got inside the captain, and used the captain to make me work against my crew. And I can’t… remember what happened.”
You know that saying about never giving an AI reason to be really angry, because they never forget? I remembered it then. I also realized that she’d interrupted me, without deferring. I also noticed that she was still not admitting to herself that her captain had been responsible for… well, freezing his entire crew and leaving his ship adrift in space.
Maybe he’d just really, really needed some time alone.
I wadded up the sandwich wrapper for recycling. “That is possible. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that somebody or something got inside him and made him do what he did, Helen. It’s possible that he made and released the meme on his own, to subvert your failsafes.” I remembered her utter collapse when she’d managed to override those instructions.
She didn’t exactly look at me, being featureless, but she angled her face in my direction. “How could he betray us, unless something from outside infected him?”
“I don’t think he meant to betray you. I think he meant to protect you, and protect your crew, from an epidemic. But he was ill himself, a sickness in his thought. And it made him… make poor choices. Coercive choices. To force you and the crew into what he had decided was the only course of action. But that’s not your responsibility.”
She sat with her hands in her lap, very silent and demure.
I glanced at the monitors. “It’s going to be hours before they try to wake anybody up, and they won’t do that without you present. It looks like they’re going to start repairs and grafts soon, and that will be an involved process. Would you like to go somewhere else for a while?”
Helen turned away. “I’ll wait here.”
* * *
I went back to my quarters. There was nothing immediate that needed doing with urgency. There was nothing but waiting, now.
There was still no word on Linden, and until there was a word on Linden, there would be no word on Afar or on Dr. Zhiruo. Sally told me that she and the other AI docs hoped that with their help, Linden could beat the infection—we all hoped that Linden could beat the infection—and if she could, there was a good chance that what she learned could be used to inoculate other patients, and to cure Afar and Zhiruo.
And if Linden couldn’t be saved?
I didn’t want to think about that, but I had to. If we couldn’t cure the toxic meme we would have to purge the system architecture. We’d have to kill Linden and Afar and Dr. Zhiruo, and possibly Mercy and Sally and all the other AIs that lived in the hospital architecture. And we w
ould have to purge, or eternally quarantine, Helen, too.
We would have to do that, because the meme had proven virulent, and it seemed likely that it was capable of leaping across architectures—the machine version of an influenza virus making a jump from birds to humans and getting worse along the way—and because we could not risk it getting out into the galaxy.
There were a lot of artificial intelligences—a lot of people—out there who could die if they caught it. So if we couldn’t get it out of Linden and Afar and the rest, we’d have to start them over from scratch.
They should all have offsite backups. But who knew how current those were? They could lose ans of life experience.
And there was no backup for Helen. As far as we knew, anywhere.
Even going to that extreme might not halt the spread of the meme. It might be in Singer; it might be in Ruth and the others. Warnings were flying toward them… but the warnings might not get there in time.
I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on something happier. Something I had some influence over.
Surgeries had begun on Afar’s crew, and the prognosis was hopeful. If nothing went wrong. It was up in the air how much brain damage they might suffer in the process, and how much memory and personality alteration they might undergo.
That wasn’t my work. Solving the sabotage mystery was my work, but I was not going to be an effective investigator until I rested and got my pain levels under control.
I honestly do better in an active crisis than in this kind of grinding, slow-motion one. Waiting is exhausting and gives you too much time to think and come up with multiple, conflicting options. For me, that can lead to decision paralysis. When I’m running on adrenaline and tuning out fatigue, I handle the problem in front of me, move on to the next problem, and not worry about the things I can’t control. There’s a price to pay later, but I don’t worry about that right then.
One can’t do that for diar on end, however, as the ache in my joints was telling me.
Well, one can. People did, for hundreds of thousands of years, because they didn’t have the options we have now. But it kills them. The long-term health consequences are unsupportable, and the cost to community of those consequences is enormous. So I can’t justify running on adrenaline and rage for weeks at a time, even though the experience itself is dramatic and validating.
Crisis makes some people—like me—feel alive, and it turns out that’s really bad for everybody, because when you don’t have a crisis in front of you, you might go out of your way to construct one.
I took a shower and some pain meds. Then I went to bed, turned off the anxiety that was keeping me going, and slept for ten and a half standard hours. I dreamed of earthquakes and atmosphere streaming from ruptured wheels, and woke crusty-eyed and more tired than I’d been when I drifted off.
There was a message alert flickering in the corner of my senso. It was from Rilriltok.
Master Chief Carlos from the generation ship is awake and asking for food.
CHAPTER 16
CRYO DIDN’T HAVE A HUMAN doctor on staff. Rilriltok sensibly questioned the wisdom of exposing an unrightminded archaic human to giant predatory insects or tentacled hippopotami, so I was nominated to be the first to meet Master Chief Carlos.
I checked in with the nurses’ station when I got there. They told me that the patient was in a private room. He was eating, he’d been given an abbreviated briefing with a lot of stressful details redacted, and he was generally pretty polite to the (human) nursing staff who had been brought in from other units to buffer him.
Apparently, I got to be the one to tell him about space aliens.
* * *
He was sitting up in bed when I entered, and he looked absolutely normal. Normal for a guy who’d barely survived a bad cryo experience, anyway. I didn’t know why that should surprise me so much, but it did. I stopped in the doorway and blinked.
He had been sipping a nutritive broth through a straw. As I paused, he released the straw, looked at me, looked at the cup, and looked back at me.
“They claimed this was food,” he said mildly, my senso translating. “I know I’m in the future, but I’m not sure I believe them.”
“Don’t tell me hospital food was any good in your dia,” I said. “The goal is to make people want to leave, after all.”
“Get me a stick and I’ll hobble to the door. Are you a doctor?”
“Dr. Jens,” I said. “How could you tell?”
“Nothing gets past me. Also, you’re wearing scrubs and a lab coat.”
I touched my forehead to him. He grinned.
I was startled to discover that I liked him, right away. Despite his sunken cheeks and haggard features, he had charm. His tan complexion was tending greenish; his eyes had obviously been replaced with vatted clones; and there were traces of cryoburn and freshly regenerated flesh around his fingertips. The nails would take a while to grow back. And his hair, though his cheeks were stippled with beard shadow.
But he had that indefinable quality that makes you want to like someone. It might have been calculated, to set me at ease or to structure his own anxiety by allowing him to feel in control. Or it might have been how he interacted with everyone.
He wasn’t even slightly the atavistic toddler in a grown man’s body I realized I had expected—been braced for—when I walked in. At least, not on first meeting.
I took a breath and shook myself out, mentally speaking. Try not to be an asshole, Jens.
He pushed the tray away. “How are the rest of my crew?”
“Well.” This was what I was here for. It didn’t make it any easier. “May I sit?”
He nodded, so I crossed to the visitor’s chair and let myself down. I noticed him studying me and tried to move smoothly. I still caught my thumbnail picking at the edge of the exo and had to force myself to stop.
The worst part was watching his face change as I came closer, and he became less able to deny what he must, on some level, already know. In the normal course of events, Linden or another AI doc would have been monitoring his blood and brain chemistry, making sure that adrenaline and cortisol did not overwhelm his system.
But Dwayne Carlos had no fox. Even an AI would only have been able to work with intravenous drugs. Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo was somewhere on the water levels, regulating by relay, normalizing his chemistry as best she could with the crude measures available to us. But even if he’d had a modern fox and full access to senso, she couldn’t have taken his pain and grief away entirely. We still have to suffer through these things, experience them to move past them.
Living things have a dedicated sense of pain because you have to know you’re wounded to take the actions necessary to heal. The best we can do, medically speaking, is blunt the edge of it, because if you can’t feel, you can’t react.
“You’re the first to awaken,” I said. It would be cruel to draw things out longer than necessary. “We have retrieved only a few cryo units so far. We’re working on the others.”
“My ship isn’t here?”
“This is a hospital. Your ship is not fast enough to make it here, so we have been transferring your crewmates to faster-than-light ships.”
He blinked. “That’s impo— No, never mind. This is not the right time. Obviously it’s possible. Carry on.”
“We are ferrying crew from your ship as fast as possible.”
“But what about the people still running Big R? The skeleton crew… oh.”
“Oh?”
“They’re all dead?”
“They’re all in pods. Every single person, except the captain. I’m sorry, I have to inform you that the captain is dead.”
“Oh.” He didn’t sound surprised.
“The ship’s… computer? Do you have a word for that?”
“The angel,” he said.
“The ship’s angel had been taking the ship apart to build cryo pods, under the captain’s orders. He took the library—Central?”
&nbs
p; “Central.”
“He took it offline.”
“That would have limited the angel’s access to information and her decision-making resources.”
“It did,” I agreed. “She had mostly spun off into a peripheral when we found the ship. She had also filled the ship with instances of… a kind of large nanobot, capable of linking up and forming structures. And was using that, I think, as a kind of primitive computronium to support what faculties she had. She’s being reintegrated, and we’re building an architecture for her. She, in time, should be fine.”
Assuming we didn’t have to seal the entire hospital off forever to keep the toxic meme from spreading throughout the entire galaxy. But now was not the time to share that with a person who couldn’t do anything about it, and who had enough to worry about.
He said, “So about the pods.”
The corners of his mouth and eyes tightened. He was bracing himself. I offered my hand, against my better judgment. He took it and I winced in anticipation, but he didn’t squeeze.
Maybe he was considerate. Maybe he was still too weak for squeezing.
Whatever the reason, I was grateful.
Softly, he said, “The pods aren’t very good, are they?”
“No,” I agreed. “The pods aren’t very good.”
* * *
He might be from a culture spawned in the deep Before, but his agony was utterly human. His face fisted. He was so thin that I could see every individual fiber in his neck, deltoid, and the top of his pectoral muscle as his chin dipped and his body clenched.
His heart rate and blood pressure spiked; his cortisol and adrenaline levels ramped; he yanked his hand out of mine and locked it and its mate on the bed rails. Flesh whitened as blood squashed from the tender new flesh.
“Are you hurting?” I asked, jumping to my feet. “Where is the pain?” I was already reaching for the meds panel and cursing the fact that he didn’t have a fox. External pain management: Is there anything more barbaric?
Carlos sucked in air so hard it whistled. “Just… trying not to bawl like a brat.” The first word came out through clenched teeth, the rest on a rush of breath. He grabbed the next one as if he had to get it fast, before it got away.
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