Machine

by Elizabeth Bear

  Well, O’Mara and I had known each other for a long time. They trusted me. They knew I had a Judiciary background.

  Tsosie and I had been the people most threatened by the sabotage on Sally, so perhaps O’Mara assumed that I was unlikely to be behind it. Also, I’d been away from the hospital when most of the local incidents took place.

  So I was likely to be clean, from their perspective. Okay.

  I wasn’t an investigator or an archinformist, but I had some investigative skills. Cheeirilaq, for example, was immediately identifiable as law enforcement, and was treated as such. Law enforcement, and also a gigantic predator.

  I was little and squishy—as I had recently been reminded—and wore medical symbols, not Judiciary rank.

  So I was nonthreatening, and I had a reason to be most anyplace in the hospital.…

  Huh. With the exception of the chlorine bleed into water, all of the sabotage events had taken place in ox sections. Now that was interesting. It suggested that the culprit or culprits were oxygen or CO2 metabolizers, who might access those areas without checking out suits and leaving a trail.

  And perhaps it was revealing for other reasons than the suit issue. Because one thing about giant multi-environment stations—whether they are hospitals or hab wheels or something else—is that people who live and work exclusively in one environment can forget that the others exist. This tendency is even more prevalent in new arrivals from single-environment habs.

  Or planets.

  So maybe I was looking for somebody who hadn’t been here for very long. And whose background was somewhere deep in an oxygen-only settlement. That would explain both why the events had started up recently, and why they were largely limited to ox environments. And water. A person from an oxygen planet would remember about water.

  It was also possible that the sabotage was entirely limited to ox environments, if it turned out that the outlier was a legitimate accident. It’s too easy to get bogged down in trying to fit all the available events into an identified pattern—in creating conspiracy theories—whether or not all those events actually belong together. In any case, I scribbled a physical note to O’Mara, DNA sealed it, put it in an interdepartmental folder marked CONFIDENTIAL, and sent it off down the hall by mail robot.

  At least checking up on ox-sector staffers from ox-only environments who had joined the hospital in the last an was a starting point.

  * * *

  I woke from a light doze with a start. My limbs still ached with exhaustion; my fox told me I’d only drifted off for twenty minutes or so. What had awakened me was not a sound or motion, but the sudden crystallization of an idea.

  I had been thinking that the saboteur or saboteurs might be unsophisticated in how they thought about multi-environment habs, and in that case probably newcomers to Core General. But what if the opposite was true?

  I’d considered the possibility that it was somebody savvy enough to know that checking out softsuits to go into hostile environments might eventually lead to them getting caught. But what if the saboteur (or saboteurs) was—were—from a non-ox-compatible environment, and they were committing their crimes in ox sectors as a red herring? That was a better scenario for me, because it might mean that they had outsmarted themselves.

  In either case, how were they hiding from Linden? The same way whoever had sabotaged Sally was hiding from Sally?

  I tuned myself a little wider awake and sent another note to Starlight and O’Mara suggesting that they look into suit checkouts into ox sectors as well as out of them, though I imagined they’d thought of it already.

  That’s why we have checklists. Because all too often, everybody assumes that everybody else has thought of it already. And then important, lifesaving steps somehow fail to be taken.

  And then accidents happen and people like me show up to—in the best-case scenario—drag you out of the rubble and graft and glue you back together and dust off your shoulders and say, “You oughtn’t have been so careless.”

  AIs usually follow checklists. AIs might get bored, but they don’t get lazy and they don’t cut corners. This is why ships have shipminds and habs have wheelminds.

  Because organic-type slowbrains get lazy and bored, and discipline is not always our strong suit.

  What if the saboteur was an AI? That would give it a route to prevent itself from being noticed, and perhaps even to hack the memories of other AIs, like Linden and Sally. I’d seen Sally’s telepresence—at least enough to speak to me—without triggering the AI presence lights.

  Hm. Possible.

  I must have dozed off again despite supporting my brain chemistry, because this time I woke about a standard and a half later with my reader resting on my nose. I nearly rolled on my side and went back to sleep.

  But… speaking of following the checklists, I pushed through the achy sluggishness of exhaustion, stowed my reader, and pulled the net down over the bed. I willed the lights off. Feeling smug in my self-righteousness and a little ridiculous also, I closed my eyes.

  * * *

  I assume I must have, anyway, because I don’t remember falling asleep. The next thing to impinge on my consciousness was a tremendous, reverberating crash. The bed net snapped tight against me as I bounced hard, imprinting my skin with what would no doubt be some very interesting contusions. Then, abruptly, I was floating.

  Well, I was held firmly against the mattress, but when you’ve worked in space as long as I have, it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between being pressed to the bed by acceleration, and being pressed to the bed by the net.

  Speaking of checklists, this was a great time for one.

  I had air for now. That was the first thing.

  The second thing was visibility, and I had no light. The on-call room was very dark. Darker than it should have been, because I’d turned the lights off but there’s always a readout by the door that doubles as a night light. I lay there in that dark and listened with everything in me for the hiss of escaping atmosphere. Or, worse, a total absence of sound from outside that would tell me the corridor beyond my little single-thickness door had been decompressed and evacuated.

  Vibrations made themselves felt through the bulkhead. The structure of the hospital creaked violently. The hab wheel had stopped spinning, which was why my gravity had failed, and the hospital’s hull was complaining at the strain. I imagined Starlight with tendrils dug deep in the hull, holding us together more or less bare-rooted.

  That was a little bit of melodrama.

  The hospital’s superstructure wouldn’t fail. The most vulnerable staff and patients had the new gravity belts, so there was a good chance nobody’s physiology was killing them while I lay there sorting myself out. But lots of bad things happen when gravity unexpectedly fails, as you can probably imagine.

  I might have heard voices carrying through the door. People moving. I was listening so hard for reassuring sounds I might have been imagining them.

  Sally?

  No answer didn’t mean she wasn’t out there. It meant that the hospital system wasn’t relaying my senso uplink to her and that she couldn’t reach me through the hull.

  If I got out of bed I might be slammed against a wall or deck when the hab started rotating again. The safest thing to do was to stay right where I was, buckled in and tucked away, and wait for an all-clear.

  But my job was saving lives in emergency situations, and this was, in my professional estimation, exactly that.

  I took a deep breath, reached out, unplugged my exo—which wasn’t getting a charge from the trickler anyway, with the power off—and snapped the net back out of the way. The bed cubby had handles, and I used them to pull myself out into the on-call room and try to orient. The bed was down: that was where the floor would be if—when—spin reasserted itself. Therefore, I should keep my shock-absorbing bits pointed in that direction.

  I floated toward the door. Where I guessed the door was, anyway. There was no orange light next to it, indicating vacuum or a n
oncompatible atmosphere on the other side. But there was no blue light, either. (Red and green are traditional for Terrans, but in a big hab like Core General, not everybody can see the wavelengths that produce red light—and orange and blue are far apart on the spectrum.)

  Well, if I was lucky, then the safety interlocks wouldn’t allow me to open the door if there was nothing but space and slowly freezing bodies outside.

  I didn’t feel lucky.

  There was a suit locker outside the on-call door, where I had left my softsider. If there was vacuum on the other side, my blood would begin to release oxygen almost immediately, whether I held my breath or not. Once the deoxygenated blood reached my brain, I would immediately black out.

  I would have about fifteen seconds to get some pressure into my lungs before I fainted. I’d be dead within a minute or two after that.

  So my first priority was oxygen, and the second was to get myself back into my softsuit. Or a hardsuit, if there was one in the locker. That would actually be easier, because I’d only have to slap the activator on my chest and go. I’d probably lose consciousness before it sealed itself, but if I was lucky I’d wake right back up again without too much brain damage.

  Back in the Judiciary, we used to drill on suiting up. My personal best with a softsuit was seventeen point one five seconds. That gave me maybe ten seconds—conservatively—to get to the locker, get it open, and get a helmet on. Possibly in pitch blackness, with the tears boiling off my eyeballs and my capillaries popping.

  Piece of cake.

  They could graft me new eyeballs. Assuming there was a hospital left afterward.

  There was even a handle beside the door that I could cling to, in case of explosive decompression. I grabbed a few deep breaths and oxygenated. I didn’t know if it would help, but it might buy me an extra second or two.

  All this assumed that the door would unlock and snap open for me, the way it was designed to. If I had to crank it open manually and there was vacuum on the other side, I’d suffocate before I made a big-enough gap to squeeze through. In that case, I would be stuck waiting here for rescue—without the telltales, it was too much risk.

  I hit the emergency door override, praying it would work without any faith in my prayers being heard. Or answered. I did not feel lucky.

  Fun fact: feeling lucky has nothing at all to do with whether you are or are not lucky.

  There was air on the other side of the door, though still no light. Down the corridor, I could clearly hear sounds now: voices, a metallic thumping, the sound of a softsuit proximity beeper warning anyone nearby that it existed. I bobbed softly in the draft as the pressure equalized. Then, using the grab rail (oh grab rails, that I ever maligned you!) and the rough wall surface, I pulled myself along the bulkhead to the suit locker.

  There was a telltale on the locker door, and it was blue. I opened it, located a hardsuit activator, and slapped it in place, timing myself in my head.

  Twenty seconds. I was out of practice, and the suit was a slightly unfamiliar model. Core General goes through a lot of suits, and they’re replaced on a rolling basis. This one was so new the lining still smelled faintly of carcinogens.

  For now, I left the faceplate unsealed. I wanted to save the suit oxygen in case, later on, I really needed it. It would seal itself if the pressure dropped. But now I had the boosters in the suit electronics. And that meant I might be able to get ahold of—

  Oh, I am so grateful, Llyn. There you are! I was terrified. Are you safe? Where are you?

  I breathed out, light-headed with relief, and gave her access to my tracking and senso. “I found a hardsuit. What’s going on, Sally?”

  I don’t know. I can only presume it’s more sabotage. Power is marginal. Translator systems are down. I’m okay, I think. I’ve been isolating my own systems since Linden and Dr. Zhiruo got sick. Can you make it to my berth? EVA might be safest.

  I finally found the toggle, and turned my suit lights on. Dim, to save battery and avoid blinding anybody whose eyes might be pointed at me.

  “I can’t,” I said, when I got a look down the corridor. “I have to be a doctor now.”

  * * *

  It was disaster triage, except the victims were sometimes people I knew, and nearly all of them were extremely hard to talk to without translation protocols. Which also didn’t exist for the time being.

  If they were incapacitated, I did what I could to stabilize them and moved on. Fine repairs could wait for later. If they weren’t incapacitated, they were eager to get a bandage slapped on and to get back to work as soon as the synthskin or their metabolic equivalent started working.

  I had to pass by Records on my way, and—with the help of my datapad and some bad machine translation—got them to upload a few ayatanas into my fox. Ox breathers of various anatomies; every little bit of information would help. Even if I had the wrong ayatana for a particular species, convergent evolution and biological convenience were still useful.

  I walked out with my feet squishing strangely and my body shambling oddly. Well, we’d get used to each other. And I was definitely going to need their medical knowledge before the dia was out.

  Most of the injuries to staff were relatively minor ones, which was good because I didn’t have ayatanas for every person who’d banged their head—or whatever the topmost part of their body was—against the ceiling when the spin gravity cut out. And without coms, I couldn’t call a doctor or nurse of an appropriate species for backup.

  They were probably all busy in their own sections, dealing with human patients whose contusions and gashes and fractures would be quite as much a mystery. I couldn’t even ask my own patients what was wrong except by typing and machine translating on a datapad—hilarious—so we communicated mostly by them shoving the affected area under my nose, and me spraying a biologically appropriate sealant over the wound.

  I made my way back to Casualty, stopping to help injured people along the way. I left the patients still in rooms alone unless there was a crisis: they were as safe where they were as they could be anywhere, and their own care teams would have the relevant ayatanas.

  And the hospital staff, once the initial confusion settled, started pulling together and cooperating with surprising efficiency. We couldn’t communicate complicated concepts, but we knew our jobs. And with long practice, you get a sense of when somebody is going to ask for a hemostat.

  Casualty—the Emergency Department—had been nearly vacant and understaffed since the quarantine went into effect, because there was nobody coming in. Now it was a mob scene. And a mob scene under emergency lighting—at least the emergency lighting was working, here—in zero g, with people clinging to the deck with mag boots (like me) or zipping around, their trajectories narrowly avoiding collisions with one another, or occasionally not avoiding those collisions at all. I ducked under a cloud of drifting feathers from one such incident and made my way toward the admin desk, looking for somebody to tell me where I could be most useful.

  My exo was at seventy percent, and I was sore but not in terrible pain. It wouldn’t have mattered if I was, under the current circumstances.

  A team of three guiding one of the new grav stretchers sailed in alongside me. They were all suited, using their jets to navigate and push. The stretcher’s grav technology maintained its attitude with respect to the deck despite the lack of rotational acceleration. I was impressed. I hadn’t known they did that.

  One of the medics pushing the stretcher noticed me standing there and squeaked demandingly through nasal slits. I jumped out of the way. It hissed like a deflating balloon and wrapped a suit-clad tentacle with a spatulate, arrowlike end around my wrist, tugging more or less gently.

  It squeaked again.

  The patient needs assistance, Sally said.

  I glanced down at myself. My suit was covered in Well knows what, and nothing about my person was scrubbed and sterile. But it had picked up my identification codes from my fox, and there on my breast was my name in sev
eral sets of symbols—and my specialty.

  Trauma doctor.

  I stepped up to the stretcher and leaned in.

  It was bad.

  I wasn’t sure what species the patient was, but they bled the same hemoglobin pigment as me. I assumed that the rattling swell and release of atmosphere through spiracles into the tube-like body was desperate respiration: blood loss or pain. Two of the medics were applying manual pressure to savage-looking wounds. I didn’t need an ayatana to know the patient was bleeding to death.

  I might need that ayatana to stop it from happening.

  The patient made noises and gestures of dismay and distress that I didn’t need a translator to understand. They were probably feeling exactly as I would have felt, had our positions been reversed. They looked to have lost several pieces of their body: part of a locomotion limb, and an upper-body manipulator. The edges had the ragged look of an industrial accident, not the neat severing of a decomp door. The patient was wearing a maintenance uniform, and I imagined it must have been operating a piece of heavy equipment when the gravity went off. A floor-polisher or loader or something worse.

  I couldn’t even request a surgical room. By the time I made myself understood, the patient would have bled to death.

  I wanted to stick this patient in a cryo tank and wait for a specialist. I didn’t even know what meds I could give it for pain without killing it. I—

  It was as if I weren’t in the hospital at all, but on a rescue mission outside somewhere, unable to communicate well and with only my own crew for support.

  Wait.

  Wait! Sally! Can you tell me what this syster is, and what I can give it for pain and shock? Does it do shock? And can you reach its fox and tune the pain down? The automatic response doesn’t seem to be working.

  She read me a list of medications and a synthetic transfusion base as we were guiding the patient into a treatment bay. Then my next problem became finding a way to communicate those requirements to the pharmacy. I had handed back all the datapads I’d borrowed along the way… but I still had the reader I’d stowed in my thigh pocket. It was inside the suit, but I wiggled it out, inputted Sally’s list, and handed it to the syster with the lowest rank insignia—which was not the one with the tentacles.