They still weren’t wrong. But they weren’t right, either. “I don’t think she got a lot of choice—”
“Ignoring your own needs constantly is selfish and makes a lot of work for other people.”
“This is not your everydia sort of situation.” I wondered how the gritting of my teeth came through the link. “Are you going to order me not to, Master Chief?”
It was a low blow. I knew O’Mara didn’t love having a desk job. But this was my hospital, and we didn’t just let people die here even if they pissed us off, and—
—and if Calliope had been trying to kill people she would have busted through an observation wall in one of the cafeterias, not spent a bunch of time digging up a well-protected section of hull with nothing but machinery underneath.
“No,” O’Mara said, after a long pause. “I’m not going to order you not to treat your patient, Doctor.”
* * *
I de-magged, kicked off from the hull, and let myself drift upward. My aim was pretty good, and this hab ring was no longer rotating, so I didn’t need to touch my jets or the edges of the hatch as I drifted through.
The door was just a door.
I don’t know exactly what I expected inside the machine—Calliope asphyxiated with her suit unsealed, maybe. Alien technology like twisted metal brambles impaling her.
Not a perfectly normal command chair in a perfectly normal cabin, and a suited woman struggling with restraints that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on any pilot’s seat.
“Hey there, Specialist.” I moved up next to her. She pulled against the straps. I moved her hands away and tried the latch; it seemed to be jammed.
There were cutters in my emergency kit. I got them out at the same time I stowed the semaphore flags. “Just hold still for a few seconds. I’ll pop you right out of there.”
Her face and her panicked expression were plain to see through the plate on her suit. I kept talking as I felt around the harness and aligned the cutters. I wasn’t really concentrating on what I was saying or if it made any sense. What was important was the tone.
She yanked against the straps, which meant she yanked against me. I put my free hand on her shoulder. “I need you to hold still, Calliope. I’m going to cut the restraints now, and I don’t want to hole your suit.”
To her credit, she held still. In a small voice, she said, “Okay.”
I watched while she unclenched her hands. Dealing with that level of adrenaline couldn’t be easy without a fox.
I reached out extra carefully, watching my hands so I wouldn’t get confused about how long my arms were. I snipped one restraint, close to the buckle.
She jerked back so sharply I was afraid I’d holed her. But she was staring over my shoulder. “Look out, Llyn!”
I ducked and started to turn, pulling the cutter up and away—the only safe direction. I wasn’t fast enough. A glimpse of a multicolored tendril snaking toward me—familiar from my experience on Big Rock Candy Mountain—was my only warning besides Calliope’s cry.
An impact. The hiss of venting atmosphere. A wild flail with the cutter—
Shit.
I fell.
CHAPTER 21
I REMEMBER WAKING UP INSIDE THE machine. Inside my exo, when it was first fitted to me.
I remember what it felt like: On my skin. Against me. A part of me.
I remember the incredible floating sensation of not being in pain for the first time I could recall.
No. That’s not quite precisely right. The pain still existed. It wasn’t gone.
It just didn’t saturate my awareness the way it had before. It was a sensation, not a prison.
It’s even in the words, isn’t it? We talk about being hungry, being thirsty, being distracted, being tired. But we are in pain. Pain is a trap. It surrounds us. It’s a cage: a thing we can’t get out of.
So maybe it is accurate to say I wasn’t in pain anymore, there inside the machine. Somebody had left the door open, and I could get out if I wanted. Walk around, look at the pain from the outside.
I was in the machine. But that meant the machine was there between me and the pain. Insulating. A protective barrier. Not something I could ignore or neglect to maintain, because I could never forget the machine.
But when I was in the machine I wasn’t in the pain. And the cognitive load of servicing the machine was so much less than that of servicing the pain that I got a heck of a lot of other things done.
The machine. My exo, as I came to know it. It was always there, a skin between me and the universe. And I was always afraid that it might be taken away.
It occurred to me that there was something else I had learned never to trust. Not only the faith that everything would turn out all right, or that institutions had the best interests of Synizens at heart. I had never been able to take for granted something that many people did: Simply being functional. Simply being okay.
* * *
Waking up inside this new darkness was very much like waking up inside my exo had been, that first time. Once again, I had hurt so badly when it took me in—been so exhausted, my pain so uncontrolled—that when I woke up again and I wasn’t hurting or groggy, I wasn’t entirely sure I was awake. I was disoriented, confused.
But my thoughts were clear and focused, even though I didn’t know what was going on.
I was still in my exo. I could feel it there through the senso, status checks all okay. But that was all I could feel through the senso. There was no feed, no connection to the outside. To Sally, or the hospital, or O’Mara, or Cheeirilaq. To Calliope, even.
There was only warm darkness, and a lack of pain. I couldn’t seem to move, not even to press myself against the exo frame—or if I was succeeding, I didn’t feel it. I couldn’t seem to move the exo, either. So there was another something—another machine? Outside the machine that was very nearly a part of me.
To be honest, the lack of pain was so nice that I just lay there and enjoyed it for a short subjective eternity. It could have been five minutes or five ans. I tried counting breaths, but I couldn’t feel myself breathing, either.
Wasn’t there supposed to be something about sensory deprivation being used as a kind of torture, historically? I reached for the information, but without a feed it wasn’t there in my senso. You get so used to being able to pull up any information that you like, the loss of that ability feels like a dismemberment.
Like the loss of part of your own native faculties, and you can’t stop fussing at it.
Still, after three attempts, I tried to force myself to let it go. No senso, no connection. My fox was still regulating, though, and it told me that my bloodstream was full of an unusual concentration of naturally occurring opioid analogues. That would explain the lack of pain. Though I didn’t understand why they weren’t making me feel giddy.
Aw. Well. I tried to make a noise of frustration, and could convince myself that I heard it—dimly, hollowly. As if from another chamber in a largely empty hab.
Somebody did, in fact, have control of my fox and my exo. The virus—the meme…
Was this what had happened to the crew of Afar? To Afar himself?
To Linden?
Was this the result of the meme?
How had it gotten into me, in that case?
There had been a tentacle. Inside Jones’s walker. Something like the machine from Big Rock Candy Mountain. I remembered it grabbing me.
Was that machine the vector for the meme, rather than a manifestation of it? If it was, then where had it come from?
My exo had firewalls and was not supposed to accept external inputs without an override code that only I—or somebody with access to my medical or service records—could give. And my fox was protected, as all foxes are. Better than most, in fact, because I’d been in the military and my unit was EMP-shielded and used a triple-encoding transmission link that had been state-of-the-art fifteen ans before.
The meme might have gotten out of Dr. Zhiruo and Linden bef
ore they isolated themselves. It might have stripped data from them, such as their access codes. My medical records were available through hospital systems to authorized users. So that was possible, but this wasn’t the time to worry about what might have happened. This was the time for getting the hell out.
I tried not to stop to wonder how I was going to get myself out of this non-space if all those methane types and several artificial intelligences hadn’t managed to escape.
Helen’s crew hadn’t been affected. Neither had Calliope, concealed in Helen’s crew. They didn’t have etchable brains. I didn’t have an etchable brain, either, but I had a fox, and I had the exo.…
Helen hadn’t been affected, either, precisely. Or rather, she’d been affected, but not in the same manner as the other AIs. She’d been… turned against herself. Mostly disassembled. But the core had hung on, though she had been—I realized now—delusional in some of the same ways that Calliope had become delusional: paranoid and fixated.
(Was Calliope delusional? I shied away from contemplating the implications of that question. It was a problem for a moment when I was not fighting for my continued existence as something other than a disembodied consciousness.)
The first step was to break it down. What did the patients in different categories of… of infection, for lack of a better word… have in common with one another?
Helen was unlike shipminds and wheelminds and medical AIs in that she had a separate body.
Carlos and Calliope were unlike me and Afar’s crew in that they did not have foxes.
I was like Helen in that I outsourced some of my functions to a peripheral system. Some of us did a lot of that kind of integration: others (Carlos) none at all. Some of us were solid-state cognitive operations—the AIs, the Darboof—and some of us thought with programmable meat, with or without integrated circuitry.
So here I was, back where I started after a fashion. Back inside the machine.
A different machine. One I hadn’t chosen to make a part of me.
Was this line of thinking getting me any closer to a solution, or even a hypothesis as to how this whole bizarre mess of generation ship, sick artificial intelligences, and an apparently fraudulent cryo chamber hooked together?
What if I resorted to wild, out-there, black-sky speculation? What was the most outré idea I could come up with?
Theory: it was totally aliens.
Not ancient, safely dead, and apparently benevolent aliens like the Koregoi, that forerunner species that had ranged—and left—the Milky Way long before the Synarche and its systers came along. Those children of dead stars had left us occasional caches of impossibly advanced technology, like the recently discovered Baomind, a library the size of a solar system, and the physics that lay behind the gravity belt I was probably still wearing over my hardsuit, for example.
So not those. And not friendly, normal, everydia it’s-rude-to-call-them-aliens like Tralgar and Cheeirilaq, systers one could sit down for a nice beer or metabolically compatible beer equivalent with—though never coffee—and complain about local Synarche policies.
But actual, hardcore, scary, middle-of-sleep-shift-three-vee-you-have-to-be-up-in-four-hours-and-are-being-irresponsible-watching-this-now aliens. Aliens that wanted to disassemble my hospital the same way they were disassembling Helen’s generation ship, and convert it into computronium and the machine. Those kind of aliens.
I wondered again about Helen’s link with the machine. If it was aliens converting her ship and self into alien computronium microbots, they seemed to have left some of her personality intact. I wasn’t a science fiction expert, but it seemed to me that that was a rarity in the annals of all-consuming, assimilating, mind-control aliens.
In some ways, this was the most terrifying prospect. In others, I was surprised to find it somehow reassuring. Assimilating aliens were a horrifying existential threat, something that might destroy the entire Synarche, that might require shoving Big Rock Candy Mountain, Core General, Sally, Mercy, Afar—and me and literally everybody and everything I loved except the daughter I had not seen in twenty-odd ans—into the consuming embrace of the Well in order to prevent it from spreading.
It was also a horrifying existential threat that I could look at and say, “That’s not us. It comes from outside, and it’s monsters.”
Even in this age of adequate mental health care, when things are so much better than they were, I’m too much of a cop and too much of a doctor to ever convince myself that the monsters are conveniently other. The monsters don’t come from outside.
The monsters are calling from inside our genome.
That’s why, during the Eschaton, it took the medical interventions that eventually developed into rightminding to make us decently able to stop destroying ourselves. It’s a small comfort, I suppose, that once we got into space and met other sapiences, we discovered that they were all more or less equally as fucked up evolutionarily as we are, and had all had to take similar social steps to grow beyond their atavistic impulses into something we might recognize as culture.
I liked the scary predatory aliens theory a lot, for certain values of like. If it was scary aliens invading, waging war, and converting us into peripherals by means of their meme viruses, that left one huge logical problem, though: Where the Well did Calliope come from?
Ah, Calliope.
Well, then it probably wasn’t aliens.
And that led to an even more frightening proposition. What if Calliope was right? What if there was some vast corrupt conspiracy centering in the Synarche, in Core General? What if she was a freedom fighter? What if?
I didn’t think Calliope was right. I knew in my (no longer aching) bones that she could not be right.
But here in the belly of the machine, a quotation from an ancient, pre-Eschaton Terran statesman named Oliver Cromwell came floating back to me. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”
Christ was a religious prophet from an even earlier era, very popular on Terra for several thousand years. He preached all the usual things the better class of prophets preach, about respecting your fellow beings and treating them as one would like oneself to be treated. He got about the reception you’d expect, and his teachings were widely misinterpreted for millennians. Millennia, I suppose, it being actual Terran years we’re talking about.
The irony is that this Cromwell person, who provided such a useful sentiment that has since been widely appropriated by logicians, historians, archinformists, and doctors (like myself), was the sort of individual who overthrew a government. (Okay, it was a monarchy of some sort, or something equally terrible.) He also murdered a lot of dissidents because he was pretty damned certain he was right. And because he was pretty adamant that everyone should subscribe to his religious convictions.
Don’t be like Oliver Cromwell, I told myself, and tried to examine Calliope’s allegations from a more neutral point of view.
Perhaps the reason I was so certain Calliope was wrong was that the prospect of her being right was so deeply terrifying.
What if there was some kind of vast conspiracy—or rampant sophipathology—infecting the hospital, infecting it as certainly as the meme was infecting Linden and Dr. Zhiruo? What would that look like? How would I tell?
What would its nature and purpose be? Why would it be worth it? What sort of motive would allow for it? How would such a thing operate, and how could it keep its existence secret, or even secret-ish?
What was behind all the things Sally could not admit to any official knowledge of?
I sighed deeply, realizing that I could at least feel the air stretch my lungs when I drew enough breath in. That was reassuring: if I could feel my body I probably wasn’t dealing with locked-in syndrome or anything else similarly daunting.
Well, I wasn’t going to find out the answers stuck in here, wherever here was, and that was for sure. I had, I was certain, colleagues on the outside working to rescue me—exactly as I woul
d have been working if things had been reversed.
That led me to wonder what my physical situation might be. Was I still stuck inside the walker, or had someone managed to extract Calliope and me? Was I physically encased in a barrier of some sort that prevented my fox from reaching into the senso? Or was my fox disconnected or damaged somehow?
I didn’t think I was experiencing what Afar’s crew had, on consideration. Their brain scans (what passed for brain scans, with their species: piezoelectric patterns in any case) hadn’t shown conscious activity, and I certainly felt conscious enough. And the breathing proved I was aware of my physical body, even if it didn’t hurt.
Had Cheeirilaq come along and spun me into a giant, protective cocoon?
That was a strangely satisfying image. Though as far as I knew, its species didn’t spin cocoons for each other. They didn’t do much for each other, except mate occasionally and refrain from eating one another—these diar.
How had it never occurred to me before that it was unusual for a member of a species with so little commensal instinct, like Rilriltok, to choose a career as a healer? I mean, it was a male, and obviously had the skills to placate hungry females at mating time, and most of its patients were frozen when it got them—
But my old friend was a real weirdo, it seemed.
I wondered if that insight came from me, or from one of the several ayatanas that were still making all my limbs feel like they were shaped weird.
The lack of pain was having an effect on my cognition. I kept having ideas. But I was having so many ideas, I was also having a hard time concentrating. The theorizing was interesting, but I was giddy and free-associating in exactly the sort of way that wasn’t helpful for concentrating on getting myself out.
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