Machine

by Elizabeth Bear

  So. Set the theorizing aside for a time and collect some data. What were the instruments available to me?

  Right now, they were limited to the interface between my exo… and whatever was on the other side of my exo. A hardsuit, presumably, unless that had been removed?

  Status check told me that the exo was functioning optimally, and so was my fox. The fox was integrating with the exo, which answered my earlier question about damage to the fox’s transmission capability. The fox’s uplink was working. So my lack of senso connection meant that it was being blocked by something.

  Right. A physical block, or a software block?

  Come back to that.

  The exo’s battery was near full charge.

  I’d replaced it before I went to try to talk Calliope down. That it was still charged told me that either it had been replaced again (unlikely), I was getting a charge from somewhere (possible), or that it hadn’t been very long and I hadn’t moved very much since I plugged it in (optimal).

  Back to the question of the uplink. I had means at my disposal to test that. When—if—I found the problem, would I also have means at my disposal to repair it?

  Wait and see, Jens, wait and see.

  * * *

  To say that I felt my way around the exo is an inexpert metaphor, but I couldn’t think of a better one. I stretched out no groping fingers, even in my imagination. What I did was to methodically consider and categorize the—I guess one could call them sensations, after a fashion—the tickles of data, however muted, from where my exo made contact with what was on the other side of my exo.

  It wasn’t my hardsuit.

  That was a horrifying realization. And if I had been rescued and brought inside the hospital and was somehow mostly unable to feel my body—and my uplink was only partially functioning—they would have taken the hardsuit off entirely.

  But the actuator core was still attached to my chest. It was merely retracted completely.

  I have a lot of expertise with my adaptive devices. My extensive experience and my skill at fixing and maintaining them come in handy in the field. And I still needed to know what I was in, if it wasn’t my hardsuit. I was breathing, and I wasn’t dead, so whatever that falling sensation had been it hadn’t shoved me out the walker’s door into space—and if I was still inside the walker, the door was not still ajar.

  There was something around me, a kind of fabric or film or very smooth metal.

  I lay in the dark and quiet and talked to my exo. It didn’t talk back except in its usual stock phrases—it was only a machine, after all, not a shipmind—but people talk to their equipment all the time. It makes us feel more connected and in control when we can personalize our things.

  There’s a thing with pain. Memory has a somatic component. Experiencing a kind of pain can bring back a host of related associations. Even witnessing an injury—or hearing somebody describe an injury—provokes powerful recollections.

  That’s why we all have the uncontrollable—and annoying—habit of regaling our freshly injured friends with tales of the times we whacked our thumb with a hammer, too, though so much worse, obviously.

  My current lack of pain was making it harder for me to hack my way around my exo. I don’t mean any kind of juvenile justifications about how I need my pain, or that it’s good for people to suffer. What builds character is encouragement to persist in the face of adversity, not needless discomfort. That uses up executive function and doesn’t help anybody accomplish anything.

  So, I had my exo. That was excellent and useful news. I had contact with my exo. Even better.

  Fatigue levels in excess of safe values, my exo replied, when I pinged it. Pain levels optimal.

  You tell ’em, exo.

  Could I move it?

  I could not. A little experimentation proved that I couldn’t so much as twitch it. Nor could I push it around manually by moving my body inside it. It was locked in position. I did discover that I could, isometrically, flex against it, but the scaffolding of the exo itself did not budge. I might have been able to bruise myself against the device, but I couldn’t shift it.

  Honestly, my chances of bruising myself against the filigree cage that supported my body were pretty slim. It was designed to be flexible, safe, and comfortable: constructed of resilient, durable, breathable materials that lay flat against my skin so it could be worn for diar at a time and only removed for cleaning.

  It was specially manufactured to be difficult to injure myself on. If it hadn’t been, it would have worn sores all over me in the course of use. I’m not sure what I thought I might be proving by trying to circumvent its safety features.

  The status indicators in my fox told me that my exo wasn’t burned out. My ability to communicate with it was not impaired. I just didn’t seem able to make it budge, either through its usual adaptive response to my own micromovements or through the brute force method of direct commands from my fox.

  Breathe, Jens. Don’t panic.

  Panic never helped anybody in a self-rescue situation get out alive.

  The exo wasn’t damaged. Also: it couldn’t be damaged because I needed it to get me out of here.

  It did have a safety interlock to hold me on my feet when the batteries failed—and which I could use intentionally to lock portions of the frame—but that was only engaged in normal mode. It should have allowed me to move—albeit painfully—under my own power rather than resisting me.

  Item: I had caught a glimpse of a tendril of the machine inside the craboid’s structure before I lost consciousness—or contact with the outside world, if that was what I had lost.

  Conclusion: the meme (or the machine, if there was any functional difference between the two) had hacked my exo.

  Solution: hack it back.

  * * *

  This would not have been possible if I’d been dealing with any other piece of equipment in the galaxy. I don’t think it would, anyway, though desperation can lend one a surprising amount of ingenuity. But, as I have mentioned, there was one single piece of equipment in the universe on which I was the leading authority.

  I was wearing it, and right this instant it was seriously pissing me off.

  Sheer cussedness doesn’t actually make luck break in your favor, and I know that. But sometimes cussedness can keep you in the game long enough for luck to break. And it seems to me that occasionally you can’t get results until you lose your temper with an object.

  This was not, I am sorry to say, one of those times. My exo did not fix itself simply because I got extremely cross with it. Maybe the clinical efficiency of my rage was hampered by my current inability to carry out percussive maintenance on the fucking thing.

  I guessed I was going to have to outsmart it, then.

  I hated to purge the system and do a factory reset, because I’ve been years tuning this thing. If I had to, I would, however. It was a final option, and one I clung to so I’d have the courage and concentration to try other things.

  But—wait. Wait.

  The excitement of epiphany swallowed me until I tuned my adrenaline down. If I was wrong, I didn’t want to be crushingly disappointed.

  I’m not going to pretend I knew the code. Not line by line. I certainly didn’t have it memorized.

  What I did have was an archived, firewalled copy, however. And the ability to write a script to go through it line by exacting line, compare it to the active code running my exo, and look for things that didn’t match.

  It took a subjective eternity, but—there. Yes. The reactivity to my movements had been set to zero. So basically, no matter how hard I pushed against it, the exo wouldn’t feel my attempts to move it as any more significant than—than my pulse. Or the beating of my breath. And it would shrug off direct commands through my fox as if they did not exist.

  Clever little bastards, whoever wrote the exploit. Clever little bastards indeed.

  Even cleverer, if they hadn’t written it exclusively for me. I supposed the same code woul
d work on a hardsuit—

  The time for theorizing had passed. Now it was time to get the hell out of here.

  I ran a system check on the hardsuit actuator, using my exo to backdoor into its operating system. The actuator seemed to think it was functional, and I didn’t have a way to check. So here I was, right back where I had been when I was staring at the override beside the on-call room door and wondering if I was going to die if I triggered it.

  Well, there was only one way to find out.

  I inserted the code fixes, and then I slapped my hand up fast. As fast as I had ever moved it. I didn’t know if whoever had seized control of my exo was monitoring the situation, ready to fight me street by street—servo by servo—so I didn’t test that the exo was responding before I went. I just went.

  If I failed, that would be enough test.

  My hand punched out. Harder than I had anticipated, but it worked out. Whatever was encasing me tore… sharp-edged… no, shattered. Then the clenched fist, my own clenched fist, pounded down on my chest.

  It hurt. It hurt as if I had punched myself intentionally, and my hand hurt where I’d torn through the stuff I couldn’t see. The pain didn’t feel so bad. I could pretend I’d hit myself as a form of self-injury, to provoke the kind of pain that makes you focus on right here right now and stop ideating.

  It was a good thing it did make me focus, because even so that punch wasn’t enough to break through.

  In primitive medicine before adrenaline injections, before electric shock, before open-heart massage, before nanoelectrical stimulus, humans in desperation used to treat heart failure—in humans, in horses, in dogs—with a series of punches or kicks in the chest.

  It worked rarely. Vanishingly rarely. But any chance is better than none.

  I wasn’t trying to kick-start a failed heart this time. I was trying to break a wall.

  I didn’t know if I could make my hand move again. But I did. Somehow I did. And I made it move harder, this time.

  This time, several things cracked under the blow. One of them was my sternum. That pain got through to my nervous system, all right, albeit briefly. Then it was gone again, along with the sting of my cut hands, leaving a vague ghost like yesterdia’s bruise. But I knew what I’d felt.

  It’s just pain. Pain alone cannot stop you from doing things. What stops you from doing things is injury, disability… and being tired. Because pain can make you tired, if it goes on for a long time. Because that pain is not a warning that you are being hurt. It’s just pain. All it can do is make things harder than they need to be.

  This wasn’t the kind of pain that makes me tired. This was the kind of pain that makes me angry. And what I felt on the other side of it filled me with furious satisfaction.

  It was the whispery sensation of the hardsuit unfolding across my exo, and my skin.

  That also hurt. It had to push between me and the thing wrapped around me. I thought it probably scraped my skin off in a couple of places, and might have done worse if the exo hadn’t protected me somewhat. That was okay. Hardsuits are designed to do that. You can grow somebody new skin, fingers, noses. Feet and hands if you have to.

  But even modern medicine hasn’t figured out how to bring back somebody who’s been breathing vacuum for more than about thirty seconds or so.

  Funny how long it took me—how old I was when I realized that if something didn’t work, you could change it. You didn’t just have to live with the problem, work around it. You could adapt, improvise. And overcome. You could take steps to make a thing better.

  Nothing about my childhood encouraged me to develop agency or a sense that I could make the galaxy a better place, repair what was broken, get out my tools. Nothing told me that things could be improved. Nothing encouraged me to effect change.

  Well, I was effecting it now.

  Remember what I said about the lack of pain clearing my head out? As I struggled, the systers in my head more or less went silent. In the absence of their opinions and demands, I realized that I had most of the information I needed to figure out who was behind the sabotage attempts. I could see the edge of the answer, and the little pattern-matching neurons in my brain were so happy with their success that I felt a kind of faith in the emergent idea. That belief made me doubt my realization rather than confirming it, because our brains really love to find those patterns.

  But I was suddenly full of ideas regarding what the sabotage was about, and where Afar had come from, and why Big Rock Candy Mountain had been where it had been. I knew. Or I suspected, anyway. At least, I knew who to ask for proof, and where to go for more information.

  The answer wasn’t really a clear shape in my head yet. More of a murky outline. But I hated what I suspected thoroughly enough to really hope that I was wrong.

  It had to be somebody with access to Sally, and with access to Sally’s personality core. I’d been convinced it couldn’t have been Sally’s crew. Now I was less convinced. And it had to have been somebody who could have gotten hold of the gravity generator technology, so that Helen could integrate it into her amorphous machine—and then burn it out again.

  I was very concerned, based on something he’d let slip, that that might mean the person I was looking for was Tsosie.

  Maybe putting Afar and his crew into comas had been a mistake, and not more ruthlessness. I really, really hoped so. I hoped the people who had been hurt or who had died… I hoped that had been an accident.

  Maybe it had been. But the saboteurs hadn’t stopped after the first attempt.

  I burst through the containing fabric—whatever it was—like I was tearing myself from a chrysalis… except nothing had actually changed. It was only me, same as I had always been, battered a bit but not remade in any better form, struggling in the dark.

  My suit lights came up, and I could see again as I shredded loops and swags of iridescent, oily-looking material that flowed apart into bulky particles and flowed together again. I’d seen that stuff before. The machine, like graphite powder with a malevolent will. Some of those shards were like broken glass, around the edges. I’d broken some of the bots. But I was wearing armor now.

  There, there was the hatchway. It was sealed; I was inside the walker. I dragged myself toward it through the drifting particles.

  My glove landed on something human.

  I dragged Calliope out of the mass by her ankle. Straps restrained her; I cut them. Her suit was still sealed. She was coming with me if I had to—

  Blow a hole in the shell of the walker?

  Concussions in small spaces are a bad idea unless those spaces contain vacuum. I had a Judiciary emergency pack. It had a couple of demo charges in it, along with the other essentials (like the flags and the rescue hook knife). But I wasn’t sure those could penetrate the weird glassy shell of the machine, even working from the inside out.

  It didn’t come to that. On the inside, the walker had a big shiny override button right beside the hatch.

  Because I had Calliope in my arms by then, I smashed it with my heel. I shoved us both at the irising hatch before it was half-open, struggling through fatigue and pain as thick as sloshing tendrils of the machine.

  To the door, and through the door. Drifting out the other side. Get a line on something, don’t go sailing off into space to suffocate—

  I had a brief glimpse of Cheeirilaq throwing a line of silk around us as I failed to get my own tackle deployed.

  Then I fainted.

  CHAPTER 22

  WHEN I BLINKED AWAKE, I was looking into a distorting mirror. My eyes seemed huge, brown and wide, their hazel-gold flecks and paler striations emphasized. My nose was too narrow. My lips seemed stretched and strange, and the shape of my chin was too pointed.

  The goblin version of my face jerked back, shrinking as it fled. I blinked at Helen.

  Helen did not blink back.

  “I’m so happy that you’re back!” she blurted.

  I remembered everything I’d figured out right before I
got myself knocked out again and flinched. I needed to make sure I was right before I accused anybody.

  I said, “How long was I gone?”

  Helen settled her heels and folded her arms under the molded bosom. “Long enough.”

  You never come back from a trip to good news. Just never.

  “Calliope?” I asked.

  Under sedation. Rilriltok’s familiar buzz.

  I looked around. Head turned smoothly, no more than the usual amount of pain. I propped myself on my elbows and discovered that I was in a trauma treatment room. “Hey. The gravity is working.”

  “Mechanical got spin back about a standard ago,” she agreed. “It was an impressive engineering accomplishment, spinning up without further disordering all the environments.”

  “I bet.” I stretched, curling my toes. Could be worse. “What happened to the quarantine?”

  I hadn’t been aware that a person like Helen had the ability to generate such dire laughter. “That ship has lifted.”

  I noticed O’Mara in the treatment room, standing a little behind Helen. And there was Rilriltok, hovering over their left shoulder.

  The breeze of its wings was exceptionally pleasant.

  I said, “Somebody please get me a drink.”

  O’Mara looked at me. It was obvious, I suppose, that I didn’t mean club soda and lime.

  Dr. Jens! Rilriltok was mad at me, because it called me Doctor rather than Friend Far be it from this individual to question the medical judgments of an esteemed colleague, but I really think—

  It must have taken an extraordinarily large bolus of courage for the little Rashaqin to stand up to me like that. Conflict avoidance was the hallmark of its species and sex. I felt terrible for it when O’Mara interrupted, holding out a flask I hadn’t known they carried.

  It had a Judiciary seal on it. I knew it had been given to them as a retirement gift, because I owned one like it. I didn’t carry my keepsake in my pocket, however.

  When I first reached for it I reached too fast, too far—a lunge—as my exo overcompensated. I almost knocked the flask to the floor. Fortunately, it was closed, and O’Mara caught it before it dented on the deck. Good reflexes for an old person.