But cynicism is also toxic sometimes, because it tells you that nothing can be changed. Nothing can be fixed or bettered. Cynicism also becomes a means of social control. A reinforcement of learned helplessness.
Learned helplessness is something I am always struggling to unlearn.
“You said you were trying to create a scandal,” I reminded her. “I don’t know what it is that you think I’m complicit in.”
She stopped tugging at her restraints—they were soft, and didn’t tighten, but they also didn’t stretch very much—and looked up at me. Her mouth thinned.
“They’re using people for parts,” she said. “Poor people. They kidnap people and cut them up. Go ahead and look if you don’t believe me.”
I wanted to jump out of my chair and lurch backward, away from the horror of her allegation. The theory was ridiculous on the face of it: kidnapping people wasn’t cost-efficient when you could grow whatever you needed from stem cells and not worry about rejection, for crying out loud.
My mouth came open to deny it—
But she believed it, obviously. Which I guessed meant somebody had programmed that idea into her.
“I’ll look into it.” I kept my voice gentle. This wasn’t about me and if I was shocked or irritated. This was about saving the hospital… and finding out the truth. Exposing what was going on in the private ward.
What if the truth destroyed the hospital, as Calliope had suggested it might? What if—
If the truth destroyed it, it needed to go. I didn’t believe that was likely, anyway. What she was suggesting was ridiculous.
There were plenty of other medically unethical possibilities out there without “kidnapping people for parts” being one of them. Although it was the kind of story that could motivate the medically uniformed.
Some people used to avoid registering as organ donors because they were afraid doctors would let them die in order to harvest their bodies. It didn’t happen, but people in marginalized groups have always had good reason to be suspicious of the medical establishment taking advantage of and experimenting on them. Informed consent rules did not, alas, grow up out of nowhere, or because they were not needed.
I was struggling with two conflicting narratives. My own, where Core General was a place of refuge… and the one I was increasingly coming to believe, where it had a dark underside that people I’d trusted were guiding me to find and reveal.
She must have read the incredulity in my face or voice, because she said, “Don’t condescend to me.”
“Calliope—”
“You’re trying to trick me. You think I’m crazy. You’ll put a box in my brain and make me like it.” The flatness and confusion of her tone reminded me of Helen, when Helen’s cycles were caught in a loop. Like a flat spin in atmosphere.
Like me, Calliope was struggling with two conflicting narratives. Two sets of memories; two sets of inputs. One derived organically, from experience. One trained into her with the intervention of the machine inside her skull. A machine that had then been crudely ripped away, leaving unhealed wounds.
I couldn’t call the result amateurish. Amateur brain surgery does not leave a functional human being behind. This had been carried out by somebody who knew what they were doing. Had at least known enough not to kill the patient. I imagined Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo wouldn’t have left such a mess behind.
Maybe the word I was looking for was butcher. Butchery was a professional skill, after all.
I flinched as I realized that Calliope could have three layers of memory in there. Or four.
Memory is an odd beast. It conflates and alters naturally, and every time you recall an event you change the memory. Adding a fox into the mix is supposed to make memories more stable, to provide an unaltered record to go with the subjective one.
But if you change the information stored in the machine, every time the patient remembers the memory it’s not reinforced by what really happened, but by the memory they have been provided. This can be used for therapy, for post-trauma repair to give the patient a sense of control back, for helping to reconstruct people who are dangerous to release otherwise. But it’s supposed to be voluntary, and overseen by boards of ethicists.
I was pretty sure involuntary memory replacement was what had been done to Calliope. And that nobody had bothered to ask her permission first. And that the review board had not been informed.
And then they had taken her fox away, and frozen her, and we’d reawakened her and subjected her to more medical trauma. And then some kind of trigger had been applied to bring the response we’d seen—the response that had been trained into her, I was certain—out. And send her haring off to find the craboid, and rip a ragged gash in my hospital.
Oh no.
Somebody would have taken care of it, right? I mean, somebody would have taken care of it. Obviously.
Still, once I thought of it I had to ask.
Sally. Where’s the walker now?
Nonesuch towed it off into space and parked it in a static point with interdict beacons all over it.
“Calliope,” I said.
She looked at me.
“I’ll do what you asked. Promise to be careful and stay safe until I get back?”
Her pupils were dilated. I didn’t know if she was seeing me or something from inside her damaged memories. “The doctors. Please don’t let them send me back.”
I stood, but didn’t turn away. “Send you back where?”
“If they send me back, I’ll never get away,” she said.
CHAPTER 24
IS THAT TRUE?” CARLOS ASKED, when I finished relaying what Jones had told me. “About the mind control?”
“No.” I twirled spaghetti around my fork. “She’s pretty obviously sick, and somebody curtailed her treatment and manipulated her into a bunch of obsessive, delusional ideations before turning her loose to wreak havoc. No, worse than that—hiding her among your people in order to conceal the source of the havoc.”
My fingers tightened on the fork. I didn’t believe in violence. But for a moment, I would have suspended that belief if I had been able to get my hands on the people who chose to put Jones through so much pain.
“I heard a different rumor,” Carlos said. “I heard that the peripheral—Helen—” He flinched again, but the flinch had a different quality this time: less disgust, more pity.
“Tell me.”
“I heard she caused the disaster. Stopped the rotation.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “The machine?”
I put the food in my mouth. It gave me something to grind my teeth through. I swallowed it through a chill of unease. “It’s still contained. In the walker and in the stasis box. As far as I know. Who told you that?”
“That pilot lady,” he said. “Loese. The… uncomfortably mannish one.”
My mouth tightened. The information was not conclusive, but it fit certain parts of the pattern I was building. I still hated the pattern I was building. “Check your gender biases, caveman.”
I filed the information away to contemplate later. I didn’t want to think about it now. That was another conversation I needed to get to quickly. Curse the physical limitations of my frail, poorly designed anatomy.
Carlos sipped his drink and made a face. “Unfair to cavemen. What about the clones, then? And the kidnapping people for parts?”
I sighed, and looked at him. “I’ll figure it out.”
“Can I trust you to tell me the truth?”
I looked at him over my fork. He frowned back at me. I thought about being angry, but I was too tired, and honestly what reason did he have to trust me? We barely knew each other.
Which was why I could talk to him. All my other relationships were way too old, way too fraught, and way too tangled up in potential medical malfeasance. Well, maybe not Rilriltok. I couldn’t imagine it doing anything unethical. Not unless it got way too excited to ask about the ethics of the situation before jumping in with all… twe
lve? limbs.
I raised my left little finger off the handle of the fork. “In fact, once I know what’s going on, I’ll show you.”
“Huh,” Carlos said, tilting his head to examine me.
“What?”
“People still pinky swear.”
* * *
I had a lot of questions, and I didn’t know the answers. But I knew where to go to find out, maybe. Thanks to Calliope Jones.
And thanks to Jones, I was pretty sure I could get in and out without being stopped.
I told Rilriltok not to let them transfer her, no matter what. “Get O’Mara if you have to. Nobody moves this patient anywhere.”
She obviously wasn’t tracking reality well. She was probably paranoid. Delusional.
Probably.
What if I asked Cheeirilaq for help? I liked the Goodlaw, and it had saved my life. But I realized, if O’Mara and Starshine knew something was wrong in the hospital… then I had no idea who I could trust.
I was going to have to handle it myself.
* * *
I couldn’t give myself time to temporize. My courage could not be allowed to fail. I paused just inside the door of the detention ward, feeling Rilriltok’s attention on my back, and nerved myself.
I also shut Sally out of my senso, which hurt me more than anything. But I couldn’t be sure of anybody. You’d think that programmed ethics would be enough to prevent an AI from doing anything really sketchy. It’s not like anybody looks at a constructed superintelligence and says, “What if we made this one a ruthless Utilitarian, just to see what happens?”
… Actually, somebody probably would, but with any luck the review board would catch it in time.
Better safe than sorry, as my allofather used to say.
When I moved into the corridor, I walked like a woman on a mission. There’s a focused, hurried gait that makes other experienced hospital personnel flatten themselves against corridor walls, and I adopted it, heading toward Casualty with all deliberate speed.
It was less of an abattoir than when I’d left it, at least. Gravity—or the simulation of it—helped. There were still cots lined up against two walls, sheets draped over improvised stands between them for some semblance of privacy, but that was far more orderly than the situation during the disaster. Walking wounded had returned to their own quarters to convalesce, and some were probably back on duty.
I noticed open panels in the floor as I passed, and people of various descriptions working inside. I guessed that the artificial gravity retrofit had been stepped up, and that getting it installed in Casualty was now the first priority. Good.
It’s always comforting to see the return of normalcy, and that the system has not completely broken down.
I nodded to an attending physician and a couple of specialists with whom I was acquainted, waved to the triage nurse, and stepped toward the doors to the private ward as if I belonged there.
The door didn’t open to my scan.
Now, that was interesting. But I wouldn’t be much of a heavy rescue specialist if I didn’t know how to override a standard lock panel. I hadn’t done this last time because I was still mostly following the rules. Still mostly being polite. And my exo had been an anchor at the time, come to think of it. Now… using my exo instead of a handheld—and instead of reaching into the senso with my fox—I hacked into the panel’s working memory and flipped the switch.
The door hissed open and I stepped through.
A white lab coat makes you anonymous in a hospital. My ID dangled, and given the experience with the door I half expected my signal to be rejected by the sensors inside. No flashing lights greeted me, however. No whooping sirens. Just the humming quiet of an intensive care unit between emergencies.
I was in the same hallway I’d passed through when my exo had been running on fumes. This time I was fully charged and full of adrenaline, however, and I had more time to look around.
It seemed much as it had; a quiet nursing unit in the middle of sleep shift. The desk was staffed with a Ceeharen nurse who didn’t look up. The unit coordinator who had spotted me on my last intrusion was nowhere in evidence. I hoped that meant he was off-shift or asleep. He’d been too alert by far, and—I blushed to admit it—I was a terrible spy.
Fortunately for terrible spies, most people are terrible observers. I sailed past the syster at the desk—they were deeply involved in something invisible to me in the air before them, making notes on it with a light pen—and walked along, checking the panels beside private rooms as if I were looking for a specific patient ID. The rooms were privacy-shielded, but my senior physician clearance was enough to de-encrypt them. I guessed when they’d locked the entrance, they hadn’t thought uninvited guests would be resourceful or determined enough to get in anyway.
My accessing the records would be logged. But I wasn’t planning on keeping my visit secret. Either there was nothing to hide, and this really was only a ridiculously posh unit devoted to keeping those who exploited more resources than they needed away from the proletariat… or Calliope was right about the hospital using indigent folks as spare-parts repositories, and I was about to blow the worst abomination in modern Synarche history sky-high.
If I ever got off this quarantined hospital. If the hospital itself even survived.
It didn’t occur to me that there might be an answer somewhere in the middle. An answer whose implications might be almost as unpleasant as organ farmers murdering people for parts.
In retrospect, this was an oversight.
The majority of patients whose data I accessed were old. Very, very old, even by modern standards, where the human life expectancy in reasonable health exceeds our natural span including senescence. I’m hardly the picture of perfect health, but I was honestly better off than many of my ancestors would have been at my age—their panoply of undiagnosed and untreatable autoimmune disorders blossomed in the early Anthropocene, for a variety of genetic and environmental reasons—and I could expect another fifty or sixty ans or so as a contributing member of society.
If I made it to tomorrow alive.
But these patients—the human ones—had birth dates that made them older than my great-grandparents had lived to be. Admittedly, my great-grandparents lived on a marginal colony world where people reproduced young. But my great-grandparents were no longer alive, and neither were their children. Or their children’s children, though that had been an accident.
These people were.
So maybe they needed the peace and quiet. Maybe they had come here to die. That seemed like an intolerable waste of resources, but… these people had resources to burn. And didn’t seem inclined to return their surplus to the commonwealth, beyond whatever they were taxed.
You can’t take it with you, as somebody wise observed. But you can sure roll around in it for as long as you’re alive.
The next thing I noticed, pulling their med charts, was that none of them were on antirejection drugs. I had expected it, but it still comforted me. It disproved Calliope’s conspiracy theory categorically. Without protein matchers and immune tuning… well, organ rejection is a real thing, and it used to kill patients, or severely limit their lives after transplant. They needed their immune systems suppressed for the rest of their lives, or their own bodies would destroy the transplanted organs they also needed to keep them alive.
Clone parts solved that—as far as your immune system is concerned, a clone finger is your own finger. So now I knew that nobody was kidnapping indigent teenagers and stealing their retinas or kidneys.
Since I hadn’t actually expected to find evidence of that, I was surprised by how relieved I felt. So now I had to find out what was really going on in here, and why it was so secret. I was pretty sure I’d figured out why O’Mara and Starlight had been pushing me toward uncovering the information on my own: so that I wouldn’t be bound by the hospital’s privacy strictures regarding patients. I wasn’t supposed to know what was going on here. Therefore nobody had both
ered to put a block in my fox about it.
I downloaded a few more sets of records, and then when I was well away from the desk (glossy Ceeharen syster still engaged and on-task behind it) I pretended I had found the room I was looking for, and stepped inside. The occupant was a human female, 135 ans of age, Beyte Denarian by name.
It was almost the last room in the corridor, and when I walked in I was surprised by how quiet and empty it seemed. Hospital rooms are usually full of stuff: wires, equipment, monitors, tubes to put fluids into the human body and tubes to take them away again.
This seemed like a bedroom, and a pleasant bedroom at that.
I crossed to the bed and looked down.
A woman lay there, head shaved, blonde hair beginning to regrow, skin translucent as the skin of low-melanin humans who have never stepped out under a living sun becomes. Eyes closed, hands folded neatly on her breast atop covers that had never been wrinkled or disarrayed by human sleep. I felt as if I were looking at a corpse arrayed for the funeral.
I could see the blue veins under the skin of her throat, her cheeks, her temples. The backs of her hands.
She could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen ans of age.
She could not be Beyte Denarian. And yet—I checked the chart again—she was.
I touched her shaved scalp gently, the soft hairs fuzzing against my palm. There was a scar there, a tiny scar, tidy and neat. She was about old enough to have had a fox implanted, if it was done early. Usually, my species waits until our children are aged around twenty-five ans. Their neural development is more or less complete at that point, and they have learned social skills and how to experience and control their emotions without intervention. They have learned who they are.
So this woman was young, biologically speaking. But she was not unreasonably young.
She did not wake up when I touched her, but there were no signs that she was sedated, or that she was being supported through a period of unconsciousness due to illness or injury. She was lying there, inert. Breathing regularly.
Machine Page 38
