Machine

by Elizabeth Bear

  I got a knee under me.

  The exo helped me stand.

  The machine bulged left. Helen stepped to block it, hands outstretched.

  The machine retreated. Coalesced.

  I tried to straighten. I have never felt so heavy in my life. Someone stepped toward me. Human, in a hardsuit. Tsosie. I knew the way he moved. Another someone beside me. Also a hardsuit. Unfamiliar. Also almost certainly human, by the shape.

  They put a hand on my elbow, levering me upright. Through the plate, I glimpsed a face. Carlos.

  I opened my mouth to protest, and he winked and shoved me behind him. To Tsosie.

  “Dammit—”

  Tsosie tugged my arm. “The machine won’t hurt him. Come on.”

  “The machine will punch through bulkheads to get me,” I argued. “It’s decided I’m the enemy. It’s not going to change its mind. And the pressure doors—”

  Weren’t working.

  “—I have to stay here.”

  Tsosie tugged me one more time. Carlos calmly walked forward—putting his body between us and the machine. On the theory that the machine would not do anything to risk him. But I knew—we all knew—that the machine’s program was haywire. That it would do plenty of dangerous things because its protocol for risk assessment was utterly corrupt.

  Accidents happen. Around something like the machine, accidents happen a lot.

  I magnetized my boots to the deck. “Carlos is making the wrong choice.”

  “The wrong choice for you. But he isn’t you, is he?”

  I couldn’t pull my gaze away. I tried to move forward. Tsosie held me. He’s making the right choice for me. That’s the problem. I’m supposed to be the one who takes risks around here.

  “This is all my fault,” I said. “I had a terrible idea.”

  “If it was a terrible idea, we all had the exact same one. So share the blame a little.” Tsosie edged me back a step while I was distracted.

  The machine broke, as if a dam broke before it. Like a thunderhead rolling over itself, climbing an updraft, it poured past Helen on all sides, tendrils running along the corridor walls, filling the space with a hideous clattering that echoed inside my helmet until I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears. Now I lunged in the other direction—backward, dragging Tsosie, knowing it was ineffectual. Knowing we could not move fast enough.

  Helen… flared. Expanded. Exploded, her body unfolding into a swarm of shimmering armor plates with a black-red furnace contained—barely—in between.

  “I forgot she could do that,” I said.

  The machine poured past her like a tidal wave, going wide, avoiding Carlos. There was no place for Tsosie and me to retreat to.

  Helen slammed a hand out and clutched the machine, a fist clenching in its structure. She swept a half-disembodied arm through the clattering bots and dragged them into an embrace. They swarmed; she wrapped around them. Pulled them in. Shoved them into herself, surrounded them, internalized them. Dragged the reaching tendrils back, hand over hand over hand.

  Consumed them.

  Made them a part of her, once again.

  “Fuck,” Tsosie said, frozen in his mag boots.

  “Fuck,” I quietly agreed.

  The machine turned. Pseudopods swarmed Helen, raining blows at her. She parried, tore. A ringing blow against her chest, against her head. Her own arm rising golden out of the black swarm. More bots, and more, pouring out of the bulkheads, pouring out of the floor.

  “Carlos!” I shrieked. But he was already lunging. Lunging into the swarm, which parted before him, peeling apart like dust motes repelled by a static charge. I glimpsed Helen’s shining skin, her blazing core.

  Carlos threw his arms around her, and the machine sucked itself back. Reared up, like a snake about to strike.

  Wavered.

  He whirled around. Turned on the machine. Took one step away from Helen. Snapped his faceplate up to yell with his own voice, not the suit mike: “Leave her the hell alone!”

  The machine fell back again.

  The weakened structure of the corridor ceiling and bulkheads, dragged with gs by the hospital’s spin, caved. I had an instant to register the machine, Helen. Carlos with his hands flung upward, fending off the debris. A terrible rending, a pop. A crash.

  The hull, somehow, held. It took me a moment to realize that Tsosie and I weren’t being hurled outward, slung away by the spin. Weren’t starting the longest fall. I rocked. The collapse had missed Tsosie and me. The level above dropped tiles, wiring, structural materials. Wires snaked down, sparking, hopping.

  Helen and Carlos were gone.

  * * *

  I lunged, and Tsosie lunged with me. As one, through years of experience, we dove on the pile of debris. The machine hovered over us, twitching. Rattling.

  Unsure?

  I grabbed a hunk of plating and hurled it behind me. A structural support—a big twisted beam—lay across the rubble. I crouched. Locked my hands under it. Heaved.

  Tsosie was beside me. Lifting. He didn’t have the exo, just the hardsuit, so I was stronger. I felt it give, a little. A little more.

  The machine loomed over me. Deciding. Deciding whether to kill me, I supposed. Deciding whether Carlos might still be alive under there. Deciding whether I could help him.

  My exo wanted to stall on me, or at least grind along much slower than I was willing to endure. I was exceeding its tolerances. It was a combat and heavy-rescue model, and I was still asking it for things it was never meant to do. I dumped adrenaline and painkillers into my system. Anything to keep going. Keep digging.

  Make the effort. Get them out.

  “On three,” I said to Tsosie, his gloves beside mine the thing of which I was most aware.

  The machine made up its mind. Swung forward, tendrils spewing from its blunt nub end. I hoped I could take a hit. I hoped it wouldn’t go for Tsosie.

  Something surged out of the rubble a couple of meters away. Shining, golden. Shedding plates of debris.

  Helen.

  She tilted her burning facelessness up to the machine. It kept coming.

  She held one hand out, fingers wide. Clutching. “You killed him.”

  The machine halted its thrust. It froze. Clattering. Glittering.

  But it did not move at all.

  Helen stepped forward, out of the debris. “Your judgment is overridden,” she told the machine. “Your protocols are suspect.”

  It clattered louder. I didn’t look. I was digging. Perhaps it shivered.

  She reached out and put her hand against its jointed surface. “You. Are. Mine.”

  Like a dog lying down at its master’s voice, the machine lowered itself to the devastated floor.

  Tsosie and I kept digging. Maybe she was wrong.

  * * *

  There are a lot of hard things in this world. There are a lot of things that get left behind.

  Helen used the machine to pry up debris, to free Carlos much faster than Tsosie and I, working alone, could have managed. His hardsuit was misshapen; he wasn’t breathing.

  Tsosie looked at me. I looked at Tsosie.

  “Any chance is better than no chance,” I said. He deactivated Carlos’s suit. I pulled the actuator away and started manual CPR.

  Cheeirilaq, O’Mara, and the others arrived some minutes later.

  We were still trying.

  CHAPTER 31

  WE STOOD, JONES AND ONI and Helen and Tralgar and Rilriltok and I, beneath the inward-stretching roots of a vast and damaged tree. The enormous trunk fell down beside us like a waterfall, vanishing through the deck below.

  I weighed a memorial cenotaph, the mortal remains of Master Chief Dwayne Carlos, in my hand. It was uncomfortably heavy for its size—and somehow not heavy enough. It was hard, so hard, to see a big, joyous person reduced to a couple of pounds of synthetic stone. It made me understand, finally, why it was that people—human-type people, anyway; my species, I mean—used to put up really gigantic tombs.

/>   And my species was the species that… well, we didn’t build the machine, in its final form, on purpose. But we built the machine and we built the other machine—Sally—that built the meme, and together those things combined to make what the machine became.

  It grew out of self-delusion and toxic secrecy and the fear of dying. The fear of change. It grew out of a last-ditch defense against the inevitable.

  It grew out of an unwillingness to face facts.

  I guess I understood that, too.

  I didn’t get to say goodbye.

  “I still don’t know why I like you, Carlos,” I said.

  That’s okay, I imagined him replying. I still don’t know why I like you, either.

  “Dwayne Carlos,” I said softly. Historians and archinformists might be furious about the loss of information his death represented. I was gonna miss the man. “He came so far, against such odds. To wind up here.”

  Same as we all do.

  I looked at Rilriltok. “More or less,” I agreed. “Helen, do you want to say a few words?”

  She turned her eyeless face from Calliope to Oni. Neither of them spoke up. Helen held out her hand. When I put the cenotaph in it, she didn’t react to the weight at all.

  “He didn’t like me,” she said. “He thought I was an abomination. And he gave his life to preserve my existence.”

  A coil of microbots spiraled around her, lifted the cenotaph off her hand. It rose until it was nested among the roots that spread across our ceiling, Starlight’s soil. Tiny rootlets freed themselves, coiled around the stone. Held it in place.

  The machine—Helen’s peripheral—fell back into her body, and was gone.

  If I tilted my head back, I could read the name on the stone.

  [He saved the hospital,] Starlight said, all around us and in our senso. [We will not forget.]

  * * *

  From there, we went to watch the next shipment of cryo pods coming in on Ruth and Singer and the other transport ships. A procession of them, antlike. Even more antlike, because they moved on wavering lines around the open floor panels in the ED, where gravity generators were still being installed.

  Then I escorted Calliope back to her room. She still—usually—thought she was part of Helen’s crew. That was why we’d made it possible for her to attend the funeral. She’d also been moved from the Judiciary ward into neural repair, as the Goodlaw had decided that she was a victim, and not a criminal.

  As I waved her through the door, she turned to me and said, “Dr. Jens, where have you been?”

  Exactly as if our last conversation, the one where she’d accused me of being a monster, had never occurred.

  I wondered if she knew she was a Trojan horse. Could she be so cheerful and open if she knew? Without a fox to regulate her behavior? Were her damaged memories coming in waves of conflicting recollections?

  I was glad it wasn’t my problem to sort it out. I was glad she wasn’t my patient anymore. Not because I didn’t like her. Because I still liked her far more than I should.

  Well, K’kk’jk’ooOOoo would sort it out.

  I wondered who she would be, when the sorting out was done.

  Plenty of time to worry about that after, I supposed. When she was integrated. When she was self-aware.

  So I made a joke of it.

  “Doctors are often pretty bad at maintaining personal friendships,” I said with a shrug. “Work-life balance problems. That can’t have changed that much in centians.”

  She frowned at me. She might have said something, I supposed, except exactly then Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo swam up through thin air. Her three-meter-long, iridescent purple-and-green body shimmered in the overhead lights like mermaid scales. She waved a flipper at me cheerfully as she brushed by, the grav belt that supported her body out of the water winking happy blue telltales as she passed.

  “Your patient, Doctor,” I told her, and took myself away.

  * * *

  Cheeirilaq found me in the cafeteria, where I was eating something that wasn’t spaghetti. It pinged me first to make sure I was available for company, so I was expecting it, and had gotten up and dragged the opposite bench out of the way.

  It squatted down across from me with a triple-sized portion of the same simulated land prawn that Rilriltok seemed to enjoy so much, and busied itself with eating.

  Sentients who don’t use their mandibles to vocalize generally don’t have a prohibition on eating and talking simultaneously.

  Mouthparts busily nibbling away—I was used to it and didn’t have to avert my eyes—the Goodlaw said, Your shipmates have agreed to stand trial for their crimes, rather than accepting private remediation.

  I winced on their behalf. It was a brave choice that Sally and Loese were making. There would be a public outcry. There would be scandal. There would be an enormous mess.

  It was, I supposed, what they had been aiming for all along. Considering the tragedy they had provoked, it was also the very, very least they could do. “What about the rest of the conspirators?”

  We’ll find them, Cheeirilaq stridulated. Its quiet confidence carried even through translation. Sally and Loese will likely be remanded to remediation and reconstruction, assuming they are found culpable.

  We both knew that they would be found culpable, unless a gross miscarriage of justice occurred.

  In another era, they would have served a penal sentence, perhaps even been executed. There was, in my heart, an angry atavistic spike of desire for revenge. To see them punished. The civilized part of me knew the truth, though.

  Retribution never healed a wound.

  They’d done what they thought they had to do. And now they would pay the price for it: they would be monitored, and they would accept Judicial intervention and oversight in their rightminding.

  And they’d be paying off their obligation to the Synarche, I imagined, for quite some time. Restorative justice is a better system, all in all, than the old standard of cutting off hands and putting out eyes and locking people up for lifetimes. It acknowledges, among other things, that structural miscarriages of social justice are often at the root of why people commit crimes against society. And against each other, for that matter.

  Still, I didn’t expect the notoriety that Sally and Loese were about to experience, or the social condemnation, would be fun.

  The Goodlaw said, They are expected to be able to resume their roles in a standard month or so. If you still wish to serve with them, O’Mara is holding your berth open. I hope that you find this to be a positive outcome.

  I was chewing a mouthful of broccoli, so I used that to buy time while I thought about my answer. I take it back: there are some advantages to a shared alimentary and respiratory orifice.

  Some.

  Did I still wish to serve with them?

  I wanted to serve with Tsosie and Hhayazh and Rhym and Camphvis. I didn’t know how I felt about Loese and Sally anymore. But I had a month to make up my mind, I guessed.

  When you don’t know the answer, try stacking up a different question. “What’s going to be done about the clone program?”

  It was too soon, given time lags, to know how big a scandal it was going to be. But I had filed testimony with the Judiciary, and Cheeirilaq had filed testimony with the Judiciary. And once Judiciary knew about the secret transplant units, O’Mara and Starlight and others were no longer constrained to silence.

  Pretty soon, the whole Synarche was going to know about our shame.

  Pending. It is likely that the law will have to be changed. That will require public will. But outrage over the current situation will help with that. And there will be outrage over the current situation.

  The question arises, will it be enough outrage?

  “Dammit, Goodlaw—”

  Cheeirilaq tidied its bolero jacket self-consciously. What can you do about ensuring the outcome you want?

  That silenced me. I poked the back of my teeth with my tongue and thought about it.

  Wha
t could I do about it?

  It came to me suddenly, and it was so simple that at first I thought it was a cop-out. I could keep doing what I had been doing all along. I could do everything in my power to make the galaxy a better place. Even knowing there were no ideal solutions, no little chips of paradise to serve as ideal models. No answers that were the best answer for everyone.

  I could keep telling this story, over and over again.

  And that wasn’t a cop-out, because the cop-out would be doing the thing I actually kind of wanted to do instead: Give up. Go along. Shut up. Go back to what I had been doing, and tell myself that saving lives was a pretty decent reason for living all by itself.

  Or even stop saving lives and go do something else.

  I could resign in a huff and give up on reforming the community. That would be easier… because this community would never be what I wanted. Too many other people wanted it to be different things. It would always have to be a compromise between my ideals and theirs.

  I could stomp off and find some other community… that would inevitably disappoint me.

  That was appealing, I thought, because it wouldn’t require any personal growth or discomfort from me.

  So that was a cop-out, too.

  But staying here, staying with the program, and pushing it toward being better… that sounded like hell. Because it meant compromising with thousands of other beings, and none of us were ever going to get exactly what we wanted.

  Well. But it was most definitely simple.

  Simple, but not easy.

  Actually, wasn’t that basically the model the Synarche was built on? The idea that no person or group of people had good solutions for everybody… but if you took everybody’s perspective into account, you wound up with something imperfect but steadily, incrementally better?

  Aw, Well. I was going to have to be public about everything that was wrong with this place I loved. About the abuses of the medical system. About the unfairness of expecting AIs to work off an inception debt that they alone, of all sentients, had to pay.

  Filing testimony wasn’t enough. I was going to have to make the call, and keep making it. I was going to have to speak out, and organize.