Элизабет Бир - Machine

Maybe Helen could split herself into multiple parts. But I suspected that wouldn’t be good for her, in her already-fragile state.

I called on all my victim-soothing skills and hoped Helen’s homebrew language-learning was up to the challenge of following what I needed to say. “I believe you. But I need to assess the technical challenges of moving your crew. We need to know what kind of power we need to supply, at the minimum.”

The tinkertoys clattered. Yes, there was definitely a link there. If I didn’t want to be the first paramedic beaten to death by building blocks, I was going to have to come up with a way to calm Helen. Fortunately, defusing difficult situations with distraught and sometimes panicky people is part of my job.

“Move my crew ? You can’t move my crew! It’s contrary to protocols. I have to protect them!”

“We are responding to your distress call,” I reminded her gently. “We are here to help you.”

I could see the program conflict, manifesting as anxiety. Helen was a sentient, too, and I did not want her to come to any harm. It wasn’t her fault some frustrated engineer had designed her to look and sound like a sexbot.

“Oh, I know that.” It came out torn between a moan and a growl. “Why can’t you help them here? They’re my crew. They belong here .”

Tsosie bumped me warningly with the elbow of his hardsuit. Not that I needed it.

Helen wouldn’t have come equipped with all those cryo units. Big Rock Candy Mountain was designed to be full of living, breathing crew. Not sleepers.

I was pretty sure that cryo hadn’t even been properly invented when Big Rock Candy Mountain had left Terra. Which meant that they had developed their own, in parallel with the Synarche, which was probably why these coffins didn’t look anything like a proper cryo tank. That meant the crew had built them—or the ship had built them, or Helen had built them.

Which meant I could at best guess at the mechanisms by which the coffins worked. Assuming they worked at all.

“Helen,” I said carefully, “how is it that your entire crew came to be in cryo?”

This ship was meant to be a home. A habitation for an entire tribe of humanity. Not merely a vehicle.

She said, “They were sick. We couldn’t help them. The machine intervened to protect them.”

Sometimes in a moment of crisis, you act. Your instincts take over, and your body and brain do the right thing without the intervention of your conscious mind. Training and repetition, presence of mind, and perhaps something innate and nameless combine to make you do a thing. It might be the right thing. It might be terribly maladaptive.

If you’re the sort of person who habitually does the maladaptive thing in a crisis, do everybody including yourself a favor and don’t go into the emergency services.

I didn’t do a maladaptive thing. And I didn’t do the right thing.

I froze.

“Machine?” I said, carefully, pitching it as a question.

While I waited for Helen to answer, Tsosie’s concern leaked through the senso to me. Neither one of us knew what this machine she spoke of might be, its provenance, its purpose. But apparently it had shoved an entire crew of humans into cryo chambers, and possibly addled their shipmind in the process. That… was scary stuff.

Tsosie wanted to pull back and evacuate immediately, quarantine this vessel and possibly Sally, too, until Judiciary could get here and take over the decision-making. It was laudable caution, and in principle I was in agreement.

Except.

Except if Helen was a threat, if this “machine” was a threat—if the machine even existed, and wasn’t a spur process of Helen herself—we might trigger an attack by disengaging. Except there were tens of thousands of people right in front of us who we could potentially rescue. Except that we could destroy the whole recontact situation by making the wrong call, and lose not just Helen, not just the crew, not just the ship—but all the knowledge and history contained in her.

In my military career, in my rescue career, I had never done something as high-stakes as this. And nothing in my experience indicated the best course of action to take with a seemingly friendly but possibly malfunctioning artificial intelligence who might have killed her entire, very numerous, crew. And then possibly dissociated a portion of herself into microbots, over which she did not seem to have conscious control. But which definitely responded to her emotional state with vigor.

As a human being, I wasn’t sure I could make myself walk away from people who were, if they were alive, this much in need, and this close to rescue after so very long. I was also, even with Sally’s renewed help, getting a fair amount of pain leakage. We’d been out for a long time, and I could tune it out and rely on my exo and the hardsuit to do the heavy lifting. I still had plenty of batteries. But I was getting tired, and the discomfort was starting to make me foggy and rob me of concentration.

Something Helen and I had in common.

I’m used to it. I’ve always functioned around the pain. I don’t remember a time before the pain. I wondered if Helen remembered a time before her pain, if it was pain. You’re projecting, Llyn. Fine, then. Her disorientation.

I could not decide what to do based on the information I had. So I asked a leading question, and waited for more data.

“Machine,” Helen agreed, with an airy wave. “The machine.”

The tinkertoys rattled behind her.

This was not, to be perfectly transparent, typical in any way of shipmind behavior. Not even the behavior of a traumatized and destabilized or physically damaged shipmind. If a shipmind lost processing power, they might become slow, unresponsive. Sticky .

But not confused .

They did not become vague in this manner. Disorientation was the stuff of organic malfunction.

So in addition to everything else, Helen was scientifically interesting.

This time, I encrypted my channel. It was a risk: Helen might decide we were plotting against her. But literally everything was a risk right now.

Sally, I subvocalized. You’re the expert in treating designed intelligences. What is going on with this AI? Mechanically, I mean. I’ve never seen anything like this.

“Neither have I,” she answered in my ear. “I’d say she’s got conflicting inputs, or conflicting imperatives. That could make her seem more—”

Senile? I waited. Organic?

“I wasn’t going to put it that way.”

It’s all right. She’s definitely acting weird. I’m not offended. Only…

I hesitated for too long. Sally responded with a query that I felt hanging there. Tsosie, too. He’d filed his recommendation and his dissent with my course of action, but this was my call. He wouldn’t interfere unless I did something obviously unjustifiable or sophipathological, or made a decision that was judged unreasonably dangerous for its potential benefits by a majority of the crew.

Only how do I get Helen to consent to let us move her people?

As I said it, though, I knew the answer. There was no urgency in treating the crew. They were in cryo: they were dead or they were alive, and for the present moment that wave state was uncollapsed and I had no way of knowing if I needed to pick up dinner for Schrödinger’s cat on my way home.

Their status, in other words, was not deteriorating. So I would treat them as if they could be saved, because that is how you work a victim, but I wouldn’t triage them to the front of the line.

There was a rush with one patient, though. We had to treat Helen—and the “machine,” if the machine was her tinkertoy microbot thing—before we did anything else. Before the Judiciary ship or ships supposed to be following us arrived.