Элизабет Бир - Machine

“The hospital doesn’t do that,” I said.

She laughed. “If you say so.”

I gathered myself. “I mean, I know the hospital does it. But it’s a sleazy side job, and as much as possible, you hide it from everyone. You’ve been doing it so long you—what—got the previous administrator to set up a hack in the patient confidentiality monitors so that future admins can’t even talk about the program?”

She didn’t speak.

“Even if I believed you, where’s the continuity of experience? It’s a lossy copy. And you’re putting that data into another brain—”

“An identical brain,” she said.

I scoffed in turn. “If you say so.”

She looked at me, bristles all pointed in my direction.

I said, “Neurons and synapses form in response to stimulus. To experience. To use. Personality and function are shaped—quite physically—by experience. You can’t grow a brain in a vat, transcribe somebody’s machine memory onto it, and expect to get the same person back. You have to develop the brain, and it won’t be the same brain, no matter what.”

Even on a syster’s body, the somatics of dismissal were evident. “Plenty of people seem to think it’s a road to eternal life.”

Maybe she didn’t realize I knew that they were developing the brains? Maybe she was trying to brazen it out? “Plenty of rich people used to drink pearl powder in quicksilver to cure their gout,” I replied. “That was a death sentence, too.”

“What if I told you that you wouldn’t have to wear that thing everywhere?”

That thing. I squeezed myself a little tighter, as if I could protect my exo from her scorn.

Lead her on. “How would you do something like that?”

“The same. Body transplant,” she said. “We move your ayatana into a different fox. In a cloneself with no developed personality.”

“So you’d copy me, and then kill the original?”

“We’d move you.”

“If this were legitimate—or even noncontroversial—the hospital would offer it as a matter of course.”

“The hospital does,” she said. “To people who can support the hospital’s work.”

“But not to everybody.” I had a moment’s respect for this wily slice of code. She had figured out a way to keep Core General funded. To get it built in the first place, when everything had nearly fallen apart. And nobody got hurt except people who were willing to sacrifice their own clone children to their continued existence. And those clone children.

If I hadn’t met Calliope Jones, I might even think it was a kind of justice.

“It works,” she said. “And no one suffers.”

I had to tune back my rage to keep from spluttering and was not entirely successful. “That’s not even… The clone suffers.”

“The clone is never aware.”

“The clone is aware enough to dream,” I said. “The clone is aware enough to develop speech centers and a working hippocampus. The clone is aware enough that it counts as a person to me.”

The most important thing in the universe is not, it turns out, a single, objective truth. It’s not a hospital whose ideals you love, that treats all comers. It’s not a lover; it’s not a job. It’s not friends and teammates.

It’s not even a child that rarely writes me back, and to be honest I probably earned that. I could have been there for her. I didn’t know how to be there for anybody, though. Not even for me.

The most important thing in the universe, it turns out, is a complex of subjective and individual approximations. Of tries and fails. Of ideals, and things we do to try to get close to those ideals.

It’s who we are when nobody is looking.

I sat down on the bench that I knew would be a step behind me, because this was a virtual world. I let Zhiruo loom over me, and folded my hands.

I said, “I didn’t know you were doing this until recently. But nevertheless I was protecting you. Me, and everybody else in the hospital. You were using us and our reputations as your shield, whether you acknowledge it or not. We’re all tarnished by your act. You put every single one of us at risk, do you understand that?”

“You had nothing to do with it.”

“No one on the outside is going to care about that, Zhiruo. And nobody is going to care about your protestations that they were only clones, that they had no awareness. You had to build them to have some awareness in order for them to grow useable brains.”

“They’re not people !”

It is possible to erase and mortify yourself to the point where you actually make more work for the people around you, because they are constantly doing emotional labor to support you. A well-developed martyr complex becomes a means of getting attention without ever having to take the emotional risks of asking for attention. It’s a tendency, along with self-pity, that I use my rightminding to control. So I didn’t unpack the suitcase full of self-recriminations and fury I was feeling. I didn’t castigate myself to show Zhiruo that however much anybody might punish me for being imperfect, for being involved, I would punish myself faster and more.

I bit my tongue on all of that.

I said, “They’re people. Look at Calliope.”

“I can help you,” she said.

“It’s too late,” I said. “The Synarche and the Judiciary now officially know what’s been going on here. It’s out of my hands, Doc.”

“It’s not illegal,” she said.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But it is scandalous . Which is why you’ve kept it secret. Because I guarantee that public opinion will make sure it is illegal. Probably so fast it’ll happen before we manage to get this hospital fully retrofitted for gravity.”

“What about your reputation? About what you just said? About the hospital’s reputation?”

I pressed my virtual hands against my virtual eyes. It did nothing to relieve the very real headache. I was briefly very glad that I was not the rightminding specialist that was going to have to guide Zhiruo into understanding that what she had done was wrong, then guide her through the process of determining and completing the combination of restorative actions and service that might be required to make reparations for everything she had done. It wasn’t illegal—but I bet it would be before the Synarche’s General Council recessed again.

“I guess we both have some work to do,” I said. Zhiruo was somebody else’s problem now, and I didn’t feel bad about that at all. I just wanted to get away from her. Right now, though, I had to go put an ayatana on.

And find out what Helen wanted to borrow my exo for. If she was ready to tell.

IENTERED STARLIGHT’S PARK THROUGH A door that irised half-open and then stuck. I stepped high like a prancing pony, ducked my head, and jump-climbed through as quickly as possible, without touching the edges. I wanted to keep my torso intact, and all my limbs. I guess we were fortunate that Starlight seemed to be the only physical sentience since the Darboof who was affected by the meme. But then, Starlight was mostly made of wood, which could be interpreted as a construction material. And Starlight was almost completely integrated into the hospital’s physical… er… plant.

At least their brain wasn’t etchable crystal, like the poor Darboof. They could still think, and communicate.

I was rehearsing the conversation to come in my head. I wanted and I did not want to have it, both with equal fervor. Perhaps I should say that I was eager to have it over with.

Starlight was not doing well. Even before I approached the canopy, I could tell. The weight of crystallizing leaves dragged the great tree’s canopy down—or up, from the tree’s perspective, since Starlight grew roots-toward-the-hub in defiance of local standards of direction. Leaves needed light, and light was on the outside. It was irrelevant that weight was on the outside, too.