Элизабет Бир - Machine

You’d be bored.

That didn’t sound like the machine. Was it? Was it Sally? Linden?

“I’d rather be bored than sad. I’d rather be alone than lonely.” I was repeating myself. Well, I wasn’t at my best. “I believed in this place. I believed in me . And the worst part is, I didn’t mind not believing in things until this place made me believe in something. And it was all a lie. It was using me.”

Silence again. Then a voice. It was definitely Linden. Dr. Jens.

Oh. “Linden.”

She was calm and warm and professional. What you said wasn’t wrong, but it sounds like you’re emotionally overwrought—

“You’re fucking right I am! And I deserve to be!” This, the detached part of me thought, is why you’d rather be dissociated. Life is easier when you compartmentalize.

Fair, she said. But listen for a moment, please. The machine in Core General’s systems is contained. I know it did a great deal of damage to your emotional equilibrium and your neurochemistry along the way, but you did it. You held on. You held the connection, and Sally and Helen and I got through. We’ve firewalled it out of the hospital’s systems and pried it loose from Starlight.

You won.

Had I? I didn’t feel like it. It felt like I had crumbled. Shattered.

“Wow,” I said. “Is that what winning feels like? I don’t think I’ve ever had such a goalpost-shifting, pointless argument in my entire life.”

Linden said, I’m here to bring you out, Llyn.

I opened my eyes in a room that seemed simultaneously bright, and full of fuzzy, undefined shadows. I blinked twice before I realized that I was looking past the open lid of the cryo pod, and my shipmates were staring down at me.

I blinked my eyes once more. They nearly focused. I blinked again.

One of the looming shadows was greener, larger, and more angular than the others, and was wearing a four-armed bolero jacket with a glint of gold on one lapel.

This was a horrible idea, said Cheeirilaq. Why is your species so full of horrible ideas?

“There is a difference between this horrible idea and all the other ones.” I started pulling electrodes off my scalp while Rilriltok buzzed behind me anxiously.

The Goodlaw cocked its head in what I, a human, could only anthropomorphize as exasperation. Eyesight, definitely improving.

“This one worked,” I said, and started laughing so hard my diaphragm hurt.

I was still giggling off residual adrenaline when the oil-slick-iridescent, knobbly-tinkertoy pseudopod burst through the cryo ward deck plating.

Life must be preserved, the machine whispered. All your lives. Forever.

It writhed, tip seeking like a blind snake’s snout, and I felt it like a snap the moment its attention fastened on me. I was still sitting in the pod, half wired to it, some of the connections going directly into my fox interface. Rilriltok, right behind me, gave a despairing buzz and worked faster. Even with all the giant, massive, impermeable systers on Core General, I have to say that my fragile little insect friend was the bravest of anyone. Precisely because it was so fragile, and yet it did terrifying and dangerous and necessary things anyway.

You, the machine said. Its voice reached me as vibrations through the deck, through the air. It set my hairs prickling. You betrayed us. You stopped us from keeping them safe. You must be restrained.

Restrained.

We will restrain you.

SURE, OF COURSE. THIS WAS how my life worked. Beat the enemy on the virtual plane. Escape, relax, start thinking about cocktails.

Then, oh shit, nanotech tentacles.

It’s possible to love a thing, to trust a thing, to rely on a thing, to be overjoyed that a thing exists—and also to resent it. My exo, for example, makes me weak with gratitude. It makes it possible for me to live the life I want to live, to give to the community in the way I wish to give to the community. It makes me strong and nimble and quick in ways I never was without it.

It is also something I have to think about. Something to consider each dia. Something to maintain, and the body within it needs maintenance, too.

A piece of cognitive load. One more damned thing to take into account.

And it’s a symbol of not being able to always do everything, all the time, right now.

Well, right that second, right now , I had no mixed emotions about my exo at all, despite the fact that the machine had infiltrated and impersonated it in order to—to put it bluntly—fuck with my mind. I guess, in fairness, I had invited the machine in—and the diversion had worked, because Linden had managed to force it to withdraw from the hospital’s structure. I guess we knew now where it had gone.

However complicated I might feel about machine and exo and exo and machine when I had the leisure to unpack those feelings, my exo was saving me from the nanotech tentacles. (Yes, I know. Microbots are not technically nanotech. When you’re being chased by them, fine distinctions kind of go out the airlock.)

My exo jerked me upright the instant Rilriltok yanked the connection free, which it managed with a surgical lack of nicety. It didn’t matter; it was hurtling its own delicate wings and exoskeleton backward like a fly that senses a drastic shift in air pressure. I got a hand up and slapped at my hardsuit actuator: too late. Either that same shift in air pressure or my exo’s self-preservation protocols had already triggered it, and I had to snatch my hand back fast to keep from losing a fingertip.

Or several.

The hardsuit sealed over my face, obscuring my vision for a moment. For another moment, I could see clearly as the utility fog formed into the transparent viewplate. Until a sudden concussion knocked it askew, and red-black tunnel edges closed on me.

I bounced off a bulkhead—I think it was a bulkhead—and tumbled into the corner, one aching bundle of bruises and pain.

The blow probably wouldn’t have killed me, even without the hardsuit. I made that determination as my exo picked me up: wheezing, my spasming diaphragm at war with clenching ribs. A quick differential suggested that they were bruised or cracked but probably not broken, and at least not grinding.

They weren’t stabbing me in a vital organ: they could wait. Even if they had been stabbing me in a vital organ, they would have had to wait.

“I’m sorry I ever doubted you,” I whispered to my exo. It didn’t answer, because it was only a machine.

A machine that had saved my bacon yet again, because as I packed a short breath in, my head was up and my eyes open. Just in time to see the next blow coming.

I was stunned. I was winded. I was fifteen ans out of practice. But I had once been combat trained. And all that work you do to teach yourself and your hardware those reflexes does, in the later moment when you need them, pay off.

Dodging also hurts like hell when your body is no longer hardened to it. But you know what hurts even more?

Getting nailed in the face by a fast-moving mountain of nanotech. Microbots. Whatever.

I reeled inelegantly out of the way.

A quick tactical assessment of the room provided the intelligence that we were… sort of fucked, to be completely fair. I’d lost track of Helen. Rilriltok, bless it, was headed for the door. Smart; the best assistance it could give us was to get the hell out of the way. It had accomplished everything here it could, and nobody would be served if it got itself squashed, crippled, or maimed.