Элизабет Бир - Machine

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.

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?”