Элизабет Бир - Machine

Sally seemed to agree, because my sense of peril stayed right where it was, and she could have gotten rid of it as easily as she’d defused Tsosie’s panic. How had people like those in the tanks gotten through the dia with just their own native brain chemicals and coping strategies?

If any of them were alive, I guessed I might have the chance to ask them.

“Please,” I said. “Print me a connector, Helen.” Encrypted, I asked, Sally, are you game for this?

It’s a terrible idea, she answered, so I knew she had picked up on exactly what I was planning.

I said, Just don’t hurt her if you can help it.

What if she hurts me?

Don’t let that happen, either.

I continued to make my way around the coffins—or the chest freezers—while Helen printed me a connector. Although I couldn’t access the vitals of the crew, I could double-check the integrity of the chambers.

At least in that, Helen’s confidence was justified. She’d arranged things so she didn’t have to do anything except cryo chamber maintenance. Who knew? Maybe she’d gotten very, very sick of having humans around after six hundred subjective ans. Years. Whatever.

“Helen,” I said, “why did the machine put the crew into cryosleep?”

“There was sickness. The ship wasn’t safe.” She had turned away from me, and from Tsosie, and was attentively waiting, her gaze—which wasn’t her gaze—trained back toward the hatch behind Tsosie. The machine hovered there, stretched between the airlock and me, balancing on all its rods and connectors. Staying out of trouble for the time being, I supposed.

“Structurally unsound?”

“The hull was too thin,” she agreed.

“Why was the hull too thin?”

I expected to hit another block here, but I didn’t. Whoever had programmed Helen not to understand the consequences of her own actions hadn’t thought to build denial around this.

“The materials were needed elsewhere.”

“So the hull’s structural integrity was compromised. Its strength and resilience.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Because the materials were needed to build the machine.”

“Yes.” She turned to me, shimmering gold and silver like moiré silk. “Should you go into stasis? The ship isn’t safe.”

As if I had some gift of clairvoyance, I could hear the echo of those words down the ans. I could imagine her telling her crew, “You have to go into stasis. The ship isn’t safe.”

The ship wasn’t safe because she had been taking it apart. To build the machine. A machine that was… a virus. A meme, a self-propagating set of ideas that could infect and cause sophipathology in an artificial intelligence.

A meme whose source I did not know.

But wherever it had come from, the machine was also an entity, as Helen was an entity. And as such I was duty-bound to try to rescue it—and her—and save both their a-lives if I could.

“I’m safe,” I told her. “I have my hardsuit on.”

“I think you should go into stasis,” she began to insist.

But she hadn’t countermanded her previous instruction. “Oh, look,” I said. “Here’s the connector.”

The machine snaked out and handed it to me. It was a fat, physical cable. I plugged one end into my suit jack, and it fit. I crouched beside the nearest cryo chamber, and felt Sally massing herself inside my fox, a grumpy wall of code who couldn’t believe what I had gotten her into.

You put me up to this, she said. Just remember that.

Do you want to go into cryo? I asked her.

The machine was grabbing for my wrist as I plugged the cable in.

What happened next wasn’t my fight, and I don’t really know how to describe my position as an observer. Because while it wasn’t my fight, it was happening in my head. I was the conduit for it, and the bandwidth Sally was using to bootstrap herself into Big Rock Candy Mountain ’s system was the bandwidth between my fox and her—well, what amounted to her physical body. The ambulance, in other words, and the processors inside it.

Synarche ships are pretty much made of four things: programmable computronium, engines, life-support consumables, and upholstery. I mean, okay: I’m not an engineer. The upholstery might be computronium, also.

But I’m not computronium. My fox—the little network of wonders embedded in my central nervous system—is, and a useful wodge of the stuff, too. It’s deeply linked to everything I am and do and see and think and feel and remember. It ties me into the senso so I can share experiences with Sally and my crewmates. It lets me live their experiences, if they share their ayatanas with me. It helps keep me emotionally stable and it helps me remember things accurately, without the subjectivity of human recollection.

It’s a damned knife blade of a bridge for an entire fucking shipmind to stuff herself across at lightspeed so she can grapple another shipmind and wrestle her to the metaphorical ground.

And I wasn’t good for anything at all while it was happening.

I stayed there, frozen in a crouch, while Sally poured herself through the electronic portions of my psyche like… I can’t even think of a metaphor. It was a good thing I was under gravity, because if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to keep myself from drifting off into space and bumping things randomly. If I concentrated really hard, I could force my eyes to focus. That was it. That was all I was good for. But after a second or two I’d have to refocus them, because I was slumping ever so slowly toward the deck.

And whatever was going on between Sally and Helen—or Sally and the machine—was happening on the other side of me, and far too fast for my conscious mind to maintain any awareness of.

“Llyn,” Tsosie said, “I really think that we should leave.”

As if I could, I thought at him fiercely, wondering if I’d even managed to subvocalize.

“There’s more bots massing outside the airlock, Llyn! A lot more! I don’t know if she’s making them or just packing the vicinity. But if I had to guess I’d say she was getting ready to rush you.”

Well, that was comforting. Wait, had Tsosie gone back out through the airlock while I was distracted? I hadn’t told him to do that.

I hadn’t told him not to, either. And checking our six wasn’t a bad idea. At least he hadn’t taken off and left me here.

That’s unfair to Tsosie, I told myself. I guess I was feeling pretty vulnerable and maybe even scared, locked down in my body like that with nowhere to go and no control.

After half a million ans, give or take, I found I could tell if I was breathing again. I had been; it was a relief to be certain. Sally?

I’m in. I just need enough bandwidth to communicate with myself, now.

“Great,” I muttered. “I was thinking about switching careers. I can be a corpus callosum.”

Something like a giant fist thundered against the exterior airlock door. I couldn’t hear it, but I felt it through the deck. I managed to turn my head. Tsosie was not in the airlock. Helen had gone back there.

The door dented, but didn’t break. It seemed unlikely that I was getting back out that way.

The outer wall of the cargo bay was nothing but hull, though. There had to be an airlock in it. In addition to whatever massive doors had been built to move bulk cargo in and out under freefall conditions.

Jens! Tsosie yelled in my head. Evacuate!

“Just a sec.” I bent down to get my sensors closer to the connection between the coffin and the bulkhead. If the chambers had been built into the ship, I wasn’t sure what we could do to move them. Cutting lasers, maybe.