Элизабет Бир - Machine

“If you knew that you wouldn’t have pushed the wrong buttons.” Hhayazh rattled its exoskeleton, a sound like the hollow carved windchimes people on my homeworld made out of native plant cellulose. It was a social cue with all sorts of meanings, like human facial expressions, and I hadn’t even begun sorting them out.

“What actually happened?” I asked.

“Equipment malfunction,” Sally said. “I’ll show you later.”

When Camphvis emerged completely around the hatchway, I saw that she was carrying a tray. Nothing complicated, just the hot, calorie-dense nutritive broth that spacers called “soup.” It wasn’t soup, but was profoundly welcome nonetheless.

Tsosie picked his up at once. I was still fighting with my hardsuit. They were supposed to peel themselves back into the actuator, but exposure to grit or something was causing it to hang up on my exo.

“Seriously.” I pretzeled myself into another awkward position. “What went wrong?”

Hhayazh, with surgical expertise, got the jammed bit unhooked and snatched its manipulators out of the way as the thing clam-shelled shut with a snap. “Go to bed,” it said. “You can ask questions when you’re not too tired to understand the answers.”

I traded Camphvis my actuator for a cup of soup. Her eyestalks twitched to focus on it. I was totally creating a distraction, because I was still working on my comeback to Hhayazh. Our Nazzish flight surgeon, Dr. Rhym, saved me from humiliation by climbing down the ladder from Sally’s hub into the gravity of the rim. (If you’re bantering and it takes you more than fifteen seconds to return a serve, you definitely lost.)

Rhym resembled a feathery tree stump, but moved with surprising agility. The long woodsy toes on their four feet wrapped the rungs in a prehensile fashion, leaving the manipulatory tendrils on what a human would have considered a face to gesticulate. They seemed as if they were talking to Sally privately: it wasn’t translated for the rest of us, and the wriggling stopped when they reached the deck.

I was bent over, working my swollen feet out of my boots. They should have retracted with the rest of the hardsuit. They hadn’t, and were stiff and not shaped for easy removal. The pressure hurt, and pushing against them to try to escape the pressure hurt.

“I’ll make sure this gets serviced,” Camphvis said, eyeballing the actuator suspiciously.

“Just take it apart and reprint it,” Hhayazh said.

Dr. Rhym was about my height in my current crouched position.

“Our patient-guests are stowed, and the peripheral has been brought aboard!” Even their translated voice sounded enthusiastic. “Dr. Jens, would you like some assistance?”

“Well, yes,” I proclaimed, and straightened up to hold on to the rungs on the opposite wall while Rhym scooted over to me.

They moved fast, each leg working independently of the others in a kind of scuttle or zoom . In moments, their manipulatory tendrils uncoiled and eased inside the left boot, gently prying it loose from my exo, which had gotten snagged on the lining. I sighed in relief as the thing came off.

Rhym is a very good surgeon. What I’d been struggling with for minutes they accomplished in instants. And they didn’t even use a knife.

I went to lie down.

It was my exo moving me at that point as much as me moving it, and I could kid myself that I picked up annoyance and worry through our link. I told myself that I was anthropomorphizing, but people used to assign personalities to ships and houses long before ships and houses had them, and there was a semi-AI processing engine in my exo. A small, uncomplicated one, without curiosity or an artificial personality. There wasn’t much room in there, and anyway can you imagine how terrible it would be for a person with agency to be stuck going through life as an assistive device?

Usually, before I went to bed, I’d tune down my pain management and see how my body was doing on the other side of the fuzzy wall of endorphins and interventions. This time, I didn’t: I knew what the answer was going to be.

I lay down on a patient bed in one of Sally’s two care units. This was not the usual bunk assigned to humans. We hot-swapped, and I traded off with Loese and Tsosie. But Tsosie was as tired as I was, and Loese wasn’t off her rest shift yet. I wouldn’t fit in Rhym’s bunk, Camphvis used gel blankets to keep her membranous skin moist, and Hhayazh’s species weren’t sleepers. So I got a bed big enough for a Thunderby, and even if it was a little hard, I didn’t complain—just printed off as many sterile blankets as we had consumables for and made a nest on top. I’d recycle the molecules later.

Then I plugged my exo in to charge, piped into it, and started checking up on my aching body to see if any of it was anything serious, or merely the usual combination of inflammation and polyarthralgia, before I dialed them down or, where I could manage it, turned them off.

My exo, predictably, had a little lecture waiting for me. Todia’s exertions have exceeded this unit’s filtering capabilities. Recommend extended rest, and a maintenance cycle.

“I can’t do the extended rest right now, kid. Put me in for eight hours and authorize the maintenance cycle.”

Lack of adequate rest will likely lead to worsening discomfort and is against medical advice.

“So is everything fun.”

This unit does not understand the response.

I sighed. “Acknowledged, patient’s decision is against medical advice.” Patient is a damn internist herself, robot . Also, I could get plenty of sleep on the trip home. Right now, we still had a second space ship to recon.

And yelling at my exo wouldn’t help. I turned both the room lights and my pain response down. Nothing was busted: it was all just inflamed. Life is like that. I reached into senso to pull up a paper on Adrychrym circulatory systems. It was a boring paper: I meant to read myself to sleep. If I could get all the noisy doctors in my head to concentrate on medicine, they wouldn’t keep me awake.

I should have unloaded the ayatanas, I know. But I was too tired, and I was going to need them again tomorrow.

I was pushing my way through a badly written extract when I was interrupted by the small throat-clearing beep our shipmind uses when she’s about to enter a conversation and doesn’t want to startle anybody.

“Llyn, go to sleep,” Sally said. “Or I will make you.”

“I was sleeping,” I said.

“You were reading.”

“I was reading myself to—oh, never mind.” I’d wake up groggy if I used my fox to send myself to sleep, but it wasn’t worth fighting with the shipmind over. I tuned up the relevant hormones, and was gone before I had to listen to her rejoinder.

Tsosie was right: we did get a lot more popular with Helen once we retrieved her people from the bottomless waste of space. She wasn’t as happy when Sally immediately put them into her own storage rather than bringing them back to Big Rock Candy Mountain , or so Sally told us after our rest cycle.

Helen didn’t say anything about it to Tsosie or me—or the rest of the crew—because Sally kept her out of our way. The peripheral sat quietly in a corner of the ambulance, cabled to a bulkhead, sharing Sally’s sensorium. It’s always hazardous to assign human emotions to nonhuman sentiences, but Helen was modeled on a human psyche. And it seemed to me that her body language became less and less reactive and more composed as more and more of her people were moved on board Sally. And the more Sally let her experience the natural environment of space the same way Sally did.