Элизабет Бир - Machine

I was sure she still wasn’t happy. Nor would I be, in her place, with most of my crew left behind. Nor was I, standing in my own shoes, with so many people left unrescued.

You can always get one more out.

Until you can’t. And it’s not easy to know where the line between “saving one more” and “dying yourself” is.

We could have left once we had a full load of patients. Could have—Helen wasn’t capable of stopping us as long as Sally had her in restraint. But we waited for the additional relief ships to arrive, because to do otherwise would have amounted to the extremest mental cruelty to Helen and to the machine.

And we were all curious, and wanted a look at that docked, silent methane ship. Even though she wasn’t answering our hails, there might be people on board her, also. It was such a huge rescue job that we couldn’t do everything at once and had to prioritize. Triage.

With Helen’s help and Sally’s override, part of the microbot machine was packed up in boxes and loaded in external holds; Sally told us that its personality core was both integrated with Helen’s and distinct from her. It was quite nonhuman in its construction, and while Sally didn’t seem to have any problem communicating with it, she also didn’t seem to be able to easily translate its concepts and logical processes for us meat types.

She did say we’d gotten enough of its processing power to preserve its personality core. If anything should happen to the rest of it, it would be able to reconstruct itself.

What can I say? AI medicine is weird.

The human patients were going to have to stay frozen for the time being. Though I wanted to thaw them out. And Hhayazh really wanted to thaw them out.

But all we needed was a virulent influenza from six hundred ans ago that nobody has any immunity to anymore, or something similar. I know we all have diar when we’re tempted to take definitive action… but wiping out humanity with a primitive plague wasn’t on our agenda. Neither was killing a lot of ice people because we couldn’t wait to defrost them until we got someplace with the most advanced medical technology in the galaxy.

The pods were decontaminated, and they would wait to be opened until we got back to Core.

Rhym tried to argue me into letting them do the EV to the methane ship, since we had no patients suitable for them to operate on. They maintained that Tsosie and I still needed rest. I pointed out that I still had the ayatanas loaded. We could have been caught in a stalemate for a standard month, but Sally pulled up the drone surveys and showed us a ship interior more suitable for long lanky types than squat broad-circumferenced ones, thereby resolving the argument in my favor.

She did insist that I eat and let my exo and hardsuit both finish full maintenance cycles before I went out, though. The exo was nearly done, and Camphvis, good to her word, had set up the hardsuit. But I suspected that Sally had conveniently not remembered to trigger the disassembly and reprint, in order to keep me indoors for another few hours.

I mean, sure, it’s supposed to be on my checklist. But she’s the AI.

I was halfway through breakfast—no coffee, drop it all down the Well, because coffee smells terrible to most syster species, so I was making do with tea—before I remembered to ask her what had gone wrong the previous dia. “Sally. When you lost contact with us. You said you would explain later. What happened?”

Sally paused, which is a thing AIs do when they’re communicating with humans, because it makes us more comfortable if they operate at our speed. Then she said, “I’m not precisely sure.”

“But you fixed it. I mean, you got back in touch with us.”

“I routed around it,” she said. “With Loese’s help. And then I forgot about it.”

That, in conjunction with the delay on maintaining my hardsuit, made me sit upright. It’s a good thing we weren’t in free fall, because I dropped my spoon and nobody likes oatmeal floating into their hair. Things did not slip Sally’s mind.

“I think I better have a look at this,” I said, trying to ignore the chill of unease I felt.

“Get Loese to show you,” Sally said. “She looked at it yesterdia.”

I got Loese to show me.

She was around in the control cabin, which is mostly where we congregated when we weren’t sleeping, eating, or working. I had to make a halfway circuit of Sally’s circumference to get there, so it took me a whole two minutes. Maybe ninety seconds. Sally is big for a starship, but that doesn’t make her big .

Loese had black hair and unusually pale skin and a butch presentation. I found her bent over panels, her afthands immersed in their interface while she worked course calculations. Loese is a spacer by upbringing, and has the usual spacer mods: it must be seriously irritating to her to be stuck on Sally with her constant simulated spin gravity.

On the other hand, maybe it’s fun to zip around the galaxy on an ambulance. No speed limits for us, except for physics. And nobody makes Loese buy her own fuel.

“Hey,” I said when she looked up. “When you get a break, can you take me to see whatever went wrong yesterdia? Sally said you hadn’t fixed it yet.”

“Sure,” Loese said. “We can go right now. Just let me pause this. And since we’ve got functional coms back, I wasn’t going to fix it until we got back to Core. To preserve the evidence.”

“The evidence,” I said, startled enough that it didn’t register with me that I ought to be asking a question. I was repeating the words that didn’t make sense, in an experimental fashion.

Loese looked at me. “Sally didn’t tell you.”

“Sally told me it was an equipment failure and sent me to bed. What didn’t Sally tell me?”

“Come see for yourself,” Loese said. “Sally?”

“Here, Loese.”

Loese led me farther around the ring, and aft. We opened a hatch that led to a little room too small for both of us to enter at once. It was an equipment access and storage space, and we wound up unclipping and moving a few duffel crates of things we used too regularly for it to be worth printing them every time we wanted them before we got to the back of it.

When they were out of the way, I could see scorch marks in the ship’s grippy interior sheathing. Somebody had scored the material and peeled it back to expose the workings underneath. Sally was supposed to be self-healing, but either she’d shut it off or that function was compromised.

“You opened this?” I asked Loese.

“There’s a superconductor path under here,” Loese said. “A lot of electricity wound up going places it shouldn’t have.”

“How is that possible? It’s not live, is it? And why isn’t it healing?”

She moved back so I could step past her. “Sally can’t find it. Based on what you told me, it sounds like she can’t even remember what’s wrong.”

“That sounds like brain damage,” I said, and had a sudden unsettling memory of Helen talking around the programmed blocks that didn’t allow her to see what a part of her own… self… was doing. “But how—”

“Sabotage,” Loese said, succinctly and reluctantly.

“The docked ship?” I asked. “Wait, Helen ?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing out here. It must have been in progress before Sally made any contact with Helen or the machine on Big Rock Candy Mountain .”

She seemed to realize that her revelation would trigger a whole cascade of questions, because she continued, “And I don’t think any of you did it: I think it must have been put in place back at Core. I think somebody hid a device with a timer or some other kind of trigger in Sally, so that she lost coms with you and Tsosie while you were outside. And then put some kind of worm or logic bomb in her code so she would not be able to tell what was happening.”