Элизабет Бир - Machine

Since I’d insisted on rescuing her, the rest of Sally’s crew seemed unified in their opinion that entertaining the peripheral with PTSD was my problem. Sally was our AI medic, and she still had access to Helen’s code and was teaching herself the archaic language Helen was programmed in. I was confident that Sally was doing everything she could to patch up Helen’s psyche—and, in fact, Helen seemed to be getting more focused and coherent and less like a brain trauma patient as Sally went to work on her operating system. And possibly her processors as well. I didn’t have the skills to know what was going on inside that peripheral, and since she wasn’t my patient, privacy dictated that I not ask Sally unless I needed the information professionally.

I did know that it would be incredibly traumatic and would cause a lot of data loss for any modern AI to be constrained in a physical plant as small as Helen’s body. Perhaps arrogantly, I assumed Big Rock Candy Mountain wouldn’t have miniaturization on the level the Synarche did, which meant the processors in Helen must be bursting, and her working memory badly overstressed. It must have been equally traumatic when the microbots hived off—or when she chose to hive them off. An AI couldn’t suffer a psychotic break, exactly. But they had their own varieties of sophipathology, and dissociation of their various subroutines into disparate personalities was definitely one that had been well-testified in the literature.

Even I, who did not have Sally’s expertise in her specialty, knew that.

Whatever the relationship between Helen and the tinkertoys, the machine didn’t seem to communicate verbally. That was Helen’s sole province. When she wasn’t aphasic, I mean. So as part of her therapy, I wound up designated to communicate verbally with her.

When Sally assigned me, I thought about protesting. But if I didn’t do it, somebody else would have to. And it wasn’t that onerous, even if I’m much better at prying people out of critically damaged space ships than I have ever been at making small talk.

Maybe that’s why I like play-by-packet games: you have all the time in the world to come up with something to say.

My duties were pretty light when we weren’t actually mid-rescue and there were no patients in need of treatment. I wasn’t a specialist in rightminding or in treating artificial persons—Sally was our AI MD—but I had the time on my hands, so I spent a fair amount of it talking to Helen.

At first, she ignored me. I knew she was aware of my presence, because Sally was also keeping tabs on her, and making herself available for conversation. (We existed, that whole flight, in an abundance of preparedness.) Helen seemed to find Sally stressful and weird, though, so Sally kept her presence light.

I preferred Helen’s silence to hearing her repeat her fixed ideations, at least, and I kept at it. And I could, with Sally’s guidance, help lay the foundation for the data docs when we arrived at home.

So I sat with her and chatted. At her more than with her, at first. With Sally’s assistance, I knew the right leading questions to ask, and if she didn’t answer, I could tune myself to be more patient than I had been made. I quizzed her on our human cargo, her crew. The crew she was so fiercely loyal to that she’d sealed them into boxes to save them from… herself? From the poisonous meme that had infected her? Or had she hived off the thing she called the machine in order to manage her own cognitive dissonance about saving her crew by freezing them?

I wasn’t even quite sure where to begin unpacking that.

Helen also seemed to look at me—inasmuch as an eyeless face can—and listen when I told her about white space, which I took to mean she was interested in the science. I might have tried to explain the physics, but I didn’t understand those, either. So I encouraged Helen to strike up a relationship with Loese, and while they talked I got my rest shift in.

Shipminds don’t sleep, you see. Even shipminds trapped in their peripherals, who have forgotten that they were ever shipminds to begin with.

Assuming that’s what Helen was.

Naturally, I was asleep when the first interesting thing happened. In my own bunk, for once, with Tsosie and Loese on shift for the time being. I didn’t stay asleep long, though, because the g forces woke me.

When you spend as much time on a ship as I do, you get to know its moods and sensations. I surfaced from dreams of eating lunch with my daughter back planetside to the hazy awareness that Sally had fallen out of white space and was dropping v , my internal organs sloshing to the side in a slightly uncomfortable fashion. Ordinarily, I might have turned over under the net and gone back to sleep. But, down the corridor, I could hear people in ops, talking.

I slithered out of bed and didn’t bother with slippers. My pajamas shushed around my ankles as I padded under light gravity toward the command module. Rhym was there, and Camphvis stretched out in her acceleration couch, alert eyestalks the only indication that she was conscious.

A glance at the scans showed me that we’d dropped out of white space at a mass in order to change vectors, pick up a beacon, and dump some v . There was a star nearby, a red giant whose dim glow and massive size let us see details of the atmosphere.

And Rhym and Sally were talking to someone. It was Sally’s voice, mellow and carrying, that I had heard in my half-awake state and followed.

“…Singer, copy,” Sally was finishing.

Another ship’s voice answered her: this one a human-sounding tenor, without the tinny ring of translation. Another ox ship, then, and another at-least-partially human-crewed ox ship. “Sally, glad to run across you. And thank you for the updated sitrep. Anything else you’d like us to know?”

“Negative,” she responded. “Good fortune on your journeys and with your investigations.”

“Good fortune on yours,” the other ship responded. “My crew extends wishes that you return home safely, and that your patients thrive. Singer out.”

I settled on my couch and leaned over to Camphvis. “Who’s that?”

“Somebody famous!” she answered, brow tufts quivering with delight.

Rhym leaned about half of their feathery tendrils in our direction. “That is the shipmind of I Rise From Ancestral Night . They’re ferrying our archinformists!”

Even translation couldn’t flatten the excitement in their voice. Senso normally provided context, but Rhym and I had worked together so long now that we could read each other’s moods pretty well, even across a nonmorphologically aligned species barrier. And I understood why everybody was so thrilled. This was the ship that had recently been discovered parked in stasis near the Saga-star itself. We’d had some of her crew at the hospital for a while after that adventure—and not in the best of shape, or so I’d heard.

“Apparently,” said Sally, “the archinformists were all already on board, so it was easy to divert them here.”

Well, naturally. Where else would you find a lot of archaeologists but at the galaxy’s most interesting archaeological site?

The next dia’s session with Helen started off like every other so far. After I ate, I took my second bulb of tea over to where Helen was floating, out of the way against the aft bulkhead. I mourned my lack of coffee. There was one place—one—on Core General where humans could go for the devil bean. Its air was scrubbed before recirculating and you had to rinse your mouth out with wash before leaving.

I understand. I do understand. The Sneckethans eat nothing but rancid space fish, and we make them use their own cafeteria also. They’re pretty good sports about it, so the least humans can do is be good sports about coffee. The smell of tea doesn’t inspire the same hatred in our fellow sentients, and I’ve gotten used to it. I come from a coffee-drinking settlement, though. We even grew it onworld, for consumption and export. Suitably isolated from the local biosphere, naturally.