Элизабет Бир - Machine

They didn’t seem to envy me mine, either.

Rhym, being a surgeon, was in the fortunate position of having the wrong specialized skills for all the unpleasant jobs this trip. But they were making themselves useful monitoring the cryo units. Loese was prowling around and poking into panels more than usual, and had been since the situation with triage and rescue settled down a little. I probably would have been, too, if I’d had the know-how.

We had all been a little on edge in the wake of Sally’s memory lapse surrounding her sabotage, and as a result were all still doing a lot more eyes-on inspection and hands-on maintenance than we usually would have. Competent shipminds take care of so much routine nonsense so much more meticulously than meatminds ever could that folks can get a little lazy, especially on a civilian ship where you don’t expect to be dealing with criminals, pirates, or invading forces. And it let us show her we cared.

I was distracting myself from thinking about Helen, because thinking about Helen bothered me. I gritted my teeth and tuned my discomfort down. I knew it was my own ethnocentrism and cultural relativism causing the trigger response, which didn’t help me at all with the conviction that I was right and these creepy assholes from the past were wrong. I believe, indeed, that it was a person from the premodern era, somebody who had to live with his own brain chemicals the way misfortune made them, who commented that it was barbarians who thought that the customs of their tribe and island were the laws of nature.

I still thought the programmers were assholes . And that their culture was probably a terrible place for women to live.

“I can’t wait for you to meet them,” Helen said brightly. She had apparently decided, after dia upon dia of me sitting there and asking her about her crew while she impersonated an erotic statue, that she wanted to tell me all about them.

Well, I’d asked for it.

Sally definitely owed me one.

HELEN DIDN’T NEED REST. BUT I did, and Sally wouldn’t let me get away with skimping on it in anything short of a life-or-death emergency. Frustrating as it was to be hustled off to bed when I felt like we were finally making a breakthrough with Helen, I also knew better than to try to outstubborn a shipmind.

The next shift after breakfast, though, I planned to be back at it. And with a considerably improved attitude now that there had been some progress. As I sipped my tea, a reminder popped up, rather startling me because I had forgotten I’d set it. I guess that’s why they call them reminders. As I was drifting off to sleep the previous shift, I’d remembered something Helen had said back on Big Rock Candy Mountain , and I’d actually left myself a note in my fox to follow up. Victory!

Helen wandered in a moment later and sat down opposite me. She angled her head but said nothing: I guessed that she was waiting. Maybe I wasn’t the only one with a sense that we might be making progress, or at least a connection. The questions she was asking bothered me deeply—but at least she was asking questions.

“Helen,” I said. “May I ask you a personal question?”

“That has the air of a formal request, Dr. Jens. Is this… courtesy?”

“It’s considered polite to allow people to opt in or out of conversations,” I agreed. “Especially on matters that might be thought of as, er, nobody else’s business.”

“I will not be offended by your questions. My purpose is to keep my crew safe, and to respond to inquiries.”

“Right.” I finished the last tepid sip of tea. “Back on Big Rock Candy Mountain , you mentioned ‘Central.’ Would you tell me more about Central, Helen?”

“Oh.” Her head tilted from side to side. “Of course. Only… most of the data I have stored in this peripheral relates either to my proper functioning, or to the history and well-being of the crew members who are accompanying us. A great deal was of necessity left behind and will have to be recovered when I return to my ship.”

So she was, as we had more or less expected to learn, closely linked to the machine. Part of the same data architecture that was eating itself, like a mechanical ouroboros.

“Just tell me whatever you can, please.”

“Central is our library. It is where the memories are kept.”

Maybe they did have something like ayatana technology, then. “Your memories? Crew memories?”

“Crew logs,” she said, obviously thinking she was agreeing with me. “Backups. Scientific and historical records. Literature, both from Earth and from the wandering.”

I wasn’t overly concerned with history, and I Rise From Ancestral Night and his crew were en route to deal with the issue of data preservation. The shipmind, Singer, had managed to rewrite his own code to operate the ancient alien ship: I was pretty sure he and his crew could manage to unpick primitive human code.

Also, they would enjoy it, while I found it impossibly stultifying to contemplate all that old stuff. I imagined they would all feel a little thrill when they confronted an entire starship full of primary documents, unseen in something like a millennian. “Our archinformists are going to be very eager to swap packets with you.”

Helen didn’t answer immediately, but tilted her head at me in that uncomfortably flirtatious manner that I was coming to recognize as confusion. “What is ‘swap packets,’ please?”

“Uh.” I bit my lip. “Exchange information?”

“And what is an archinformist?”

“Someone who specializes in accessing, recovering, and interpreting ancient data.”

“A historian!” She was so pleased with herself that I didn’t want to correct her.

“A sort of historian,” I agreed, which was close enough to accurate that I didn’t feel I was being misleading.

The pleased tone still resonating, Helen said, “I have several historians among my crew.”

I knew it was a long shot, but it would give her something to focus on, so I still found myself asking, “Are any of them here on Sally?”

The odds of being able to rewarm Helen’s crew successfully hadn’t improved since we brought the coffins aboard. And now I was worried about Master Chief Dwayne Carlos as a human person and pipefitter, not as a patient-shaped abstract. So why was I asking Helen about our other passengers? I would just wind up fretting about them in turn.

On the other hand, talking about her crew was the one thing that seemed to concretize and ground Helen, even as limited as her processing power was, separated from the rest of her brain.

I wondered if the machine was the equivalent of her subconscious, and if so, how dangerous it would be to the other rescue and salvage crews working on Big Rock Candy Mountain without her there to guide it, or if it would lie quiescently. Sally’s override was still in place, and Ruth would have no problem using it. Everything would probably be fine.

Sally telling me about Master Chief Carlos had made me feel a personal connection to him. Feeling connected to Master Chief Carlos, by extension, made me feel connected to the rest of the crew. Helen obviously cared deeply about them, no matter if the expression of that care jarred me with its awkward sexuality. And her caring about them made me care about them in turn.

I mean, more than I always care for my patients.

There’s a certain level of professional detachment that gets you through a job like mine, and that detachment is a skill I have cultivated.

It was unsettling to feel so connected with a freight of corpsicles. And the shipload of corpsicles we’d left behind. And I knew it would only get worse, the more I found out about each of them as individuals.