Элизабет Бир - Machine

It was hard to be constantly reminded that they weren’t just corpsicles. They weren’t just cargo. They were people. People we might or might not be able to save.

I had to tune down my worry so I could think clearly. As I did, it occurred to me that Helen had been silent for a fairly long time. Had she shut down again? “Helen? Are you still with me?”

“I was thinking about historians,” she said. “It’s so strange and wonderful that you lived. That you built all this. That you found”—she lowered her voice and gestured toward the control cabin, where Camphvis and Rhym were helping Loese—“aliens.”

Technically speaking, the aliens had found us. But I girded my loins, gritted my teeth, exerted all the power of my masterful will, and managed not to correct her. “You didn’t expect to find anyone else out here.”

“Are you absolutely certain that humanity survived on Earth? My records show that it was impossible.”

I admit it: I laughed.

But I also knew the answer without even checking my fox. I’d done a little research since visiting Big Rock Candy Mountain. Sally’s library was pared down, but she had the basics. Including a history of Terra. Or Earth, if you prefer.

I’d boned up. What a weird idiom.

“We nearly didn’t,” I said. “There was a population bottleneck, and Terra’s human population crashed from something over nine billion to a few hundred million.”

“That sounds terrible,” she said politely. “I am so sorry for your loss.”

“This was long before I was born, you understand, and I’ve never been to Terra. But my ancestors were among the lucky ones who realized that humanity needed to grow up.”

“Grow up? But you are an adult.”

“As a wise person once said: Adulthood begins when you look at the mess you’ve made and realize that the common element in all the terrible things that have gone wrong in your life is you . The choices you have made; the shortcuts you have taken; the times you have been lazy or selfish or not taken steps to mitigate damage, or have neglected to care for the community. As a species, the immature decisions we made contributed to the collapse of our own population and the radical alteration of our biosphere. Running away to space at sublight speeds was a desperate move. It made more sense and was more sustainable in the long run to fix the evolutionary issues in our own psyches that led us into irrational, hierarchal, and self-destructive choices.”

“I don’t understand,” Helen said.

I said, “My ancestors figured out how to hack into their own nervous systems and correct or ameliorate a lot of sophipathologies.”

Helen cocked her shining non-face at me. The question was evident.

“Sophipathologies. Antisocial behaviors, atavistic illnesses of the thought process. Maladaptive ideations. Once the population was stabilized and the immediate crises passed, they realized that it was possible to keep people operating in the state of altruism we’d already evolved to engage in during disasters. The architecture was already there in the brain: it was a matter of activating and using it.

“They were also pretty ready to discard existing systems of government, as it was evident that hierarchies and cronyism and the exploitation of the system by kleptocrats was a universal feature of every model tried so far. But they were already changing human nature—well, they were accelerating and universalizing the process of adulthood, shall we say. What some cultures used to call enlightenment . Which is basically sharing your stuff and playing well with others.”

“And now everybody does this.” Her disbelief was polite, but definite. Apparently even a primitive AI could manage to be a little arch when confronted with human self-aggrandizement.

I thought about pirates and criminals and all the… insufficiently rightminded folks I had met when I was in the Judiciary. “Er. No. I mean, Judiciary can enforce rightminding on convicted criminals as a condition of release. And mostly people, given the chance and appropriate social support structures, will elect to not be mentally ill.”

“Who defines mental illness?” Her bosom heaved a little less with breathless interest. Or maybe I was getting used to it.

“That is the subject of some controversy, as it happens. But social health and hygiene do tend to reinforce themselves. As they did once our ancestors developed the technology to fiddle with their own neurochemistry. They built a more egalitarian government based on service rather than authority, salvaged the remains of technological society, and within a couple of generations had invented the Alcubierre-White drive.”

“That sounds very tidy.”

I found myself frowning at her. That sounded very skeptical, for the vacant service personality we’d first encountered. Was she becoming… more astute?

Sally, are you loaning Helen processing space?

Sally was bad at not sounding shifty. Maybe a little.

You might have mentioned it.

I am the responsible physician.

She was, indeed. The responsible physician.

I said, “In the process of exploring the galaxy they eventually met up with the Synarche, which used a more refined and advanced but grossly similar governmental model, and we became galactic Synizens.”

“That’s brainwashing,” Helen said dubiously.

“That’s what acculturation is,” I answered cheerily. “Tell me about your historians?”

After a long pause, Helen settled into herself, shimmering faintly, and admitted, “I have gaps.”

“I won’t judge.” I’d made it through the conversation on eugenics without tossing her into space. What was the worst that could happen?

“It’s not considered an essential primary.”

I rubbed the back of my hand, feeling dry skin and the slick rise of my exo over it. I needed to exercise better self-care. And moisturize.

With that same supreme effort of my masterful will, I managed not to make any comments about history and the repeating thereof. I waited, and Helen seemed to be thinking hard, so I didn’t interrupt her.

Finally, she said, “There’s Specialist First Rank Calliope Jones. She’s a systems architect, and she secondaries as a historian. She’s very bright. I think you will like her.”

I might never get to meet her, but I didn’t say that. Filtering my speech for Helen was becoming second nature. Even if Specialist Jones survived rewarming, the odds were not in favor of my finding myself on her treatment team. I’d be back out in space again, zooming around the Core with Sally and the rescue rangers.

I didn’t think Helen needed the reminder that the continuity of our relationship was not assured. So I asked, “Is she with us?”

“She is,” Helen said. “Chamber 8186-A. I could show you!”

“Maybe later. Why don’t you tell me about the rest of the crew we’ve rescued? That will give me a much better idea of who they are than I can get from looking at the outside of a cryo unit. But first let me get some more tea. No, you stay there. I can handle it.”

Helen’s account of the life of Specialist Jones was more than a little garbled, but since I was mostly trying to get her to talk, stay oriented, and begin processing her new environment, it didn’t matter. I got her to tell me the life stories of all our corpsicles, and tried not to let myself get attached to any of them.

She told me about Patrika Thomas, who was a systems engineer trainee; and about Joseph Meadows, a manufacturer; and Lyndsay Bohacz, in biosystems; and Call Reznik, a medic. She told me about their families, and their hobbies, and their aspirations—as much as she recalled.