Элизабет Бир - Machine

I asked, “Can we help them?”

That’s an interesting question, the doctor said. They’re cryoburned.

“Are they dead?”

Rilriltok rippled its wings, then pinned them back, flicking the wing coverts closed. The hard scales blushed jewel-pink, with bright green beads of trim. Not until we thaw them out and they don’t wake up, it admitted. Technically.

“Comforting.”

I didn’t spend six ans in medical apprenticeship in order to lie to people.

It clacked its mandibles and gestured to something behind me. A Rashaqin could see in most directions with that cloud of eyes. Is this the next of kin?

I turned my head and saw Helen approaching, wringing her golden hands. A reflective and equally golden shimmer washed Rilriltok’s carapace, starting with its raptorial forelimbs and rapidly licking across its body down to the tip of its abdomen: the iridophores expanding. Color-based communication is a fascinating thing.

I waved to catch Helen’s eye… lack of eyes… and gestured her up to us. “This is Helen, yes.” I couldn’t bear to use her full pun of a name.

Any attending physician got weirder stuff than a faceless android with exaggerated gender markers for lunch. Rilriltok held out the case board that had been clutched in a couple of its smaller manipulators. Hello. I am Dr. Rilriltok, the cryonics treatment specialist. Will you authorize treatment, please?

Helen turned her eyeless gaze from the glassy surface of the tablet to my face, and back again. “I don’t know how.”

Just touch the surface, Rilriltok said. My fox translated its tone as kindness. Rilriltok always had a better bedside manner than me. We’ll do everything we can for your people. Are you the shipmind?

“N—”

“Yes,” I said. “Her people have a different word for it.”

“You’ll take care of my crew,” she said.

I will do everything I can to help them, Rilriltok said. But you have to understand that in a situation like this there are no guarantees.

Over Helen’s shoulder, I watched the next casket being plugged into the next diagnostic bay. The one beside us was uncoupled—a process that involved staff wrestling with some adaptors with the randomly colored swirls of a rush print job—and escorted by a triage nurse farther into the hospital.

Helen took a half step after it, as if dragged. For a moment, I thought she was going to have one of her meltdowns, or lockouts. But the expression on her hollows and ridges shifted faintly.

“Can I stay with them?”

It’s best if you don’t, for now, Rilriltok said. Some of the essential procedures might be distressing. We will scan them, sample their DNA, and begin growing any necessary replacement organs and limbs that may have lost function while the patients were in cryo. If we have to amputate flesh that would become gangrenous if allowed to rewarm, we will do that now. Don’t worry, though; your crew can’t feel anything in cryosleep.

Its faceted eye caught mine, and I knew what it wasn’t saying. Your crew can’t feel anything if they’re dead.

Helen went very still, a mirrored statue of a ridiculously proportioned female form. My pulse accelerated, and I forgot the ache in my ligaments. Sensing adrenaline flooding my system, my exo glided across my skin, realigning itself for explosive power. I was combat trained—years in Judiciary, after all—but I also knew I was rusty. Restraining irrational injured people was not at all like tackling actual criminals.

And tackling actual criminals was not at all like trying to stop a freaked-out AI peripheral on a rampage.

I assumed. Right then, I was hoping I never had to find out.

Helen expanded , pulsing larger like a bull impanaton drawing a deep, angry breath. I half expected her to paw and toss her horns. Her seamless body broke into disconnected plates, all hovering over a lambent core of swirling flame-colored sparks like an internal galaxy.

I thought of footage of lava welling between adhered chunks of basalt. It was all I could manage not to step back.

Rilriltok had no such ego holding it in place. It dropped off my shoulder and zipped up and backward on a diagonal several meters, the drone of its wings rising to a pitch betokening alarm.

Helen spoke in a flat, metallic tone. The sparkles of light inside her dazzled my vision. “I need. To protect. My crew.”

“Helen.” I made my voice as level and unemotional as I could, but I didn’t want to tune away the adrenaline thumping through my veins: I might need it. All I had in a situation like this was good old-fashioned training and sangfroid. “Do you have a protocol you engage to allow medical intervention to save crew members whose lives are at risk otherwise? Even if that medical intervention may be dangerous?”

“I do,” she said, leaning forward in a gesture that made my exo tighten around my body, ready to yank me out of harm’s way.

I took a deep breath, intentionally slow. I wished I could make eye contact. I’d gotten used to the shimmery facelessness on the trip home, but it was suddenly creepy as anything once more, and the shifting gleams through the open sutures dissecting it did nothing to reassure me.

They looked like they were getting wider.

“Will you believe me that we are doing everything we can to save your crew, and allow us to proceed with that work without making my crew fear for their own safety?”

I heard a series of slow, pinging clicks like cooling metal as she thought it over. I held my own breath, irrationally certain that if I moved even that much, everything would crumble and Helen would start punching her way through the staff and environments of Core General.

With a snap , the plates collapsed back into one another, and Helen was again an exaggerated mannequin, not very tall.

I heard Linden breathe a sigh of relief in my head. Oh good. Thank you for rendering it unnecessary for me to intervene, Dr. Jens.

It’s good to know you were on the job anyway, wheelmind, I said, feeling my heart begin to slow. My exo wasn’t yet quite ready to relax around me, but I rolled my shoulders back and tried to let go of some of the tension. Tension turns into pain very quickly.

Rilriltok blurred forward again, stopping over my left shoulder with such precision that it almost seemed like an animation. It said, Shipmind Helen, do you require medical care as well?

I almost copied what Tsosie had done and said yes for her. Helen obviously needed her program adjusted, and pretty badly. But she was a sovereign person under Synarche law, though one currently without the obligations of citizenship. Obligations or no obligations, she had her inalienable rights, and one of those was the right to personal sovereignty. She could refuse treatment so long as her illness did not present a danger to others.

Did it present a danger to others? Well, the jury was still deliberating that. A jury comprised of Sally and me, mostly, though Tsosie had some opinions, too. And Hhayazh was made of nothing but opinions.

I felt like the Lava Avatar Incident was a check mark in the danger-to-others column, however. And based on how quickly the wall monitor nearby had glowed with presence lights, Linden—who monitored everything in the public spaces of her wheel—seemed to agree.

Linden probably belonged on that jury, too.

“Yes,” Helen said. “I consent to treatment.”

I wondered if she’d been conferring with Sally in the interim.

The identification tag on the wall monitor presence lights told me I was dealing with Dr. Zhiruo, Core General’s most senior artificial intelligence. Someone who had been with the hospital since it was nothing more than a crazy, brilliant, idealistic plan.