Элизабет Бир - Machine

I absolutely wasn’t intimidated in the slightest.

That’s a lie.

“Oh, here’s the AI doc,” I said, and added, “Hello, Doctor,” toward the wall.

“Hello, Doctor,” she replied, in tones of mellow amusement. “I understand you have an unusual case for us.”

Quickly, as efficiently as I could, I filled her in on Helen—a little constrained because Helen was standing right there, but one thing medical training knocks out of you is too much self-consciousness (sometimes it knocks out all the politeness, too, and I hoped I was falling on the right side of that line)—and on the machine, a sample of which was still boxed up neatly in that Faraday crate in Sally’s hold. It seemed to stay quiet—quiescent—as long as we could keep it from talking to the outside, or contacting its own components.

I couldn’t quite tell if Helen was listening intently or if she had folded inward again. I didn’t mention the incident we’d witnessed, because I knew Linden would fill Dr. Zhiruo in. I did mention that Helen was uncomfortable with unbodied AIs, and that her culture was strongly inclined toward the use of peripherals.

Sally would have already given Dr. Zhiruo a full report, so I didn’t feel the need to warn her about Helen’s uncanny relationship with the machine, and whatever had gone wrong with her—their?—programming that led to the progressive deconstruction of the ship.

As I had hoped, by the time I finished telling the wall monitor about our rescue operation and introducing Helen’s background, Dr. Zhiruo had shown up driving a peripheral of her own.

It was a great deal less exaggerated than Helen’s chassis, but Dr. Zhiruo had chosen a humanoid model, which I thought was a good choice given Helen’s limited cultural referents. The peripheral had a dark gray polymer skin; narrow, even features; a genderless body under a chiton-like robe printed to emulate “natural” undyed fabric. The eyes were dark glass lenses, unreflective apertures in the neutral face.

Dr. Zhiruo held out a hand and smiled. It was a smile you might imagine on a deva: distant, controlled, serene. “Please come with me, Helen. I promise I will take very good care of you.”

Rilriltok and I watched them leave until they vanished through a decompression door, and Zhiruo’s presence lights blinked out.

I felt a little guilty at how thankful I was to realize that Helen Alloy and her quicksilver bosoms were somebody else’s problem now. I reminded myself that it wasn’t unreasonable to experience a reduction in anxiety when relieved of a responsibility for which one wasn’t really qualified. I let out the breath I’d been holding too long for comfort and said, “So what now?”

The Rashaqin zipped around me to hover at eye level, the breeze from its blurring wings stretching tendrils of my hair. I saw my dishabille reflected multiply in compound eyes and had to smile. DNA scans! it said brightly. Want to come?

IDID WANT TO GO, BUT unfortunately I felt the press of responsibility toward less medically interesting duties. Regretfully, I took my leave of my old friend. I stopped by my on-hospital quarters and showered and dressed in scrubs and a lab coat, then headed toward the office of my other old friend, Master Chief O’Mara, the head of ox sector’s Emergency Department. My boss.

I sent them a message requesting an urgent appointment and got an immediate confirmation. My door is open.

As I walked, I thought about the patient who shared O’Mara’s title—Dwayne Carlos, the master pipefitter. I sent a note to Rilriltok while I was thinking about it, asking that—if Sally was in port—I be allowed to be present when he rewarmed Helen’s crew members. I felt like I owed them that, having brought them in from the cold. If they lived, and considering where they came from, it would probably be comforting if the first face they saw on wakening was a human one.

O’Mara’s office was centrally located in the ox-sector Emergency Department, and Sally had come in on one end, so I had some traveling to do. It wasn’t quite far enough away to catch a lift, but it did take almost fifteen standard minutes of weaving through my fellow professionals and their patients in corridors to arrive. When I did, the door was standing open, though there was a sound-dampening privacy field in place.

I ducked through quickly—nobody lingers under a decompression door—and was surprised to find that two members of my crew had beaten me here. And additionally surprised that neither one of them was Loese. I’d come here without discussing it with any of them, O’Mara hadn’t mentioned their presence, and if anybody was consulting with the master chief, I’d expect it to be the person who had been most involved in investigating the sabotage.

Tsosie nodded in greeting as I entered, and Dr. Rhym wriggled their tendrils. O’Mara waved me to a seat. They were a blocky medium-complected human with cropped graying red hair. A pair of positively prehensile eyebrows were the only thing at odds with the general squareness of their face, features, and their massive squareness of frame.

They looked like a retired prizefighter. They were a retired prizefighter—Judiciary zero-G boxing subchampion three years running, before I’d worked with them. They were also the person who kept the ox-sector Emergency Department of the largest hospital in the galaxy purring like an only slightly dyspeptic cat.

“Are you here to report the sabotage, Dr. Jens?” they asked, when I’d settled.

The faint hum of the privacy barrier reassured me. What did not reassure me was Tsosie’s expression of shock. I assumed the sudden retraction of Rhym’s tendrils also indicated surprise, but I wasn’t certain.

I looked at Tsosie. “I assume from the look on your face that you hadn’t gotten around to telling them yet?”

Tsosie looked over at O’Mara. “We’d barely sat down when you walked in. Loese got here first?”

I rubbed my hands until I caught myself. O’Mara’s brain was as sharp as their physique was lumpish. I was too late: I saw their eyebrows flicker as they looked down. They didn’t say anything about it.

O’Mara shook their head.

I said, “That’s not like you. You’re not surprised. And you’re not angry.”

O’Mara rumbled, “Well, there’s no point in trying to hide any of this from you. The grapevine will fill you in before you get the first scuff on your station shoes. We’ve had some… odd occurrences in your absence. So when all three of you showed up needing to talk urgently…”

“Odd.” Tsosie wasn’t really asking a question. He wasn’t really not asking one, either.

“Environmental leaks. Contaminated medication. Nobody’s been harmed yet, but if it keeps up it’s only a matter of time.”

“And you think this is intentional.”

“I do,” O’Mara said. “Unfortunately. What happened on Sally?”

“Coms failed.” I looked at Tsosie.

“Coms failed while Llyn and I were on the generation ship.”

“Basically the worst possible moment,” I agreed. “If Sally and Loese hadn’t managed a patch job, Tsosie and I might not be here, because the situation over there got dicey very quickly.”

“Tell them about falling through the hull,” Rhym suggested.

“What?”

I held up my hand. Knuckles swollen. I put it down again quickly. “It’s all in my afteraction,” I said. “Which is already filed, and I bet Tsosie’s is, too.”

Tsosie studiously examined his fingernails, hiding a smile. Nobody wants to be the bad kid when O’Mara’s at the head of the classroom.

“How are the Darboof patients doing?” I asked. As a section chief, O’Mara would have access to that information. And I wasn’t changing the subject or being nosy. They were my patients, too, and I cared.