Элизабет Бир - Machine

Cheeirilaq leaned over my shoulder. Friend wheelmind, it might be best to isolate yourself immediately. I am concerned about contagion—

“I’ve been using firewalls!” Linden wailed. A moment later, she calmed her voice. “Yes. If the firewalls and air-gap communications have been ineffective in preventing contamination, I am in danger. What shall I tell colleagues about why I am not sharing data?” Linden asked. “I am a major traffic control hub for this sector!”

Presence lights blossomed on the wall. The Administree was tuning in. I could only assume Linden had summoned them. My hands clenched on the arms of my chair.

Something terrible was happening, and I was utterly helpless to do anything about it. To even really understand it. All I could do was watch.

Rilriltok’s feather-barbed foot groomed my hair. I have to admit, it was soothing. It even slowed the heart palpitations a little.

[Tell them you’re initiating a quarantine protocol,] Starlight instructed. [Tell Dr. Zhiruo the full story, however.]

“I’ve discovered another problem,” Linden said. “Dr. Zhiruo is offline. Administrator, I am going to initiate an emergency purge and restore.

“Now.”

The lights flickered. The spin gravity wavered. Rilriltok darted to the center of the observation room and hovered there, far from any obstacle. I grabbed the chair I was sitting in, because I was too far from the rails.

I guess the rails all around this place weren’t as silly as I had thought.

I braced for a slam—so much of the environmental control of this hospital depended on things spinning at the right speed in relation to one another—but instead my weight stabilized and neither Rilriltok nor Cheeirilaq went crashing to the deck. In the Cryo ward, staff looked up and around, then went quickly back to work.

“Starlight? Are you there?”

[Present,] said the administrator, just as Helen burst into the observation room.

“I can’t find the doctor!” she said. “I need to see my crew!”

“It’s okay,” I said, which might be the biggest lie of my medical career, and let me tell you 50 percent of medicine is knowing what lies are helpful when, and which are indefensible. “Your crew are right there. Dr. Zhiruo is sick. We’re working on it.”

Lack of faith doesn’t keep you from praying. It just keeps you from feeling like it’s going to make a difference. Right then, I prayed that Linden, with our warning, had caught her own infection in time. I prayed that her backups were clean.

It would be a while before we knew.

I had no doubt, now, that whatever had happened to Afar and now Dr. Zhiruo and Linden was an invasive meme, an AI virus of some kind. That somehow Sally had managed to avoid manifesting symptoms, unless the memory glitch about the sabotage was one.

Oh, little space fishes. I Rise From Ancestral Night and Ruth and probably half a dozen other ships were still out there at the generation ship. And our whole way back from it, we had cheerily been dropping packets into every transponder we passed, and exchanging data with other shipminds.

Every AI in the galaxy could eventually be affected—and if the toxic meme had gone out that way already, any packets telling people to quarantine themselves would be standard weeks or months behind the contaminated ones.

That was enough time for a lot of things to go wrong.

Understatement of the centian.

Helen walked past me, to the door connecting to the ward. Goodlaw Cheeirilaq wasn’t quite in time to intercept her before she went through, and Tsosie made a completely comical grab that slid off her arm as if he had tried to pick up a handful of hydrophobic colloid. So like a pack of idiot ducklings, the other four of us followed Helen into the unit.

The ward staff either hadn’t noticed yet that something was critically wrong with Linden, or were presuming it would be fixed in a moment. I suppose it’s a drawback of how smoothly this enormous, improbable institution usually runs that when something actually goes simultaneously belly-up, pear-shaped, and sideways, everybody not immediately involved in the crisis assumes it’s only a glitch, and somebody else’s problem, and will be dealt with momentarily.

The amazing thing is that they are usually correct.

Tralgar waved a tentacle as we entered, eyes blinking in succession around its head. It trumpeted a greeting that shivered Rilriltok’s antennae.

Ah, just the sentients I was hoping for. You should look at this, Dr. Tralgar said to Rilriltok and me. It extended a large orange datapad.

Rilriltok dodged back in alarm. I didn’t blame it. The pad was so large I needed both hands to receive it, and despite my exo I still staggered a bit. It probably would have crushed Rilriltok like a… um.

At least we weren’t under anything like full gravity, a convenience for Dr. Rilriltok that made the normally ponderous Tralgar move like a ballet-dancing elephant.

Rilriltok hovered, balancing at my shoulder with feathery forelimbs, and peered down. This looks like poetry.

It wasn’t incorrect. I was looking down at a series of sentences decorated with line breaks. It seemed to go on for a while—at least several screenfuls as I flicked through, and Tralgar’s handheld had a big screen.

“Does poetry serve a medical purpose now?” I asked.

You tell me, said Dr. Tralgar. Does your species usually use its genome to record works of literature?

I looked up. “Excuse me?”

Tralgar’s eyes blinked in sequence. Dr. Zhiruo recovered it from several of these patients. It was encoded in their DNA sequences. She got curious because they looked too tidy.

“Helen,” I said, “what can you tell me about this?”

She had been standing quiescent, or nearly so—little shivers of light running across her surface showed that her body was rocking imperceptibly back and forth. Eagerness? Conflicting calls? All of the above?

I locked my exo so that it was entirely supporting the weight of the Tralgar-sized Tralgar-handling-hardened pad. That way, I could hold it one-handed without discomfort. I scrolled back to the top of the readout.

“It’s not very good poetry,” Tsosie said, rising on his toes to read over my shoulder. He looked up at Tralgar. It must have hurt his neck. “Some people with a lot of resources to waste, who can afford the penalty percentages as well as the cost of the intervention, gengineer their kids. I suppose you might put poetry in a genome for the hell of it.”

“Conspicuous consumption,” I said. “Surely humans can’t be the only species that wastes resources on display behaviors.”

Tralgar blinked at me. It didn’t really signify: Tralgar was always blinking. Surely they’d use better poetry.

“Do they all have it?” I asked.

They all have something, it trumpeted softly. Dr. Zhiruo apparently had not managed to decode all of it before she went offline. And I admit, it’s interesting, but it doesn’t seem relevant.

I scrolled up again. I didn’t particularly feel the urge to read any more. This particular poem—or litany, maybe—had been retrieved from the genome of one Calvin Weir, ensign, no specialty listed. Age seventeen.

A kid. A trainee. I wasn’t a cryo specialist, but the chart wasn’t encouraging for his survival.

You tell yourself not to think about the casualties. You tell yourself you did your best. You helped more than would have been helped otherwise.