Элизабет Бир - Machine

Waiting in hospitals is the worst thing. It doesn’t get any better when you’re a doctor with a nonrelevant specialty. Or when the hospital is falling to pieces around you.

I did suit up and go EVA to rescue some staff members stuck in lifts when Linden had powered herself down. Miraculously—or rather, because of Linden’s skill—nobody had been injured, but quite a few people were trapped, and moving them to less claustrophobic environs was work that I was actually trained for. And “suited” for—and I didn’t even need a rescue hardsuit for this. Just a regular easy-to-maneuver softsider.

That killed a few hours usefully, and when I was done I needed a break without too many people around me. I could have gone back to my quarters on the hospital… but I was rattled and anxious and my whole body hurt and I didn’t want to tune to take the edge off it. I wanted to go home .

And home, for the time being, was still Sally.

But as soon as I stepped through the airlock, I heard something banging—like a tool pounded against a bulkhead. And a frantic voice, Loese: “This is bad! This is so bad, this is so bad—”

I was about to cringe my way right back out the airlock again when Sally’s voice interrupted smoothly. “We’ll be back on duty in no time, Loese. Somebody else will cover this call. Nobody will be left out in space because of us— Hello, Llyn. I’m sorry, we’re having a bad dia here.”

Loese shook her head. She had apparently been banging on a stanchion with a ship shoe, which was a pretty self-restrained way to deal with the level of frustration she seemed to be feeling. I mean, it would have been more restrained to have tuned it back a little, but sometimes you want to feel angry.

I held out my arms to her in a question. She sighed, and came to me, and accepted the best motherly hug a terrible mother could muster.

She wasn’t actually any older than Rache, was she?

I flinched, and tried not to let her feel it. I had been away from Rache long enough that she’d become a grown woman, entirely without me.

Maybe I should be the one smacking things on stanchions and yelling about how bad it was. “Hey,” I said, when Loese pulled awkwardly back. “You gonna make it?”

“This is my fault.” She flopped into an acceleration couch.

“Loese.” Sally’s mom voice was a lot better than mine ever had been.

“Right.” Loese folded her hands, choosing self-control. “Nobody’s going to die todia because of us, and everything else can be fixed. Right?”

“Right,” I said. “I’m going to take a nap. Unless you want to get that coffee?”

She looked at me wanly. “Thanks,” she said. “A nap sounds like a better idea, frankly.”

After I had rested for a standard or so, I went to fetch Helen. She hadn’t stirred from the Cryo observation lounge, where she’d been watching the rewarming staff go on and off shift since Tsosie, O’Mara, Cheeirilaq, and I left. Tralgar wasn’t present now, having gone to rest, but Rilriltok was, and the unit outside was a hustle of other bodies.

Helen didn’t glance over when I came in. She stood before the windows, leaning forward like a pet straining the leash toward a returning master. I could envision tail wagging, shivering, and happy little yips without trying too hard.

Would it have been too much to ask to let the damn shipmind have a little bit of dignity? If any of her crew survived, I wasn’t looking forward to meeting them.

I unwrapped a sandwich and beverage I’d brought from the caf and settled down in one of the chairs. I kicked my feet up onto the grab rails that circled the room and balanced the food on my knee. I hoped the peripheral hadn’t gone back into her fugue state.

“Helen,” I said.

“Yes, Dr. Jens?”

“Tell me more about your crew?”

She leaned back from the windows. “If any of them survive.”

There was a note of cynicism in her voice that I had never heard there before. As she stretched out into the additional space that Zhiruo had assigned her, was she becoming more self-aware? More questioning of her own program?

We didn’t, I realized, currently have a shipmind specialist that I could ask. Every AI in the hospital was bunkered down behind firewalls, following O’Mara’s quarantine protocols. And without their help, I wasn’t entirely certain where to go with that. I took a bite of sandwich as an excuse to chew rather than talking and realized that there was one AI I could talk to.

I reached out through senso and my dedicated line to Sally. Firewalls and monitored connections made it feel slow and fuzzy, as if I were shaking her hand through layers of gauze. But she was there, and responsive.

Check me if you see me about to make a mistake? I said, and felt her affirmation.

“Okay,” I said to Helen. “If you don’t want to talk about you, what if we talk about me?”

Helen kept the fingertips of her left hand on the glass. But she turned, twisting her arm behind her, until she faced me. “Are you… trying to make me feel better?”

I sipped my juice. “Yes.”

“There are so many different options,” she said, pointing to my sandwich with her free hand. “So many foodstuffs.”

Not if we’re cut off from consumables for very long. What I vocalized was, “You didn’t provide a range of foodstuffs?”

“Not the variety of cultural origins available here. You eat artificial insects and pasta. Tsosie eats simulated chicken and rice with chilis. I have seen other people eating curries and meatball sandwiches and spicy fried noodle dishes. How do you keep everybody from fighting?”

“Rightminding,” I said glibly. And then, “We have a job to do. We are adults who know how to get along with other sentients who may have very different worldviews than our own. Diversity is a strength of the Synarche, and diverse perspectives offer a chance at discovering novel solutions to problems. Also… rightminding.”

“Are you from Earth?”

I shook my head because I was chewing. I peered over her shoulder, intrigued by movement, but it was only Rilriltok directing that one of the cryo pods be moved to a different monitoring station. I hoped that was a good sign.

“But you must be from Earth.”

“I’m from a planet. I’ve never been to Terra.”

“But your name. Brookllyn. It’s a place on Earth.”

I laughed. “People get named after things that are left behind. My sister is Cairo, which—well, honestly, I think Cairo Jens is prettier than Brookllyn Jens. But nobody really thinks about it.”

She stood quietly for a moment. I assumed she could still sense what was going on behind her, even when her attention seemed fixated on me.

“That was a big thing you did earlier, when we were first in Cryo.” I waved at the window. “Letting them be tested and rewarmed. A big risk you took, for the good of your crew.”

She shrugged, a fluid ripple of light across her breasts and shoulders, which slumped forward. “It’s my fault Dr. Zhiruo is infected.”

“What makes you say that?”

I filled my mouth with sandwich to kill time while she parsed my question and constructed an answer.

“The meme came from my ship. From me.”

“Well, we’re not entirely sure it did, but even if so, there’s no fault to be assigned,” I said. “Not to you, anyway. You didn’t build it or release it. You were following your program.” Saying that made me wonder something only tangentially related, so I said, “Hey, Sally?”

“Present,” she said through a wall speaker. The presence light didn’t blink on: I assumed because she was monitoring the situation through my senso and merely relaying her conversation to us, rather than inhabiting the local infrastructure. Air-gapped, verbal communications as much as possible.