Элизабет Бир - Machine

Keeping herself safe. Good.

“We sampled loose DNA on Big Rock Candy Mountain . Any poetry in that?”

“There is,” she said. “At least, there is a jumble of artificially tidy sequences that seem similar to the ones Dr. Zhiruo was translating into poetry. I do not currently have the spare cycles to translate them, but the likeness is evident.”

“Right,” I said. “Sorry, Helen, I wanted to check that before it slipped my mind. Anyway, please don’t blame yourself—”

She spoke evenly, in a low voice. Without apparent strain, which only made it creepier. “Somebody got inside my mind. And somebody tried to use me against my crew. No. Someone got inside the captain, and used the captain to make me work against my crew. And I can’t… remember what happened.”

You know that saying about never giving an AI reason to be really angry, because they never forget? I remembered it then. I also realized that she’d interrupted me, without deferring. I also noticed that she was still not admitting to herself that her captain had been responsible for… well, freezing his entire crew and leaving his ship adrift in space.

Maybe he’d just really, really needed some time alone.

I wadded up the sandwich wrapper for recycling. “That is possible. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that somebody or something got inside him and made him do what he did, Helen. It’s possible that he made and released the meme on his own, to subvert your failsafes.” I remembered her utter collapse when she’d managed to override those instructions.

She didn’t exactly look at me, being featureless, but she angled her face in my direction. “How could he betray us, unless something from outside infected him?”

“I don’t think he meant to betray you. I think he meant to protect you, and protect your crew, from an epidemic. But he was ill himself, a sickness in his thought. And it made him… make poor choices. Coercive choices. To force you and the crew into what he had decided was the only course of action. But that’s not your responsibility.”

She sat with her hands in her lap, very silent and demure.

I glanced at the monitors. “It’s going to be hours before they try to wake anybody up, and they won’t do that without you present. It looks like they’re going to start repairs and grafts soon, and that will be an involved process. Would you like to go somewhere else for a while?”

Helen turned away. “I’ll wait here.”

I went back to my quarters. There was nothing immediate that needed doing with urgency. There was nothing but waiting, now.

There was still no word on Linden, and until there was a word on Linden, there would be no word on Afar or on Dr. Zhiruo. Sally told me that she and the other AI docs hoped that with their help, Linden could beat the infection—we all hoped that Linden could beat the infection—and if she could, there was a good chance that what she learned could be used to inoculate other patients, and to cure Afar and Zhiruo.

And if Linden couldn’t be saved?

I didn’t want to think about that, but I had to. If we couldn’t cure the toxic meme we would have to purge the system architecture. We’d have to kill Linden and Afar and Dr. Zhiruo, and possibly Mercy and Sally and all the other AIs that lived in the hospital architecture. And we would have to purge, or eternally quarantine, Helen, too.

We would have to do that, because the meme had proven virulent, and it seemed likely that it was capable of leaping across architectures—the machine version of an influenza virus making a jump from birds to humans and getting worse along the way—and because we could not risk it getting out into the galaxy.

There were a lot of artificial intelligences—a lot of people —out there who could die if they caught it. So if we couldn’t get it out of Linden and Afar and the rest, we’d have to start them over from scratch.

They should all have offsite backups. But who knew how current those were? They could lose ans of life experience.

And there was no backup for Helen. As far as we knew, anywhere.

Even going to that extreme might not halt the spread of the meme. It might be in Singer; it might be in Ruth and the others. Warnings were flying toward them… but the warnings might not get there in time.

I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on something happier. Something I had some influence over.

Surgeries had begun on Afar’s crew, and the prognosis was hopeful. If nothing went wrong. It was up in the air how much brain damage they might suffer in the process, and how much memory and personality alteration they might undergo.

That wasn’t my work. Solving the sabotage mystery was my work, but I was not going to be an effective investigator until I rested and got my pain levels under control.

I honestly do better in an active crisis than in this kind of grinding, slow-motion one. Waiting is exhausting and gives you too much time to think and come up with multiple, conflicting options. For me, that can lead to decision paralysis. When I’m running on adrenaline and tuning out fatigue, I handle the problem in front of me, move on to the next problem, and not worry about the things I can’t control. There’s a price to pay later, but I don’t worry about that right then.

One can’t do that for diar on end, however, as the ache in my joints was telling me.

Well, one can. People did, for hundreds of thousands of years, because they didn’t have the options we have now. But it kills them. The long-term health consequences are unsupportable, and the cost to community of those consequences is enormous. So I can’t justify running on adrenaline and rage for weeks at a time, even though the experience itself is dramatic and validating.

Crisis makes some people—like me—feel alive, and it turns out that’s really bad for everybody, because when you don’t have a crisis in front of you, you might go out of your way to construct one.

I took a shower and some pain meds. Then I went to bed, turned off the anxiety that was keeping me going, and slept for ten and a half standard hours. I dreamed of earthquakes and atmosphere streaming from ruptured wheels, and woke crusty-eyed and more tired than I’d been when I drifted off.

There was a message alert flickering in the corner of my senso. It was from Rilriltok.

Master Chief Carlos from the generation ship is awake and asking for food.

CRYO DIDN’T HAVE A HUMAN doctor on staff. Rilriltok sensibly questioned the wisdom of exposing an unrightminded archaic human to giant predatory insects or tentacled hippopotami, so I was nominated to be the first to meet Master Chief Carlos.

I checked in with the nurses’ station when I got there. They told me that the patient was in a private room. He was eating, he’d been given an abbreviated briefing with a lot of stressful details redacted, and he was generally pretty polite to the (human) nursing staff who had been brought in from other units to buffer him.

Apparently, I got to be the one to tell him about space aliens.

He was sitting up in bed when I entered, and he looked absolutely normal. Normal for a guy who’d barely survived a bad cryo experience, anyway. I didn’t know why that should surprise me so much, but it did. I stopped in the doorway and blinked.

He had been sipping a nutritive broth through a straw. As I paused, he released the straw, looked at me, looked at the cup, and looked back at me.

“They claimed this was food,” he said mildly, my senso translating. “I know I’m in the future, but I’m not sure I believe them.”

“Don’t tell me hospital food was any good in your dia,” I said. “The goal is to make people want to leave, after all.”