Элизабет Бир - Machine

“Get me a stick and I’ll hobble to the door. Are you a doctor?”

“Dr. Jens,” I said. “How could you tell?”

“Nothing gets past me. Also, you’re wearing scrubs and a lab coat.”

I touched my forehead to him. He grinned.

I was startled to discover that I liked him, right away. Despite his sunken cheeks and haggard features, he had charm. His tan complexion was tending greenish; his eyes had obviously been replaced with vatted clones; and there were traces of cryoburn and freshly regenerated flesh around his fingertips. The nails would take a while to grow back. And his hair, though his cheeks were stippled with beard shadow.

But he had that indefinable quality that makes you want to like someone. It might have been calculated, to set me at ease or to structure his own anxiety by allowing him to feel in control. Or it might have been how he interacted with everyone.

He wasn’t even slightly the atavistic toddler in a grown man’s body I realized I had expected—been braced for—when I walked in. At least, not on first meeting.

I took a breath and shook myself out, mentally speaking. Try not to be an asshole, Jens.

He pushed the tray away. “How are the rest of my crew?”

“Well.” This was what I was here for. It didn’t make it any easier. “May I sit?”

He nodded, so I crossed to the visitor’s chair and let myself down. I noticed him studying me and tried to move smoothly. I still caught my thumbnail picking at the edge of the exo and had to force myself to stop.

The worst part was watching his face change as I came closer, and he became less able to deny what he must, on some level, already know. In the normal course of events, Linden or another AI doc would have been monitoring his blood and brain chemistry, making sure that adrenaline and cortisol did not overwhelm his system.

But Dwayne Carlos had no fox. Even an AI would only have been able to work with intravenous drugs. Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo was somewhere on the water levels, regulating by relay, normalizing his chemistry as best she could with the crude measures available to us. But even if he’d had a modern fox and full access to senso, she couldn’t have taken his pain and grief away entirely. We still have to suffer through these things, experience them to move past them.

Living things have a dedicated sense of pain because you have to know you’re wounded to take the actions necessary to heal. The best we can do, medically speaking, is blunt the edge of it, because if you can’t feel, you can’t react.

“You’re the first to awaken,” I said. It would be cruel to draw things out longer than necessary. “We have retrieved only a few cryo units so far. We’re working on the others.”

“My ship isn’t here?”

“This is a hospital. Your ship is not fast enough to make it here, so we have been transferring your crewmates to faster-than-light ships.”

He blinked. “That’s impo— No, never mind. This is not the right time. Obviously it’s possible. Carry on.”

“We are ferrying crew from your ship as fast as possible.”

“But what about the people still running Big R? The skeleton crew… oh.”

“Oh?”

“They’re all dead?”

“They’re all in pods. Every single person, except the captain. I’m sorry, I have to inform you that the captain is dead.”

“Oh.” He didn’t sound surprised.

“The ship’s… computer? Do you have a word for that?”

“The angel,” he said.

“The ship’s angel had been taking the ship apart to build cryo pods, under the captain’s orders. He took the library—Central?”

“Central.”

“He took it offline.”

“That would have limited the angel’s access to information and her decision-making resources.”

“It did,” I agreed. “She had mostly spun off into a peripheral when we found the ship. She had also filled the ship with instances of… a kind of large nanobot, capable of linking up and forming structures. And was using that, I think, as a kind of primitive computronium to support what faculties she had. She’s being reintegrated, and we’re building an architecture for her. She, in time, should be fine.”

Assuming we didn’t have to seal the entire hospital off forever to keep the toxic meme from spreading throughout the entire galaxy. But now was not the time to share that with a person who couldn’t do anything about it, and who had enough to worry about.

He said, “So about the pods.”

The corners of his mouth and eyes tightened. He was bracing himself. I offered my hand, against my better judgment. He took it and I winced in anticipation, but he didn’t squeeze.

Maybe he was considerate. Maybe he was still too weak for squeezing.

Whatever the reason, I was grateful.

Softly, he said, “The pods aren’t very good, are they?”

“No,” I agreed. “The pods aren’t very good.”

He might be from a culture spawned in the deep Before, but his agony was utterly human. His face fisted. He was so thin that I could see every individual fiber in his neck, deltoid, and the top of his pectoral muscle as his chin dipped and his body clenched.

His heart rate and blood pressure spiked; his cortisol and adrenaline levels ramped; he yanked his hand out of mine and locked it and its mate on the bed rails. Flesh whitened as blood squashed from the tender new flesh.

“Are you hurting?” I asked, jumping to my feet. “Where is the pain?” I was already reaching for the meds panel and cursing the fact that he didn’t have a fox. External pain management: Is there anything more barbaric?

Carlos sucked in air so hard it whistled. “Just… trying not to bawl like a brat.” The first word came out through clenched teeth, the rest on a rush of breath. He grabbed the next one as if he had to get it fast, before it got away.

Empathic grief clutched my chest. I laid a hand on his shoulder. He leaned away, so I removed it.

“Cry if you need to,” I said. “It’s a physiologically normal response.”

And I wasn’t sure how somebody who wasn’t wearing a fox thought he could avoid it, anyway.

Something about my words seemed to startle him. He got another breath, and this one stayed caught behind his teeth. He let it out in a controlled fashion, shaped around words. “Some big strong guy I’d look.” A barked laugh followed. “It’s okay. I think I’ve got it.”

When you work in a multispecies hospital the size of a small moon, you get used to feeling like you’re missing much of the cultural context in any given conversation. Even with other humans: it’s a big galaxy, and we don’t all think alike.

I didn’t understand what was going on inside Master Chief Carlos’s head, but I was prepared to roll with it.

“Obviously some of us survived.” He waved his own grafted hand, and winced when he noticed it. “More or less. You said I was the first awake.”

“Yes.”

“Am I the only?”

“So far,” I said, having checked that it was true. “Biologist Cirocco Oni is undergoing treatments for cryoburn before awakening, and Specialist First Rank Jones should be awake in the next dia or so.”

There was no flicker of recognition in his face when I said either name—but with over ten thousand crewmates, I would not expect anyone to know them all personally.

“There are thirteen more of your crewmates at the hospital already, and more on the way.”

“Will all of them live?”

“It is”—I searched for the right word—“unlikely.”

“How many more will make it?”

“I can’t be sure.”

He stared at me. “How many more are being retrieved now?”

“I also can’t be sure of that.”