Элизабет Бир - Machine

“God damn it to hell, Doc, why the hell are you bothering to talk to me if you’re not going to tell me anything?”

There was the toddler. I flinched, but he didn’t come at me. Just as well. In his current state he wouldn’t have stood much of a chance, and I would have felt bad hitting him. And my whole body would have hurt even more afterward than it usually did.

I sighed and said, “Your ship is an extremely long way away. Lightspeed communication—pulsed lasers, for example—lags significantly behind simple ship travel. They’ll be back here centuries before any direct message they could have sent.”

Bit by bit, I watched Master Chief Carlos relax against the pillow. I was confident that he was forcing himself to. I was impressed that he had the ability.

“Awkward for RSVPing to parties,” he said. “You might as well drop by with regrets.”

“Or they can find out you’re not coming after you’re dead.”

I must have gotten the deadpan right, because he laughed.

“So you have faster-than-light travel.”

“Not me personally… but yes. Or sneakier-than-light, anyway.”

“Warp drive.”

“More or less. I can get you some books on it if you want? There are virtual classes.” And nothing is more boring than sitting in a hospital bed, listening to the outside world spin.

His mouth twitched, as if he was about to say something important. Then he settled back and folded his arms. “I’d be very grateful.”

“There’s another thing,” I said. “We’ve been limiting the staff treating you so far. But the cryonics docs—the real specialists—well, I should warn you that they’re not human.”

I saw his lips soften as his jaw slackened, though it didn’t quite fall open. “Aliens?”

“We call them systers . Some of them look… very different.”

“Do they farm humans for meat?”

“No,” I said, categorically. “Most of them couldn’t digest us. Amino acids all wrong, sugars backward. You know how it goes.”

He laughed. “So you’re not a cryonics specialist?”

“I’m a rescue specialist.” I smiled. “I got you here. And turned you over to Dr. Tralgar and Dr. Rilriltok.”

“Those are some names.”

I laughed. “Wait until you meet the beings that belong to them.”

His smile was more like a flinch, and quickly faded. “So you can’t promise me anyone else will live.”

“Not in any honesty,” I said, as gently as I could. Dammit, I went into rescue so that I wouldn’t have to give people bad news. Everybody I deal with is supposed to be in the middle of a crisis, not weathering a series of emotional blows. I hate this part of the job. “The cryonics specialists feel that we can expect about one in three of your crewmates to survive.”

He breathed out, slowly. “Wow.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He shook his head. “We knew it was a crazy risk—oh God! The influenza virus, there was some kind of superbug wiping out the ship, you might be exposed—”

“We’re all inoculated,” I said. “And we engineered an antiviral to support your immune system and administered it before we woke you up.”

“You’ve cured the flu.”

“We’ve cured a lot of things.” I squeezed my hand closed, the familiar ache of joints reminding me that we hadn’t cured everything. “Part of your ship’s core is here. And she’s very eager to meet you.”

“You rescued Central?” he said hopefully. Then he must have remembered what I told him about Central, because his mouth contracted with dismay.

“Helen,” I answered.

“Oh. That thing.”

Perhaps it stung because his response was so similar to what mine had been. And because I was beginning to appreciate Helen as a person, rather than an ill-considered toy. I was struck silent for a moment.

Carlos tugged the sheets up. “I hope you’re not going to judge us all by that joke.”

“Since the moment we made contact with her, she’s been absolutely dedicated to your well-being,” I mentioned. “And that of the rest of her crew.”

“Some of the guys thought it was amusing,” he said. “I didn’t—my wife told me how dehumanized it made her feel, and I was never comfortable around it, after.” He frowned deeply. “My wife…?”

“I know she’s not among the patients we’re currently working on. Helen might be able to guide us to her cryo unit, though, and we’ll prioritize retrieving her.”

His mouth twisted again.

I said, “You do know your AI is self-aware and self-willed, right?”

“Helen?” He shook his head. “It’s a peripheral. Central has a personality module, but the Helen bot is just a bot. It can talk, and carry out assigned tasks, and keep you awake through a swing shift… but that’s all.”

“Well,” I said, settling back in my chair. “You’ll be surprised to discover that some things have changed….”

I had been wrong about Oni: there were complications treating her cryoburn, and her awakening was put off. So specialist Calliope Jones was the next to awaken, and I recalled that she was the historian. She was also the individual in the anomalous cryo pod, which made me hope she might be able to provide some answers about it.

Or maybe the Goodlaw was right, and she was a Freeport pirate hiding from justice amidst ten thousand identical corpsicle coffins.

It had to be kidding, right?

How do you tell if a mantoid the size of a Terran pony is kidding?

I checked in with Mercy to make sure he was still okay and open to receiving visitors. He was, as long as they were willing to come to him for a nice, in-person, air-gapped audio conversation. All of the remaining AIs had compartmentalized themselves, which meant that consulting them required intercom communication, or moving one’s self to the physical location of their storage media. As if visiting an oracle in a temple.

At the same time, I realized that Rilriltok and Tralgar had assumed that I would be available to midwife the rebirth of every single member of Helen’s crew. That… was not going to work out long-term. Whatever I was doing for Helen, I wasn’t the care liaison for ten-thousand-odd archaic humans.

And—I made a solemn promise to myself—I was not going to allow myself to be bullied into becoming the care liaison for ten-thousand-odd archaic humans. Or even three-thousand-odd, if we managed to save thirty percent.

Still a lot of humans.

“Sally,” I said, while I was masking up to go in and visit Jones. We have transparent polymer filter masks for situations like this. Very effective, and they help the patients’ psychology enormously. Rilriltok thinks it’s very funny that humans find other humans with their breathing and eating holes covered ominous, but then its face has an immobile exoskeleton and it breathes through spiracles, so I’m not sure its opinion is broadly medically applicable.

I hear you, Sally answered, muffled by protocols.

“Do you have time to send a message to Starlight that Core General needs to hire a lot of stable, sensible, Terran-style volunteers to manage introduction to modern society for the Big Rock Candy Mountain survivors? Once we’re not under quarantine, that is.”

That’s an excellent point, Sally said. The next load of survivors can’t dock until the quarantine is lifted, anyway. In the meantime, I can send you Loese. She’s cluttering up the place without enough to do. She’s getting on my circuits.

I laughed. Loese, grounded, sounded like a shipmind’s worst nightmare. And from what I’d seen, she wasn’t taking the enforced downtime or the vague sense of personal responsibility well. “Send her to Tralgar.”