Элизабет Бир - Machine

I will. How are you doing?

“Overworked,” I said, trying to sound cheerful about it. “And none of it is actually my job.”

I still had barely begun the assignment O’Mara and Starlight wanted me to work on. It was amazing how much stuff everybody had for me to do.

I opened the door and stepped into the isolation chamber. A woman with black hair and a medium complexion rendered grayish and chalky by cryoburn and fatigue looked up, blinking as if her eyes weren’t focusing exactly as she expected. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Dr. Jens.”

“Calliope Jones,” she answered. “I’m alive? I’m in a hospital?”

“The biggest hospital in the galaxy,” I agreed. “And you’re definitely alive, unless dead folks have skills I’m not aware of. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

She laughed, then flinched when her dry lips cracked.

“Here.” I poured a cup of water and stuck a straw in. “This might help with that dehydration.”

She sipped. Her lip left blood on the straw. She seemed to surprise herself with her own thirst, and finished the water.

“What do you remember?” I asked when she’d put the cup aside.

“Um,” she said. “A… drill? Flashing lights. An alert. People scrambling for… for escape pods? No, that can’t be right. We don’t have escape pods. There’s nowhere to escape to.” She looked around. “Except apparently there is. I was in a cryonics freezer, wasn’t I?”

“Yes,” I said.

Ouch, I thought. What a way to live. Like being stuck on a single planet with no failsafes and no way off in case of catastrophe.

Except the generation ship was far more precarious and fragile even than a planet.

“There was a virus—”

“We know,” I said. “You’ve been treated and I’m immunized.”

“My ship? My crew?”

“Your ship and the shipmind—the angel , sorry, we use a different word — have suffered significant damage. What we’ve been able to recover of the shipmind is here, with the first group of evacuees—fourteen of you. One other has been successfully awakened so far: Master Chief Dwayne Carlos. Do you know him?”

She shook her head. “Everything is very fuzzy. I know the—the shipmind. Central?”

“Helen,” I said. “And what’s left of Central, I think. If I understand the outcome correctly, they both suffered damage and integrated out of self-preservation. Helen’s become self-aware; I understand she wasn’t before.”

“Helen!” She gave a big sigh of relief. “Well, that’s something to make me feel a little more grounded, I guess. How’s our command structure?”

“Right now, you don’t have one.”

“Oh. Captain and first mate? Officers?”

“The captain, we believe, perished. No other officers have been retrieved. We’re ferrying your crewmates here in groups, but it’s going to take a while, and there were no commissioned officers in the first group.”

“I’ve just realized,” she said incredulously, “that I cannot remember anyone’s name.”

“Anyone?”

“Any of my crewmates. My family. I must have a family?”

I sighed. She certainly seemed as if she came from a millennian ago. “Our scans show you’ve suffered some intracranial scarring. It may be impairing your cognition—”

“ Brain damage? ”

“Repairable damage,” I said. “The memory loss is probably permanent, I’m afraid, but we’ve already infused stem cells and growth medium, and you should be finding your cognition clearing up over the next few diar.”

“You can… patch up brain damage.” She snapped her fingers and winced when it made the infusion needle jump in her vein. I could have reached out and put my hand on her arm, but for some reason the thought made me feel shy, so I didn’t.

“We have doctors that do nothing else,” I said. “Which, I am afraid, brings me to another part of your orientation that you might find unsettling. Not all—or even most—of the staff here are human. The doctor who’s been working on your neurological injury is an oxygen-breathing, water-dwelling vertebrate from a planet whose name I need mechanical assistance to pronounce. She gets around in a big tank on wheels.”

“My neurologist is a dolphin?” Jones broke into a delighted grin. “I think I might like the future!” Then she sobered. “How far in the future are we, anyway?”

“That’s a complicated question,” I said. “We don’t know exactly when you went into suspension, or exactly how much subjective time you had spent traveling before then. There are relativistic effects to consider. And—”

“Twenty-four forty-seven,” she said, with confidence. Then she froze. “No, I… I can’t say that with any confidence. The date popped into my head, but I can’t put a context to it. It could just be a date. So your people—are you descendants of the other ships?” She sat forward in the bed, animated despite the effort it obviously cost her. “Can you get me a timeline, oh, and—”

“Wait, wait,” I said, laughing. “You don’t want to talk to me about those things. You want to talk to Mercy. He’s the hospital archinformist. His specialty is medical history, but—”

“I’ll take it!” she enthused, beaming.

I got a voice link to Mercy and turned them loose on each other. Jones’s avocation shone through in her conversation: she wanted dates, names, places, and root causes of everything. Mercy rapidly retrieved a pile of pull numbers to get her started requesting histories. He only had to explain how to request data once. I excused myself: it seemed like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and I would only have been in the way.

Jones smiled and waved as I was leaving, but that was all. I felt a tiny pang. Her enthusiasm was utterly adorable.

Tralgar was waiting when I stepped outside. I checked the time and realized I’d been with Jones so long that Rilriltok had gone to dinner and its rest shift. I asked how Cirocco Oni was.

Tralgar’s tentacles contracted into coils. There’s damage. It might be reversible. And… something in the pod’s program seems to be trying to prevent the rewarming sequence from taking hold. Possibly it’s the remains of the program the ship’s captain released when he was evacuating his crew to the pods.

I thought about Helen’s desire to get everybody into pods for their safety. I thought about the machine.

I hadn’t told Carlos or Jones that they—and Oni, and the medic Call Reznik—were the only four of the fourteen crewmembers to survive rewarming to the point of needing the next medical interventions. Oni and Reznik were still touch-and-go.

I imagined the other graft clones had already been recycled. It took a significant amount of resources to keep them alive, blood pumping, lungs breathings, when they were intentionally grown with stunted brain structures.

It would have been in poor taste to congratulate Tralgar on the accuracy with which he and Rilriltok had estimated their chances of success in saving these patients. But right now, we were as close to that grim 30 percent mark as possible unless we started saving fractions of patients. Or unless Oni and Reznik died.

I had hoped they were being conservative. No matter how hard you try to stay uninvested and professional… people don’t go into medicine because their patients’ welfare is irrelevant to them.

“You’re going to want me to explain that to Helen, aren’t you?”

Maybe the tiredness in my voice and expression was strong enough to make it through the species and translation barrier. Maybe Tralgar had an appreciation for the exhausting nature of everything I had already done todia.