Элизабет Бир - Machine

So what sort of operation would you be running if you couldn’t let an AI onto your team?

I gritted my teeth and raised my palm to the decomp door so that it could read my tag.

It didn’t open.

“Sally?” I muttered inside my helmet.

Right here, she whispered in my head. And no, I can’t get it open. The circuit is isolated, and I don’t dare reach into the hospital architecture until Linden is back online and I know we’re free of viruses .

I wished I could argue with her. Well, I’m getting pretty obvious out here. I’m not sure what to do next.

Duck into that room on the left, Sally suggested. Quick, the unit admin is coming.

I stepped into the patient room behind the open door. A glance at the panel beside it—and my senso—confirmed that it was empty. Footsteps echoed down the corridor—a trotting beat rather than a human stride. I folded my arms over my chest and assumed a contemplative pose inside the door.

It was a nice room. Big, and airy, with a green wall boosting the oxygen and humidity. It was full of lettuces and dandelions and greens from nonhuman planets. All of them would be edible. Some had been recently harvested. I wondered if they’d contributed to my steak salad the other dia.

There was a holowindow on the far wall, framed by decorative curtains. Right now, it offered a view of the Core from somewhere on the exterior of the hospital, but there was a remote by the bed. One could set it to anything in the library, if one didn’t find a massive black hole, lensing stars in orbit, and heavy ship traffic restful.

I did, though, and I let out a heavy sigh of relaxation—and further fogged my plate. Some diar you just can’t win.

A translated voice broke in. Doctor?

I only managed not to jump guiltily because I had been expecting it. I turned.

The unit supervisor—what they used to call a head nurse—stood framed in the doorway. He looked a little like a centaur, if the back half were a cream-colored angora goat, and somebody had thrown in floppy bunny ears and big doe eyes for good measure. His tag told me he was Nurse-Administrator Wizee, and gave me the usual details of preferred gender markers and species.

Can I help you?

My senso tag would tell him exactly who I was, also, so there was no point lying about it. “I’m exploring,” I said.

This is a closed ward, Doctor. Do you have some business here?

“I have a patient I think might benefit from a calmer environment,” I said. Which was not a lie, after all. “This seems nice.”

This ward is for exclusive patients, the administrator said patiently.

“Surely if the room isn’t being used—”

It’s reserved, he said. The patient will be joining us when the quarantine lifts. May I show you out now, Doctor?

Well, that was that. I wondered what O’Mara knew about this place. Their sector, after all. Did my remit of investigating sabotage extend to investigating other weird stuff that seemed to be official hospital business?

Probably not, I decided sadly. Anyway, my investigation was supposed to be secret.

And I hadn’t been doing a very good job of making time for it, between the demands of my actual job, my side job as Helen’s care liaison, and everything else that was keeping me busy.

Which hadn’t even involved, I remembered, the machine. I’d been so busy, and it had been somebody else’s problem, so I’d nearly forgotten it existed. Worry settled like a weight into my guts, and I wondered if anybody was keeping an eye on it with Dr. Zhiruo incapacitated.

Well, whatever I was looking for, it would have to wait until I slept and charged my exo.

“Yes,” I told the administrator. “I’ll leave quietly.”

My exo found a last flicker of power as I staggered back along the corridor toward the Casualty Department. Fortuitous, as by then I was too exhausted to have made my way home without it. I was pretty sure the private unit nurse had twigged that there was something wrong with me, though. With a little luck, he’d chalk it up to “systers are weird,” and not think too much about it.

As for me, I dragged myself back to my quarters at half speed, tumbled back into my hammock, and got the trickle attached. I dozed off in the middle of reading safety incident reports.

I’ll be honest. I dozed off three screens into the first safety incident report.

I’d told O’Mara they should have found somebody else.

DESPITE MY EXHAUSTION, I DIDN’T sleep particularly well. The pain kept waking me, even when I tuned it back. And I had to be up and fed and garbed and suited early.

I was attending grand rounds in a set of hydrogen atmosphere units that dia, as part of my continuing cross-species medical and cultural education, as required for all Core General staff. This was always… interesting, not least because their atmosphere and mine made a flammable combination.

Todia, it was even more of an annoyance than normal, because five shifts later, the lifts still weren’t working. And because the lifts still weren’t working, anybody who wanted to move around the hospital had to do it by climbing in and out of enviro suits at every section lock, or by sticking to the sections they could get through in a sterile softsider. So the lockers were a mess, and no one could rely on the lockers containing the equipment they were labeled as holding, because tracking and redistribution was falling behind demand.

You can only rightmind people into social consciousness so far when they’re running to make it to surgery. At least the lockers self-sterilized.

I still had my sterile suit from the previous dia, having almost fallen asleep in it. And it was designed so you could swap other environmental modules in on top of it—including the spark-proof, antistatic ceramic plates I needed for the hydrogen environment. So, a little chafing (for me) and a trip through the sterilizer (for the rig) aside, everything was under control. Even the hydrogen.

I finished that obligation by lunchtime.

I scarfed down another much-needed meal and scrambled back to Cryo, barely in time to introduce our second archaic human to her first alien. Tralgar told me they’d probably have Oni awake within the week, so that was one more task on my plate unless Loese could make herself available. She had better make herself available. Or I was going to have to turn into twins.

Nobody had asked Tsosie—or even suggested Tsosie as an alternate. Apparently, nobody thought much of his bedside manner.

I guess being overbooked is a compliment. But I was going to need a nap in the on-call room, because getting to my own quarters… well, they were far away. And I needed to get on with the task that O’Mara and the tree had assigned me.

And I needed to check on Helen, and make sure somebody somewhere was keeping tabs on the machine in Zhiruo’s and Linden’s absence. Not to mention find the time to talk to Sally some more about her own experience with sabotage.

There were not enough standards in the dia.

I wondered if I had enough time to find Rhym and ask them for a squat, tentacular hug. And maybe a neck massage. Those flexible sucker paddles on the ends of their gross manipulators are surprisingly excellent for getting right up into the attachment points at the base of the skull that are so poorly designed on us humans. And they squeeze really comfortingly.

When I let myself into Jones’s room this time, I was struck by how cramped it was in comparison to the rooms in the private unit. There was just about enough space in here for a Thunderby to edge around the bed if it was excruciatingly careful.