Элизабет Бир - Machine

Jones seemed alert and oriented. She remembered me at once. “Hello, Dr. Jens.”

“Hello, Patient Jones,” I replied. The consonance of our family names pleased and amused me.

Based on her laugh, she hadn’t realized it before, and it amused her, too. “Do you think we’re related?”

I thought about the poetry that somebody had engineered into her DNA.

“It’s possible,” I said. “You’d have to ask an archinformist about the vowel shifts.”

She had solid food on her tray, I noticed approvingly. She seemed to have made a pretty good accounting of it, too, before she pushed it aside.

“How’s the grub?” I asked.

“A little weird,” she admitted. “Scrambled tofu is pretty much scrambled tofu, though.”

“Some of the options are worse than others, but I’m afraid it’s all hospital food.”

“All right, Doc.” She folded her arms and cocked her head suspiciously. Tubes draped with her movements. She was still being hydrated and electrolyte balanced. “I can tell from the look on your face that you’re up to something. And it’s not just checking up on patients, is it?”

“No… oo.” I looked over my shoulder. Cheeirilaq was out of sight along the wall. “Did you look over the files I left you?”

“About the Synarche? Sure.”

“Would you like to meet your first syster?”

Her eyes widened. “Already? I mean, there’s one here?”

“There’s a lot here. Your care team is minority Terran. Once you were awake, though, we didn’t want to shock you before you had some time to prep yourself.”

“Your multispecies culture is diverse and honors complexity,” she said, parroting one of the files I’d given her. “Mine only has boring human people in it.”

I laughed. Both of these archaic humans were so charming. Whatever brain damage Jones had suffered, Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo’s intervention seemed to have helped her heal without evident deficits other than the memory loss. It made me feel even more awful about the people we wouldn’t be able to save. And the ones we hadn’t been able to save already.

“I’ve seen the movies,” Jones continued. “If you’re not going to use me as an incubator for some horrible insectoid’s eggs, I can probably manage without freaking out.”

Hmm. Goodlaw Cheeirilaq definitely counted as a horrible insectoid, from an atavistic primate point of view. Maybe I should go get Tralgar. Or even Rhym or Hhayazh, though Hhayazh probably wouldn’t be any less horrifying, and its reproductive cycle did involve parasitism. Though not of sentient beings, in this dia and age.

Camphvis would probably do it if I asked nicely enough, but—eyestalks aside—I’m not sure a Banititlan really would be perceived as exotic enough .

The Goodlaw really did want to interrogate all of the surviving patients. I hadn’t seen anything to indicate that it would not do so nicely. But it didn’t hurt for me to keep an eye on the process, and my patients.

My secondhand patients. Patients once-removed?

“Well, in at the deep end,” I said. “Specialist Jones, this is Goodlaw Cheeirilaq. Cheeirilaq, come on in.”

The Goodlaw’s exoskeleton clicked gently as it lowered itself to duck through the doorway. It kept its raptorial arms and manipulators folded, and its wings furled tight under the wing coverts. Nothing, however, could make it look small.

Jones made a noise. I hadn’t taken my attention off her. Her heart rate spiked, though not as sharply as Carlos’s had. Eyes wide, shoulders pulled back against the pillows.

“I was kidding about the horrifying giant insects,” she said.

I solemnly vow not to parasitize you, Cheeirilaq responded. With its small manipulators, it popped the collar of its uniform jacket.

Its “voice” came from the bedside monitor, and Jones turned her shocked look at that. “It talks?”

“It’s sentient and sapient,” I said. “And very law-abiding.”

“Damn,” said Jones. “How many different kinds of… of systers are there?”

She had been studying.

“Thousands,” I said. “It’s a big galaxy. Not all of them are equally distributed. Any more than we are. Space travel is harder for some systers than others, depending on their environmental and emotional needs.”

“And not all of them are like that? Like you, Goodlaw? I’m sorry.”

She didn’t attempt Cheeirilaq’s name, and I didn’t blame her. It’s kind of a trill followed by a click, and human vocal apparatus can approximate it, but not without long practice. Mostly, we all rely on the translators.

No, not all of the systers are like me. Some are squishy, like you.

Jones shrugged. “If I’m squishy, I guess I need a harder shell.”

Your species is a syster species to mine. You are fine the way you evolved.

“Oh,” Jones said. “Oh! You mean that all of us are systers to one another!”

This is so, said Cheeirilaq. Cautiously, it elevated its body to a more natural position. Jones watched curiously, but to her credit did not recoil.

Admittedly, it was a giant bug—but it was also a giant bug in a tiny bolero jacket.

May I ask you some questions? it said.

I left Cheeirilaq interviewing the patient, once I’d satisfied myself that they were going to get along fine. I was hungry again, but the hospital was instituting rationing in order to weather the quarantine, and it was my shift to forgo eating.

Occasional fasting is good for my species, I told myself, and decided I could combine my initial research on the sabotage with my nap.

Multitasking always leads to excellent rest, as you know.

I took myself into an on-call room—currently empty—and claimed a bench bed. It was a little too short and wide for my species, but I made do, constructed a nest, plugged in my exo, and started scrolling through the incident reports of recent accidents at the hospital. I should probably look at the sites in person… but the lifts weren’t running, and who had the time?

O’Mara was right. I immediately identified a significant statistical upswing in “safety incidents” over the past half an or so. No surprise there, obviously, but it’s good to have confirmation. Human brains are excellent pattern makers. They’ll figure out a pattern even if all you’ve got are random data points that don’t actually mean anything, which is why we also have AIs and statisticians.

And AI statisticians, who are kind of terrifying.

There had been a chlorine leak into a water section—bad, but no fatalities—and another into an oxygen section that had been detected and contained before reaching dangerous levels. There’d been a malfunction in the newly installed artificial gravity that had buckled deck plates in an ox section and dropped atmospheric pressure enough so the decomp doors had triggered on either side. Nobody had been standing in the doorways, but the engineer handling the testing had spent an uncomfortable standard hour and a half pinned to the floor by high gravity and isolated by dropped doors.

Fortunately, he was from a fairly sturdy species and had suffered no lasting injuries.

Another staffer—a Terran—had not been so lucky, and had sustained near-fatal burns when a pressure seal in the airlock into one of the hell-planet sections that made Venus seem balmy had failed after she’d stripped out of her pressure suit—a rattling armored vehicle on treads. She’d still had her softsuit on, and that had probably saved her life. She was receiving clone grafts, some of it neural tissue.

I flinched in sympathy.

Those armored self-mobile hardsuits were designed to endure conditions beyond even what my rescue hardsuit could be adapted to. The idea of sweating up a swamp in one, caring for patients, struggling out of the foul thing only to be caught in a jet of superheated steam and half cooked alive… it was something I could relate to far too personally.