Элизабет Бир - Machine

There were other incidents of equipment failure or safety protocol malfunction, an additional half dozen or so. One more had led to a serious injury. Another had resulted in a pair of fatalities.

If it was all sabotage, it couldn’t all be caused by the same person—could it? It was happening in too many different sectors, on too many different shifts. And then there was the incident on Sally, with the damaged coms. We all assumed it had been set up before we left port. But what if Sally had been damaged by a member of the crew, and she and Loese were in denial about it?

That was horrifying.

Why had O’Mara and the Administree recruited me for this job? They had access to staff logs, to the comings and goings of everybody in the hospital. They could access all sorts of information that was off-limits for a simple trauma doc.

You might even say that Starlight was the central Authoritree.

For ox and CO 2, anyway.

No, the quality of my sense of humor is not improved by stress.

But couldn’t they check who had accessed each damaged sector before the damage occurred? Well, maybe. The Synarche’s privacy regulations precluded pulling bulk data, though I was confident we could get a warrant to track the movements of an individual person or persons if I could identify a suspect or two. Assuming that they hadn’t used timed devices to cause the damage, which they probably had, which in turn meant that establishing a timeline would be well-nigh impossible when one considered the sheer volume of traffic around this place.

Yes, I know, privacy is a core value and a sentient right. But right then it was a pain in my ass.

So what did my supervisors think I could do—or that I would notice—that they couldn’t?

Well, O’Mara and I had known each other for a long time. They trusted me. They knew I had a Judiciary background.

Tsosie and I had been the people most threatened by the sabotage on Sally, so perhaps O’Mara assumed that I was unlikely to be behind it. Also, I’d been away from the hospital when most of the local incidents took place.

So I was likely to be clean, from their perspective. Okay.

I wasn’t an investigator or an archinformist, but I had some investigative skills. Cheeirilaq, for example, was immediately identifiable as law enforcement, and was treated as such. Law enforcement, and also a gigantic predator.

I was little and squishy—as I had recently been reminded—and wore medical symbols, not Judiciary rank.

So I was nonthreatening, and I had a reason to be most anyplace in the hospital….

Huh. With the exception of the chlorine bleed into water, all of the sabotage events had taken place in ox sections. Now that was interesting. It suggested that the culprit or culprits were oxygen or CO 2metabolizers, who might access those areas without checking out suits and leaving a trail.

And perhaps it was revealing for other reasons than the suit issue. Because one thing about giant multi-environment stations—whether they are hospitals or hab wheels or something else—is that people who live and work exclusively in one environment can forget that the others exist. This tendency is even more prevalent in new arrivals from single-environment habs.

Or planets.

So maybe I was looking for somebody who hadn’t been here for very long. And whose background was somewhere deep in an oxygen-only settlement. That would explain both why the events had started up recently, and why they were largely limited to ox environments. And water. A person from an oxygen planet would remember about water.

It was also possible that the sabotage was entirely limited to ox environments, if it turned out that the outlier was a legitimate accident. It’s too easy to get bogged down in trying to fit all the available events into an identified pattern—in creating conspiracy theories—whether or not all those events actually belong together. In any case, I scribbled a physical note to O’Mara, DNA sealed it, put it in an interdepartmental folder marked CONFIDENTIAL, and sent it off down the hall by mail robot.

At least checking up on ox-sector staffers from ox-only environments who had joined the hospital in the last an was a starting point.

I woke from a light doze with a start. My limbs still ached with exhaustion; my fox told me I’d only drifted off for twenty minutes or so. What had awakened me was not a sound or motion, but the sudden crystallization of an idea.

I had been thinking that the saboteur or saboteurs might be unsophisticated in how they thought about multi-environment habs, and in that case probably newcomers to Core General. But what if the opposite was true?

I’d considered the possibility that it was somebody savvy enough to know that checking out softsuits to go into hostile environments might eventually lead to them getting caught. But what if the saboteur (or saboteurs) was—were—from a non-ox-compatible environment, and they were committing their crimes in ox sectors as a red herring? That was a better scenario for me, because it might mean that they had outsmarted themselves.

In either case, how were they hiding from Linden? The same way whoever had sabotaged Sally was hiding from Sally?

I tuned myself a little wider awake and sent another note to Starlight and O’Mara suggesting that they look into suit checkouts into ox sectors as well as out of them, though I imagined they’d thought of it already.

That’s why we have checklists. Because all too often, everybody assumes that everybody else has thought of it already. And then important, lifesaving steps somehow fail to be taken.

And then accidents happen and people like me show up to—in the best-case scenario—drag you out of the rubble and graft and glue you back together and dust off your shoulders and say, “You oughtn’t have been so careless.”

AIs usually follow checklists. AIs might get bored, but they don’t get lazy and they don’t cut corners. This is why ships have shipminds and habs have wheelminds.

Because organic-type slowbrains get lazy and bored, and discipline is not always our strong suit.

What if the saboteur was an AI? That would give it a route to prevent itself from being noticed, and perhaps even to hack the memories of other AIs, like Linden and Sally. I’d seen Sally’s telepresence—at least enough to speak to me—without triggering the AI presence lights.

Hm. Possible.

I must have dozed off again despite supporting my brain chemistry, because this time I woke about a standard and a half later with my reader resting on my nose. I nearly rolled on my side and went back to sleep.

But… speaking of following the checklists, I pushed through the achy sluggishness of exhaustion, stowed my reader, and pulled the net down over the bed. I willed the lights off. Feeling smug in my self-righteousness and a little ridiculous also, I closed my eyes.

I assume I must have, anyway, because I don’t remember falling asleep. The next thing to impinge on my consciousness was a tremendous, reverberating crash. The bed net snapped tight against me as I bounced hard, imprinting my skin with what would no doubt be some very interesting contusions. Then, abruptly, I was floating.

Well, I was held firmly against the mattress, but when you’ve worked in space as long as I have, it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between being pressed to the bed by acceleration, and being pressed to the bed by the net.

Speaking of checklists, this was a great time for one.

I had air for now. That was the first thing.

The second thing was visibility, and I had no light. The on-call room was very dark. Darker than it should have been, because I’d turned the lights off but there’s always a readout by the door that doubles as a night light. I lay there in that dark and listened with everything in me for the hiss of escaping atmosphere. Or, worse, a total absence of sound from outside that would tell me the corridor beyond my little single-thickness door had been decompressed and evacuated.