Элизабет Бир - Machine

We found a lot of indications that the ancient hull was under stress, and that material had been scavenged from it for… mysterious purposes. It was still intact, but it was thin. And I wouldn’t have wanted to rely on it for my life and well-being.

Big Rock Candy Mountain was not the sort of place where you took a nap without a space suit on. Not if you were me.

“Want to chase that thermal signature?” Tsosie sounded as frustrated as I felt.

“Point me at it.”

Sally uses a magnetic resonance imager built into the hardsuit helmets to stimulate our visual cortexes and induce controlled hallucinations. They’re vivid, and you can’t ignore them. She makes them look a little cartoony, to be sure you know they’re not real. Linden, the Core General wheelmind, can pull the same trick.

In the absence of AIs, Tsosie tapped into the same functionality and used dramatic shades of magenta to outline a distant blotch and give me an idea of the path of hatches and corridors that would take us there.

“This ghost ship stuff is starting to creep me out,” Tsosie said. “I didn’t sign on to recon the Flying Dutchman .”

“Even if everybody is gone, this is a valuable source of archinformation,” I reminded him.

“Well, I didn’t sign on to excavate the Flying Dutchman then.”

“Worse things happen at sea,” I joked.

He reached back—he was a half step ahead of me at that point—and rapped me on the hardsuit pauldron with his fingertips.

I waved at the structures still rearranging themselves in waves around us. “What if everybody got disassembled and made into tinkertoys?”

“Then we’re next,” he grumbled. “This ought to be the hatch we’re looking for.”

It irised open as we approached, which none of the previous hatches had done. They’d all worked when we asked, but this one seemed to be anticipating us. Beyond it, we could glimpse an even more colorful thicket of pegs and keepers, and behind that fretwork… something moving. Something that seemed to be replicating the pieces.

It was glittery and holographic and refractive, like the tinkertoys, and caught the light like them. It seemed to be curved, though it was hard to tell through the lattice.

We stepped up to the hatchway. I called, “Hello?”

The lattice furled itself up like a series of stage curtains being drawn open, and we found ourselves face-to-facelessness with a humanoid form like a shaped bubble of inexplicably golden mercury.

AS IT STARED AT US, and we stared back, I realized that my first impression had not been perfectly correct. The shape had a face, or at least the suggestion of a face. Hollows where the eyes would be; a smooth tapered bulge for a nose; the tilt of cheekbones and the shadows beneath. A pointed chin.

The shape of the body was stereotypically human and feminine, despite having no actual external genitalia or nipples. The torso swelled and tapered into enticing curves and valleys, flaring into breasts and hips that could serve no biological purpose. The figure stood and seemed to watch us approach. It—she?—did not move except for a curious little tilt of the head like a cat tracking prey up a wall.

I wished I hadn’t thought of that particular comparison. I also wanted to roll my eyes violently at the engineer who had designed her.

Sally was still nowhere in the senso. I pinged Tsosie to let me deal with the contact, and stepped around him. He stood very still. I turned my suit speakers on and stopped myself halfway through asking Sally to translate my words into language from about a millennian before.

We’d seen signs in archaic English and Spanish and Chinese, so I was extrapolating. I spoke some English—I’d taken a course back home, when I’d had a lot of time to kill and couldn’t get around very well—so it seemed worth giving it a try. I didn’t know all the words. Rescue specialist and lead trauma specialist were mysteries, for example.

But I knew some. And maybe—

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Dr. Brookllyn Jens. This is Dr. Paul Tsosie. We’re crew from the… the ambulance ship that has matched velocities with your ship. We are friends. We come from a hospital called Core General. We’re responding to your distress signal. Do you have casualties?”

There was a pause, and I swear it blinked, though there were no eyes and no eyelids to blink with. Its gestures reminded me of techniques I’d been shown in school by a friend studying to be a puppeteer. The tilt of a head, the inclination of a shoulder—those could give the watcher a picture of emotion and focus as clearly as any words.

It made a garbled sound: not speech, but like a lot of audio information compressed into a very tight space, laid over itself again and again. I recognized the timbre of Sally’s voice in there, and Tsosie’s, though I could not make out words. And what could have been my own voice, changed the way voices are changed when you don’t hear them from inside your own head.

Then it spoke, in stilted but correct Standard, in a smoky contrived alto that made me flinch.

“I am Helen,” the android said. “The distress signal—yes. There is a distress signal. And there are casualties. Please, come with me.”

Helen? I asked Sally silently, forgetting for a moment that she wasn’t there. Who names their shipmind Helen? We followed the android through more of the ship’s habitation areas. She said she was taking us to a cargo area, which didn’t bode well for living casualties.

Tsosie heard me, though. We still had our local connection, even if the uplink had failed.

I’m not sure she is a shipmind, he replied. You could ask .

I was still contemplating the options when Tsosie said, “Helen, are you the shipmind?”

Helen did not look back. Her shimmering golden body preceded us, and I did my best not to stare at her shiny metal ass. What can I say? It was very distracting.

She said, “I’m Helen Alloy. I was made to wait.”

Helen Alloy.

Because some engineer thought he was funny. And between the smoky voice and the shiny metal ass, I will bet you whatever you care to name that the person who built her was a he.

Tsosie apparently was right there with me, as his voice came over our direct link: There’s a Trojan horse joke here, and I’m not going to make it.

I sighed out loud. One benefit of the hardsuit: I could be kind to myself and those around me and decide not to mike my exasperated sound effects.

“Wait for who?” Tsosie asked, when it became plain that I was ignoring his joke and that Helen wasn’t going to elaborate without prompting.

“Wait for you.” She shook her head, as if indicating confusion. “Wait for whoever came to save us. To maintain the ship and keep the crew safe until somebody came. It’s been a long time.”

“Does the shipmind still exist?” Tsosie asked. “How about the library?”

“There’s a library,” she said. “And there’s Central.”

“Central?” I asked, deciding not to remind Tsosie that I had been going to do the talking. I was a little distracted: without Sally to keep an eye on my pain levels and help coordinate my exo, I was still doing those tasks myself. Keeping abreast of it wasn’t a problem, but it used up a few cycles. “Who is Central?”

“Central,” Helen said, “isn’t a person.”

“You’ve been here alone?” I was beginning to understand why the whole ship was filled with bot toys. Helen must have been incredibly bored. I hoped she’d at least been programmed to be interested in astronomical data, because that was the only source of intellectual stimulation for parsecs.