Элизабет Бир - Machine

Aw. Well. I tried to make a noise of frustration, and could convince myself that I heard it—dimly, hollowly. As if from another chamber in a largely empty hab.

Somebody did, in fact, have control of my fox and my exo. The virus—the meme…

Was this what had happened to the crew of Afar? To Afar himself?

To Linden?

Was this the result of the meme?

How had it gotten into me, in that case?

There had been a tentacle. Inside Jones’s walker. Something like the machine from Big Rock Candy Mountain. I remembered it grabbing me.

Was that machine the vector for the meme, rather than a manifestation of it? If it was, then where had it come from?

My exo had firewalls and was not supposed to accept external inputs without an override code that only I—or somebody with access to my medical or service records—could give. And my fox was protected, as all foxes are. Better than most, in fact, because I’d been in the military and my unit was EMP-shielded and used a triple-encoding transmission link that had been state-of-the-art fifteen ans before.

The meme might have gotten out of Dr. Zhiruo and Linden before they isolated themselves. It might have stripped data from them, such as their access codes. My medical records were available through hospital systems to authorized users. So that was possible, but this wasn’t the time to worry about what might have happened. This was the time for getting the hell out.

I tried not to stop to wonder how I was going to get myself out of this non-space if all those methane types and several artificial intelligences hadn’t managed to escape.

Helen’s crew hadn’t been affected. Neither had Calliope, concealed in Helen’s crew. They didn’t have etchable brains. I didn’t have an etchable brain, either, but I had a fox, and I had the exo….

Helen hadn’t been affected, either, precisely. Or rather, she’d been affected, but not in the same manner as the other AIs. She’d been… turned against herself. Mostly disassembled. But the core had hung on, though she had been—I realized now—delusional in some of the same ways that Calliope had become delusional: paranoid and fixated.

(Was Calliope delusional? I shied away from contemplating the implications of that question. It was a problem for a moment when I was not fighting for my continued existence as something other than a disembodied consciousness.)

The first step was to break it down. What did the patients in different categories of… of infection, for lack of a better word… have in common with one another?

Helen was unlike shipminds and wheelminds and medical AIs in that she had a separate body.

Carlos and Calliope were unlike me and Afar’s crew in that they did not have foxes.

I was like Helen in that I outsourced some of my functions to a peripheral system. Some of us did a lot of that kind of integration: others (Carlos) none at all. Some of us were solid-state cognitive operations—the AIs, the Darboof—and some of us thought with programmable meat, with or without integrated circuitry.

So here I was, back where I started after a fashion. Back inside the machine.

A different machine. One I hadn’t chosen to make a part of me.

Was this line of thinking getting me any closer to a solution, or even a hypothesis as to how this whole bizarre mess of generation ship, sick artificial intelligences, and an apparently fraudulent cryo chamber hooked together?

What if I resorted to wild, out-there, black-sky speculation? What was the most outré idea I could come up with?

Theory: it was totally aliens.

Not ancient, safely dead, and apparently benevolent aliens like the Koregoi, that forerunner species that had ranged—and left—the Milky Way long before the Synarche and its systers came along. Those children of dead stars had left us occasional caches of impossibly advanced technology, like the recently discovered Baomind, a library the size of a solar system, and the physics that lay behind the gravity belt I was probably still wearing over my hardsuit, for example.

So not those. And not friendly, normal, everydia it’s-rude-to-call-them-aliens like Tralgar and Cheeirilaq, systers one could sit down for a nice beer or metabolically compatible beer equivalent with—though never coffee—and complain about local Synarche policies.

But actual, hardcore, scary, middle-of-sleep-shift-three-vee-you-have-to-be-up-in-four-hours-and-are-being-irresponsible-watching-this-now aliens. Aliens that wanted to disassemble my hospital the same way they were disassembling Helen’s generation ship, and convert it into computronium and the machine. Those kind of aliens.

I wondered again about Helen’s link with the machine. If it was aliens converting her ship and self into alien computronium microbots, they seemed to have left some of her personality intact. I wasn’t a science fiction expert, but it seemed to me that that was a rarity in the annals of all-consuming, assimilating, mind-control aliens.

In some ways, this was the most terrifying prospect. In others, I was surprised to find it somehow reassuring. Assimilating aliens were a horrifying existential threat, something that might destroy the entire Synarche, that might require shoving Big Rock Candy Mountain , Core General, Sally, Mercy, Afar—and me and literally everybody and everything I loved except the daughter I had not seen in twenty-odd ans—into the consuming embrace of the Well in order to prevent it from spreading.

It was also a horrifying existential threat that I could look at and say, “That’s not us. It comes from outside, and it’s monsters.”

Even in this age of adequate mental health care, when things are so much better than they were, I’m too much of a cop and too much of a doctor to ever convince myself that the monsters are conveniently other . The monsters don’t come from outside.

The monsters are calling from inside our genome.

That’s why, during the Eschaton, it took the medical interventions that eventually developed into rightminding to make us decently able to stop destroying ourselves. It’s a small comfort, I suppose, that once we got into space and met other sapiences, we discovered that they were all more or less equally as fucked up evolutionarily as we are, and had all had to take similar social steps to grow beyond their atavistic impulses into something we might recognize as culture.

I liked the scary predatory aliens theory a lot, for certain values of like . If it was scary aliens invading, waging war, and converting us into peripherals by means of their meme viruses, that left one huge logical problem, though: Where the Well did Calliope come from?

Ah, Calliope.

Well, then it probably wasn’t aliens.

And that led to an even more frightening proposition. What if Calliope was right? What if there was some vast corrupt conspiracy centering in the Synarche, in Core General? What if she was a freedom fighter? What if?

I didn’t think Calliope was right. I knew in my (no longer aching) bones that she could not be right.

But here in the belly of the machine, a quotation from an ancient, pre-Eschaton Terran statesman named Oliver Cromwell came floating back to me. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”

Christ was a religious prophet from an even earlier era, very popular on Terra for several thousand years. He preached all the usual things the better class of prophets preach, about respecting your fellow beings and treating them as one would like oneself to be treated. He got about the reception you’d expect, and his teachings were widely misinterpreted for millennians. Millenni a , I suppose, it being actual Terran years we’re talking about.