Элизабет Бир - Machine

The irony is that this Cromwell person, who provided such a useful sentiment that has since been widely appropriated by logicians, historians, archinformists, and doctors (like myself), was the sort of individual who overthrew a government. (Okay, it was a monarchy of some sort, or something equally terrible.) He also murdered a lot of dissidents because he was pretty damned certain he was right. And because he was pretty adamant that everyone should subscribe to his religious convictions.

Don’t be like Oliver Cromwell, I told myself, and tried to examine Calliope’s allegations from a more neutral point of view.

Perhaps the reason I was so certain Calliope was wrong was that the prospect of her being right was so deeply terrifying.

What if there was some kind of vast conspiracy—or rampant sophipathology—infecting the hospital, infecting it as certainly as the meme was infecting Linden and Dr. Zhiruo? What would that look like? How would I tell?

What would its nature and purpose be? Why would it be worth it? What sort of motive would allow for it? How would such a thing operate, and how could it keep its existence secret, or even secret-ish?

What was behind all the things Sally could not admit to any official knowledge of?

I sighed deeply, realizing that I could at least feel the air stretch my lungs when I drew enough breath in. That was reassuring: if I could feel my body I probably wasn’t dealing with locked-in syndrome or anything else similarly daunting.

Well, I wasn’t going to find out the answers stuck in here, wherever here was, and that was for sure. I had, I was certain, colleagues on the outside working to rescue me—exactly as I would have been working if things had been reversed.

That led me to wonder what my physical situation might be. Was I still stuck inside the walker, or had someone managed to extract Calliope and me? Was I physically encased in a barrier of some sort that prevented my fox from reaching into the senso? Or was my fox disconnected or damaged somehow?

I didn’t think I was experiencing what Afar’s crew had, on consideration. Their brain scans (what passed for brain scans, with their species: piezoelectric patterns in any case) hadn’t shown conscious activity, and I certainly felt conscious enough. And the breathing proved I was aware of my physical body, even if it didn’t hurt.

Had Cheeirilaq come along and spun me into a giant, protective cocoon?

That was a strangely satisfying image. Though as far as I knew, its species didn’t spin cocoons for each other. They didn’t do much for each other, except mate occasionally and refrain from eating one another—these diar.

How had it never occurred to me before that it was unusual for a member of a species with so little commensal instinct, like Rilriltok, to choose a career as a healer? I mean, it was a male, and obviously had the skills to placate hungry females at mating time, and most of its patients were frozen when it got them—

But my old friend was a real weirdo, it seemed.

I wondered if that insight came from me, or from one of the several ayatanas that were still making all my limbs feel like they were shaped weird.

The lack of pain was having an effect on my cognition. I kept having ideas. But I was having so many ideas, I was also having a hard time concentrating. The theorizing was interesting, but I was giddy and free-associating in exactly the sort of way that wasn’t helpful for concentrating on getting myself out .

So. Set the theorizing aside for a time and collect some data. What were the instruments available to me?

Right now, they were limited to the interface between my exo… and whatever was on the other side of my exo. A hardsuit, presumably, unless that had been removed?

Status check told me that the exo was functioning optimally, and so was my fox. The fox was integrating with the exo, which answered my earlier question about damage to the fox’s transmission capability. The fox’s uplink was working. So my lack of senso connection meant that it was being blocked by something.

Right. A physical block, or a software block?

Come back to that.

The exo’s battery was near full charge.

I’d replaced it before I went to try to talk Calliope down. That it was still charged told me that either it had been replaced again (unlikely), I was getting a charge from somewhere (possible), or that it hadn’t been very long and I hadn’t moved very much since I plugged it in (optimal).

Back to the question of the uplink. I had means at my disposal to test that. When—if—I found the problem, would I also have means at my disposal to repair it?

Wait and see, Jens, wait and see.

To say that I felt my way around the exo is an inexpert metaphor, but I couldn’t think of a better one. I stretched out no groping fingers, even in my imagination. What I did was to methodically consider and categorize the—I guess one could call them sensations, after a fashion—the tickles of data, however muted, from where my exo made contact with what was on the other side of my exo.

It wasn’t my hardsuit.

That was a horrifying realization. And if I had been rescued and brought inside the hospital and was somehow mostly unable to feel my body—and my uplink was only partially functioning—they would have taken the hardsuit off entirely.

But the actuator core was still attached to my chest. It was merely retracted completely.

I have a lot of expertise with my adaptive devices. My extensive experience and my skill at fixing and maintaining them come in handy in the field. And I still needed to know what I was in, if it wasn’t my hardsuit. I was breathing, and I wasn’t dead, so whatever that falling sensation had been it hadn’t shoved me out the walker’s door into space—and if I was still inside the walker, the door was not still ajar.

There was something around me, a kind of fabric or film or very smooth metal.

I lay in the dark and quiet and talked to my exo. It didn’t talk back except in its usual stock phrases—it was only a machine, after all, not a shipmind—but people talk to their equipment all the time. It makes us feel more connected and in control when we can personalize our things.

There’s a thing with pain. Memory has a somatic component. Experiencing a kind of pain can bring back a host of related associations. Even witnessing an injury—or hearing somebody describe an injury—provokes powerful recollections.

That’s why we all have the uncontrollable—and annoying—habit of regaling our freshly injured friends with tales of the times we whacked our thumb with a hammer, too, though so much worse, obviously.

My current lack of pain was making it harder for me to hack my way around my exo. I don’t mean any kind of juvenile justifications about how I need my pain, or that it’s good for people to suffer. What builds character is encouragement to persist in the face of adversity, not needless discomfort. That uses up executive function and doesn’t help anybody accomplish anything.

So, I had my exo. That was excellent and useful news. I had contact with my exo. Even better.

Fatigue levels in excess of safe values , my exo replied, when I pinged it. Pain levels optimal.

You tell ’em, exo.

Could I move it?

I could not. A little experimentation proved that I couldn’t so much as twitch it. Nor could I push it around manually by moving my body inside it. It was locked in position. I did discover that I could, isometrically, flex against it, but the scaffolding of the exo itself did not budge. I might have been able to bruise myself against the device, but I couldn’t shift it.