Элизабет Бир - Machine

Probably a sure sign that my brain chemicals needed a nudge, but I didn’t have the energy to put myself out even that much. Which was another downvote on my chemistry, come to think of it. I wondered where that loyalty would be when I pursued what I thought I knew.

Tears prickled my eye-corners.

Fine. Fine! I tuned myself, and instantly felt better. There were no resources to waste by not efficiently fixing small problems.

“Am I cleared to return to duty?”

Rilriltok buzzed grumpily.

“You’re not even cleared to sit up in bed, Jens. Not that we have the time to worry about that now.” O’Mara held out a hand. “Alley-oop. You can have a quick shower—which you badly need, by the way—and then we have to go talk to Starlight.”

You could have waited for us to get you out, said Rilriltok reasonably.

“Could I have?”

It sighed. No. I suppose you couldn’t have.

“Hey,” I said suddenly. “Translation is working! Is Linden back online?”

O’Mara and Helen looked at each other. Rilriltok bobbed a little lower in the air.

“After a fashion,” O’Mara said. “You know what we said about quarantine? Come on, shake a tentacle. We need to move, and it’ll be faster to demonstrate than explain.”

I badly needed to have a conversation with someone. But I badly needed to have it in private. And I didn’t think I could get rid of O’Mara until I ran this errand.

The shower, hydration, and a couple of stimulant tabs helped clear the nebulas from around my thoughts, though not as effectively as coffee would have. And not that my resultant ideas precisely blazed with the clarity of newborn stars. I pulled on scrubs and a lab coat and liberated a fresh hardsuit actuator from a locker on my way out of the bathroom. Possibly I was never going to let myself be more than a meter away from one again under any circumstances.

In the process of getting cleaned up and dressed, I was reminded that my exo was still overcompensating and twitchy. I knocked over toiletries three times, and the stack of clean clothes twice. (The second time it was more of a heap of clean clothes, really, because I hadn’t bothered to refold something I was only going to put right on.) They still had that freshly printed smell, which did as much as any amount of tuning to make me feel like maybe we could fix our problems.

The fact that translation was working again made the several conflicting ayatanas wrestling in my head feel much more like a hardship than a sensible precaution. So I told O’Mara that we were stopping on the way to get them pulled. He grumbled about time constraints, but this time Rilriltok came down on the side of preserving my mental health, so I prevailed.

My scalp still tingled slightly from the magnetic manipulation of having my fox vacuumed. It took a little more juice than when Linden used magnetic resonance to shoot street signs and danger signals right into our heads, but not that much more. I wasn’t used to having several ayatanas purged at once, was all.

When that was done and I stood up, I still felt wrongish. My body was the wrong shape and my head was strangely empty. I didn’t want to show it, though. The exo would compensate for me until the feeling wore off.

I was still telling myself that as I wobbled stiff-legged down the corridor. Rilriltok had gone back to work by then, but Helen accompanied O’Mara and me.

“I feel,” O’Mara said, as I caught myself with one hand before I lurched into a corridor wall, “as if you are making some unwise life choices.”

“You said we were in a hurry.”

They looked at me.

I sighed. “It’s only my exo.”

“Damaged?”

“No.” I lurched the other way. “I had to overclock the microservos to get loose. It’s going to take me a week to get them calibrated and balanced again.”

At least a week. Probably four. But I thought O’Mara would find unnecessary precision upsetting right then.

The lifts still weren’t running. I supposed that would have been entirely too much convenience. Having translation back was such a relief that I didn’t complain, though. And because we were going to see Starlight, we didn’t even have to leave the main oxygen hab sectors. Though that didn’t remove all the annoyances.

“I cannot wait,” O’Mara said, as we climbed outward and down and got heavier along the way, “until we have the artificial gravity working.”

I concentrated on not tripping on the stairs, as my weight increased with each footfall.

“Tell me about Linden,” I said. I could use the distraction.

O’Mara grunted like a big, grumpy dog. “We’ve got contact. She hasn’t managed to purge the meme, but she’s still fighting it. Translation is running through main engineering, though—they managed to get that back before they spun us up again.”

So everybody had had some warning about the change in acceleration.

This time.

I think I gasped audibly when I saw Starlight, because Helen put her warm metal hand on my shoulder.

I’ve said it before, but: You can’t evacuate a hospital. Not one this size, with patients with this many needs, some of whom are too fragile to transport without killing. And yet… I’m not proud to say it, but one look at the state of our enormous, sessile oxygen sector administrator made me want to turn tail and run.

I could see why O’Mara and company had decided that quarantine, at least within the hospital, was pointless now.

When I was little I knew what the world was. It was a place without pity. A terrible place. A place of loss. A place where no one ever got to keep anything. Where things just hurt all the time, and there was no respite. And very few people took your pain seriously.

I’m older now, and I know that this view, while true, is incomplete and immature. Because a thing is ephemeral doesn’t mean that it is worthless. Rather it makes it more part of the world.

Looking at Starlight, looking up at their translucent leaves, windowpaned in the bright Corelight, I was plunged right back to that place in childhood where everything was futile and there was no point in anything. All my protocols, all my training: I had no idea what to do.

The great pattern of leaves stretched over me, layered and moving as before. But they didn’t rustle; they clattered. They rattled , where one edge contacted another. They rang like crystal. They chimed .

The paler unpigmented windows in the leaves were no longer merely translucent. They were actual windows—clear as glass. They were glass… or rather crystal, based on the sound they made and the rainbows they cast over everything.

Starlight didn’t show… wires, or circuits, or anything else growing along their stems. There were none of those signifiers that people use to symbolize the interface of technology and nature, or whatever.

But the tree was clearly infected, and cell by cell, portions of their structure were being replaced with silicon.

I put a hand out for balance. If it hadn’t been for my exo, I might have sat down. Helen still, with programmed concern, steadied me. She’d been ready. I wondered what it was to be an AI programmed entirely for emotional labor. For taking care of humans and our needs.

It sounded really boring, and I wanted to do something to take care of Helen in return. But her face was featureless, expressionless. How could you even tell what she needed?

How could you tell if she even had any needs?

That was, I supposed, the point. That was why she’d been built. Helen would never make you feel you needed to do anything for her.

I drew a breath, and spoke to my administrator, the plant that seemed to be turning into computronium in front of me. “Hello, Starlight. Are you in discomfort?”