Элизабет Бир - Machine

They did not answer.

I said, “You’re inhibited from talking about it, aren’t you? A privacy block? Because it’s technically a matter of patient care?”

O’Mara glanced down at the canopy of the Administree. “Told you she was sharp.”

The tree laughed like crystal wind chimes. The sound crawled along my nerves and the nape of my neck in an unpleasant frisson.

“Right,” I said. “So I take the risk if it comes out. The buck stops here.”

“Maybe you get the glory if your heroism is recognized,” Helen said dreamily.

I stared at her. I’d almost forgotten she was there, she had been standing so silently in the background.

In my defense, O’Mara stared at her, too.

I pointed at Starlight’s silicon-edged leaves. “What about that? Helen’s machine is eating the hospital from the inside out? That’s kind of important!”

“We’re working on that,” O’Mara said. “You have your own job. You can’t do everything.”

Be nice if they’d tell me what the job was. But if they were forbidden to by a formal confidentiality stricture, it was quite possible they literally couldn’t talk about it. Which would… explain some things. Such as: why they had led me by the nose to this information, in a manner where I could plausibly have found it out on my own….

I shook my head. “I guess I had better figure out what you want from me, then. But don’t blame me if I get it wrong.”

O’Mara drawled in a particular dry tone when they were deadpanning. They drawled now. “Figure the odds.”

“I’m not that good of a handicapper,” I said.

IWASN’T WELL YET, THOUGH I was better. And all this adrenaline, confusion, and anger weren’t doing my healing process any favors. Pain and weakness throbbed through my body. Breathing was a chore. But I wasn’t going back to a treatment room or an on-call bunk. I needed real, comfortable, uninterrupted rest in my own quarters, even if I had to walk halfway around the hab ring to get there with the lifts not running.

But once I arrived, undressed, and lay down in bed, I couldn’t turn off.

I could have tuned myself into sleep, but I had an idea that if I stared into space and tried not to think about the things that were currently bothering me, I might be giving my subconscious time to work on the problem. I spent the time writing a letter to my daughter. I didn’t know if a plain text file would be safe to send, but if even those were forbidden by the quarantine, I could write it, queue it, and it would go when it was safe to let it go.

For the first time I found myself wondering if I would still be alive when Rache received it. If she ever did.

If the Synarche didn’t decide that it needed to push the whole hospital down the gravity slope into the Well, stored information and all, in order to prevent the thing that was infecting us from spreading. I’d probably be dead before that happened, though. I was reasonably certain that the Synarche would wait until we were cold—until there were no signs of life from Core General—before disposing of the corpses.

If by some mischance I was not dead at that point, I’d have plenty of time to contemplate the slide into nothingness. Time dilation meant that the subjective eternity of falling into a black hole would take long enough that there was no chance I’d be alive to enjoy being spaghettified. Sort of a pity, from the point of view of science, but I found I didn’t mind at all.

These were not thoughts I put in the letter to my kid.

When I had finished it, I lay in the dark once more and once more talked quietly with my exo about how scared I was and how I didn’t know what to do.

It still didn’t answer. It was still just a machine. I could have shared with Sally. She remained trapped in dock, despite having taken on consumables and gotten sterilized for her next trip out. Waiting for the call. If quarantine was ever lifted, she could be away in instants.

If quarantine was never lifted, she would die here, too. And it would take her a lot longer to die than it would the meatminds. Perhaps it wasn’t such a blessing that she hadn’t gotten infected.

Even if we all survived, if everybody else managed to fix the things that O’Mara had reminded me weren’t all my job… unless something changed between now and then—well, if the situation on Core General was what I was coming to suspect it was, I probably wouldn’t be going with Sally. I wouldn’t be going with Sally, because I was going to get up in the morning, and I was going to do some more research and talk to a few more people.

And then I was going to take on the entirety of whatever was going on at Core General that wasn’t publicly supposed to be. Knowing there would be professional repercussions for an action like that. So the idea of talking with my friend the shipmind, my colleague of a decan and more, made my chest ache with preemptive loneliness.

Core General was not what I had believed in. I was becoming increasingly convinced that there was something poisoned at its center, and the top administrators knew it, and they were physically prevented from telling. And that was why they were using me to reveal it. If I could collect the evidence, and figure out what was going on.

Losing my faith in Core felt like I was losing my family of origin all over again. Except worse, because I was closer to my crew than I had been to my family of origin. They’d died when I was too young to know them as people . I felt like I was losing my wife and daughter all over again.

It hurt.

And I realized that I was going to do it anyway.

People—human-type people, my own people—are constantly on a quest for an identity. Some lucky ones find the thing they want to be already inside themselves, or in a healthy family or community. Far too many of us, however, latch onto a simplified externality that seems to offer all the answers and invest our sense of meaning in it. We make some half-baked philosophy our driving force. Something we picked up reading the sort of novels and graphic stuff where first-person narrators opine bombastically about how the galaxy really works and what makes people really tick and How You Ought To Be.

Usually the ones steeped in atavistic machismo.

I was afraid I’d done the same thing, except what I had picked up and latched onto was a hospital employment manual.

I wanted to jump up and run around waving my arms and shouting accusations. I wanted to yell at O’Mara, in particular, until my throat hurt. I wanted to finish my investigation, when I was so close to the answers that I could taste them.

And a pretty foul taste it was, too. But I’d pushed my poor body as far as it was willing to go, and it would fail me if I tried to push it any farther. I had to rest, as frustrating as rest was. I had to care for myself so I could solve the bigger problem confronting everyone .

Well , I told myself. I will deal with it in the morning.

Well , I told myself. The only way out is through.

I tuned myself to calm and doziness, and finally drifted to sleep while looking at memories of Rache in my senso. Some of them were my memories, recorded when she was very small. Some were hers, that she had saved and sent to me. I slept hard, for not nearly long enough, and woke when my timer nudged my biochemistry. That left me in a better state of mind than a loud noise or an explosion.

It was the little things.

Rilriltok was on duty when I made my way down to the secure ward Judiciary used to see to the medical needs of prisoners, which is what Specialist Calliope Jones had become. It was something of a surprise to find it here, because if this were its shift—which it was not—I would have expected it to be in Cryo. Since that was where it worked, being a cryonicist and all.