Элизабет Бир - Machine

I wouldn’t do anything unethical. I would make no rash or unconsidered choices. I wouldn’t take her side, betray my beliefs or my ethics, damage my career. I wasn’t going to make a single bad decision because of Calliope Jones.

(I was aware that the jury was still out on whether going into the machine to get her back was a good decision or not, but as far as I was concerned, any decision that ended with a life saved and no rescuers lost was one that had worked out okay. Adapt, improvise, overcome, don’t die yourself, and worry about the property damage later: that’s my motto.)

Anyway, I was going to enjoy the sense of having a bond of sympathy with another human being. And possibly even use that sense to try to create an emotional connection with that other human being. In order to help me do my job, which was still—damn you, O’Mara—figuring out what was behind the sabotage.

I could feel a little bad about that, if I permitted myself. But I was not going to permit myself. I was going to do my damned job, even the parts that were likely to get O’Mara in trouble. I was going to do my job, and that was all.

I’ve always wanted to save people. Maybe because nobody saved me. (Nobody could have saved me: my youth being hard was nobody’s fault but the universe’s, for not giving a damn, and society’s, for not being perfectly able to maintain supply chains to the back end of beyond.) But it’s always been important to me—dramatically important—to make as many people safe as possible. Maybe it made me feel like I was justifying my existence. Doing something worthwhile with my time.

I wanted to save Calliope, too.

I stroked her hair again. “Hey.”

She didn’t look at me. That was okay, because she was listening. I knew she had to be listening.

“What were you digging for, Calliope? What were you fighting so hard to reach and destroy?”

“X marks the spot.” Her eyes flickered at me. “The damned machine was supposed to work better.”

“This hospital is pretty sturdy,” I agreed. “I’m sure it’s better built than they expected. Who are they, Calliope? Who told you the machine could punch through our hull?”

She drew in a deep breath and held it. I took my hand off her shoulder and folded it into my lap with the other one. I leaned in slightly, maintaining the connection, but giving her space as well.

“Calliope?”

“You tied me up,” she said suddenly. “Why am I tied up? Help! Nurse!”

She tugged her bonds as if she had just noticed and was testing them. “Why am I in jail?”

“You’re not in jail,” I said. I strained myself to remember history. They used to lock people up for crimes, sometimes for life, I knew. Sometimes because they couldn’t safely be released, and sometimes for revenge or as a form of social control. Political prisoners. Calliope had… two sets of memories in her. One, whatever she knew from being a modern person. The other, whatever had been trained into her about being an archaic person, before the fox that must have been used to do it was removed. “You’re in a secure ward. You have an illness, an antisocial pathology, and you have a brain injury. We’re not going to punish you for that. It’s not a moral failing.”

She laughed as if I had said something cruel. “You’re going to brainwash me.”

I wanted to draw back. I made myself hold still. “We’re going to offer you a chance to be treated, if you decide that’s what you want.”

Sweetheart, brainwash you? Somebody already did that.

She thrashed her head violently side to side. “Everybody here is complicit!” she shouted. “Everybody here needs to be exposed!”

There was a moment when I almost put my hands up in the air and walked away, shouting, You won’t let me help you and nothing I will do will change anything.

Almost.

Cynicism is useful. It’s like calluses: it helps you get through life without constantly finding your tender bits worn raw by everything in the world that is wrong. It helps you choose your battles.

But cynicism is also toxic sometimes, because it tells you that nothing can be changed. Nothing can be fixed or bettered. Cynicism also becomes a means of social control. A reinforcement of learned helplessness.

Learned helplessness is something I am always struggling to unlearn.

“You said you were trying to create a scandal,” I reminded her. “I don’t know what it is that you think I’m complicit in.”

She stopped tugging at her restraints—they were soft, and didn’t tighten, but they also didn’t stretch very much—and looked up at me. Her mouth thinned.

“They’re using people for parts,” she said. “Poor people. They kidnap people and cut them up. Go ahead and look if you don’t believe me.”

I wanted to jump out of my chair and lurch backward, away from the horror of her allegation. The theory was ridiculous on the face of it: kidnapping people wasn’t cost-efficient when you could grow whatever you needed from stem cells and not worry about rejection, for crying out loud.

My mouth came open to deny it—

But she believed it, obviously. Which I guessed meant somebody had programmed that idea into her.

“I’ll look into it.” I kept my voice gentle. This wasn’t about me and if I was shocked or irritated. This was about saving the hospital… and finding out the truth. Exposing what was going on in the private ward.

What if the truth destroyed the hospital, as Calliope had suggested it might? What if—

If the truth destroyed it, it needed to go. I didn’t believe that was likely, anyway. What she was suggesting was ridiculous.

There were plenty of other medically unethical possibilities out there without “kidnapping people for parts” being one of them. Although it was the kind of story that could motivate the medically uniformed.

Some people used to avoid registering as organ donors because they were afraid doctors would let them die in order to harvest their bodies. It didn’t happen, but people in marginalized groups have always had good reason to be suspicious of the medical establishment taking advantage of and experimenting on them. Informed consent rules did not, alas, grow up out of nowhere, or because they were not needed.

I was struggling with two conflicting narratives. My own, where Core General was a place of refuge… and the one I was increasingly coming to believe, where it had a dark underside that people I’d trusted were guiding me to find and reveal.

She must have read the incredulity in my face or voice, because she said, “Don’t condescend to me.”

“Calliope—”

“You’re trying to trick me. You think I’m crazy. You’ll put a box in my brain and make me like it.” The flatness and confusion of her tone reminded me of Helen, when Helen’s cycles were caught in a loop. Like a flat spin in atmosphere.

Like me, Calliope was struggling with two conflicting narratives. Two sets of memories; two sets of inputs. One derived organically, from experience. One trained into her with the intervention of the machine inside her skull. A machine that had then been crudely ripped away, leaving unhealed wounds.

I couldn’t call the result amateurish. Amateur brain surgery does not leave a functional human being behind. This had been carried out by somebody who knew what they were doing. Had at least known enough not to kill the patient. I imagined Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo wouldn’t have left such a mess behind.

Maybe the word I was looking for was butcher . Butchery was a professional skill, after all.

I flinched as I realized that Calliope could have three layers of memory in there. Or four.

Memory is an odd beast. It conflates and alters naturally, and every time you recall an event you change the memory. Adding a fox into the mix is supposed to make memories more stable, to provide an unaltered record to go with the subjective one.