Элизабет Бир - Machine

“I’m not alone,” she said. “Here are the passengers.”

She pressed a metal palm to a pad beside an irising hatch. A big hatch: this must be one of the promised cargo bays. Sally’s map and my own sense of dead reckoning told me that we’d come up on the side of the spinning wheel. That made sense: cargo bays would serve as valuable radiation shielding, though this one seemed to be oriented away from the wheel’s direction of travel.

She stepped through and gestured us into the airlock with her. We went. Helen cycled the lock. The door in front of us came open. A pale light flooded past her, shimmering on the curve of her hip and thigh.

I peered over Helen’s shoulder. The hold was filled with rank after rank of caskets.

Coffins, or cryo containers? It was hard to be sure, and given that the cargo hold was cold as space and held no atmosphere, the only functional difference was going to be whether the people inside could be resuscitated.

Whatever the objects were, there were a lot of them. I did a little quick mental math and figured that there must be a thousand of them in this bay alone.

They might be alive. Or at least, aliveable.

“Bet you two standard weeks of kitchen duty that this isn’t the only hold,” Tsosie murmured.

“No bet.” My heart sank at the size of the job ahead.

Sally still wasn’t there. So I had to ask Helen about the history.

“Helen,” I said, “how good was your people’s cryonics technology?”

She looked at me and shrugged a fluid, rippling shrug. “In comparison to what, Doctor?”

“Do you know what your revival success rate is?”

“They are my crew,” she said. “They must be all right.”

Her program was focused on protecting her crew’s well-being to the point of being dangerous to herself or bystanders. It was a common problem in early model AIs: they were geared toward maximum preservation of human life in the very short term, and because their algorithms weren’t flexible, they had occasionally created a hell born of trolley problems.

Worry feels like somebody doing crochet with your internal organs. I subvocalized, Tsosie, are you seeing this?

“I am,” he answered, without turning on his suit speakers. “We’re going to have to salvage the whole ship, aren’t we?”

Suddenly, Sally was with us again. “Don’t panic,” she said, as if those words were ever inclined to keep one from panicking. They came with a nice dose of anxiolytics, though, which helped. “The crew is all fine. We’re dealing with a technical problem.”

I shot her a hard feeling.

She sighed. “A little damage came to light. We’re making repairs.”

How could you have damage and not know it?

The ambulance is, in a very real sense, Sally’s body. For her not to notice damage would be like me having burned my hand and not realized it: indicative of a far bigger problem.

“We’ll talk about it when you’re not so busy.”

But— Tsosie began.

I knew what he was about to say, and I was totally with him. What, exactly, had been damaged? He was the mission commander, and I was the rescue coordinator—

But Sally was the shipmind. She shushed him with the electronic equivalent of a squelching stare, and we both subsided.

“We’re not going to salvage the whole ship,” she said, as if she’d been a part of the conversation all along. “The engineering is intractable. We don’t have the facilities to grapple it, and even if we did it’s been accelerating in the wrong direction since Earth was all humans knew, and it’s fragile. It’s too big for a salvage tug to pull through white space. The best approach is to take the people off, if they’re alive, then turn it around and send it back to Terra. It should only take it another six hundred subjective ans of constant braking to get there. If the Synarche lasts that long, we can park it in orbit and turn it into a museum.”

“If not, it will serve as a nice surprise for whoever comes after.” Tsosie sounded… bitter. As if something about this was hitting him personally.

“Well, somebody is going to have to come get it,” I said. Out loud, but with my speakers turned off. Then I turned them on again, before realizing that if Helen was linked to Big Rock Candy Mountain , it and she were probably monitoring our radio transmissions and nothing we were saying was encrypted. The evidence supported me, because she seemed to have taught herself Standard by listening to us before we met her. Our coms channel wasn’t translated , but I had to assume that any AI worth its salt—even a primitive one—could handle unpacking mere centians of linguistic progress.

Screw it, I thought, and spoke so Helen could hear me. “Let’s inspect those cryo chambers, shall we? We probably won’t be able to tell if the ones that are still working contain people who can be brought back. That will have to wait for the hospital. But we should be able to tell if any of them have failed.”

“None have failed,” Helen said. “I’ve done my job. I have maintained the machines.”

I wondered, pityingly, how long Helen had been alone. I wondered if being alone bothered her. Certainly the tinkertoy constructions had an aspect of neuroticism to them, if she was responsible for those. AIs left for too long without input could become fragmented and compulsive. Especially if they’d suffered damage to their hardware.

But Core General cared for artificial intelligences as well as biological ones. We didn’t make a distinction regarding the kind of life we treated, though the doctors for those patients had different specialties. The hospital had several excellent cybersurgeons.

(I was told they were excellent, anyway. Their CVs were certainly impressive, though I didn’t have the expertise to judge. Sally did, and I’d never heard her say anything derogatory.

And believe me, if there is anything centian-long space flights are good for, it’s gossip.)

Digressions aside, I thought our best strategy was to bring Helen back with us, along with a full load of cryo chambers—if we could manage to keep them powered while transporting them. That would be the tricky part. As soon as we got close enough to a beacon, we’d send out a request for cargo haulers to meet another rescue team, and some salvage experts, and let them sort out what to do with—conservatively estimating—ten thousand or so only provisionally not-dead people.

As for us, we might even get back to Core General with our quota before our message did, if we legged it, and we could warn the hospital that it needed to gear up isolation wards and massive amounts of powered cargo storage to be ready for a slow-motion mass casualty situation.

You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. It’s been a truism of emergency response for close to a millennian, and it’s no less true now than it was when they were hauling people out of frozen lakes on the homeworld. It applies doubly to cryo accidents. And we’re a lot better at fixing brain damage these diar than we had been then.

“I’m going to go look,” I told Tsosie, Helen, and Sally.

“None have failed ,” Helen insisted. Behind us, the tinkertoys that had followed us into the airlock rustled as if in response to her emotion. Tsosie’s head turned. I felt his shock of unease through the senso, felt him tune to calm himself and refocus on the task at hand.

If the peripheral—if that’s what Helen was—freaked out, how were we going to restrain her, exactly? She obviously was linked to her microbots, and she was probably linked to the ship as well. I foresaw problems if she decided that she needed to personally escort all the cryo chambers. Especially as we’d need to divide them into groups in order to move the people in them to safety. Or, I should say, to move those people to the potential of safety, if any could be saved.