Элизабет Бир - Machine

Then I looked at them again, and realized they were not cryo tanks, but the exact opposite. The cryo tanks were there, but they were in ranks behind the objects I’d first noticed, and there were a lot more of them.

The ones in the front… were artificial wombs and incubator tanks full of suspensory medium. Incubator tanks of various shapes and sizes. Incubator tanks optimized for a dozen, two dozen different species of systers.

And they, and the cryo units behind them also, were full of clones.

It was not the first clone farm in my experience. This was a hugely resource-intensive operation, but there was no good reason for it not to be here. The whole private unit was a resource-intensive operation, after all. But something about this place and the young/old woman I’d seen outside bothered me.

I picked my away along the rows of tanks. Call me ethnocentric, but I concentrated on the human ones. A few dozen, ranging in age from fetal to the prime of youth. Suspended in their nutrient liquid, doing nothing at all. Medical clones don’t have fully developed brains; enough to keep the autonomous functions functioning and the normal growth growing. Brains don’t develop in a vacuum; they need stimulation and experience to learn how to do even such basic things as balance, pick up a fruit. Interpret language. See.

I supposed there was a possibility that Mx. Denarian out there had had her brain transplanted into a clone body. It would be an egregious waste of resources; sure, you could use a stem-cell suspension to graft the old brain onto the new neural tissue, but old brains are old . We don’t die, these diar, because our bodies wear out; we die because our brains stop functioning effectively and we run out of the ability to prop them up with spot repairs.

Besides, the incision on the patient’s skull had been small, tidy. The sort of thing you did to efficiently implant a fox, for example.

One of the clones near me twitched, and I almost jumped right out of my exo. I turned toward it, but it was only a long, myoclonic tremble. A contraction through the muscles of the shapely, muscular thigh and calf and ankle. A REM-sleep shiver.

Clones didn’t dream.

Clones weren’t usually… buff. They didn’t have exquisitely trained, athletic bodies.

They didn’t generally have deep brain stimulation wires running into their skulls. They didn’t wear virtual reality goggles over their eyes, waterproof earphones in their ear canals.

My hands trembling despite the exo, I called up records on the pad attached to the incubation tank. Daily exercise sequences, isometrics, general health of the body—

Brain development.

I looked at the magnetic scans. I craned my head back and looked up at the clone, hovering over me in hairless, godlike nudity. Looming pale inside its tank of translucent dark liquid.

I looked back at the magnetic scans.

Brain development normal for a seventeen-year-old person.

But this wasn’t a person. This was an object.

Objects were not supposed to have brains.

TSOSIE WAITED FOR ME OUTSIDE my quarters. He was sitting on a bench in an alcove, looking uncomfortable: those multispecies perches aren’t really suited to most of the species they serve. I looked at him, and he looked at me.

He stood.

I said, “You appear to know where I’ve been. How much do you know about what I found there?”

“Can I come in?”

I didn’t feel like having this fight in the hallway, so I opened my door and led him inside. My quarters are rated for a family, it’s true, but that doesn’t make them large. It does mean that what would have been Rache’s room is my own private bedroom, so I can use the main room off the little entry as a sitting room.

It’s selfish of me, but I never bothered to clarify to admin that my daughter would probably never be visiting me. Maybe I didn’t want to clarify it to myself, to be honest.

I offered him the couch. He took the floor. I printed myself a cold beer and asked if he wanted one, too.

“Caffeine,” he replied, looking uncomfortable.

I gave him a mug of coffee substitute. If he wasn’t using the couch, I was. I settled into it.

He sipped his drink, probably framing an opening gambit, and I exploded in his face. “Am I the only person in this entire fucking hospital that didn’t know what was going on in there?”

Tsosie swallowed. “You’re not the only one who doesn’t want to know. Am I right in saying you never bothered to find out until somebody made you?”

He looked more compassionate than I had expected, given his words. As is completely predictable, I immediately tried to pick a fight.

“I need,” I said, “a certain amount of professional detachment to do my job.”

“You’re not detached,” he told me. “You’re dissociated. It’s treatable and you know it.”

“If Sally thought I was ill—”

“If Sally thought you were too ill to do your job , she’d say something,” Tsosie interrupted. “You’re not too ill to do your job. You’re just too ill to be good for yourself.”

“Oh,” I said, “and you’re absolutely perfect.”

“Perfection is not required for awareness,” he said, and his deadpan—curse him—made me laugh. Once they get you to laugh the fight is over, because no matter how mad you are, nobody takes you seriously when you’re trying to dress them down while giggling. Anyway, he was sitting a half meter lower than I was, which made it hard to find him threatening.

That man is entirely too good at everything he does. I wondered if he was right about me—whether what I thought of as a professional reserve, professional detachment… was really more like floating a centimeter outside the world, never really engaging with it.

He might be right, I decided. If he was, it was a problem for another dia.

“Nobody holds it against you,” he said. “But you do make yourself hard to get close to, Llyn.”

I wanted to bite his head off, which probably meant that what he was saying was true. I sighed. “Am I good at my job?”

“Very,” he admitted.

“Are you one of the saboteurs?”

“No!” His horror had to be real, didn’t it?

“Then why are you here?”

“Sally sent me. She said you might need emotional support.”

Tsosie was definitely the guy you sent for that, all right. I rolled my eyes.

It occurred to me that he said he knew what was in there, but maybe he only thought he knew. Maybe he didn’t actually know the worst. “So what do you know about what’s in the private unit?”

He put his hot caffeine water under his nose and leaned over the mug, closing his eyes and inhaling exactly as if the contents were palatable. “I know,” he said, “that there are a couple of secret—well, okay, not secret exactly—wards in Core Gen. That one is in ox sector. That it’s reserved for patients who fork over a ridiculous amount of resources for access, and that most of them are suffering from diseases of extreme senescence. I also know that the death rate of these extremely old people is extremely low, even by the standards of care available at Core General.”

I studied him. He was, as near as I could tell, being honest.

“I don’t imagine they’re coming here to die,” I said. “They could do that far more comfortably in their own habitations, or in a planetary hospital for that matter, though nobody likes gravity when their joints hurt.”

I knew that for a fact.

He sipped the hot caffeine water and rolled it around his mouth before swallowing. “I don’t know exactly what therapies they’re receiving.”

“Clones,” I said. “Not parts grown from stem cells. Whole bodies. Whole clones.”