Элизабет Бир - Machine

He stared at me, head turned slightly as if he had almost figured out what was bothering me, but hadn’t quite yet made the intuitive leap.

“Whole clones,” I said. “With fully developed brains.”

He breathed out.

“I met one of the patients. Well, I can’t say I met her, as she was still in an integrative coma. A young woman of a mere hundred and thirty ans or so. With a fresh implant scar.” I touched my head.

His face did a number of interesting things as I talked, and as he considered what I had said. It settled on concentration. He was going to treat it as an intellectual problem, then. “You can’t transplant a fox . The architecture of one brain is too different from another. Even a clone brain—especially a clone brain, that’s grown to adult size without experiences to influence its development. It wouldn’t have—it wouldn’t have developed speech centers, even. And even if you could, you wouldn’t be transplanting the person .”

Beer had been the right choice. Possibly O’Mara’s tequila would have been a better one. “What if you… exercised the developing clone brain? The same way you exercise the body so the muscles and skeleton develop normally? Virtual stimulation? A series of implants, changing as the clone grows? They start them young in some of the clades: the technology exists.”

“That’s not a blank slate,” he said. “That’s a person.”

“A person who has never existed in the world,” I said. “A person with no rights, and no records, and no friends or family. And then, when they are physically adult, you put a final fox in place, integrate it, and… download the entire senso of the original person into the clone body you made. It would cost a fortune. But some people have fortunes to spend.”

“That’s not the same person!” he protested.

“Legally it’s the same person. There’s continuity of experience, of a sort. As much as any of us have, anyway. If you could buy planets, but not another moment of being alive, would the niceties matter to you? Or would you have the ego to believe that you would persist in some meaningful sense?”

“I think I’ll take that beer now,” he said.

I gestured to the printer. “Help yourself.”

I missed real beer, with its irreproducible organic esters and subtle, layered tastes. But this would do in an emergency, and I felt like emergency had arrived.

My breath frosted in the air in front of me, which was unusual. I checked the datapad in its pocket on the couch arm. An unusual power drain on environmental systems, technicians working to correct. So many little things going wrong.

“Wow. It got chilly in here.” Tsosie made himself a pale ale and came around to sit on the other end of the couch. I felt better conversing at eye level.

I handed him the pad, and he grunted, then made eye contact. There was nothing either of us could do about it now. Saboteurs? The digital infestation of the hospital’s physical plant? I hoped the engineers could solve it.

“Is the private unit the target of the sabotage? I suddenly have some sympathy—” He stopped. “Does O’Mara know?”

“O’Mara knows and is under a confidentiality lock. I think they pushed me into finding out on purpose. And yes, it’s what the sabotage is about. I think it’s meant to… draw attention. And that’s why the hospital has been being quiet about it—because they didn’t have any choice, because they couldn’t explain…”

“Why didn’t the saboteurs just tell everybody what was going on?”

“No proof?” I said. “Add that question to the pile with ‘Where the hell did they get a generation ship?’ ” I finished my beer. “I think Calliope is one of the clones. Remember how Dr. Zhiruo said her DNA looked… very orderly? But hadn’t managed to decode the painfully bad archaic bragging poetry we assumed was encoded in it?”

He looked aghast. “I… that’s awful. I don’t know. I don’t even want to think about that.”

“I don’t want to think about any of it.” Having no more drink to occupy myself, I returned the glass to the recycler. Since I was up, I started to pace. “But I think we have to. You started to say that you might have sympathy for the saboteurs and… you’re probably right. Empathy, anyway. But my god, Tsosie, they have fucked things up. Maybe less through cold malevolence and more through bad planning, or lack of considering the consequences. I…”

“Why is everyone such an asshole?” he asked, sympathetically.

“Yes.”

He sighed. “Helps us fit in better.”

His comment reminded me to apologize. “I’m sorry, by the way. I suspected you might be behind the sabotage for a while.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “I suspected you.”

“I thought you trusted me!”

“I thought you trusted me.”

“With my life. But then I couldn’t trust anything anymore.”

He finished his beer. “That’s smart.”

“It’s lonely.”

“So what made you decide to trust me now?”

I blew out. “I figured out who it had to be, and it wasn’t you.”

In three-vee thrillers the amateur detective goes off and confronts the suspect without leaving a note, but that’s a little too risk-unaverse even for me. Tsosie didn’t want to leave me alone, after I explained to him. But I explained that I was telling him as a security measure, and that if he came with me that security measure was useless, because we would both be in the same place with the person I suspected was a saboteur.

“Why not tell Starlight?” he asked, pretty reasonably. He was now on his second beer.

“Because I’m not one hundred percent sure, and I want to be sure before I accuse anybody of attempted murder and negligent homicide. And also because I agree with their goals, though not their methods. This needs to be exposed.”

“What if you don’t come back?”

I got up. “Finish your beer.”

He finished his beer. “What if you don’t come back?”

“Then you have proof.” I grinned at his stricken expression. “Come on, Tsosie. Let’s go to work. It’s way too late to start pretending you like me.”

“I do like you, you enormous pain in the ass.” He stood, also. “Don’t get killed.”

Loese wasn’t in her quarters. I should have checked before I dropped by, but I didn’t want her to get the location ping and figure out that I was onto her. She wasn’t on-shift; there was literally nothing for a pilot to be doing right now, and wouldn’t be until ships could leave the hospital again.

So that meant that unless she was socializing, exercising, or eating, she was likely to be on Sally.

I sighed. I had wanted to have this conversation in private. Not in front of Hhayazh and Camphvis and Rhym. Or Sally.

I was more or less in luck. Rhym and Hhayazh were on-shift, doctoring away somewhere in the ox sections of Core General. Camphvis was sleeping, privacy shield pulled closed. Loese was in her bunk, reading from a handheld. She sat up and swung her legs down when I walked over.

“You haven’t been around much.” She stood. Her voice sounded hurt. The emotion might even be real. People are complicated.

“I got seconded to some administrative work, and then a lot of people needed emergency surgery.” I cleared my throat. “Why are you telling people that Helen caused the disaster?”

She looked at me. She looked around. She said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

We went for a walk. Around the outside of the ring, in one of the habitrails that loop its surface. The stars were under our feet; Starlight’s mutating leaves glittered beyond the transparent ceiling. I wondered if the Administree would be able to hear us, through the layers of atmosphere, structural material, and more atmosphere.