Элизабет Бир - Machine

“…off the normal trade routes.”

“Did he know that you planned to sacrifice him and his crew?”

“What happened to Afar was an accident. He and his crew were supposed to drop off the walker and the cryo tube holding Calliope and leave. We did not expect him to get infected with the meme, and we really didn’t expect it to affect his crew.” She shook her head. “Afar must have really screwed up somehow. I don’t know how he could have messed up so badly that he, his crew, and the walker all got infected.”

“You keep saying ‘accident’…” I squinted at Loese, remembering the dropped coms, the sabotage to Sally. “You and Sally tried to kill me!”

“We knew you’d survive,” she said.

It was a nice vote of confidence. You’ll forgive me if I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time. “You risked my life and Tsosie’s life. To—what, make sure we were on the ship long enough to find the right cryo coffins? Sally did come back online awfully conveniently once we were there.”

“She needed—” Loese looked at her hands. “She needed to control the machine, and make sure that the accident with the coffins happened the right way, to ensure that you weren’t hurt in the process.”

“Why didn’t you just tell somebody?”

She sighed. “Do you think nobody tried? It all sounds like rumors and conspiracy theories. We needed proof. We needed evidence. And none of this is illegal. It’s only awful .”

“You had,” I said distinctly, “a discarded, fully grown, sapient clone of a dead rich woman, with a fully developed brain. And you didn’t think that was evidence enough? No, you decided it was a better idea to do exactly what the fucking mad scientists here at Core Gen were doing, and implant false memories in her, rip out her fox, and hide her on a generation ship where there was a very good chance that she would die.”

“She didn’t,” Loese said. “And it was for the best cause imaginable.”

I had to tune in order not to hit her. Hitting people almost never solves anything, and you can trust me on that. I was in the military.

“So the virus, the toxic meme, came in with the machine? Sally used herself as a mule to bring it back?”

“Sally used herself as a mule to bring it back,” Loese agreed. “But the important part of the meme, the part that infected Zhiruo, wasn’t in the machine. Or Helen. They were only… along for the ride.”

I didn’t ask. I waited.

“The virus was encoded in Calliope’s DNA.”

“ What? ” Loese had said they’d altered Calliope’s DNA. I had assumed she meant to make her seem like she belonged among the corpsicles.

“The meme. It’s programmed into her. That was why Afar got sick. That was why Dr. Zhiruo got sick. The meme was there to be read into their memories when they scanned Jones’s DNA or contacted each other. The orderliness in her wasn’t poetry.

“It was malignant code.”

“You poisoned Dr. Zhiruo on purpose?” And Afar. And Linden!… Maybe those had been accidents. But still.

A responsible person, a healthy-minded person, would not put herself into a position where that kind of accident happened .

Loese reached out very hesitantly and put a hand on my arm. “It wasn’t supposed to take her offline, Llyn. It was just supposed to make her tell the truth.”

I looked at her. “She’s under the same kind of confidentiality seal as Starlight and O’Mara? You wanted them to tell the truth, too, I suppose? Is that how Starlight got infected?”

“That would have been nice, but… no. We didn’t expect the meme to get beyond Zhiruo. It wasn’t supposed to be virulent. We wanted to make her tell the truth, and we wanted to write over the privacy protocols. Reverse them, so she would have to come forward. We didn’t expect it to affect Afar, or for him to get stuck there. He was supposed to drop Calliope and the walker off, and be on his way. There was some kind of interaction between the virus and the generation ship’s antique AI and the commands its last captain left it—whatever had it building the machine—and everything went wrong, fast.”

Tuning, tuning. “Why Zhiruo? Why make her tell the truth? Because she’s got seniority?”

“Aw, Jens,” Loese said sadly. “Zhiruo is the head of the clone program. I said it had been going on for ages.”

That liquid sensation in my gut—that was real horror. Real betrayal. And only a little bit of it was because what Loese and Sally and their unnamed co-conspirators had done was so unbelievably stupid.

You commit yourself completely to something and then you take your eyes off it for an instant and it’s gone. Like it never was. Like you can’t even see the evidence of the thing that was there, that you trusted your weight, your honor, your life, your heart to.

I’ve seen some shit, let me tell you.

But somewhere deep down, I find myself craving the impossible. I find myself craving that certainty that people and things and… and principles in my life will stay where I fucking left them .

A betrayal retroactively poisons everything good about that relationship. And right then, I wanted to stop spending so much time thinking about and compensating for how damaged I am. I wanted to be able to relax. To feel safe, and like I didn’t have to constantly be on my guard, again.

You’d think I’d be a little old to be feeling my innocence betrayed. But I hadn’t even turned my back on Core General. I trusted its ethical principles to hold me up. To bear my weight.

And it fell away under my feet.

The worst part is that I wasn’t braced at all. I didn’t have the slightest excuse to not be ready for it.

I’d believed. And now I couldn’t believe anymore. And I missed that believing so much.

This must be what losing your religion feels like.

At least Rhym isn’t involved in this. At least I don’t have to be angry at Hhayazh.

“Well,” I said, “you fucked up good, Loese. You and Sally and all the people you’re still protecting.”

Her face folded like a balled-up tissue. “I know. And you’re going to turn me over to Starlight and Zhiruo.”

“I don’t think Starlight approves of Zhiruo,” I said. “Or at least, not her little side program. I don’t think they can avoid using the resources she generates—I mean, we’ve all been using the resources she generates. That program must help pay for the ambulance ships, and… I don’t even know what else.”

“Zhiruo started the clone program,” Loese said miserably, “because the Core General project was defunded during the Laesil system cataclysm, a long time ago. They didn’t have the resources to support finishing it when hundreds of thousands of people were dying of stellar radiation and needed immediate help. So Zhiruo… found the resources elsewhere.”

Sweet death in a vacuum, why can’t anybody be uncomplicatedly evil in real life? Or uncomplicatedly good? Why are we all such a twist of good and bad decisions, selfishness and self-justification, altruism and desire?

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to turn you in. You need your rightminding adjusted, sure as shitting after eating. How many casualties did you cause?”

She studied her shoes, and the stars beyond them. “A lot. The sabotage to the hospital—that wasn’t Sally and me, though.”

“Who was it? Some of your co-conspirators?”

Her lip thrust out. “They were involved in the little things. The leaks, the equipment malfunctions. We did not cause the rotational and lift failures. Something else caused that. I don’t want them blamed for it!”

Something else caused that. “Aw, crud,” I said. “So the machine—carrying the meme Sally made—has infiltrated the hospital’s superstructure. That’s what caused the big failures, isn’t it?”