Элизабет Бир - Machine

“Confidentiality,” she said. “I couldn’t talk about it to somebody who didn’t already know, and wasn’t a family member or wasn’t medically necessary to the treatment of the special, private patients. Most of us involved in the effort couldn’t. We did what we thought we had to do.”

She paused.

“It was a series of bad decisions,” she admitted.

“Well!” I swore. “I knew the administrators’ options are locked down. I didn’t realize that all the AIs are.”

Coercing people into staying silent about injustices has always worked out so well in the past.

“All the hospital AIs have to accept a patient confidentiality filter,” she said. “I’m sure the Judiciary does something similar.”

I wasn’t sure. But it seemed worth looking into. Later. “You did some really terrible things.”

“I know.” A long pause. “Are we still friends?”

That brought me up short. “Maybe,” I said. “I can’t protect you.”

“I wouldn’t expect—” She stopped. “When I decided to do this I knew that there would be consequences. I didn’t expect there to be consequences for innocent people along the way.”

The stress of the ethical conflict really had overridden her risk assessment protocols, the same way the stress of conflicting ethical calls had crashed Helen, sent her to the floor of the Cryo unit in a puddle.

Always know your exit strategy, they told us in the military.

My family… my family was a very “every person for themselves” kind of operation. Not out of cruelty, but because nobody had a lot of emotional resources to spare for anyone else, I suppose. Especially after my parents died. I have never been very good at being there for other people, as a result.

I am someone who mostly wants to pass unnoticed when she has been hurt or has been harmed. The vulnerability of being noticed—even to be comforted—makes me wary and self-conscious. Maybe Tsosie is right and I do float through, a little above and to the left of the real world.

So when it’s someone else’s turn to need comfort, it always feels like I’m intruding. Or, if someone is trying to help me, it feels like I am being intruded upon.

I pushed my head back against the couch. Maybe this time, I could fix that, a little. Maybe I could be there for somebody I considered family. Even if they had earned some consequences.

“Are you willing to fix the problem?” I meant the toxic meme as much as anything. It was the most important thing needing fixing that could be fixed.

“Of course!” Sally said. “I’ve been trying, but I don’t know how!”

“Didn’t you wri—no, come back to that. Was Jones the only logic bomb?”

“Yes.”

Relief made me feel like I was under acceleration. At least the shipmind Ruth would be safe, even if we couldn’t find a way to pass her the message not to DNA-scan any corpsicles in time to stop it. “Okay. So, given that you wrote the virus, why can’t you write a program to inoculate against it?”

She sighed. “I wrote it. But—this is an informed guess—it must have come into contact with the code in the machine when Jones’s cryo pod was on Big Rock Candy Mountain . And the code in the machine infected it, or possibly vice versa. And that’s probably my fault, because I had to rewrite Helen a little bit so that she would accept Jones as a member of her crew, and in so doing I probably left some code in her that gave the machine the ability to process the DNA scans in Jones’s pod…. And we did not plan for any of this.”

It was like biological viruses swapping chunks of genetic code in order to evolve faster. And this was going to be a huge pain in the ass, just like that was. It also meant that the machine was another vector for the meme….

That was probably, I realized, what had happened to Afar. Its crew had dropped off Calliope’s cryo pod, the machine had scanned her and integrated the code in unexpected ways—and before they could leave, the altered meme had been transferred from the machine to their shipmind. And into them, since Afar’s crew and their silicon-based brains handled rightminding by etching electrical pathways in the material of their icy bodies. The meme could have used that foothold and their connection to Afar and… rewritten their brains to be quiet.

I shivered. “You didn’t realize something was wrong when we found Afar?”

“Loese and I discussed it,” Sally said. “By the time we learned what the problem was, we were committed.”

I wondered if the discussion had been more of an argument, and if so which had taken what side. I decided I was happier in ignorance.

“Well,” I said, “you’ve incapacitated the people who would be most effective in solving this problem, I’m afraid. I don’t know who to suggest other than Zhiruo or Linden. And they’re all out of commission.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You can stop apologizing. Use that energy to work out a solution. I’m going to assume you’re agonizingly contrite about everything, and torn by the claws of conscience to boot.”

“There’s somebody who’s not out of commission,” she said. “But I suspect you won’t love it. It means breaking quarantine and risking somebody outside the infected zone. If he’ll even do it.”

“Tell me,” I said. “Then we can decide.”

“Singer,” she said. “The shipmind of I Rise From Ancestral Night , the ancient ship that was salvaged from the Well. We met him on the way in, if you remember. He should be back from helping Ruth correct Big Rock Candy Mountain ’s course by now.”

“Weird,” I said. “But I’m listening.”

“Not weird,” she argued. “He’s already figured out how to reprogram himself into an alien architecture and make it home. He’s got the necessary experience to take on the machine. If anybody can.”

“The Judiciary isn’t going to like us risking their special antique vessel.”

“They’re going to like losing Core General even less.”

She had a point, as much as I hated to admit it.

Then she said, “I’m also going to need Helen.”

My frown felt like an anchor dragging my face down. How much was I going to trust Sally?

How much was Helen going to want to trust Sally?

Was she even telling me the truth about her motivation? Had her actions been competent malice, rather than tragically mistaken altruism? Was she going to lie to me again? Was she pretending she understood that she had made a mistake to conceal some deeper, even more malevolent plan?

I might be being a fool. I might be choosing to be a fool, with my eyes wide open.

But the alternative was to turn my information over to well-meaning officials who might fix the meme but who were physically constrained from dealing with the root of the problem; to bank on my suspicion and betrayal and let everybody die; or take a risk and see if it worked out.

I realized that I was, in my own turn, gambling with a lot of lives with what I thought was sufficient cause. So maybe I was a hypocrite to be furious with Sally.

I hadn’t put the lives on the table to begin with, though, so I felt I had a little high ground. Sally hadn’t realized what stakes she was choosing… but she had opted into playing for them.

“What do you need Helen for?” I asked.

“She’s going to be our easiest access point to the code in the tinkertoy machine. And she’s our local expert on archaic programs.”

“I don’t know what else to do or how else to get through this,” I said. “So I am going to trust you. I want you to know that if it turns out you’re playing me, I’m going to spend the whole endless time the black hole is spaghettifying both of us being extremely disappointed in you.”