Элизабет Бир - Machine

Sally made a sound I couldn’t translate, though it had to be intended as communication or she wouldn’t have made it. “You wouldn’t be wrong.”

Now I was sneaking around behind O’Mara’s back, even though I was pretty sure I was doing what they wanted me to be doing. The goals, anyway: they’d probably think my methods were criminally stupid.

Much as I felt about Sally. It’s turtles all the way down, is what I’m saying, and if we destroy the universe at least we died trying to fix it. Rather than sitting around with digits in our orifices expecting somebody else to come to the rescue.

That said, being hasty and reckless leads to catastrophe. (Imagine me looking pointedly at Sally, here. Also, imagine for the purposes of this exercise that Sally is corporeal.) There are a couple of principles that translate through both military action and rescue action. One I know I’ve mentioned before: “adapt, improvise, and overcome.” Another is the old aphorism that “slow is fast,” or “slow and steady wins the race,” or “haste makes waste,” or “more speed, less haste,” or however your CO likes to phrase it.

The third and sometimes most important one boils down to the knowledge that contingency plans and fallback positions are mission-critical: never get into something without knowing your route back out again.

I couldn’t see a lot of routes out of our current cluster. Admittedly, I hadn’t gotten us into it, either. But at this point, why not endorse Sally getting in touch with yet another AI for help with the coding? I say endorse rather than allow because let’s be honest, I had absolutely no control over her. One never does have control over other people, and it’s abusive to try—outside of certain defined command structures. But the illusion of control is comforting.

The toxicity of certain comforting illusions is another argument in favor of rightminding, I guess. Being able to identify those self-delusions for what they are is the beginning of healthy cognition, and allows one to take steps to mitigate their impact on decision-making.

But we modern humans aren’t any better or more evolved than our ancient ancestors who nearly destroyed their planet and themselves with shortsightedness and selfishness: making the immediately futile decision and not worrying too much about the consequences. The choices Loese and Sally made should render that quite plain.

What we do have is better health care, better management of sophipathology, more leisure in which to think about things, and centians or millennians more experience and history and aggregated thought to draw upon.

Well, I wanted to preserve that history and experience for further generations. And I couldn’t see a better way to do that—and preserve all the lives on Core General—than Sally’s plan.

So here we were. Breaking quarantine.

We could receive signals from the outside with no problem. Nobody was going to get infected with a toxic meme because we were listening to them. (Listening is always a good first step when you find you have a communications problem. Thank you, I’m here all week.) Broadcasting, however, was strictly contraindicated. O’Mara must have either pulled some real strings or used an isolated com when they called the gunship Nonesuch in on Calliope and her craboid.

I wondered, as I worked to determine the current location and trajectory of I Rise From Ancestral Night , if there was an AI organization working on securing more rights for their people. Sally would never tell me if I asked, of that I was suddenly sure.

AIs were Synizens of the galaxy. But they were born into debt and owing decans of service to pay for their own construction—an obligation we don’t ask any other sentient to assume.

Core General is considered essential, and the AIs who elect to work here are usually free of their inception debt after one term of contract, whether they volunteer or are selected. Still, remembering that gave me some insight. Both into why Zhiruo might consider clones, even ones developed to the possibility of sentience, as disposable raw materials to save another life… and why Sally might risk everything, even somewhat illogically, to put a stop to the practice.

“Found him,” Sally said, disrupting my reverie. “Or, rather, found where he was 9.73 light-minutes ago, and I have a very good plot of his trajectory.”

Loese had joined us on the command deck and been briefed about our strategy. I’d half hoped she would come up with something better, but here we were. Making potentially terrible decisions. Now she said, “Are you ready with the tightbeam?”

“Sending,” Sally answered. “Audio only, filtered frequencies.”

That was the safest way we could make the contact.

Actually, I was pretty sure she’d already sent our prepared burst to the ancient ship’s projected locations approximately 9.7 et cetera light-minutes from now. The longer we waited, the more the probabilities drifted on the other ship’s projected track.

I settled back to wait. The earliest possible response would come in twenty minutes, more or less. The urge to drift into self-pity was nearly irresistible, and it startled me—but the urge itself didn’t startle me as much as how comfortable it was. How inviting.

I knew what was behind it: embracing the sense of betrayal and righteousness was safe.

It wouldn’t help me work with Sally, though. And I needed to work with Sally.

Ten and a half standard minutes later, while I was losing a game of virtual checkers to Loese, a brilliant flash of light heralded the sudden dimming of our forward port. A huge mass blocked my view of every running light, every lensing star, even the vast whirl of the Saga-star’s accretion disk. They all vanished, replaced by the back-limned outline of a strangely organic-looking hull: something that looked less built and more grown.

It had fallen out of white space as if materializing, angled slightly away from Sally and the hospital both to avoid pulverizing us with its bow wave. The accelerated particles that came with a white space transition had caused that blinding flash when they met some of the local, thinly distributed matter near Core General. Now they were speeding off on a harmless trajectory.

The ship was I Rise From Ancestral Night , and I felt a spark of disbelief that it had not only risked a white space transition of so short a duration, into such a confined space—but also managed it flawlessly. The pilot and the shipmind, I concluded, were both hot dogs.

There, undocked, it maintained position seamlessly—despite the hospital’s spin. Sally sighed in my head with envy.

“Sally?” said a voice audibly over coms. “This is Singer. I got your message. It seemed I should come in a hurry.”

“Um,” I said. “I don’t want to be the one who has to explain that to O’Mara.”

The AIs got down to business. Singer seemed comfortable protecting himself, and I decided to leave the process to the experts and not worry myself. I was pretty sure I could find plenty of my own problems to concentrate on anyway. Sitting here waiting for Sally or Singer to goof up and get infected with their own virus/antivirus code wasn’t making me any happier or helping to move the situation toward a successful resolution.

Ergo, it was time for me to go find something else useful to do.

GUESS WHO GOT TO EXPLAIN things to O’Mara? They were about to press the call button beside our hatch as I climbed out of Sally into the docking ring.

They eyed me. I eyed them.

They said, “We’re supposed to be under quarantine, you know.”