Элизабет Бир - Machine

Dr. Zhiruo wasn’t my patient. And I knew perfectly well that what had solved the problem was the combination of Sally’s knowledge of the virus that had caused it with Helen’s knowledge of the machine and Singer’s skill at reading strange programs. It’s much easier to provide an antidote if the poisoner tells you how they made the patient sick in the first place.

Five standard hours after I left them alone to work on the problem, the artificial intelligences had solved it. Helen found me and delivered the antivirus on a data diamond. I held it in my hand and watched its brilliance as I turned it in the light.

I had expected to spend most of that time—after my conversation with Tsosie and Carlos—justifying my existence and life choices to O’Mara and Starlight, given that we’d broken quarantine protocol. That I wasn’t summoned to report for administrative endoscopy was possibly the best indicator possible of how bad things were. And that O’Mara still trusted me.

I looked from the diamond to Helen, who sparkled in her own way. “Well,” I said. “I guess we go to Cryo now.”

Her suggestion of a chin lifted. “After that, we need to tackle the machine.”

“I’m not sure how,” I admitted.

She was continuing to develop and evolve. All she had ever needed was the resources to enrich herself, and the space to grow into. She was so brave and so slight—and, okay, so glittery—that my eyes stung a little from looking at her.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “But I’m going to need to borrow your exo.”

“My—”

“We’ll talk about it later. Right now, let’s get to Cryo.”

O’Mara was still waiting in Cryo. Their blocky frame leaned against the bulkhead, arms folded over their chest. It should have been a self-effacing pose, but the master chief was so damned big they made the unit seem cramped.

Rilriltok was with them, buzzing morosely, perched on the high back of the desk rather than hovering in the air.

Helen and I marched up to them. I held the diamond aloft. “Why the long faces, Doctors?”

O’Mara’s expression didn’t brighten, but they straightened from their slump. “What’s that?”

“With luck, the antiviral for Dr. Zhiruo that I told you about.”

O’Mara made a motion whose significance I had to look up in senso. Apparently it was a religious gesture for averting evil or summoning luck. I hadn’t known they were a Catholic.

“Will it work?” they asked.

There is doubtless only one way to find out, friend O’Mara. Rilriltok buzzed to me. Fragile manipulators lifted the crystal from my hands. Try it and see.

Singer was confident in his work, at least. While we waited for the program to run, he patched himself through to Core General and watched over our shoulders. I couldn’t stand it: I plugged my exo into the system directly. I could charge myself up while I watched the treatment happening.

Most of the data flow was over my head, to be honest. I’m not an AI doctor. Helen, much more practical—and built to anticipate the needs of organic life-forms—made a head-wiggle as if rolling the eyes she didn’t have at me, and loaded a sim even O’Mara could follow onto the wall screen.

I watched orange blocks turning blue, hundreds of thousands of them. A logarithmic process, apparently, because the conversion started off achingly slowly and bit by bit accelerated until they were changing too fast for me to see. The whole treatment took five minutes.

Five minutes, after which I realized I had reached out at some point and taken Helen’s hand. Her hand, which was warm and resilient and a little bit plasticky and felt nothing at all like a real human body. There were no bones in it. It was all squish.

“It worked,” Sally said.

I looked at O’Mara. “I want to talk to her.”

O’Mara pursed their lips. Before they could formulate whatever they were thinking of saying, I shook my head and said, “Alone.”

Their hands went up; they stepped back. “It’s my own fault if this doesn’t work out how I wanted.”

“Funny.” I grinned. We weren’t out of the woods yet, not by a long shot. But I felt like I had at least found a blazed trail that looked like it might lead somewhere. “I thought the whole point of getting me involved was so you could blame me for whatever went wrong.”

O’Mara lifted their chin to look over my shoulder. “Helen, let’s treat Linden next. Jens—”

My heels clicked. “Present.”

“Just fucking make sure you’re recording.”

When I went in, Zhiruo’s code was still isolated. I found her in a virtual garden, a haven of classical statues of seven or eight civilizations and whispering leaves. Never having interacted with her through avatars, I was surprised that she had chosen to simulate a physical, organic form. Most AIs—if they must manifest as something other than a disembodied voice or a presence in the senso—choose an inorganic avatar. I’ve lost count of how many sparkles of dancing lights in various colors I’ve had heart-to-heart conversations with, over the ans.

But Zhiruo was dressed as a Ykazhian. It gave me a start, because at first sight I thought I was looking at Hhayazh, and the rush of gladness and recognition of an old friend almost overwhelmed my anger.

I bet that was why she did it, frankly. Sneaky manipulative bundle of code.

I walked up in front of her, choosing to interact with the virtual world as if it had gravity and I had a solid human body. I felt like stomping; I limited myself to stepping firmly.

“Dr. Jens,” she said, sounding pleased and plummy and prim. “You seem to have reintegrated my code. I had not realized that lay within your skill corona.”

“I had help.”

If she picked up my tone, she didn’t show it. “Linden?”

“Linden has been affected by the virus, too, and is being treated. We called in an outside specialist.” I took a breath my avatar didn’t need. It’s always hard to switch modes from polite introduction into confrontation. So much easier to slide away and let a problem go unchallenged. “I know what you’ve been doing, Dr. Zhiruo.”

She quivered her feelers inquiringly. “Struggling to retain program integrity?”

“I mean the clones.”

Her simulated jaws clicked, internal a moment before external. She must be performing the calculations on my mood and intent too fast for me to see, so perhaps she was delaying in order to give herself additional time to read my signals.

“Well,” she said, “since you’ve learned about it by yourself, there’s no difficulty. We can fix your problem easily.”

My avatar had crossed its arms. I heard my fingers rattle on my exo as I tapped them against my upper arms. “I have a problem?”

I hadn’t known a Ykazhian could look so conciliatory. “What we’re doing helps people, Llyn. It helps them directly, when we treat them. And it helps them indirectly, when we use the resources we collect to support access to health care for everybody else. The Synarche does not allot us enough resources to run this hospital as well as it needs to be run. What if I could help you?”

“Help me.”

Her gesture took in my body, the exo. “You don’t have to be in pain.”

“I’m not in pain.” I was. But I saw no reason to make myself vulnerable.

“What if I told you we could clone your body, repair the genetic damage—your neuralgia—and upload your ayatana into the fox of a blank slate?”

That brought me up short and hard. Without snappy repartee. Without anything to say at all.

I was still herding my neurons back into some semblance of coherence when she added, “We’d waive the procedure support cost. Your service to Core Gen has earned you some consideration.”