Machine

CHAPTER 9

HELEN DIDN’T NEED REST. BUT I did, and Sally wouldn’t let me get away with skimping on it in anything short of a life-or-death emergency. Frustrating as it was to be hustled off to bed when I felt like we were finally making a breakthrough with Helen, I also knew better than to try to outstubborn a shipmind.

The next shift after breakfast, though, I planned to be back at it. And with a considerably improved attitude now that there had been some progress. As I sipped my tea, a reminder popped up, rather startling me because I had forgotten I’d set it. I guess that’s why they call them reminders. As I was drifting off to sleep the previous shift, I’d remembered something Helen had said back on Big Rock Candy Mountain, and I’d actually left myself a note in my fox to follow up. Victory!

Helen wandered in a moment later and sat down opposite me. She angled her head but said nothing: I guessed that she was waiting. Maybe I wasn’t the only one with a sense that we might be making progress, or at least a connection. The questions she was asking bothered me deeply—but at least she was asking questions.

“Helen,” I said. “May I ask you a personal question?”

“That has the air of a formal request, Dr. Jens. Is this… courtesy?”

“It’s considered polite to allow people to opt in or out of conversations,” I agreed. “Especially on matters that might be thought of as, er, nobody else’s business.”

“I will not be offended by your questions. My purpose is to keep my crew safe, and to respond to inquiries.”

“Right.” I finished the last tepid sip of tea. “Back on Big Rock Candy Mountain, you mentioned ‘Central.’ Would you tell me more about Central, Helen?”

“Oh.” Her head tilted from side to side. “Of course. Only… most of the data I have stored in this peripheral relates either to my proper functioning, or to the history and well-being of the crew members who are accompanying us. A great deal was of necessity left behind and will have to be recovered when I return to my ship.”

So she was, as we had more or less expected to learn, closely linked to the machine. Part of the same data architecture that was eating itself, like a mechanical ouroboros.

“Just tell me whatever you can, please.”

“Central is our library. It is where the memories are kept.”

Maybe they did have something like ayatana technology, then. “Your memories? Crew memories?”

“Crew logs,” she said, obviously thinking she was agreeing with me. “Backups. Scientific and historical records. Literature, both from Earth and from the wandering.”

I wasn’t overly concerned with history, and I Rise From Ancestral Night and his crew were en route to deal with the issue of data preservation. The shipmind, Singer, had managed to rewrite his own code to operate the ancient alien ship: I was pretty sure he and his crew could manage to unpick primitive human code.

Also, they would enjoy it, while I found it impossibly stultifying to contemplate all that old stuff. I imagined they would all feel a little thrill when they confronted an entire starship full of primary documents, unseen in something like a millennian. “Our archinformists are going to be very eager to swap packets with you.”

Helen didn’t answer immediately, but tilted her head at me in that uncomfortably flirtatious manner that I was coming to recognize as confusion. “What is ‘swap packets,’ please?”

“Uh.” I bit my lip. “Exchange information?”

“And what is an archinformist?”

“Someone who specializes in accessing, recovering, and interpreting ancient data.”

“A historian!” She was so pleased with herself that I didn’t want to correct her.

“A sort of historian,” I agreed, which was close enough to accurate that I didn’t feel I was being misleading.

The pleased tone still resonating, Helen said, “I have several historians among my crew.”

I knew it was a long shot, but it would give her something to focus on, so I still found myself asking, “Are any of them here on Sally?”

The odds of being able to rewarm Helen’s crew successfully hadn’t improved since we brought the coffins aboard. And now I was worried about Master Chief Dwayne Carlos as a human person and pipefitter, not as a patient-shaped abstract. So why was I asking Helen about our other passengers? I would just wind up fretting about them in turn.

On the other hand, talking about her crew was the one thing that seemed to concretize and ground Helen, even as limited as her processing power was, separated from the rest of her brain.

I wondered if the machine was the equivalent of her subconscious, and if so, how dangerous it would be to the other rescue and salvage crews working on Big Rock Candy Mountain without her there to guide it, or if it would lie quiescently. Sally’s override was still in place, and Ruth would have no problem using it. Everything would probably be fine.

Sally telling me about Master Chief Carlos had made me feel a personal connection to him. Feeling connected to Master Chief Carlos, by extension, made me feel connected to the rest of the crew. Helen obviously cared deeply about them, no matter if the expression of that care jarred me with its awkward sexuality. And her caring about them made me care about them in turn.

I mean, more than I always care for my patients.

There’s a certain level of professional detachment that gets you through a job like mine, and that detachment is a skill I have cultivated.

It was unsettling to feel so connected with a freight of corpsicles. And the shipload of corpsicles we’d left behind. And I knew it would only get worse, the more I found out about each of them as individuals.

It was hard to be constantly reminded that they weren’t just corpsicles. They weren’t just cargo. They were people. People we might or might not be able to save.

I had to tune down my worry so I could think clearly. As I did, it occurred to me that Helen had been silent for a fairly long time. Had she shut down again? “Helen? Are you still with me?”

“I was thinking about historians,” she said. “It’s so strange and wonderful that you lived. That you built all this. That you found”—she lowered her voice and gestured toward the control cabin, where Camphvis and Rhym were helping Loese—“aliens.”

Technically speaking, the aliens had found us. But I girded my loins, gritted my teeth, exerted all the power of my masterful will, and managed not to correct her. “You didn’t expect to find anyone else out here.”

“Are you absolutely certain that humanity survived on Earth? My records show that it was impossible.”

I admit it: I laughed.

But I also knew the answer without even checking my fox. I’d done a little research since visiting Big Rock Candy Mountain. Sally’s library was pared down, but she had the basics. Including a history of Terra. Or Earth, if you prefer.

I’d boned up. What a weird idiom.

“We nearly didn’t,” I said. “There was a population bottleneck, and Terra’s human population crashed from something over nine billion to a few hundred million.”

“That sounds terrible,” she said politely. “I am so sorry for your loss.”

“This was long before I was born, you understand, and I’ve never been to Terra. But my ancestors were among the lucky ones who realized that humanity needed to grow up.”

“Grow up? But you are an adult.”

“As a wise person once said: Adulthood begins when you look at the mess you’ve made and realize that the common element in all the terrible things that have gone wrong in your life is you. The choices you have made; the shortcuts you have taken; the times you have been lazy or selfish or not taken steps to mitigate damage, or have neglected to care for the community. As a species, the immature decisions we made contributed to the collapse of our own population and the radical alteration of our biosphere. Running away to space at sublight speeds was a desperate move. It made more sense and was more sustainable in the long run to fix the evolutionary issues in our own psyches that led us into irrational, hierarchal, and self-destructive choices.”

“I don’t understand,” Helen said.

I said, “My ancestors figured out how to hack into their own nervous systems and correct or ameliorate a lot of sophipathologies.”

Helen cocked her shining non-face at me. The question was evident.

“Sophipathologies. Antisocial behaviors, atavistic illnesses of the thought process. Maladaptive ideations. Once the population was stabilized and the immediate crises passed, they realized that it was possible to keep people operating in the state of altruism we’d already evolved to engage in during disasters. The architecture was already there in the brain: it was a matter of activating and using it.

“They were also pretty ready to discard existing systems of government, as it was evident that hierarchies and cronyism and the exploitation of the system by kleptocrats was a universal feature of every model tried so far. But they were already changing human nature—well, they were accelerating and universalizing the process of adulthood, shall we say. What some cultures used to call enlightenment. Which is basically sharing your stuff and playing well with others.”

“And now everybody does this.” Her disbelief was polite, but definite. Apparently even a primitive AI could manage to be a little arch when confronted with human self-aggrandizement.

I thought about pirates and criminals and all the… insufficiently rightminded folks I had met when I was in the Judiciary. “Er. No. I mean, Judiciary can enforce rightminding on convicted criminals as a condition of release. And mostly people, given the chance and appropriate social support structures, will elect to not be mentally ill.”

“Who defines mental illness?” Her bosom heaved a little less with breathless interest. Or maybe I was getting used to it.

“That is the subject of some controversy, as it happens. But social health and hygiene do tend to reinforce themselves. As they did once our ancestors developed the technology to fiddle with their own neurochemistry. They built a more egalitarian government based on service rather than authority, salvaged the remains of technological society, and within a couple of generations had invented the Alcubierre-White drive.”

“That sounds very tidy.”

I found myself frowning at her. That sounded very skeptical, for the vacant service personality we’d first encountered. Was she becoming… more astute?

Sally, are you loaning Helen processing space?

Sally was bad at not sounding shifty. Maybe a little.

You might have mentioned it.

I am the responsible physician.

She was, indeed. The responsible physician.

I said, “In the process of exploring the galaxy they eventually met up with the Synarche, which used a more refined and advanced but grossly similar governmental model, and we became galactic Synizens.”

“That’s brainwashing,” Helen said dubiously.

“That’s what acculturation is,” I answered cheerily. “Tell me about your historians?”

After a long pause, Helen settled into herself, shimmering faintly, and admitted, “I have gaps.”

“I won’t judge.” I’d made it through the conversation on eugenics without tossing her into space. What was the worst that could happen?

“It’s not considered an essential primary.”

I rubbed the back of my hand, feeling dry skin and the slick rise of my exo over it. I needed to exercise better self-care. And moisturize.

With that same supreme effort of my masterful will, I managed not to make any comments about history and the repeating thereof. I waited, and Helen seemed to be thinking hard, so I didn’t interrupt her.

Finally, she said, “There’s Specialist First Rank Calliope Jones. She’s a systems architect, and she secondaries as a historian. She’s very bright. I think you will like her.”

I might never get to meet her, but I didn’t say that. Filtering my speech for Helen was becoming second nature. Even if Specialist Jones survived rewarming, the odds were not in favor of my finding myself on her treatment team. I’d be back out in space again, zooming around the Core with Sally and the rescue rangers.

I didn’t think Helen needed the reminder that the continuity of our relationship was not assured. So I asked, “Is she with us?”

“She is,” Helen said. “Chamber 8186-A. I could show you!”

“Maybe later. Why don’t you tell me about the rest of the crew we’ve rescued? That will give me a much better idea of who they are than I can get from looking at the outside of a cryo unit. But first let me get some more tea. No, you stay there. I can handle it.”

Helen’s account of the life of Specialist Jones was more than a little garbled, but since I was mostly trying to get her to talk, stay oriented, and begin processing her new environment, it didn’t matter. I got her to tell me the life stories of all our corpsicles, and tried not to let myself get attached to any of them.

She told me about Patrika Thomas, who was a systems engineer trainee; and about Joseph Meadows, a manufacturer; and Lyndsay Bohacz, in biosystems; and Call Reznik, a medic. She told me about their families, and their hobbies, and their aspirations—as much as she recalled.

I did notice that Helen’s memory gaps seemed to have patterns to them. It reminded me of organic brain damage, except instead of seeming like she had damage to certain aspects of processing speech, or parts of her visual field, the damage asserted itself in recall about a particular crew member’s service record, say, or their love life.

But I kept her talking. This was all fine. Well, not fine. But part of the job. What was a lot harder to deal with was the awkward family dinner that followed. Tsosie and Hhayazh had gone over to Afar while we were out of white space, changing vector, and they needed to rewarm and rest; Camphvis would be heading over to take a turn monitoring our remote patients after we ate. Rhym, who found communal meals incomprehensible, was on rest shift, and we were all sitting around staring at each other while the printer/cooker did its thing.

I wasn’t physically tired, but an entire shift of drawing somebody out of their shell is exhausting. But no matter how much emotional labor I’d done, I wasn’t going to make Tsosie pry his still faintly blue-tinged fingers from his hot chocolate mug. I stood up when the cooker dinged.

“Oh no, Doctor,” Helen said, appearing through the doorway. “Please allow me.”

She bustled to the cooker, interposing herself between me and the device so that I would have had to body check her if I wanted to serve myself, Loese, and Tsosie. She unloaded the cooker and turned, balancing the plates gracefully overhead on fingers grown long and stemlike to support them.

“Doctors,” she said cheerfully, doling the plates out. “Pilot. Would anyone like something to drink?”

Whiskey, I thought, but kept my mouth shut.

Camphvis’s eyestalks twined in amusement. Hhayazh already had its food and was crunching green and orange stalks between its mandibles, an operation I did my best not to observe closely. The busy gnawing hid its own arachnoid amusement.

“Thank you,” I said to Helen. “You should go check on your crew now.”

She made a little curtsey and scuttled back out.

Tsosie gave me a sidelong glance and shook his head sadly, the hint of a smirk deforming his mouth.

“Don’t you even,” I said.

“She likes you, though,” Loese said. Helen had gotten our plates reversed. Loese had my steak, and I had her salad. I like salad, but I grew up on the ground and expect real plants with the texture of real cell walls and water and sucrose inside. Printed plants are horrible. Printed steak is fine.

“Give me my damn food.” I swapped the offending plates and picked up a strip of steak with my chopsticks. The juices, soaking into the polenta underneath, smelled delicious. I stuffed the steak into my mouth. Not as good as vat-cloned, but still spicy and salty and rich enough to take my mind off how irritated I was.

“It wouldn’t be the first time a human has fallen for an AI,” Tsosie said.

I swallowed and drank water. The systers were keeping out of the human banter for once. Thank the Interventionist Bodhisattvas for that one small kindness from the universe.

“They designed her as a sexbot,” I answered, keeping my voice low. “It’s horrible.”

Tsosie, realizing I was really unsettled, raised a hand. “Sorry,” he said. “I know it’s not your fault.”

“Sally,” I asked, “is there anything we can do to tune down the flirtatiousness?”

Sally cleared her throat. “I’m a shipmind, not a psychologist.”

“I’m going to throw this steak in your air vents, computer. Technically, you are a psychologist. Or an AI doc, anyway.”

“I am an AI doc,” she agreed. “And you’re a human doctor. How comfortable would you be trying to rightmind a Neanderthal, even if you had a language in common?”

“Oh,” I said. “I’d be really concerned with breaking them.”

“And if they were already broken?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I see.”

“We’ll be home soon,” Camphvis reassured me with a friendly shoulder pat. I was only wearing a tank top—it can get warm in Sally—and Camphvis’s suckers stuck to my skin, releasing with a gentle pop. Banititlans are very tactile, as a rule. “Oops, sorry about that. And once we’re back at Core General, there are specialists standing by. You don’t have to solve this on your own.”

“What a mess,” said Loese.

I picked up another strip of steak. “You’re telling me.”