Machine

CHAPTER 10

IN AN INFINITE UNIVERSE, WHAT’S the single most important thing?

Well, I can tell you. The most important thing in the universe looks like a vast, leafy, lumpy oval, a greenhouse in space. From the outside, it’s the galaxy’s biggest terrarium: a semitransparent jewel embraced by a setting of rare metals, the filigree of jet and platinum threads, catching and softening all the lurid light of the Core’s crowded sky into the warm, precious glow of life.

So much life, crowded into hundreds of levels and dozens of biomes. An engineering challenge for the ages; a triumph of ingenuity and collaboration; a symbol of everything right about the Synarche and a rebuke of all the things we still don’t have figured out.

I’d told Tsosie I didn’t have a relationship with faith, but it occurred to me that that wasn’t entirely true.

I believed in this thing.

It was a good thing, Core General. It was good through and through, top to bottom, coming in and going out. Unreservedly good.

Difficult to navigate sometimes, absolutely. Full of creatures so accomplished in their trade and so confident that they could help that no one would have been able to rightmind away enough of the arrogance to keep it from occasionally permeating the atmosphere and straining the enviro filters, sure. You needed a certain amount of arrogance to slice somebody open and try to fix what’s wrong with them.

And Core General was not immune to mistakes, failures of protocol, and plain glitches.

Not perfect. Nothing is perfect.

But I believed with all my heart that Core General was good. That it meant well.

What did we do here? We saved lives. We alleviated suffering, and I’ve lived with enough suffering to know that any time you can take the edge off it, repair it for even one creature, you are creating a net good in the universe.

Not because the universe cared. The universe was vast and didn’t even care enough to be called implacable. But because life cared, and life had ethics and morals and obligations to one another.

Core General was the concretization of those ethics. It was a place where we ameliorated tragedies, healed victims, comforted survivors. It was a place where we told them not to count the cost in resources, because the Synarche believed that there was no price on a life.

You could never know in advance what a person might become or accomplish, given time. And even if they accomplished nothing, their life was still a life.

It wasn’t our place to judge them. It was our place to save them.

I believed in that so hard it choked me up. And I’d never admit it to Tsosie. But when I opened my eyes to compare the image on the screens to what Sally was feeding into our foxes from her own enormous sensorium, I caught him grinning at me. Just a little.

I shook my head and sighed. He rolled his eyes.

Core General. This vast habitat—the largest constructed biosphere in the galaxy—seemed strangely inevitable against a brilliant and bottomless night. There was no darkness in space here. There was no velvet black between the stars for this small artificial world to rest on as if it were a tumbled aventurine.

There was, in fact, virtually no “between the stars” to speak of. The Core was a gigantic, claustrophobic stellar cocktail party. If there had been any darkness, it would have been lost in the glare of the Saga-star’s accretion disk. The disk alone, though distant, wiped out a swath of the sky. It was so huge and fast-spinning that I could clearly see the redshift sloping along the trailing side. From the slight elevation of my perspective—above its equator—the blueshift along the edge that was rushing toward me glowed bright and true.

The Saga-star’s jets angled and flashed as it spun, whipping about in a terrible turmoil that only seemed stately because the scale was so gargantuan. Everything constructed in the Core required extreme radiation shielding. The couple of planets here that supported life had notoriously powerful magnetic fields and thick atmospheres, not to mention radiation-tolerant biospheres. Even the Delyth—little leggy systers composed mostly of animate metallic structures, who obtained their metabolic needs by soaking up radiation and who treated refined uranium like snack chips—had to use protective hardware in the Core, lest they die of overeating. And they were so hot that if I were to stand next to one, unshielded, my skin would redden and then bubble off after minutes of exposure.

Some of the photosynthetic systers had similar problems relating to too much light among all these stars: it could cause uncontrolled growth, even cancers. It’s not always as restful being a plant as you might imagine. And it’s definitely not easy to be an extremophile. Though honestly, every species is some kind of extremophile by somebody else’s standard.

Afar was well-shielded against the death rays that, from the perspective of his crew, saturated all of space. We still kept Sally’s bulk between him and the Saga-star. She was well-shielded, too, and a little bit extra couldn’t hurt.

We closed with Core General at a good but respectful clip, staying in the shipping lane. Sally didn’t run the emergency transponder: this was a routine approach even though we were full to the gills with casualties. We weren’t coming in hot and covered with ichor for once, and I was content with that.

We were all strapped to our couches in the command module—even Camphvis, whose rest period it was. Sally let her get away with it: nobody wants to miss the first glimpse of home. Sally had halted her spin for docking, so for the time being we had no rotational gravity.

Helen was with us, sitting on the spare couch. She wasn’t strapped in, merely holding herself in place… but she was an android, and acceleration really didn’t seem to bother her.

She was twisting her hands together so hard the golden material of her fingers creaked. It surprised me that an android could manage to register that much anxiety. A lot of people don’t realize that AIs aren’t built to register emotion only in order to make the evolved types feel more comfortable around them. They’re built to feel because, as far as anyone can tell, emotion is a critical part of cognition, and trying to build A-life without it never results in emergent sapience.

So her having emotions didn’t surprise me, antique though her design was. What surprised me was that she was as deregulated as I would expect an unrightminded human to be.

I guess the expectations of reasonable behavior were different back then?

A tug came out and relieved us of Afar, pulling him around toward the chill and dark of the methane section, which was located behind the bulk of the hospital, relative to the Saga-star and the Core. We zoomed along on another vector, toward our assigned ox airlock in the Emergency Department. It was all so terribly, weirdly routine.

A private ambulance zipped past us on a priority course. Sally changed vector to accommodate. Tsosie made an irritated noise.

“It could be a critical patient,” I said.

“I suppose that happens occasionally,” he replied, with a significant expression.

It happened more often than not, but I didn’t feel like arguing with him. We were currently nonemergency traffic, which meant other traffic took priority. Though Tsosie wasn’t wrong that some nonemergency traffic was more equal than others: the Synarche guaranteed everybody a humane subsistence, care, and an income, but it didn’t promise to allocate resources beyond that unless you could show societal benefit for that allocation, potential or real.

If you had a needed skill, you might be required to enter service for a while—but if that happened, any debts or resource obligations you might have accrued from additional allocated resources would be forgiven at the end. If you hadn’t accrued an obligation, the Synarche would assume one toward you that you could claim at a future date.

Say you were a pilot, and you wanted to operate a private ambulance, for example, like the one whose taillights were glowing blue as it turned into dock ahead of us. If you had served, your obligation for the resources—the equipment—would be paid off in advance. At least some of the equipment, anyway. A private ambulance was probably a lot of resources.

And if you had a private ambulance, that counted as a needed resource, and the Synarche might call you back into service on a short-term emergency basis fairly frequently. The sleek silver ship with the massive white coils that was nuzzling up to the hospital’s spinning flank might be full of plague victims, or running vaccines under government contract.

The Synarche governed itself by datagen and simulation: game theory and models, run by both AI specialists and us slowbrains. Some people made playing the simulators a full-time service position, though I didn’t think it ranked very high on the resource-allotment scale. Those models, when compared, led to governance by emergent consensus.

The Synarche mandated a certain return on its investment in society and infrastructure from those who isolated a significant amount of personal resources from the community. My species hadn’t quite been there on its own, though before we’d connected with the Synarche we’d already largely adapted ourselves to a more commensal lifestyle than the one we’d developed in the Before. This process was helped along by the fact that the lifestyle we’d developed in the Before had led to the Eschaton, and to people fleeing Terra en masse in glorified soap bubbles like Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Rightminding, like the concepts of Right Thought, Right Action, and Right Speech that had preceded it, wasn’t such a bad system for correcting some of evolution’s kludges. A lot of kludges were trivial to fix now, such as shoulder joints and spines that didn’t cause constant pain after the age of thirty-five, and so on. But despite rightminding, some Synizens still managed—through ingenuity, drive, or uncorrected sophipathology—to hoard more resources than they had any imaginable use for. But some of that also came back to the Synarche in the form of assessments, and those assessments went to bolster the public good. The resources from those assessments built things like—ta-da—Core General.

And my exo, for that matter, which benefits me and my quality of life almost exclusively. Although it also makes me capable in my chosen career.

As you can probably tell, I’ve had this argument with Tsosie often enough to manage both sides of it quite fluently by now.

So if a rich person was cutting us off, well, we weren’t in a hurry right now anyway. And if we had been, we would have had priority. They might have a legitimate medical emergency on board all the same, something that a routine flight could make way for.

I kept sneaking sideways glances at Helen. This wasn’t routine. She wasn’t routine. We were bringing home a piece of history. Nothing in the human galaxy would ever be quite the same again.

Sally and Loese didn’t bother the rest of us with the coms chatter, leaving me free to look down on the hospital with all my usual feelings of awe and appreciation. Core General had been built by the combined resources of the entire Synarche, all the thousands of syster species. Well, fewer than that, I guessed, because it was built decans ago and was constantly being updated. But that didn’t stop the sheer scale of the project from flatly amazing me.

It was a gobsmacking accomplishment. Not only was it huge, it was intricate. Different systers had different environmental and gravitational needs, and environments were stacked from hub to rim of the spinning station to accommodate them. The apex of the enormous station was pointed toward the Core; the nadir lay in sheltering shadow.

I didn’t at all blame the administration for being in a blistering hurry to get the new artificial gravity installed throughout the environment. It was an infinitely better solution than trying to balance the gravitational needs of different systers with various rates of spin. Although there might also be safety concerns with the artificial gravity.

Probably. Technology can always break. The question is always, when it breaks, how does it break? What does it do? And what failsafes can be installed to keep it from killing anybody?

I turned to Helen. “When we dock,” I told her, “people are going to come on board and get your crew members and the sample of the machine. They are going to try to help, and you need to let them. Do you think you can manage that?”

“They’re going to help my crew,” she repeated, as if fixing it in memory.

“They’re doctors,” I said. “Very good doctors. If anybody can help, they will.”

It didn’t seem advantageous to mention that if her crew were past recovery, it was probably because she’d force-frozen them.

Sally brushed against the docking ring, matching velocity and vector so precisely we heard nothing. And felt nothing, until the docking bolts shot with a thud that reverberated through our hull. Suddenly, my limbs were sore, as we fell heavily back into the embrace of simulated gravity.

The warm feminine voice of Linden, Core’s wheelmind, broke in. She could use magnetic resonance to communicate directly with many types of sentient brains via hallucinations one could not ignore, but she felt it was more polite to talk to people when possible. I had to admit, I agreed.

We’d tightbeamed ahead to let her know what we had coming, so I wasn’t surprised when she said, “Welcome home, Sally, Doctors, Nurses, Pilot. Welcome to Core General, Helen. Helen, I’m Linden, the wheelmind here, and I will be in charge of making sure that you are comfortable while my staff begins care for your crew. Do you require treatment also?”

“Yes,” Tsosie said, while Helen was still grinding through her decision. It was technically a bit sketchy of him to speak on her behalf, but she’d have other chances to refuse, and the lags she was running were a pretty good argument in favor of her need.

Helen wanted to hover as we started moving the coffins out, and was absolutely and entirely in the damned way. I managed to convince her that the airlock worked better when she wasn’t standing in it, and Loese—who was off duty once we docked, so it was service above and beyond—led her out into the receiving bay to stand next to the triage nurse and do her worrying where she could see the end stage of the process.

I ducked through to treatment, past the milling crew surrounding the cryo pod being offloaded from that private ship. I glanced over my shoulder, but Tsosie wasn’t in view, or I would have gloated at him over the pod: evidence that somebody was actually pretty darn sick or hurt.

So there.

To my enormous relief, my old friend Dr. Rilriltok was on duty in Cryonics. It was a Rashaqin trauma recovery specialist, a job classification that included cryo fail and other injuries often sustained during rescue and transportation. It spotted me and fluttered up through the big, echoing bay, flying because the spin gravity in this trauma bay was light enough to be safe for it to do so, and because the floor was covered with swarms of doctors, nurses, and techs of about sixteen different species.

Despite the madhouse of people sliding coffins around on lifts, I spotted it coming a long way off: it was hard to miss, being airborne and about a meter long. The drone of its diamond-faceted wings was equally distinctive, having a tendency to set my back teeth buzzing against each other.

“Hey,” I said. “Nice sash. Is that jewelry? Did you get promoted?”

Rilriltok hovered, the wings a blur. Portable gravity nullifier, it said, stroking the sash with a small manipulator. Koregoi tech. Now that the hospital has begun retrofitting, they’re issuing these to all fragile staff members. For safety, in case of a gravity emergency. Greetings, friend Brookllyn. Have you eaten? Are you well?

Rilriltok had been my mentor/liaison when I did my training rotation at Core General, and we’d hit it off brilliantly. It was a Rashaqin male, which meant that it was possessed of a dizzying array of limbs, two compound eyes, enough simple eyes that I’d have to point to each in sequence to reliably count them, and layers of chromatophores and iridophores that it could use to disappear effectively into almost any background. The females of its species were much larger and more aggressive, without the adaptations for color manipulation, and in pre-Synarche times had been known to occasionally eat the males during mating if they weren’t already sated.

As a result, the males were incredibly diplomatic, empathic, and polite. And prone to repeatedly offering food to anybody they had to deal with in a social or professional situation. Especially if the situation was somewhat tense.

Rilriltok, in short, was a delight.

Rashaqins were also exoskeletal—they looked like praying mantises with a few extra limbs—and had evolved on a much less dense, higher-oxygen world than humans had. This meant that fair amounts of Core General, especially around the rim, were off-limits to any Rashaqin that did not wish to be squashed. It also meant that they usually wore supplemental breathing gear threaded around the spiracles on their abdomens, because their mix was rich enough to present an unreasonably large oxidation risk if used as a general atmosphere.

I’d been to Rashaq once, when I was still in the Judiciary. Things on Rashaq tended to spontaneously burst into flames.

The entire planet was saved from being a constant firestorm mostly because it also never stopped raining. I’d spent three standard months on the surface in my duty rotation. I only ever saw its pleasant yellow sun from aircraft. My skin was fantastic the whole time, though—soft and supple and very well-moisturized.

I pointed to the stream of coffins coming in. “Have you had a look yet?”

The first one is being hooked up to the diagnostics. Shall we go?

Rilriltok perched on my shoulder—its personal antigravity device seemed to be working, as it weighed less than my exo—and let me carry it through the crowd, safely raised above the bustle. Under other circumstances, I might have shied from the raptorial forelegs as long as my arms, folded neatly away beneath the level torso. Whatever else it was, Rilriltok was an extremely large bug.

It was a large bug that I was perfectly accustomed to, however. And—Hhayazh aside—I’ve always been fond of bugs. Actually, I’m fond of Hhayazh, too, but don’t tell it I said so.

I stood still and served as a perch for the even more motionless Rilriltok as it scanned the readouts being sent to our senso. Odds for the occupant of the cryo casket didn’t look great to me—the numbers were too cold, too weird—but I wasn’t the expert. And to my vast relief, I wasn’t currently wearing a specialist ayatana, either. Much easier, saner, and safer to let somebody who had their own knowledge handle the diagnosing when I had one standing—or perching—right there.

At length, Rilriltok buzzed faintly. I couldn’t tell if the emotion it was experiencing was exasperation or relief.

I asked, “Can we help them?”

That’s an interesting question, the doctor said. They’re cryoburned.

“Are they dead?”

Rilriltok rippled its wings, then pinned them back, flicking the wing coverts closed. The hard scales blushed jewel-pink, with bright green beads of trim. Not until we thaw them out and they don’t wake up, it admitted. Technically.

“Comforting.”

I didn’t spend six ans in medical apprenticeship in order to lie to people.

It clacked its mandibles and gestured to something behind me. A Rashaqin could see in most directions with that cloud of eyes. Is this the next of kin?

I turned my head and saw Helen approaching, wringing her golden hands. A reflective and equally golden shimmer washed Rilriltok’s carapace, starting with its raptorial forelimbs and rapidly licking across its body down to the tip of its abdomen: the iridophores expanding. Color-based communication is a fascinating thing.

I waved to catch Helen’s eye… lack of eyes… and gestured her up to us. “This is Helen, yes.” I couldn’t bear to use her full pun of a name.

Any attending physician got weirder stuff than a faceless android with exaggerated gender markers for lunch. Rilriltok held out the case board that had been clutched in a couple of its smaller manipulators. Hello. I am Dr. Rilriltok, the cryonics treatment specialist. Will you authorize treatment, please?

Helen turned her eyeless gaze from the glassy surface of the tablet to my face, and back again. “I don’t know how.”

Just touch the surface, Rilriltok said. My fox translated its tone as kindness. Rilriltok always had a better bedside manner than me. We’ll do everything we can for your people. Are you the shipmind?

“N—”

“Yes,” I said. “Her people have a different word for it.”

“You’ll take care of my crew,” she said.

I will do everything I can to help them, Rilriltok said. But you have to understand that in a situation like this there are no guarantees.

Over Helen’s shoulder, I watched the next casket being plugged into the next diagnostic bay. The one beside us was uncoupled—a process that involved staff wrestling with some adaptors with the randomly colored swirls of a rush print job—and escorted by a triage nurse farther into the hospital.

Helen took a half step after it, as if dragged. For a moment, I thought she was going to have one of her meltdowns, or lockouts. But the expression on her hollows and ridges shifted faintly.

“Can I stay with them?”

It’s best if you don’t, for now, Rilriltok said. Some of the essential procedures might be distressing. We will scan them, sample their DNA, and begin growing any necessary replacement organs and limbs that may have lost function while the patients were in cryo. If we have to amputate flesh that would become gangrenous if allowed to rewarm, we will do that now. Don’t worry, though; your crew can’t feel anything in cryosleep.

Its faceted eye caught mine, and I knew what it wasn’t saying. Your crew can’t feel anything if they’re dead.

Helen went very still, a mirrored statue of a ridiculously proportioned female form. My pulse accelerated, and I forgot the ache in my ligaments. Sensing adrenaline flooding my system, my exo glided across my skin, realigning itself for explosive power. I was combat trained—years in Judiciary, after all—but I also knew I was rusty. Restraining irrational injured people was not at all like tackling actual criminals.

And tackling actual criminals was not at all like trying to stop a freaked-out AI peripheral on a rampage.

I assumed. Right then, I was hoping I never had to find out.

Helen expanded, pulsing larger like a bull impanaton drawing a deep, angry breath. I half expected her to paw and toss her horns. Her seamless body broke into disconnected plates, all hovering over a lambent core of swirling flame-colored sparks like an internal galaxy.

I thought of footage of lava welling between adhered chunks of basalt. It was all I could manage not to step back.

Rilriltok had no such ego holding it in place. It dropped off my shoulder and zipped up and backward on a diagonal several meters, the drone of its wings rising to a pitch betokening alarm.

Helen spoke in a flat, metallic tone. The sparkles of light inside her dazzled my vision. “I need. To protect. My crew.”

“Helen.” I made my voice as level and unemotional as I could, but I didn’t want to tune away the adrenaline thumping through my veins: I might need it. All I had in a situation like this was good old-fashioned training and sangfroid. “Do you have a protocol you engage to allow medical intervention to save crew members whose lives are at risk otherwise? Even if that medical intervention may be dangerous?”

“I do,” she said, leaning forward in a gesture that made my exo tighten around my body, ready to yank me out of harm’s way.

I took a deep breath, intentionally slow. I wished I could make eye contact. I’d gotten used to the shimmery facelessness on the trip home, but it was suddenly creepy as anything once more, and the shifting gleams through the open sutures dissecting it did nothing to reassure me.

They looked like they were getting wider.

“Will you believe me that we are doing everything we can to save your crew, and allow us to proceed with that work without making my crew fear for their own safety?”

I heard a series of slow, pinging clicks like cooling metal as she thought it over. I held my own breath, irrationally certain that if I moved even that much, everything would crumble and Helen would start punching her way through the staff and environments of Core General.

With a snap, the plates collapsed back into one another, and Helen was again an exaggerated mannequin, not very tall.

I heard Linden breathe a sigh of relief in my head. Oh good. Thank you for rendering it unnecessary for me to intervene, Dr. Jens.

It’s good to know you were on the job anyway, wheelmind, I said, feeling my heart begin to slow. My exo wasn’t yet quite ready to relax around me, but I rolled my shoulders back and tried to let go of some of the tension. Tension turns into pain very quickly.

Rilriltok blurred forward again, stopping over my left shoulder with such precision that it almost seemed like an animation. It said, Shipmind Helen, do you require medical care as well?

I almost copied what Tsosie had done and said yes for her. Helen obviously needed her program adjusted, and pretty badly. But she was a sovereign person under Synarche law, though one currently without the obligations of citizenship. Obligations or no obligations, she had her inalienable rights, and one of those was the right to personal sovereignty. She could refuse treatment so long as her illness did not present a danger to others.

Did it present a danger to others? Well, the jury was still deliberating that. A jury comprised of Sally and me, mostly, though Tsosie had some opinions, too. And Hhayazh was made of nothing but opinions.

I felt like the Lava Avatar Incident was a check mark in the danger-to-others column, however. And based on how quickly the wall monitor nearby had glowed with presence lights, Linden—who monitored everything in the public spaces of her wheel—seemed to agree.

Linden probably belonged on that jury, too.

“Yes,” Helen said. “I consent to treatment.”

I wondered if she’d been conferring with Sally in the interim.

The identification tag on the wall monitor presence lights told me I was dealing with Dr. Zhiruo, Core General’s most senior artificial intelligence. Someone who had been with the hospital since it was nothing more than a crazy, brilliant, idealistic plan.

I absolutely wasn’t intimidated in the slightest.

That’s a lie.

“Oh, here’s the AI doc,” I said, and added, “Hello, Doctor,” toward the wall.

“Hello, Doctor,” she replied, in tones of mellow amusement. “I understand you have an unusual case for us.”

Quickly, as efficiently as I could, I filled her in on Helen—a little constrained because Helen was standing right there, but one thing medical training knocks out of you is too much self-consciousness (sometimes it knocks out all the politeness, too, and I hoped I was falling on the right side of that line)—and on the machine, a sample of which was still boxed up neatly in that Faraday crate in Sally’s hold. It seemed to stay quiet—quiescent—as long as we could keep it from talking to the outside, or contacting its own components.

I couldn’t quite tell if Helen was listening intently or if she had folded inward again. I didn’t mention the incident we’d witnessed, because I knew Linden would fill Dr. Zhiruo in. I did mention that Helen was uncomfortable with unbodied AIs, and that her culture was strongly inclined toward the use of peripherals.

Sally would have already given Dr. Zhiruo a full report, so I didn’t feel the need to warn her about Helen’s uncanny relationship with the machine, and whatever had gone wrong with her—their?—programming that led to the progressive deconstruction of the ship.

As I had hoped, by the time I finished telling the wall monitor about our rescue operation and introducing Helen’s background, Dr. Zhiruo had shown up driving a peripheral of her own.

It was a great deal less exaggerated than Helen’s chassis, but Dr. Zhiruo had chosen a humanoid model, which I thought was a good choice given Helen’s limited cultural referents. The peripheral had a dark gray polymer skin; narrow, even features; a genderless body under a chiton-like robe printed to emulate “natural” undyed fabric. The eyes were dark glass lenses, unreflective apertures in the neutral face.

Dr. Zhiruo held out a hand and smiled. It was a smile you might imagine on a deva: distant, controlled, serene. “Please come with me, Helen. I promise I will take very good care of you.”

Rilriltok and I watched them leave until they vanished through a decompression door, and Zhiruo’s presence lights blinked out.

I felt a little guilty at how thankful I was to realize that Helen Alloy and her quicksilver bosoms were somebody else’s problem now. I reminded myself that it wasn’t unreasonable to experience a reduction in anxiety when relieved of a responsibility for which one wasn’t really qualified. I let out the breath I’d been holding too long for comfort and said, “So what now?”

The Rashaqin zipped around me to hover at eye level, the breeze from its blurring wings stretching tendrils of my hair. I saw my dishabille reflected multiply in compound eyes and had to smile. DNA scans! it said brightly. Want to come?