Machine

CHAPTER 13

RILRILTOK’S WEIGHT SHIFTED AS IT raised its eyes to peer over my shoulder. I turned slightly to give it a better view and more cover behind my torso.

Helen walked up to the glass and pressed both hands and what passed for her face against it. The body parts she pushed against the glass squished and flattened.

I guessed that left it up to me to carry the conversation.

I said, “What brings you here, Goodlaw?”

And almost jumped out of my scrubs when Rilriltok stridulated instead. The vibrations of its speech shivered up my spine and left my teeth aching in the bones of my skull.

Huh, it said. Well, that’s peculiar.

“Peculiar?” I echoed, grateful that the vagaries of senso translation hadn’t choked up an ambiguous word such as “funny.”

Rilriltok didn’t answer. It swarmed up my shoulder and stood balanced against the intervening window, giving me an unusual view of its feathery feet-hooks splayed on the transparent wall and the smooth, interlocking plates that made up the underside of its abdominal carapace. Its instinctive camouflage failed, and excited rills of blue and orange ran along its body from head to tail.

Pardon me, friend doctor, the Goodlaw said, in very careful tones. I apologize for addressing you directly, and if you find the situation too stressful I will withdraw the question. But, if you will pardon my rudeness, what is it that you have observed?

The scientist on my shoulder didn’t even flinch away from the predator it had been petrified of moments before. It shook itself with an excited buzz and flipped its wings as if ordering its thoughts.

These cryo units are not all identical, it said. They look similar, but let me draw your attention to these impedance readouts.

It tapped the glass, bringing up a display that my senso translated into good old human symbols after a couple of annoying flickers. They would have meant nothing to me—I am not a cryo specialist—but they meant something to the ayatana of the engineer that I was wearing.

One of the pods was significantly more efficient than the others, and running at significantly safer tolerances.

“Can we go inside?”

Rilriltok turned its head to me with one of the sharp, unsettling gestures that used to make me jerk back in surprise, before I became accustomed to my friend. I don’t see why not.

Helen, who had been standing perfectly straight except that her face pressed against the glass, said, “What do you mean, they’re not all identical? Of course they’re identical. We made them all on the same plan—”

Linden, I said to Core General’s giant, quiet sentience. With almost limitless space and processing power, the wheelmind’s only job was to care for the well-being of everyone who lived within her hull. The hospital didn’t talk much, but she was always there. Abiding.

She didn’t really need a hint from me. I felt her moving to soothe Helen, to calm her anxious algorithms and tame her runaway emotion modules. Linden would also call Dr. Zhiruo, if needed.

The interrupt was a good thing, even though I felt bad that it was being used without Helen’s consent. But it was being used to keep her safe. Her, and her crew, and the staff of Core General.

Helen didn’t breathe. But the effect of Linden’s intervention on her was exactly as if she had taken one deep breath, centered herself, and settled. Rilriltok had already lifted off my shoulder, and was zooming toward the door. I followed it—not quite as swiftly as Helen did—and Cheeirilaq trooped gamely along behind us. We disinfected—we didn’t have to mask and glove up, because none of the coffins were open—asked the staff for permission to join them, and went inside.

The first thing I noticed now that there wasn’t a helmet between me and the coffins—well, and now that they weren’t in vacuum in a cargo hold—was that the cryo units had a smell. A particular tang, like ozone or something. Watching Rilriltok’s feathery olfactors wave, I got a sense that I wasn’t the only one smelling it.

Rilriltok hovered up to its closest colleague—a gigantic Thunderby with three trunklike legs that stepped around the smaller medicos like a large human picking their way among cats—and said, Tell me about the differences in the units.

The specialist—a Dr. Tralgar, from its fox signature—waved a brick-red, tentacular appendage in an untranslatable gesture and said, Well, one of these is much better designed than the others. And there’s something odd about the cranial scan on the person inside.

“None of these people should have foxes, right?” I asked.

None of these people do have foxes, Dr. Tralgar trumpeted softly. At least, I assumed it was trying to keep its voice down, as I was only lightly deafened. The bugling and subsonics made an unpleasant counterpoint to the lingering buzz from Rilriltok’s stridulations. But this one has intracranial scarring.

“Brain damage?”

They’re not my species—a tentacle waved apologetically—but I’m wearing an ayatana from a human neurosurgeon. And I’m reasonably certain the scarring is surgical in nature.

“You’re not saying somebody lobotomized this patient?”

The scarring is not consistent with a lobotomy. It may be the result of a tumor removal or an aneurysm repair.

“May I have a look, Doctor?” I asked.

It wriggled in compliance. Of course, Doctor. You were on the retrieval team, were you not?

I nodded, confident that senso would translate the gesture.

Rilriltok had not awaited protocol. It buzzed the cryo pods, waving its antennae near open and closed panels. When it circled back, it hovered excitedly and said, The electrical signatures are slightly different, friend Llyn, between this unit and the others.

I had forgotten that the Rashaqin sensorium had the ability to detect electromagnetic fields.

They’re also different colors, Cheeirilaq said. There’s more infrared in the one your colleague mentioned. It extended a raptorial forelimb and waved the razorlike tip very gently, near the closest of the anomalous units. I would say this one was manufactured separately and integrated into the lot.

“I made them all. The machine and I did. I would know if one was different,” Helen said, with great certainty. Then she squared her shoulders and repeated, more forlornly, “If that had happened, I would know.”

What if someone modified your program? Cheeirilaq asked. This capsule is demonstrably different. More advanced than the others. And yet it seems you cannot recognize that.

Helen twisted from the waist, inhumanly, a colloid contained in a person-shaped skin. A ripple passed through her, as if she was thinking of doing the swelling-up trick again.

I like mysteries, Cheeirilaq said. Maybe this one is modern. Maybe Afar brought it. Maybe they were hiding a criminal.

Cops are cops. “A human criminal on a methane ship?”

Its wing coverts rippled. Do you have a more interesting solution?

“Maybe Helen and the machine got lucky and turned out a really good one.”

Cheeirilaq bobbed its thorax. Dr. Tralgar, is there any chance we can wake these people up?

“Let’s discuss that further somewhere else,” I suggested, before Tralgar or Rilriltok could comment on the likelihood of any of the patients surviving rewarming.

Oh, Rilriltok said, jerking in the air as if suddenly remembering that Cheeirilaq was there. Oh dear. Have you eaten? Can I offer you something to eat?

Cheeirilaq bowed its elongated thorax very close to the deck and folded its raptorial arms tightly against its body. Thank you, friend Rilriltok. I am quite satiated. Now, Doctor, about these patients. Would it be ethically acceptable under these circumstances to type the DNA of these individuals for identification purposes?

Questionable, said Dr. Tralgar.

I ducked a waist-thick tentacle.

Tralgar continued, Eminently ethical, and in fact even necessary, to do so in order to develop a treatment plan and begin growing replacement organs. We have already done so. What is not ethical, unfortunately, is releasing that information to law enforcement without either a warrant, or the patient’s permission. Since I assume you want to run it against your databases.

Cheeirilaq nodded its triangular head. I’m reasonably certain that I can come up with a Judicially acceptable argument that there is evidence of some sort of a crime committed here—kidnapping consisting of cryonic suspension without consent—and obtain such a warrant.

Good. Then come back when you have it. I’m going to bring Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo to consult. She’s a specialist in brain damage, and she might have some ideas about this patient’s intracranial scarring.

I said, “I’d hate to think that somebody intentionally damaged this person’s brain.”

Before dropping them off in an intentionally primitive cryo pod? And somehow convincing Helen here that the patient was a crew member whose presence had always been logged in her manifest? I’d hate to think that, too. Although I suspect that everybody who survives rewarming will have a little brain damage to contend with. Tralgar waggled its upper torso back and forth. We are also inspecting the samples for archaic pathogens. Measles, influenza, Y. pestis, and so on. The cultures and scans are extensive and will take several diar to process fully. We cannot begin rewarming procedures until we are certain we have appropriate vaccines and treatment available for any bugs we may be importing from the distant past.

It made a noise that senso translated as a chuckle. Not that I need to be worried. But Dr. Jens here would probably prefer not to die of scarlet fever or something equally romantic and premillennial.

Surgeons are not notoriously great at bedside manner.

“That patient is Specialist Jones,” Helen said.

She’d told me about Jones on the way in. The historian. The one I wanted to introduce to our archinformists, if she lived. That level of confidence and backstory seemed to contradict Cheeirilaq’s theory that she’d been stuck in with the other corpsicles as a kind of frozen Trojan horse.

I nibbled my lip, trying to decide how to respond to Helen’s statement.

“I give permission,” Helen said suddenly.

“I beg your pardon?” I’d understood her perfectly. But I had expected her to say something quite different, based on available evidence and her behavior patterns so far.

“I give permission,” Helen said. “They are my crew. I am in authority over them, in the absence of a commanding officer. I give you permission to examine them, and to release such information as may be relevant to an ongoing investigation to Constable Cheeirilaq.”

I guessed all that extra storage and the personality reconstruction were having an effect already. Dr. Zhiruo was the best at what she did, and Helen must not have been as intractable a case as I’d feared.

Well, boomed Tralgar. That conveniently settles that. Now about the rewarming— It abruptly bent all three enormous legs at surprisingly sharp angles and dropped its posterior end to the deck, sitting down. It folded its tentacles and seemed to scrunch in on itself, widening and thickening throughout the muscular gumdrop of its body. This brought the conical head with its circle of bright violet eyes and walrus whiskers to my eye level, more or less.

This may be distressing information, it admitted, leaning toward Helen. She did not step back. Are you prepared to internalize bad news?

I’m here, Linden whispered in my senso.

“I am prepared,” Helen said.

Dr. Rilriltok? the Thunderby offered.

Rilriltok hovered gently over my shoulder. The breeze it generated was pleasant on my neck. It buzzed.

We can at best expect a thirty percent success rate based on the level of technology of the cryo units. Some of the patients who survive are likely to have severe deficits, possibly permanent ones. In those cases—survival, with brain injury—we can repair the organic damage, but in the absence of ayatanas—

“What are ayatanas?” Helen asked.

I realized I’d never heard her interrupt before.

“Machine-stored memories,” I said.

Helen nodded, an odd, crisp gesture that bobbed her head like the stride of a connecting rod.

In the absence of ayatanas, Tralgar continued, we cannot restore their memories or personalities. They will essentially be new people in the same bodies. The patient in the better capsule is much likelier to make a full recovery.

Helen collapsed in on herself. Literally, as her previous slight expansion vanished, and her body contracted to a smaller, denser-seeming version.

I asked, “Those odds don’t change if we wait? Past the point where the transplants and cultures are ready, I mean?”

They do not change, Rilriltok said, sympathetically.

I half expected Helen to straighten up, or shake herself, or make some other small human gesture of resignation and resolve. But what she did was stand perfectly still—eerily still, back in her statue mode. It was so very unsettling, being around an AI who was embodied in a humanoid but entirely unhuman shell.

“I should not be deciding this,” she said. “The captain should be deciding this.”

“Perhaps someone in the chain of command will be in the next shipload of rescues,” I suggested.

“The captain…” She was so still, so motionless, that it seemed as if her voice originated from all around us rather than being localized in the slight golden body of the peripheral. “The captain. The captain’s orders…”

There was a terrible sound like rending metal. Rilriltok darted back—a quick, perfectly horizontal zip of flight in reverse. Tralgar leaned its bulk slightly toward Helen and uncoiled its tentacles. Cheeirilaq froze, long thorax elevated so it towered over me, forelimbs cocked in a predatory position.

I swallowed my desire to run, tuned my racing heartbeat to a less painful level of acceleration, and trusted Linden to know what she was talking about when she said she had things under control.

“The captain,” Helen said, still utterly immobile except for the small motion of her small hands knotting themselves into fists, “gave the orders for the crew to be frozen. The captain wrote the program. The captain took Central apart. The captain made it happen. He died.”

Too late I remembered the body in the chair on the bridge.

Helen said, “It is not my fault. I followed orders. It is not my fault.”

I thought about that. About all the ways it could have happened. Epidemic illness among the crew. Mutiny and the need to stop mutiny.

Sophipathology and madness.

She didn’t seem to be done speaking, and none of us interrupted. In a standard second or two, with the air of someone gritting their teeth on a decision, she continued, “If we don’t try to help them, then they are all dead.”

As good as, Tralgar agreed.

“Do it,” Helen said. And collapsed in a puddle of gold, only vaguely formed to resemble a human being.

“Page Dr. Zhiruo!” I yelled, but the presence chime and lights were already announcing her arrival. I wanted to shout for a crash team, but a crash team was useless. Helen wasn’t a human being. She was a peripheral.

The engineer whose skills and memories I was borrowing would be far more useful. “Use my hands if you need them,” I told Zhiruo, crouching beside Helen. “Tell me how to intervene.”

There was a pause that stretched subjective ans. Then, “It’s all right,” Zhiruo said. “She’s withdrawn herself into the core we provided.”

“Is her link with the peripheral severed?”

“Not permanently.”

I might have felt slightly disappointed at that. Less so than I would have when we found Helen. I still didn’t like her burlesque body, but maybe I was starting to get used to it.

Whether that was a good thing or a bad one, I wasn’t certain. It was certainly, however, a thing I could worry about some other time.

“Too much strain?” I asked.

“Conflicting calls,” Zhiruo answered. “Preserve her crew, or risk all to save some. Disobey a direct order from her captain, or follow it and let her people die. Her program is not very robust when dealing with real-world conflicts. As we bring her into modern architecture, her resilience will improve.”

“Right,” I said.

Zhiruo had backed a gurney up next to me. I scooped Helen’s gelatinous form up in my arms, remembering to lift with my knees—and my exo. I told myself that it could have been a lot worse. At least the peripheral was room-temperature, rather than actually clammy.

I put her on the gurney and arranged her decently. Her arms and legs were jointless and fluid in their relaxed state, unsettlingly as if her bones had liquefied. “Zhiruo, your patient.”

“Thank you,” she said.

Rilriltok zipped sideways out of the way as the gurney trundled itself toward the door.

Tralgar seemed to be watching it go. What are you going to do next? it asked me.

I bit my lip. “Talk to the archinformist, I guess.”

Let us know what you find out, said Rilriltok, from the corner by the door. I guess we’ll start seeing how many lives we can save.