Machine

CHAPTER 14

THE HOSPITAL HAS ITS OWN archinformist, the medical librarian. His name is Mercy.

And one nice thing about the hospital AIs is that you don’t have to go see them. You can call them up and ask a question anywhere.

On the other hand, I really like the library.

We didn’t have physical libraries back on Wisewell: the settlement was too new and the resources not available to dedicate an entire building—or even a room in one—as a temple to knowledge. Here on Core General, space is at a premium, but many people work more efficiently when they leave their quarters to do so, and communal workspace is much more efficient than private offices.

If sharing workspace means not having to either hot-bunk or manage my own journal subscriptions, I’m all for it. And libraries are pleasant and efficient communal workspaces. So we have a lot of libraries.

The ox-sector library closest to my quarters is a wedge-shaped compartment, half of which is divided into soundproofed study carrels capacious enough for sentients somewhat larger than me. The other half of the room has adjustable benches with wide aisles and privacy shields every two meters.

I wouldn’t care to try to cram Tralgar into a study carrel, either. Even as a theoretical exercise.

I selected a carrel at the back, with nobody working nearby, and programmed the chair and desk setup so I could settle in with my feet elevated and my knees propped up. Fortunately, I was well-caffeinated, or I might have dozed off, because the chairs were awfully comfortable.

The screens came alive with a dim, cheery glow as I lowered myself into the chair and dropped the privacy shield. Patient information is meant to be kept confidential. I was sure the entire hospital was already buzzing about Helen and her crew, but at least I could observe the forms.

“Mercy,” I said, “I have a problem.”

“Hello, Dr. Jens,” he answered. “I have a solution. Shall we see if they match?”

I should mention that one of the challenges of working with archinformists—or with Mercy, who is the only archinformist I’ve worked with extensively, so I should not generalize—is their fondness for very, very, very old things.

Including jokes.

Very, very, very old jokes.

You can’t stare at an AI under lowered brows, so I said, “I’ve been appointed to the care team for the archaic AI we recovered, and I’m hoping you can give me some data on the history of her ship and possibly even some development files, if there are any.”

“I can try,” Mercy said. “Information that’s specific to Terran history and which is not frequently called for may take a while to… unearth, however.”

Ouch. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

“Isn’t all of human knowledge since the 1990s preserved in a holographic solid somewhere?” Preferably, somewhere in the Core, so it wouldn’t take too long to get to.

“A lot of people think so,” he said. “There used to be an axiom that the Internet was forever.”

I had to look up Internet as he was talking. A primitive form of senso, without neural interface, accessible through small handheld devices.

“And it’s not forever?”

Graphics and charts and illustrations populated the screens around me, a bewildering array.

“Nothing is forever,” he said, as cheerfully as only a functionally immortal artificial intelligence could. “If retrieving archaic data were easy, if there were no informational decay, my specialty would not exist. There would be no archinformists, no research librarians.”

“Wait,” I said. “How can information decay?”

“They used to call it bit rot. Servers get taken down, data falls through the cracks and doesn’t get backed up. Physical substrates are destroyed or damaged, or degrade over time—especially the primitive ones. A holographic diamond is very durable but can’t be changed once it’s written to, and magnetic media only lasted a decan or so under ideal conditions.

“And even if the data is preserved somewhere, that somewhere might not be networked. If it’s networked, it might not be indexed. Even if it’s indexed, it might be half the galaxy away and take two or three ans for the file request to get there, be fulfilled, turn around, and come back. And then you might find out that you needed different files entirely.” He huffed with great satisfaction. “Infohistory is a mess.”

“Well.” Despondence is useless, so I tuned it down, took a breath, and regrouped. “I guess that gives you job security.”

“As long as somebody somewhere cares what happened in medicine in the past.”

“Do you only do medicine?”

“I specialize in medicine,” he said. “The past is a big place.”

“If it had bearing on a medical case, could you look up some information for me?”

“I could,” he said, judiciously, “try. It might take a while.”

“My whole lifetime?”

“A noticeable percentage. But not a large one, assuming you maintain good health and you continue to exercise due caution regarding the risks of your profession.”

Fantastic. Everybody needs an actuarial AI.

Well, I’d asked.

“Fantastic,” I said, forcing myself to feel and sound bright and cheerful. “I need any background you can get me on the Terran generation ship Big Rock Candy Mountain. Especially her crew roster and build details on the AI known as Helen Alloy.”

“Such a clever name!” Mercy enthused.

I closed my eyes. There had to have been somebody other than her designer who would think naming a sexy metal android with a metal-based pun on Helen of Troy was a good idea. It was my luck that the other one was a colleague.

“Dr. Zhiruo said you’d already been working on Helen?”

“Since you’re her care liaison,” Mercy said, “I can tell you in confidence that her substrate is badly degraded. I’ve been patching her personality core with predictive algorithms. We’re rebuilding the substrate with modern materials and integrating the new core into her existing build as much as possible, to preserve continuity of experience.”

“Zhiruo said you had her using some external storage.”

“She already was, after a fashion.”

“The machine.”

“Yes. It’s semiautonomous. Not really a part of Helen, but also not really not a part of her. It might be more intelligent en masse, but the sample we have is built on reactive algorithms rather than being on the road to true consciousness. It’s possible that Helen started using the machine as external storage as her own systems degraded, and its lack of flexibility—for lack of a better word—infected her processes. I suspect it was intended to be a tool, and not autonomous. Helen was designed to have access to an external storage core—”

“Central,” I said.

“Yes. I’m not certain of the timeline. I theorize a potential sequence of events in which her captain ordered Helen to construct cryo pods and then ordered the crew into them before destroying the ship’s library and main computing core. Or perhaps he took it offline: I won’t know for sure until I have a chance to speak with the archinformists who are working on the generation ship itself and see what they have found. Helen must have been nearly quiescent at that point, as she’d been ordered not to access Central. The captain, well. You found him.”

I swallowed. Indeed we had.

“At some later time, possibly as an outgrowth of the evolving conflict over following the captain’s orders versus following her core values and caring for the crew in the pods, Helen hit on the apparently weird solution of converting a bunch of the ship’s remaining material into—”

“The machine.”

“Yes. The storage she needed, and a friend. Of sorts. And she hadn’t been specifically ordered not to do it. She was pretty well degraded into sophipathology at that point, though.”

I remembered the microbot pseudopod taking a swipe at me, and shuddered. “Well, tools are dangerous when used improperly. You can cut your finger off with a circular saw.”

“Indeed, one can.”

“So where do we start looking?”

“The generation ship itself might still have some or all of the data you’re looking for, despite whatever damage the library—Central—sustained. That is what we have archinformists working on it for.”

I began to see the problem. “But the generation ship isn’t networked, and its AI is corrupted.”

“The library might be salvageable. The archinformists will make duplicates of whatever they can retrieve from the files. They’ll bring those back to the Core. That information will be useful,” he said. “Also, I should warn you that every archinformist and journalist in fifteen light-ans is inbound in hopes of interviewing Helen.”

“Is that my problem?” Little space fishes, there were things I cared less about than history. And one of them was wrangling historians.

Humor tinged his disembodied voice. “As her care liaison… yes.”

Before I left the library, I checked in on Helen’s status—still recompiling—and then with Sally to see if she or the Core General mechanical teams were making any progress with the walker. Sally said that it was still crouching there with the door open.

Like some sort of ambush predator buried in sand, except for its gaping maw. Her turn of phrase, not mine. Sally has a colorful vocabulary.

They hadn’t managed to get a drone or even a passive probe past its door defenses, and drilling into the thing from the outside was as much of a failure as it had been when I tried it. I felt a little gratified that even people whose core proficiency was in breaking stuff weren’t managing any better than I had.

O’Mara had come down and looked at the thing, pronouncing it the equal of any military-grade hardware they’d seen. On their recommendation, the hospital stood ready to jettison it if it suddenly became aggressive.

Sally also told me that her repairs were nearly complete, but that she had not yet been cleared to return to duty. She expressed worry that I would not be available when she was released. I expressed my concerns right back, tuning like hell so I didn’t start crying.

I’d cry later, if I had to.

I told Sally that it was going to take quite a while to rewarm Helen’s crew. And I might be… grounded… until all that was well underway.

“Is that what you want?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “I want to keep you.”

That left me feeling a warm glow that was something of an antidote to all my recent frustrations.

The next logical step for me was to check on Afar and his crew, who—being in the methane section—were much less physically accessible to Cheeirilaq, Rilriltok, Helen, and I. Well, honestly—I didn’t know about Helen. Possibly she could walk into a methane section like it wasn’t anything. Possibly it would speed up her processing to be superchilled.

Or maybe she’d freeze solid.

I should ask, once she was feeling well enough for visitors again.

Rather than suiting up and tromping through the methane section, with all the attendant risks and nuisances, I met up with Rilriltok and we removed ourselves to a remote observation lounge. The lounges were usually used by residents and doctors on a training rotation to watch treatment in sections they were not biologically suited to—but they were open to anybody with an interest. Teaching hospitals are great.

Monitors and holopresence units along two walls gave us a mediated view of the ward where the Darboof crew members were resting. It was, by human standards, pitch-black in the actual ward, but the lounge translated the Darboof’s homey, comfortable IR into wavelengths my visual receptors could process.

A patient care specialist of some description moved around the beds. Having given up the Darboof ayatanas, I did not know if the person manipulating their crystalline limbs and administering medication or nutrition was the equivalent of a nurse or filled some other function. They were, however, remarkably efficient, and I left myself a note in senso to find out who they were, so I could request them for my own patients in future, if needed.

We were barely getting settled when Tsosie walked in, followed by Cheeirilaq. Tsosie seemed as surprised to see us as I was to see him in the company of the Goodlaw. Or maybe he only noticed me. Rilriltok was suddenly blending into the upholstery again. I hoped it didn’t get sat on. That would be an embarrassing incident report to have to fill out.

Greetings, Dr. Jens, Cheeirilaq stridulated. I was certain it noticed Rilriltok, by how politely it kept its triangular face pointed toward the observation windows.

“Oh,” Tsosie said. “Are you checking on our patients?”

“Not ours anymore,” I said. “Technically.”

“I’m not busy while we’re grounded.” He walked to the monitors on the side of the room at right angles to the ones I had been observing. The new bank lit up in its turn with a different angle on the enhanced images of Afar’s crew. “Loese is volunteering in the nursery, she’s so bored. I’ve gotten involved with retrofitting the gravity generators into key areas. It’s grunt work—”

He sighed.

Of all the people I thought would enjoy spending time around children… well, Loese wasn’t one of them. It goes to show how stereotypes can mislead.

“I didn’t know you knew anything about gravity generators.”

“I played around with them a little in my downtime. I like techy stuff.” He grinned.

From here, we could have accessed senso from the care team—filtered, so we didn’t wind up with their love lives…. Did Darboof or any of the methane breathers even have love lives? Hastily, I canceled the request for info that my wondering had automatically generated, before the answer chipped away any more of my battered innocence.

Accessing the senso would have come with partial immersion in their alien sensorium, however. Having worn Darboof ayatanas, I wasn’t in any hurry to experience that again so soon. They were too different to fit comfortably over my skin. For one thing, their nervous systems depended on supercooled superconductors to move electricity around. They thought with electrons—same as Sally, same as me, same as Rilriltok—but they thought awfully fast. And moved awfully slow.

Their experience was a particularly ill-fitting suit, for a human.

They probably would have felt the same way about me and my weird, hot, bright life. Although there were hobbyists who liked to try on other species recreationally. The more exotic and extremophile, the better. Not that I judge, but some subcultures are odd.

“I’m bored, too.” I had plenty to do, but none of it was what I loved doing. I contemplated my thumbnails, and the moonstone gleam of my exo against the skin of my hands. I was tempted to tell him about my conversations with O’Mara and Starlight. Did he know about the extent of the sabotage on Core General? Rilriltok had been cagey but informed. But from O’Mara I’d gotten a sense that they were keeping it quiet, and all I’d heard through the grapevine since I got back was a bit of muttering about unlucky happenings—or, depending on the personality of the mutterer, poor maintenance.

Cheeirilaq must know, being a Goodlaw. And Rilriltok had suggested I speak with it, though I hadn’t nerved myself up yet. I wasn’t sure it would want assistance from outside of its chain of command, especially assistance foisted on it by a former Judiciary noncom who now worked for an entirely different organization.

Its role was not quite judge, jury, and executioner, but beings that achieved the status of Goodlaw in the Judiciary were trusted by the Synarche to exercise reliable judgment in ethically complex frontier situations, when they could not rely on communication to higher authorities. That was a level of responsibility that went beyond solid rightminding and into strong personal moral development—not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of legal precedents.

I trusted Sally and her crew with my life. But somebody had sabotaged Sally. And although it didn’t seem likely, I found myself circling back to consider the possibility that it had happened after we left Core General. So where did that leave me? Wondering if I could trust Tsosie. Wondering if I could trust Cheeirilaq enough to confide in it.

I refused to wonder about Rilriltok.

But as implications I had been sort of glossing over in a haze of busyness unpacked themselves, my heartbeat seemed to pulse in my belly rather than my chest, and my hands grew cold. I was suddenly rather scared.

“I’m still intrigued by the mystery,” I admitted. Then I rolled my eyes in irritation. “Oh, Void. I should have asked Zhiruo about Afar. I got distracted by Helen and all the discussion of corpsicles.”

Mystery? Cheeirilaq’s head bobbed forward, framed by the collar of its little blue jacket. Do you mean the potential law enforcement problem I am investigating?

“Maybe? You haven’t explained your interest in Helen and her crew. Is it acceptable to ask what your intentions are?”

As I formed the question, I realized that it had seemed natural to encounter the Goodlaw because we had been talking about it, so I hadn’t questioned the coincidence of it being interested in our historical and medical mystery.

Helen, her crew, Afar, and his crew, also. Allow me to set it forth thusly:

First, why and how was Big Rock Candy Mountain moving so quickly?

Second, why was Afar docked with the generation ship?

Third, why was Afar transporting—I should say, smuggling, because it does not appear on a manifest—what appears to be a privately designed and manufactured combat walker? Or a really overdesigned environmental suit, perhaps, because it does not appear to have weapons.

Fourth, who sent Afar, and where was Afar en route to?

Fifth, what incapacitated Afar’s crew?

“Wait,” I interrupted, connecting some dots that had seemingly been too apparent to the Goodlaw to warrant expositing. “Arms smugglers?”

It would appear so. Shall I continue?

There was more. Of course there was more. “Be my guest.”

Tsosie had his arms folded and was watching with an expressionless mouth and a little line between his eyes. The expression was familiar, and boded ill for somebody.

Not, I hoped, me. Or Cheeirilaq.

Cheeirilaq buzzed softly.

Sixth, what incapacitated Afar?

Seventh, if the thing that incapacitated Afar is not the same thing, what is causing the generation ship’s shipmind or shipminds to malfunction?

“I might have some answers on that one, actually. I’ve been talking to Mercy.” Quickly, I relayed what he had reconstructed from Helen’s information about the captain freezing his crew, incapacitating the shipmind, and then eventually dying alone—old age? illness? suicide?—in his command chair. I was aware of Rilriltok leaning close and listening intently, and the moment in which it buzzed and coruscated with excitement vibrated my jaw.

I might have some information to contribute on that front, it said. Our preliminary scans of the rescued patients indicate that many of them are infected with a human influenza-type virus. We will be vaccinating human hospital staff against it, and we have antiviral treatments available for the patients as they are rewarmed.

We all looked at one another in silence, humans and Rashaqins. Tsosie breathed out, an eloquent sigh.

“Out of curiosity,” I said, “was Specialist Jones one of the ones infected?”

Rilriltok hesitated, with the air of one consulting senso for its notes. She is not.

Cheeirilaq stretched its lime-green wing coverts wide, cocked its head, and continued, I have one more question.

“Let’s hear it,” Tsosie said, as if relieved for the break in tension.

Eighth, how can rock also be candy?

I blinked. Tsosie snorted. I pointed a finger at the Goodlaw, realizing too late that that might be seen as a very aggressive gesture by a species whose forelimbs were cavalry sabers.

I folded the finger back into my hand. “Was that a joke?”

Honest curiosity.

“Rock candy is crystallized sucrose,” Tsosie said.

Rilriltok’s antennae peeked over the back of its chair. Ninth, it interjected, how did an anomalous cryo pod wind up mixed in among the rest?

That should have been first, the Goodlaw said. I’m slipping.

Rilriltok was obviously terrified, but nothing as small as mortal peril could inhibit that vast curiosity and intellect.

Most doctors don’t get to serve at Core General. A few might come here for an exomedicine rotation or a residency. Only the very best are invited to stay. Any given attending physician here is, in general, among the galaxy’s best in their specialty.

I can say that without embarrassment because I got in by having a very narrow and unusual specialty. And I have an advantage in that my background in the military—Judiciary Search and Rescue—is why I serve on Sally. I’m a rare subspecies of doctor: I started my medical training by ministering to people who were already in difficult and dangerous situations, and my treatment goal was getting them out of those difficult and dangerous situations in no greater number of pieces than I had acquired them in. So rescue ops hold no terrors for me.

By contrast, Rilriltok did not obtain its position through any sort of special standing. It’s just a really excellent cryonics doc—a really excellent doc in general. This fact, I found reinforced in my understanding as it launched itself from the chair, buzzed up to the window, and rested feathery forelimbs against the monitors.

I stepped up beside it.

It asked, What kind of technology do Darboof use for senso, emotional regulation, and translation? Is it something like a fox? They think with electrical channels, don’t they?

Rashaqins had more distributed neural networks than humans did. Those tiny heads held a cluster of ganglia and sensory processing equipment, but their neurons were spread throughout their thorax and abdomen in addition to the head. I happened to know, because Rilriltok was such a good friend, that their fox design wasn’t that different from a human’s. Just more spread out. Rashaq and Terra had at least grossly compatible biochemistry.

Compatible enough that it could have eaten me without indigestion, though I imagine it would have felt bad, afterward.

I had gotten rid of the Darboof ayatanas. But I was still carrying around my friendly hospital engineer, and they knew a few things. “They use a fairly standard cold-methane extremophile model,” I said. “The fox circuits are etched in, kind of like a smart tattoo—oh.”

“Oh,” Tsosie agreed. “You think they’ve been rendered dormant by electrical interference in their foxes?”

It is the only thing that makes sense of a shipmind and all his crew being simultaneously comatose without multiple proximate causes in evidence.

“We should talk to Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo,” Tsosie said, making less of a hash of the good doctor’s name than I usually did. My accent for blowhole noises is terrible.

“They’re not our patients,” I reminded him.

Our patients are a related case, however. I think I can make the suggestion without causing offense, Rilriltok said. Apparently, it checked in with its own team, because after a pause it commented, Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo has inspected the ox-environment patients from Big Rock Candy Mountain’s crew, and the team is ready to initiate the rewarming process. This is your last chance to put a hold on it, Llyn, should you wish to. Once we start, we can’t stop without killing them.

“It’s Helen’s call,” I said. “And she’s made it. Asking her to revisit the decision would only be cruel.”

Shall we see if Dr. Zhiruo thinks she can be roused? She may wish to be present. I’m going to return to the Cryo unit in order to be available for any emergencies.

It buzzed up into the air.

We can ask Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo what she thinks about the Darboof when we get there.

“I’ll join you,” I said. I checked senso. Dr. Zhiruo was not presently available, but I left a message for her about Helen. While I was there, I asked if any progress had been made in determining what was wrong with Afar.

I felt certain it wouldn’t take her long to get back to me.

The four of us walked, scuttled, and buzzed down the corridor two by two. Cheeirilaq and I were in the front. Rilriltok hovered a little behind me. And Tsosie went on its left.

Cheeirilaq seemed genuinely interested as it asked, Your preferred pronoun is she, is it not?

I allowed that this was the case.

Will I be invading your privacy if I ask more questions?

“I’m comfortable with questions,” I said.

In observing other humans, I have noticed that your sexes seem very much alike. This is very different from my own species. And in observing your species-mates, I have come to realize that despite this similarity, many humans see themselves as very strongly gendered. And many others do not. So… why does your species subscribe to a gender binary?

“Do you mean me? For myself?”

Was that a rude question? I am terribly sorry. The enormous mantoid paced along on feathery feet, moving noiselessly.

“No,” I said. “Not a rude question, exactly. I mean, some would find it so. But I don’t.”

Thank you for forgiving my ignorance.

I laughed. It was charming, for a creature entirely out of nightmare. Comparing it to the almost embarrassingly adorable Rilriltok, I could see what it meant about my species’s lack of dimorphism. “I don’t think of myself as very strongly gendered. And I could elect a genderless identity, or a mixed-gender identity, if I preferred.”

Wouldn’t that be less work?

“Oh, probably,” I admitted. “Sure. But I choose to inhabit this conceptual space. To stretch it to accommodate me, rather than allowing it to contract. Because once a conceptual space starts to shrink by squeezing people out of it, it has a tendency to accelerate, and shrink and shrink and shrink until it squeezes out more and more people.”

And your conceptual space is woman.

“For now. Identities can be fluid over lifetimes, after all.”

Cheeirilaq inspected, then groomed the serrated edge of one raptorial forearm. That is an interesting perspective. But surely, sex is only important when one is choosing to reproduce.

That’s easy for you to say, Rilriltok commented. Then it ducked behind my shoulder, carapace showing variegated blues as it attempted to match my scrubs, the carpet, and the corridor walls all at once.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s why you folks prefer a singular, genderless pronoun.”

Rilriltok made the chirruping noise I associated with laughter. It’s not my fault humans are scandalous. We use gendered pronouns for animals and reproductive partners. And females that are trying to eat us.

Which amounts to the same thing, Cheeirilaq said.

I looked at it in surprise.

It said, There is no ethical sentient justification for my sex’s reproductive strategy. But we try to do better these diar.

“That almost sounds personal.” I had meant to be conversational. I realized that perhaps I’d overstepped when Rilriltok buzzed low against my shoulder. “I mean, I’m not sure there’s any ethical sentient justification for any species’s reproductive strategy—”

I come from a well-known female line. Some of my brilliant ancestors—its abdomen expanded as it drew a heavy breath, patterns of red and yellow veining appearing between the pale green plates—crafted the society our people now enjoy. But I do not think Rilriltok will argue with me when I say that they… deserved gendered pronouns.

I am ashamed of their legacy. I try to make some restoration with my own right behavior.

My mouth twisted against itself. I didn’t want to dismiss the Goodlaw’s willingness to acknowledge historic crimes or to accept accountability. But I was also interested in the conversation. “My ancestors came very close to destroying our species and our homeworld, but also managed to save it—and us—in spite of themselves. Or by finally understanding that everybody is responsible for fixing broken things, maybe. We had to learn that there were more important things than being ‘right.’ Brilliant people are sometimes terrible at being people. It goes a long way toward making their legacies complicated. I remember being taught an old ethics conundrum about whether humanity should give up space travel because Einstein was kind of a dick to his first spouse.”

“Wife,” Tsosie said, with uncharacteristic irrelevance.

“What?”

“They called them wives.”

“Some of us still call them wives,” I said. “Or at least that’s what I called mine, and vice versa. But I believe even archaically, it’s acceptable to use spouse interchangeably with gender-specific terms.”

“Huh.” Tsosie looked at me oddly. I frowned back until he shook his head. “Sorry, nothing. Just—we’ve served together for nearly ten ans, and I never knew that you were married.”

I smiled. “Possibly I was also kind of a dick to my spouse,” I admitted. “Or maybe she was kind of a dick to me. I honestly couldn’t tell you one way or the other, at this point. Subjectivity is a great ruiner of testimony.”

We reached the lift and stepped inside. Cheeirilaq considerately crowded itself into a back corner, tilting its long body almost vertical to give Rilriltok as much distance from its person as practical. Rilriltok scuttled around to my front.

“The great ruiner of testimony,” Tsosie said, “but the font of great art.”

“And here we are back to terrible people inconveniently not making terrible art.”

Expecting art to present absolute answers or offer tidy moral certainties is expecting art to act like propaganda, Cheeirilaq said, which made me think maybe I did not need to offer it my grammar school philosophy on dealing with the problematic acts of problematic ancestors.

It continued, Possibly your people do not find it rude to discuss sexual dimorphism because sexual dimorphism and gendered violence have caused less harm to your species than mine.

I was still too embarrassed to say anything. Tsosie came to the rescue.

“Less, maybe,” Tsosie said. “But I can only say that because I am talking to a Rashaqin.”

Rilriltok chirruped laughter.

Tsosie continued, “I would not say ‘none.’ I wouldn’t even say ‘not much.’ But isn’t maturity—individual, or as a species—acknowledging when you or your ancestors have done wrong, and trying to do better, not one-upping each other on who has suffered more?”

I was still trying to figure out how to paint myself back out of the corner I’d painted myself into—without sounding even more condescending—when the lift suddenly lurched, and gave a thud. I stumbled forward, instinctively throwing my hands out. Between me and my exo, we managed to brace against the wall without crushing Rilriltok under my large, endoskeletal body.

There was a second jolt, more terrible than the first. Tsosie fell against my back, then grabbed on to a rail beside me. We drifted for a moment, all four of us breathing heavily, and I braced for tearing, crushing, the pop of expelled atmosphere.

The lift started up again, and we dropped to the floor more heavily than I suspect Cheeirilaq or Rilriltok liked. I was glad my low-gravity friends had their magic belts on. It seemed to have dampened the worst of the impact.

Quickly, my neck and spine protesting the wrenches and impacts, I activated mine.

“Linden?” Tsosie asked.

“Dr. Tsosie,” she replied, a presence light pinging up beside the door panel. “Apologies for the discomfort.”

“Did we miss a transition?” I asked. To my knowledge, a Core General lift had never malfunctioned that way. Definitely not during my tenure here. “Are we going to miss a transition?”

I imagined the linking switches inside the branches and shafts slicing the lift in half. Their moorings tearing open the hospital’s hull and spilling atmosphere, staff, patients, crash carts, monitors into space.

There were safety overrides, but knowing that wasn’t very comforting right now.

“Apologies for the discomfort,” Linden said, as I tuned some of my pain away.

I remembered what Starlight had said about sabotage and accidents, and my breath hurt. “Linden, did you know that you’re repeating yourself?”

“The lift is safe,” Linden said. “You will arrive at your destination in ninety seconds.”

I looked at the others. Rilriltok was practically vibrating with fear. Cheeirilaq said, Ride it out?

“No more dangerous than diverting,” Tsosie answered. He rubbed his palms together, and I hoped he was right.

I turned toward the outside, and watched the lights of the lift cradle ripple past, outlined against the swirling sky. Biofeedback. Breathing. Tuning. No time to panic.

The lift sighed to a halt as liquidly as if nothing had gone wrong at all. I held my breath as the doors opened—

They did not open on void, the Big Suck, and freezing eyeballs. Nor did they open on choking chlorine or caustic vapor or searing steam. Just a quiet corridor on an ox deck with a couple of staff members hustling past in murmured conversation.

I felt so relieved it was almost a letdown.

We got out of that lift so fast we almost tripped over ourselves and one another.

“Oh no,” I said. “Linden, have you been in contact with Afar?”

Tsosie looked at me, alert with worry. I could tell he was following my train of thought.

Although if the incidents had started before we came back… and the sabotage to Sally had occurred on our way to the generation ship…

It didn’t make sense.

Linden’s presence lights burned steady along the wall beside us. “Don’t worry, we’ve been using sterile data protocols. With Sally also, even though she firewalled when dealing with Afar and Helen.”

“She went right into a portion of the machine.”

“She overwrote it; she didn’t integrate it. Don’t worry. Sally is good at her job.”

Rilriltok flew up and hovered near the ceiling, adjusting its gravity control belt as it went. Linden, is it too late to abort rewarming the generation ship crew?

“Affirmative,” she said. “The rewarming process has begun.”

“Brilliant timing,” I murmured to Rilriltok. Just what we needed: a finicky, long-term procedure taking place while the hospital was experiencing instabilities such as the one that had jolted us.

It buzzed grumpily. We’d better hurry, friends.