Machine

CHAPTER 15

THE FOUR OF US WALKED with good speed, Rilriltok running along the carpeted ceiling on its feathery toes to stay out of the corridor traffic.

“Linden,” I said without pausing, “please put me through to the Administree? Or O’Mara, if Starlight isn’t available?”

Starlight was available. We were only a third of the way to Cryomedicine when I heard their familiar voice through my senso. [Hello, Dr. Jens.]

“Something is wrong with Linden,” I said. “Linden, sorry to talk about you in the third person, but—”

“All my diagnostics show normal functioning, Doctor,” Linden said. “I will consult with Dr. Zhiruo—”

“Firewall!” I said, louder than I had intended. Doctors, nurses, and staffers of various species turned to stare—the ones who had both necks and eyes, anyway. “Linden, you need to make sure you observe sterile protocols.”

[Firewall,] Starlight agreed. [Dr. Jens, please update me.]

I sent them my ayatana of the incident on the lift, and said, “In Afar and maybe Sally, we’ve got two damaged shipminds already. Helen’s trauma seems to have a different source, but I cannot help but be suspicious…”

[Until we can run a diagnostic,] Starlight said, [Linden, please do firewall all communications with other digital entities. No code exchanges. Air-gapped auditory communication only. I realize this is inconvenient, and I apologize.]

“Acknowledged,” Linden said.

[Do you have a clean backup?]

“Yes, I believe so. But my diagnostics show nothing currently amiss.”

[Then what happened in the lift?] Starlight asked, reasonably.

With some relief, I opened the door to the Cryo observation lounge and ushered everybody into its somewhat more private environs.

At first I thought there was nobody else inside. Then I realized that one of the chairs mostly concealed a slouched human form, a spike of black hair peeking over the back. I shot a glance at Tsosie and the two Rashaqins, warning them back a little. The figure was familiar, and something about her body language made me want to approach her alone.

I settled in the chair next to her. “Loese? You okay?”

She looked up, startled. She must have been far away inside her own head, because generally your fox will remind you if somebody enters proximity. This was a full-body flinch.

I rested the backs of my fingers on her arm. “Checking on the patients?”

She sat up, and I watched her reconstruct her facade. It was fast and skilled, and I might not have noticed if I hadn’t been staring right at her. “This is all pretty upsetting.”

She looked over my shoulder and saw the others clustered by the door. “Come in, folks. Don’t let me stop you.” She stood, tugging her uniform tunic down, and looked back out into the Cryo unit. “I feel responsible.”

“Yeah.” I stood up, too. We hadn’t yet really bonded, but this might be an opportunity to grow a little closer. “This was all set in motion long before you or I was born, Loese. We couldn’t have gotten there sooner, or prevented the catastrophe that led to this.”

She grunted as if she wanted to argue, but stopped herself. Easy for you to say, the look she shot me seemed to imply. I stepped back, realizing how little I knew about her, her backstory, the traumas and triumphs that had brought her to where we were. I knew her service record. I knew that Sally had requested her from the available pilot rosters.

But I only knew Loese in the professional working friendship we’d shared.

I thought about Tsosie mentioning that he hadn’t known I was married. I bet he didn’t know I had a kid, either, unless he’d checked my next of kin—something a commander might do.

I guess I did keep myself distant and locked down. I kept myself from complaining too much, and from feeling too much faith that things would work out if I let them.

It was too big a series of personal epiphanies to unpack all at once, especially with four colleagues staring at me. I tried to come up with something anodyne to say.

Loese smiled. Her face looked strained around it. “I’ll be fine,” she said.

“We’ll catch up,” I offered. “You drink coffee? How about a field trip down to the Forbidden Zone?”

“Ping me,” she said, and fidgeted her way past Tsosie and the pair of Rashaqins.

Having exchanged departing pleasantries with Loese, the rest of my companions joined me closer to the windows. Tsosie leaned over and whispered, “Do you know what that was about?”

“Survivor guilt?” I hazarded. We’d all had to deal with it. “It’s her rightminding and none of our business, unless her work suffers.”

Tsosie sighed. He’s from more of an auntie culture than I am. It makes him a good CO.

Behind the windows, hospital staff including Dr. Tralgar bustled around the cryo chambers. I spotted a peripheral that was probably Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo. She’d have to use waldos outside of a water environment anyway, so there was no point in her hauling herself into a tank and driving the damned thing, sloshing, down crowded corridors and through two or three environment locks.

I leaned against the wall, letting myself react a little to the useless adrenaline the lift ride had left me with. It would break down fast enough; for now I could ride it out. Besides, I might need it again in a minute.

“I don’t know,” Linden admitted, suddenly, as if she had been obsessing over the question and it had burst out of her. “Maybe the lift failure is linked to the earlier sabotage attempts I could not detect until I was informed of them by organic colleagues.”

Tsosie said, “How many attempts, precisely, are we talking about?”

I held a finger up, and he subsided.

Linden continued, “My point is, if my diagnostics show nothing amiss now, would I be able to tell if the backup was corrupted?”

The back of my head thudded softly against the seat back. Nobody else seemed to notice.

“The sabotage started before we got back,” I pointed out. Tsosie’s lips flattened, but he didn’t interrupt. “And there was an attempt on Sally. And you’ve also been experiencing memory gaps?”

“I did not realize until now,” Linden said. “But I’ve reviewed the recordings, and the lift definitely glitched.”

I rubbed my bruised elbow. “It sure did.”

Cheeirilaq leaned over my shoulder. Friend wheelmind, it might be best to isolate yourself immediately. I am concerned about contagion—

“I’ve been using firewalls!” Linden wailed. A moment later, she calmed her voice. “Yes. If the firewalls and air-gap communications have been ineffective in preventing contamination, I am in danger. What shall I tell colleagues about why I am not sharing data?” Linden asked. “I am a major traffic control hub for this sector!”

Presence lights blossomed on the wall. The Administree was tuning in. I could only assume Linden had summoned them. My hands clenched on the arms of my chair.

Something terrible was happening, and I was utterly helpless to do anything about it. To even really understand it. All I could do was watch.

Rilriltok’s feather-barbed foot groomed my hair. I have to admit, it was soothing. It even slowed the heart palpitations a little.

[Tell them you’re initiating a quarantine protocol,] Starlight instructed. [Tell Dr. Zhiruo the full story, however.]

“I’ve discovered another problem,” Linden said. “Dr. Zhiruo is offline. Administrator, I am going to initiate an emergency purge and restore.

“Now.”

The lights flickered. The spin gravity wavered. Rilriltok darted to the center of the observation room and hovered there, far from any obstacle. I grabbed the chair I was sitting in, because I was too far from the rails.

I guess the rails all around this place weren’t as silly as I had thought.

I braced for a slam—so much of the environmental control of this hospital depended on things spinning at the right speed in relation to one another—but instead my weight stabilized and neither Rilriltok nor Cheeirilaq went crashing to the deck. In the Cryo ward, staff looked up and around, then went quickly back to work.

“Starlight? Are you there?”

[Present,] said the administrator, just as Helen burst into the observation room.

“I can’t find the doctor!” she said. “I need to see my crew!”

“It’s okay,” I said, which might be the biggest lie of my medical career, and let me tell you 50 percent of medicine is knowing what lies are helpful when, and which are indefensible. “Your crew are right there. Dr. Zhiruo is sick. We’re working on it.”

Lack of faith doesn’t keep you from praying. It just keeps you from feeling like it’s going to make a difference. Right then, I prayed that Linden, with our warning, had caught her own infection in time. I prayed that her backups were clean.

It would be a while before we knew.

I had no doubt, now, that whatever had happened to Afar and now Dr. Zhiruo and Linden was an invasive meme, an AI virus of some kind. That somehow Sally had managed to avoid manifesting symptoms, unless the memory glitch about the sabotage was one.

Oh, little space fishes. I Rise From Ancestral Night and Ruth and probably half a dozen other ships were still out there at the generation ship. And our whole way back from it, we had cheerily been dropping packets into every transponder we passed, and exchanging data with other shipminds.

Every AI in the galaxy could eventually be affected—and if the toxic meme had gone out that way already, any packets telling people to quarantine themselves would be standard weeks or months behind the contaminated ones.

That was enough time for a lot of things to go wrong.

Understatement of the centian.

Helen walked past me, to the door connecting to the ward. Goodlaw Cheeirilaq wasn’t quite in time to intercept her before she went through, and Tsosie made a completely comical grab that slid off her arm as if he had tried to pick up a handful of hydrophobic colloid. So like a pack of idiot ducklings, the other four of us followed Helen into the unit.

The ward staff either hadn’t noticed yet that something was critically wrong with Linden, or were presuming it would be fixed in a moment. I suppose it’s a drawback of how smoothly this enormous, improbable institution usually runs that when something actually goes simultaneously belly-up, pear-shaped, and sideways, everybody not immediately involved in the crisis assumes it’s only a glitch, and somebody else’s problem, and will be dealt with momentarily.

The amazing thing is that they are usually correct.

Tralgar waved a tentacle as we entered, eyes blinking in succession around its head. It trumpeted a greeting that shivered Rilriltok’s antennae.

Ah, just the sentients I was hoping for. You should look at this, Dr. Tralgar said to Rilriltok and me. It extended a large orange datapad.

Rilriltok dodged back in alarm. I didn’t blame it. The pad was so large I needed both hands to receive it, and despite my exo I still staggered a bit. It probably would have crushed Rilriltok like a… um.

At least we weren’t under anything like full gravity, a convenience for Dr. Rilriltok that made the normally ponderous Tralgar move like a ballet-dancing elephant.

Rilriltok hovered, balancing at my shoulder with feathery forelimbs, and peered down. This looks like poetry.

It wasn’t incorrect. I was looking down at a series of sentences decorated with line breaks. It seemed to go on for a while—at least several screenfuls as I flicked through, and Tralgar’s handheld had a big screen.

“Does poetry serve a medical purpose now?” I asked.

You tell me, said Dr. Tralgar. Does your species usually use its genome to record works of literature?

I looked up. “Excuse me?”

Tralgar’s eyes blinked in sequence. Dr. Zhiruo recovered it from several of these patients. It was encoded in their DNA sequences. She got curious because they looked too tidy.

“Helen,” I said, “what can you tell me about this?”

She had been standing quiescent, or nearly so—little shivers of light running across her surface showed that her body was rocking imperceptibly back and forth. Eagerness? Conflicting calls? All of the above?

I locked my exo so that it was entirely supporting the weight of the Tralgar-sized Tralgar-handling-hardened pad. That way, I could hold it one-handed without discomfort. I scrolled back to the top of the readout.

“It’s not very good poetry,” Tsosie said, rising on his toes to read over my shoulder. He looked up at Tralgar. It must have hurt his neck. “Some people with a lot of resources to waste, who can afford the penalty percentages as well as the cost of the intervention, gengineer their kids. I suppose you might put poetry in a genome for the hell of it.”

“Conspicuous consumption,” I said. “Surely humans can’t be the only species that wastes resources on display behaviors.”

Tralgar blinked at me. It didn’t really signify: Tralgar was always blinking. Surely they’d use better poetry.

“Do they all have it?” I asked.

They all have something, it trumpeted softly. Dr. Zhiruo apparently had not managed to decode all of it before she went offline. And I admit, it’s interesting, but it doesn’t seem relevant.

I scrolled up again. I didn’t particularly feel the urge to read any more. This particular poem—or litany, maybe—had been retrieved from the genome of one Calvin Weir, ensign, no specialty listed. Age seventeen.

A kid. A trainee. I wasn’t a cryo specialist, but the chart wasn’t encouraging for his survival.

You tell yourself not to think about the casualties. You tell yourself you did your best. You helped more than would have been helped otherwise.

Sometimes you still think about the casualties.

“It seems like a valediction.” I stepped closer to Helen. “Helen, your crew. How were they replaced?”

She turned her head to me, blindly. “Dr. Jens?”

“Where did the babies come from, Helen?”

“Oh, we made them. When couples wanted children, we combined and edited their DNA, and produced the offspring.”

“Did you encode markers?”

“The technicians encoded markers,” she agreed.

I put both hands on the tablet, unlocked my exo, and extended it back to Tralgar, somehow managing to not tip myself over in the seconds before the Thunderby relieved me of the weight of its device.

“I don’t know,” I said. I looked at Cheeirilaq, at Tsosie. I didn’t look at Rilriltok, because it was still mostly hiding behind me.

“I think we worry about this some other time,” Tsosie said. “It’s a fascinating cultural artifact. But right now, we need to concentrate on whatever’s causing AIs to go offline.”

“Right,” I said. “That is over my grade.”

It’s not over my grade, the Goodlaw said. But my expertise is in law enforcement, not AI medicine. What do you suggest?

I said, “This is a good time to talk to O’Mara.”

We met them in the observation lounge with the addition of Dr. Tralgar. O’Mara had already been aware of the problems with Linden and Dr. Zhiruo, because Starlight had told them. We still had no idea how the meme was propagating from AI to AI despite the sterile protocols. Figuring out how it had been done, if we were lucky, would put us one step closer to the cure.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we should jettison the pods,” O’Mara said.

“No!” Helen cried, moving forward.

I put an arm out between her and O’Mara. I didn’t think I could stop Helen if she wanted to go through me—but I thought she might hesitate to go through me.

O’Mara rubbed a hand across their short coppery bristles. “I said that we should jettison the pods. Not that we were going to. Nor are we going to jettison Helen, or her machine, or the undocumented military tech that was packed into Afar’s hold. It’s too late, anyway, even if the notion wasn’t morally repugnant: the hospital staff is already infected, and while the pods might be the vector, so might Afar, or Sally, or anything that came into contact. We need to place the hospital under medical interdict—”

“Quarantine,” I clarified, for the staff that didn’t speak Judiciary.

“Right. So on to your other interesting discovery. I’m wondering, do all the patients have the modified DNA?”

“Yes,” Tralgar said. “Including the one in the better-engineered cryo pod.”

“You know,” O’Mara said, “I was not expecting that. Have you decoded her poem yet?”

Tralgar checked his pad. “Dr. Zhiruo had not managed to crack that one. They’re not all encoded the same way, apparently.”

“Of course not.” Tsosie sighed. “That would be too easy.”

O’Mara humphed. “I had been about to guess that Afar most likely brought that additional pod in, possibly using the walker to put it in place. Then… accidentally exposed himself and his crew to the toxic meme that was infecting the generation ship’s systems, since it seems pretty evident at this point that there is a meme, and got trapped there with enough time to trigger his distress beacon?”

Tralgar chirped, disbelievingly. You are speculating that somebody found this derelict ship and started using it to store corpsicles? For reasons unknown?

“I mean,” Tsosie said, “it’s not the only hypothesis. And Cheeirilaq here floated something like it before.”

I’ve seen weirder things, the Goodlaw admitted. Where did the meme come from, then?

“Mercy the archinformist AI suspects that it has devolved from the override codes that Big Rock Candy Mountain’s captain used to force his crew into cryo pods. But that doesn’t explain why Sally didn’t catch it,” I said.

“That’s not actually the peculiar thing.” O’Mara crossed beefy arms. “The peculiar thing is that any of our friends could catch a meme that originated on such archaic system architecture.”

“Aw, pustulence.” Everybody looked at me. “Zhiruo was helping Helen import herself to modern architecture. And adapt her programs to it.”

“That doesn’t explain Afar.”

“No,” Tsosie said. “And it doesn’t explain Afar’s crew, either.”

Tralgar, who seemed to have been holding in a piece of information for a while, waved that reinforced orange datapad for attention and made every attempt to bugle quietly. I made a mental note to print some sound-dampening earplugs if I was going to be spending this much time in Cryo from now on.

It said, We should know if any of the crew might survive rewarming in about twenty-four standard hours.

“Well, good.” O’Mara stuffed meaty hands into their jumpsuit pockets. “If they or any of the other rescues wake up, we can ask ’em what they know about toxic memes from the bottom of space-time. You keep on this. I’ll check in when I’ve heard something from Starlight or Linden, or if Afar or his crew regain consciousness.”

We hear and understand, friend O’Mara, Rilriltok said.

O’Mara cleared their throat. “And Llyn, don’t forget what we talked about earlier.”

Sure, Master Chief. In my copious fucking spare time.

How long is it likely to be? Rilriltok asked.

O’Mara looked at Cheeirilaq, but apparently Cheeirilaq had remembered its manners and was staring off into space absentmindedly. O’Mara’s big shoulders hunched. “Depends on how fast Linden can get herself back up, and whether Dr. Zhiruo’s colleagues can intervene and get her and Afar cleaned up and rebooted.”

“Nobody has had much luck with Afar yet,” Tsosie said.

Tralgar’s tentacles writhed in what might have been distress, irritation, or deep thought. The translation was not clear. We know more now. And we know how the damage to Afar’s crew was done. I have been in contact with the methane team working on them, and they believe that a surgical intervention is likely to be successful.

“Surgical?” I asked. “What exactly—? How badly are they hurt?”

They need re-etching of the… I suppose the nearest equivalent is circuits—the neural pathways that I now, with this new information, suspect have been affected by the meme. Tralgar stopped itself. I’m getting ahead of myself. Something—probably the toxic meme, by Occam’s razor—infiltrated their foxes and rewrote the neural pathways to lock them into a deep sleep.

I shied away from the idea. It nauseated me. I know we’re all mostly microprocessors made of various substrates and chemicals and electrical impulses—the thing all sentients have in common—and the philosophers love to tell us that free will is an illusion. But the idea that something could just… reach in, and rewrite your brain.

How hideous.

There are so many reasons I decided not to specialize in neurosurgery, and right then I was remembering all of them. At least with my patients it is very difficult for me to make things worse for them, in terms of long-term outcomes, since they’re usually about to die if I don’t do something to help them.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck,” I said, after due consideration.

O’Mara nodded. “In the meantime, I need to go figure out how to feed a hundred thousand sentients on limited rations for an indeterminate time. I hope somebody on this bubble knows something about hydroponic farming. Or the crystalline ice-creature equivalent.”

Waiting in hospitals is the worst thing. It doesn’t get any better when you’re a doctor with a nonrelevant specialty. Or when the hospital is falling to pieces around you.

I did suit up and go EVA to rescue some staff members stuck in lifts when Linden had powered herself down. Miraculously—or rather, because of Linden’s skill—nobody had been injured, but quite a few people were trapped, and moving them to less claustrophobic environs was work that I was actually trained for. And “suited” for—and I didn’t even need a rescue hardsuit for this. Just a regular easy-to-maneuver softsider.

That killed a few hours usefully, and when I was done I needed a break without too many people around me. I could have gone back to my quarters on the hospital… but I was rattled and anxious and my whole body hurt and I didn’t want to tune to take the edge off it. I wanted to go home.

And home, for the time being, was still Sally.

But as soon as I stepped through the airlock, I heard something banging—like a tool pounded against a bulkhead. And a frantic voice, Loese: “This is bad! This is so bad, this is so bad—”

I was about to cringe my way right back out the airlock again when Sally’s voice interrupted smoothly. “We’ll be back on duty in no time, Loese. Somebody else will cover this call. Nobody will be left out in space because of us— Hello, Llyn. I’m sorry, we’re having a bad dia here.”

Loese shook her head. She had apparently been banging on a stanchion with a ship shoe, which was a pretty self-restrained way to deal with the level of frustration she seemed to be feeling. I mean, it would have been more restrained to have tuned it back a little, but sometimes you want to feel angry.

I held out my arms to her in a question. She sighed, and came to me, and accepted the best motherly hug a terrible mother could muster.

She wasn’t actually any older than Rache, was she?

I flinched, and tried not to let her feel it. I had been away from Rache long enough that she’d become a grown woman, entirely without me.

Maybe I should be the one smacking things on stanchions and yelling about how bad it was. “Hey,” I said, when Loese pulled awkwardly back. “You gonna make it?”

“This is my fault.” She flopped into an acceleration couch.

“Loese.” Sally’s mom voice was a lot better than mine ever had been.

“Right.” Loese folded her hands, choosing self-control. “Nobody’s going to die todia because of us, and everything else can be fixed. Right?”

“Right,” I said. “I’m going to take a nap. Unless you want to get that coffee?”

She looked at me wanly. “Thanks,” she said. “A nap sounds like a better idea, frankly.”

After I had rested for a standard or so, I went to fetch Helen. She hadn’t stirred from the Cryo observation lounge, where she’d been watching the rewarming staff go on and off shift since Tsosie, O’Mara, Cheeirilaq, and I left. Tralgar wasn’t present now, having gone to rest, but Rilriltok was, and the unit outside was a hustle of other bodies.

Helen didn’t glance over when I came in. She stood before the windows, leaning forward like a pet straining the leash toward a returning master. I could envision tail wagging, shivering, and happy little yips without trying too hard.

Would it have been too much to ask to let the damn shipmind have a little bit of dignity? If any of her crew survived, I wasn’t looking forward to meeting them.

I unwrapped a sandwich and beverage I’d brought from the caf and settled down in one of the chairs. I kicked my feet up onto the grab rails that circled the room and balanced the food on my knee. I hoped the peripheral hadn’t gone back into her fugue state.

“Helen,” I said.

“Yes, Dr. Jens?”

“Tell me more about your crew?”

She leaned back from the windows. “If any of them survive.”

There was a note of cynicism in her voice that I had never heard there before. As she stretched out into the additional space that Zhiruo had assigned her, was she becoming more self-aware? More questioning of her own program?

We didn’t, I realized, currently have a shipmind specialist that I could ask. Every AI in the hospital was bunkered down behind firewalls, following O’Mara’s quarantine protocols. And without their help, I wasn’t entirely certain where to go with that. I took a bite of sandwich as an excuse to chew rather than talking and realized that there was one AI I could talk to.

I reached out through senso and my dedicated line to Sally. Firewalls and monitored connections made it feel slow and fuzzy, as if I were shaking her hand through layers of gauze. But she was there, and responsive.

Check me if you see me about to make a mistake? I said, and felt her affirmation.

“Okay,” I said to Helen. “If you don’t want to talk about you, what if we talk about me?”

Helen kept the fingertips of her left hand on the glass. But she turned, twisting her arm behind her, until she faced me. “Are you… trying to make me feel better?”

I sipped my juice. “Yes.”

“There are so many different options,” she said, pointing to my sandwich with her free hand. “So many foodstuffs.”

Not if we’re cut off from consumables for very long. What I vocalized was, “You didn’t provide a range of foodstuffs?”

“Not the variety of cultural origins available here. You eat artificial insects and pasta. Tsosie eats simulated chicken and rice with chilis. I have seen other people eating curries and meatball sandwiches and spicy fried noodle dishes. How do you keep everybody from fighting?”

“Rightminding,” I said glibly. And then, “We have a job to do. We are adults who know how to get along with other sentients who may have very different worldviews than our own. Diversity is a strength of the Synarche, and diverse perspectives offer a chance at discovering novel solutions to problems. Also… rightminding.”

“Are you from Earth?”

I shook my head because I was chewing. I peered over her shoulder, intrigued by movement, but it was only Rilriltok directing that one of the cryo pods be moved to a different monitoring station. I hoped that was a good sign.

“But you must be from Earth.”

“I’m from a planet. I’ve never been to Terra.”

“But your name. Brookllyn. It’s a place on Earth.”

I laughed. “People get named after things that are left behind. My sister is Cairo, which—well, honestly, I think Cairo Jens is prettier than Brookllyn Jens. But nobody really thinks about it.”

She stood quietly for a moment. I assumed she could still sense what was going on behind her, even when her attention seemed fixated on me.

“That was a big thing you did earlier, when we were first in Cryo.” I waved at the window. “Letting them be tested and rewarmed. A big risk you took, for the good of your crew.”

She shrugged, a fluid ripple of light across her breasts and shoulders, which slumped forward. “It’s my fault Dr. Zhiruo is infected.”

“What makes you say that?”

I filled my mouth with sandwich to kill time while she parsed my question and constructed an answer.

“The meme came from my ship. From me.”

“Well, we’re not entirely sure it did, but even if so, there’s no fault to be assigned,” I said. “Not to you, anyway. You didn’t build it or release it. You were following your program.” Saying that made me wonder something only tangentially related, so I said, “Hey, Sally?”

“Present,” she said through a wall speaker. The presence light didn’t blink on: I assumed because she was monitoring the situation through my senso and merely relaying her conversation to us, rather than inhabiting the local infrastructure. Air-gapped, verbal communications as much as possible.

Keeping herself safe. Good.

“We sampled loose DNA on Big Rock Candy Mountain. Any poetry in that?”

“There is,” she said. “At least, there is a jumble of artificially tidy sequences that seem similar to the ones Dr. Zhiruo was translating into poetry. I do not currently have the spare cycles to translate them, but the likeness is evident.”

“Right,” I said. “Sorry, Helen, I wanted to check that before it slipped my mind. Anyway, please don’t blame yourself—”

She spoke evenly, in a low voice. Without apparent strain, which only made it creepier. “Somebody got inside my mind. And somebody tried to use me against my crew. No. Someone got inside the captain, and used the captain to make me work against my crew. And I can’t… remember what happened.”

You know that saying about never giving an AI reason to be really angry, because they never forget? I remembered it then. I also realized that she’d interrupted me, without deferring. I also noticed that she was still not admitting to herself that her captain had been responsible for… well, freezing his entire crew and leaving his ship adrift in space.

Maybe he’d just really, really needed some time alone.

I wadded up the sandwich wrapper for recycling. “That is possible. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that somebody or something got inside him and made him do what he did, Helen. It’s possible that he made and released the meme on his own, to subvert your failsafes.” I remembered her utter collapse when she’d managed to override those instructions.

She didn’t exactly look at me, being featureless, but she angled her face in my direction. “How could he betray us, unless something from outside infected him?”

“I don’t think he meant to betray you. I think he meant to protect you, and protect your crew, from an epidemic. But he was ill himself, a sickness in his thought. And it made him… make poor choices. Coercive choices. To force you and the crew into what he had decided was the only course of action. But that’s not your responsibility.”

She sat with her hands in her lap, very silent and demure.

I glanced at the monitors. “It’s going to be hours before they try to wake anybody up, and they won’t do that without you present. It looks like they’re going to start repairs and grafts soon, and that will be an involved process. Would you like to go somewhere else for a while?”

Helen turned away. “I’ll wait here.”

I went back to my quarters. There was nothing immediate that needed doing with urgency. There was nothing but waiting, now.

There was still no word on Linden, and until there was a word on Linden, there would be no word on Afar or on Dr. Zhiruo. Sally told me that she and the other AI docs hoped that with their help, Linden could beat the infection—we all hoped that Linden could beat the infection—and if she could, there was a good chance that what she learned could be used to inoculate other patients, and to cure Afar and Zhiruo.

And if Linden couldn’t be saved?

I didn’t want to think about that, but I had to. If we couldn’t cure the toxic meme we would have to purge the system architecture. We’d have to kill Linden and Afar and Dr. Zhiruo, and possibly Mercy and Sally and all the other AIs that lived in the hospital architecture. And we would have to purge, or eternally quarantine, Helen, too.

We would have to do that, because the meme had proven virulent, and it seemed likely that it was capable of leaping across architectures—the machine version of an influenza virus making a jump from birds to humans and getting worse along the way—and because we could not risk it getting out into the galaxy.

There were a lot of artificial intelligences—a lot of people—out there who could die if they caught it. So if we couldn’t get it out of Linden and Afar and the rest, we’d have to start them over from scratch.

They should all have offsite backups. But who knew how current those were? They could lose ans of life experience.

And there was no backup for Helen. As far as we knew, anywhere.

Even going to that extreme might not halt the spread of the meme. It might be in Singer; it might be in Ruth and the others. Warnings were flying toward them… but the warnings might not get there in time.

I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on something happier. Something I had some influence over.

Surgeries had begun on Afar’s crew, and the prognosis was hopeful. If nothing went wrong. It was up in the air how much brain damage they might suffer in the process, and how much memory and personality alteration they might undergo.

That wasn’t my work. Solving the sabotage mystery was my work, but I was not going to be an effective investigator until I rested and got my pain levels under control.

I honestly do better in an active crisis than in this kind of grinding, slow-motion one. Waiting is exhausting and gives you too much time to think and come up with multiple, conflicting options. For me, that can lead to decision paralysis. When I’m running on adrenaline and tuning out fatigue, I handle the problem in front of me, move on to the next problem, and not worry about the things I can’t control. There’s a price to pay later, but I don’t worry about that right then.

One can’t do that for diar on end, however, as the ache in my joints was telling me.

Well, one can. People did, for hundreds of thousands of years, because they didn’t have the options we have now. But it kills them. The long-term health consequences are unsupportable, and the cost to community of those consequences is enormous. So I can’t justify running on adrenaline and rage for weeks at a time, even though the experience itself is dramatic and validating.

Crisis makes some people—like me—feel alive, and it turns out that’s really bad for everybody, because when you don’t have a crisis in front of you, you might go out of your way to construct one.

I took a shower and some pain meds. Then I went to bed, turned off the anxiety that was keeping me going, and slept for ten and a half standard hours. I dreamed of earthquakes and atmosphere streaming from ruptured wheels, and woke crusty-eyed and more tired than I’d been when I drifted off.

There was a message alert flickering in the corner of my senso. It was from Rilriltok.

Master Chief Carlos from the generation ship is awake and asking for food.