Machine

CHAPTER 17

AFTER LUNCH, I CHECKED IN on Helen. She was still camped out in the Cryo unit observation lounge as if she had grown into the furniture. She asked if she could see her surviving crew yet. I told her soon, though maybe not Carlos unless he started feeling more inclined toward visitors. I promised to ask them if I could further update her on their care, however. I told her that Oni was not yet ready to be awakened, and that I would keep Helen apprised of her progress, as well.

She asked after Dr. Zhiruo and whether she—Helen—would be receiving additional treatment. I told her that she would, as soon as Dr. Zhiruo’s infection was under control and the quarantine was lifted. I told her that the next group—I managed not to say shipment—of her crew would be arriving at that point, and that some were already in ships in holding patterns near Core General, waiting for us to be open for business again.

She asked when the quarantine was going to be lifted.

That was a harder one, and I thought about it anxiously for a moment or two before coming up with an answer that seemed honest to me, but filtered of all my own ability to catastrophize. I was perfectly capable of keeping myself up all night, staring into space and coming up with Ways Things Could Be Worse. Like the one where the Synarche never could contain the meme, and eventually everybody organic on Core General had to take turns deactivating and purging each other’s foxes to make sure there was no data transfer, and then we evacuated as many of the hospital’s staff and patients as possible before leaving the rest to starve, run out of power and oxygen, and eventually spiral into the Well on a decaying orbit to be pulled apart like Rilriltok swiping my spaghetti.

Or the one where the meme was already loose in the galaxy, winging its way around on data packets and wiping out a thousand ans of interspecies civilization in one fell blow.

Thinking like that made me a good disaster planner and emergency response coordinator, and often got Sally wandering into my brain after lights-out to pull the plug and make sure I actually slept a little.

What I said was, “Eventually. I don’t know when, but I can assure you that it is a tremendous annoyance to everybody, and a very grave hardship to many. The hospital is treating it as an emergency situation, and working to resolve it as fast as we can.”

All in all, it was one of the saner conversations I’d ever had with an upset Helen. Dr. Zhiruo might be out of commission, but the healing she had initiated seemed to be proceeding apace. Maybe all Helen had needed was some space in which to sort herself out.

Literally, I mean. Adequate data caching.

That reminded me that I had been so busy since we got back that I hadn’t checked on the machine. Hadn’t Zhiruo been treating that, too?

It definitely wasn’t my job. And I should be doing some more data sorting on the sabotage question while I had a free minute. After I checked on my patients here, I would go and do that, I decided.

Helen went back to her post by the window when I excused myself. I half expected to see footprints worn in the floor in her habitual spot.

Cheeirilaq intercepted me as I was heading toward the room housing Master Chief Carlos. Friend Dr. Jens.

“Goodlaw Cheeirilaq.” I had a feeling I knew what came next, and honestly it was convenient. Todia’s goal had been to introduce the Big Rock Candy Mountain survivors—the conscious ones, anyway—to the reality of systers and the Synarche. “Let me guess. You would like to question the master chief?”

Cheeirilaq froze so completely that when, a few moments later, it let out a held breath, I found myself sighing in sympathy. How did you know that?

“I was Judiciary myself, remember? It’s a logical next step in your investigation.”

I don’t recall having shared details of my investigation with you.

“Of course not. But you did tell me that it involved Afar and associated questions. And most doctors aren’t dumb.” I looked over at where Tralgar and another doctor I didn’t know were consulting on something. I’d been thinking of drafting one of the unit docs or nurses to be my sample syster, but they all had jobs to do. And here was Cheeirilaq, who wanted an opportunity to talk to Carlos and Jones.

Expedient. I could put off the research for another hour.

Linden was still not responding to queries, and the lifts were still down. I spared a moment to be grateful that the hospital’s senso and translation were operated on different protocols. I assumed that there was an AI—possibly Mercy—responsible for them, but the functions seemed to be largely autonomous.

Can you imagine any job more boring for a galactic supercomputer than translating endless complaints about the scrambled eggs?

I went into the master chief’s room first, leaving the door open and Cheeirilaq lurking behind its frame. Carlos looked up from a console he’d been fiddling with—the kind of thing you give kids whose brains aren’t myelinated enough for a fox yet. “Hi, Doc,” he said. “I found an interesting game. I think it’s civics for kids or something.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m glad you’re using the brain cells.”

“I don’t suppose you have a timeline showing when more of my crew might be arriving?” His voice had a hesitant hopefulness that reached into my chest and squeezed. I noticed that he did not, specifically, ask about his wife.

“A week, maybe? Ten diar? Not long now. Would it help if I arranged for you to have access to any telemetry we get from the rescue ships?”

His smile almost split his cheeks. “Yes, please.”

I perched myself on the edge of the visitor’s chair, intentionally moving from a professional to a personal context. “How are you adjusting?”

His shoulders flinched toward his ears. “Rough,” he said. “Trying not to lose my shi—er, I mean. I’m trying to hold it together.”

I am not trained in rightminding. Never send a trauma doc to do a psychiatrist’s job, I’m just saying. I managed not to panic, though, and groped around in the relevant stock phrases cluttering up my brain until I came up with, “It’s pretty normal to experience a huge sense of dislocation, you know.”

Apparently, something about my demeanor was funny, because he pushed his head back against the pillow and laughed until he started coughing. I helped him sit up, gave him water. Patted his back until he managed to swallow some.

World’s Most Awkward Nursemaid, that’s what it reads on my favorite mug.

When he was settled again, I put his cup down on the nightstand and asked, “What was so funny?”

“You.” The corners of his eyes twinkled with helpless tears. “You’re so serious. ‘It’s pretty normal to experience a huge sense of dislocation, you know’!” he parroted. “As if there’s literally anything normal about waking up centuries in the future and not even knowing which of my friends or family are alive, or might make it out of the meat lockers. You just—”

His face stilled. He settled back.

“You just have to laugh,” he finished, seriously.

“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t even imagine your experience.”

“Heck, Doc,” he said. “I can’t imagine it, and I’m living it. So let’s talk about something else. What do you have for me today, more historians?”

“Actually…” I looked toward the door. “Todia I brought somebody along that you might be interested in meeting.”

“Is this show-and-tell?” He moved the console from the bed to the nightstand and hitched himself up, smoothing his pajama lapels. “I have to say, these things are a damn sight more dignified than a hospital johnny.”

I didn’t know what a hospital johnny was, so I made a note to investigate later. “You know the Synarche is comprised of a lot of different species.”

“Systers,” he said, with a squint of concentration. “Are you slow-walking that you’re about to introduce me to my first a—I mean, my first nonhuman sentience?”

I decided not to argue with him about Helen. Or Central.

“Come on, Doc,” he said, jocularity over an edge of irritation. “You can give it to me straight. I’m not as damn fragile as you all seem to think I am. I might not have a little box in my head controlling my thoughts and emotions, but I am a grown man. I can keep a lid on myself!”

I leaned back against the bulkhead—mostly because my feet hurt—and crossed my arms. “Keeping a lid on yourself doesn’t actually help you deal with those feelings and move through them, though. Are you familiar with the concept of repression?”

I’d done a little historical reading and consulted the archinformist, so even without Mercy there riding my senso to back me up, I knew the right terms to use. Always make friends with a super-genius AI historian when you get the chance.

“I’m not gay,” Carlos said, after a long silence.

“I am,” I answered.

He blinked and frowned, but didn’t say anything. A whole ship full of atavistic bigots, yay. Well, it was only to be expected.

“But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about choosing not to experience and process your feelings. I believe the archaic term would be not owning one’s own shit.”

“Okay,” he said. “What does any of that have to do with… with nonhuman intelligences?”

“It has to do with your crewmates,” I said. “And your ship. And nonhuman intelligences. These are all things you need to process, not put aside.”

He sighed and closed his eyes. “You sound like my wife.” Then he winced, as if remembering that his wife had a three in ten chance of surviving her next adventure, and opened them again. “All right. I promise to try to be more in touch with my feelings. Can you show me what’s hiding behind the door now?”

“Who,” I said, and cued Cheeirilaq to come in.

The Goodlaw moved slowly, one meticulous leg at a time. Which, I think, only succeeded in making it look more menacing, as it seemed to stalk into the room. It stopped halfway, thorax held parallel to the deck so it wouldn’t loom—which had the effect of making it look three meters long instead of two—raptorial arms and manipulators folded away along its carapace so it didn’t bristle. It was trying to take up as little room as a bug as long as a bunk bed can, and I admit, I found its lowered antennae and compressed abdomen kind of adorable.

Master Chief Carlos responded a little differently.

“Holy,” Carlos said. “Holy… cow.”

Greetings, friend Carlos, Cheeirilaq said. I am Goodlaw Cheeirilaq. A constable, of sorts.

The translation came from Carlos’s tablet, because he didn’t have a fox. He touched his ear, and so I noticed he was wearing a bud in the canal.

He said, “A giant praying mantis cop? You have got to be kidding me.”

You are not in any trouble. I would like to ask you a few questions about your experiences.

Carlos looked at me. I said, “You don’t have to cooperate. But the Goodlaw would not lie about your legal status. If it did, and you were in trouble, the courts would throw that out.”

“Due process,” Carlos said, his shoulders relaxing. “That’s a relief.”

It was a bit of a relief to me that he recognized it for what it was. That made me think that integrating these survivors of the deep past into Synarche society might actually work out pretty easily.

I was worried about Carlos’s wife, also. I knew she wasn’t in Ruth’s load of pods, because we had the serial numbers and Helen had checked. Singer was coming in behind her—or might already be here—with a bigger load. But that meant I didn’t know where she was, or if our colleagues had retrieved her yet.

And nobody could know if she would survive rewarming.

I thought Carlos’s continued avoidance of the question meant he was scared for her.

He looked at Cheeirilaq, tipping his head. “Well, you might as well come the rest of the way in.”

Cheeirilaq did, and shut the door behind it. Even folded to its smallest profile, it seemed to fill up the entire isolation room. It slowly extended one raptorial forelimb and pointed at the datapad. You are studying government, friend Carlos?

Carlos waved one hand. “I think it’s some kind of educational game.”

I stepped forward, glancing at the pad. “That’s the modeling protocols. It’s a sector of the government. Synizens can play through simulated problems, and then one or many of the Grand Council’s subcouncils process the results to a series of models to determine policies and outcomes.”

A line formed between his brows. The hand dropped. “Is this really how you run your country?”

I had to look up the archaic word. “Our polity, you mean?”

“If you prefer.” He sounded amused, as if I were splitting hairs. Didn’t country specifically refer to physical terrain on a planet?

“It’s part of the process,” I said. “I’m not an expert. But the game allows Synizens to model an extremely large number of policy paths, and from the repeated models and results—and occasional individual inspiration—a superior policy emerges. Structure modeling has been experimentally proven to consistently produce better results than relying on experts. Democracies, from Before, were a primitive way of managing the math.”

His face stilled, as if assessing a threat. “You don’t vote?”

“You haven’t woken up into a totalitarian nightmare,” I said, laughing. “Don’t worry. The Synarche’s index of personal freedom is around seventy-nine percent, and the index of well-being is close to eighty-seven percent. Those are the best numbers in human history.”

They’re the best numbers in Rashaqin history, too, Cheeirilaq stridulated. It hadn’t moved from its post near the door—it hadn’t moved at all, except to breathe. Essentially, I’d been treating it as a large, emerald-colored chitin statue, and from Carlos’s start I could see that his limbic system had forgotten to be afraid of it.

“Just the local constabulary,” I reminded him as his heart rate spiked.

“Do they eat you for traffic tickets here?”

I have never eaten a sentient, Cheeirilaq said. And only once or twice contemplated it. Your amino acids probably wouldn’t agree with me anyway.

They would be fine, but this seemed like a bad time to point that out.

Carlos looked at me. “Joking,” I mouthed.

He sighed. “You are very large,” he said to Cheeirilaq. “But not too different from some Earth species that were part of my ship’s biosphere.” Carlos held up his fingers about eight centimeters apart. “Is it offensive if I say we carried them for pest control?”

As long as you recognize that I am a great deal smarter, I will not be offended. Cheeirilaq’s head rose, its thorax inclining toward the vertical. Its face swiveled toward me. I assume I am a great deal smarter?

“Infinitely,” I agreed.

Excellent. After a fashion, I also specialize in pest control.

I walked back to my quarters, contemplating a nap. It had been a long dia, and it wasn’t getting any shorter. My exo didn’t let me trudge, but it was definitely doing 90 percent of the work of motivating me along the corridor.

I should have been planning my data requests regarding the “safety incidents.” But I kept thinking about what Rhym and Hhayazh had told me. I was a Core General staff physician. I could just… go and see what was going on back there in the private ox ward.

Couldn’t I?

My fox was all-access. I wouldn’t even need a suit. And there was direct access to the private unit from the Casualty Department, so I wouldn’t have to worry about the still nonfunctional lifts, or suiting up beyond decontamination protocols.

I had every right to be there. And nevertheless, I felt a chill as I contemplated it.

My species is very good at picking up unconscious cues and aversions, being highly social animals. We are excellent at reading the room and knowing what is expected of us and whether we have overstepped somehow.

And yet I didn’t want to go back there. For no reason at all.

So I found myself wondering, given the intensity of my desire to avoid finding out what was back there—or even speculating on it—if some small aversion (a don’t-see-me, a denial bug, a Somebody Else’s Problem field) hadn’t been added to the hospital staff fox updates at some point.

Sally, I asked inside the privacy of my own senso, what do you know about the private units?

She hesitated.

Sally?

Know from personal experience? Nothing. Additionally, I am unaware of any public details regarding the functioning of these units.

What do you speculate, then? Or what have you discerned?

As you know, she answered, everyone in the Synarche is guaranteed a high minimum standard of care. Everyone is entitled to be as healthy as possible, given the limits of technology.

I would have tapped my fingers on my exo, but I was much too sore for extraneous movement.

Up to and including transplants and regeneration therapies.

“Clones,” I said. “We don’t grow them with anything more than autonomic brain functions, because that would be unethical.”

So all patients receive the highest standard of care. Anything else would, likewise, be unethical.

I slid through the door to my quarters. It had hardly closed behind me before I stripped down to my exo, wiped myself off with a lemon swab that didn’t smell a thing like real citrus oil, and tipped myself into my bunk before my gear had even stowed itself. My limbs ached. My feet felt heavy and overlarge.

My exo needed a charge. I hooked it to the trickle and tried to get comfortable.

“Right,” I said. “I certainly try to provide that. And I know that you do, too. So… what’s in first class? What are they getting that we’re not?”

Now that we were in private, Sally spoke out loud. “Concierge service. Their pillows fluffed. Chocolates thereon. Expensive resources: human labor, surface foods.”

“Huh,” I said. “Did the unit AI tell you that?”

“There is no unit AI.”

“There what?” I sat up so fast I almost dropped myself out of the hammock.

“There is no unit AI.”

A sour feeling settled inside me. “That can’t be right.”

“Nevertheless,” said Sally. “It is true.”

It was a terrible reason to break into a medical unit. Well, all right, it wasn’t technically breaking in. But as much as I was a full-time doctor now, I’d been a doctor and a cop before. One does not become either of those things due to a congenital lack of curiosity.

I was tired and in pain. I tuned myself for wakefulness and pain relief, knowing that it would cost me later in backlash. But later was not now. I climbed back out of my hammock and dressed in fresh scrubs. I even combed styler through my hair and programmed my overworked frizz to a nice, tight, professional cap of curls.

My exo’s charge light was still blinking. It could process a certain amount of electricity from my motions, but that wasn’t the same as a nice fat eight-hour trickle. Still, I should be good for another standard, if I didn’t try anything too strenuous.

Even if I ran out of juice, it wouldn’t be as if I couldn’t move at all. It would, however, hurt much more, and involve a lot of groaning and hobbling.

Piece of cake.

It wasn’t far to Casualty. I suited up in the hall, for the anonymity it offered—and the biohazard protection. Just in case there was something unsavory going on back there that was also contagious, rather than merely the exploitation of resources by the rich.

Imagine what it must have been like hundreds of ans ago—back in Carlos’s dia—when there was no Guarantee, no Income, no useful work for anyone who wanted it. No promise of safety and health and security. Only exploitation under various systems all claiming to be different, but all amounting to the farming of the many to make wealthy the few. Serfdoms and indenturehood and chattel slavery.

Explaining the future to him was going to be interesting.

The Casualty Department was positively eerie in its emptiness. I hadn’t been back to Sally recently, and I hadn’t expected the complete lack of patients and the nearly complete lack of staff. One lone Ceeharen triage nurse waved to me from behind the desk across the big reception deck without raising their head. They appeared to be bent over a reader or game board of some sort.

I waved back and kept walking, angling far enough from the desk to preclude casual conversation, and headed toward the entrance to the private unit.

My footsteps echoed through the eerie emptiness. I braced myself for whatever bullshit I might be about to witness, and keyed myself in through the door.

Battery levels critical, my exo said. Fatigue levels excessive. Recommend recharge and sleep cycle as soon as possible.

I know, robot. I know.

My exo quit about ten steps after I crossed the threshold. I couldn’t see the telltale on my wrist through the suit, but I knew it would be blinking orange.

“Exo, are you there?”

The only thing breaking the silence inside my suit was the soft echo of my own voice inside the helmet. The senso link in the lower quadrant of my visual field blinked EXO 0% BAT, just to add insult to injury. Orange, when moments before it had been yellow and at 7 percent.

One thing primitive humans did have going for them was a lack of stuff that runs on batteries. And, more to the point, runs out of batteries.

I realized I had stopped in a doorway and, pushing against my exo, hastily stepped through. Decompression shields are designed like guillotines.

It’s a terrible thing if an unsuspecting sentient happens to be standing under one when it closes. Worse, though, if that didn’t happen—for all the other unsuspecting sentients that might be explosively decompressed if the doors failed.

That was another reason for me in particular not to stand in the way. My exo was featherweight, breathable, barely there. And made of sandwiched nanofilms and conductive, contracting polymer. Conceivably, the door might not be able to cut through it, if I was under it when it fell.

They might be privileged fuckers in here, but I’d hate to be the person who ensured the deaths of every patient in the private unit. And the staff certainly deserved better.

Once I was moving, I continued to step forward as briskly as I could manage. Now that it was dead, the exo offered resistance rather than assistance when I moved. It seemed to compress my limbs and torso, pushing back against me with every step as if I were strapped into a zero-g resistance machine.

There were patient rooms down the hall. Maybe I could get to one and peer through the window, check the monitors. I made it five steps farther into the private unit and dragged myself the last sideways half meter into an alcove along the corridor. Two multispecies bench seats crouched intimately across from each other. An old-fashioned curtain on rings hung from the bar across the top of the door. Enough privacy for delivering bad news. Not enough privacy to encourage bad behavior.

I flipped the curtain across to hide my distress. I didn’t sit down because if I sat, I was only going to have to get up again. And I’d rather not embrace that particular experience.

But I needed to get out of the public view for a moment. Gather myself. Force myself to move confidently, like a medical professional with every right to be here.

And not like somebody on the verge of a total systemic collapse who had stolen a staff uniform in some misguided attempt at escape.

A sensible human being would have gathered her resources, steadied her nerves, and turned right back around as if she had forgotten some important piece of kit. A sensible human being would have marched back through the other decomp door and gone back to bed. Would never have come here on a restless sleep-shift whim in the first place.

A sensible human being would spend less time jumping out of perfectly good spacecraft than I did. I was not, perforce, a sensible human being.

I squared my shoulders, embraced my inner warrior, and flicked the curtain aside.

The corridor was not crowded by Core General standards. I spotted a variety of ox-breathing staff and one lone Ceeharen, whose beneficial metabolic needs split the carbon dioxide my type of sentient produced and converted it back into oxygen and carbon. Nobody looked strangely at my softsider quarantine suit, or even appeared to notice me. It was a reasonable enough precaution, and doubled as a light environmental suit if the environments you were passing through weren’t too extreme.

Given the lack of functional lifts, we were seeing a lot more of them in the hospital corridors. People had to get to work.

I had no idea what I might be looking for. I had no reason to be here, other than curiosity and a nasty itchy sensation.

I felt, to be perfectly honest, like I was going through my wife’s private messages, looking for evidence because I suspected her of misleading me. Not that I had a wife anymore, or any reason to suspect one of malfeasance. But you know what I mean.

I knew it was ridiculous. I believed in this hospital. I had faith in this hospital.

And yet, here I was. Checking up.

The private unit looked like a perfectly normal hospital unit, albeit one with nicer rooms. Several were inhabited, bodies in a range of beds designed for three different species. I spotted holowindows and possibly even a real viewport or two through open room doors. Several more rooms were obviously empty. Waiting for the next sentient with the resources to buy their way in.

I kept walking, sweat stinging my eyes inside the helmet. Softsuits weren’t meant for anything this strenuous. As strenuous as walking down a hospital corridor under moderate spin gravity.

It hurt, and because I didn’t feel like being in pain, I decided I would rather be angry.

Being angry is a skill I have a lot of experience with, though I worked pretty hard in my military years to learn not to tote anger around with me all the time. There’s constructive anger, which motivates you to get up off the ground and get things done. There’s righteous anger, which motivates you to protect the afflicted and downtrodden. There’s helpless anger, which just makes you feel useless and turns you mean.

And there’s self-pitying anger, which gets under your skin and eats you away like a slow drop of acid if you let it.

This was probably two parts righteous and a half part each self-pitying and helpless, which wasn’t too bad a ratio to work with.

What could these kinds of resources—these resources that lay behind these quiet corridors and mostly empty private rooms—have meant to me as a kid?

The alchemy of my anger made the pain easier to bear and gave me energy. I tried to put my feet down softly, so I wouldn’t seem to be either staggering or stomping past the admin station, and because it hurt when I slapped them into the deck.

Don’t get so pissed off you lose your shit, I told myself. These people are not getting better care than everybody else. It’s just that the décor is a little bit nicer.

And they got to be important. There are some people, even in these enlightened diar, who do enjoy being important. That got up my nose as much as anything.

It was easy to forget, once I was angry, that I had decided to let myself be angry. Because it was useful. Because the adrenaline gave me strength to keep moving when exhaustion weighed me down.

One room had a human in it. An old woman, asleep on her pillow, gray locks spread around her in the most photogenic possible manner. I thought about going in and talking to her. I might have, if I hadn’t been so tired, and in so very much pain. The ache seemed to start in the soles of my feet, the nape of my neck, and the small of my back and radiate through my entire body.

Beyond the private rooms, I found another decompression door with another staff filter. It was too much; I’d come too far. My heart pounded so hard that I felt it in my belly. The corridor walls seemed to pulse in the edges of my vision.

I rested a hand on the back of another chair set against the wall, trying to look as if I were casually checking my senso. I wished on the first evening planet in the skies of whatever the closest world might be that I could lock the knees of my exo to help hold myself up. But a stiff-legged limp would be pretty obvious.

At least the softsuit hid my heavy breathing, though my faceplate had fogged around my mouth and nose. Not a top-of-the-line faceplate, but Core General used a lot of them.

I should turn back. I would already be paying for these choices for diar, thanks to my decision to push on. I’d either be groggy from the tuning I’d have to do to manage, or I would be groggy from the pain.

I should turn back. It was the only sane thing to do. However far I went, I had to make the same trip back. And I was going to get noticed if I kept standing here. I was way off my patch, and I’d walked the whole length of the unit and everything had seemed perfectly normal.

But Sally had said there wasn’t a unit AI, or even an AI doctor assigned to this team. And that made me nervous.

AIs are ethical.

AIs don’t need rightminding, because AIs are built that way. They are created to be ethical beings.

So what sort of operation would you be running if you couldn’t let an AI onto your team?

I gritted my teeth and raised my palm to the decomp door so that it could read my tag.

It didn’t open.

“Sally?” I muttered inside my helmet.

Right here, she whispered in my head. And no, I can’t get it open. The circuit is isolated, and I don’t dare reach into the hospital architecture until Linden is back online and I know we’re free of viruses.

I wished I could argue with her. Well, I’m getting pretty obvious out here. I’m not sure what to do next.

Duck into that room on the left, Sally suggested. Quick, the unit admin is coming.

I stepped into the patient room behind the open door. A glance at the panel beside it—and my senso—confirmed that it was empty. Footsteps echoed down the corridor—a trotting beat rather than a human stride. I folded my arms over my chest and assumed a contemplative pose inside the door.

It was a nice room. Big, and airy, with a green wall boosting the oxygen and humidity. It was full of lettuces and dandelions and greens from nonhuman planets. All of them would be edible. Some had been recently harvested. I wondered if they’d contributed to my steak salad the other dia.

There was a holowindow on the far wall, framed by decorative curtains. Right now, it offered a view of the Core from somewhere on the exterior of the hospital, but there was a remote by the bed. One could set it to anything in the library, if one didn’t find a massive black hole, lensing stars in orbit, and heavy ship traffic restful.

I did, though, and I let out a heavy sigh of relaxation—and further fogged my plate. Some diar you just can’t win.

A translated voice broke in. Doctor?

I only managed not to jump guiltily because I had been expecting it. I turned.

The unit supervisor—what they used to call a head nurse—stood framed in the doorway. He looked a little like a centaur, if the back half were a cream-colored angora goat, and somebody had thrown in floppy bunny ears and big doe eyes for good measure. His tag told me he was Nurse-Administrator Wizee, and gave me the usual details of preferred gender markers and species.

Can I help you?

My senso tag would tell him exactly who I was, also, so there was no point lying about it. “I’m exploring,” I said.

This is a closed ward, Doctor. Do you have some business here?

“I have a patient I think might benefit from a calmer environment,” I said. Which was not a lie, after all. “This seems nice.”

This ward is for exclusive patients, the administrator said patiently.

“Surely if the room isn’t being used—”

It’s reserved, he said. The patient will be joining us when the quarantine lifts. May I show you out now, Doctor?

Well, that was that. I wondered what O’Mara knew about this place. Their sector, after all. Did my remit of investigating sabotage extend to investigating other weird stuff that seemed to be official hospital business?

Probably not, I decided sadly. Anyway, my investigation was supposed to be secret.

And I hadn’t been doing a very good job of making time for it, between the demands of my actual job, my side job as Helen’s care liaison, and everything else that was keeping me busy.

Which hadn’t even involved, I remembered, the machine. I’d been so busy, and it had been somebody else’s problem, so I’d nearly forgotten it existed. Worry settled like a weight into my guts, and I wondered if anybody was keeping an eye on it with Dr. Zhiruo incapacitated.

Well, whatever I was looking for, it would have to wait until I slept and charged my exo.

“Yes,” I told the administrator. “I’ll leave quietly.”

My exo found a last flicker of power as I staggered back along the corridor toward the Casualty Department. Fortuitous, as by then I was too exhausted to have made my way home without it. I was pretty sure the private unit nurse had twigged that there was something wrong with me, though. With a little luck, he’d chalk it up to “systers are weird,” and not think too much about it.

As for me, I dragged myself back to my quarters at half speed, tumbled back into my hammock, and got the trickle attached. I dozed off in the middle of reading safety incident reports.

I’ll be honest. I dozed off three screens into the first safety incident report.

I’d told O’Mara they should have found somebody else.