Machine

CHAPTER 21

I REMEMBER WAKING UP INSIDE THE machine. Inside my exo, when it was first fitted to me.

I remember what it felt like: On my skin. Against me. A part of me.

I remember the incredible floating sensation of not being in pain for the first time I could recall.

No. That’s not quite precisely right. The pain still existed. It wasn’t gone.

It just didn’t saturate my awareness the way it had before. It was a sensation, not a prison.

It’s even in the words, isn’t it? We talk about being hungry, being thirsty, being distracted, being tired. But we are in pain. Pain is a trap. It surrounds us. It’s a cage: a thing we can’t get out of.

So maybe it is accurate to say I wasn’t in pain anymore, there inside the machine. Somebody had left the door open, and I could get out if I wanted. Walk around, look at the pain from the outside.

I was in the machine. But that meant the machine was there between me and the pain. Insulating. A protective barrier. Not something I could ignore or neglect to maintain, because I could never forget the machine.

But when I was in the machine I wasn’t in the pain. And the cognitive load of servicing the machine was so much less than that of servicing the pain that I got a heck of a lot of other things done.

The machine. My exo, as I came to know it. It was always there, a skin between me and the universe. And I was always afraid that it might be taken away.

It occurred to me that there was something else I had learned never to trust. Not only the faith that everything would turn out all right, or that institutions had the best interests of Synizens at heart. I had never been able to take for granted something that many people did: Simply being functional. Simply being okay.

Waking up inside this new darkness was very much like waking up inside my exo had been, that first time. Once again, I had hurt so badly when it took me in—been so exhausted, my pain so uncontrolled—that when I woke up again and I wasn’t hurting or groggy, I wasn’t entirely sure I was awake. I was disoriented, confused.

But my thoughts were clear and focused, even though I didn’t know what was going on.

I was still in my exo. I could feel it there through the senso, status checks all okay. But that was all I could feel through the senso. There was no feed, no connection to the outside. To Sally, or the hospital, or O’Mara, or Cheeirilaq. To Calliope, even.

There was only warm darkness, and a lack of pain. I couldn’t seem to move, not even to press myself against the exo frame—or if I was succeeding, I didn’t feel it. I couldn’t seem to move the exo, either. So there was another something—another machine? Outside the machine that was very nearly a part of me.

To be honest, the lack of pain was so nice that I just lay there and enjoyed it for a short subjective eternity. It could have been five minutes or five ans. I tried counting breaths, but I couldn’t feel myself breathing, either.

Wasn’t there supposed to be something about sensory deprivation being used as a kind of torture, historically? I reached for the information, but without a feed it wasn’t there in my senso. You get so used to being able to pull up any information that you like, the loss of that ability feels like a dismemberment.

Like the loss of part of your own native faculties, and you can’t stop fussing at it.

Still, after three attempts, I tried to force myself to let it go. No senso, no connection. My fox was still regulating, though, and it told me that my bloodstream was full of an unusual concentration of naturally occurring opioid analogues. That would explain the lack of pain. Though I didn’t understand why they weren’t making me feel giddy.

Aw. Well. I tried to make a noise of frustration, and could convince myself that I heard it—dimly, hollowly. As if from another chamber in a largely empty hab.

Somebody did, in fact, have control of my fox and my exo. The virus—the meme…

Was this what had happened to the crew of Afar? To Afar himself?

To Linden?

Was this the result of the meme?

How had it gotten into me, in that case?

There had been a tentacle. Inside Jones’s walker. Something like the machine from Big Rock Candy Mountain. I remembered it grabbing me.

Was that machine the vector for the meme, rather than a manifestation of it? If it was, then where had it come from?

My exo had firewalls and was not supposed to accept external inputs without an override code that only I—or somebody with access to my medical or service records—could give. And my fox was protected, as all foxes are. Better than most, in fact, because I’d been in the military and my unit was EMP-shielded and used a triple-encoding transmission link that had been state-of-the-art fifteen ans before.

The meme might have gotten out of Dr. Zhiruo and Linden before they isolated themselves. It might have stripped data from them, such as their access codes. My medical records were available through hospital systems to authorized users. So that was possible, but this wasn’t the time to worry about what might have happened. This was the time for getting the hell out.

I tried not to stop to wonder how I was going to get myself out of this non-space if all those methane types and several artificial intelligences hadn’t managed to escape.

Helen’s crew hadn’t been affected. Neither had Calliope, concealed in Helen’s crew. They didn’t have etchable brains. I didn’t have an etchable brain, either, but I had a fox, and I had the exo….

Helen hadn’t been affected, either, precisely. Or rather, she’d been affected, but not in the same manner as the other AIs. She’d been… turned against herself. Mostly disassembled. But the core had hung on, though she had been—I realized now—delusional in some of the same ways that Calliope had become delusional: paranoid and fixated.

(Was Calliope delusional? I shied away from contemplating the implications of that question. It was a problem for a moment when I was not fighting for my continued existence as something other than a disembodied consciousness.)

The first step was to break it down. What did the patients in different categories of… of infection, for lack of a better word… have in common with one another?

Helen was unlike shipminds and wheelminds and medical AIs in that she had a separate body.

Carlos and Calliope were unlike me and Afar’s crew in that they did not have foxes.

I was like Helen in that I outsourced some of my functions to a peripheral system. Some of us did a lot of that kind of integration: others (Carlos) none at all. Some of us were solid-state cognitive operations—the AIs, the Darboof—and some of us thought with programmable meat, with or without integrated circuitry.

So here I was, back where I started after a fashion. Back inside the machine.

A different machine. One I hadn’t chosen to make a part of me.

Was this line of thinking getting me any closer to a solution, or even a hypothesis as to how this whole bizarre mess of generation ship, sick artificial intelligences, and an apparently fraudulent cryo chamber hooked together?

What if I resorted to wild, out-there, black-sky speculation? What was the most outré idea I could come up with?

Theory: it was totally aliens.

Not ancient, safely dead, and apparently benevolent aliens like the Koregoi, that forerunner species that had ranged—and left—the Milky Way long before the Synarche and its systers came along. Those children of dead stars had left us occasional caches of impossibly advanced technology, like the recently discovered Baomind, a library the size of a solar system, and the physics that lay behind the gravity belt I was probably still wearing over my hardsuit, for example.

So not those. And not friendly, normal, everydia it’s-rude-to-call-them-aliens like Tralgar and Cheeirilaq, systers one could sit down for a nice beer or metabolically compatible beer equivalent with—though never coffee—and complain about local Synarche policies.

But actual, hardcore, scary, middle-of-sleep-shift-three-vee-you-have-to-be-up-in-four-hours-and-are-being-irresponsible-watching-this-now aliens. Aliens that wanted to disassemble my hospital the same way they were disassembling Helen’s generation ship, and convert it into computronium and the machine. Those kind of aliens.

I wondered again about Helen’s link with the machine. If it was aliens converting her ship and self into alien computronium microbots, they seemed to have left some of her personality intact. I wasn’t a science fiction expert, but it seemed to me that that was a rarity in the annals of all-consuming, assimilating, mind-control aliens.

In some ways, this was the most terrifying prospect. In others, I was surprised to find it somehow reassuring. Assimilating aliens were a horrifying existential threat, something that might destroy the entire Synarche, that might require shoving Big Rock Candy Mountain, Core General, Sally, Mercy, Afar—and me and literally everybody and everything I loved except the daughter I had not seen in twenty-odd ans—into the consuming embrace of the Well in order to prevent it from spreading.

It was also a horrifying existential threat that I could look at and say, “That’s not us. It comes from outside, and it’s monsters.”

Even in this age of adequate mental health care, when things are so much better than they were, I’m too much of a cop and too much of a doctor to ever convince myself that the monsters are conveniently other. The monsters don’t come from outside.

The monsters are calling from inside our genome.

That’s why, during the Eschaton, it took the medical interventions that eventually developed into rightminding to make us decently able to stop destroying ourselves. It’s a small comfort, I suppose, that once we got into space and met other sapiences, we discovered that they were all more or less equally as fucked up evolutionarily as we are, and had all had to take similar social steps to grow beyond their atavistic impulses into something we might recognize as culture.

I liked the scary predatory aliens theory a lot, for certain values of like. If it was scary aliens invading, waging war, and converting us into peripherals by means of their meme viruses, that left one huge logical problem, though: Where the Well did Calliope come from?

Ah, Calliope.

Well, then it probably wasn’t aliens.

And that led to an even more frightening proposition. What if Calliope was right? What if there was some vast corrupt conspiracy centering in the Synarche, in Core General? What if she was a freedom fighter? What if?

I didn’t think Calliope was right. I knew in my (no longer aching) bones that she could not be right.

But here in the belly of the machine, a quotation from an ancient, pre-Eschaton Terran statesman named Oliver Cromwell came floating back to me. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”

Christ was a religious prophet from an even earlier era, very popular on Terra for several thousand years. He preached all the usual things the better class of prophets preach, about respecting your fellow beings and treating them as one would like oneself to be treated. He got about the reception you’d expect, and his teachings were widely misinterpreted for millennians. Millennia, I suppose, it being actual Terran years we’re talking about.

The irony is that this Cromwell person, who provided such a useful sentiment that has since been widely appropriated by logicians, historians, archinformists, and doctors (like myself), was the sort of individual who overthrew a government. (Okay, it was a monarchy of some sort, or something equally terrible.) He also murdered a lot of dissidents because he was pretty damned certain he was right. And because he was pretty adamant that everyone should subscribe to his religious convictions.

Don’t be like Oliver Cromwell, I told myself, and tried to examine Calliope’s allegations from a more neutral point of view.

Perhaps the reason I was so certain Calliope was wrong was that the prospect of her being right was so deeply terrifying.

What if there was some kind of vast conspiracy—or rampant sophipathology—infecting the hospital, infecting it as certainly as the meme was infecting Linden and Dr. Zhiruo? What would that look like? How would I tell?

What would its nature and purpose be? Why would it be worth it? What sort of motive would allow for it? How would such a thing operate, and how could it keep its existence secret, or even secret-ish?

What was behind all the things Sally could not admit to any official knowledge of?

I sighed deeply, realizing that I could at least feel the air stretch my lungs when I drew enough breath in. That was reassuring: if I could feel my body I probably wasn’t dealing with locked-in syndrome or anything else similarly daunting.

Well, I wasn’t going to find out the answers stuck in here, wherever here was, and that was for sure. I had, I was certain, colleagues on the outside working to rescue me—exactly as I would have been working if things had been reversed.

That led me to wonder what my physical situation might be. Was I still stuck inside the walker, or had someone managed to extract Calliope and me? Was I physically encased in a barrier of some sort that prevented my fox from reaching into the senso? Or was my fox disconnected or damaged somehow?

I didn’t think I was experiencing what Afar’s crew had, on consideration. Their brain scans (what passed for brain scans, with their species: piezoelectric patterns in any case) hadn’t shown conscious activity, and I certainly felt conscious enough. And the breathing proved I was aware of my physical body, even if it didn’t hurt.

Had Cheeirilaq come along and spun me into a giant, protective cocoon?

That was a strangely satisfying image. Though as far as I knew, its species didn’t spin cocoons for each other. They didn’t do much for each other, except mate occasionally and refrain from eating one another—these diar.

How had it never occurred to me before that it was unusual for a member of a species with so little commensal instinct, like Rilriltok, to choose a career as a healer? I mean, it was a male, and obviously had the skills to placate hungry females at mating time, and most of its patients were frozen when it got them—

But my old friend was a real weirdo, it seemed.

I wondered if that insight came from me, or from one of the several ayatanas that were still making all my limbs feel like they were shaped weird.

The lack of pain was having an effect on my cognition. I kept having ideas. But I was having so many ideas, I was also having a hard time concentrating. The theorizing was interesting, but I was giddy and free-associating in exactly the sort of way that wasn’t helpful for concentrating on getting myself out.

So. Set the theorizing aside for a time and collect some data. What were the instruments available to me?

Right now, they were limited to the interface between my exo… and whatever was on the other side of my exo. A hardsuit, presumably, unless that had been removed?

Status check told me that the exo was functioning optimally, and so was my fox. The fox was integrating with the exo, which answered my earlier question about damage to the fox’s transmission capability. The fox’s uplink was working. So my lack of senso connection meant that it was being blocked by something.

Right. A physical block, or a software block?

Come back to that.

The exo’s battery was near full charge.

I’d replaced it before I went to try to talk Calliope down. That it was still charged told me that either it had been replaced again (unlikely), I was getting a charge from somewhere (possible), or that it hadn’t been very long and I hadn’t moved very much since I plugged it in (optimal).

Back to the question of the uplink. I had means at my disposal to test that. When—if—I found the problem, would I also have means at my disposal to repair it?

Wait and see, Jens, wait and see.

To say that I felt my way around the exo is an inexpert metaphor, but I couldn’t think of a better one. I stretched out no groping fingers, even in my imagination. What I did was to methodically consider and categorize the—I guess one could call them sensations, after a fashion—the tickles of data, however muted, from where my exo made contact with what was on the other side of my exo.

It wasn’t my hardsuit.

That was a horrifying realization. And if I had been rescued and brought inside the hospital and was somehow mostly unable to feel my body—and my uplink was only partially functioning—they would have taken the hardsuit off entirely.

But the actuator core was still attached to my chest. It was merely retracted completely.

I have a lot of expertise with my adaptive devices. My extensive experience and my skill at fixing and maintaining them come in handy in the field. And I still needed to know what I was in, if it wasn’t my hardsuit. I was breathing, and I wasn’t dead, so whatever that falling sensation had been it hadn’t shoved me out the walker’s door into space—and if I was still inside the walker, the door was not still ajar.

There was something around me, a kind of fabric or film or very smooth metal.

I lay in the dark and quiet and talked to my exo. It didn’t talk back except in its usual stock phrases—it was only a machine, after all, not a shipmind—but people talk to their equipment all the time. It makes us feel more connected and in control when we can personalize our things.

There’s a thing with pain. Memory has a somatic component. Experiencing a kind of pain can bring back a host of related associations. Even witnessing an injury—or hearing somebody describe an injury—provokes powerful recollections.

That’s why we all have the uncontrollable—and annoying—habit of regaling our freshly injured friends with tales of the times we whacked our thumb with a hammer, too, though so much worse, obviously.

My current lack of pain was making it harder for me to hack my way around my exo. I don’t mean any kind of juvenile justifications about how I need my pain, or that it’s good for people to suffer. What builds character is encouragement to persist in the face of adversity, not needless discomfort. That uses up executive function and doesn’t help anybody accomplish anything.

So, I had my exo. That was excellent and useful news. I had contact with my exo. Even better.

Fatigue levels in excess of safe values, my exo replied, when I pinged it. Pain levels optimal.

You tell ’em, exo.

Could I move it?

I could not. A little experimentation proved that I couldn’t so much as twitch it. Nor could I push it around manually by moving my body inside it. It was locked in position. I did discover that I could, isometrically, flex against it, but the scaffolding of the exo itself did not budge. I might have been able to bruise myself against the device, but I couldn’t shift it.

Honestly, my chances of bruising myself against the filigree cage that supported my body were pretty slim. It was designed to be flexible, safe, and comfortable: constructed of resilient, durable, breathable materials that lay flat against my skin so it could be worn for diar at a time and only removed for cleaning.

It was specially manufactured to be difficult to injure myself on. If it hadn’t been, it would have worn sores all over me in the course of use. I’m not sure what I thought I might be proving by trying to circumvent its safety features.

The status indicators in my fox told me that my exo wasn’t burned out. My ability to communicate with it was not impaired. I just didn’t seem able to make it budge, either through its usual adaptive response to my own micromovements or through the brute force method of direct commands from my fox.

Breathe, Jens. Don’t panic.

Panic never helped anybody in a self-rescue situation get out alive.

The exo wasn’t damaged. Also: it couldn’t be damaged because I needed it to get me out of here.

It did have a safety interlock to hold me on my feet when the batteries failed—and which I could use intentionally to lock portions of the frame—but that was only engaged in normal mode. It should have allowed me to move—albeit painfully—under my own power rather than resisting me.

Item: I had caught a glimpse of a tendril of the machine inside the craboid’s structure before I lost consciousness—or contact with the outside world, if that was what I had lost.

Conclusion: the meme (or the machine, if there was any functional difference between the two) had hacked my exo.

Solution: hack it back.

This would not have been possible if I’d been dealing with any other piece of equipment in the galaxy. I don’t think it would, anyway, though desperation can lend one a surprising amount of ingenuity. But, as I have mentioned, there was one single piece of equipment in the universe on which I was the leading authority.

I was wearing it, and right this instant it was seriously pissing me off.

Sheer cussedness doesn’t actually make luck break in your favor, and I know that. But sometimes cussedness can keep you in the game long enough for luck to break. And it seems to me that occasionally you can’t get results until you lose your temper with an object.

This was not, I am sorry to say, one of those times. My exo did not fix itself simply because I got extremely cross with it. Maybe the clinical efficiency of my rage was hampered by my current inability to carry out percussive maintenance on the fucking thing.

I guessed I was going to have to outsmart it, then.

I hated to purge the system and do a factory reset, because I’ve been years tuning this thing. If I had to, I would, however. It was a final option, and one I clung to so I’d have the courage and concentration to try other things.

But—wait. Wait.

The excitement of epiphany swallowed me until I tuned my adrenaline down. If I was wrong, I didn’t want to be crushingly disappointed.

I’m not going to pretend I knew the code. Not line by line. I certainly didn’t have it memorized.

What I did have was an archived, firewalled copy, however. And the ability to write a script to go through it line by exacting line, compare it to the active code running my exo, and look for things that didn’t match.

It took a subjective eternity, but—there. Yes. The reactivity to my movements had been set to zero. So basically, no matter how hard I pushed against it, the exo wouldn’t feel my attempts to move it as any more significant than—than my pulse. Or the beating of my breath. And it would shrug off direct commands through my fox as if they did not exist.

Clever little bastards, whoever wrote the exploit. Clever little bastards indeed.

Even cleverer, if they hadn’t written it exclusively for me. I supposed the same code would work on a hardsuit—

The time for theorizing had passed. Now it was time to get the hell out of here.

I ran a system check on the hardsuit actuator, using my exo to backdoor into its operating system. The actuator seemed to think it was functional, and I didn’t have a way to check. So here I was, right back where I had been when I was staring at the override beside the on-call room door and wondering if I was going to die if I triggered it.

Well, there was only one way to find out.

I inserted the code fixes, and then I slapped my hand up fast. As fast as I had ever moved it. I didn’t know if whoever had seized control of my exo was monitoring the situation, ready to fight me street by street—servo by servo—so I didn’t test that the exo was responding before I went. I just went.

If I failed, that would be enough test.

My hand punched out. Harder than I had anticipated, but it worked out. Whatever was encasing me tore… sharp-edged… no, shattered. Then the clenched fist, my own clenched fist, pounded down on my chest.

It hurt. It hurt as if I had punched myself intentionally, and my hand hurt where I’d torn through the stuff I couldn’t see. The pain didn’t feel so bad. I could pretend I’d hit myself as a form of self-injury, to provoke the kind of pain that makes you focus on right here right now and stop ideating.

It was a good thing it did make me focus, because even so that punch wasn’t enough to break through.

In primitive medicine before adrenaline injections, before electric shock, before open-heart massage, before nanoelectrical stimulus, humans in desperation used to treat heart failure—in humans, in horses, in dogs—with a series of punches or kicks in the chest.

It worked rarely. Vanishingly rarely. But any chance is better than none.

I wasn’t trying to kick-start a failed heart this time. I was trying to break a wall.

I didn’t know if I could make my hand move again. But I did. Somehow I did. And I made it move harder, this time.

This time, several things cracked under the blow. One of them was my sternum. That pain got through to my nervous system, all right, albeit briefly. Then it was gone again, along with the sting of my cut hands, leaving a vague ghost like yesterdia’s bruise. But I knew what I’d felt.

It’s just pain. Pain alone cannot stop you from doing things. What stops you from doing things is injury, disability… and being tired. Because pain can make you tired, if it goes on for a long time. Because that pain is not a warning that you are being hurt. It’s just pain. All it can do is make things harder than they need to be.

This wasn’t the kind of pain that makes me tired. This was the kind of pain that makes me angry. And what I felt on the other side of it filled me with furious satisfaction.

It was the whispery sensation of the hardsuit unfolding across my exo, and my skin.

That also hurt. It had to push between me and the thing wrapped around me. I thought it probably scraped my skin off in a couple of places, and might have done worse if the exo hadn’t protected me somewhat. That was okay. Hardsuits are designed to do that. You can grow somebody new skin, fingers, noses. Feet and hands if you have to.

But even modern medicine hasn’t figured out how to bring back somebody who’s been breathing vacuum for more than about thirty seconds or so.

Funny how long it took me—how old I was when I realized that if something didn’t work, you could change it. You didn’t just have to live with the problem, work around it. You could adapt, improvise. And overcome. You could take steps to make a thing better.

Nothing about my childhood encouraged me to develop agency or a sense that I could make the galaxy a better place, repair what was broken, get out my tools. Nothing told me that things could be improved. Nothing encouraged me to effect change.

Well, I was effecting it now.

Remember what I said about the lack of pain clearing my head out? As I struggled, the systers in my head more or less went silent. In the absence of their opinions and demands, I realized that I had most of the information I needed to figure out who was behind the sabotage attempts. I could see the edge of the answer, and the little pattern-matching neurons in my brain were so happy with their success that I felt a kind of faith in the emergent idea. That belief made me doubt my realization rather than confirming it, because our brains really love to find those patterns.

But I was suddenly full of ideas regarding what the sabotage was about, and where Afar had come from, and why Big Rock Candy Mountain had been where it had been. I knew. Or I suspected, anyway. At least, I knew who to ask for proof, and where to go for more information.

The answer wasn’t really a clear shape in my head yet. More of a murky outline. But I hated what I suspected thoroughly enough to really hope that I was wrong.

It had to be somebody with access to Sally, and with access to Sally’s personality core. I’d been convinced it couldn’t have been Sally’s crew. Now I was less convinced. And it had to have been somebody who could have gotten hold of the gravity generator technology, so that Helen could integrate it into her amorphous machine—and then burn it out again.

I was very concerned, based on something he’d let slip, that that might mean the person I was looking for was Tsosie.

Maybe putting Afar and his crew into comas had been a mistake, and not more ruthlessness. I really, really hoped so. I hoped the people who had been hurt or who had died… I hoped that had been an accident.

Maybe it had been. But the saboteurs hadn’t stopped after the first attempt.

I burst through the containing fabric—whatever it was—like I was tearing myself from a chrysalis… except nothing had actually changed. It was only me, same as I had always been, battered a bit but not remade in any better form, struggling in the dark.

My suit lights came up, and I could see again as I shredded loops and swags of iridescent, oily-looking material that flowed apart into bulky particles and flowed together again. I’d seen that stuff before. The machine, like graphite powder with a malevolent will. Some of those shards were like broken glass, around the edges. I’d broken some of the bots. But I was wearing armor now.

There, there was the hatchway. It was sealed; I was inside the walker. I dragged myself toward it through the drifting particles.

My glove landed on something human.

I dragged Calliope out of the mass by her ankle. Straps restrained her; I cut them. Her suit was still sealed. She was coming with me if I had to—

Blow a hole in the shell of the walker?

Concussions in small spaces are a bad idea unless those spaces contain vacuum. I had a Judiciary emergency pack. It had a couple of demo charges in it, along with the other essentials (like the flags and the rescue hook knife). But I wasn’t sure those could penetrate the weird glassy shell of the machine, even working from the inside out.

It didn’t come to that. On the inside, the walker had a big shiny override button right beside the hatch.

Because I had Calliope in my arms by then, I smashed it with my heel. I shoved us both at the irising hatch before it was half-open, struggling through fatigue and pain as thick as sloshing tendrils of the machine.

To the door, and through the door. Drifting out the other side. Get a line on something, don’t go sailing off into space to suffocate—

I had a brief glimpse of Cheeirilaq throwing a line of silk around us as I failed to get my own tackle deployed.

Then I fainted.