Machine

CHAPTER 22

WHEN I BLINKED AWAKE, I was looking into a distorting mirror. My eyes seemed huge, brown and wide, their hazel-gold flecks and paler striations emphasized. My nose was too narrow. My lips seemed stretched and strange, and the shape of my chin was too pointed.

The goblin version of my face jerked back, shrinking as it fled. I blinked at Helen.

Helen did not blink back.

“I’m so happy that you’re back!” she blurted.

I remembered everything I’d figured out right before I got myself knocked out again and flinched. I needed to make sure I was right before I accused anybody.

I said, “How long was I gone?”

Helen settled her heels and folded her arms under the molded bosom. “Long enough.”

You never come back from a trip to good news. Just never.

“Calliope?” I asked.

Under sedation. Rilriltok’s familiar buzz.

I looked around. Head turned smoothly, no more than the usual amount of pain. I propped myself on my elbows and discovered that I was in a trauma treatment room. “Hey. The gravity is working.”

“Mechanical got spin back about a standard ago,” she agreed. “It was an impressive engineering accomplishment, spinning up without further disordering all the environments.”

“I bet.” I stretched, curling my toes. Could be worse. “What happened to the quarantine?”

I hadn’t been aware that a person like Helen had the ability to generate such dire laughter. “That ship has lifted.”

I noticed O’Mara in the treatment room, standing a little behind Helen. And there was Rilriltok, hovering over their left shoulder.

The breeze of its wings was exceptionally pleasant.

I said, “Somebody please get me a drink.”

O’Mara looked at me. It was obvious, I suppose, that I didn’t mean club soda and lime.

Dr. Jens! Rilriltok was mad at me, because it called me Doctor rather than Friend Far be it from this individual to question the medical judgments of an esteemed colleague, but I really think—

It must have taken an extraordinarily large bolus of courage for the little Rashaqin to stand up to me like that. Conflict avoidance was the hallmark of its species and sex. I felt terrible for it when O’Mara interrupted, holding out a flask I hadn’t known they carried.

It had a Judiciary seal on it. I knew it had been given to them as a retirement gift, because I owned one like it. I didn’t carry my keepsake in my pocket, however.

When I first reached for it I reached too fast, too far—a lunge—as my exo overcompensated. I almost knocked the flask to the floor. Fortunately, it was closed, and O’Mara caught it before it dented on the deck. Good reflexes for an old person.

Ha. I wondered what they say about me. The gravity definitely seemed to be working again, anyway. And so did my exo’s reflexes.

I closed aching fingers around the flask. My exoskeleton clicked faintly against the metal. The sound startled me, but at least my grip was firm by then.

“Medicinal purposes,” said I.

“Medicinal purposes,” they agreed.

To my shipmates, I thought. Please don’t let any of them be criminals. I unscrewed the lid and drank, wiping my lips after.

Tequila.

I obviously hadn’t eaten anything in quite some time, because the warmth of the liquor raced through me. Capillary flush scorched my face; at least I had the comfort that my complexion would hide it. Though I supposed O’Mara thinking I was a cheap drunk was the least of my worries.

I handed the flask back. “You were obviously expecting me. Medical coma?”

“Just a nice nap while we fused your sternum for you,” O’Mara said. My hand didn’t sting, which told me they’d fixed the holes in my skin, also. “Your own crew insisted on operating on you. I think you’re going to be fine.”

They were Sally’s crew, not mine—not as long as I was seconded to O’Mara and Core General. That made me feel almost weepily touched by their loyalty.

Probably a sure sign that my brain chemicals needed a nudge, but I didn’t have the energy to put myself out even that much. Which was another downvote on my chemistry, come to think of it. I wondered where that loyalty would be when I pursued what I thought I knew.

Tears prickled my eye-corners.

Fine. Fine! I tuned myself, and instantly felt better. There were no resources to waste by not efficiently fixing small problems.

“Am I cleared to return to duty?”

Rilriltok buzzed grumpily.

“You’re not even cleared to sit up in bed, Jens. Not that we have the time to worry about that now.” O’Mara held out a hand. “Alley-oop. You can have a quick shower—which you badly need, by the way—and then we have to go talk to Starlight.”

You could have waited for us to get you out, said Rilriltok reasonably.

“Could I have?”

It sighed. No. I suppose you couldn’t have.

“Hey,” I said suddenly. “Translation is working! Is Linden back online?”

O’Mara and Helen looked at each other. Rilriltok bobbed a little lower in the air.

“After a fashion,” O’Mara said. “You know what we said about quarantine? Come on, shake a tentacle. We need to move, and it’ll be faster to demonstrate than explain.”

I badly needed to have a conversation with someone. But I badly needed to have it in private. And I didn’t think I could get rid of O’Mara until I ran this errand.

The shower, hydration, and a couple of stimulant tabs helped clear the nebulas from around my thoughts, though not as effectively as coffee would have. And not that my resultant ideas precisely blazed with the clarity of newborn stars. I pulled on scrubs and a lab coat and liberated a fresh hardsuit actuator from a locker on my way out of the bathroom. Possibly I was never going to let myself be more than a meter away from one again under any circumstances.

In the process of getting cleaned up and dressed, I was reminded that my exo was still overcompensating and twitchy. I knocked over toiletries three times, and the stack of clean clothes twice. (The second time it was more of a heap of clean clothes, really, because I hadn’t bothered to refold something I was only going to put right on.) They still had that freshly printed smell, which did as much as any amount of tuning to make me feel like maybe we could fix our problems.

The fact that translation was working again made the several conflicting ayatanas wrestling in my head feel much more like a hardship than a sensible precaution. So I told O’Mara that we were stopping on the way to get them pulled. He grumbled about time constraints, but this time Rilriltok came down on the side of preserving my mental health, so I prevailed.

My scalp still tingled slightly from the magnetic manipulation of having my fox vacuumed. It took a little more juice than when Linden used magnetic resonance to shoot street signs and danger signals right into our heads, but not that much more. I wasn’t used to having several ayatanas purged at once, was all.

When that was done and I stood up, I still felt wrongish. My body was the wrong shape and my head was strangely empty. I didn’t want to show it, though. The exo would compensate for me until the feeling wore off.

I was still telling myself that as I wobbled stiff-legged down the corridor. Rilriltok had gone back to work by then, but Helen accompanied O’Mara and me.

“I feel,” O’Mara said, as I caught myself with one hand before I lurched into a corridor wall, “as if you are making some unwise life choices.”

“You said we were in a hurry.”

They looked at me.

I sighed. “It’s only my exo.”

“Damaged?”

“No.” I lurched the other way. “I had to overclock the microservos to get loose. It’s going to take me a week to get them calibrated and balanced again.”

At least a week. Probably four. But I thought O’Mara would find unnecessary precision upsetting right then.

The lifts still weren’t running. I supposed that would have been entirely too much convenience. Having translation back was such a relief that I didn’t complain, though. And because we were going to see Starlight, we didn’t even have to leave the main oxygen hab sectors. Though that didn’t remove all the annoyances.

“I cannot wait,” O’Mara said, as we climbed outward and down and got heavier along the way, “until we have the artificial gravity working.”

I concentrated on not tripping on the stairs, as my weight increased with each footfall.

“Tell me about Linden,” I said. I could use the distraction.

O’Mara grunted like a big, grumpy dog. “We’ve got contact. She hasn’t managed to purge the meme, but she’s still fighting it. Translation is running through main engineering, though—they managed to get that back before they spun us up again.”

So everybody had had some warning about the change in acceleration.

This time.

I think I gasped audibly when I saw Starlight, because Helen put her warm metal hand on my shoulder.

I’ve said it before, but: You can’t evacuate a hospital. Not one this size, with patients with this many needs, some of whom are too fragile to transport without killing. And yet… I’m not proud to say it, but one look at the state of our enormous, sessile oxygen sector administrator made me want to turn tail and run.

I could see why O’Mara and company had decided that quarantine, at least within the hospital, was pointless now.

When I was little I knew what the world was. It was a place without pity. A terrible place. A place of loss. A place where no one ever got to keep anything. Where things just hurt all the time, and there was no respite. And very few people took your pain seriously.

I’m older now, and I know that this view, while true, is incomplete and immature. Because a thing is ephemeral doesn’t mean that it is worthless. Rather it makes it more part of the world.

Looking at Starlight, looking up at their translucent leaves, windowpaned in the bright Corelight, I was plunged right back to that place in childhood where everything was futile and there was no point in anything. All my protocols, all my training: I had no idea what to do.

The great pattern of leaves stretched over me, layered and moving as before. But they didn’t rustle; they clattered. They rattled, where one edge contacted another. They rang like crystal. They chimed.

The paler unpigmented windows in the leaves were no longer merely translucent. They were actual windows—clear as glass. They were glass… or rather crystal, based on the sound they made and the rainbows they cast over everything.

Starlight didn’t show… wires, or circuits, or anything else growing along their stems. There were none of those signifiers that people use to symbolize the interface of technology and nature, or whatever.

But the tree was clearly infected, and cell by cell, portions of their structure were being replaced with silicon.

I put a hand out for balance. If it hadn’t been for my exo, I might have sat down. Helen still, with programmed concern, steadied me. She’d been ready. I wondered what it was to be an AI programmed entirely for emotional labor. For taking care of humans and our needs.

It sounded really boring, and I wanted to do something to take care of Helen in return. But her face was featureless, expressionless. How could you even tell what she needed?

How could you tell if she even had any needs?

That was, I supposed, the point. That was why she’d been built. Helen would never make you feel you needed to do anything for her.

I drew a breath, and spoke to my administrator, the plant that seemed to be turning into computronium in front of me. “Hello, Starlight. Are you in discomfort?”

[Thank you, Doctor,] they replied, translated tones infused with humor. [Although it feels a little strange, it’s not what we would call painful. It’s more a sense of stiffness and pressure. But you are not here to diagnose us.]

“Do you mind if I ask… what’s causing this condition?”

[Afar’s crew were strangely affected… their foxes re-etched by the malignant code. We think that perhaps… it is trying to affect us in similar ways. Remake us. Rewrite us into something like its microbots.]

“Is there—are you being treated?”

The tree clinked softly. [With support, our immune system is slowing the progress of the infection. And the longer we hold it off, the more time others have to solve the problem before it affects the rest of the hospital.]

“It will affect the rest of the hospital,” Helen said. “It’s designed to want more.”

I looked from her to Starlight. “I’m here to talk about the saboteurs, I suppose.”

[What have you discovered?]

If Helen was here, I could assume that O’Mara and Starlight had decided she was an interested party or a victim, and not part of the problem. Her hand was comfortingly heavy on my elbow where she steadied me.

“Go ahead,” O’Mara said.

I nodded. “I had a lot of time to think in there.” I waved a hand vaguely. They would know I meant the machine.

Starlight rustled—chimed—assent.

“This was all a conspiracy. It had to be. But it’s an incomprehensible conspiracy. Why would anybody go to such insane lengths to damage a hospital? And an ambulance ship? And to draw attention to the fact that they were damaging it?”

“What do you mean?” asked O’Mara.

I said, “This feels like—there’s a word—like monkey-wrenching to me. Sabotage in order to draw attention to a problem, or to stop a process you find unethical. Or to stop a process in a manner that injures an enemy in a war.”

[We had not heard that term before,] Starlight said, [but we are familiar with the concept.]

I craned down to look through the floor to Starlight’s lattice of branches, catching all that Corelight. “Why did you stay in space? Didn’t you want to reproduce? Have a family?”

It occurred to me too late that maybe that was a rude question where they came from. And that I definitely should have asked permission.

[We’re claustrophobic,] they replied.

“Are you… teasing me?”

Trees can’t smile, but this one seemed to be trying. [We’re claustrophobic,] they said again. [We couldn’t stand the idea, after centians in space, of being trapped in the earth forever, unmoving. Unable to see out of a gravity well. We couldn’t bear it. No amount of adjusting our chemistry helped to reconcile us. We were fortunate to find this place.

[Besides, if we had children, we would have to think about their inheritance, and we’re morally opposed.]

“There isn’t any inheritance,” I said. “That’s barbaric. This is the Synarche. There’s nothing to inherit. You’re not allowed to hoard resources when they could be used bettering life for everyone.”

[Oh, child,] Starlight said. [Of course there is inheritance. Some of our inheritances are personal; some are a commonwealth. Skills and competencies learned from parents are an inheritance. Not having to care about taking risks because you know somebody will be there to rescue you is an inheritance. Feeling safe is an inheritance.]

That last one hit me like a knife.

I said, “This hospital is what I want my legacy to be. What if we lose it all?”

I was asking a sick plant for emotional labor so that I could find the courage to ask them things I knew would hurt them greatly. But I was a sick mammal, so I suppose it evened out.

Starlight was correct. We cannot isolate ourselves from systems, have no impact, change nothing as we pass. We alter the world by observing it.

The best we can do is not pretend that we don’t belong to a system; it’s to accept that we do, and try to be fair about using it. To keep it from exploiting the weakest.

I had been the weakest, once. But I wasn’t now, and I was here to do what I could.

[Things have been dire in the universe before,] the old tree said. [And mostly life has made it through. Even if we lose biomass.]

I studied the back of my hand. “And what about the ones that don’t?”

[The ones that don’t?]

“Make it through. Species, planets. Biospheres. Individuals. Don’t they matter?”

Around me, a seemingly transfinite number of leaves chimed in a space without a wind. [Naturally they matter. But mattering doesn’t improve their chances of survival in any meaningful way. We can try to protect them ourselves. And we can try to mitigate the damage when things go wrong.]

“And that’s why you administrate a hospital.”

[Not just any hospital.] I could have imagined that the tree spoke smugly. [It’s the perfect environment for us.]

I took a breath. Now, or cowardice. “Since you administrate this hospital, you must have the answers to some questions that are really bothering me.”

There was a silence.

O’Mara let a held breath out on a word. The word was my name.

I did not permit myself to hear them.

“Starlight,” I asked, “what’s in the private ward?”

This silence was shorter than I expected. They answered crisply, [There are confidentiality agreements in place.]

“Confidentiality agreements? You can’t even tell me what the purpose of the ward is?”

[It’s for the treatment of private patients.]

“Wealthy patients?”

The tree didn’t argue.

“What kind of treatments do they get in there that we can’t get out here?” I asked. “Everything we offer here is state-of-the-art, the finest treatment technology can design.”

[Patient confidentiality agreements preclude my answering.]

Well, at least that was an answer that sounded legitimate. Even if something nameless deep inside me—a hunch, an intuition—was convinced that it was bullshit.

They could have told me that the accommodations in there were more private, more luxurious. They could have fed me a line about staff ratios.

Their choice not to do so suggested perhaps they wanted me to keep asking.

“Starlight.”

[We cannot tell you,] they said.

“O’Mara?” I turned and looked them in the eye. It was a relief to be talking to something with eyes, and only two of them, placed in the human-standard arrangement on a head.

I convicted myself of temporary xenophobia and moved on. The relief was short-lived, anyway, because O’Mara’s expressions were easy to read. They had hung a mask of Judiciary impassiveness over them, but the tightness at the corners of their mouth and eyes betrayed tension and controlled anger.

I didn’t think they were angry with me.

Sometimes, regulating the stuff that falls out of my mouth is not my best skill. In a tone of absolute horror, I said, “Please tell me that you’re not behind the sabotage.”

“No!” O’Mara exploded. “What do you take me for?”

I held up a hand, palm toward them, and after a deep breath or two we each got ourselves under control. “I had to ask.”

They nodded tightly and either used some kind of biofeedback trick, willed themselves to calm down, or tuned, because I saw their shoulders relaxing. It was like watching somebody in pain release the bracing while knowing that the pain hadn’t gone away, a phenomenon I was unfortunately familiar with.

They were still angry, but I still didn’t think they were angry with me.

“Okay,” I said. “You won’t—can’t?—give me a direct order, but you want me to uncover something. And you can’t tell me what it is. And that’s why you asked me to investigate the sabotage in the first place.”

They did not answer.

I said, “You’re inhibited from talking about it, aren’t you? A privacy block? Because it’s technically a matter of patient care?”

O’Mara glanced down at the canopy of the Administree. “Told you she was sharp.”

The tree laughed like crystal wind chimes. The sound crawled along my nerves and the nape of my neck in an unpleasant frisson.

“Right,” I said. “So I take the risk if it comes out. The buck stops here.”

“Maybe you get the glory if your heroism is recognized,” Helen said dreamily.

I stared at her. I’d almost forgotten she was there, she had been standing so silently in the background.

In my defense, O’Mara stared at her, too.

I pointed at Starlight’s silicon-edged leaves. “What about that? Helen’s machine is eating the hospital from the inside out? That’s kind of important!”

“We’re working on that,” O’Mara said. “You have your own job. You can’t do everything.”

Be nice if they’d tell me what the job was. But if they were forbidden to by a formal confidentiality stricture, it was quite possible they literally couldn’t talk about it. Which would… explain some things. Such as: why they had led me by the nose to this information, in a manner where I could plausibly have found it out on my own….

I shook my head. “I guess I had better figure out what you want from me, then. But don’t blame me if I get it wrong.”

O’Mara drawled in a particular dry tone when they were deadpanning. They drawled now. “Figure the odds.”

“I’m not that good of a handicapper,” I said.