Machine

CHAPTER 23

I WASN’T WELL YET, THOUGH I was better. And all this adrenaline, confusion, and anger weren’t doing my healing process any favors. Pain and weakness throbbed through my body. Breathing was a chore. But I wasn’t going back to a treatment room or an on-call bunk. I needed real, comfortable, uninterrupted rest in my own quarters, even if I had to walk halfway around the hab ring to get there with the lifts not running.

But once I arrived, undressed, and lay down in bed, I couldn’t turn off.

I could have tuned myself into sleep, but I had an idea that if I stared into space and tried not to think about the things that were currently bothering me, I might be giving my subconscious time to work on the problem. I spent the time writing a letter to my daughter. I didn’t know if a plain text file would be safe to send, but if even those were forbidden by the quarantine, I could write it, queue it, and it would go when it was safe to let it go.

For the first time I found myself wondering if I would still be alive when Rache received it. If she ever did.

If the Synarche didn’t decide that it needed to push the whole hospital down the gravity slope into the Well, stored information and all, in order to prevent the thing that was infecting us from spreading. I’d probably be dead before that happened, though. I was reasonably certain that the Synarche would wait until we were cold—until there were no signs of life from Core General—before disposing of the corpses.

If by some mischance I was not dead at that point, I’d have plenty of time to contemplate the slide into nothingness. Time dilation meant that the subjective eternity of falling into a black hole would take long enough that there was no chance I’d be alive to enjoy being spaghettified. Sort of a pity, from the point of view of science, but I found I didn’t mind at all.

These were not thoughts I put in the letter to my kid.

When I had finished it, I lay in the dark once more and once more talked quietly with my exo about how scared I was and how I didn’t know what to do.

It still didn’t answer. It was still just a machine. I could have shared with Sally. She remained trapped in dock, despite having taken on consumables and gotten sterilized for her next trip out. Waiting for the call. If quarantine was ever lifted, she could be away in instants.

If quarantine was never lifted, she would die here, too. And it would take her a lot longer to die than it would the meatminds. Perhaps it wasn’t such a blessing that she hadn’t gotten infected.

Even if we all survived, if everybody else managed to fix the things that O’Mara had reminded me weren’t all my job… unless something changed between now and then—well, if the situation on Core General was what I was coming to suspect it was, I probably wouldn’t be going with Sally. I wouldn’t be going with Sally, because I was going to get up in the morning, and I was going to do some more research and talk to a few more people.

And then I was going to take on the entirety of whatever was going on at Core General that wasn’t publicly supposed to be. Knowing there would be professional repercussions for an action like that. So the idea of talking with my friend the shipmind, my colleague of a decan and more, made my chest ache with preemptive loneliness.

Core General was not what I had believed in. I was becoming increasingly convinced that there was something poisoned at its center, and the top administrators knew it, and they were physically prevented from telling. And that was why they were using me to reveal it. If I could collect the evidence, and figure out what was going on.

Losing my faith in Core felt like I was losing my family of origin all over again. Except worse, because I was closer to my crew than I had been to my family of origin. They’d died when I was too young to know them as people. I felt like I was losing my wife and daughter all over again.

It hurt.

And I realized that I was going to do it anyway.

People—human-type people, my own people—are constantly on a quest for an identity. Some lucky ones find the thing they want to be already inside themselves, or in a healthy family or community. Far too many of us, however, latch onto a simplified externality that seems to offer all the answers and invest our sense of meaning in it. We make some half-baked philosophy our driving force. Something we picked up reading the sort of novels and graphic stuff where first-person narrators opine bombastically about how the galaxy really works and what makes people really tick and How You Ought To Be.

Usually the ones steeped in atavistic machismo.

I was afraid I’d done the same thing, except what I had picked up and latched onto was a hospital employment manual.

I wanted to jump up and run around waving my arms and shouting accusations. I wanted to yell at O’Mara, in particular, until my throat hurt. I wanted to finish my investigation, when I was so close to the answers that I could taste them.

And a pretty foul taste it was, too. But I’d pushed my poor body as far as it was willing to go, and it would fail me if I tried to push it any farther. I had to rest, as frustrating as rest was. I had to care for myself so I could solve the bigger problem confronting everyone.

Well, I told myself. I will deal with it in the morning.

Well, I told myself. The only way out is through.

I tuned myself to calm and doziness, and finally drifted to sleep while looking at memories of Rache in my senso. Some of them were my memories, recorded when she was very small. Some were hers, that she had saved and sent to me. I slept hard, for not nearly long enough, and woke when my timer nudged my biochemistry. That left me in a better state of mind than a loud noise or an explosion.

It was the little things.

Rilriltok was on duty when I made my way down to the secure ward Judiciary used to see to the medical needs of prisoners, which is what Specialist Calliope Jones had become. It was something of a surprise to find it here, because if this were its shift—which it was not—I would have expected it to be in Cryo. Since that was where it worked, being a cryonicist and all.

It buzzed over, excited and seemingly happy to see me, isinglass wings a blur. The cheerful blue light on its gravity control belt blinked, though the hab wasn’t producing much more than a third of a g. It was, I supposed, a sensible precaution, the way things had been going around here.

I reflexively put a hand on my own belt.

Friend Dr. Jens! The wind of its hovering stirred my hair. It tilted from side to side, like a bird cocking its head first one way, then the other, in order to examine me. I’m pleased to see you appearing more well!

“I’m pleased to be feeling better.” Self-restraint is not my most defining characteristic, but I managed to hold in the next thing that wanted to burst from my tongue, which was What are you doing here?

After a moment’s consideration, I went with a less potentially offensive construction. “What brings you to the prison ward?”

It zipped back and then forward on a horizontal plane, ending with its bulbous eyes and insectile mouthparts only centimeters from my nose. Long experience lent me the composure to stand still and not take it amiss: this was Rilriltok expressing nearly unbearable excitement. Nevertheless, my amygdala was momentarily convinced that I was about to be eaten by a giant bug. It responded by dumping a lot of adrenaline into my system.

Whatever. It seemed likely I might need the stuff soon, so uncomfortable as it was, I decided to hang on to it.

I’ve been doing brain scans! Brain scans, and going over some other things! Look!

Almost before I could accept the connection, it was downloading a giant bolus of information into my fox. Quarantine protocols lifted or no, this seemed like dubious practice under the current situation, but it was too late for me to complain about hygiene now.

And then I was too busy being interested in the data it was showing me to worry.

I had firewalls in place anyway. I was sure it would be fine.

“What’s that?”

I was experiencing Calliope Jones’s post-repair brain. I’d seen scans before, but the earlier ones had not been resolved to this level of detail. I wasn’t a neurologist or a cryonicist, but even a trauma doc like me could distinguish the pattern of remaining damage against healthy tissue. It was slowly being repaired, but the healthy tissue would take time to grow.

The injured portions of her brain looked like empty space, like a lightless nebula occluding the stars behind.

I wondered if the brain damage accounted for Calliope’s apparently questionable executive function. “I’m impressed by how well she’s compensated.”

It’s not just that, said Rilriltok. Look here.

I followed its attention as it guided me through the scan. Some big centralized injuries, fluid-filled sinuses that shouldn’t be there. Well, not that big—but generally speaking any hole in your brain is surplus to requirements.

I think she had a fox, friend Jens. I think she had it removed surgically.

I stared at Rilriltok through the images projected on the screen of my mind. I probably looked like I’d been electrically stunned. “She’s a modern person.”

She pretty much has to be. You realize, I assume, that this means that what she believes… well, it could have been managed. She isn’t necessarily lying, or hypocritical. Her breakdown and actions since the escape… Somebody might have managed her memories to make that all seem reasonable.

Of course it did. I’d speculated as much. Being confronted with the proof was still a little shattering.

Throughout history, certain doctors have done terrible things. It’s still never nice to be reminded.

But! Had she volunteered for this?

Still want to talk to her?

“Even more than before.”

I went in to see Calliope alone. I had some vague hope, I suppose, that she might be feeling grateful after I pried her out of her can opener carapace. At least she looked up when I came in. Her eyes focused, alert and oriented, and she looked wary but didn’t otherwise seem unhappy with my presence.

Unfortunately, it had been necessary to restrain her to the bed. Soft restraints, and she had some latitude of movement. But not enough to make herself really comfortable.

“Hi.” I sat down in the chair beside her.

At my conversational tone, the wariness deepened. “Hello, Dr. Jens.”

“Are you going to make me sorry I rescued you?”

She flinched. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. We didn’t plan for anyone to come to harm.”

“ ‘We’?”

“It was just supposed to be an inconvenience. A… what’s the opposite of a diversion? When you want to draw attention to something?”

“You overestimated the bystanders,” I said coldly. “And underestimated the element of surprise. You knew where you were coming? You made this plan? You intentionally fooled us into believing you were a crew member on Big Rock Candy Mountain?”

Her face clouded. Not with anger, but with confusion. Cognitive load. “I—”

The lost look she gave me reminded me of Helen. Or of somebody with brain damage struggling to make sense of inputs that did not match the filters their damaged comprehension supplied.

People in those circumstances make up stories. Conflations. They build narratives to make things make sense. To make whatever they’re thinking of doing seem normal.

They must be perfectly normal. The circumstances are what’s odd.

Her silence lengthened. “What is your name?” I asked, very gently.

“Calliope Anne Jones.”

“All right then.” I caught myself steepling my fingers and made myself stop. Open body language. No evidence that I didn’t believe her. “When and where were you born?”

She gave me all the right answers, all the same answers. Until I got to, “You said ‘we’ earlier. Who is ‘we,’ in this context?”

Then she froze. I saw her eyes seek upward, looking for the answer—or perhaps constructing it. I wouldn’t be able to tell unless I looked at her brain function. Actually, I wouldn’t be able to tell at all: neurology, as I mentioned, isn’t my specialty.

“What do you know?” she asked sharply. “You’re the one walking around with a box in your head. How many people are in there? How do you even know what you think?”

Something I had said had put her on the defensive, provoking this attack. It was sideways and irrational, referred aggression. But revealing nonetheless.

I said, “Rightminding, appropriately used, makes me more myself. Not somebody else. Me, but less reactive. Less… whatever I was programmed to be and more what I choose to be.” Then I said, “I don’t think it was used appropriately on you.”

“I…”

I waited. She strained against her bonds, as if she wanted to put her hand against her temple. As if her head hurt. As if it would not stop hurting. She looked down at her hands and laughed. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

I reached out, gently, giving her time to refuse the contact or consent to it, and I stroked her hair. She leaned into the touch with a sigh that was half whimper.

It’s not so much that doctors who develop crushes on their patients are idiots. It’s natural to form an emotional bond with people when you are in a caregiving relationship with them. The ones who act on it are idiots, and unethical to boot.

But I wasn’t going to act on it.

I know I should have tuned it out. Shut it down. Turned off the hormonal responses that filled me up with feel-good neurotransmitters. But it had been so long since I was attracted to anyone that I desperately wanted to feel it for a little while. And it might help me work with her.

I wouldn’t do anything unethical. I would make no rash or unconsidered choices. I wouldn’t take her side, betray my beliefs or my ethics, damage my career. I wasn’t going to make a single bad decision because of Calliope Jones.

(I was aware that the jury was still out on whether going into the machine to get her back was a good decision or not, but as far as I was concerned, any decision that ended with a life saved and no rescuers lost was one that had worked out okay. Adapt, improvise, overcome, don’t die yourself, and worry about the property damage later: that’s my motto.)

Anyway, I was going to enjoy the sense of having a bond of sympathy with another human being. And possibly even use that sense to try to create an emotional connection with that other human being. In order to help me do my job, which was still—damn you, O’Mara—figuring out what was behind the sabotage.

I could feel a little bad about that, if I permitted myself. But I was not going to permit myself. I was going to do my damned job, even the parts that were likely to get O’Mara in trouble. I was going to do my job, and that was all.

I’ve always wanted to save people. Maybe because nobody saved me. (Nobody could have saved me: my youth being hard was nobody’s fault but the universe’s, for not giving a damn, and society’s, for not being perfectly able to maintain supply chains to the back end of beyond.) But it’s always been important to me—dramatically important—to make as many people safe as possible. Maybe it made me feel like I was justifying my existence. Doing something worthwhile with my time.

I wanted to save Calliope, too.

I stroked her hair again. “Hey.”

She didn’t look at me. That was okay, because she was listening. I knew she had to be listening.

“What were you digging for, Calliope? What were you fighting so hard to reach and destroy?”

“X marks the spot.” Her eyes flickered at me. “The damned machine was supposed to work better.”

“This hospital is pretty sturdy,” I agreed. “I’m sure it’s better built than they expected. Who are they, Calliope? Who told you the machine could punch through our hull?”

She drew in a deep breath and held it. I took my hand off her shoulder and folded it into my lap with the other one. I leaned in slightly, maintaining the connection, but giving her space as well.

“Calliope?”

“You tied me up,” she said suddenly. “Why am I tied up? Help! Nurse!”

She tugged her bonds as if she had just noticed and was testing them. “Why am I in jail?”

“You’re not in jail,” I said. I strained myself to remember history. They used to lock people up for crimes, sometimes for life, I knew. Sometimes because they couldn’t safely be released, and sometimes for revenge or as a form of social control. Political prisoners. Calliope had… two sets of memories in her. One, whatever she knew from being a modern person. The other, whatever had been trained into her about being an archaic person, before the fox that must have been used to do it was removed. “You’re in a secure ward. You have an illness, an antisocial pathology, and you have a brain injury. We’re not going to punish you for that. It’s not a moral failing.”

She laughed as if I had said something cruel. “You’re going to brainwash me.”

I wanted to draw back. I made myself hold still. “We’re going to offer you a chance to be treated, if you decide that’s what you want.”

Sweetheart, brainwash you? Somebody already did that.

She thrashed her head violently side to side. “Everybody here is complicit!” she shouted. “Everybody here needs to be exposed!”

There was a moment when I almost put my hands up in the air and walked away, shouting, You won’t let me help you and nothing I will do will change anything.

Almost.

Cynicism is useful. It’s like calluses: it helps you get through life without constantly finding your tender bits worn raw by everything in the world that is wrong. It helps you choose your battles.

But cynicism is also toxic sometimes, because it tells you that nothing can be changed. Nothing can be fixed or bettered. Cynicism also becomes a means of social control. A reinforcement of learned helplessness.

Learned helplessness is something I am always struggling to unlearn.

“You said you were trying to create a scandal,” I reminded her. “I don’t know what it is that you think I’m complicit in.”

She stopped tugging at her restraints—they were soft, and didn’t tighten, but they also didn’t stretch very much—and looked up at me. Her mouth thinned.

“They’re using people for parts,” she said. “Poor people. They kidnap people and cut them up. Go ahead and look if you don’t believe me.”

I wanted to jump out of my chair and lurch backward, away from the horror of her allegation. The theory was ridiculous on the face of it: kidnapping people wasn’t cost-efficient when you could grow whatever you needed from stem cells and not worry about rejection, for crying out loud.

My mouth came open to deny it—

But she believed it, obviously. Which I guessed meant somebody had programmed that idea into her.

“I’ll look into it.” I kept my voice gentle. This wasn’t about me and if I was shocked or irritated. This was about saving the hospital… and finding out the truth. Exposing what was going on in the private ward.

What if the truth destroyed the hospital, as Calliope had suggested it might? What if—

If the truth destroyed it, it needed to go. I didn’t believe that was likely, anyway. What she was suggesting was ridiculous.

There were plenty of other medically unethical possibilities out there without “kidnapping people for parts” being one of them. Although it was the kind of story that could motivate the medically uniformed.

Some people used to avoid registering as organ donors because they were afraid doctors would let them die in order to harvest their bodies. It didn’t happen, but people in marginalized groups have always had good reason to be suspicious of the medical establishment taking advantage of and experimenting on them. Informed consent rules did not, alas, grow up out of nowhere, or because they were not needed.

I was struggling with two conflicting narratives. My own, where Core General was a place of refuge… and the one I was increasingly coming to believe, where it had a dark underside that people I’d trusted were guiding me to find and reveal.

She must have read the incredulity in my face or voice, because she said, “Don’t condescend to me.”

“Calliope—”

“You’re trying to trick me. You think I’m crazy. You’ll put a box in my brain and make me like it.” The flatness and confusion of her tone reminded me of Helen, when Helen’s cycles were caught in a loop. Like a flat spin in atmosphere.

Like me, Calliope was struggling with two conflicting narratives. Two sets of memories; two sets of inputs. One derived organically, from experience. One trained into her with the intervention of the machine inside her skull. A machine that had then been crudely ripped away, leaving unhealed wounds.

I couldn’t call the result amateurish. Amateur brain surgery does not leave a functional human being behind. This had been carried out by somebody who knew what they were doing. Had at least known enough not to kill the patient. I imagined Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo wouldn’t have left such a mess behind.

Maybe the word I was looking for was butcher. Butchery was a professional skill, after all.

I flinched as I realized that Calliope could have three layers of memory in there. Or four.

Memory is an odd beast. It conflates and alters naturally, and every time you recall an event you change the memory. Adding a fox into the mix is supposed to make memories more stable, to provide an unaltered record to go with the subjective one.

But if you change the information stored in the machine, every time the patient remembers the memory it’s not reinforced by what really happened, but by the memory they have been provided. This can be used for therapy, for post-trauma repair to give the patient a sense of control back, for helping to reconstruct people who are dangerous to release otherwise. But it’s supposed to be voluntary, and overseen by boards of ethicists.

I was pretty sure involuntary memory replacement was what had been done to Calliope. And that nobody had bothered to ask her permission first. And that the review board had not been informed.

And then they had taken her fox away, and frozen her, and we’d reawakened her and subjected her to more medical trauma. And then some kind of trigger had been applied to bring the response we’d seen—the response that had been trained into her, I was certain—out. And send her haring off to find the craboid, and rip a ragged gash in my hospital.

Oh no.

Somebody would have taken care of it, right? I mean, somebody would have taken care of it. Obviously.

Still, once I thought of it I had to ask.

Sally. Where’s the walker now?

Nonesuch towed it off into space and parked it in a static point with interdict beacons all over it.

“Calliope,” I said.

She looked at me.

“I’ll do what you asked. Promise to be careful and stay safe until I get back?”

Her pupils were dilated. I didn’t know if she was seeing me or something from inside her damaged memories. “The doctors. Please don’t let them send me back.”

I stood, but didn’t turn away. “Send you back where?”

“If they send me back, I’ll never get away,” she said.