Machine

CHAPTER 24

“IS THAT TRUE?” CARLOS ASKED, when I finished relaying what Jones had told me. “About the mind control?”

“No.” I twirled spaghetti around my fork. “She’s pretty obviously sick, and somebody curtailed her treatment and manipulated her into a bunch of obsessive, delusional ideations before turning her loose to wreak havoc. No, worse than that—hiding her among your people in order to conceal the source of the havoc.”

My fingers tightened on the fork. I didn’t believe in violence. But for a moment, I would have suspended that belief if I had been able to get my hands on the people who chose to put Jones through so much pain.

“I heard a different rumor,” Carlos said. “I heard that the peripheral—Helen—” He flinched again, but the flinch had a different quality this time: less disgust, more pity.

“Tell me.”

“I heard she caused the disaster. Stopped the rotation.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “The machine?”

I put the food in my mouth. It gave me something to grind my teeth through. I swallowed it through a chill of unease. “It’s still contained. In the walker and in the stasis box. As far as I know. Who told you that?”

“That pilot lady,” he said. “Loese. The… uncomfortably mannish one.”

My mouth tightened. The information was not conclusive, but it fit certain parts of the pattern I was building. I still hated the pattern I was building. “Check your gender biases, caveman.”

I filed the information away to contemplate later. I didn’t want to think about it now. That was another conversation I needed to get to quickly. Curse the physical limitations of my frail, poorly designed anatomy.

Carlos sipped his drink and made a face. “Unfair to cavemen. What about the clones, then? And the kidnapping people for parts?”

I sighed, and looked at him. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Can I trust you to tell me the truth?”

I looked at him over my fork. He frowned back at me. I thought about being angry, but I was too tired, and honestly what reason did he have to trust me? We barely knew each other.

Which was why I could talk to him. All my other relationships were way too old, way too fraught, and way too tangled up in potential medical malfeasance. Well, maybe not Rilriltok. I couldn’t imagine it doing anything unethical. Not unless it got way too excited to ask about the ethics of the situation before jumping in with all… twelve? limbs.

I raised my left little finger off the handle of the fork. “In fact, once I know what’s going on, I’ll show you.”

“Huh,” Carlos said, tilting his head to examine me.

“What?”

“People still pinky swear.”

I had a lot of questions, and I didn’t know the answers. But I knew where to go to find out, maybe. Thanks to Calliope Jones.

And thanks to Jones, I was pretty sure I could get in and out without being stopped.

I told Rilriltok not to let them transfer her, no matter what. “Get O’Mara if you have to. Nobody moves this patient anywhere.”

She obviously wasn’t tracking reality well. She was probably paranoid. Delusional.

Probably.

What if I asked Cheeirilaq for help? I liked the Goodlaw, and it had saved my life. But I realized, if O’Mara and Starshine knew something was wrong in the hospital… then I had no idea who I could trust.

I was going to have to handle it myself.

I couldn’t give myself time to temporize. My courage could not be allowed to fail. I paused just inside the door of the detention ward, feeling Rilriltok’s attention on my back, and nerved myself.

I also shut Sally out of my senso, which hurt me more than anything. But I couldn’t be sure of anybody. You’d think that programmed ethics would be enough to prevent an AI from doing anything really sketchy. It’s not like anybody looks at a constructed superintelligence and says, “What if we made this one a ruthless Utilitarian, just to see what happens?”

… Actually, somebody probably would, but with any luck the review board would catch it in time.

Better safe than sorry, as my allofather used to say.

When I moved into the corridor, I walked like a woman on a mission. There’s a focused, hurried gait that makes other experienced hospital personnel flatten themselves against corridor walls, and I adopted it, heading toward Casualty with all deliberate speed.

It was less of an abattoir than when I’d left it, at least. Gravity—or the simulation of it—helped. There were still cots lined up against two walls, sheets draped over improvised stands between them for some semblance of privacy, but that was far more orderly than the situation during the disaster. Walking wounded had returned to their own quarters to convalesce, and some were probably back on duty.

I noticed open panels in the floor as I passed, and people of various descriptions working inside. I guessed that the artificial gravity retrofit had been stepped up, and that getting it installed in Casualty was now the first priority. Good.

It’s always comforting to see the return of normalcy, and that the system has not completely broken down.

I nodded to an attending physician and a couple of specialists with whom I was acquainted, waved to the triage nurse, and stepped toward the doors to the private ward as if I belonged there.

The door didn’t open to my scan.

Now, that was interesting. But I wouldn’t be much of a heavy rescue specialist if I didn’t know how to override a standard lock panel. I hadn’t done this last time because I was still mostly following the rules. Still mostly being polite. And my exo had been an anchor at the time, come to think of it. Now… using my exo instead of a handheld—and instead of reaching into the senso with my fox—I hacked into the panel’s working memory and flipped the switch.

The door hissed open and I stepped through.

A white lab coat makes you anonymous in a hospital. My ID dangled, and given the experience with the door I half expected my signal to be rejected by the sensors inside. No flashing lights greeted me, however. No whooping sirens. Just the humming quiet of an intensive care unit between emergencies.

I was in the same hallway I’d passed through when my exo had been running on fumes. This time I was fully charged and full of adrenaline, however, and I had more time to look around.

It seemed much as it had; a quiet nursing unit in the middle of sleep shift. The desk was staffed with a Ceeharen nurse who didn’t look up. The unit coordinator who had spotted me on my last intrusion was nowhere in evidence. I hoped that meant he was off-shift or asleep. He’d been too alert by far, and—I blushed to admit it—I was a terrible spy.

Fortunately for terrible spies, most people are terrible observers. I sailed past the syster at the desk—they were deeply involved in something invisible to me in the air before them, making notes on it with a light pen—and walked along, checking the panels beside private rooms as if I were looking for a specific patient ID. The rooms were privacy-shielded, but my senior physician clearance was enough to de-encrypt them. I guessed when they’d locked the entrance, they hadn’t thought uninvited guests would be resourceful or determined enough to get in anyway.

My accessing the records would be logged. But I wasn’t planning on keeping my visit secret. Either there was nothing to hide, and this really was only a ridiculously posh unit devoted to keeping those who exploited more resources than they needed away from the proletariat… or Calliope was right about the hospital using indigent folks as spare-parts repositories, and I was about to blow the worst abomination in modern Synarche history sky-high.

If I ever got off this quarantined hospital. If the hospital itself even survived.

It didn’t occur to me that there might be an answer somewhere in the middle. An answer whose implications might be almost as unpleasant as organ farmers murdering people for parts.

In retrospect, this was an oversight.

The majority of patients whose data I accessed were old. Very, very old, even by modern standards, where the human life expectancy in reasonable health exceeds our natural span including senescence. I’m hardly the picture of perfect health, but I was honestly better off than many of my ancestors would have been at my age—their panoply of undiagnosed and untreatable autoimmune disorders blossomed in the early Anthropocene, for a variety of genetic and environmental reasons—and I could expect another fifty or sixty ans or so as a contributing member of society.

If I made it to tomorrow alive.

But these patients—the human ones—had birth dates that made them older than my great-grandparents had lived to be. Admittedly, my great-grandparents lived on a marginal colony world where people reproduced young. But my great-grandparents were no longer alive, and neither were their children. Or their children’s children, though that had been an accident.

These people were.

So maybe they needed the peace and quiet. Maybe they had come here to die. That seemed like an intolerable waste of resources, but… these people had resources to burn. And didn’t seem inclined to return their surplus to the commonwealth, beyond whatever they were taxed.

You can’t take it with you, as somebody wise observed. But you can sure roll around in it for as long as you’re alive.

The next thing I noticed, pulling their med charts, was that none of them were on antirejection drugs. I had expected it, but it still comforted me. It disproved Calliope’s conspiracy theory categorically. Without protein matchers and immune tuning… well, organ rejection is a real thing, and it used to kill patients, or severely limit their lives after transplant. They needed their immune systems suppressed for the rest of their lives, or their own bodies would destroy the transplanted organs they also needed to keep them alive.

Clone parts solved that—as far as your immune system is concerned, a clone finger is your own finger. So now I knew that nobody was kidnapping indigent teenagers and stealing their retinas or kidneys.

Since I hadn’t actually expected to find evidence of that, I was surprised by how relieved I felt. So now I had to find out what was really going on in here, and why it was so secret. I was pretty sure I’d figured out why O’Mara and Starlight had been pushing me toward uncovering the information on my own: so that I wouldn’t be bound by the hospital’s privacy strictures regarding patients. I wasn’t supposed to know what was going on here. Therefore nobody had bothered to put a block in my fox about it.

I downloaded a few more sets of records, and then when I was well away from the desk (glossy Ceeharen syster still engaged and on-task behind it) I pretended I had found the room I was looking for, and stepped inside. The occupant was a human female, 135 ans of age, Beyte Denarian by name.

It was almost the last room in the corridor, and when I walked in I was surprised by how quiet and empty it seemed. Hospital rooms are usually full of stuff: wires, equipment, monitors, tubes to put fluids into the human body and tubes to take them away again.

This seemed like a bedroom, and a pleasant bedroom at that.

I crossed to the bed and looked down.

A woman lay there, head shaved, blonde hair beginning to regrow, skin translucent as the skin of low-melanin humans who have never stepped out under a living sun becomes. Eyes closed, hands folded neatly on her breast atop covers that had never been wrinkled or disarrayed by human sleep. I felt as if I were looking at a corpse arrayed for the funeral.

I could see the blue veins under the skin of her throat, her cheeks, her temples. The backs of her hands.

She could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen ans of age.

She could not be Beyte Denarian. And yet—I checked the chart again—she was.

I touched her shaved scalp gently, the soft hairs fuzzing against my palm. There was a scar there, a tiny scar, tidy and neat. She was about old enough to have had a fox implanted, if it was done early. Usually, my species waits until our children are aged around twenty-five ans. Their neural development is more or less complete at that point, and they have learned social skills and how to experience and control their emotions without intervention. They have learned who they are.

So this woman was young, biologically speaking. But she was not unreasonably young.

She did not wake up when I touched her, but there were no signs that she was sedated, or that she was being supported through a period of unconsciousness due to illness or injury. She was lying there, inert. Breathing regularly.

I lifted an eyelid and flashed a light against her pupil. It contracted normally. Her pulse was even and tidy.

I set her hand down where I had found it and slowly left the room. The syster had not looked up from their work. You don’t find many people that devoted on a sleep shift, but maybe they were studying for advancement. Or maybe they were playing solitaire.

There was a little more corridor beyond this room, and at the end of it, another door.

I squared my shoulders. I was ready to jimmy this lock, too.

I wondered what I would find there.

At first, I thought the space beyond—too large to call it a room: a hold, maybe, labyrinthine—was full of cryo tanks. Much more modern ones than those that had lined the vast hold on Big Rock Candy Mountain, naturally—but it still left me with a shiver of recognition.

Then I looked at them again, and realized they were not cryo tanks, but the exact opposite. The cryo tanks were there, but they were in ranks behind the objects I’d first noticed, and there were a lot more of them.

The ones in the front… were artificial wombs and incubator tanks full of suspensory medium. Incubator tanks of various shapes and sizes. Incubator tanks optimized for a dozen, two dozen different species of systers.

And they, and the cryo units behind them also, were full of clones.

It was not the first clone farm in my experience. This was a hugely resource-intensive operation, but there was no good reason for it not to be here. The whole private unit was a resource-intensive operation, after all. But something about this place and the young/old woman I’d seen outside bothered me.

I picked my away along the rows of tanks. Call me ethnocentric, but I concentrated on the human ones. A few dozen, ranging in age from fetal to the prime of youth. Suspended in their nutrient liquid, doing nothing at all. Medical clones don’t have fully developed brains; enough to keep the autonomous functions functioning and the normal growth growing. Brains don’t develop in a vacuum; they need stimulation and experience to learn how to do even such basic things as balance, pick up a fruit. Interpret language. See.

I supposed there was a possibility that Mx. Denarian out there had had her brain transplanted into a clone body. It would be an egregious waste of resources; sure, you could use a stem-cell suspension to graft the old brain onto the new neural tissue, but old brains are old. We don’t die, these diar, because our bodies wear out; we die because our brains stop functioning effectively and we run out of the ability to prop them up with spot repairs.

Besides, the incision on the patient’s skull had been small, tidy. The sort of thing you did to efficiently implant a fox, for example.

One of the clones near me twitched, and I almost jumped right out of my exo. I turned toward it, but it was only a long, myoclonic tremble. A contraction through the muscles of the shapely, muscular thigh and calf and ankle. A REM-sleep shiver.

Clones didn’t dream.

Clones weren’t usually… buff. They didn’t have exquisitely trained, athletic bodies.

They didn’t generally have deep brain stimulation wires running into their skulls. They didn’t wear virtual reality goggles over their eyes, waterproof earphones in their ear canals.

My hands trembling despite the exo, I called up records on the pad attached to the incubation tank. Daily exercise sequences, isometrics, general health of the body—

Brain development.

I looked at the magnetic scans. I craned my head back and looked up at the clone, hovering over me in hairless, godlike nudity. Looming pale inside its tank of translucent dark liquid.

I looked back at the magnetic scans.

Brain development normal for a seventeen-year-old person.

But this wasn’t a person. This was an object.

Objects were not supposed to have brains.