Machine

CHAPTER 25

TSOSIE WAITED FOR ME OUTSIDE my quarters. He was sitting on a bench in an alcove, looking uncomfortable: those multispecies perches aren’t really suited to most of the species they serve. I looked at him, and he looked at me.

He stood.

I said, “You appear to know where I’ve been. How much do you know about what I found there?”

“Can I come in?”

I didn’t feel like having this fight in the hallway, so I opened my door and led him inside. My quarters are rated for a family, it’s true, but that doesn’t make them large. It does mean that what would have been Rache’s room is my own private bedroom, so I can use the main room off the little entry as a sitting room.

It’s selfish of me, but I never bothered to clarify to admin that my daughter would probably never be visiting me. Maybe I didn’t want to clarify it to myself, to be honest.

I offered him the couch. He took the floor. I printed myself a cold beer and asked if he wanted one, too.

“Caffeine,” he replied, looking uncomfortable.

I gave him a mug of coffee substitute. If he wasn’t using the couch, I was. I settled into it.

He sipped his drink, probably framing an opening gambit, and I exploded in his face. “Am I the only person in this entire fucking hospital that didn’t know what was going on in there?”

Tsosie swallowed. “You’re not the only one who doesn’t want to know. Am I right in saying you never bothered to find out until somebody made you?”

He looked more compassionate than I had expected, given his words. As is completely predictable, I immediately tried to pick a fight.

“I need,” I said, “a certain amount of professional detachment to do my job.”

“You’re not detached,” he told me. “You’re dissociated. It’s treatable and you know it.”

“If Sally thought I was ill—”

“If Sally thought you were too ill to do your job, she’d say something,” Tsosie interrupted. “You’re not too ill to do your job. You’re just too ill to be good for yourself.”

“Oh,” I said, “and you’re absolutely perfect.”

“Perfection is not required for awareness,” he said, and his deadpan—curse him—made me laugh. Once they get you to laugh the fight is over, because no matter how mad you are, nobody takes you seriously when you’re trying to dress them down while giggling. Anyway, he was sitting a half meter lower than I was, which made it hard to find him threatening.

That man is entirely too good at everything he does. I wondered if he was right about me—whether what I thought of as a professional reserve, professional detachment… was really more like floating a centimeter outside the world, never really engaging with it.

He might be right, I decided. If he was, it was a problem for another dia.

“Nobody holds it against you,” he said. “But you do make yourself hard to get close to, Llyn.”

I wanted to bite his head off, which probably meant that what he was saying was true. I sighed. “Am I good at my job?”

“Very,” he admitted.

“Are you one of the saboteurs?”

“No!” His horror had to be real, didn’t it?

“Then why are you here?”

“Sally sent me. She said you might need emotional support.”

Tsosie was definitely the guy you sent for that, all right. I rolled my eyes.

It occurred to me that he said he knew what was in there, but maybe he only thought he knew. Maybe he didn’t actually know the worst. “So what do you know about what’s in the private unit?”

He put his hot caffeine water under his nose and leaned over the mug, closing his eyes and inhaling exactly as if the contents were palatable. “I know,” he said, “that there are a couple of secret—well, okay, not secret exactly—wards in Core Gen. That one is in ox sector. That it’s reserved for patients who fork over a ridiculous amount of resources for access, and that most of them are suffering from diseases of extreme senescence. I also know that the death rate of these extremely old people is extremely low, even by the standards of care available at Core General.”

I studied him. He was, as near as I could tell, being honest.

“I don’t imagine they’re coming here to die,” I said. “They could do that far more comfortably in their own habitations, or in a planetary hospital for that matter, though nobody likes gravity when their joints hurt.”

I knew that for a fact.

He sipped the hot caffeine water and rolled it around his mouth before swallowing. “I don’t know exactly what therapies they’re receiving.”

“Clones,” I said. “Not parts grown from stem cells. Whole bodies. Whole clones.”

He stared at me, head turned slightly as if he had almost figured out what was bothering me, but hadn’t quite yet made the intuitive leap.

“Whole clones,” I said. “With fully developed brains.”

He breathed out.

“I met one of the patients. Well, I can’t say I met her, as she was still in an integrative coma. A young woman of a mere hundred and thirty ans or so. With a fresh implant scar.” I touched my head.

His face did a number of interesting things as I talked, and as he considered what I had said. It settled on concentration. He was going to treat it as an intellectual problem, then. “You can’t transplant a fox. The architecture of one brain is too different from another. Even a clone brain—especially a clone brain, that’s grown to adult size without experiences to influence its development. It wouldn’t have—it wouldn’t have developed speech centers, even. And even if you could, you wouldn’t be transplanting the person.”

Beer had been the right choice. Possibly O’Mara’s tequila would have been a better one. “What if you… exercised the developing clone brain? The same way you exercise the body so the muscles and skeleton develop normally? Virtual stimulation? A series of implants, changing as the clone grows? They start them young in some of the clades: the technology exists.”

“That’s not a blank slate,” he said. “That’s a person.”

“A person who has never existed in the world,” I said. “A person with no rights, and no records, and no friends or family. And then, when they are physically adult, you put a final fox in place, integrate it, and… download the entire senso of the original person into the clone body you made. It would cost a fortune. But some people have fortunes to spend.”

“That’s not the same person!” he protested.

“Legally it’s the same person. There’s continuity of experience, of a sort. As much as any of us have, anyway. If you could buy planets, but not another moment of being alive, would the niceties matter to you? Or would you have the ego to believe that you would persist in some meaningful sense?”

“I think I’ll take that beer now,” he said.

I gestured to the printer. “Help yourself.”

I missed real beer, with its irreproducible organic esters and subtle, layered tastes. But this would do in an emergency, and I felt like emergency had arrived.

My breath frosted in the air in front of me, which was unusual. I checked the datapad in its pocket on the couch arm. An unusual power drain on environmental systems, technicians working to correct. So many little things going wrong.

“Wow. It got chilly in here.” Tsosie made himself a pale ale and came around to sit on the other end of the couch. I felt better conversing at eye level.

I handed him the pad, and he grunted, then made eye contact. There was nothing either of us could do about it now. Saboteurs? The digital infestation of the hospital’s physical plant? I hoped the engineers could solve it.

“Is the private unit the target of the sabotage? I suddenly have some sympathy—” He stopped. “Does O’Mara know?”

“O’Mara knows and is under a confidentiality lock. I think they pushed me into finding out on purpose. And yes, it’s what the sabotage is about. I think it’s meant to… draw attention. And that’s why the hospital has been being quiet about it—because they didn’t have any choice, because they couldn’t explain…”

“Why didn’t the saboteurs just tell everybody what was going on?”

“No proof?” I said. “Add that question to the pile with ‘Where the hell did they get a generation ship?’ ” I finished my beer. “I think Calliope is one of the clones. Remember how Dr. Zhiruo said her DNA looked… very orderly? But hadn’t managed to decode the painfully bad archaic bragging poetry we assumed was encoded in it?”

He looked aghast. “I… that’s awful. I don’t know. I don’t even want to think about that.”

“I don’t want to think about any of it.” Having no more drink to occupy myself, I returned the glass to the recycler. Since I was up, I started to pace. “But I think we have to. You started to say that you might have sympathy for the saboteurs and… you’re probably right. Empathy, anyway. But my god, Tsosie, they have fucked things up. Maybe less through cold malevolence and more through bad planning, or lack of considering the consequences. I…”

“Why is everyone such an asshole?” he asked, sympathetically.

“Yes.”

He sighed. “Helps us fit in better.”

His comment reminded me to apologize. “I’m sorry, by the way. I suspected you might be behind the sabotage for a while.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “I suspected you.”

“I thought you trusted me!”

“I thought you trusted me.”

“With my life. But then I couldn’t trust anything anymore.”

He finished his beer. “That’s smart.”

“It’s lonely.”

“So what made you decide to trust me now?”

I blew out. “I figured out who it had to be, and it wasn’t you.”

In three-vee thrillers the amateur detective goes off and confronts the suspect without leaving a note, but that’s a little too risk-unaverse even for me. Tsosie didn’t want to leave me alone, after I explained to him. But I explained that I was telling him as a security measure, and that if he came with me that security measure was useless, because we would both be in the same place with the person I suspected was a saboteur.

“Why not tell Starlight?” he asked, pretty reasonably. He was now on his second beer.

“Because I’m not one hundred percent sure, and I want to be sure before I accuse anybody of attempted murder and negligent homicide. And also because I agree with their goals, though not their methods. This needs to be exposed.”

“What if you don’t come back?”

I got up. “Finish your beer.”

He finished his beer. “What if you don’t come back?”

“Then you have proof.” I grinned at his stricken expression. “Come on, Tsosie. Let’s go to work. It’s way too late to start pretending you like me.”

“I do like you, you enormous pain in the ass.” He stood, also. “Don’t get killed.”

Loese wasn’t in her quarters. I should have checked before I dropped by, but I didn’t want her to get the location ping and figure out that I was onto her. She wasn’t on-shift; there was literally nothing for a pilot to be doing right now, and wouldn’t be until ships could leave the hospital again.

So that meant that unless she was socializing, exercising, or eating, she was likely to be on Sally.

I sighed. I had wanted to have this conversation in private. Not in front of Hhayazh and Camphvis and Rhym. Or Sally.

I was more or less in luck. Rhym and Hhayazh were on-shift, doctoring away somewhere in the ox sections of Core General. Camphvis was sleeping, privacy shield pulled closed. Loese was in her bunk, reading from a handheld. She sat up and swung her legs down when I walked over.

“You haven’t been around much.” She stood. Her voice sounded hurt. The emotion might even be real. People are complicated.

“I got seconded to some administrative work, and then a lot of people needed emergency surgery.” I cleared my throat. “Why are you telling people that Helen caused the disaster?”

She looked at me. She looked around. She said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

We went for a walk. Around the outside of the ring, in one of the habitrails that loop its surface. The stars were under our feet; Starlight’s mutating leaves glittered beyond the transparent ceiling. I wondered if the Administree would be able to hear us, through the layers of atmosphere, structural material, and more atmosphere.

“Turn on privacy,” I told Loese.

Her eyes flicked up. “I see.”

Together, we temporarily withdrew translator permissions. I set myself a reminder to turn them back on again, or I was going to wind up shouting to somebody for suction and all they would be able to hear would be gargling noises.

Then she said, “I haven’t been telling anyone anything.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“I’m not saying I haven’t discussed a possibility.”

That self-justifying—

Well, she would have to be.

I sighed. “If Starlight found out—”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

I was tired and in pain, and I wasn’t thinking too clearly. That’s the only excuse I have for what I said next. “Why would you assume that I would keep a secret like that?”

Oh. You would assume that, if you were secretly combatting something nefarious, and you weren’t afraid of being found out.

“I don’t expect you to keep a secret.” She kept pacing along, strong calf muscles giving her a rolling gait.

“Loese, I know about the sabotage.”

She nodded, and didn’t glance at me. “I figured.”

“You—” All the things I could have accused her of, and the one that burst out of me was, “You hurt Sally.”

Now she looked at me: pityingly. “Did you think Sally didn’t know? She’s one of us, Llyn. Several AIs are.”

I put a hand on the transparent wall to steady myself. These trails didn’t see a lot of use. They were beautiful, but many people found them unsettling. Now I leaned my weight on apparent emptiness that was nevertheless a rigid bulkhead, and struggled to catch my breath.

I had to tune to get any kind of equilibrium. “Sally would never… never hurt people. Never hurt so many people.”

“No,” Loese agreed. “Neither would I. We, ah. We made a mistake.”

That was such a disingenuously mild way of putting it that even with my emotional controls firmly in place I found myself exploding into rage. I clenched my fist, took two deep breaths, and thought about the deep green seas of home.

No, that wouldn’t help me. My child was at home, and the toxic meme that Loese and her allies had unleashed… it could eat the entire galaxy. Centimeter by centimeter. World by world. If we ever released the quarantine.

The evidence was over my head.

I thought about the chill depths of space, the flicker of stars, instead. There, that was much better. Space was right there, inches beyond my fingertips. The tangled, lensing stars of the Core didn’t seem orderly—their pattern was too complex for me to discern through observation—but they were. I could take it on faith that whatever was out there was doing exactly what it was destined to do.

In here, we had to make choices, and right now all of them seemed bad.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Sally never caught the meme,” Loese said. “Didn’t you wonder why?”

The bulkhead didn’t feel sturdy enough to hold me up. Somehow, though, it did. Somehow I held myself up against it.

“Tell me,” I said, “about your mistake. If you don’t mind.”

She told me, and as she told me, I realized that she was part of a conspiracy that must have started before she was born. That had been constructed out of pieces of found material, and whose various individuals often took actions and set plans in motion without consulting one another. There was no grand design behind any of it: just a series of fumbling attempts to do something.

Fucking humans. Even rightminding can’t make us sensible. And even programming can’t make AIs make good decisions, I guess. All rightminding can do is make us less massively self-destructive in the long run, less reactive, more willing to work together for the common good. We used to think, when we first invented it, that it made us logical. That was the propaganda put around, anyway. I’m not sure even the originators ever believed it.

Ha ha. It turns out, with further research, that human thought is, by its nature, not logical. We can lessen our susceptibility to confirmation bias, egocentrism, and denial. But it turns out that nearly everything about our decision-making process is emotional, and that this is actually a good thing. Because our conscious minds are slow and ineffectual, and if we actually had to sort all the information our subconscious minds process in order to present us with hunches, gitchy feelings, and the occasional epiphany, we’d never fit through the birth canal.

Evolutionarily speaking, obviously: even I wasn’t gestated inside a suffering human host, and I was born into frontier barbarism.

Loese talked for a long time. She didn’t use names, other than hers and Sally’s. But from what I gathered, there didn’t seem to be a lot of people involved. At least one shipmind AI of fairly significant age, however: that much was obvious. Somebody had been coordinating this effort for… I shook my head.

Longer than I had been alive.

Loese told me—without naming it—about the ship that, decans before, had stumbled across Big Rock Candy Mountain and its self-repair program run wild and hit upon the idea of hacking it and repurposing it to disable Core General and bring the critical eye of the Synarche’s population to bear on the activities going on behind closed doors.

“What about Calliope?”

“She was medical waste,” Loese said, with justified bitterness. “Her progenitor died before the download could be arranged, and our chief organizer arranged to salvage her. And to use gene therapy to alter her DNA.”

I wondered who the chief organizer was. The shadowy Mx. Big behind it all.

Somebody in Cryo? Not Rilriltok, I thought. I couldn’t imagine my excitable, enthusiastic, nerdy little friend managing to keep a lie that big, that interesting, a secret from me for the fifteen ans we’d known each other.

An additional problem was that none of what they had discovered was technically illegal. Unawakened clones were not considered Synizens: they had no life experience, no legal personhood. I was sure Loese could see that I was as horrified as she was that anybody would make a clone, grow it to adulthood, exercise its brain and body into proper development with virtual experiences… and then put it in cryostasis until it was needed as a replacement body.

“How did the generation ship get moved?” I asked. “That’s been bothering me.”

“We couldn’t have done that if that salvage mission hadn’t turned up the Koregoi gravity generators,” she said. “But when the hospital refit began, we managed to liberate some test models.”

“Cheeirilaq knows about that. That was what made me wonder if Tsosie was involved,” I said. “He was interested in those test models.”

“We copied them, and by integrating them into the self-replicating tinkertoy machine’s code, we made one big enough to, er, distort space-time and slide Big Rock Candy Mountain close enough to a white space jump point that somebody could plausibly stumble across her.”

I wondered if the gravity generators, used that way, compensated in some way for relativistic effects. I wondered if you could use them to manipulate the time part of space-time as well as the space part.

I decided that now was not the time to find out.

“This all must have taken decans.”

“It did,” Loese said. “This clone thing has been going on for a very long time. We didn’t have the last pieces until recently, however.”

“Afar and his crew were in on the conspiracy?”

“He was the ship that found Big Rock Candy Mountain in the first place,” she admitted, reluctantly. “They were…”

“Smuggling?”

“…off the normal trade routes.”

“Did he know that you planned to sacrifice him and his crew?”

“What happened to Afar was an accident. He and his crew were supposed to drop off the walker and the cryo tube holding Calliope and leave. We did not expect him to get infected with the meme, and we really didn’t expect it to affect his crew.” She shook her head. “Afar must have really screwed up somehow. I don’t know how he could have messed up so badly that he, his crew, and the walker all got infected.”

“You keep saying ‘accident’…” I squinted at Loese, remembering the dropped coms, the sabotage to Sally. “You and Sally tried to kill me!”

“We knew you’d survive,” she said.

It was a nice vote of confidence. You’ll forgive me if I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time. “You risked my life and Tsosie’s life. To—what, make sure we were on the ship long enough to find the right cryo coffins? Sally did come back online awfully conveniently once we were there.”

“She needed—” Loese looked at her hands. “She needed to control the machine, and make sure that the accident with the coffins happened the right way, to ensure that you weren’t hurt in the process.”

“Why didn’t you just tell somebody?”

She sighed. “Do you think nobody tried? It all sounds like rumors and conspiracy theories. We needed proof. We needed evidence. And none of this is illegal. It’s only awful.”

“You had,” I said distinctly, “a discarded, fully grown, sapient clone of a dead rich woman, with a fully developed brain. And you didn’t think that was evidence enough? No, you decided it was a better idea to do exactly what the fucking mad scientists here at Core Gen were doing, and implant false memories in her, rip out her fox, and hide her on a generation ship where there was a very good chance that she would die.”

“She didn’t,” Loese said. “And it was for the best cause imaginable.”

I had to tune in order not to hit her. Hitting people almost never solves anything, and you can trust me on that. I was in the military.

“So the virus, the toxic meme, came in with the machine? Sally used herself as a mule to bring it back?”

“Sally used herself as a mule to bring it back,” Loese agreed. “But the important part of the meme, the part that infected Zhiruo, wasn’t in the machine. Or Helen. They were only… along for the ride.”

I didn’t ask. I waited.

“The virus was encoded in Calliope’s DNA.”

“What?” Loese had said they’d altered Calliope’s DNA. I had assumed she meant to make her seem like she belonged among the corpsicles.

“The meme. It’s programmed into her. That was why Afar got sick. That was why Dr. Zhiruo got sick. The meme was there to be read into their memories when they scanned Jones’s DNA or contacted each other. The orderliness in her wasn’t poetry.

“It was malignant code.”

“You poisoned Dr. Zhiruo on purpose?” And Afar. And Linden!… Maybe those had been accidents. But still.

A responsible person, a healthy-minded person, would not put herself into a position where that kind of accident happened.

Loese reached out very hesitantly and put a hand on my arm. “It wasn’t supposed to take her offline, Llyn. It was just supposed to make her tell the truth.”

I looked at her. “She’s under the same kind of confidentiality seal as Starlight and O’Mara? You wanted them to tell the truth, too, I suppose? Is that how Starlight got infected?”

“That would have been nice, but… no. We didn’t expect the meme to get beyond Zhiruo. It wasn’t supposed to be virulent. We wanted to make her tell the truth, and we wanted to write over the privacy protocols. Reverse them, so she would have to come forward. We didn’t expect it to affect Afar, or for him to get stuck there. He was supposed to drop Calliope and the walker off, and be on his way. There was some kind of interaction between the virus and the generation ship’s antique AI and the commands its last captain left it—whatever had it building the machine—and everything went wrong, fast.”

Tuning, tuning. “Why Zhiruo? Why make her tell the truth? Because she’s got seniority?”

“Aw, Jens,” Loese said sadly. “Zhiruo is the head of the clone program. I said it had been going on for ages.”

That liquid sensation in my gut—that was real horror. Real betrayal. And only a little bit of it was because what Loese and Sally and their unnamed co-conspirators had done was so unbelievably stupid.

You commit yourself completely to something and then you take your eyes off it for an instant and it’s gone. Like it never was. Like you can’t even see the evidence of the thing that was there, that you trusted your weight, your honor, your life, your heart to.

I’ve seen some shit, let me tell you.

But somewhere deep down, I find myself craving the impossible. I find myself craving that certainty that people and things and… and principles in my life will stay where I fucking left them.

A betrayal retroactively poisons everything good about that relationship. And right then, I wanted to stop spending so much time thinking about and compensating for how damaged I am. I wanted to be able to relax. To feel safe, and like I didn’t have to constantly be on my guard, again.

You’d think I’d be a little old to be feeling my innocence betrayed. But I hadn’t even turned my back on Core General. I trusted its ethical principles to hold me up. To bear my weight.

And it fell away under my feet.

The worst part is that I wasn’t braced at all. I didn’t have the slightest excuse to not be ready for it.

I’d believed. And now I couldn’t believe anymore. And I missed that believing so much.

This must be what losing your religion feels like.

At least Rhym isn’t involved in this. At least I don’t have to be angry at Hhayazh.

“Well,” I said, “you fucked up good, Loese. You and Sally and all the people you’re still protecting.”

Her face folded like a balled-up tissue. “I know. And you’re going to turn me over to Starlight and Zhiruo.”

“I don’t think Starlight approves of Zhiruo,” I said. “Or at least, not her little side program. I don’t think they can avoid using the resources she generates—I mean, we’ve all been using the resources she generates. That program must help pay for the ambulance ships, and… I don’t even know what else.”

“Zhiruo started the clone program,” Loese said miserably, “because the Core General project was defunded during the Laesil system cataclysm, a long time ago. They didn’t have the resources to support finishing it when hundreds of thousands of people were dying of stellar radiation and needed immediate help. So Zhiruo… found the resources elsewhere.”

Sweet death in a vacuum, why can’t anybody be uncomplicatedly evil in real life? Or uncomplicatedly good? Why are we all such a twist of good and bad decisions, selfishness and self-justification, altruism and desire?

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to turn you in. You need your rightminding adjusted, sure as shitting after eating. How many casualties did you cause?”

She studied her shoes, and the stars beyond them. “A lot. The sabotage to the hospital—that wasn’t Sally and me, though.”

“Who was it? Some of your co-conspirators?”

Her lip thrust out. “They were involved in the little things. The leaks, the equipment malfunctions. We did not cause the rotational and lift failures. Something else caused that. I don’t want them blamed for it!”

Something else caused that. “Aw, crud,” I said. “So the machine—carrying the meme Sally made—has infiltrated the hospital’s superstructure. That’s what caused the big failures, isn’t it?”

Her mouth twisted in a horrified grimace. “Oh shit.”

I sighed.

I could waste a lot of time trying to get the names of her co-conspirators out of her. But… I was part of a system. If we lived long enough, the system could figure out who the rest of the conspirators were, using the information I gave them as a wedge for entering. The system could decide what the proper reparations were for them to earn forgiveness. In the meantime, I awarded Loese a few meager maturity points for not reminding me that she hadn’t meant to cause any casualties. But who in the spiral arms thought mixing a computer virus with an insane, damaged, poorly understood shipmind and then turning it loose was a good plan?

I nodded. “But we have a more immediate problem than the criminally stupid thing you and Sally did.”

She looked at me. That outthrust lip retracted a little.

“Unless you want to increase that death toll by every soul on Core General, staff and patients alike… we need to find a way to end the damage being done by the meme you set loose. And that is probably going to take all of us, working together. So you’d better give me access to the source files for this malignant code you and Sally cooked up, so I can do something about fixing Linden and Afar and Dr. Zhiruo. And Starlight, for the love of little blue suns.”

“Right,” she said. Her expression lightened a little. “Do you think you can fix it?”

Hope.

She was, I realized, really young. Young and full of idealism. Faith that things could be made to work out all right.

Maybe they could. Maybe they could. And maybe the survivors of this minor disaster could be repaired and restored to health.

That wouldn’t help the dead, however.

“I can’t fix it,” I said. “Nobody can fix a thing like this, once it happens. But maybe we can prevent anybody else from getting hurt.”