Machine

CHAPTER 26

LOESE WANTED TO TALK TO Sally before she made any irrevocable decisions. I didn’t blame her. I wanted to talk to Sally myself.

I also badly wanted to talk to Dr. Zhiruo. But first we needed an AI doctor who could somehow fix her corrupted code. Or bring her out of her protective hibernation. Or—whatever, it wasn’t my specialty—make her go.

And hopefully make Linden and Afar go, too.

The problem was that the best AI doctors in the hospital other than Zhiruo were already working on Zhiruo. Sally was an AI doc… and Sally had written the toxic meme. And that was a problem, because although she had written it, it had since gotten corrupted and made—virulent? contagious?—by contact with the machine’s operating system, and apparently Sally couldn’t figure out how to stop it once it went wrong.

At least, I was choosing to assume that she couldn’t manage to stop it. And not that she was choosing not to stop it. Because, shocking revelations and horrible mistakes aside, Sally was my friend. A friend who had fucked up catastrophically. But, nevertheless, a friend.

I was angrier at Sally than I was at Loese. I knew Sally better. I had trusted her more.

I had trusted her implicitly. Reflexively. The way a child trusts a parent, I suppose, until proven otherwise.

The same way, I realized, I had trusted Core General. I hadn’t thought either of them would let me down. And yet, here we were. They were on opposite sides of this issue, and both of them had catastrophically let me down.

It’s so easy to be catastrophically wrong. And so difficult to admit it to yourself, internalize it, and act upon the knowledge.

Is faith ever warranted?

Probably not.

Sally’s betrayal felt more personal than Core General’s. Sally’s betrayal was more personal. I mean, for one thing, she was a person and not an institution.

I left Loese and walked into Ops. Sally was moored and spinning with the hospital, so we enjoyed the semblance of gravity and I settled into the familiar embrace of my acceleration couch. When I leaned back and looked up, the wide toroid of the hospital framed a sharp-edged, upside-down horizon across the top of the forward port.

Below that hard line, a line as solid and straight and massive as the stone edge of a crypt lid, the stars spilled out across the blinding brightness of the Core, with a whole galaxy turning behind it, the whole universe turning behind that. Billions upon billions of stars and billions upon billions of living souls.

They all seemed so bright and close that I almost could reach out my hand and cup them up, like cupping up reflections from the surface of still water. Except that putative water was light-ans deep, and mostly empty, and I was alone in it.

Well, staring into space wasn’t making me feel any less lonely. And difficult conversations don’t get any less difficult if you put them off.

“Sally,” I said, “can you make sure we’re alone?”

“We’re alone,” she answered. “I suppose you’re very angry with me?”

I knew she was already talking to Loese. And I was angry with her—very angry—but I paused a moment to inspect and categorize my feelings. I wanted to be fair, not punitive. I also wanted to be clear, so I let Sally into my senso while I ran the assessment, furious and hurt as I was.

I was angry on my own behalf. She had risked my life and betrayed my trust. Worse, she had lied to me about it—knowingly lied, not merely misdirected or left things out—and her lies had compounded the emotional damage.

Showing that vulnerability to Sally now, in the absence of trust that she would not use it against me, took courage I didn’t know I had, and I jump out of space ships for a living.

It was easier to let her see the other things I was angry about, the ones that made me a warrior rather than a victim. It was easy to show her that I was angry about her carelessness with Tsosie’s life, about the damage to the hospital and the casualties here, about her absolute bare-assed malicious negligence.

That was a righteous anger, and it was so much easier and more comfortable and safer to feel than the anger of personal hurt. But they were both real, and they both mattered, and—

And I was getting too angry to communicate effectively. To problem-solve.

I wasn’t going to start shouting at Sally. She deserved it, but yelling was a waste of time. And time was a thing we didn’t have in abundance right now. We had plenty of problems, crises, questions. Even plenty of tools: brains, skills, personnel.

But we didn’t have a lot of time. And we didn’t have a lot of answers, either.

So we needed to use the resources we did have to make up for or obtain the ones we didn’t. And the first step toward that was me not losing my shit all over Sally and wasting valuable hours when we could be problem-solving and saving lives.

I tuned, and I let Sally feel me tuning. I don’t know, even now, if that was honesty or a guilt trip. Or maybe sometimes a thing can be both. But right then I needed the machine in my head to make my emotions work, the same way the machine of my exo made my body work.

I was grateful for both of them. Which reminded me to plug myself in to the trickle charger on my couch while talking to Sally. Was it still my couch? I didn’t know. Maybe I really was losing everything, and that scared me more than the even-more-immediate prospect of losing my life.

Well, if I didn’t lose my life, there would be time to worry about everything else I didn’t have anymore after. It would be so much easier and safer to drop this. Let it go. Pretend I didn’t know anything.

I could not do that thing.

“I am angry,” I said at last. “I also understand your motivation, though I think your choices were really dumb.”

“Confidentiality,” she said. “I couldn’t talk about it to somebody who didn’t already know, and wasn’t a family member or wasn’t medically necessary to the treatment of the special, private patients. Most of us involved in the effort couldn’t. We did what we thought we had to do.”

She paused.

“It was a series of bad decisions,” she admitted.

“Well!” I swore. “I knew the administrators’ options are locked down. I didn’t realize that all the AIs are.”

Coercing people into staying silent about injustices has always worked out so well in the past.

“All the hospital AIs have to accept a patient confidentiality filter,” she said. “I’m sure the Judiciary does something similar.”

I wasn’t sure. But it seemed worth looking into. Later. “You did some really terrible things.”

“I know.” A long pause. “Are we still friends?”

That brought me up short. “Maybe,” I said. “I can’t protect you.”

“I wouldn’t expect—” She stopped. “When I decided to do this I knew that there would be consequences. I didn’t expect there to be consequences for innocent people along the way.”

The stress of the ethical conflict really had overridden her risk assessment protocols, the same way the stress of conflicting ethical calls had crashed Helen, sent her to the floor of the Cryo unit in a puddle.

Always know your exit strategy, they told us in the military.

My family… my family was a very “every person for themselves” kind of operation. Not out of cruelty, but because nobody had a lot of emotional resources to spare for anyone else, I suppose. Especially after my parents died. I have never been very good at being there for other people, as a result.

I am someone who mostly wants to pass unnoticed when she has been hurt or has been harmed. The vulnerability of being noticed—even to be comforted—makes me wary and self-conscious. Maybe Tsosie is right and I do float through, a little above and to the left of the real world.

So when it’s someone else’s turn to need comfort, it always feels like I’m intruding. Or, if someone is trying to help me, it feels like I am being intruded upon.

I pushed my head back against the couch. Maybe this time, I could fix that, a little. Maybe I could be there for somebody I considered family. Even if they had earned some consequences.

“Are you willing to fix the problem?” I meant the toxic meme as much as anything. It was the most important thing needing fixing that could be fixed.

“Of course!” Sally said. “I’ve been trying, but I don’t know how!”

“Didn’t you wri—no, come back to that. Was Jones the only logic bomb?”

“Yes.”

Relief made me feel like I was under acceleration. At least the shipmind Ruth would be safe, even if we couldn’t find a way to pass her the message not to DNA-scan any corpsicles in time to stop it. “Okay. So, given that you wrote the virus, why can’t you write a program to inoculate against it?”

She sighed. “I wrote it. But—this is an informed guess—it must have come into contact with the code in the machine when Jones’s cryo pod was on Big Rock Candy Mountain. And the code in the machine infected it, or possibly vice versa. And that’s probably my fault, because I had to rewrite Helen a little bit so that she would accept Jones as a member of her crew, and in so doing I probably left some code in her that gave the machine the ability to process the DNA scans in Jones’s pod…. And we did not plan for any of this.”

It was like biological viruses swapping chunks of genetic code in order to evolve faster. And this was going to be a huge pain in the ass, just like that was. It also meant that the machine was another vector for the meme….

That was probably, I realized, what had happened to Afar. Its crew had dropped off Calliope’s cryo pod, the machine had scanned her and integrated the code in unexpected ways—and before they could leave, the altered meme had been transferred from the machine to their shipmind. And into them, since Afar’s crew and their silicon-based brains handled rightminding by etching electrical pathways in the material of their icy bodies. The meme could have used that foothold and their connection to Afar and… rewritten their brains to be quiet.

I shivered. “You didn’t realize something was wrong when we found Afar?”

“Loese and I discussed it,” Sally said. “By the time we learned what the problem was, we were committed.”

I wondered if the discussion had been more of an argument, and if so which had taken what side. I decided I was happier in ignorance.

“Well,” I said, “you’ve incapacitated the people who would be most effective in solving this problem, I’m afraid. I don’t know who to suggest other than Zhiruo or Linden. And they’re all out of commission.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You can stop apologizing. Use that energy to work out a solution. I’m going to assume you’re agonizingly contrite about everything, and torn by the claws of conscience to boot.”

“There’s somebody who’s not out of commission,” she said. “But I suspect you won’t love it. It means breaking quarantine and risking somebody outside the infected zone. If he’ll even do it.”

“Tell me,” I said. “Then we can decide.”

“Singer,” she said. “The shipmind of I Rise From Ancestral Night, the ancient ship that was salvaged from the Well. We met him on the way in, if you remember. He should be back from helping Ruth correct Big Rock Candy Mountain’s course by now.”

“Weird,” I said. “But I’m listening.”

“Not weird,” she argued. “He’s already figured out how to reprogram himself into an alien architecture and make it home. He’s got the necessary experience to take on the machine. If anybody can.”

“The Judiciary isn’t going to like us risking their special antique vessel.”

“They’re going to like losing Core General even less.”

She had a point, as much as I hated to admit it.

Then she said, “I’m also going to need Helen.”

My frown felt like an anchor dragging my face down. How much was I going to trust Sally?

How much was Helen going to want to trust Sally?

Was she even telling me the truth about her motivation? Had her actions been competent malice, rather than tragically mistaken altruism? Was she going to lie to me again? Was she pretending she understood that she had made a mistake to conceal some deeper, even more malevolent plan?

I might be being a fool. I might be choosing to be a fool, with my eyes wide open.

But the alternative was to turn my information over to well-meaning officials who might fix the meme but who were physically constrained from dealing with the root of the problem; to bank on my suspicion and betrayal and let everybody die; or take a risk and see if it worked out.

I realized that I was, in my own turn, gambling with a lot of lives with what I thought was sufficient cause. So maybe I was a hypocrite to be furious with Sally.

I hadn’t put the lives on the table to begin with, though, so I felt I had a little high ground. Sally hadn’t realized what stakes she was choosing… but she had opted into playing for them.

“What do you need Helen for?” I asked.

“She’s going to be our easiest access point to the code in the tinkertoy machine. And she’s our local expert on archaic programs.”

“I don’t know what else to do or how else to get through this,” I said. “So I am going to trust you. I want you to know that if it turns out you’re playing me, I’m going to spend the whole endless time the black hole is spaghettifying both of us being extremely disappointed in you.”

Sally made a sound I couldn’t translate, though it had to be intended as communication or she wouldn’t have made it. “You wouldn’t be wrong.”

Now I was sneaking around behind O’Mara’s back, even though I was pretty sure I was doing what they wanted me to be doing. The goals, anyway: they’d probably think my methods were criminally stupid.

Much as I felt about Sally. It’s turtles all the way down, is what I’m saying, and if we destroy the universe at least we died trying to fix it. Rather than sitting around with digits in our orifices expecting somebody else to come to the rescue.

That said, being hasty and reckless leads to catastrophe. (Imagine me looking pointedly at Sally, here. Also, imagine for the purposes of this exercise that Sally is corporeal.) There are a couple of principles that translate through both military action and rescue action. One I know I’ve mentioned before: “adapt, improvise, and overcome.” Another is the old aphorism that “slow is fast,” or “slow and steady wins the race,” or “haste makes waste,” or “more speed, less haste,” or however your CO likes to phrase it.

The third and sometimes most important one boils down to the knowledge that contingency plans and fallback positions are mission-critical: never get into something without knowing your route back out again.

I couldn’t see a lot of routes out of our current cluster. Admittedly, I hadn’t gotten us into it, either. But at this point, why not endorse Sally getting in touch with yet another AI for help with the coding? I say endorse rather than allow because let’s be honest, I had absolutely no control over her. One never does have control over other people, and it’s abusive to try—outside of certain defined command structures. But the illusion of control is comforting.

The toxicity of certain comforting illusions is another argument in favor of rightminding, I guess. Being able to identify those self-delusions for what they are is the beginning of healthy cognition, and allows one to take steps to mitigate their impact on decision-making.

But we modern humans aren’t any better or more evolved than our ancient ancestors who nearly destroyed their planet and themselves with shortsightedness and selfishness: making the immediately futile decision and not worrying too much about the consequences. The choices Loese and Sally made should render that quite plain.

What we do have is better health care, better management of sophipathology, more leisure in which to think about things, and centians or millennians more experience and history and aggregated thought to draw upon.

Well, I wanted to preserve that history and experience for further generations. And I couldn’t see a better way to do that—and preserve all the lives on Core General—than Sally’s plan.

So here we were. Breaking quarantine.

We could receive signals from the outside with no problem. Nobody was going to get infected with a toxic meme because we were listening to them. (Listening is always a good first step when you find you have a communications problem. Thank you, I’m here all week.) Broadcasting, however, was strictly contraindicated. O’Mara must have either pulled some real strings or used an isolated com when they called the gunship Nonesuch in on Calliope and her craboid.

I wondered, as I worked to determine the current location and trajectory of I Rise From Ancestral Night, if there was an AI organization working on securing more rights for their people. Sally would never tell me if I asked, of that I was suddenly sure.

AIs were Synizens of the galaxy. But they were born into debt and owing decans of service to pay for their own construction—an obligation we don’t ask any other sentient to assume.

Core General is considered essential, and the AIs who elect to work here are usually free of their inception debt after one term of contract, whether they volunteer or are selected. Still, remembering that gave me some insight. Both into why Zhiruo might consider clones, even ones developed to the possibility of sentience, as disposable raw materials to save another life… and why Sally might risk everything, even somewhat illogically, to put a stop to the practice.

“Found him,” Sally said, disrupting my reverie. “Or, rather, found where he was 9.73 light-minutes ago, and I have a very good plot of his trajectory.”

Loese had joined us on the command deck and been briefed about our strategy. I’d half hoped she would come up with something better, but here we were. Making potentially terrible decisions. Now she said, “Are you ready with the tightbeam?”

“Sending,” Sally answered. “Audio only, filtered frequencies.”

That was the safest way we could make the contact.

Actually, I was pretty sure she’d already sent our prepared burst to the ancient ship’s projected locations approximately 9.7 et cetera light-minutes from now. The longer we waited, the more the probabilities drifted on the other ship’s projected track.

I settled back to wait. The earliest possible response would come in twenty minutes, more or less. The urge to drift into self-pity was nearly irresistible, and it startled me—but the urge itself didn’t startle me as much as how comfortable it was. How inviting.

I knew what was behind it: embracing the sense of betrayal and righteousness was safe.

It wouldn’t help me work with Sally, though. And I needed to work with Sally.

Ten and a half standard minutes later, while I was losing a game of virtual checkers to Loese, a brilliant flash of light heralded the sudden dimming of our forward port. A huge mass blocked my view of every running light, every lensing star, even the vast whirl of the Saga-star’s accretion disk. They all vanished, replaced by the back-limned outline of a strangely organic-looking hull: something that looked less built and more grown.

It had fallen out of white space as if materializing, angled slightly away from Sally and the hospital both to avoid pulverizing us with its bow wave. The accelerated particles that came with a white space transition had caused that blinding flash when they met some of the local, thinly distributed matter near Core General. Now they were speeding off on a harmless trajectory.

The ship was I Rise From Ancestral Night, and I felt a spark of disbelief that it had not only risked a white space transition of so short a duration, into such a confined space—but also managed it flawlessly. The pilot and the shipmind, I concluded, were both hot dogs.

There, undocked, it maintained position seamlessly—despite the hospital’s spin. Sally sighed in my head with envy.

“Sally?” said a voice audibly over coms. “This is Singer. I got your message. It seemed I should come in a hurry.”

“Um,” I said. “I don’t want to be the one who has to explain that to O’Mara.”

The AIs got down to business. Singer seemed comfortable protecting himself, and I decided to leave the process to the experts and not worry myself. I was pretty sure I could find plenty of my own problems to concentrate on anyway. Sitting here waiting for Sally or Singer to goof up and get infected with their own virus/antivirus code wasn’t making me any happier or helping to move the situation toward a successful resolution.

Ergo, it was time for me to go find something else useful to do.