Machine

CHAPTER 27

GUESS WHO GOT TO EXPLAIN things to O’Mara? They were about to press the call button beside our hatch as I climbed out of Sally into the docking ring.

They eyed me. I eyed them.

They said, “We’re supposed to be under quarantine, you know.”

I said, “Well, you called a gunship.”

They held out their hand to assist me to my feet. I took it, feeling dwarfed. O’Mara was always good about letting you use their strength as an anchor, but sometimes you remembered how large and strong they were. “Come on,” I said. “Walk with me, and I’ll explain how we’re going to save the biggest hospital in the galaxy.”

“I like the sound of that,” they said. “How confident are you?”

I laughed. “Oh,” I said. “Thirty percent? Ten percent, if you plan to try to stop me.”

They looked at me very seriously. “I have no intentions of doing anything to stop you.”

Helen was easy to track down. Once I found her, I sent her to talk to Sally and Singer about the machine, her own programming, and how to save the world—at least the small, artificial world that was this hospital, and the small artificial world that was Big Rock Candy Mountain, and possibly many much larger worlds as well.

That accomplished, I applied myself to the next problem. I sent O’Mara ahead to Cryo, and found Dwayne Carlos in a cafeteria. The directories were still down, so I got a lot of walking in while tracking him through the hospital. I picked up Tsosie along the way, more by accident than by design, and was surprised to find his presence bulwarked me.

Carlos was at a corner table eating spaghetti. Pretty soon so were Tsosie and I, having sat down across from him. I was trying to remember the last time I ate something that wasn’t spaghetti.

My allofather used to say grace before every meal. I wasn’t sure what it was that had abruptly made me remember that, but this seemed like a good time for being thankful. So I contented myself with a moment of gratitude that there were still organics for the printers (even if what they were printing was, ironically, spaghetti) and that the reclaimers were still working to make water. Dying of thirst in space seemed even less fun than being spaghettified.

That made me wonder about the optics of eating long pasta. I suppose irony will out.

Having bowed my head over the food—I sensed Tsosie’s amusement but didn’t make eye contact—I sipped my tea, started twirling spaghetti, and applied myself to the conversation.

Carlos was eating methodically, with every evidence of enjoyment, cutting slices of protein ball with the side of his fork, swirling them through the sauce, and chewing each one meditatively. I still didn’t really understand him.

But he was, I thought, somebody I could trust. He wasn’t from here. He didn’t have alliances or duties. He might be useful somehow. And what we were doing involved his crew, and other than Helen—and Oni, who was still being kept under sedation—he was their only representative.

Briskly, in a low voice that wouldn’t carry over the cafeteria noise, I brought both Carlos and Tsosie up to speed on what I’d learned from Loese and Sally. Tsosie’s expression got darker and dourer as I spoke, but he said nothing. Carlos at some point quit eating his spaghetti.

He leaned forward. “So Jones isn’t one of mine.”

I made a sour face.

“Ha!” he said, and resumed eating as if well-satisfied. A bite or two later, he frowned at me and said, “So what does this mean for the rest of my crew?”

I shrugged. “If we can unpick the machine, we might have a better chance of reviving the ones who’ve made it this far. Something in the capsule programs has been… sticky.”

“Sticky?”

“Oppositional.”

“Oh.” He pushed his fork through noodles. “And you found some sort of cargo hold full of clones? Illegal clones? Do I understand that properly?”

“Unethical clones.” I set my own fork down. A moment of meanness made me add, “I said I would show you and… I’ll show you.”

“Mmm,” Carlos said. “Thanks all the same. I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around why me, why us. Why they thought this was a good idea in the first place.”

I laughed and covered my face. “If you found a disabled generation ship full of corpsicles, could you resist using it?”

“I resent the appellation corpsicle,” he said, so deadpan that it was a moment before I realized he was joking.

Tsosie said, “A literal sleeper agent. It’s like a conspiracy sandwich.”

I reclaimed the fork and made myself stick it into the food. Eating hurt. Not eating would hurt more, in the long run. “Treason between two slices of betrayal.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” Tsosie asked.

I shook my head. “Fix the problem, if we can? Save the dia? Save the hospital and Carlos’s ship and basically everything?”

A presence filled my senso. “Sally’s here,” I told the men. Tsosie, obviously also in the loop, nodded. Carlos leaned on his forearms.

Singer was there, too, I realized. Definitely taking a few risks, that one.

I’ve told Singer what we know, Sally said. He’s informed the Judiciary. They’re not pleased with his and his pilot’s decision to come to our rescue, but he doesn’t think they will take any action against him. Especially if we succeed in saving the hospital.

“Great,” I said. “Are we going to succeed in saving the hospital?”

We have something we think might work, Singer said.

Sally asked, Do you want to try it first on Afar, or on Linden? I’d recommend Afar, because if anything goes terribly wrong for Linden it might further damage the hospital.

“Zhiruo,” I answered, and everybody—physically present and in senso—stared at me. Or performed the virtual equivalent.

Are you… sure? Sally’s tone told me that she found my choice potentially punitive, which I wasn’t sure was a judgment she was currently entitled to make, but whatever.

It was true that if it didn’t work, Zhiruo—other than Sally, who wasn’t infected—was the person who most deserved whatever fallout the sequelae might entail. That was not a medically ethical reason to use her as a test subject, however.

But I very much needed to talk to her. And that… was a much more supportable reason.

I wasn’t at all sure it was the best idea I’d ever had, however.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”

Over by the printers, someone cursed. Tsosie craned his neck, frowned, and hunched his head back into his shoulders. Under his breath, he muttered, “Looks like no more provisions from this cafeteria.”

Carlos’s face sallowed. “This was how it started.”

“How what started?” Tsosie asked.

The ancient human swallowed, reached for water. Drank and swallowed again. “On the Rock. When the machine broke out. When we were all sick, and the captain wanted us to go into the pods. This is how the system failures started.”

There’s a thing that happens in medicine sometimes where you spend a subjective lifetime scratching your head (if you have a head) over a patient whose condition you can’t make heads or tails of. So you hand that patient over to a colleague in a more appropriate specialty, and get them back again, dizzyingly fast, cured of whatever was puzzling you.

It doesn’t happen often—usually, you get them back with whatever their other complaints were worsened by the delay, and a boatload of additional treatment modalities in place that may or may not be helping. Because patients insist on being not logic problems but real, complicated people with real, complicated problems that won’t tidily resolve with the application of an epiphany and a course of antivirals, or some stem cell therapy, or a quick reprogram of some damaged DNA.

But sometimes it does work. And those cases are gratifying and humiliating in equal measure. Gratifying because the problem is solved. Humiliating because you weren’t the one who solved it, and from the outside and in retrospect, the process of diagnosis and treatment looks so damned easy.

Dr. Zhiruo wasn’t my patient. And I knew perfectly well that what had solved the problem was the combination of Sally’s knowledge of the virus that had caused it with Helen’s knowledge of the machine and Singer’s skill at reading strange programs. It’s much easier to provide an antidote if the poisoner tells you how they made the patient sick in the first place.

Five standard hours after I left them alone to work on the problem, the artificial intelligences had solved it. Helen found me and delivered the antivirus on a data diamond. I held it in my hand and watched its brilliance as I turned it in the light.

I had expected to spend most of that time—after my conversation with Tsosie and Carlos—justifying my existence and life choices to O’Mara and Starlight, given that we’d broken quarantine protocol. That I wasn’t summoned to report for administrative endoscopy was possibly the best indicator possible of how bad things were. And that O’Mara still trusted me.

I looked from the diamond to Helen, who sparkled in her own way. “Well,” I said. “I guess we go to Cryo now.”

Her suggestion of a chin lifted. “After that, we need to tackle the machine.”

“I’m not sure how,” I admitted.

She was continuing to develop and evolve. All she had ever needed was the resources to enrich herself, and the space to grow into. She was so brave and so slight—and, okay, so glittery—that my eyes stung a little from looking at her.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “But I’m going to need to borrow your exo.”

“My—”

“We’ll talk about it later. Right now, let’s get to Cryo.”

O’Mara was still waiting in Cryo. Their blocky frame leaned against the bulkhead, arms folded over their chest. It should have been a self-effacing pose, but the master chief was so damned big they made the unit seem cramped.

Rilriltok was with them, buzzing morosely, perched on the high back of the desk rather than hovering in the air.

Helen and I marched up to them. I held the diamond aloft. “Why the long faces, Doctors?”

O’Mara’s expression didn’t brighten, but they straightened from their slump. “What’s that?”

“With luck, the antiviral for Dr. Zhiruo that I told you about.”

O’Mara made a motion whose significance I had to look up in senso. Apparently it was a religious gesture for averting evil or summoning luck. I hadn’t known they were a Catholic.

“Will it work?” they asked.

There is doubtless only one way to find out, friend O’Mara. Rilriltok buzzed to me. Fragile manipulators lifted the crystal from my hands. Try it and see.

Singer was confident in his work, at least. While we waited for the program to run, he patched himself through to Core General and watched over our shoulders. I couldn’t stand it: I plugged my exo into the system directly. I could charge myself up while I watched the treatment happening.

Most of the data flow was over my head, to be honest. I’m not an AI doctor. Helen, much more practical—and built to anticipate the needs of organic life-forms—made a head-wiggle as if rolling the eyes she didn’t have at me, and loaded a sim even O’Mara could follow onto the wall screen.

I watched orange blocks turning blue, hundreds of thousands of them. A logarithmic process, apparently, because the conversion started off achingly slowly and bit by bit accelerated until they were changing too fast for me to see. The whole treatment took five minutes.

Five minutes, after which I realized I had reached out at some point and taken Helen’s hand. Her hand, which was warm and resilient and a little bit plasticky and felt nothing at all like a real human body. There were no bones in it. It was all squish.

“It worked,” Sally said.

I looked at O’Mara. “I want to talk to her.”

O’Mara pursed their lips. Before they could formulate whatever they were thinking of saying, I shook my head and said, “Alone.”

Their hands went up; they stepped back. “It’s my own fault if this doesn’t work out how I wanted.”

“Funny.” I grinned. We weren’t out of the woods yet, not by a long shot. But I felt like I had at least found a blazed trail that looked like it might lead somewhere. “I thought the whole point of getting me involved was so you could blame me for whatever went wrong.”

O’Mara lifted their chin to look over my shoulder. “Helen, let’s treat Linden next. Jens—”

My heels clicked. “Present.”

“Just fucking make sure you’re recording.”

When I went in, Zhiruo’s code was still isolated. I found her in a virtual garden, a haven of classical statues of seven or eight civilizations and whispering leaves. Never having interacted with her through avatars, I was surprised that she had chosen to simulate a physical, organic form. Most AIs—if they must manifest as something other than a disembodied voice or a presence in the senso—choose an inorganic avatar. I’ve lost count of how many sparkles of dancing lights in various colors I’ve had heart-to-heart conversations with, over the ans.

But Zhiruo was dressed as a Ykazhian. It gave me a start, because at first sight I thought I was looking at Hhayazh, and the rush of gladness and recognition of an old friend almost overwhelmed my anger.

I bet that was why she did it, frankly. Sneaky manipulative bundle of code.

I walked up in front of her, choosing to interact with the virtual world as if it had gravity and I had a solid human body. I felt like stomping; I limited myself to stepping firmly.

“Dr. Jens,” she said, sounding pleased and plummy and prim. “You seem to have reintegrated my code. I had not realized that lay within your skill corona.”

“I had help.”

If she picked up my tone, she didn’t show it. “Linden?”

“Linden has been affected by the virus, too, and is being treated. We called in an outside specialist.” I took a breath my avatar didn’t need. It’s always hard to switch modes from polite introduction into confrontation. So much easier to slide away and let a problem go unchallenged. “I know what you’ve been doing, Dr. Zhiruo.”

She quivered her feelers inquiringly. “Struggling to retain program integrity?”

“I mean the clones.”

Her simulated jaws clicked, internal a moment before external. She must be performing the calculations on my mood and intent too fast for me to see, so perhaps she was delaying in order to give herself additional time to read my signals.

“Well,” she said, “since you’ve learned about it by yourself, there’s no difficulty. We can fix your problem easily.”

My avatar had crossed its arms. I heard my fingers rattle on my exo as I tapped them against my upper arms. “I have a problem?”

I hadn’t known a Ykazhian could look so conciliatory. “What we’re doing helps people, Llyn. It helps them directly, when we treat them. And it helps them indirectly, when we use the resources we collect to support access to health care for everybody else. The Synarche does not allot us enough resources to run this hospital as well as it needs to be run. What if I could help you?”

“Help me.”

Her gesture took in my body, the exo. “You don’t have to be in pain.”

“I’m not in pain.” I was. But I saw no reason to make myself vulnerable.

“What if I told you we could clone your body, repair the genetic damage—your neuralgia—and upload your ayatana into the fox of a blank slate?”

That brought me up short and hard. Without snappy repartee. Without anything to say at all.

I was still herding my neurons back into some semblance of coherence when she added, “We’d waive the procedure support cost. Your service to Core Gen has earned you some consideration.”

“The hospital doesn’t do that,” I said.

She laughed. “If you say so.”

I gathered myself. “I mean, I know the hospital does it. But it’s a sleazy side job, and as much as possible, you hide it from everyone. You’ve been doing it so long you—what—got the previous administrator to set up a hack in the patient confidentiality monitors so that future admins can’t even talk about the program?”

She didn’t speak.

“Even if I believed you, where’s the continuity of experience? It’s a lossy copy. And you’re putting that data into another brain—”

“An identical brain,” she said.

I scoffed in turn. “If you say so.”

She looked at me, bristles all pointed in my direction.

I said, “Neurons and synapses form in response to stimulus. To experience. To use. Personality and function are shaped—quite physically—by experience. You can’t grow a brain in a vat, transcribe somebody’s machine memory onto it, and expect to get the same person back. You have to develop the brain, and it won’t be the same brain, no matter what.”

Even on a syster’s body, the somatics of dismissal were evident. “Plenty of people seem to think it’s a road to eternal life.”

Maybe she didn’t realize I knew that they were developing the brains? Maybe she was trying to brazen it out? “Plenty of rich people used to drink pearl powder in quicksilver to cure their gout,” I replied. “That was a death sentence, too.”

“What if I told you that you wouldn’t have to wear that thing everywhere?”

That thing. I squeezed myself a little tighter, as if I could protect my exo from her scorn.

Lead her on. “How would you do something like that?”

“The same. Body transplant,” she said. “We move your ayatana into a different fox. In a cloneself with no developed personality.”

“So you’d copy me, and then kill the original?”

“We’d move you.”

“If this were legitimate—or even noncontroversial—the hospital would offer it as a matter of course.”

“The hospital does,” she said. “To people who can support the hospital’s work.”

“But not to everybody.” I had a moment’s respect for this wily slice of code. She had figured out a way to keep Core General funded. To get it built in the first place, when everything had nearly fallen apart. And nobody got hurt except people who were willing to sacrifice their own clone children to their continued existence. And those clone children.

If I hadn’t met Calliope Jones, I might even think it was a kind of justice.

“It works,” she said. “And no one suffers.”

I had to tune back my rage to keep from spluttering and was not entirely successful. “That’s not even… The clone suffers.”

“The clone is never aware.”

“The clone is aware enough to dream,” I said. “The clone is aware enough to develop speech centers and a working hippocampus. The clone is aware enough that it counts as a person to me.”

The most important thing in the universe is not, it turns out, a single, objective truth. It’s not a hospital whose ideals you love, that treats all comers. It’s not a lover; it’s not a job. It’s not friends and teammates.

It’s not even a child that rarely writes me back, and to be honest I probably earned that. I could have been there for her. I didn’t know how to be there for anybody, though. Not even for me.

The most important thing in the universe, it turns out, is a complex of subjective and individual approximations. Of tries and fails. Of ideals, and things we do to try to get close to those ideals.

It’s who we are when nobody is looking.

I sat down on the bench that I knew would be a step behind me, because this was a virtual world. I let Zhiruo loom over me, and folded my hands.

I said, “I didn’t know you were doing this until recently. But nevertheless I was protecting you. Me, and everybody else in the hospital. You were using us and our reputations as your shield, whether you acknowledge it or not. We’re all tarnished by your act. You put every single one of us at risk, do you understand that?”

“You had nothing to do with it.”

“No one on the outside is going to care about that, Zhiruo. And nobody is going to care about your protestations that they were only clones, that they had no awareness. You had to build them to have some awareness in order for them to grow useable brains.”

“They’re not people!”

It is possible to erase and mortify yourself to the point where you actually make more work for the people around you, because they are constantly doing emotional labor to support you. A well-developed martyr complex becomes a means of getting attention without ever having to take the emotional risks of asking for attention. It’s a tendency, along with self-pity, that I use my rightminding to control. So I didn’t unpack the suitcase full of self-recriminations and fury I was feeling. I didn’t castigate myself to show Zhiruo that however much anybody might punish me for being imperfect, for being involved, I would punish myself faster and more.

I bit my tongue on all of that.

I said, “They’re people. Look at Calliope.”

“I can help you,” she said.

“It’s too late,” I said. “The Synarche and the Judiciary now officially know what’s been going on here. It’s out of my hands, Doc.”

“It’s not illegal,” she said.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But it is scandalous. Which is why you’ve kept it secret. Because I guarantee that public opinion will make sure it is illegal. Probably so fast it’ll happen before we manage to get this hospital fully retrofitted for gravity.”

“What about your reputation? About what you just said? About the hospital’s reputation?”

I pressed my virtual hands against my virtual eyes. It did nothing to relieve the very real headache. I was briefly very glad that I was not the rightminding specialist that was going to have to guide Zhiruo into understanding that what she had done was wrong, then guide her through the process of determining and completing the combination of restorative actions and service that might be required to make reparations for everything she had done. It wasn’t illegal—but I bet it would be before the Synarche’s General Council recessed again.

“I guess we both have some work to do,” I said. Zhiruo was somebody else’s problem now, and I didn’t feel bad about that at all. I just wanted to get away from her. Right now, though, I had to go put an ayatana on.

And find out what Helen wanted to borrow my exo for. If she was ready to tell.