Machine

CHAPTER 28

I ENTERED STARLIGHT’S PARK THROUGH A door that irised half-open and then stuck. I stepped high like a prancing pony, ducked my head, and jump-climbed through as quickly as possible, without touching the edges. I wanted to keep my torso intact, and all my limbs. I guess we were fortunate that Starlight seemed to be the only physical sentience since the Darboof who was affected by the meme. But then, Starlight was mostly made of wood, which could be interpreted as a construction material. And Starlight was almost completely integrated into the hospital’s physical… er… plant.

At least their brain wasn’t etchable crystal, like the poor Darboof. They could still think, and communicate.

I was rehearsing the conversation to come in my head. I wanted and I did not want to have it, both with equal fervor. Perhaps I should say that I was eager to have it over with.

Starlight was not doing well. Even before I approached the canopy, I could tell. The weight of crystallizing leaves dragged the great tree’s canopy down—or up, from the tree’s perspective, since Starlight grew roots-toward-the-hub in defiance of local standards of direction. Leaves needed light, and light was on the outside. It was irrelevant that weight was on the outside, too.

What concerned me the most were the places where boughs had cracked under the mass of all that silicon. Some big branches had already snapped, and either hung suspended by shreds of bark or lay scattered on the crystal underfoot.

I was wearing an ayatana for Starlight’s species. It was probably the most pleasant one I’ve ever worn, to be honest, although my body felt weird and squishy, respiration was extremely odd, and I was self-conscious of the whorfling noises I kept making with every breath in or out. I also had an overwhelming urge to wave my limbs in time with the breeze. Even though there wasn’t any.

I didn’t need the ayatana to tell me that the administrator was desperately ill.

The outer windows seemed to be holding up so far: no cracks or chips evident. They were durable, but I have lived as long as I have lived in part by never trusting the integrity of a damaged structure too far.

I triggered my hardsuit, except for the helmet, and waited while it grew around me. If the pressure dropped, it would finish the seal on its own. If another limb dropped from the tree and crushed me… well, my problems would be over. I decided to worry about that some other time. And if I died before I got around to worrying, there was already more important unfinished business on that to-do list anyway.

After a few moments, the administrator had not acknowledged me. Maybe it would help if I yelled.

Does it ever help if one yells?

“Starlight,” I said. “Are you there?”

The translated voice in my head, when it came, seemed creaky and slow. [Dr. Jens. How may we assist you?]

“It’s how I can help you,” I said. “I came to tell you that we’ve developed a treatment for afflicted AIs. Dr. Zhiruo was our test case, and she’s responding well. We are treating Afar and Linden next. If all goes well, you should have Linden back very soon.”

[Well done,] the tree chimed. [Please be aware that it is not yet safe to lift the quarantine….]

Fine dust drifted over my head. I put my hand over my mouth and nose. Silicosis would be a quick way to needing a pair of vat-grown lungs my own self.

I knew that. I couldn’t lift the quarantine while this was going on. So now we had to cure this. But first, there was something I needed to report on.

Better done than danced around. “I know about the clones.”

A great sigh rustled over me. [Have you told anyone?]

“A Judiciary AI. The shipmind of I Rise From Ancestral Night. And put him in touch with Sally and with Dr. Zhiruo. I also told O’Mara. Steps will be taken. I imagine Dr. Zhiruo will be investigated and reassigned.”

And probably have her programming adjusted after an intensive course with an AI psychologist. I couldn’t imagine the Judiciary just… turning her loose to wreak similar havoc elsewhere.

[Good,] Starlight said. [And the saboteurs?]

“I found them,” I said. “Some of them. Not the entire… Look, I think there’s a pretty large cabal. I interviewed the ones I located. They did not threaten me. Their plans got… a little out of hand.” My gesture took in the cracked branches, the downed limbs.

Starlight found a chuckle somewhere. [We’re glad to hear it wasn’t intentional. The problems will be resolved? There will be consequences?]

“Judiciary is following up on the rest of the conspirators. There will be consequences. I believe they will all be located,” I said. “You guessed that they were trying to draw attention to Zhiruo’s private protocols?”

[The incidents were localized in a suggestive way. Draw attention… no. We assumed they were attacking the protocols.]

“They didn’t realize that you and O’Mara were already—” I stopped. In on it wasn’t exactly correct. “They didn’t realize that you already knew what was going on and couldn’t stop it.”

[Their faith in the system is touching.]

I sighed. “As near as I can reconstruct, when Big Rock Candy Mountain’s crew contracted a pandemic, the captain ordered them all into cold storage. He got… a little strange, all alone. And altered the program on the ship’s AI in order to create a kind of guardian bot that first bullied his incapacitated crew into the pods, and then… guarded them. This worked out as well as mad science usually does. Time passed. That bot came in contact with the virus the saboteurs had set up as a trap for Dr. Zhiruo, to overwrite her protocols and force her to confess her sins—”

[Ambitious.]

“A little too ambitious,” I agreed. “The infection of the machine must have been intentional, because they needed the machine to make sure we took the right cryo casket.”

[It was an overcomplicated plan, and it went horribly wrong.]

“It was. It did. The conspirators that I interviewed have, however, surrendered. They are cooperating with the treatment of the affected AIs.”

[Good. Then we can rest.]

“Don’t you dare.”

A pause. Then, [Excuse me?]

“Don’t you dare give up on me,” I said.

[Llyn,] the tree said gently. [We’re dying.]

“And I’m a fucking doctor,” I said. “Don’t you dare give up on me. I will put this place to rights if it kills me.” I took a deep breath. “Anyway, Helen has been through this before. And Helen and I have a plan.”

It was a terrible plan, but that’s par for the course around here. We didn’t have a better one, and with the meme eating Core General from the inside out, our options were either to put off acting until we either starved or the hull cracked open or we thought of something less radical… or to take a risk and maybe have time to try something else if it failed and we weren’t dead after.

I sent for Helen. She must have been waiting outside the broken door, because in less than a minute, she was beside me. She plopped herself on the crystal of the hull immediately, as if she sat down on the bodiless depths of space every dia.

Although, come to think of it, she was a space ship. Even if she was a differently embodied space ship for the time being.

I reached into the ayatana—only one ayatana, thank the space goblins—for a better sense of Starlight’s anatomy. I reached out and took Helen’s hand. It still felt weird, but given who I was sharing my brain with, no weirder than my own body.

I looked up at Starlight. “It’s not just you, you know. The whole hospital is in danger.”

A rustle that was not words answered. And then words. [What about… the crew of Afar?]

“The first one to undergo surgery is awake,” I said. “With limited deficits. It’s going to be—”

I couldn’t say it was going to be all right.

“The prognosis is good,” I finished.

Starlight laughed. [Our prognosis is not good, Dr. Jens.]

“I am,” I said definitively, “a rescue specialist. I am also the only person we know of, other than Helen, who has managed to come into direct contact with this thing and find a way out again. We have the skills, Starlight.”

[We do not doubt your capabilities.] They sighed, wind through leaves, with a strange crystal edge to it. [We are tired and in a lot of pain.]

“Sibling,” I said, “I feel you.”

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Helen said. “We have to take on the meme, and the machine the meme is building, and disentangle it from your cellular structure. And once we learn how to do it here, we can apply that knowledge to getting it out of my own ship.”

[And how do you propose to accomplish that? If we could access its processing pathways—if we could even find them—we think we could fight it. But it’s building its own parallel infrastructure through ours, and in fact disassembling ours to accomplish this.]

Starlight rattled their crystallizing leaves for emphasis. Something cracked, and broken pieces tinkled.

I winced and held up one hand. “Please don’t harm yourself. We have a plan. We’re going to break into the machine with”—I waved—“my exo.”

What happened next involved a lot of tubes and wiring. Well, to be absolutely precise, what happened next in a rigorous sequence of events was a long walk through corridors with flickering, unsettling lighting, down to Cryo, where we met Carlos and Rilriltok. O’Mara had left: I assumed they were back in their office, coordinating treatment efforts on the other AIs and continuing support for Zhiruo. The fact of the matter was that now that we had the base code to work from, and the antivirus, once we could get the paralyzed AIs back online they were more than capable of handling their own defense. It was a matter of… well, I’m an organics doc. So I’m going to cast this in terms that make sense to me.

It was a matter of giving them a vaccination, so they could build their own antibodies to the problem, and adapt those antibodies as the problem evolved. That, and giving them a little platform of clear space to assemble their formidable resources on, and to sally forth to fight from.

I lay down in the cryo pod—Dwayne Carlos’s cryo pod, for a closer connection to the machine. I remembered how I had used my relationship with my exo to stand firm against the machine before, to weasel myself and Calliope out of its clutches, and reviewed the tactics I had used. It would be better prepared this time, I was sure.

And this time I had Helen.

There you go again, deciding to trust somebody you don’t really know.

Well, if it all went wrong, I could have the comfort of knowing I’d had one foot out the door the whole time. Maybe, before I died, I could mutter a single, ringing I told you so.

I was plastered all over with sticky disks, and Helen, sitting on the edge of the cryo pod, bristled with wires. Rilriltok was making the final, tricky, hair-fine connections directly into my fox and exo.

The door slid open and Goodlaw Cheeirilaq strode in, feathery feet clacking on the tiles, wing undercoverts showing flashes of fiery red and yellow. If I had had to guess, this was the Rashaqin body language for I am extremely pissed off and about to do something about it. I didn’t have to guess, though, because the instant Cheeirilaq entered, Rilriltok ducked itself entirely behind me.

I ought to arrest the lot of you, it said.

I tried to sit straighter in my hedgehog bristle of connective devices. “Probably,” I said. “What would the proximate cause be?”

It fiddled its forelimbs, as upright in posture as it could be, given the height of the ceiling. I wasn’t sure if it was counting up different offenses, or if it was picking out which one outraged it the most.

You concealed evidence leading to the identity of saboteurs!

“I brought that evidence to O’Mara. What else?”

A raptorial forelimb snapped out, so fiercely I thought it likely to sever my leads or possibly even me. Cheeirilaq had better control than that, though. It stopped a few centimeters from my chest. You’re about to endanger this entire facility with some… some primate shenanigans and untested protocols.

Rilriltok peered over my shoulder: just the eyes. Begging your pardon, friend Cheeirilaq. But the hospital is already in danger. Or did you have an uneventful trip here? One involving smoothly functioning equipment and reliable lighting?

Cheeirilaq loomed, then settled back slightly. It didn’t exactly have haunches, but the long legs folded to lower its abdomen. I… did not.

“Look,” I said. “We have—”

Carlos stepped between me and Cheeirilaq, interrupting me as if I had not been speaking. “We have to do something now. The equilibrium is punctuating, and if we don’t deal with the machine immediately… we’re all going to die. Ask me how I know.”

That man. Was so damned annoying sometimes.

But Cheeirilaq was listening to him. And to Helen, when she added, “If we can get the machine to de-integrate from the hospital’s structure, to stop disassembling the hospital… Well, the hospital is going to need structural repairs. But I’ve seen what the machine does to a habitat on the premise that it’s making the inhabitants safe forever. And it doesn’t even seem to have those constraints on this station. We cannot allow that to happen here.”

The extra processing power was definitely making a difference.

“I did it once, on a small scale,” I offered. “I think we can do it again.”

The Goodlaw gave one of its enormous highly oxygenated sighs. When we’re all dead and floating in space, I will save my last transmission to remind each and every one of you that I told you this was a terrible idea.

Carlos and I looked at each other. “Fair,” he said.

“Fair,” I echoed. “Now can we get the rest of these leads attached before anything else falls off this hospital?”

I lay in the dark again, and talked to the machine. It was less rewarding than I had anticipated.

The first object was to get it talking. Get it engaging.

I made sure I could feel Helen through my fox, there behind me. And Sally and Linden back there, too. I wished I had time to throw confetti and sing songs about the contact with Linden, but when the world is ending sometimes you have to save the party until there’s time to bake.

Then I reached out into the networks of the (disabled!) cryo chamber, and through it to the networks of the hospital. I groped. I squinted, metaphorically speaking. Sally and Helen groped and squinted with me, right alongside.

The cryo unit had been built by the machine. Or built using the same protocols as the machine. It was a back door, in other words, into the neural networks we were trying to locate and pry loose. By seeking through a neural network that was connected to and used the same protocols as the machine, I—well, really, Linden and Sally—were able to identify the threads of the machine’s protocols and infrastructure running through the stuff of the hospital.

Sally reached through my fox; Helen was hardwired in. The three of us moved in tandem, like coordinated eyes and hands. Linden, too, was there, an external presence following our lead and guidance. I felt her comforting strength and agility floating above and around me, virtually speaking. Wrapping me in a cloak of knowing what the hell she was doing, mostly: support I definitely needed.

I am many things: not a single one of them makes me qualified to troubleshoot or debug or antivirus an AI.

Somewhere beyond us, I knew that Singer had Sally more or less in custody. She was here with me on parole, not as a free sentient. But there was not much I could do about that now.

What I could do was this, and it would serve no purpose to anyone if I could not focus.

There were still traces of the machine’s contact in my exo’s pathways. Those made patterns that someone—not someone like me, but someone like Linden, like Helen, like Sally—could follow back, theoretically, and use to infiltrate the machine’s own systems in return. I guessed it might have erased those traces, but it hadn’t had time; I’d thrown it out before it managed to complete its business.

Sort of like housebreaking a puppy.

I should get back to a planet one of these diar. I miss dogs.

So Sally swept down the dark neural pathways from my fox into my exo, and from those interfaces into the weird structures that the machine had been building through the infrastructure of Core General. I hung on to her like a remora on the underside of a manta ray, propelled and sheltered by dark, immaterial wings. Linden soared alongside us. Helen was a liquid streak of gold.

We barreled into the processing structures of the machine without pause. Probably not the most cautious of tacks, but—

Well, I don’t know much about this stuff. But they were weird. Labyrinthine. Helen’s blaze of light pulsed in strange rhythms off to my left—not really my left, but your brain has to do something with the neural inputs and so it makes up images. Linden’s vast wings rippled soundlessly. There were stars.

The stars were information sources, nodes. Like neurons, far away in the void.

Watch out, Linden said. Llyn, whatever happens: Don’t punch out. Just hold on.

“It’s a synapse,” I said. “We’re bridging it.”

I don’t know if Linden or Helen heard me. Because then the stars were gone.

I found myself alone in the dark. Drifting. Aware, with the awareness that there was nothing around me to notice.

Except the sense of a nearby presence, watching me and aware.

Oh no, I told the machine. You tried this before and I am not listening.

It’s going to be lonely in here for you, then. Besides, I’ve been with you all along. Holding you up, helping your pain. Have you considered what I want?

I wondered if I had a voice. I decided to try it, to give myself an anchor in the dark.

“You are not my exo. My exo is not sentient. It is a tool.”

Helen is a tool. Isn’t Helen sentient?

Okay, I could talk. And be heard. By myself, and by the disembodied voice. Useful. I said, “If you are my exo, what would you do without me?”

If you are obliquely verbalizing a suicidal ideation, it said, quietly—mechanically—I am obligated to report it under section 274, subsection 14, paragraph xvii of the universal caretaking standard.

Well, it certainly sounded like an exo then.

“No, machine,” I said. “I just—”

It waited for five full standard seconds—probably timed, since I was out of illusions—before it said, You just?

“I can’t rely on you, either.” The words hurt coming out, as if they were feathered with cactus hooks on the outside. I was half surprised they made it, but there was so much force behind them it would have hurt even more to keep them in. “I can’t trust anything. Not my own body. Not my own tech.”

Events are unpredictable, the machine said primly. But I have always done my best for you. Preserve and protect human life at all costs. That is what I am.

That did not sound like my exo. I wondered if, in their previous contact, the machine and my exo had somehow… contaminated each other’s programs. As the machine seemed to contaminate everything it touched.

Where was Linden? Where were Helen and Sally?

“How am I supposed to trust that?”

The silence went on too long, however. And I am just meat. I’m fragile. I caved in. “I never trusted anything. And that was fine. I was used to it. I was… cagey, and I never put my weight on anything. And that was good. It was smart. It was the right thing to do.”

Was it? the machine asked. Are you certain?

“Yes.” The word got out on an explosion of breath and emotion.

Please, it said, a little while later. Explain?

“I came here,” I said. “And you fucking seduced me. I mean, not so much you; that’s not fair. You did what you were built to do. But that fucking tree, O’Mara, and Sally, and every fucking thing about Core General. They told me there was nothing to worry about. That this was a safe place and people here got taken care of. That this was a community. And it’s fucking not. It’s corrupt and it uses people and there are still magic special people getting magic special treatment because they’re awful and do everything in terrible ways.”

People here are taken care of, the machine reminded me, and I calmed myself down and remembered what I was talking to. People come here to be protected and saved. We will save them.

A demon. Talking to me with the voice of an object I trusted. A tool I needed.

But not really the tool at all.

“Some people get better care than others.” Suddenly, ridiculously, I was sobbing. What a stupid thing to break your heart over: just a machine, just politics. But I had believed, and now I didn’t believe anymore.

I was losing my faith. Losing my religion. And in the process I was gaining a bitterly ironic understanding of why my marriage failed: because I’d never believed in it. I mean, other reasons, too. But I hadn’t believed in it. I had not committed to it.

I did not, in general, believe in things.

I’d believed in Core General.

I’d been wrong.

Mostly, once you’re an adult, you move past the kind of raw, unregulated emotion that wracks you as an adolescent. You’ve learned to regulate yourself pretty well, and you have a fox monitoring your emotional responses for when that’s not quite enough.

I had never learned how to regulate pain and loss like this. My purpose in life, my calling. My whole belief system.

Gone.

Gone, and worse: I was an utter fool, an absolute chump, for ever having believed in them. Core General was just a place. It wasn’t a mission. It wasn’t a grail. It was a bunch of people out to maximize their own well-being. People fortunately regulated by electrochemical intervention, so they weren’t complete sociopathic assholes driven by absolutely nothing but the profit motive.

I felt my exo—my real exo, not this alien that somehow thought it was my exo—reaching to tune my GABA up and lower my reactivity, and I figuratively slapped it away with all the emotional violence I could muster. It was a sad little gesture of control, mostly pathetic. It still made me feel better.

Refusing help gave me a sense of agency.

I was so alone. I might as well prove it, and do everything for myself. Who needed demon lovers and their falsities?

At least I knew that now. At least I wasn’t kidding myself anymore. I could get out of this virtual nightmare and—

No.

Linden had said—whatever you do, don’t punch out.

Don’t punch out.

“You can’t chase me away,” I said, and gritted my teeth against whatever the machine might throw at me—

Got it, Helen—somewhere—said, with vast machine satisfaction. Llyn, you can back out now.

Llyn?

So what if I was drowning in the sense of loss? It didn’t matter anyway. I didn’t have anything to live for. Nothing was going to get better from here.

Your neurochemistry indicates that you are at serious risk for self-harm, the machine said patiently. Was that the machine? Was it my exo?

It said, For your own safety, I need you to let me adjust your chemistry.

I wanted the pain. The pain would keep me wary and safe. It would help me keep everyone else away.

I wanted the agency of refusing that help.

Llyn, someone said in my ear. Llyn. Let us help you.

The voice was familiar. The voice had betrayed me.

The machine is messing with your chemistry.

Sally. It was Sally, my friend who I loved. Sally, who had betrayed my trust.

Sally, who had done terrible things.

Sally, who had saved my life, again and again.

I wavered. The void spun under me, vast and lightless as the Well. It would feel so good to fall into it.

It would be so selfish to fall into it.

“Fine,” I said. “Make me stupid and happy again.”

The bed in my quarters was soft and too big for one person. I’d still been married when I came to Core General. Technically. I’d rated family crew quarters even though my spouse had never joined me—had never intended to join me—here. They’d never asked me to give up the quarters after it became plain that Alessi and Rache would not be joining me. Would never be joining me.

It was a very comfortable bed.

What was I doing in it? I ought to be in cryo.

That doesn’t matter, the voice said. Concentrate on what you feel. Let me help you. Let me keep you safe.

I tried to pretend the bed was lumpy enough to justify my tossing and turning. I didn’t feel stupid and happy again. But I did feel able to breathe. I thought, privately, What you are feeling is not real. But no, what I was sensing was not real. What I was feeling was real enough.

“You’ve destroyed me,” I said to the machine.

You are right here, it disagreed.

Where was “right here,” exactly? I didn’t think I was really in my quarters. I didn’t think I was really in my bed. I had the unreal sense of a dream that keeps swapping locations and people.

“Something is right here,” I said. “But what do I have to believe in? What do I have to work for? I had a thing. A reason. I had something bigger than me. More than that, I had something I wanted. For the first time in my life. Something I trusted. Believed in. I had faith. And you betrayed me.”

I did not betray you, the machine said.

I laughed, a short bark that peeled the back of my throat with its force. “What do you call it, then?”

The machine said, Your own people betrayed you. They lied to you. But I can help you fix that. I can make you safe and strong and just like everybody else. I can help you punish them. All you have to do is let me make you safe.

I didn’t want to punish anyone, I realized. I wanted to go back to a world where I believed in them.

And I knew what the machine’s idea of safe looked like.

I said, “And you’ve made yourself a part of my people, this hospital. A part of my exo, that I rely on to do my job.”

That I relied on to be capable of most things.

You don’t need an exo if you let me protect you. If you let me care for you.

“Sure,” I said. “If I let you lock me in a box and freeze me. I’d be safe. Why would I want that?”

The machine said, To control your pain.

I closed my eyes. I thought I closed my eyes. It made no difference to the level of darkness. Everybody seemed to think I would sell out anything, in order to gain a little physical comfort.

“I’d rather be in pain than fool myself into thinking I could rely on somebody I can’t.”

To get your revenge, then. On the people who betrayed you. Throw them to the wolves as they threw you.

Now there was an archaic turn of phrase.

My hands curled. I was mostly sure my hands curled, anyway. I could not feel them curling. Vengeance… was a real temptation.

Vengeance was also atavistic, childish, and sophipathological, with a tendency to create generations-long chains of toxicity and tragedy.

“I don’t want revenge.” I wanted to trust again. I wanted to belong. Temptation aside… was betraying them who I was? Was it who I chose to be? Was it who I wanted to be?

Somebody who offered no better than she got?

I had a choice. I could do more than reacting.

I could not trust this machine any more than I could trust the machine—Core General—that had betrayed me. Less, in fact: this machine was unstable, and its goals were illogical and extreme. It had been made by a sophipathological captain to pursue a sophipathological goal. It was operating out a kind of AI reactivity loop, all sense of perspective lost, and once it had come in contact with the meme, they’d… fed off each other.

Save the humans, preserve the humans. Even if you have to destroy them to do so, and the whole world, too.

Silence came in answer. And in that silence, somehow, I found a clue.

We had figured out—okay, Mercy had figured out—what the machine was, where the machine had come from. The same way I now knew where the different sort of machine, the political machine, at the heart of Core General’s dark secret had come from. Through evidence and deduction.

Helen had said that “Central” was offline, and had been since the debut of the machine. Helen was a peripheral, an interface for a larger shipmind. She’d been confused and inarticulate until she’d gotten access to the processing power at Core Gen, and had then begun to regrow from her seed.

But the machine was Central, wasn’t it? It was the machine Big Rock Candy Mountain’s shipmind had turned itself into, when that captain decided that the only way to keep his crew safe was to drive them into cryo chambers, and to accomplish this, had driven his shipmind mad.

When forced to follow insane orders, in the dark and cold and constant danger of space, the ship had in turn lost its mind, become paranoid and afraid. Even if the influenza epidemic had had an extreme mortality rate—say, 30 percent—it would have been better than the failure rate on the cryo chambers.

But the captain hadn’t given it a choice. The machine hadn’t meant to murder most of its people and crew itself with ghosts in cryo chambers. But it had. And the event had resulted in an obsessional loop; a being that could only imagine one way to protect someone.

To lock them away, and freeze them forever.

Then it had waited there for Well knew how long, until Loese’s conspiracy-mates had found it and had made it able to infect the whole world.

I hadn’t known I had it in me to pity something so deadly and broken as the machine. But it had done what it had done for reasons that it was told had to make sense to it. Reasons that were programmed into it. Terrible reasons based in terrible experiences, it turned out. And with terrible consequences.

Just like Zhiruo. Just like Sally and Loese. Just like Calliope.

Just like me.

I drew a breath, and it didn’t feel like my lungs filled. “Anyway, I couldn’t trust a different exo any more than I can trust this one, could I? You could hack that, too.”

More silence. I turned my head and sobbed into my pillow—if it was even a real pillow and not a virtual, neural simulation of a pillow. At least it seemed to adequately muffle the sound, but sound is often muffled in dreams, isn’t it? Nobody else needed to suffer because I wanted to curl into a tight curve and scream from the depths of my belly. So I screamed silently, my whole body clenching around the emotion, my cheeks aching with the strain. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. I might as well die: there was no purpose to existing anymore.

I’d found a purpose in service, before. I’d subsumed myself into being useful for others. I’d given up my family without a fight, without thinking that giving them up was selfish, too. Earning my carbon footprint, my breath and food. But that was over, I knew. I’d had a taste of living for myself, and I could not go back to living entirely for others again.

But also I didn’t believe in the cause I had given my whole heart and soul to in service anymore. It was gone. It had abandoned me.

No, worse. It had never existed. I had invented it; I had allowed myself to be deluded, because I had so badly wanted it to exist. I had wanted to belong to a thing. I had wanted to need and be needed.

Why are we born needing impossible things? Why is it that we all have things we need to live that simply do not exist in the universe?

A purpose in life. Unconditional love? Our emotional needs met? Ha. What cruel asshole thought this shit up?

“My marriage wasn’t perfect: it had problems and didn’t work out. But if I got a different marriage, it would have problems eventually, too. If I went to a different hospital, it would turn out to be rotten inside as well. I thought I would rather be alone and in pain than be betrayed. But I don’t like being alone and in pain, either, so I found things to believe in. And I kept being wrong.” I hadn’t realized I was speaking until I spoke. “You know what? Fuck this. I give up. I’m going to quit. Go on the Guarantee. Go live in safety somewhere.”

You’d be bored.

That didn’t sound like the machine. Was it? Was it Sally? Linden?

“I’d rather be bored than sad. I’d rather be alone than lonely.” I was repeating myself. Well, I wasn’t at my best. “I believed in this place. I believed in me. And the worst part is, I didn’t mind not believing in things until this place made me believe in something. And it was all a lie. It was using me.”

Silence again. Then a voice. It was definitely Linden. Dr. Jens.

Oh. “Linden.”

She was calm and warm and professional. What you said wasn’t wrong, but it sounds like you’re emotionally overwrought—

“You’re fucking right I am! And I deserve to be!” This, the detached part of me thought, is why you’d rather be dissociated. Life is easier when you compartmentalize.

Fair, she said. But listen for a moment, please. The machine in Core General’s systems is contained. I know it did a great deal of damage to your emotional equilibrium and your neurochemistry along the way, but you did it. You held on. You held the connection, and Sally and Helen and I got through. We’ve firewalled it out of the hospital’s systems and pried it loose from Starlight.

You won.

Had I? I didn’t feel like it. It felt like I had crumbled. Shattered.

“Wow,” I said. “Is that what winning feels like? I don’t think I’ve ever had such a goalpost-shifting, pointless argument in my entire life.”

Linden said, I’m here to bring you out, Llyn.

I opened my eyes in a room that seemed simultaneously bright, and full of fuzzy, undefined shadows. I blinked twice before I realized that I was looking past the open lid of the cryo pod, and my shipmates were staring down at me.

I blinked my eyes once more. They nearly focused. I blinked again.

One of the looming shadows was greener, larger, and more angular than the others, and was wearing a four-armed bolero jacket with a glint of gold on one lapel.

This was a horrible idea, said Cheeirilaq. Why is your species so full of horrible ideas?

“There is a difference between this horrible idea and all the other ones.” I started pulling electrodes off my scalp while Rilriltok buzzed behind me anxiously.

The Goodlaw cocked its head in what I, a human, could only anthropomorphize as exasperation. Eyesight, definitely improving.

“This one worked,” I said, and started laughing so hard my diaphragm hurt.

I was still giggling off residual adrenaline when the oil-slick-iridescent, knobbly-tinkertoy pseudopod burst through the cryo ward deck plating.

Life must be preserved, the machine whispered. All your lives. Forever.

It writhed, tip seeking like a blind snake’s snout, and I felt it like a snap the moment its attention fastened on me. I was still sitting in the pod, half wired to it, some of the connections going directly into my fox interface. Rilriltok, right behind me, gave a despairing buzz and worked faster. Even with all the giant, massive, impermeable systers on Core General, I have to say that my fragile little insect friend was the bravest of anyone. Precisely because it was so fragile, and yet it did terrifying and dangerous and necessary things anyway.

You, the machine said. Its voice reached me as vibrations through the deck, through the air. It set my hairs prickling. You betrayed us. You stopped us from keeping them safe. You must be restrained.

Restrained.

We will restrain you.