Machine

CHAPTER 29

SURE, OF COURSE. THIS WAS how my life worked. Beat the enemy on the virtual plane. Escape, relax, start thinking about cocktails.

Then, oh shit, nanotech tentacles.

It’s possible to love a thing, to trust a thing, to rely on a thing, to be overjoyed that a thing exists—and also to resent it. My exo, for example, makes me weak with gratitude. It makes it possible for me to live the life I want to live, to give to the community in the way I wish to give to the community. It makes me strong and nimble and quick in ways I never was without it.

It is also something I have to think about. Something to consider each dia. Something to maintain, and the body within it needs maintenance, too.

A piece of cognitive load. One more damned thing to take into account.

And it’s a symbol of not being able to always do everything, all the time, right now.

Well, right that second, right now, I had no mixed emotions about my exo at all, despite the fact that the machine had infiltrated and impersonated it in order to—to put it bluntly—fuck with my mind. I guess, in fairness, I had invited the machine in—and the diversion had worked, because Linden had managed to force it to withdraw from the hospital’s structure. I guess we knew now where it had gone.

However complicated I might feel about machine and exo and exo and machine when I had the leisure to unpack those feelings, my exo was saving me from the nanotech tentacles. (Yes, I know. Microbots are not technically nanotech. When you’re being chased by them, fine distinctions kind of go out the airlock.)

My exo jerked me upright the instant Rilriltok yanked the connection free, which it managed with a surgical lack of nicety. It didn’t matter; it was hurtling its own delicate wings and exoskeleton backward like a fly that senses a drastic shift in air pressure. I got a hand up and slapped at my hardsuit actuator: too late. Either that same shift in air pressure or my exo’s self-preservation protocols had already triggered it, and I had to snatch my hand back fast to keep from losing a fingertip.

Or several.

The hardsuit sealed over my face, obscuring my vision for a moment. For another moment, I could see clearly as the utility fog formed into the transparent viewplate. Until a sudden concussion knocked it askew, and red-black tunnel edges closed on me.

I bounced off a bulkhead—I think it was a bulkhead—and tumbled into the corner, one aching bundle of bruises and pain.

The blow probably wouldn’t have killed me, even without the hardsuit. I made that determination as my exo picked me up: wheezing, my spasming diaphragm at war with clenching ribs. A quick differential suggested that they were bruised or cracked but probably not broken, and at least not grinding.

They weren’t stabbing me in a vital organ: they could wait. Even if they had been stabbing me in a vital organ, they would have had to wait.

“I’m sorry I ever doubted you,” I whispered to my exo. It didn’t answer, because it was only a machine.

A machine that had saved my bacon yet again, because as I packed a short breath in, my head was up and my eyes open. Just in time to see the next blow coming.

I was stunned. I was winded. I was fifteen ans out of practice. But I had once been combat trained. And all that work you do to teach yourself and your hardware those reflexes does, in the later moment when you need them, pay off.

Dodging also hurts like hell when your body is no longer hardened to it. But you know what hurts even more?

Getting nailed in the face by a fast-moving mountain of nanotech. Microbots. Whatever.

I reeled inelegantly out of the way.

A quick tactical assessment of the room provided the intelligence that we were… sort of fucked, to be completely fair. I’d lost track of Helen. Rilriltok, bless it, was headed for the door. Smart; the best assistance it could give us was to get the hell out of the way. It had accomplished everything here it could, and nobody would be served if it got itself squashed, crippled, or maimed.

Cheeirilaq, its own armored hardsuit finished integrating, had jumped, inverted itself, and was racing across the ceiling of the ward. Carlos was edging back toward the private room doors. His hardsuit had triggered, or he had thought to trigger it. His hand groped out toward a fire extinguisher.

Sure, why not. Good thinking. It couldn’t hurt, after all.

The machine wiggled itself backward out of the bulkhead I had been standing in front of a minute before like a big, segmented worm inching out of its burrow. Light streamed in around the blunt taper of its nose. At its rear—or its middle, maybe—more microbots humped themselves out of the ragged gash in the decking the machine had lunged through.

The edges of the hole weren’t smooth. That meant that the material the thing was assembling itself from wasn’t merely whatever it came into contact with. The curled and ruptured polymer and metal showed no signs of ablating away, sublimating into the stuff of the machine.

It’s ripping out the dedicated information pathways it built. Linden’s voice, in my fox, urgent. The ones we chased it out of.

Starlight— I don’t know if my subvocalization was as panicked as I felt.

The invasive architecture is stripping itself, Linden answered. We have a trauma team standing by.

Oh, unrebirthing Well. That was going to be… awful.

What could I do? I wasn’t a tree surgeon. And I was running for my life. Running for my life, and trying to come up with a plan. While on the run.

Item one: the machine had a personal grudge against me. Okay, I could use that, maybe, to lead it away from Carlos and the patients he—

Oh, Carlos. You asshole. That’s what he was doing over there. Putting himself between the machine and Cirocco Oni, and the other people who were probably, honestly, just frozen and dead but we couldn’t declare them such until they were thawed and dead.

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

“Funny way you have of going about it,” I gasped, and lunged toward the hole it had made in the corner where the bulkheads met. I jumped, and as I jumped I triggered my gravity belt and sailed through, momentarily immune to the spin momentum that left everybody else stuck to the deck.

Your brain does strange things in a crisis. Right then, mine chose to have the epiphany that Core General was really, if you thought about it, a giant centrifuge.

I had no idea what was on the other side of that ruptured bulkhead, except by the lack of freezing, boiling, poisoning, asphyxiation, drowning, melting, or screams it seemed to be ox sector. But whatever it was, the machine had busted clear through, and the gap was probably big enough for me, also.

Linden, clear that corridor!

Honestly. Dr. Jens, what do you think I’ve been doing with my time?

I burst through into the other side, somersaulted, let the gravity reclaim me, and took off at a sprint. Every step jarred pain up through my ankles and knees, and I triggered the belt again, kicked off, and went sailing away

Sally?

Here. Her virtual voice came crisp and distinct and possibly a little relieved through my fox.

Sally, can’t you hack this thing? You did it once before?

Sure, she said. I did it before we pulled all my backsplash viral code out of it!

Huh. It had never occurred to me that her taking control of the machine back on Big Rock Candy Mountain was improbable. I guess I am not very adept, when it comes to figuring out which of my dearest and most trusted friends is a spy.

“Well don’t you have a record of what you used at the time?” I dodged, and flung myself farther down the corridor.

Just in time, as the pseudopod slammed through the hole behind me like a monstrous snake and started propagating down the corridor walls, tinkertoys clacking.

I am, Sally said in a measured tone, currently under arrest for suspicion of sabotage, negligent homicide, gross bodily harm, reckless endangerment, waste of common resources, waste of dedicated resources, interfering with the regular functioning of a Synarche emergency response, interfering with the regular functioning of Synarche emergency personnel, assault on a digital person, interfering with the regular functioning of a Synarche public service—

“And mopery,” I muttered, ducking another tentacle.

What?

“Kind of in a hurry here!”

My files are under legal interdict, is what I’m saying.

If the massive failures of Core General’s systems had been due to the machine undermining its systems and not to the saboteurs, she didn’t deserve all of those charges. But some of them were certainly valid, and I didn’t have a lot of time to argue, no matter how inconvenient her being under arrest was right now. I ricocheted around a corner. A pseudopod dented a wall behind me. Not smashing through it this time. Shocking demonstration of restraint.

Maybe it actually didn’t mean to kill me.

Mostly, however, I didn’t want to find out. The machine did not have a good track record of keeping its pets in good health.

“Situation assessment?”

I had been asking Sally, but it was Linden who answered: Run.

“Running is not a tactic!” I shouted back.

Ahead, along my projected path, sirens warned bystanders to clear the corridor. The whisk of closing doors and figures vanishing through them told me most of the staff were complying.

“What am I running toward?”

That was another piece of advice I’ve often found myself recalling: Never retreat from an enemy; always fall back toward a resource.

Right now, I was drawing the machine away from my friends, and managing to keep it from attacking—pardon me, rescuing—other patients or staff. Soon, I’d need the next strategy.

Core General was a wheel, and I’d run out of racetrack unless I led the machine through different levels or into the units that housed chlorine, methane, water breathers. That would result in deaths, and I didn’t want any more rainbow-colored blood on my hands.

I dodged again, full of a diffuse, frustrated, distracting rage. I was still angry, and I didn’t have time to feel things right now. Then I remembered that being angry was sometimes useful, and also—tentacle!—that I had a lot of really good things to be angry about.

Being in fear for your life is marvelously focusing. You can concentrate, let go of everything nonessential, think only about the thing right in front of your face. The thing that needs to be done. If the anger was bubbling up now, that suggested that it was a message from the part of my mind that processed things too complicated to turn over to my conscious attention, things that did not neatly resolve themselves into narrative but were complicated and chaotic and emerged in patterns only on the level of hunches and gitchy feelings. So I ought to be using my anger. It didn’t have to be a distraction, a paralysis. Turned inward.

It could be fuel.

I didn’t need a reaction. I needed a plan. And I needed it now, as I careened around the corridor, flipping from ceiling to hand rail to the frame of a door. Behind me, the machine cooed and rustled, its tendrils propagating along the bulkheads at terrifying speed. Pseudopods edged up on me as you might edge up on a skittish cat you were trying to catch for transport.

Preserve life. Preserve life.

It had its metric.

No.

Preserve human life. I had to think like an archaic Terran, who considered their own species and its survival more important than any other single factor in the universe. So the machine’s goal had to be to preserve human life. And given the politics of its unrightminded era, probably to preserve the lives of those it considered to be its people. So that meant its crew, over and above anything else.

It had turned away from Carlos.

It had, in fact, generalized the directive to preserve the lives of its crew into a hellish and accidentally genocidal series of actions. And—I was guessing here—it seemed pretty likely that that overgeneralized code was what, when combined with Sally’s nice little sabotage meme, had unleashed such unprecedented unholy hell all over my nice hospital.

What had I been thinking about utilitarianism as a bad philosophy on which to train AIs?

Helen! I yelled. I need Helen right now! Helen, HELP!