Machine

CHAPTER 31

WE STOOD, JONES AND ONI and Helen and Tralgar and Rilriltok and I, beneath the inward-stretching roots of a vast and damaged tree. The enormous trunk fell down beside us like a waterfall, vanishing through the deck below.

I weighed a memorial cenotaph, the mortal remains of Master Chief Dwayne Carlos, in my hand. It was uncomfortably heavy for its size—and somehow not heavy enough. It was hard, so hard, to see a big, joyous person reduced to a couple of pounds of synthetic stone. It made me understand, finally, why it was that people—human-type people, anyway; my species, I mean—used to put up really gigantic tombs.

And my species was the species that… well, we didn’t build the machine, in its final form, on purpose. But we built the machine and we built the other machine—Sally—that built the meme, and together those things combined to make what the machine became.

It grew out of self-delusion and toxic secrecy and the fear of dying. The fear of change. It grew out of a last-ditch defense against the inevitable.

It grew out of an unwillingness to face facts.

I guess I understood that, too.

I didn’t get to say goodbye.

“I still don’t know why I like you, Carlos,” I said.

That’s okay, I imagined him replying. I still don’t know why I like you, either.

“Dwayne Carlos,” I said softly. Historians and archinformists might be furious about the loss of information his death represented. I was gonna miss the man. “He came so far, against such odds. To wind up here.”

Same as we all do.

I looked at Rilriltok. “More or less,” I agreed. “Helen, do you want to say a few words?”

She turned her eyeless face from Calliope to Oni. Neither of them spoke up. Helen held out her hand. When I put the cenotaph in it, she didn’t react to the weight at all.

“He didn’t like me,” she said. “He thought I was an abomination. And he gave his life to preserve my existence.”

A coil of microbots spiraled around her, lifted the cenotaph off her hand. It rose until it was nested among the roots that spread across our ceiling, Starlight’s soil. Tiny rootlets freed themselves, coiled around the stone. Held it in place.

The machine—Helen’s peripheral—fell back into her body, and was gone.

If I tilted my head back, I could read the name on the stone.

[He saved the hospital,] Starlight said, all around us and in our senso. [We will not forget.]

From there, we went to watch the next shipment of cryo pods coming in on Ruth and Singer and the other transport ships. A procession of them, antlike. Even more antlike, because they moved on wavering lines around the open floor panels in the ED, where gravity generators were still being installed.

Then I escorted Calliope back to her room. She still—usually—thought she was part of Helen’s crew. That was why we’d made it possible for her to attend the funeral. She’d also been moved from the Judiciary ward into neural repair, as the Goodlaw had decided that she was a victim, and not a criminal.

As I waved her through the door, she turned to me and said, “Dr. Jens, where have you been?”

Exactly as if our last conversation, the one where she’d accused me of being a monster, had never occurred.

I wondered if she knew she was a Trojan horse. Could she be so cheerful and open if she knew? Without a fox to regulate her behavior? Were her damaged memories coming in waves of conflicting recollections?

I was glad it wasn’t my problem to sort it out. I was glad she wasn’t my patient anymore. Not because I didn’t like her. Because I still liked her far more than I should.

Well, K’kk’jk’ooOOoo would sort it out.

I wondered who she would be, when the sorting out was done.

Plenty of time to worry about that after, I supposed. When she was integrated. When she was self-aware.

So I made a joke of it.

“Doctors are often pretty bad at maintaining personal friendships,” I said with a shrug. “Work-life balance problems. That can’t have changed that much in centians.”

She frowned at me. She might have said something, I supposed, except exactly then Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo swam up through thin air. Her three-meter-long, iridescent purple-and-green body shimmered in the overhead lights like mermaid scales. She waved a flipper at me cheerfully as she brushed by, the grav belt that supported her body out of the water winking happy blue telltales as she passed.

“Your patient, Doctor,” I told her, and took myself away.

Cheeirilaq found me in the cafeteria, where I was eating something that wasn’t spaghetti. It pinged me first to make sure I was available for company, so I was expecting it, and had gotten up and dragged the opposite bench out of the way.

It squatted down across from me with a triple-sized portion of the same simulated land prawn that Rilriltok seemed to enjoy so much, and busied itself with eating.

Sentients who don’t use their mandibles to vocalize generally don’t have a prohibition on eating and talking simultaneously.

Mouthparts busily nibbling away—I was used to it and didn’t have to avert my eyes—the Goodlaw said, Your shipmates have agreed to stand trial for their crimes, rather than accepting private remediation.

I winced on their behalf. It was a brave choice that Sally and Loese were making. There would be a public outcry. There would be scandal. There would be an enormous mess.

It was, I supposed, what they had been aiming for all along. Considering the tragedy they had provoked, it was also the very, very least they could do. “What about the rest of the conspirators?”

We’ll find them, Cheeirilaq stridulated. Its quiet confidence carried even through translation. Sally and Loese will likely be remanded to remediation and reconstruction, assuming they are found culpable.

We both knew that they would be found culpable, unless a gross miscarriage of justice occurred.

In another era, they would have served a penal sentence, perhaps even been executed. There was, in my heart, an angry atavistic spike of desire for revenge. To see them punished. The civilized part of me knew the truth, though.

Retribution never healed a wound.

They’d done what they thought they had to do. And now they would pay the price for it: they would be monitored, and they would accept Judicial intervention and oversight in their rightminding.

And they’d be paying off their obligation to the Synarche, I imagined, for quite some time. Restorative justice is a better system, all in all, than the old standard of cutting off hands and putting out eyes and locking people up for lifetimes. It acknowledges, among other things, that structural miscarriages of social justice are often at the root of why people commit crimes against society. And against each other, for that matter.

Still, I didn’t expect the notoriety that Sally and Loese were about to experience, or the social condemnation, would be fun.

The Goodlaw said, They are expected to be able to resume their roles in a standard month or so. If you still wish to serve with them, O’Mara is holding your berth open. I hope that you find this to be a positive outcome.

I was chewing a mouthful of broccoli, so I used that to buy time while I thought about my answer. I take it back: there are some advantages to a shared alimentary and respiratory orifice.

Some.

Did I still wish to serve with them?

I wanted to serve with Tsosie and Hhayazh and Rhym and Camphvis. I didn’t know how I felt about Loese and Sally anymore. But I had a month to make up my mind, I guessed.

When you don’t know the answer, try stacking up a different question. “What’s going to be done about the clone program?”

It was too soon, given time lags, to know how big a scandal it was going to be. But I had filed testimony with the Judiciary, and Cheeirilaq had filed testimony with the Judiciary. And once Judiciary knew about the secret transplant units, O’Mara and Starlight and others were no longer constrained to silence.

Pretty soon, the whole Synarche was going to know about our shame.

Pending. It is likely that the law will have to be changed. That will require public will. But outrage over the current situation will help with that. And there will be outrage over the current situation.

The question arises, will it be enough outrage?

“Dammit, Goodlaw—”

Cheeirilaq tidied its bolero jacket self-consciously. What can you do about ensuring the outcome you want?

That silenced me. I poked the back of my teeth with my tongue and thought about it.

What could I do about it?

It came to me suddenly, and it was so simple that at first I thought it was a cop-out. I could keep doing what I had been doing all along. I could do everything in my power to make the galaxy a better place. Even knowing there were no ideal solutions, no little chips of paradise to serve as ideal models. No answers that were the best answer for everyone.

I could keep telling this story, over and over again.

And that wasn’t a cop-out, because the cop-out would be doing the thing I actually kind of wanted to do instead: Give up. Go along. Shut up. Go back to what I had been doing, and tell myself that saving lives was a pretty decent reason for living all by itself.

Or even stop saving lives and go do something else.

I could resign in a huff and give up on reforming the community. That would be easier… because this community would never be what I wanted. Too many other people wanted it to be different things. It would always have to be a compromise between my ideals and theirs.

I could stomp off and find some other community… that would inevitably disappoint me.

That was appealing, I thought, because it wouldn’t require any personal growth or discomfort from me.

So that was a cop-out, too.

But staying here, staying with the program, and pushing it toward being better… that sounded like hell. Because it meant compromising with thousands of other beings, and none of us were ever going to get exactly what we wanted.

Well. But it was most definitely simple.

Simple, but not easy.

Actually, wasn’t that basically the model the Synarche was built on? The idea that no person or group of people had good solutions for everybody… but if you took everybody’s perspective into account, you wound up with something imperfect but steadily, incrementally better?

Aw, Well. I was going to have to be public about everything that was wrong with this place I loved. About the abuses of the medical system. About the unfairness of expecting AIs to work off an inception debt that they alone, of all sentients, had to pay.

Filing testimony wasn’t enough. I was going to have to make the call, and keep making it. I was going to have to speak out, and organize.

I wondered if Calliope and Helen would help me. I didn’t think I needed to give up my job to do it, though. Maybe I could do that for myself, and do all these other things for society, and make it all work. I didn’t have to make a martyr of myself to be effective. And I didn’t have to give up one important thing because something else was important, too.

Maybe there are still things to have faith in. Maybe you have to build them yourself, and defend them against the people who would corrupt them.

Maybe faith is a thing you decide to have, even knowing that it’s not safe. Even knowing you could lose it; you could be betrayed at any moment.

Maybe that’s what courage is.

Maybe love is a kind of faith, and I have—all this time—been doing love all wrong. Maybe I should look into fixing that. Doing better.

Trying again.

“I think I have some ideas of what I want to be, going forward,” I said to Cheeirilaq. “But first I’m going to talk with Rhym and Hhayazh and make sure they know that I’m coming back to them. Then I’m going to get a cup of real coffee. And then I’m going to take a month or two and travel home, and see if my daughter will talk to me. I think I have some apologizing of my own to do. And then I’m going to come back here”—I sighed—“and see if any of Carlos’s friends or family survive rewarming, and tell them that he was thinking of them until the end.”

You’re taking a lot of personal responsibility, Cheeirilaq said.

“That’s who I want to be,” I answered. “I hope we can stay in touch.”

I’d like that.

One more time, I found myself standing in the door.