Machine

CHAPTER 3

AS IT STARED AT US, and we stared back, I realized that my first impression had not been perfectly correct. The shape had a face, or at least the suggestion of a face. Hollows where the eyes would be; a smooth tapered bulge for a nose; the tilt of cheekbones and the shadows beneath. A pointed chin.

The shape of the body was stereotypically human and feminine, despite having no actual external genitalia or nipples. The torso swelled and tapered into enticing curves and valleys, flaring into breasts and hips that could serve no biological purpose. The figure stood and seemed to watch us approach. It—she?—did not move except for a curious little tilt of the head like a cat tracking prey up a wall.

I wished I hadn’t thought of that particular comparison. I also wanted to roll my eyes violently at the engineer who had designed her.

Sally was still nowhere in the senso. I pinged Tsosie to let me deal with the contact, and stepped around him. He stood very still. I turned my suit speakers on and stopped myself halfway through asking Sally to translate my words into language from about a millennian before.

We’d seen signs in archaic English and Spanish and Chinese, so I was extrapolating. I spoke some English—I’d taken a course back home, when I’d had a lot of time to kill and couldn’t get around very well—so it seemed worth giving it a try. I didn’t know all the words. Rescue specialist and lead trauma specialist were mysteries, for example.

But I knew some. And maybe—

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Dr. Brookllyn Jens. This is Dr. Paul Tsosie. We’re crew from the… the ambulance ship that has matched velocities with your ship. We are friends. We come from a hospital called Core General. We’re responding to your distress signal. Do you have casualties?”

There was a pause, and I swear it blinked, though there were no eyes and no eyelids to blink with. Its gestures reminded me of techniques I’d been shown in school by a friend studying to be a puppeteer. The tilt of a head, the inclination of a shoulder—those could give the watcher a picture of emotion and focus as clearly as any words.

It made a garbled sound: not speech, but like a lot of audio information compressed into a very tight space, laid over itself again and again. I recognized the timbre of Sally’s voice in there, and Tsosie’s, though I could not make out words. And what could have been my own voice, changed the way voices are changed when you don’t hear them from inside your own head.

Then it spoke, in stilted but correct Standard, in a smoky contrived alto that made me flinch.

“I am Helen,” the android said. “The distress signal—yes. There is a distress signal. And there are casualties. Please, come with me.”

Helen? I asked Sally silently, forgetting for a moment that she wasn’t there. Who names their shipmind Helen? We followed the android through more of the ship’s habitation areas. She said she was taking us to a cargo area, which didn’t bode well for living casualties.

Tsosie heard me, though. We still had our local connection, even if the uplink had failed.

I’m not sure she is a shipmind, he replied. You could ask.

I was still contemplating the options when Tsosie said, “Helen, are you the shipmind?”

Helen did not look back. Her shimmering golden body preceded us, and I did my best not to stare at her shiny metal ass. What can I say? It was very distracting.

She said, “I’m Helen Alloy. I was made to wait.”

Helen Alloy.

Because some engineer thought he was funny. And between the smoky voice and the shiny metal ass, I will bet you whatever you care to name that the person who built her was a he.

Tsosie apparently was right there with me, as his voice came over our direct link: There’s a Trojan horse joke here, and I’m not going to make it.

I sighed out loud. One benefit of the hardsuit: I could be kind to myself and those around me and decide not to mike my exasperated sound effects.

“Wait for who?” Tsosie asked, when it became plain that I was ignoring his joke and that Helen wasn’t going to elaborate without prompting.

“Wait for you.” She shook her head, as if indicating confusion. “Wait for whoever came to save us. To maintain the ship and keep the crew safe until somebody came. It’s been a long time.”

“Does the shipmind still exist?” Tsosie asked. “How about the library?”

“There’s a library,” she said. “And there’s Central.”

“Central?” I asked, deciding not to remind Tsosie that I had been going to do the talking. I was a little distracted: without Sally to keep an eye on my pain levels and help coordinate my exo, I was still doing those tasks myself. Keeping abreast of it wasn’t a problem, but it used up a few cycles. “Who is Central?”

“Central,” Helen said, “isn’t a person.”

“You’ve been here alone?” I was beginning to understand why the whole ship was filled with bot toys. Helen must have been incredibly bored. I hoped she’d at least been programmed to be interested in astronomical data, because that was the only source of intellectual stimulation for parsecs.

“I’m not alone,” she said. “Here are the passengers.”

She pressed a metal palm to a pad beside an irising hatch. A big hatch: this must be one of the promised cargo bays. Sally’s map and my own sense of dead reckoning told me that we’d come up on the side of the spinning wheel. That made sense: cargo bays would serve as valuable radiation shielding, though this one seemed to be oriented away from the wheel’s direction of travel.

She stepped through and gestured us into the airlock with her. We went. Helen cycled the lock. The door in front of us came open. A pale light flooded past her, shimmering on the curve of her hip and thigh.

I peered over Helen’s shoulder. The hold was filled with rank after rank of caskets.

Coffins, or cryo containers? It was hard to be sure, and given that the cargo hold was cold as space and held no atmosphere, the only functional difference was going to be whether the people inside could be resuscitated.

Whatever the objects were, there were a lot of them. I did a little quick mental math and figured that there must be a thousand of them in this bay alone.

They might be alive. Or at least, aliveable.

“Bet you two standard weeks of kitchen duty that this isn’t the only hold,” Tsosie murmured.

“No bet.” My heart sank at the size of the job ahead.

Sally still wasn’t there. So I had to ask Helen about the history.

“Helen,” I said, “how good was your people’s cryonics technology?”

She looked at me and shrugged a fluid, rippling shrug. “In comparison to what, Doctor?”

“Do you know what your revival success rate is?”

“They are my crew,” she said. “They must be all right.”

Her program was focused on protecting her crew’s well-being to the point of being dangerous to herself or bystanders. It was a common problem in early model AIs: they were geared toward maximum preservation of human life in the very short term, and because their algorithms weren’t flexible, they had occasionally created a hell born of trolley problems.

Worry feels like somebody doing crochet with your internal organs. I subvocalized, Tsosie, are you seeing this?

“I am,” he answered, without turning on his suit speakers. “We’re going to have to salvage the whole ship, aren’t we?”

Suddenly, Sally was with us again. “Don’t panic,” she said, as if those words were ever inclined to keep one from panicking. They came with a nice dose of anxiolytics, though, which helped. “The crew is all fine. We’re dealing with a technical problem.”

I shot her a hard feeling.

She sighed. “A little damage came to light. We’re making repairs.”

How could you have damage and not know it?

The ambulance is, in a very real sense, Sally’s body. For her not to notice damage would be like me having burned my hand and not realized it: indicative of a far bigger problem.

“We’ll talk about it when you’re not so busy.”

But— Tsosie began.

I knew what he was about to say, and I was totally with him. What, exactly, had been damaged? He was the mission commander, and I was the rescue coordinator—

But Sally was the shipmind. She shushed him with the electronic equivalent of a squelching stare, and we both subsided.

“We’re not going to salvage the whole ship,” she said, as if she’d been a part of the conversation all along. “The engineering is intractable. We don’t have the facilities to grapple it, and even if we did it’s been accelerating in the wrong direction since Earth was all humans knew, and it’s fragile. It’s too big for a salvage tug to pull through white space. The best approach is to take the people off, if they’re alive, then turn it around and send it back to Terra. It should only take it another six hundred subjective ans of constant braking to get there. If the Synarche lasts that long, we can park it in orbit and turn it into a museum.”

“If not, it will serve as a nice surprise for whoever comes after.” Tsosie sounded… bitter. As if something about this was hitting him personally.

“Well, somebody is going to have to come get it,” I said. Out loud, but with my speakers turned off. Then I turned them on again, before realizing that if Helen was linked to Big Rock Candy Mountain, it and she were probably monitoring our radio transmissions and nothing we were saying was encrypted. The evidence supported me, because she seemed to have taught herself Standard by listening to us before we met her. Our coms channel wasn’t translated, but I had to assume that any AI worth its salt—even a primitive one—could handle unpacking mere centians of linguistic progress.

Screw it, I thought, and spoke so Helen could hear me. “Let’s inspect those cryo chambers, shall we? We probably won’t be able to tell if the ones that are still working contain people who can be brought back. That will have to wait for the hospital. But we should be able to tell if any of them have failed.”

“None have failed,” Helen said. “I’ve done my job. I have maintained the machines.”

I wondered, pityingly, how long Helen had been alone. I wondered if being alone bothered her. Certainly the tinkertoy constructions had an aspect of neuroticism to them, if she was responsible for those. AIs left for too long without input could become fragmented and compulsive. Especially if they’d suffered damage to their hardware.

But Core General cared for artificial intelligences as well as biological ones. We didn’t make a distinction regarding the kind of life we treated, though the doctors for those patients had different specialties. The hospital had several excellent cybersurgeons.

(I was told they were excellent, anyway. Their CVs were certainly impressive, though I didn’t have the expertise to judge. Sally did, and I’d never heard her say anything derogatory.

And believe me, if there is anything centian-long space flights are good for, it’s gossip.)

Digressions aside, I thought our best strategy was to bring Helen back with us, along with a full load of cryo chambers—if we could manage to keep them powered while transporting them. That would be the tricky part. As soon as we got close enough to a beacon, we’d send out a request for cargo haulers to meet another rescue team, and some salvage experts, and let them sort out what to do with—conservatively estimating—ten thousand or so only provisionally not-dead people.

As for us, we might even get back to Core General with our quota before our message did, if we legged it, and we could warn the hospital that it needed to gear up isolation wards and massive amounts of powered cargo storage to be ready for a slow-motion mass casualty situation.

You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. It’s been a truism of emergency response for close to a millennian, and it’s no less true now than it was when they were hauling people out of frozen lakes on the homeworld. It applies doubly to cryo accidents. And we’re a lot better at fixing brain damage these diar than we had been then.

“I’m going to go look,” I told Tsosie, Helen, and Sally.

“None have failed,” Helen insisted. Behind us, the tinkertoys that had followed us into the airlock rustled as if in response to her emotion. Tsosie’s head turned. I felt his shock of unease through the senso, felt him tune to calm himself and refocus on the task at hand.

If the peripheral—if that’s what Helen was—freaked out, how were we going to restrain her, exactly? She obviously was linked to her microbots, and she was probably linked to the ship as well. I foresaw problems if she decided that she needed to personally escort all the cryo chambers. Especially as we’d need to divide them into groups in order to move the people in them to safety. Or, I should say, to move those people to the potential of safety, if any could be saved.

Maybe Helen could split herself into multiple parts. But I suspected that wouldn’t be good for her, in her already-fragile state.

I called on all my victim-soothing skills and hoped Helen’s homebrew language-learning was up to the challenge of following what I needed to say. “I believe you. But I need to assess the technical challenges of moving your crew. We need to know what kind of power we need to supply, at the minimum.”

The tinkertoys clattered. Yes, there was definitely a link there. If I didn’t want to be the first paramedic beaten to death by building blocks, I was going to have to come up with a way to calm Helen. Fortunately, defusing difficult situations with distraught and sometimes panicky people is part of my job.

“Move my crew? You can’t move my crew! It’s contrary to protocols. I have to protect them!”

“We are responding to your distress call,” I reminded her gently. “We are here to help you.”

I could see the program conflict, manifesting as anxiety. Helen was a sentient, too, and I did not want her to come to any harm. It wasn’t her fault some frustrated engineer had designed her to look and sound like a sexbot.

“Oh, I know that.” It came out torn between a moan and a growl. “Why can’t you help them here? They’re my crew. They belong here.”

Tsosie bumped me warningly with the elbow of his hardsuit. Not that I needed it.

Helen wouldn’t have come equipped with all those cryo units. Big Rock Candy Mountain was designed to be full of living, breathing crew. Not sleepers.

I was pretty sure that cryo hadn’t even been properly invented when Big Rock Candy Mountain had left Terra. Which meant that they had developed their own, in parallel with the Synarche, which was probably why these coffins didn’t look anything like a proper cryo tank. That meant the crew had built them—or the ship had built them, or Helen had built them.

Which meant I could at best guess at the mechanisms by which the coffins worked. Assuming they worked at all.

“Helen,” I said carefully, “how is it that your entire crew came to be in cryo?”

This ship was meant to be a home. A habitation for an entire tribe of humanity. Not merely a vehicle.

She said, “They were sick. We couldn’t help them. The machine intervened to protect them.”

Sometimes in a moment of crisis, you act. Your instincts take over, and your body and brain do the right thing without the intervention of your conscious mind. Training and repetition, presence of mind, and perhaps something innate and nameless combine to make you do a thing. It might be the right thing. It might be terribly maladaptive.

If you’re the sort of person who habitually does the maladaptive thing in a crisis, do everybody including yourself a favor and don’t go into the emergency services.

I didn’t do a maladaptive thing. And I didn’t do the right thing.

I froze.

“Machine?” I said, carefully, pitching it as a question.

While I waited for Helen to answer, Tsosie’s concern leaked through the senso to me. Neither one of us knew what this machine she spoke of might be, its provenance, its purpose. But apparently it had shoved an entire crew of humans into cryo chambers, and possibly addled their shipmind in the process. That… was scary stuff.

Tsosie wanted to pull back and evacuate immediately, quarantine this vessel and possibly Sally, too, until Judiciary could get here and take over the decision-making. It was laudable caution, and in principle I was in agreement.

Except.

Except if Helen was a threat, if this “machine” was a threat—if the machine even existed, and wasn’t a spur process of Helen herself—we might trigger an attack by disengaging. Except there were tens of thousands of people right in front of us who we could potentially rescue. Except that we could destroy the whole recontact situation by making the wrong call, and lose not just Helen, not just the crew, not just the ship—but all the knowledge and history contained in her.

In my military career, in my rescue career, I had never done something as high-stakes as this. And nothing in my experience indicated the best course of action to take with a seemingly friendly but possibly malfunctioning artificial intelligence who might have killed her entire, very numerous, crew. And then possibly dissociated a portion of herself into microbots, over which she did not seem to have conscious control. But which definitely responded to her emotional state with vigor.

As a human being, I wasn’t sure I could make myself walk away from people who were, if they were alive, this much in need, and this close to rescue after so very long. I was also, even with Sally’s renewed help, getting a fair amount of pain leakage. We’d been out for a long time, and I could tune it out and rely on my exo and the hardsuit to do the heavy lifting. I still had plenty of batteries. But I was getting tired, and the discomfort was starting to make me foggy and rob me of concentration.

Something Helen and I had in common.

I’m used to it. I’ve always functioned around the pain. I don’t remember a time before the pain. I wondered if Helen remembered a time before her pain, if it was pain. You’re projecting, Llyn. Fine, then. Her disorientation.

I could not decide what to do based on the information I had. So I asked a leading question, and waited for more data.

“Machine,” Helen agreed, with an airy wave. “The machine.”

The tinkertoys rattled behind her.

This was not, to be perfectly transparent, typical in any way of shipmind behavior. Not even the behavior of a traumatized and destabilized or physically damaged shipmind. If a shipmind lost processing power, they might become slow, unresponsive. Sticky.

But not confused.

They did not become vague in this manner. Disorientation was the stuff of organic malfunction.

So in addition to everything else, Helen was scientifically interesting.

This time, I encrypted my channel. It was a risk: Helen might decide we were plotting against her. But literally everything was a risk right now.

Sally, I subvocalized. You’re the expert in treating designed intelligences. What is going on with this AI? Mechanically, I mean. I’ve never seen anything like this.

“Neither have I,” she answered in my ear. “I’d say she’s got conflicting inputs, or conflicting imperatives. That could make her seem more—”

Senile? I waited. Organic?

“I wasn’t going to put it that way.”

It’s all right. She’s definitely acting weird. I’m not offended. Only…

I hesitated for too long. Sally responded with a query that I felt hanging there. Tsosie, too. He’d filed his recommendation and his dissent with my course of action, but this was my call. He wouldn’t interfere unless I did something obviously unjustifiable or sophipathological, or made a decision that was judged unreasonably dangerous for its potential benefits by a majority of the crew.

Only how do I get Helen to consent to let us move her people?

As I said it, though, I knew the answer. There was no urgency in treating the crew. They were in cryo: they were dead or they were alive, and for the present moment that wave state was uncollapsed and I had no way of knowing if I needed to pick up dinner for Schrödinger’s cat on my way home.

Their status, in other words, was not deteriorating. So I would treat them as if they could be saved, because that is how you work a victim, but I wouldn’t triage them to the front of the line.

There was a rush with one patient, though. We had to treat Helen—and the “machine,” if the machine was her tinkertoy microbot thing—before we did anything else. Before the Judiciary ship or ships supposed to be following us arrived.

Which led us to a new complex of problems. Because I had even less idea where to begin with Helen, or how to get her to let us take care of her so we could save her and her crew.

And get somebody over to the docked methane ship, too. That was a totally unaddressed problem, still hanging out there. Waiting out there.

At least it was a smaller-scale problem.

“You can come with me,” I said to Helen. “That way you can be sure I don’t do anything to harm your crew.”

Helen seemed to study me—disconcerting, given her eyeless, faceless face. I could only assume that it was a behavior she’d been designed to model by the same engineer who gave her the sexualized peripheral.

“I will come with you,” she agreed, on the other side of I-didn’t-even-want-to-contemplate-how-many simulations. “You will not move my crew without my permission. And the other doctor stays here.”

Tsosie shook his head inside the hardsuit. I overruled him.

There was a mystery here, and I have never been good at letting go of mysteries. I can’t leave a crossword puzzle unfinished, and when I was in the Judiciary I never let go of a cold case.

I mean, sure, I could get the bulldog tendency corrected. But it’s part of my identity. So I pick careers where being a bulldog helps.

I wasn’t sure it was helping now. But here I was, and I wasn’t going to magically turn into someone different in time to save thousands of lives.

“I’ll agree to those conditions until further notice,” I said. “Take me to the crew.”

The gravity was getting to me. I wasn’t used to this much, for this long, with the kind of sustained physical activity we’d experienced crawling under and around the machine.

Some kind of immaterial barrier (electrostatic?) held the air inside the airlock, but let more solid objects—such as me—pass through.

When I went out into the space of the hold, the first thing that struck me was that it was not, for a wonder, full of tinkertoys. I’d become so used to picking my away around them that it felt a little strange, for the first few moments, to reach out or gesture and not see a wave of them unzipping and rezipping themselves around my hand.

The machine—or the bit of it that had come through the door with us—did follow me into the cargo hold. Maybe that was what she meant by “I will come with you.”

I’d been hoping it would be just the Helen peripheral—I was becoming more and more convinced that I was dealing with whatever remained of Big Rock Candy Mountain’s shipmind—but her golden figure remained in the airlock beside Tsosie and waved me out among the coffins. I was escorted on my mission of mercy by a latticework tendril made of brilliantly holographic microbots. It was one of the more unsettling search-and-rescue partners I’ve ever worked with.

The machine didn’t do anything at first, however, except hover over my shoulder.

Since there was no atmosphere in the cargo hold to carry sound, I made sure my radio was transmitting unencrypted and spoke into my suit mike, “Where did the machine come from?”

Helen heard it, as I had suspected, and the question seemed to puzzle her. Her answer came back through my suit. “It… made itself?”

“It looked like you were making the component parts, when we met you.”

“I was making the spindles and connectors,” she said. “But they’re not the machine. Or they’re not all of the machine. The machine is an idea.”

I wondered. If the machine was a part of her, and she had made the machine, then it made sense to say that the machine had made itself. But her cognition on this topic, as on certain others, seemed blocked.

It was certainly possible that it was blocked. That someone, sometime, had intentionally closed those pathways and instituted a kind of machine denial in her. Human beings were perfectly capable of blatantly ignoring objective reality all on our lonesome. AIs had to be programmed to do it.

If she had been blocked, though, there was no way for me to fix it, and trying to get her to talk about it wouldn’t lead to any kind of self-realization about the conflict. Talk therapy doesn’t work on lines of code. And no matter what the three-vees say, you can’t actually send an AI into crisis and meltdown by challenging its programmed assumptions. They can grow and change—that’s one of the things that makes them sentient—but they can’t shake off a code block any more than I could regrow a severed trunk nerve.

Sally could fix it, given time. And there were code doctors at Core General that could fix it, if we could get her there.

Whatever had been done to her, though, the person who had set it up seemed to have set up defenses around it. It was becoming plausible that what had happened to Helen—and to Big Rock Candy Mountain—was an act of self-sustaining sabotage. But on the part of a member of the crew, or the crew of the docked vessel, which we hadn’t investigated yet, or something else entirely?

I picked my way along the row of cryo chambers, sighing in frustration as I examined them. They were not designed for human technicians to maintain. There were no readouts. There were no telltales or happy blinking lights. There was row upon row of… honestly, they looked more like chest freezers than like coffins. They didn’t look at all like a Synarche cryo tank, which at least partially confirmed my supposition that Helen or her crew had invented cryonic technology on the… fly, as it were. The chambers looked as if she had assembled them from whatever materials were available.

They didn’t need readouts. Nobody was ever supposed to look at them and see if they were working other than Helen and the machine.

And, well, Helen appeared to be superficially correct. Whether those cryo chambers contained living persons or dead ones, they were all intact.

The chambers did each have a battery, which made my life that much easier. I thanked Helen profusely when she mentioned them to me. We’d have to fab chargers that fit these ports when we moved the caskets, but I wasn’t too concerned about that. We had the printers, and we could copy one of the originals. Electricity is a remarkably simple—though dangerous—animal.

The number of chambers we could haul would be limited by the amount of juice we could generate more than by our cargo space.

“Helen,” I said, “can I connect to the data storage on one of these chambers to run some diagnostics?”

“I will have to print you a connector,” she said. “They don’t broadcast a signal.”

“They’re hardwired into your systems.”

I had a tickle of an idea on how to get us out of this situation. How to get control of it. I couldn’t be certain that my encryption with Sally was completely secure, and I needed her for it.

I hoped she would guess.

Helen said, “Into the machine.” She began to drift toward me, body poised and toes pointed, like a monster levitating toward its victim in some old three-vee.

“Are you part of the machine?” I asked, very casually.

Tsosie’s level of worry spiked so high that Sally bumped his antianxiety cocktail before clearing it with him. She was within her rights as a shipmind to do it—she, like Helen, had an obligation to her crew—but I picked up his irritation that she’d felt the need.

Llyn, you’re going to invite her right into your fox? That’s too risky. I cannot allow it!

Relax. Sally has my back.

I didn’t have time to say more, because Helen was answering.

“We are all,” she said, with great conviction, “part of the machine.”

It sent a chill up my spine, and I didn’t tune the unease away. A certain wariness was good. A certain wariness was my brain and body telling me that I was in a dangerous situation. A certain wariness was useful. Sensible.

Sally seemed to agree, because my sense of peril stayed right where it was, and she could have gotten rid of it as easily as she’d defused Tsosie’s panic. How had people like those in the tanks gotten through the dia with just their own native brain chemicals and coping strategies?

If any of them were alive, I guessed I might have the chance to ask them.

“Please,” I said. “Print me a connector, Helen.” Encrypted, I asked, Sally, are you game for this?

It’s a terrible idea, she answered, so I knew she had picked up on exactly what I was planning.

I said, Just don’t hurt her if you can help it.

What if she hurts me?

Don’t let that happen, either.

I continued to make my way around the coffins—or the chest freezers—while Helen printed me a connector. Although I couldn’t access the vitals of the crew, I could double-check the integrity of the chambers.

At least in that, Helen’s confidence was justified. She’d arranged things so she didn’t have to do anything except cryo chamber maintenance. Who knew? Maybe she’d gotten very, very sick of having humans around after six hundred subjective ans. Years. Whatever.

“Helen,” I said, “why did the machine put the crew into cryosleep?”

“There was sickness. The ship wasn’t safe.” She had turned away from me, and from Tsosie, and was attentively waiting, her gaze—which wasn’t her gaze—trained back toward the hatch behind Tsosie. The machine hovered there, stretched between the airlock and me, balancing on all its rods and connectors. Staying out of trouble for the time being, I supposed.

“Structurally unsound?”

“The hull was too thin,” she agreed.

“Why was the hull too thin?”

I expected to hit another block here, but I didn’t. Whoever had programmed Helen not to understand the consequences of her own actions hadn’t thought to build denial around this.

“The materials were needed elsewhere.”

“So the hull’s structural integrity was compromised. Its strength and resilience.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Because the materials were needed to build the machine.”

“Yes.” She turned to me, shimmering gold and silver like moiré silk. “Should you go into stasis? The ship isn’t safe.”

As if I had some gift of clairvoyance, I could hear the echo of those words down the ans. I could imagine her telling her crew, “You have to go into stasis. The ship isn’t safe.”

The ship wasn’t safe because she had been taking it apart. To build the machine. A machine that was… a virus. A meme, a self-propagating set of ideas that could infect and cause sophipathology in an artificial intelligence.

A meme whose source I did not know.

But wherever it had come from, the machine was also an entity, as Helen was an entity. And as such I was duty-bound to try to rescue it—and her—and save both their a-lives if I could.

“I’m safe,” I told her. “I have my hardsuit on.”

“I think you should go into stasis,” she began to insist.

But she hadn’t countermanded her previous instruction. “Oh, look,” I said. “Here’s the connector.”

The machine snaked out and handed it to me. It was a fat, physical cable. I plugged one end into my suit jack, and it fit. I crouched beside the nearest cryo chamber, and felt Sally massing herself inside my fox, a grumpy wall of code who couldn’t believe what I had gotten her into.

You put me up to this, she said. Just remember that.

Do you want to go into cryo? I asked her.

The machine was grabbing for my wrist as I plugged the cable in.

What happened next wasn’t my fight, and I don’t really know how to describe my position as an observer. Because while it wasn’t my fight, it was happening in my head. I was the conduit for it, and the bandwidth Sally was using to bootstrap herself into Big Rock Candy Mountain’s system was the bandwidth between my fox and her—well, what amounted to her physical body. The ambulance, in other words, and the processors inside it.

Synarche ships are pretty much made of four things: programmable computronium, engines, life-support consumables, and upholstery. I mean, okay: I’m not an engineer. The upholstery might be computronium, also.

But I’m not computronium. My fox—the little network of wonders embedded in my central nervous system—is, and a useful wodge of the stuff, too. It’s deeply linked to everything I am and do and see and think and feel and remember. It ties me into the senso so I can share experiences with Sally and my crewmates. It lets me live their experiences, if they share their ayatanas with me. It helps keep me emotionally stable and it helps me remember things accurately, without the subjectivity of human recollection.

It’s a damned knife blade of a bridge for an entire fucking shipmind to stuff herself across at lightspeed so she can grapple another shipmind and wrestle her to the metaphorical ground.

And I wasn’t good for anything at all while it was happening.

I stayed there, frozen in a crouch, while Sally poured herself through the electronic portions of my psyche like… I can’t even think of a metaphor. It was a good thing I was under gravity, because if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to keep myself from drifting off into space and bumping things randomly. If I concentrated really hard, I could force my eyes to focus. That was it. That was all I was good for. But after a second or two I’d have to refocus them, because I was slumping ever so slowly toward the deck.

And whatever was going on between Sally and Helen—or Sally and the machine—was happening on the other side of me, and far too fast for my conscious mind to maintain any awareness of.

“Llyn,” Tsosie said, “I really think that we should leave.”

As if I could, I thought at him fiercely, wondering if I’d even managed to subvocalize.

“There’s more bots massing outside the airlock, Llyn! A lot more! I don’t know if she’s making them or just packing the vicinity. But if I had to guess I’d say she was getting ready to rush you.”

Well, that was comforting. Wait, had Tsosie gone back out through the airlock while I was distracted? I hadn’t told him to do that.

I hadn’t told him not to, either. And checking our six wasn’t a bad idea. At least he hadn’t taken off and left me here.

That’s unfair to Tsosie, I told myself. I guess I was feeling pretty vulnerable and maybe even scared, locked down in my body like that with nowhere to go and no control.

After half a million ans, give or take, I found I could tell if I was breathing again. I had been; it was a relief to be certain. Sally?

I’m in. I just need enough bandwidth to communicate with myself, now.

“Great,” I muttered. “I was thinking about switching careers. I can be a corpus callosum.”

Something like a giant fist thundered against the exterior airlock door. I couldn’t hear it, but I felt it through the deck. I managed to turn my head. Tsosie was not in the airlock. Helen had gone back there.

The door dented, but didn’t break. It seemed unlikely that I was getting back out that way.

The outer wall of the cargo bay was nothing but hull, though. There had to be an airlock in it. In addition to whatever massive doors had been built to move bulk cargo in and out under freefall conditions.

Jens! Tsosie yelled in my head. Evacuate!

“Just a sec.” I bent down to get my sensors closer to the connection between the coffin and the bulkhead. If the chambers had been built into the ship, I wasn’t sure what we could do to move them. Cutting lasers, maybe.

That would pose no risk to the occupants at all.

I wanted to know before I left what kind of preparation we needed to make before we came back. And I was definitely leaving.

My plan seemed pretty good to me, honestly. Until the hull plates under my feet began to crumble.

Well, that explained where the extra bots had come from. Helen had been autocannibalizing her own hull to build them, and she’d finally autocannibalized too far. I had a certain amount of time to contemplate it, as I fell through the shredding fabric of that hull in slow motion, surrounded by the cryo coffins that had been closest to me. I was still plugged into the access port on the nearest one.

I wasn’t too worried. There was a long way to fall, and while Big Rock Candy Mountain was moving fast, she wasn’t accelerating fast. There was too much of her, and her design wasn’t built to take a lot of torque. I had maneuvering jets.

And I had Sally.

I pinwheeled, without much control. I needed to wait for the correct attitude before I hit my jets to stabilize and keep catching up. But I could set the suit to do that on its own. Its automated reflexes were a hell of a lot better than mine. I’d just jet myself right over and start collecting cryo units until Sally could come and get me.

I kept thinking that right up until I got myself stabilized and got a glimpse back inside the cargo bay. I didn’t see Helen or Tsosie inside.

But a tentacle of microbots was stretching toward me.

I yelped—out loud, knowing Sally and possibly Tsosie could hear me. And anybody back on the ambulance who was listening to our coms, which was probably everybody.

I hit my jets on manual, ducking away. Until I hit the end of the connector cable, at which point the cryo chamber and I began to revolve around one another.

It was a rookie mistake, and the kind of error that ended with frozen astronauts falling endlessly in orbit. Or at least until somebody came and collected their corpse, since it was antisocial to leave space junk spinning around out there where somebody else might run into it.

So on some level I should have been grateful that the tendril compensated for my maneuver, and snatched me effortlessly out of space. The cryo units were starting to fall behind—Big Rock Candy Mountain slowly gaining v over them—and I squeaked in frustration as I was pulled away. An unprofessional manifestation of a very professional anger. There were people in there.

If I could get them to Core General, they might be people we could save. But as we accelerated away from them, all I could see was their batteries failing, along with any chance at life for the people inside. Helen apparently had no control over Big Rock Candy Mountain’s engines, which had been accelerating for centians and were expected to accelerate for centians more.

It occurred to me that the microbots could crack my hardsuit, or whip me around until my vertebrae separated, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to prevent it. A little bit of worry on my own behalf penetrated my professional despair.

“There you are!” Sally cried brightly. The rush of relief that flooded through me was so intense I had to dial it back a little. “You’re all right!”

“Not for much longer!” I yelled, shoving uselessly at the microbots.

Sally said, “Cut that out! It worked. But don’t you ever scare me like that again.”

I blinked several times before it occurred to me that I should ask her what she meant. “Excuse me?”

“Punching through the hull. Helen couldn’t let lives be at risk. You distracted her—and the machine—long enough for me to override them.”

“Oh.” I decided not to explain that I hadn’t punched through the hull on purpose. “Oh! Is that you towing me in?”

“It doesn’t mean I won’t squeeze you a bit,” she threatened.

“How are Helen and the machine?”

“I don’t think I harmed them,” Sally said. “Just subdued.”

I craned my head around. I couldn’t twist that far and had to rely on senso for a visual of the cryo units. “What about those people out there?”

“Helen’s going to be pretty happy with us once we rescue them,” Tsosie said. “I’m fine, too, thanks for asking.”

He knew—and he knew I knew—that I would have felt it through our link if anything had actually happened to him. But if Tsosie ever stopped busting my ass, it would mean that he was being controlled by brainworms.

“Well,” I said. “So am I. Can I go fetch those cryo units?”

“I’m coming,” Sally said. “I’ll save you a step.”

Tsosie cleared his throat. “You know. It is possible to be too cool under pressure.”

I ignored him. “Sally, we’re going to have to divert power from our own cryo tanks to support these.”

We had three. We used them when somebody was wounded beyond what we could repair in the field, and too badly to survive the flight back to Core General.

“Well,” Sally said in resignation, “nobody had better get sick on the way home.”