Machine

CHAPTER 4

WE COULD HAVE GONE DIRECTLY on to the docked Synarche ship, but it would have been dumb. Sally was sending drones to investigate, and we could deal with it after a rest cycle. Tsosie and I were both exhausted and low on resources, and I was in too much pain to be much good to anybody.

One thing about the kind of pain I have is that it is so amorphous—so unlocalized—that it’s hard to describe and easy to ignore. You don’t even necessarily notice that it hurts, when it hurts. You just notice that you’re crabby and out of sorts and everything seems harder than it should.

Not being able to describe it also tends to make other people take it less seriously. Like family members, and sometimes doctors, too.

I found myself trying to massage my hands through the hardsuit as we cruised back to Sally, using our thrusters to match velocity and then, when she seemed motionless, to nudge us into contact with her hull.

Since we weren’t jumping out of her at a moving target at this time, we both entered through the same airlock at the same time. We waited through the decon and, when the lock cycled, stepped inside.

Loese, the pilot, wasn’t waiting for us, because she was on a rest shift and Sally gets very cross with us if we ditch our rest for nonessential reasons—or, as she calls them, “excuses.” The rest of the crew all found reasons to wander by and greet us as we were stripping out of our newly sterilized hardsuits. It wasn’t exactly a hero’s welcome, but it was nice to see everybody.

Not that Sally was so big we could have avoided them even if we were trying.

The first to wander around the ring was Hhayazh. It was one of our flight nurses, a multi-limbed multi-eyed nightmare creature from Ykazh, its dull black exoskeleton covered in thick, bristling hairs. It was also one of the nicest sentients you’d ever care to meet, once you embraced Ykazhian culture… which, in turn, embraced sarcasm with the enthusiasm of an octopus embracing a tasty, tasty mollusk.

“Greetings, far wanderers,” it said, through the usual translation protocols. “I perceive you’ve made it back to the real hub of the action. I hope your trip wasn’t too boring.”

“About as boring as being here,” Tsosie answered. “We heard you broke the place.”

“That wasn’t me,” Hhayazh said. It pointed at Camphvis, the other flight nurse, as the Banititlan came into the cabin. As she always did, she was leading with her eyestalks. “Camphvis leaned on the dashboard.”

Camphvis responded with the bubbling sound that her species used to indicate derisive laughter—which the senso translated into derisive laughter. This produced an interesting layering effect. “Where does Sally keep her dashboard?”

“If you knew that you wouldn’t have pushed the wrong buttons.” Hhayazh rattled its exoskeleton, a sound like the hollow carved windchimes people on my homeworld made out of native plant cellulose. It was a social cue with all sorts of meanings, like human facial expressions, and I hadn’t even begun sorting them out.

“What actually happened?” I asked.

“Equipment malfunction,” Sally said. “I’ll show you later.”

When Camphvis emerged completely around the hatchway, I saw that she was carrying a tray. Nothing complicated, just the hot, calorie-dense nutritive broth that spacers called “soup.” It wasn’t soup, but was profoundly welcome nonetheless.

Tsosie picked his up at once. I was still fighting with my hardsuit. They were supposed to peel themselves back into the actuator, but exposure to grit or something was causing it to hang up on my exo.

“Seriously.” I pretzeled myself into another awkward position. “What went wrong?”

Hhayazh, with surgical expertise, got the jammed bit unhooked and snatched its manipulators out of the way as the thing clam-shelled shut with a snap. “Go to bed,” it said. “You can ask questions when you’re not too tired to understand the answers.”

I traded Camphvis my actuator for a cup of soup. Her eyestalks twitched to focus on it. I was totally creating a distraction, because I was still working on my comeback to Hhayazh. Our Nazzish flight surgeon, Dr. Rhym, saved me from humiliation by climbing down the ladder from Sally’s hub into the gravity of the rim. (If you’re bantering and it takes you more than fifteen seconds to return a serve, you definitely lost.)

Rhym resembled a feathery tree stump, but moved with surprising agility. The long woodsy toes on their four feet wrapped the rungs in a prehensile fashion, leaving the manipulatory tendrils on what a human would have considered a face to gesticulate. They seemed as if they were talking to Sally privately: it wasn’t translated for the rest of us, and the wriggling stopped when they reached the deck.

I was bent over, working my swollen feet out of my boots. They should have retracted with the rest of the hardsuit. They hadn’t, and were stiff and not shaped for easy removal. The pressure hurt, and pushing against them to try to escape the pressure hurt.

“I’ll make sure this gets serviced,” Camphvis said, eyeballing the actuator suspiciously.

“Just take it apart and reprint it,” Hhayazh said.

Dr. Rhym was about my height in my current crouched position.

“Our patient-guests are stowed, and the peripheral has been brought aboard!” Even their translated voice sounded enthusiastic. “Dr. Jens, would you like some assistance?”

“Well, yes,” I proclaimed, and straightened up to hold on to the rungs on the opposite wall while Rhym scooted over to me.

They moved fast, each leg working independently of the others in a kind of scuttle or zoom. In moments, their manipulatory tendrils uncoiled and eased inside the left boot, gently prying it loose from my exo, which had gotten snagged on the lining. I sighed in relief as the thing came off.

Rhym is a very good surgeon. What I’d been struggling with for minutes they accomplished in instants. And they didn’t even use a knife.

I went to lie down.

It was my exo moving me at that point as much as me moving it, and I could kid myself that I picked up annoyance and worry through our link. I told myself that I was anthropomorphizing, but people used to assign personalities to ships and houses long before ships and houses had them, and there was a semi-AI processing engine in my exo. A small, uncomplicated one, without curiosity or an artificial personality. There wasn’t much room in there, and anyway can you imagine how terrible it would be for a person with agency to be stuck going through life as an assistive device?

Usually, before I went to bed, I’d tune down my pain management and see how my body was doing on the other side of the fuzzy wall of endorphins and interventions. This time, I didn’t: I knew what the answer was going to be.

I lay down on a patient bed in one of Sally’s two care units. This was not the usual bunk assigned to humans. We hot-swapped, and I traded off with Loese and Tsosie. But Tsosie was as tired as I was, and Loese wasn’t off her rest shift yet. I wouldn’t fit in Rhym’s bunk, Camphvis used gel blankets to keep her membranous skin moist, and Hhayazh’s species weren’t sleepers. So I got a bed big enough for a Thunderby, and even if it was a little hard, I didn’t complain—just printed off as many sterile blankets as we had consumables for and made a nest on top. I’d recycle the molecules later.

Then I plugged my exo in to charge, piped into it, and started checking up on my aching body to see if any of it was anything serious, or merely the usual combination of inflammation and polyarthralgia, before I dialed them down or, where I could manage it, turned them off.

My exo, predictably, had a little lecture waiting for me. Todia’s exertions have exceeded this unit’s filtering capabilities. Recommend extended rest, and a maintenance cycle.

“I can’t do the extended rest right now, kid. Put me in for eight hours and authorize the maintenance cycle.”

Lack of adequate rest will likely lead to worsening discomfort and is against medical advice.

“So is everything fun.”

This unit does not understand the response.

I sighed. “Acknowledged, patient’s decision is against medical advice.” Patient is a damn internist herself, robot. Also, I could get plenty of sleep on the trip home. Right now, we still had a second space ship to recon.

And yelling at my exo wouldn’t help. I turned both the room lights and my pain response down. Nothing was busted: it was all just inflamed. Life is like that. I reached into senso to pull up a paper on Adrychrym circulatory systems. It was a boring paper: I meant to read myself to sleep. If I could get all the noisy doctors in my head to concentrate on medicine, they wouldn’t keep me awake.

I should have unloaded the ayatanas, I know. But I was too tired, and I was going to need them again tomorrow.

I was pushing my way through a badly written extract when I was interrupted by the small throat-clearing beep our shipmind uses when she’s about to enter a conversation and doesn’t want to startle anybody.

“Llyn, go to sleep,” Sally said. “Or I will make you.”

“I was sleeping,” I said.

“You were reading.”

“I was reading myself to—oh, never mind.” I’d wake up groggy if I used my fox to send myself to sleep, but it wasn’t worth fighting with the shipmind over. I tuned up the relevant hormones, and was gone before I had to listen to her rejoinder.

Tsosie was right: we did get a lot more popular with Helen once we retrieved her people from the bottomless waste of space. She wasn’t as happy when Sally immediately put them into her own storage rather than bringing them back to Big Rock Candy Mountain, or so Sally told us after our rest cycle.

Helen didn’t say anything about it to Tsosie or me—or the rest of the crew—because Sally kept her out of our way. The peripheral sat quietly in a corner of the ambulance, cabled to a bulkhead, sharing Sally’s sensorium. It’s always hazardous to assign human emotions to nonhuman sentiences, but Helen was modeled on a human psyche. And it seemed to me that her body language became less and less reactive and more composed as more and more of her people were moved on board Sally. And the more Sally let her experience the natural environment of space the same way Sally did.

I was sure she still wasn’t happy. Nor would I be, in her place, with most of my crew left behind. Nor was I, standing in my own shoes, with so many people left unrescued.

You can always get one more out.

Until you can’t. And it’s not easy to know where the line between “saving one more” and “dying yourself” is.

We could have left once we had a full load of patients. Could have—Helen wasn’t capable of stopping us as long as Sally had her in restraint. But we waited for the additional relief ships to arrive, because to do otherwise would have amounted to the extremest mental cruelty to Helen and to the machine.

And we were all curious, and wanted a look at that docked, silent methane ship. Even though she wasn’t answering our hails, there might be people on board her, also. It was such a huge rescue job that we couldn’t do everything at once and had to prioritize. Triage.

With Helen’s help and Sally’s override, part of the microbot machine was packed up in boxes and loaded in external holds; Sally told us that its personality core was both integrated with Helen’s and distinct from her. It was quite nonhuman in its construction, and while Sally didn’t seem to have any problem communicating with it, she also didn’t seem to be able to easily translate its concepts and logical processes for us meat types.

She did say we’d gotten enough of its processing power to preserve its personality core. If anything should happen to the rest of it, it would be able to reconstruct itself.

What can I say? AI medicine is weird.

The human patients were going to have to stay frozen for the time being. Though I wanted to thaw them out. And Hhayazh really wanted to thaw them out.

But all we needed was a virulent influenza from six hundred ans ago that nobody has any immunity to anymore, or something similar. I know we all have diar when we’re tempted to take definitive action… but wiping out humanity with a primitive plague wasn’t on our agenda. Neither was killing a lot of ice people because we couldn’t wait to defrost them until we got someplace with the most advanced medical technology in the galaxy.

The pods were decontaminated, and they would wait to be opened until we got back to Core.

Rhym tried to argue me into letting them do the EV to the methane ship, since we had no patients suitable for them to operate on. They maintained that Tsosie and I still needed rest. I pointed out that I still had the ayatanas loaded. We could have been caught in a stalemate for a standard month, but Sally pulled up the drone surveys and showed us a ship interior more suitable for long lanky types than squat broad-circumferenced ones, thereby resolving the argument in my favor.

She did insist that I eat and let my exo and hardsuit both finish full maintenance cycles before I went out, though. The exo was nearly done, and Camphvis, good to her word, had set up the hardsuit. But I suspected that Sally had conveniently not remembered to trigger the disassembly and reprint, in order to keep me indoors for another few hours.

I mean, sure, it’s supposed to be on my checklist. But she’s the AI.

I was halfway through breakfast—no coffee, drop it all down the Well, because coffee smells terrible to most syster species, so I was making do with tea—before I remembered to ask her what had gone wrong the previous dia. “Sally. When you lost contact with us. You said you would explain later. What happened?”

Sally paused, which is a thing AIs do when they’re communicating with humans, because it makes us more comfortable if they operate at our speed. Then she said, “I’m not precisely sure.”

“But you fixed it. I mean, you got back in touch with us.”

“I routed around it,” she said. “With Loese’s help. And then I forgot about it.”

That, in conjunction with the delay on maintaining my hardsuit, made me sit upright. It’s a good thing we weren’t in free fall, because I dropped my spoon and nobody likes oatmeal floating into their hair. Things did not slip Sally’s mind.

“I think I better have a look at this,” I said, trying to ignore the chill of unease I felt.

“Get Loese to show you,” Sally said. “She looked at it yesterdia.”

I got Loese to show me.

She was around in the control cabin, which is mostly where we congregated when we weren’t sleeping, eating, or working. I had to make a halfway circuit of Sally’s circumference to get there, so it took me a whole two minutes. Maybe ninety seconds. Sally is big for a starship, but that doesn’t make her big.

Loese had black hair and unusually pale skin and a butch presentation. I found her bent over panels, her afthands immersed in their interface while she worked course calculations. Loese is a spacer by upbringing, and has the usual spacer mods: it must be seriously irritating to her to be stuck on Sally with her constant simulated spin gravity.

On the other hand, maybe it’s fun to zip around the galaxy on an ambulance. No speed limits for us, except for physics. And nobody makes Loese buy her own fuel.

“Hey,” I said when she looked up. “When you get a break, can you take me to see whatever went wrong yesterdia? Sally said you hadn’t fixed it yet.”

“Sure,” Loese said. “We can go right now. Just let me pause this. And since we’ve got functional coms back, I wasn’t going to fix it until we got back to Core. To preserve the evidence.”

“The evidence,” I said, startled enough that it didn’t register with me that I ought to be asking a question. I was repeating the words that didn’t make sense, in an experimental fashion.

Loese looked at me. “Sally didn’t tell you.”

“Sally told me it was an equipment failure and sent me to bed. What didn’t Sally tell me?”

“Come see for yourself,” Loese said. “Sally?”

“Here, Loese.”

Loese led me farther around the ring, and aft. We opened a hatch that led to a little room too small for both of us to enter at once. It was an equipment access and storage space, and we wound up unclipping and moving a few duffel crates of things we used too regularly for it to be worth printing them every time we wanted them before we got to the back of it.

When they were out of the way, I could see scorch marks in the ship’s grippy interior sheathing. Somebody had scored the material and peeled it back to expose the workings underneath. Sally was supposed to be self-healing, but either she’d shut it off or that function was compromised.

“You opened this?” I asked Loese.

“There’s a superconductor path under here,” Loese said. “A lot of electricity wound up going places it shouldn’t have.”

“How is that possible? It’s not live, is it? And why isn’t it healing?”

She moved back so I could step past her. “Sally can’t find it. Based on what you told me, it sounds like she can’t even remember what’s wrong.”

“That sounds like brain damage,” I said, and had a sudden unsettling memory of Helen talking around the programmed blocks that didn’t allow her to see what a part of her own… self… was doing. “But how—”

“Sabotage,” Loese said, succinctly and reluctantly.

“The docked ship?” I asked. “Wait, Helen?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing out here. It must have been in progress before Sally made any contact with Helen or the machine on Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

She seemed to realize that her revelation would trigger a whole cascade of questions, because she continued, “And I don’t think any of you did it: I think it must have been put in place back at Core. I think somebody hid a device with a timer or some other kind of trigger in Sally, so that she lost coms with you and Tsosie while you were outside. And then put some kind of worm or logic bomb in her code so she would not be able to tell what was happening.”

I stared at her. There were words in my head, but they all seemed to get jammed in the pre-verbial door trying to get out at the same time. She’d only been our pilot for a few standard months, but I’d come to rely on her skill and calm. And the nervous twitchiness I was picking up from her was… deeply worrying.

Loese, watching my expression, shrugged. “If Rhym hadn’t sensed smoke… well, their tendrils are a lot more sensitive than a human olfactory system. We could have been in much more trouble by the time we were found.”

But how could she be sure that none of us were behind it?

“This was sabotage.” I had to hear it in my own voice to internalize it, I suppose.

“Yes,” Loese said. “I am confident in that assessment.”

“But how could Sally not notice? How could she not detect the damage before it happened? How could she not feel the device?”

“That troubles me as well; thus my theory of the logic bomb. Sally is running a self-diagnostic, and we’ve been unable to find signs of any other time bombs ticking away, but a definitive cyberpathology report will probably have to wait until we get home again.”

“Should we abort? Run for home?” I asked.

Her lips pressed together. “We’re not in any more danger here than we are running home, really. We can do the diagnostics perfectly well right where we are. Our patients need us. And if something were to go catastrophically wrong, the next wave of rescue vehicles has a better chance of finding us here than they do somewhere in white space. I also wonder what the purpose of it was. It wasn’t enough damage to really endanger Sally. It just left us out of contact with you for a while.”

“Tsosie and I have been replaced by predatory, shapeshifting aliens,” I said. “You caught us. If you throw water on us, we’ll melt.”

I must have nailed the deadpan, because Loese blinked at me for at least three seconds before she laughed.

I said, “Even if Sally were totally disabled, or Tsosie and I got stuck on the generation ship, there’s a small fleet right behind us.”

“I know.” Loese shook her head. “The good news is, none of this is critical to life support or propulsion. And we’re looking for it, should anything happen again. When we get back, maybe the master chief will have some ideas about what happened.”

Master Chief O’Mara wasn’t in the Judiciary anymore, but everybody mostly still used their old title and not their new one. Core General’s ox dockmaster—really, they were the head of the Emergency Department, ox sector—was an old acquaintance of mine from the military. They were also a total badass.

I was kind of looking forward to the detonation when I told them somebody had busted one of the ships in their care. They would take it personally, and they treated invective as an art form.

I could look forward to a colorful performance.

“Can you run down whatever’s blocked Sally’s awareness of the event? I… what are the odds that that’s evidence of… that worm, or something that’s still messing with her functionality?”

“Working on it.” Loese waved me out of the cubby and sealed the hatch. “Really, really working on it. Now go do your job.”

Unsettled, I went to get a nice warm mug of creatine, anti-inflammatories, and caffeine from the gallery for breakfast. I sat down across from Tsosie, who was spooning porridge. He grunted a hello; I slurped my beverage. It was faintly lemon-flavored and a little spicy from the capsaicin and curcumin it contained. I hurt a little less than I had before I rested, and this would improve things even more.

“Loese tell you about the… damage?” I asked.

He nodded, lips flexing. He wasn’t what you’d call a handsome man, I didn’t think—though what did I know about what made men handsome? His cheekbones were wide over a sharply triangular chin, and his deep-set eyes seemed to rest behind them like caves on stark ledges. That gaze held a sharp intelligence, and it assessed me. “You worried about it?”

I slurped again. “A little, yeah.” That was an understatement. But hysteria is contagious, and even if you’re scared, you do the job in front of you, and then the next job after that. And you trust the other professionals around you to do their jobs, too.

That’s how you get through dangerous situations. That’s how we were going to get through this one. Sally’s injury—the sabotage—was her problem, and Loese’s, to deal with and repair. My fluttering at them wouldn’t help the situation, so I would do my own job and stay out of their way.

Maybe I should admit to Tsosie that I did, after all, have a little faith.

Tsosie pushed his bowl away and reached for his own mug, which smelled like chocolate. “You never get scared. You weren’t even scared back on the generation ship, walking out into that cargo hold with the machine following you like a pissed-off guard bot.”

“What was there to get scared of? There’s just a job to do.” I wrapped my hands around the mug. The heat helped the ache.

“Oh,” he said, “fembots. A ship that’s taking itself apart to become macro-programmable matter. Mysterious, sourceless sabotage damage to our own vessel. The incapacitated, silent Synarche ship you’re about to go enter?”

I held a hand out, flat, and wobbled it from side to side. So-so. “What else you got?”

He laughed at my ironic bravado and batted my hand aside. Gently, because Tsosie is always gentle. “You’re that dedicated to Judiciary.”

“I couldn’t care less about Judiciary. I left Judiciary when I got the chance to be a doctor full-time.” The drink was starting to taste metallic as it cooled. I swilled the rest of it. “I’m that dedicated to saving lives.”

“Sure, you’re an angel.” He shook his head and laughed harder: my expression must have been something to behold. “No, I know you are. This job is your life.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m not scared,” I said. “Maybe it’s that the job is all I have to lose.”

Tsosie stopped laughing.

“What?” I said.

He frowned at me, inspecting my face as intently as Loese had inspected the scorched bulkhead.

“What?” I said again.

“I believe you’re telling the truth.” He finished his chocolate and stood, sweeping his utensils together. “I hope you find more again, somedia.”