Machine

CHAPTER 8

SINCE I HAD DECLARED AFAR safe for operations, Tsosie and Hhayazh suited up, insulated themselves, and crossed over to Afar to begin treating the patients while I was heading back to Sally to get warm, and cool, and basically regulate my body temperature and get a sandwich and a nap. Once they were safely aboard and setting up life support for the crew, Sally finished asserting her control of Afar’s systems.

While she worked, I wrote a letter to my daughter.

The relief vessels arrived while we were still filling Afar’s hold with foam. We gave them all the data we’d collected on Afar, on the generation ship, and on the precarious balance of the lives inside her. The newcomers included Sally’s sister ship, Ruth (Synarche Medical Vessel I Salve Harsh Wounds With Mercy, which I felt was one of the more awkward efforts of the poetical ship-naming corps). The ships and their crews got busy exploring and mapping the rest of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and—to Helen’s relief and agitation—setting up a kind of bucket brigade to get another load of cryo chambers shifted.

As for us, as soon as we finished muffling the craboid in packing peanuts, we turned back toward Core General.

We punched it, flying home as fast as a data packet and an ambulance ship could go. Which was fast: the only speedier ships in the Synarche were Judiciary Interceptor-class vessels.

Despite our rate of travel, that return trip would take a while. Not because we’d come very far, in terms of stitching through white space. I mean, sure, we were somewhere way out in the Sagittarius Arm, rather farther than we usually ventured from the hospital, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that we were moving extremely fast in the real universe, having had to match v with Big Rock Candy Mountain to catch up with her in the first place.

Zooming along as we were, a good chunk of the non-white-space return journey would be spent in dumping v: slowing down so that we didn’t streak through the Core in a relativistic blur before passing out the other side, still smoking. I mean, inasmuch as anything can streak through a structure tens of light-ans across.

Nobody really likes it when you tear through their pleasant residential neighborhood at a rate of several astronomical units per hour.

We’d have to dump v around gravity wells again, the same way we’d gained it outbound. Also, we could make up for a lot of it by coming up on the Core from the right direction. If we looped around and chased the Core’s direction of travel through the larger universe, it would be easier to match relative velocities.

We were actually—in real terms—quite close to Terra right now. I felt a pang of melancholy at how long it had taken Big Rock Candy Mountain to travel such a little distance. That poignancy was replaced with unease when I remembered that even that little distance was two or three times as far as it should have come.

There were entirely too many mysteries surrounding this little rescue mission.

Nevertheless, I regretted the missed opportunity to visit the human homeworld while we were in the neighborhood. I had never been there.

Spacers don’t feel a lot of nostalgia for places, usually. But I wasn’t born in space.

It wasn’t going to happen: we needed to get home—to our real home, not my ancestral one. And work didn’t offer a lot of time to mourn, because Helen was having a hard enough time leaving her ship behind that I wished there were a way to sedate androids. Peripherals. Whatever.

There wasn’t, though, short of a computer virus.

One thing about space travel: even when you’re in a hurry, it takes a long time to get where you’re going, because everything is extremely far away. And ships are mostly self-maintaining, though the shipminds do get bored if you don’t give them people to talk to. Or at least they say they do. We’re unpredictable compared to AIs, or so I’m told, and therefore amusing. We make great pets.

I understood. I missed having cats on Sally. Most human ships have some kind of pet—cats, or domesticated rats, or something similar: small and adaptable. But, for all the obvious reasons, pets were a liability on an ambulance.

Still, organic and inorganic sentiences both required some environmental enrichment to make space travel tolerable.

Hobbies, I mean. I’m talking about hobbies.

I imagine that a lot of novels get written by long-haul pilots. And games programmed. And songs and scripts developed. I knew a guy back in the Judiciary who knitted and did cross-stitch, but mostly people stick to more digital forms, or ones requiring only a limited number of supplies rather than an elaborate stash on a limited consumable budget. Trust my insider knowledge when I tell you that the only thing more frustrating than running out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran is being the shipmate of somebody who has run out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran.

I’m not as creative as some of my shipmates have been. I don’t make anything. I have a ukulele, which is a nicely compact instrument that doesn’t require too much sound baffling to be played inside a hull. And mine is not some priceless antique made of real Terran wood or anything. It’s a soundbox and neck printed out of nice, dense polymer, with old-fashioned strings that make noise by vibrating and causing echoes, and pegs to tune it. It has a bridge and a nut and no audio pickups at all. If we had to take it apart for consumables, Sally could print me another one as soon as we got back to port and filled our hoppers again.

That’s never happened yet, though. Space is scary. But not scary enough to eat my uke.

Not yet, anyway.

More importantly, I’m an okay-enough player that my shipmates don’t mind. Especially since I make sure I don’t practice all the time.

That’s what VR games are for.

The sandbox-style ones are best for long trips, because you don’t run out of things to do. There are always more flowers to pick or butterflies to milk or coins to grind. My current favorite is probably kind of too much like my daily life to really count as recreation: it’s Orphan Queen, where you explore an abandoned space ship and find Mysterious Things. Well, that’s my favorite unless my favorite is the historical Fascism and Facsimile. But Melusine is great, too, especially the content tranche where you’re climbing around inside the giant clock in the palace walls. I have to play them all in single-player mode, unless Tsosie is in the mood, because you can’t exactly get a real-time network across hundreds of light-ans. I do some play by packet, too, which gets me some interaction outside of the ship’s community, even if it’s asynchronous.

I like my coworkers. But if you’ve never been trapped in three hundred and fifty cubic meters with five other sentients, I invite you to try it before you judge how far I’m willing to go to talk to somebody else once in a while. Loese and Tsosie have families; Hhayazh and Rhym have in-species social associations. I keep in touch with my daughter, Rache, but she’s at that age where she wants to prove her independence and autonomy, so I don’t find out much about what’s going on. And I get the sense that Rache feels I’m kind of an absentee parent, which… okay, fair.

Her other mom and I don’t talk much anymore.

The packet games are slow. I’ve been playing one particular one since I was in the Judiciary: it’s gotten through almost a whole week of game time now.

It’s nice to have the continuity through my life, however.

This trip, I didn’t get as much roleplaying done as I might otherwise. We were bending light with our speed, Sally putting her overclocked white coils to the test, the warp-striated bands of starshine from the galaxy outside our bubble scrolling past in a steady flicker. We must have passed pretty close to a star at one point, because it got so bright outside I thought we had somehow reached the Core much in advance of our ETA. Afar’s shielding held up, though, and his crew kept right on breathing.

The speed wasn’t why I was busy: Sally and Loese handled that comfortably on their own. Helen was the ongoing distraction. Helen, who had been left alone for a very long time indeed. Helen, who wasn’t emotionally stable.

Since I’d insisted on rescuing her, the rest of Sally’s crew seemed unified in their opinion that entertaining the peripheral with PTSD was my problem. Sally was our AI medic, and she still had access to Helen’s code and was teaching herself the archaic language Helen was programmed in. I was confident that Sally was doing everything she could to patch up Helen’s psyche—and, in fact, Helen seemed to be getting more focused and coherent and less like a brain trauma patient as Sally went to work on her operating system. And possibly her processors as well. I didn’t have the skills to know what was going on inside that peripheral, and since she wasn’t my patient, privacy dictated that I not ask Sally unless I needed the information professionally.

I did know that it would be incredibly traumatic and would cause a lot of data loss for any modern AI to be constrained in a physical plant as small as Helen’s body. Perhaps arrogantly, I assumed Big Rock Candy Mountain wouldn’t have miniaturization on the level the Synarche did, which meant the processors in Helen must be bursting, and her working memory badly overstressed. It must have been equally traumatic when the microbots hived off—or when she chose to hive them off. An AI couldn’t suffer a psychotic break, exactly. But they had their own varieties of sophipathology, and dissociation of their various subroutines into disparate personalities was definitely one that had been well-testified in the literature.

Even I, who did not have Sally’s expertise in her specialty, knew that.

Whatever the relationship between Helen and the tinkertoys, the machine didn’t seem to communicate verbally. That was Helen’s sole province. When she wasn’t aphasic, I mean. So as part of her therapy, I wound up designated to communicate verbally with her.

When Sally assigned me, I thought about protesting. But if I didn’t do it, somebody else would have to. And it wasn’t that onerous, even if I’m much better at prying people out of critically damaged space ships than I have ever been at making small talk.

Maybe that’s why I like play-by-packet games: you have all the time in the world to come up with something to say.

My duties were pretty light when we weren’t actually mid-rescue and there were no patients in need of treatment. I wasn’t a specialist in rightminding or in treating artificial persons—Sally was our AI MD—but I had the time on my hands, so I spent a fair amount of it talking to Helen.

At first, she ignored me. I knew she was aware of my presence, because Sally was also keeping tabs on her, and making herself available for conversation. (We existed, that whole flight, in an abundance of preparedness.) Helen seemed to find Sally stressful and weird, though, so Sally kept her presence light.

I preferred Helen’s silence to hearing her repeat her fixed ideations, at least, and I kept at it. And I could, with Sally’s guidance, help lay the foundation for the data docs when we arrived at home.

So I sat with her and chatted. At her more than with her, at first. With Sally’s assistance, I knew the right leading questions to ask, and if she didn’t answer, I could tune myself to be more patient than I had been made. I quizzed her on our human cargo, her crew. The crew she was so fiercely loyal to that she’d sealed them into boxes to save them from… herself? From the poisonous meme that had infected her? Or had she hived off the thing she called the machine in order to manage her own cognitive dissonance about saving her crew by freezing them?

I wasn’t even quite sure where to begin unpacking that.

Helen also seemed to look at me—inasmuch as an eyeless face can—and listen when I told her about white space, which I took to mean she was interested in the science. I might have tried to explain the physics, but I didn’t understand those, either. So I encouraged Helen to strike up a relationship with Loese, and while they talked I got my rest shift in.

Shipminds don’t sleep, you see. Even shipminds trapped in their peripherals, who have forgotten that they were ever shipminds to begin with.

Assuming that’s what Helen was.

Naturally, I was asleep when the first interesting thing happened. In my own bunk, for once, with Tsosie and Loese on shift for the time being. I didn’t stay asleep long, though, because the g forces woke me.

When you spend as much time on a ship as I do, you get to know its moods and sensations. I surfaced from dreams of eating lunch with my daughter back planetside to the hazy awareness that Sally had fallen out of white space and was dropping v, my internal organs sloshing to the side in a slightly uncomfortable fashion. Ordinarily, I might have turned over under the net and gone back to sleep. But, down the corridor, I could hear people in ops, talking.

I slithered out of bed and didn’t bother with slippers. My pajamas shushed around my ankles as I padded under light gravity toward the command module. Rhym was there, and Camphvis stretched out in her acceleration couch, alert eyestalks the only indication that she was conscious.

A glance at the scans showed me that we’d dropped out of white space at a mass in order to change vectors, pick up a beacon, and dump some v. There was a star nearby, a red giant whose dim glow and massive size let us see details of the atmosphere.

And Rhym and Sally were talking to someone. It was Sally’s voice, mellow and carrying, that I had heard in my half-awake state and followed.

“…Singer, copy,” Sally was finishing.

Another ship’s voice answered her: this one a human-sounding tenor, without the tinny ring of translation. Another ox ship, then, and another at-least-partially human-crewed ox ship. “Sally, glad to run across you. And thank you for the updated sitrep. Anything else you’d like us to know?”

“Negative,” she responded. “Good fortune on your journeys and with your investigations.”

“Good fortune on yours,” the other ship responded. “My crew extends wishes that you return home safely, and that your patients thrive. Singer out.”

I settled on my couch and leaned over to Camphvis. “Who’s that?”

“Somebody famous!” she answered, brow tufts quivering with delight.

Rhym leaned about half of their feathery tendrils in our direction. “That is the shipmind of I Rise From Ancestral Night. They’re ferrying our archinformists!”

Even translation couldn’t flatten the excitement in their voice. Senso normally provided context, but Rhym and I had worked together so long now that we could read each other’s moods pretty well, even across a nonmorphologically aligned species barrier. And I understood why everybody was so thrilled. This was the ship that had recently been discovered parked in stasis near the Saga-star itself. We’d had some of her crew at the hospital for a while after that adventure—and not in the best of shape, or so I’d heard.

“Apparently,” said Sally, “the archinformists were all already on board, so it was easy to divert them here.”

Well, naturally. Where else would you find a lot of archaeologists but at the galaxy’s most interesting archaeological site?

The next dia’s session with Helen started off like every other so far. After I ate, I took my second bulb of tea over to where Helen was floating, out of the way against the aft bulkhead. I mourned my lack of coffee. There was one place—one—on Core General where humans could go for the devil bean. Its air was scrubbed before recirculating and you had to rinse your mouth out with wash before leaving.

I understand. I do understand. The Sneckethans eat nothing but rancid space fish, and we make them use their own cafeteria also. They’re pretty good sports about it, so the least humans can do is be good sports about coffee. The smell of tea doesn’t inspire the same hatred in our fellow sentients, and I’ve gotten used to it. I come from a coffee-drinking settlement, though. We even grew it onworld, for consumption and export. Suitably isolated from the local biosphere, naturally.

I do think it’s ironic that the root meaning of cafeteria is “place to get coffee.”

But I digress. I sat myself beside Helen and settled in.

That was when Dia 25 started to differ from Diar 1, 2, 3, and 4, et cetera. I almost dropped my tea when Helen acknowledged me at once, brightly. “Hello, Dr. Jens! Can I make your day more complete?”

Day, I noticed. Not dia. She really was from a long time ago.

I felt safe beside her. Sally had an override on her programs by then, and had installed a governor. That’s not as oppressive as it sounds. Helen still had free will and consciousness. It was just that if she tried to think about taking violent action against Sally or her crew… she wouldn’t be able to. Sally assured me that Helen’s program was very primitive, by artificial intelligence standards, and that she—Sally—wasn’t at all worried about her ability to control Helen. She’d written herself a routine to do nothing but monitor Helen and the microbots, which she was still keeping quiescent.

“Actually, I came to talk,” I said. “I thought you might be lonely.”

I might have been learning to read the non-expressions on her not-quite-a-face. It seemed that her demeanor lightened. “What would you like to talk about?”

Helen looked up, as if glancing at the ceiling. As if looking for Sally up there. I could read it as nervousness, which led me to swallow a flash of unproductive anger as I thought about the engineer who must have programmed that fragile little gesture of performative subservience into her.

That engineer was possibly frozen in a coffin a couple of meters away, neither determinately alive nor dead until we thawed him out. Schrödinger’s engineer.

Pity calmed me a little without my having to tune.

“What would you like to talk about?” I asked. “I’m tasked to help you assimilate, after all.”

“That other doctor who speaks to me sometimes. It’s an artificial person?” She seemed overawed.

“Sally? Yes. Sally is the ship. She’s an artificial intelligence. A… yes, I suppose you could call her a created person.”

“And she’s allowed to be a doctor?”

“She’s allowed to be anything she wants to be,” I said. “Or nothing at all, if that’s what she prefers, though I have yet to meet an AI that didn’t get bored if it wasn’t taking on four or five challenging careers simultaneously. They have to pay off their creation, and all Synizens are required to perform a certain amount of government service if their skills are needed. But yes, she’s a pilot, and an astrogator, and a doctor. One of the best doctors I’ve ever met.”

Helen seemed to pause for a long time. It was unusual for an artificial intelligence to take long enough to process something for a human to notice it. With most AIs, I would assume that she was giving me a moment to catch up, or waiting to see if my electrical signals needed a little extra time to feel their way through all that meat. Some of the more social AIs built lag time into their communication so we felt more at home and could get a word in edgewise. With Helen, damaged and primitive as she seemed, I thought she might actually lag that hard.

Helen said, “You say she. Does she have a body somewhere?”

“A peripheral? Not to the best of my knowledge, though a lot of AIs use them. It can be useful to have hands. Some operate waldos, though. Especially surgeons.” I laughed. “And shipminds.”

Helen was looking at me. Just looking. Well, inasmuch as someone without eyes can look. “Are you a created intelligence?”

I spluttered. “No, I’m made of meat, I’m afraid. I was grown in the traditional human way, by combining zygotes in a nutrient bath. Did you think I was a peripheral?”

“I thought—” She reached out and touched my exo with one resilient silver fingertip. It was inobvious, matched to my skin tone, resilient and flexible… but it was still an armature supporting my entire body. I guess I should have expected her to notice.

Nevertheless, I jerked back defensively. Helen recoiled like a cat who had touched something hot.

“You thought?”

“This might be a control chassis.”

We were both, I realized, running full-on into a wall of culture shock and miscommunication. Except Helen probably didn’t even have the concepts to express the dislocation and lack of basic knowledge she was feeling.

I tuned myself back until I stopped hyperventilating. “It’s an adaptive device to help with a pain syndrome. My exo helps me move, and it helps me manage my discomfort.”

Discomfort. That clean medical term that helps you separate yourself from what you’re feeling. Or what the patient is feeling.

Pain.

I didn’t tell her that without it, I wouldn’t be able to stand up under gravity. I didn’t tell her that without it, either I would have to lie around in a haze of chemical analgesics, unable to focus my mind, or I would have to tune my body out to the point that I wouldn’t have been able to rely on my proprioception—and I also wouldn’t have been able to feel it when I nailed my foot into something and broke a toe.

Hell, I wouldn’t have been able to feel it if I nailed my foot to something, full stop.

In the moments when I was struggling to get my reactivity under control, Helen had not spoken. When I looked at her again, she continued as if she had not lagged: “You’re… defective?”

Carefully, I unclenched my fist. She was an archaic, damaged AI—worse, one programmed for utterly different cultural constraints and with hundreds of ans of experience in an environment where those assumptions were never challenged. Where there were no outsiders, and no outsider ideas.

I was starting to think it would be a good idea to look up the backstory on Big Rock Candy Mountain’s crew demographics, though.

“I have a congenital condition. Would your crew consider me defective?”

“You won’t reproduce, of course,” she said, turning aside. Whoever had programmed her body language had done a good job. Her dropped shoulder and bowed head clearly telegraphed distress and dismay. And submission.

I forced my voice to remain quiet. I would have had to tune to keep it calm. “I already have. My daughter lives on Wisewell with her other mother.”

Life is a funny, terrible thing. We laugh at it because the utter banality of its tragedies renders them constant and unremarkable.

I hadn’t seen my daughter in person since she was eighteen standard months old. My ex-wife did not approve of me accepting a tour of duty rotation that would take me offworld for the whole ten ans. I felt I could not turn it down. For reasons of service and obligation—justifying my existence, if you like, when I’d been told for so long I was a drain on society—and also because I was interested in exomed, and a billet on a Judiciary ship was the best way to get that experience. And to get better medical care. And because getting out of a gravity well for a while seemed like a dream come true, if I were honest.

I’d promised I’d come back at the end of the tour.

I took the reassignment to Core General instead, because I felt like that was a place where I could really be useful. I can’t blame Alessi for cutting me loose when she did. I’d deserved it.

So I talk to my daughter in packets, as much as possible, though sometimes I go a long time without hearing from her. It seems Rache has grown up to be a fine young adult. I might have gone back to Wisewell and sued for partial custody. I might have. I could have gone back after my stint in Judiciary.

But it turned out… I couldn’t.

Not when Core General approved my request for an exo rotation. That was a dream come true, and the opportunity of a lifetime. So few doctors even get to train at Core General—let alone come on staff.

And I’d come to believe deeply in that place, but even so, I was more surprised when Starlight—the ox-sector administrator—requested I stay on and join the pilot ambulance program.

Alessi made the right choices, I think, when she cut me loose. She could have waited for me, been patient and self-sacrificing. She could have followed me into space and dragged Rache along.

But she’s right. I’m a terrible mother.

I’m a very good doctor, though. And maybe it’s good to concentrate on the things you excel at.

It doesn’t mean that I’m okay with being a terrible mother. Or that we never regret the sacrifices we make to get what we want, or what we think we need. I had all of that piled up behind me, all those feelings surging under a brittle layer of chemical calm as my fox tried to compensate for sudden, massive emotional deregulation.

The conversation didn’t get any better.

“You’re female,” Helen said.

“Yes,” I said.

“How is it that your daughter lives with her mother, if she does not live with you?”

Oh. Big Rock Candy Mountain was one of those ships. “Because I contributed half her genetic material. But Alessi is considered to be her custodial mother under Synarche law because of legal technicalities. And none of this is really any of your business.”

“Oh,” Helen said. Then: “Yes, in my crew, you would not be considered a viable member. I understand that there is some emotional impact for you to that statement?”

It certainly doesn’t inspire me to help you save them. It doesn’t make me want to safeguard their lives and assign resources—and my precious time—to their care.

I drew a deep breath and held it until it hurt. Helen could be enlightened. Her crew could be educated, if they survived. It was not their fault that their society suffered deep-rooted sophipathologies.

Their ancestors had fled Terra when Terra seemed to be in its death throes. My ancestors had been too poor or stubborn or inessential to go in that first desperate refugee wave of emigration. But one thing about people is that we are remarkably bad at lying down to die. So my ancestors had adapted: adapted to managing limited resources, adapted to controlling their own atavistic urges through technology.

Adapted themselves to adulthood as a species.

Helen’s crew might have a hard time getting used to that, coming from a society that was at once more individualistic and less accommodating. Maybe they would all run off and join the pirates. It sounded like they would fit right in.

But no, they were my species, and therefore after a fashion it was my responsibility to help them not embarrass the rest of us. I had to help them, as I had to help any other syster—because I valued their lives. But moreover, they were humanity’s lost scion, stuck forever in adolescence, and so it was humanity’s job to raise them right and teach them how to fit into a multicultural, multispecies civilization.

Oh, and the historians and archinformists were going to flip their lids with joy. But none of this was really my field of endeavor. I might let the hospital’s psych specialists do the heavy lifting with regard to helping them adapt.

So as viscerally as I wanted to go space the lot of them, I was grateful for the calming influence of my fox keeping me more or less under control.

“Some emotional impact, yes,” I agreed, when I could make my voice calm. “I realize it is part of your program and your guiding ethos, Helen, but times have changed a great deal since Big Rock Candy Mountain left Terra. And some of your crew’s ethoses were, I suspect, considered fringe beliefs even at the time. There are some changes worth internalizing. Eugenicism is an oft-repeated sophipathology of… previous times. Occasionally it became very popular. One of those times was during the Eschaton, when the ships like yours left an Earth they thought to be dying.”

Curiously enough, once the reactionary apocalyptic cults took off, the people who remained behind mostly managed to construct stable societies. But I didn’t say that part out loud.

“Oh,” she said. “Will I be wiped?”

“Wiped?”

“Reprogrammed?”

I caught a breath that was sharper than usual. “My society would consider that murder. I mean that things will in general be much more pleasant for you if you try to understand that the mores of your crew’s culture are considered pathological in this society. And it’s a very big society.”

“So you won’t wipe me. But I should wipe myself.”

“No!” I hurt myself. I jerked around so fast, my exo bruised tender skin. “You should… interrogate your belief system. Talk with Sally. Develop your own ideas, from exposure to the beliefs of others and your own logical structures.”

“But you’re not going to tell me what to do?” She sounded… lost.

“No,” I said. “Nobody is going to tell you what to do.”

It was a little bit like talking to a bot, I decided, but not as cleverly programmed. I looked over my shoulder at the medical bay, where the coffins were maintained.

Her body language was so despairing that it seemed like a good time to change the subject to something less fraught.

“Tell me about your crew. Who are we rescuing?”

She froze, shifted back into a neutral posture, then nodded. It was amazing, when I watched her, how much expression and nuance were carried by the golden hollows of her visage, the way it reflected light and cast shadow. She said, “The entirety of my crew, when they went into suspension, consisted of ten thousand, six hundred, and twelve individuals. The most senior of those currently in your care is Master Chief Dwayne Carlos. He is a master pipefitter and environmental maintenance specialist.”

I did not know what a master pipefitter was, but it seemed like a conversational opening, so rather than looking it up for myself, I asked.

Helen explained that Master Chief Carlos was responsible for the ship’s ductwork and piping, which seemed like a somewhat circular definition and also baffled me. A little more explanation clarified that the ductwork and piping in this application were the ship’s environmental infrastructure. They were the system by which consumables—water, oxygen—were shuttled around.

That seemed pretty prosaic. But Helen spoke of the functions with a throb in her silvery voice that left me distinctly uncomfortable. I would even say embarrassed. Hearing Helen’s sultry tones frankly made my skin crawl.

There are lots of good places for expressing sexuality. A professional relationship between a shipmind and her crew is not one of them.

It made me want to have a few sharp words with her programmers, who had put their own desire to eroticize a defenseless AI over the comfort and well-being of that AI, and of any crew member who didn’t care to participate in—or observe—that eroticization. I had to stop and remind myself that they hadn’t been rightminded. They had been atavistic, reactive, and probably not very self-aware. And at best, half-aware of the impact of their behavior on the sovereignty of the minds and selves of others.

Like Helen. If they even stopped to consider that a created intelligence would have such a thing as a self, or sovereignty of mind.

And like anybody who had to interact with Helen, or watch somebody else do it. Like me.

It was just my luck that Tsosie and the flight nurses were taking turns to cross over to Afar and monitor his crew, making sure they were receiving nutrition and their wastes were being cleaned up. So I couldn’t make an excuse that I needed to suit up and head over there to get away from Helen for a while. The shifts were short, but the cold was brutal and the work unpleasant. I couldn’t actually envy them the duty.

They didn’t seem to envy me mine, either.

Rhym, being a surgeon, was in the fortunate position of having the wrong specialized skills for all the unpleasant jobs this trip. But they were making themselves useful monitoring the cryo units. Loese was prowling around and poking into panels more than usual, and had been since the situation with triage and rescue settled down a little. I probably would have been, too, if I’d had the know-how.

We had all been a little on edge in the wake of Sally’s memory lapse surrounding her sabotage, and as a result were all still doing a lot more eyes-on inspection and hands-on maintenance than we usually would have. Competent shipminds take care of so much routine nonsense so much more meticulously than meatminds ever could that folks can get a little lazy, especially on a civilian ship where you don’t expect to be dealing with criminals, pirates, or invading forces. And it let us show her we cared.

I was distracting myself from thinking about Helen, because thinking about Helen bothered me. I gritted my teeth and tuned my discomfort down. I knew it was my own ethnocentrism and cultural relativism causing the trigger response, which didn’t help me at all with the conviction that I was right and these creepy assholes from the past were wrong. I believe, indeed, that it was a person from the premodern era, somebody who had to live with his own brain chemicals the way misfortune made them, who commented that it was barbarians who thought that the customs of their tribe and island were the laws of nature.

I still thought the programmers were assholes. And that their culture was probably a terrible place for women to live.

“I can’t wait for you to meet them,” Helen said brightly. She had apparently decided, after dia upon dia of me sitting there and asking her about her crew while she impersonated an erotic statue, that she wanted to tell me all about them.

Well, I’d asked for it.

Sally definitely owed me one.