Machine

  Presence lights blossomed on the wall. The Administree was tuning in. I could only assume Linden had summoned them. My hands clenched on the arms of my chair.

  Something terrible was happening, and I was utterly helpless to do anything about it. To even really understand it. All I could do was watch.

  Rilriltok’s feather-barbed foot groomed my hair. I have to admit, it was soothing. It even slowed the heart palpitations a little.

  [Tell them you’re initiating a quarantine protocol,] Starlight instructed. [Tell Dr. Zhiruo the full story, however.]

  “I’ve discovered another problem,” Linden said. “Dr. Zhiruo is offline. Administrator, I am going to initiate an emergency purge and restore.

  “Now.”

  * * *

  The lights flickered. The spin gravity wavered. Rilriltok darted to the center of the observation room and hovered there, far from any obstacle. I grabbed the chair I was sitting in, because I was too far from the rails.

  I guess the rails all around this place weren’t as silly as I had thought.

  I braced for a slam—so much of the environmental control of this hospital depended on things spinning at the right speed in relation to one another—but instead my weight stabilized and neither Rilriltok nor Cheeirilaq went crashing to the deck. In the Cryo ward, staff looked up and around, then went quickly back to work.

  “Starlight? Are you there?”

  [Present,] said the administrator, just as Helen burst into the observation room.

  “I can’t find the doctor!” she said. “I need to see my crew!”

  “It’s okay,” I said, which might be the biggest lie of my medical career, and let me tell you 50 percent of medicine is knowing what lies are helpful when, and which are indefensible. “Your crew are right there. Dr. Zhiruo is sick. We’re working on it.”

  Lack of faith doesn’t keep you from praying. It just keeps you from feeling like it’s going to make a difference. Right then, I prayed that Linden, with our warning, had caught her own infection in time. I prayed that her backups were clean.

  It would be a while before we knew.

  I had no doubt, now, that whatever had happened to Afar and now Dr. Zhiruo and Linden was an invasive meme, an AI virus of some kind. That somehow Sally had managed to avoid manifesting symptoms, unless the memory glitch about the sabotage was one.

  Oh, little space fishes. I Rise From Ancestral Night and Ruth and probably half a dozen other ships were still out there at the generation ship. And our whole way back from it, we had cheerily been dropping packets into every transponder we passed, and exchanging data with other shipminds.

  Every AI in the galaxy could eventually be affected—and if the toxic meme had gone out that way already, any packets telling people to quarantine themselves would be standard weeks or months behind the contaminated ones.

  That was enough time for a lot of things to go wrong.

  Understatement of the centian.

  Helen walked past me, to the door connecting to the ward. Goodlaw Cheeirilaq wasn’t quite in time to intercept her before she went through, and Tsosie made a completely comical grab that slid off her arm as if he had tried to pick up a handful of hydrophobic colloid. So like a pack of idiot ducklings, the other four of us followed Helen into the unit.

  The ward staff either hadn’t noticed yet that something was critically wrong with Linden, or were presuming it would be fixed in a moment. I suppose it’s a drawback of how smoothly this enormous, improbable institution usually runs that when something actually goes simultaneously belly-up, pear-shaped, and sideways, everybody not immediately involved in the crisis assumes it’s only a glitch, and somebody else’s problem, and will be dealt with momentarily.

  The amazing thing is that they are usually correct.

  Tralgar waved a tentacle as we entered, eyes blinking in succession around its head. It trumpeted a greeting that shivered Rilriltok’s antennae.

  Ah, just the sentients I was hoping for. You should look at this, Dr. Tralgar said to Rilriltok and me. It extended a large orange datapad.

  Rilriltok dodged back in alarm. I didn’t blame it. The pad was so large I needed both hands to receive it, and despite my exo I still staggered a bit. It probably would have crushed Rilriltok like a… um.

  At least we weren’t under anything like full gravity, a convenience for Dr. Rilriltok that made the normally ponderous Tralgar move like a ballet-dancing elephant.

  Rilriltok hovered, balancing at my shoulder with feathery forelimbs, and peered down. This looks like poetry.

  It wasn’t incorrect. I was looking down at a series of sentences decorated with line breaks. It seemed to go on for a while—at least several screenfuls as I flicked through, and Tralgar’s handheld had a big screen.

  “Does poetry serve a medical purpose now?” I asked.

  You tell me, said Dr. Tralgar. Does your species usually use its genome to record works of literature?

  I looked up. “Excuse me?”

  Tralgar’s eyes blinked in sequence. Dr. Zhiruo recovered it from several of these patients. It was encoded in their DNA sequences. She got curious because they looked too tidy.

  “Helen,” I said, “what can you tell me about this?”

  She had been standing quiescent, or nearly so—little shivers of light running across her surface showed that her body was rocking imperceptibly back and forth. Eagerness? Conflicting calls? All of the above?

  I locked my exo so that it was entirely supporting the weight of the Tralgar-sized Tralgar-handling-hardened pad. That way, I could hold it one-handed without discomfort. I scrolled back to the top of the readout.

  This life we dedicate

  To the stars

  To the future

  To the apex of human endeavor

  To success and continuance.

  This life we dedicate…

  “It’s not very good poetry,” Tsosie said, rising on his toes to read over my shoulder. He looked up at Tralgar. It must have hurt his neck. “Some people with a lot of resources to waste, who can afford the penalty percentages as well as the cost of the intervention, gengineer their kids. I suppose you might put poetry in a genome for the hell of it.”

  “Conspicuous consumption,” I said. “Surely humans can’t be the only species that wastes resources on display behaviors.”

  Tralgar blinked at me. It didn’t really signify: Tralgar was always blinking. Surely they’d use better poetry.

  “Do they all have it?” I asked.

  They all have something, it trumpeted softly. Dr. Zhiruo apparently had not managed to decode all of it before she went offline. And I admit, it’s interesting, but it doesn’t seem relevant.

  I scrolled up again. I didn’t particularly feel the urge to read any more. This particular poem—or litany, maybe—had been retrieved from the genome of one Calvin Weir, ensign, no specialty listed. Age seventeen.

  A kid. A trainee. I wasn’t a cryo specialist, but the chart wasn’t encouraging for his survival.

  You tell yourself not to think about the casualties. You tell yourself you did your best. You helped more than would have been helped otherwise.

  Sometimes you still think about the casualties.

  “It seems like a valediction.” I stepped closer to Helen. “Helen, your crew. How were they replaced?”

  She turned her head to me, blindly. “Dr. Jens?”

  “Where did the babies come from, Helen?”

  “Oh, we made them. When couples wanted children, we combined and edited their DNA, and produced the offspring.”

  “Did you encode markers?”

  “The technicians encoded markers,” she agreed.

  I put both hands on the tablet, unlocked my exo, and extended it back to Tralgar, somehow managing to not tip myself over in the seconds before the Thunderby relieved me of the weight of its device.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I looked at Cheeirilaq, at Tsosie. I didn’t look at Rilriltok, because it was still mostly hi
ding behind me.

  “I think we worry about this some other time,” Tsosie said. “It’s a fascinating cultural artifact. But right now, we need to concentrate on whatever’s causing AIs to go offline.”

  “Right,” I said. “That is over my grade.”

  It’s not over my grade, the Goodlaw said. But my expertise is in law enforcement, not AI medicine. What do you suggest?

  I said, “This is a good time to talk to O’Mara.”

  * * *

  We met them in the observation lounge with the addition of Dr. Tralgar. O’Mara had already been aware of the problems with Linden and Dr. Zhiruo, because Starlight had told them. We still had no idea how the meme was propagating from AI to AI despite the sterile protocols. Figuring out how it had been done, if we were lucky, would put us one step closer to the cure.

  “Out of an abundance of caution, we should jettison the pods,” O’Mara said.

  “No!” Helen cried, moving forward.

  I put an arm out between her and O’Mara. I didn’t think I could stop Helen if she wanted to go through me—but I thought she might hesitate to go through me.

  O’Mara rubbed a hand across their short coppery bristles. “I said that we should jettison the pods. Not that we were going to. Nor are we going to jettison Helen, or her machine, or the undocumented military tech that was packed into Afar’s hold. It’s too late, anyway, even if the notion wasn’t morally repugnant: the hospital staff is already infected, and while the pods might be the vector, so might Afar, or Sally, or anything that came into contact. We need to place the hospital under medical interdict—”

  “Quarantine,” I clarified, for the staff that didn’t speak Judiciary.

  “Right. So on to your other interesting discovery. I’m wondering, do all the patients have the modified DNA?”

  “Yes,” Tralgar said. “Including the one in the better-engineered cryo pod.”

  “You know,” O’Mara said, “I was not expecting that. Have you decoded her poem yet?”

  Tralgar checked his pad. “Dr. Zhiruo had not managed to crack that one. They’re not all encoded the same way, apparently.”

  “Of course not.” Tsosie sighed. “That would be too easy.”

  O’Mara humphed. “I had been about to guess that Afar most likely brought that additional pod in, possibly using the walker to put it in place. Then… accidentally exposed himself and his crew to the toxic meme that was infecting the generation ship’s systems, since it seems pretty evident at this point that there is a meme, and got trapped there with enough time to trigger his distress beacon?”

  Tralgar chirped, disbelievingly. You are speculating that somebody found this derelict ship and started using it to store corpsicles? For reasons unknown?

  “I mean,” Tsosie said, “it’s not the only hypothesis. And Cheeirilaq here floated something like it before.”

  I’ve seen weirder things, the Goodlaw admitted. Where did the meme come from, then?

  “Mercy the archinformist AI suspects that it has devolved from the override codes that Big Rock Candy Mountain’s captain used to force his crew into cryo pods. But that doesn’t explain why Sally didn’t catch it,” I said.

  “That’s not actually the peculiar thing.” O’Mara crossed beefy arms. “The peculiar thing is that any of our friends could catch a meme that originated on such archaic system architecture.”

  “Aw, pustulence.” Everybody looked at me. “Zhiruo was helping Helen import herself to modern architecture. And adapt her programs to it.”

  “That doesn’t explain Afar.”

  “No,” Tsosie said. “And it doesn’t explain Afar’s crew, either.”

  Tralgar, who seemed to have been holding in a piece of information for a while, waved that reinforced orange datapad for attention and made every attempt to bugle quietly. I made a mental note to print some sound-dampening earplugs if I was going to be spending this much time in Cryo from now on.

  It said, We should know if any of the crew might survive rewarming in about twenty-four standard hours.

  “Well, good.” O’Mara stuffed meaty hands into their jumpsuit pockets. “If they or any of the other rescues wake up, we can ask ’em what they know about toxic memes from the bottom of space-time. You keep on this. I’ll check in when I’ve heard something from Starlight or Linden, or if Afar or his crew regain consciousness.”

  We hear and understand, friend O’Mara, Rilriltok said.

  O’Mara cleared their throat. “And Llyn, don’t forget what we talked about earlier.”

  Sure, Master Chief. In my copious fucking spare time.

  How long is it likely to be? Rilriltok asked.

  O’Mara looked at Cheeirilaq, but apparently Cheeirilaq had remembered its manners and was staring off into space absentmindedly. O’Mara’s big shoulders hunched. “Depends on how fast Linden can get herself back up, and whether Dr. Zhiruo’s colleagues can intervene and get her and Afar cleaned up and rebooted.”

  “Nobody has had much luck with Afar yet,” Tsosie said.

  Tralgar’s tentacles writhed in what might have been distress, irritation, or deep thought. The translation was not clear. We know more now. And we know how the damage to Afar’s crew was done. I have been in contact with the methane team working on them, and they believe that a surgical intervention is likely to be successful.

  “Surgical?” I asked. “What exactly—? How badly are they hurt?”

  They need re-etching of the… I suppose the nearest equivalent is circuits—the neural pathways that I now, with this new information, suspect have been affected by the meme. Tralgar stopped itself. I’m getting ahead of myself. Something—probably the toxic meme, by Occam’s razor—infiltrated their foxes and rewrote the neural pathways to lock them into a deep sleep.

  I shied away from the idea. It nauseated me. I know we’re all mostly microprocessors made of various substrates and chemicals and electrical impulses—the thing all sentients have in common—and the philosophers love to tell us that free will is an illusion. But the idea that something could just… reach in, and rewrite your brain.

  How hideous.

  There are so many reasons I decided not to specialize in neurosurgery, and right then I was remembering all of them. At least with my patients it is very difficult for me to make things worse for them, in terms of long-term outcomes, since they’re usually about to die if I don’t do something to help them.

  “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck,” I said, after due consideration.

  O’Mara nodded. “In the meantime, I need to go figure out how to feed a hundred thousand sentients on limited rations for an indeterminate time. I hope somebody on this bubble knows something about hydroponic farming. Or the crystalline ice-creature equivalent.”

  * * *

  Waiting in hospitals is the worst thing. It doesn’t get any better when you’re a doctor with a nonrelevant specialty. Or when the hospital is falling to pieces around you.

  I did suit up and go EVA to rescue some staff members stuck in lifts when Linden had powered herself down. Miraculously—or rather, because of Linden’s skill—nobody had been injured, but quite a few people were trapped, and moving them to less claustrophobic environs was work that I was actually trained for. And “suited” for—and I didn’t even need a rescue hardsuit for this. Just a regular easy-to-maneuver softsider.

  That killed a few hours usefully, and when I was done I needed a break without too many people around me. I could have gone back to my quarters on the hospital… but I was rattled and anxious and my whole body hurt and I didn’t want to tune to take the edge off it. I wanted to go home.

  And home, for the time being, was still Sally.

  But as soon as I stepped through the airlock, I heard something banging—like a tool pounded against a bulkhead. And a frantic voice, Loese: “This is bad! This is so bad, this is so bad—”

  I was about to cringe my way right back out the airlock again when Sally’s voice interrupted smoothly. “We’ll be back on duty i
n no time, Loese. Somebody else will cover this call. Nobody will be left out in space because of us— Hello, Llyn. I’m sorry, we’re having a bad dia here.”

  Loese shook her head. She had apparently been banging on a stanchion with a ship shoe, which was a pretty self-restrained way to deal with the level of frustration she seemed to be feeling. I mean, it would have been more restrained to have tuned it back a little, but sometimes you want to feel angry.

  I held out my arms to her in a question. She sighed, and came to me, and accepted the best motherly hug a terrible mother could muster.

  She wasn’t actually any older than Rache, was she?

  I flinched, and tried not to let her feel it. I had been away from Rache long enough that she’d become a grown woman, entirely without me.

  Maybe I should be the one smacking things on stanchions and yelling about how bad it was. “Hey,” I said, when Loese pulled awkwardly back. “You gonna make it?”

  “This is my fault.” She flopped into an acceleration couch.

  “Loese.” Sally’s mom voice was a lot better than mine ever had been.

  “Right.” Loese folded her hands, choosing self-control. “Nobody’s going to die todia because of us, and everything else can be fixed. Right?”

  “Right,” I said. “I’m going to take a nap. Unless you want to get that coffee?”

  She looked at me wanly. “Thanks,” she said. “A nap sounds like a better idea, frankly.”

  * * *

  After I had rested for a standard or so, I went to fetch Helen. She hadn’t stirred from the Cryo observation lounge, where she’d been watching the rewarming staff go on and off shift since Tsosie, O’Mara, Cheeirilaq, and I left. Tralgar wasn’t present now, having gone to rest, but Rilriltok was, and the unit outside was a hustle of other bodies.