I should turn back. I would already be paying for these choices for diar, thanks to my decision to push on. I’d either be groggy from the tuning I’d have to do to manage, or I would be groggy from the pain.
I should turn back. It was the only sane thing to do. However far I went, I had to make the same trip back. And I was going to get noticed if I kept standing here. I was way off my patch, and I’d walked the whole length of the unit and everything had seemed perfectly normal.
But Sally had said there wasn’t a unit AI, or even an AI doctor assigned to this team. And that made me nervous.
AIs are ethical.
AIs don’t need rightminding, because AIs are built that way. They are created to be ethical beings.
So what sort of operation would you be running if you couldn’t let an AI onto your team?
* * *
I gritted my teeth and raised my palm to the decomp door so that it could read my tag.
It didn’t open.
“Sally?” I muttered inside my helmet.
Right here, she whispered in my head. And no, I can’t get it open. The circuit is isolated, and I don’t dare reach into the hospital architecture until Linden is back online and I know we’re free of viruses.
I wished I could argue with her. Well, I’m getting pretty obvious out here. I’m not sure what to do next.
Duck into that room on the left, Sally suggested. Quick, the unit admin is coming.
I stepped into the patient room behind the open door. A glance at the panel beside it—and my senso—confirmed that it was empty. Footsteps echoed down the corridor—a trotting beat rather than a human stride. I folded my arms over my chest and assumed a contemplative pose inside the door.
It was a nice room. Big, and airy, with a green wall boosting the oxygen and humidity. It was full of lettuces and dandelions and greens from nonhuman planets. All of them would be edible. Some had been recently harvested. I wondered if they’d contributed to my steak salad the other dia.
There was a holowindow on the far wall, framed by decorative curtains. Right now, it offered a view of the Core from somewhere on the exterior of the hospital, but there was a remote by the bed. One could set it to anything in the library, if one didn’t find a massive black hole, lensing stars in orbit, and heavy ship traffic restful.
I did, though, and I let out a heavy sigh of relaxation—and further fogged my plate. Some diar you just can’t win.
A translated voice broke in. Doctor?
I only managed not to jump guiltily because I had been expecting it. I turned.
The unit supervisor—what they used to call a head nurse—stood framed in the doorway. He looked a little like a centaur, if the back half were a cream-colored angora goat, and somebody had thrown in floppy bunny ears and big doe eyes for good measure. His tag told me he was Nurse-Administrator Wizee, and gave me the usual details of preferred gender markers and species.
Can I help you?
My senso tag would tell him exactly who I was, also, so there was no point lying about it. “I’m exploring,” I said.
This is a closed ward, Doctor. Do you have some business here?
“I have a patient I think might benefit from a calmer environment,” I said. Which was not a lie, after all. “This seems nice.”
This ward is for exclusive patients, the administrator said patiently.
“Surely if the room isn’t being used—”
It’s reserved, he said. The patient will be joining us when the quarantine lifts. May I show you out now, Doctor?
Well, that was that. I wondered what O’Mara knew about this place. Their sector, after all. Did my remit of investigating sabotage extend to investigating other weird stuff that seemed to be official hospital business?
Probably not, I decided sadly. Anyway, my investigation was supposed to be secret.
And I hadn’t been doing a very good job of making time for it, between the demands of my actual job, my side job as Helen’s care liaison, and everything else that was keeping me busy.
Which hadn’t even involved, I remembered, the machine. I’d been so busy, and it had been somebody else’s problem, so I’d nearly forgotten it existed. Worry settled like a weight into my guts, and I wondered if anybody was keeping an eye on it with Dr. Zhiruo incapacitated.
Well, whatever I was looking for, it would have to wait until I slept and charged my exo.
“Yes,” I told the administrator. “I’ll leave quietly.”
* * *
My exo found a last flicker of power as I staggered back along the corridor toward the Casualty Department. Fortuitous, as by then I was too exhausted to have made my way home without it. I was pretty sure the private unit nurse had twigged that there was something wrong with me, though. With a little luck, he’d chalk it up to “systers are weird,” and not think too much about it.
As for me, I dragged myself back to my quarters at half speed, tumbled back into my hammock, and got the trickle attached. I dozed off in the middle of reading safety incident reports.
I’ll be honest. I dozed off three screens into the first safety incident report.
I’d told O’Mara they should have found somebody else.
CHAPTER 18
DESPITE MY EXHAUSTION, I DIDN’T sleep particularly well. The pain kept waking me, even when I tuned it back. And I had to be up and fed and garbed and suited early.
I was attending grand rounds in a set of hydrogen atmosphere units that dia, as part of my continuing cross-species medical and cultural education, as required for all Core General staff. This was always… interesting, not least because their atmosphere and mine made a flammable combination.
Todia, it was even more of an annoyance than normal, because five shifts later, the lifts still weren’t working. And because the lifts still weren’t working, anybody who wanted to move around the hospital had to do it by climbing in and out of enviro suits at every section lock, or by sticking to the sections they could get through in a sterile softsider. So the lockers were a mess, and no one could rely on the lockers containing the equipment they were labeled as holding, because tracking and redistribution was falling behind demand.
You can only rightmind people into social consciousness so far when they’re running to make it to surgery. At least the lockers self-sterilized.
I still had my sterile suit from the previous dia, having almost fallen asleep in it. And it was designed so you could swap other environmental modules in on top of it—including the spark-proof, antistatic ceramic plates I needed for the hydrogen environment. So, a little chafing (for me) and a trip through the sterilizer (for the rig) aside, everything was under control. Even the hydrogen.
I finished that obligation by lunchtime.
I scarfed down another much-needed meal and scrambled back to Cryo, barely in time to introduce our second archaic human to her first alien. Tralgar told me they’d probably have Oni awake within the week, so that was one more task on my plate unless Loese could make herself available. She had better make herself available. Or I was going to have to turn into twins.
Nobody had asked Tsosie—or even suggested Tsosie as an alternate. Apparently, nobody thought much of his bedside manner.
I guess being overbooked is a compliment. But I was going to need a nap in the on-call room, because getting to my own quarters… well, they were far away. And I needed to get on with the task that O’Mara and the tree had assigned me.
And I needed to check on Helen, and make sure somebody somewhere was keeping tabs on the machine in Zhiruo’s and Linden’s absence. Not to mention find the time to talk to Sally some more about her own experience with sabotage.
There were not enough standards in the dia.
I wondered if I had enough time to find Rhym and ask them for a squat, tentacular hug. And maybe a neck massage. Those flexible sucker paddles on the ends of their gross manipulators are surprisingly excellent for getting right up into the attachment points at the base of the skull that are so
poorly designed on us humans. And they squeeze really comfortingly.
* * *
When I let myself into Jones’s room this time, I was struck by how cramped it was in comparison to the rooms in the private unit. There was just about enough space in here for a Thunderby to edge around the bed if it was excruciatingly careful.
Jones seemed alert and oriented. She remembered me at once. “Hello, Dr. Jens.”
“Hello, Patient Jones,” I replied. The consonance of our family names pleased and amused me.
Based on her laugh, she hadn’t realized it before, and it amused her, too. “Do you think we’re related?”
I thought about the poetry that somebody had engineered into her DNA.
“It’s possible,” I said. “You’d have to ask an archinformist about the vowel shifts.”
She had solid food on her tray, I noticed approvingly. She seemed to have made a pretty good accounting of it, too, before she pushed it aside.
“How’s the grub?” I asked.
“A little weird,” she admitted. “Scrambled tofu is pretty much scrambled tofu, though.”
“Some of the options are worse than others, but I’m afraid it’s all hospital food.”
“All right, Doc.” She folded her arms and cocked her head suspiciously. Tubes draped with her movements. She was still being hydrated and electrolyte balanced. “I can tell from the look on your face that you’re up to something. And it’s not just checking up on patients, is it?”
“No… oo.” I looked over my shoulder. Cheeirilaq was out of sight along the wall. “Did you look over the files I left you?”
“About the Synarche? Sure.”
“Would you like to meet your first syster?”
Her eyes widened. “Already? I mean, there’s one here?”
“There’s a lot here. Your care team is minority Terran. Once you were awake, though, we didn’t want to shock you before you had some time to prep yourself.”
“Your multispecies culture is diverse and honors complexity,” she said, parroting one of the files I’d given her. “Mine only has boring human people in it.”
I laughed. Both of these archaic humans were so charming. Whatever brain damage Jones had suffered, Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo’s intervention seemed to have helped her heal without evident deficits other than the memory loss. It made me feel even more awful about the people we wouldn’t be able to save. And the ones we hadn’t been able to save already.
“I’ve seen the movies,” Jones continued. “If you’re not going to use me as an incubator for some horrible insectoid’s eggs, I can probably manage without freaking out.”
Hmm. Goodlaw Cheeirilaq definitely counted as a horrible insectoid, from an atavistic primate point of view. Maybe I should go get Tralgar. Or even Rhym or Hhayazh, though Hhayazh probably wouldn’t be any less horrifying, and its reproductive cycle did involve parasitism. Though not of sentient beings, in this dia and age.
Camphvis would probably do it if I asked nicely enough, but—eyestalks aside—I’m not sure a Banititlan really would be perceived as exotic enough.
The Goodlaw really did want to interrogate all of the surviving patients. I hadn’t seen anything to indicate that it would not do so nicely. But it didn’t hurt for me to keep an eye on the process, and my patients.
My secondhand patients. Patients once-removed?
“Well, in at the deep end,” I said. “Specialist Jones, this is Goodlaw Cheeirilaq. Cheeirilaq, come on in.”
The Goodlaw’s exoskeleton clicked gently as it lowered itself to duck through the doorway. It kept its raptorial arms and manipulators folded, and its wings furled tight under the wing coverts. Nothing, however, could make it look small.
Jones made a noise. I hadn’t taken my attention off her. Her heart rate spiked, though not as sharply as Carlos’s had. Eyes wide, shoulders pulled back against the pillows.
“I was kidding about the horrifying giant insects,” she said.
I solemnly vow not to parasitize you, Cheeirilaq responded. With its small manipulators, it popped the collar of its uniform jacket.
Its “voice” came from the bedside monitor, and Jones turned her shocked look at that. “It talks?”
“It’s sentient and sapient,” I said. “And very law-abiding.”
“Damn,” said Jones. “How many different kinds of… of systers are there?”
She had been studying.
“Thousands,” I said. “It’s a big galaxy. Not all of them are equally distributed. Any more than we are. Space travel is harder for some systers than others, depending on their environmental and emotional needs.”
“And not all of them are like that? Like you, Goodlaw? I’m sorry.”
She didn’t attempt Cheeirilaq’s name, and I didn’t blame her. It’s kind of a trill followed by a click, and human vocal apparatus can approximate it, but not without long practice. Mostly, we all rely on the translators.
No, not all of the systers are like me. Some are squishy, like you.
Jones shrugged. “If I’m squishy, I guess I need a harder shell.”
Your species is a syster species to mine. You are fine the way you evolved.
“Oh,” Jones said. “Oh! You mean that all of us are systers to one another!”
This is so, said Cheeirilaq. Cautiously, it elevated its body to a more natural position. Jones watched curiously, but to her credit did not recoil.
Admittedly, it was a giant bug—but it was also a giant bug in a tiny bolero jacket.
May I ask you some questions? it said.
* * *
I left Cheeirilaq interviewing the patient, once I’d satisfied myself that they were going to get along fine. I was hungry again, but the hospital was instituting rationing in order to weather the quarantine, and it was my shift to forgo eating.
Occasional fasting is good for my species, I told myself, and decided I could combine my initial research on the sabotage with my nap.
Multitasking always leads to excellent rest, as you know.
I took myself into an on-call room—currently empty—and claimed a bench bed. It was a little too short and wide for my species, but I made do, constructed a nest, plugged in my exo, and started scrolling through the incident reports of recent accidents at the hospital. I should probably look at the sites in person… but the lifts weren’t running, and who had the time?
O’Mara was right. I immediately identified a significant statistical upswing in “safety incidents” over the past half an or so. No surprise there, obviously, but it’s good to have confirmation. Human brains are excellent pattern makers. They’ll figure out a pattern even if all you’ve got are random data points that don’t actually mean anything, which is why we also have AIs and statisticians.
And AI statisticians, who are kind of terrifying.
There had been a chlorine leak into a water section—bad, but no fatalities—and another into an oxygen section that had been detected and contained before reaching dangerous levels. There’d been a malfunction in the newly installed artificial gravity that had buckled deck plates in an ox section and dropped atmospheric pressure enough so the decomp doors had triggered on either side. Nobody had been standing in the doorways, but the engineer handling the testing had spent an uncomfortable standard hour and a half pinned to the floor by high gravity and isolated by dropped doors.
Fortunately, he was from a fairly sturdy species and had suffered no lasting injuries.
Another staffer—a Terran—had not been so lucky, and had sustained near-fatal burns when a pressure seal in the airlock into one of the hell-planet sections that made Venus seem balmy had failed after she’d stripped out of her pressure suit—a rattling armored vehicle on treads. She’d still had her softsuit on, and that had probably saved her life. She was receiving clone grafts, some of it neural tissue.
I flinched in sympathy.
Those armored self-mobile hardsuits were designed to endure conditions beyond even what my rescue hardsuit co
uld be adapted to. The idea of sweating up a swamp in one, caring for patients, struggling out of the foul thing only to be caught in a jet of superheated steam and half cooked alive… it was something I could relate to far too personally.
There were other incidents of equipment failure or safety protocol malfunction, an additional half dozen or so. One more had led to a serious injury. Another had resulted in a pair of fatalities.
If it was all sabotage, it couldn’t all be caused by the same person—could it? It was happening in too many different sectors, on too many different shifts. And then there was the incident on Sally, with the damaged coms. We all assumed it had been set up before we left port. But what if Sally had been damaged by a member of the crew, and she and Loese were in denial about it?
That was horrifying.
Why had O’Mara and the Administree recruited me for this job? They had access to staff logs, to the comings and goings of everybody in the hospital. They could access all sorts of information that was off-limits for a simple trauma doc.
You might even say that Starlight was the central Authoritree.
For ox and CO2, anyway.
No, the quality of my sense of humor is not improved by stress.
But couldn’t they check who had accessed each damaged sector before the damage occurred? Well, maybe. The Synarche’s privacy regulations precluded pulling bulk data, though I was confident we could get a warrant to track the movements of an individual person or persons if I could identify a suspect or two. Assuming that they hadn’t used timed devices to cause the damage, which they probably had, which in turn meant that establishing a timeline would be well-nigh impossible when one considered the sheer volume of traffic around this place.
Yes, I know, privacy is a core value and a sentient right. But right then it was a pain in my ass.
So what did my supervisors think I could do—or that I would notice—that they couldn’t?
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