I swore at him and told him he was a pompous ass. He laughed, and it sounded like genuine amusement, the way he had always laughed at my rude remarks. It was a good sound to hear again.
By the second-last day, with our helium-three reserves so close to the minimum required, I kept telling Gideon, “Go on, try the engine now!”
And Gideon would always reply, “Not yet. It’s not all there yet.”
“But it’s so close! Even I can see it’s close!”
“The reaction won’t sustain itself. It’ll flame out and we’ll be screwed and we’ll be stuck here for God knows how much longer.”
“But it’s so close!”
“Not yet!”
“My suit is killing me!” I was on the final recharge of the final suit, and already two days past its expiration date. Waste processing was not going well. I was hardly eating; most of the time I felt dizzy, sick and feverish.
“Mine’s the same. Just wait a bit longer. You made it this far.”
“How can you be so bloody reasonable about this!” I yelled, even though it meant taking a deep breath.
“I am old like the forests. I have the patience of stone.”
“What if the tube’s already been shifted?”
“It hasn’t been shifted.”
“How do you know it hasn’t been shifted?”
“I just know.”
“You just know?”
“That’s right.”
“Because you are so old and wise, like the trees.”
“That’s right, McGee.”
He was insufferable when he was like this. “You’re supposed to be still freaking out about the unspeakable machine in your midst!” I said.
“I love machines. Can’t you tell?” He gestured around the compartment, which was, it must be admitted, an ode to Victorian-era industry in all its whizzing, steaming, pumping, spinning, churning steel glory.
“Yes, but your friends aren’t supposed to be machines, Smith.”
“Or is that machines aren’t meant to be your friends? Who’s to say the definition of friendship can’t expand to accommodate paradigm shifts?”
I swore at him again for being pretentious.
He smiled. “It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.”
“Think about it some more. You’re still looking at me like I’m a museum exhibit.”
He apologized again. I’d lost count of the apology score. I think he was slightly ahead of me.
On the final day the hours hardly moved. For a long time we hovered in the powerplant compartment, watching the needle creep its imperceptible way to the green zone. This made me crazy. I couldn’t just hang around there, staring at the thing. Gideon could. In that final week, he’d spent almost all his time in the powerplant compartment, even sleeping in there. He was at pains to explain that it certainly was not personal. He said it was like hypnosis, watching a needle that doesn’t move, except you know it does move, and you’re sure that if you watch it long enough, you’ll see it move. He did at various times report that he’d actually seen this for himself; it wasn’t simply something that happened when his back was turned or when he was talking to me.
At last, however, Gideon made the announcement. We had enough juice to start up the powerplant. He explained that we’d have enough to get the drive online, as well as the inertial dampers and the tube grapples. He was going to leave life-support and other systems like ShipMind offline so that all the powerplant had to do was get us out of the tube. Once out, we’d be back in real space. Gideon could then install a fresh, intruder-checked copy of ShipMind. Once that was done, we could resume normal ship operations. Ah, normal ship operations. It sounded grand!
This, Gideon explained, was the point of waiting for enough helium-three to accumulate, so the reaction would keep going, so we’d get, as he put it, “a good head of steam”.
“Here goes nothing,” Gideon said, clutching the big lever in the powerplant compartment. His fingers flexed around the brass handle. He looked like he could not believe he was finally at this point. The month had felt like years. Surely we’d both been given up for dead.
“Well?” I said, urging him to get on with it. “My suit’s not getting any fresher!”
He looked up at the big reactor, and then looked at me. An expression crossed his face that looked like mischief.
Suddenly, he pulled himself across to where I floated in the doorway. “You do it,” he said.
“What?”
“You pull the lever.”
“What?” I heard him, but I still didn’t understand.
“You do it.”
“You want me to…?” I gestured at the lever.
“Just give it a pull.”
“It’s your ship, Smith. Besides, to be honest I don’t know if I’ve got the strength.”
He sighed and coughed. At last he looked up at me and abruptly pulled me into a hug. There was no escape. It was the most inelegant, most awkward, difficult hug in human history. My first instinct was to pull away, but he kept hold of me, squeezing me tight. I started to feel something strange, a warmth, a feeling of what might have been peace. I squeezed him back. He felt thin and flimsy, like a bird wrapped in plastic film. I worried he’d break if I hugged him back. He didn’t let go.
I don’t know when I started crying.
CHAPTER 12
The powerplant started up the first time. The engines fired. The electromagnetic tube grapples unfurled and set about straightening the tube. An exit point opened. We shifted into real space, emerging about eight light-years out from Serendipity, and five light-years from New Norway. Gideon had warned me that it would probably take two tube jumps to get to our destination, but that was before our Month of Icky Smelly Hell.
“It can’t happen again,” he said.
“You didn’t think it could happen the first time.”
“Let’s just say I’ve been a little more cautious than usual with this installation.”
I was surprised, to say the least. “You mean you weren’t as cautious as possible previously?”
Gideon slipped into professor mode. “There are classes of threats, McGee. There are the simple and common threats you know are out there, and which are easy to prevent. Then there are the very unlikely and rather nasty threats, threats that are very hard to guard against and of which you only hear perhaps three cases per year in all of human space. Defending against such attacks requires extremely slick, extremely expensive, black market mil-spec quantum crypto gear.”
I moved on, trying not to look alarmed. “So something like that couldn’t happen again?”
“Let’s just say an intruder at that level would find things a little more tricky.” He grinned.
“Right,” I said, not happy about our prospects. “So it’s another tube for us, then?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I am going to have the longest, hardest, hottest shower in human history when we get there.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever quite feel clean again, McGee.” He had taken to scratching at the suit’s skin. He’d told me there was no way his gloved fingernails could ever hope to penetrate the self-regenerating suit fabric, but it was still a worrying thing to see. I’d been resisting the urge to scratch for this very reason. The suit fabric looked and felt flimsy when it was new; by now, days after its expiry date, surely it was only holding together out of its sheer pride as a product.
It took an unbelievable seven hours and twenty minutes before ShipMind found us a compatible tube. That’s how bad things were getting now. Last year a trip from Serendipity to New Norway, even with two tubes, would have taken only about two hours. More time would have been taken up traveling through the New Norway system at a safe speed. I was anxious to escape the damned suit.
It felt like there were hordes of stinking bugs crawling over my skin. We maneuvered and accelerated into the tube.
I watched Gideon’s face. He had his eyes closed, watching his interface, concentrating, ready to respond to trouble.
ShipMind stayed online.
Gideon reported no threats.
The tube grapples worked.
We reached the end of the hypertube, collapsed back into real space, and found ourselves near the outer reaches of the New Norway system.
Gideon reported a hail from New Norway System Control’s outer boundary network, welcoming us to the system and inquiring after our condition.
It took a while for Gideon to explain.
System Control got us onto the nav beam, which, if we followed it all the way insystem to New Norway, would provide the easiest and safest approach through the teeming interplanetary traffic. Meanwhile, they were deploying medical teams to pick us up on arrival. The System Control officer sounded concerned but reassuring.
We arrived at Amundsen Station three hours and five minutes later, and not a moment too soon.
“I really don’t have time for this,” I was saying much later to an implacable disposable nurse.
The nurse was telling me that a Dr. Panassos, the specialist assigned to our case, wanted Gideon and me to stay overnight for “observation and restoration”. We would be free to go about our business in the morning, after Dr. Panassos’ rounds.
It was hard for me to argue. I was completely immersed, naked and powerfully sedated, in a bath of blue nano scrubber goo which felt warm and very tingly against my skin. My head was only under for a minute, but it felt like longer. I remember the active goo had strange acoustic properties.
Unable to breathe, I began to feel a sort of sluggish panic starting up, but the nurse pulled my head out and made me breathe before anything worrying happened. For the rest of the bath I simply lay back and let the swarms of scrubbers go about their business, while I tried not to think about zillions of tiny mouths munching and crunching their way through my caked layers of stinking filth.
The process was finished after only ten minutes and I emerged from the bath, like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, feeling profoundly clean, much lighter — and much weaker, which was disturbing. I could not stand up. We’d been taken from the Good Idea, lying down, on float stretchers. Right now, as I sat up for the first time since reaching the station, feeling like seaweed out of water on the edge of the bath, the nurse informed me that it would take time for the restoration therapy to build me back up, but I should at least be ambulant by morning. She said that a month in weightlessness, living only on emergency rations and water, and doing only fitful exercise could be very hard on one’s body.
The nurse also showed me I did not need to dry off; the bots, eerily, stayed in the bath. I was already dry. “Very decent bots”, I said, blearily. She wheeled me back to my bed.
So there I was, lying in a very comfortable hospital bed, wearing hospital pajamas made of what felt like real flannel and listening to the nurse explain why I could not simply get on with my investigation. In one sense at least, I did not particularly want to get on with “the case”: it would mean more space travel. It would mean getting dirty. Right now I could not remember ever having been cleaner. Getting dirty again after a scrubbing like this would feel like wanton vandalism.
Clean or not, though, and even through my sticky haze of sedation, I knew that I did have to get on with the case. There would be less evidence with every passing day. Memories of witnesses would get that much foggier. The trail would only get colder.
“I have to get down to Narwhal Island”.
The nurse told me the sedation would wear off overnight, and I would be fine in the morning. As soon as Dr. Panassos cleared me to travel, then I could go to Narwhal Island.
“But I have to go now!” I said, sounding drunk even to me, and in fact having a go at struggling out of bed. “I’ve lost too much time already!”
The nurse effortlessly tucked my legs back under the covers. “Ms. McGee,” she said, and I remember the very lifelike way she bristled, “considering what we found growing in your emergency suit, you are very fortunate indeed that we’re letting you out as soon as tomorrow. You have several potentially lethal bacterial infections, plus a month’s worth of muscle-wastage from living in zero-g, not to mention the shock to your nervous system.”
This puzzled me, distantly. “What?”
“You could have died, Ms. McGee.”
I started to swim towards that worrying sound she had just made. “Died?”
“Yes, died. Mr. Smith, too. A man his age is particularly vulnerable to infection.”
Frowning, I knew what she was telling me was very bad indeed. “Infection?”
The nurse was suddenly gone. I was alone in a room with three other beds; none were occupied. There was little noise from outside, in the corridor. I had no idea where Gideon was or how he was doing. Dimly it occurred to me that he might be in even worse shape from the muscle wastage and lack of nutrition, but this was having trouble registering in the parts of my mind where urgent matters lived.
Looking around, I admired the pale wood decor, the airy sense of light, the way all the technology was well-hidden. No substantial noise penetrated into the room to interrupt my rest. There were fresh sweetly-aromatic and colorful flowers in a glass vase on a table next to my bed. You might think, in a situation like this, that I would perhaps feel lonely. In any other circumstance, I think that would have been the case.
Instead, it felt to me like the room was packed full, to the point of suffocation, with the idea the nurse had left me with, that we had nearly died in that tube.
I curled tight around myself, pulling the covers around me, trying to get warm.
It was a long, hard, wakeful night.
Slowly, the bath sedation wore off. Sense returned. My body ached. When I complained to a night-nurse — another blank-eyed disposable — she explained that this was the restoration therapy at work, swarms of biomolecular builders were reconstructing my depleted tissues. She asked if I would like something to help me sleep. After several hours suffering like this, it was tempting to respond with something like, “Do I look like I want to stay awake all bloody night?”
Instead, I said, “Yes, please. If you wouldn’t mind.”
Even with a sedative, I couldn’t sleep. The pain throughout every muscle in my body was appalling. There was no escaping it. I called the nurse back. She switched the bed to pain-management; it started to work, a little. I didn’t writhe and gasp quite as much.
“Is this normal for this kind of thing?” I asked another nurse a little later.
“Oh yes. However, you should be asleep. Why aren’t you asleep?”
“Lots on my mind?” I said, trying hard but not succeeding in keeping the sarcasm out of my voice.
There was a lot on my mind.
Every time one of these disposable nurses came to see what was wrong with me, I found myself looking at their beautiful, open, blue-eyed faces. They affected a business-like warmth and their smiles looked fairly convincing. They seemed like they knew their nursing stuff backwards and forwards, and would do everything in their power to look after me properly, whether I liked it or not.
Had I ever looked like that? I wondered. Perhaps in the early days of my police career?
All right, I’d never had much of a body and nobody would ever have said my face was beautiful, but had I exhibited an analogous sense of brisk police professionalism? Did the other cops working with me wonder why I had such a full-on, by-the-book, enthusiastic sort of manner? Surely someone would have commented on it, and told me to settle the hell down and relax a bit.
I also thought about what Gideon had said: what if all disposables were just like regular people, with inner lives, ideas,
wishes, hopes, but programmed not to express any of it? It would mean the difference between useful tools and nanofactured human slaves. What if I was defective in that I, for some reason, lacked the programming block that suppressed my inner life and would have made me a slave?
The thought nagged at me all night.
Though you would think, if I was a defective unit and behaving like a normal person, capable of free choices and creative thought, then someone would have contacted Cytex Systems to tell them about it. You were no use as a slave if you didn’t know you were supposed to be a slave. If this was all correct, then surely I’d be taken back to the factory for either repairs or recycling.
I didn’t remember anything like a repair situation.
But would I remember? Surely a technician could select which memories I would keep and which would be lost, just as they had given me an entire lifetime of illusory memory.
Hmm. It was too complicated.
Back to first principles. Things of which I was at least reasonably sure.
I registered as a Claudia 3.0, but at the same time I was more than a normal Claudia 3.0 model. I looked like a regular person. I didn’t have that glassy, vacant look that instantly gives disposables away. Even before I’d woken up, I had blended in as a regular person. Disposables couldn’t do that. They might perform complex functions, but they never fooled anybody into thinking they were human.
I was betting Kell Fallow would have reported the same thing had he still been alive.
Not for the first time, I was starting to wonder how many other regular-looking human beings there might be in human space who were really some form of unknown android.
As I lay there, trying hard not to think about my aching body, this question went round and round in my head. I kept coming back to the idea that certain government and semi-government agencies might be very interested in disposables that could think beyond the limits of even complex rules-based programming, employing creativity, feeling, and even intuition. Disposables, in a word, who thought just like a person.
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