by Tim Pratt
The darkness receded, and she was… in the infirmary still, but this time sitting on a bench next to Sebastien’s bed. The simulation was excellent: it even smelled of the sick bay’s aggressively filtered air. Sebastien opened his eyes, blinked in a fluttering flurry, then looked at her. “I… know you. Don’t I?”
“You tried to kill me once.”
He sat up, looking around. “No, that doesn’t sound right. I… locked you up? I was afraid you were going to interfere with something important.”
“That ‘something important’ was a plot to transform the entire human race into your obedient slaves using mind-control implants. Which I class as murder, so, I stand by my statement.”
“I think… were you with Elena? Did you… oh, God.” He put his face in his hands. “I tried to change her.” He looked up, then touched his skull all over, tenderly, as if expecting to find implants there. “The way… I was changed. But I’m all right now? You helped me? Like you helped her?”
“Cut the shit, Sebastien,” Callie said. “You remember what happened just fine, don’t you?”
His face lost its twist of worry and went briefly blank. Then he sighed. “Yes, all right. I was just trying to make a good first impression.”
“You blew your chance at that on the Axiom space station,” Callie said.
He turned toward her, leaning slightly forward, a bit of intimacy-building body language – or manipulation. “I remember you, Captain Machedo. I remember what I did. I don’t remember why it seemed like a good idea, because now it strikes me as absolutely insane… but I did it. I don’t dispute that. I remember waking up a couple of other times, too, though they seem more dreamlike, somehow. They weren’t dreams, were they?”
“No.” She crossed her arms, closing out his attempt to connect with her, whether it was unconscious or not. “They were simulations – what you’d call virtual reality, though a lot more advanced than the stuff they had in your day.”
He frowned. “Why wake me up in a computer program?”
She snorted. “We weren’t sure if our attempts to get the brain-spiders out of your head worked or not, and I wasn’t about to wake up a genocidal lunatic on my ship, so we did it in a safe space. A good thing, too, since you attacked people and tried to blow up my house.”
“Ah.” He waved his hand in front of his face. “Is this real?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“I think, based on what I know of you… no. This isn’t real. You aren’t actually here.”
“Oh, we’re really right next to each other. I’m in a hospital bed next to you. But yes, this is a simulation, so strangling me here, like you did to Elena the first time you woke up, won’t accomplish much. Won’t even hurt me, because pain responses are dialed way down for me. Not so much for you, though, so watch yourself. You can feel pain, and I’m good at inflicting it.”
He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “Threat duly noted. I feel… different, though, captain. Before, it was like I was looking at the world through a pane of thick, dirty glass. Everything was dim and muffled. Like instead of inhabiting my own body, I was in a sort of… control room, inside my own skull, looking out, manipulating my body like it was a robot under my remote control. You all seemed like robots, everyone – and moreover, you were malfunctioning, or programmed in ways that conflicted with my own goals.”
Callie didn’t let herself shudder. She wasn’t going to show Sebastien anything that could even remotely be construed as weakness. “What goals were those?”
“I think… freedom? Yes. Freedom.”
“Last time we woke you up in a simulation, you stole my ship and blew up my station. For freedom?”
He sighed. “Freedom for me, anyway. Maybe… less so freedom for everyone else. I don’t feel that way now, though, captain. I don’t have that sense of… estrangement from myself, and from others, any more. I am so ashamed of the things I did, even though it doesn’t really feel like it was me that did them.”
Callie considered his look of anguish. “How do I know you aren’t lying?”
Now he just looked tired. “You can’t detect lies with your fancy future technology?”
“Not with perfect reliability, though believe me, your brain is being scanned very thoroughly, and we’ll get some indications about your general truthfulness from that.”
“Something changed, though. I feel it. You, or the doctors, must have done something to me, to clear away that fog, to let me out of the cage inside myself. Am I wrong?”
Callie shook her head. “No. Parts of your brain were damaged by the Axiom intrusion. Our ship’s doctor, Stephen – you killed him once in a simulation too, remember? – gave you some very expensive experimental drugs that regrew some of your brain tissue. You’ve regenerated the bits that got chewed up by nanobots. Some of your mirror neurons, he said, and parts of your prefrontal cortex, and the temporo-parietal junction, and your… something… supramarginal gyrus. Brain bits associated with empathy and impulse control, apparently. The Axiom didn’t think you needed those. We disagree. Stephen said the treatment might make you less megalomaniacal.”
He looked sheepish. “Well. Probably. But I was always a little megalomaniacal.”
She actually laughed. “I bet you were. How about the homicidal part?”
“I was never particularly homicidal. I don’t feel at all like murdering anyone right now.”
“I won’t take your word for it.”
He slumped. “Elena must despise me.”
“She’s the reason you’re still in therapy. She hasn’t given up on you. But I wouldn’t expect her to make out with you.”
“Ah, no, of course. Maybe I can be her friend again, though. I… Do you know, I forgot what guilt felt like? It feels terrible. I want to crawl into a hole and pull the hole over me.”
“That was my suggestion for how to deal with you, though it was going to be more like me throwing you in a hole than letting you crawl into one.”
“Point taken. You don’t like me. I don’t blame you. Where do we go from here?”
“I’ll unplug myself, and talk to the doctor about what your brain scan says. If it looks good, we’ll wake you up in the real world… and you’ll be closely monitored. Like, a small machine the size of a hummingbird, with the mind of a hyperintelligent AI inside it, will fly around with you at all times, keeping you under surveillance.”
“Ah. There was a writer, before my time, named Iain M Banks, who wrote about something similar – criminals on an alien world were assigned robot minders to keep them in line. They were called slap-drones, I think.”
“Ha. You wish you’d only get a slap from these machines. They’re more like a stab-drone.”
“I always used to say, science fiction helps us imagine the future, which helps us create it,” he said. “And here we are.”
“Huh. You’re less humorless than you were with large parts of your brain burned out. I’ll take that as a good sign.” She stood up. “Oh, hey: Elena and I are together now. Like, together-together. The only reason I didn’t let you die on the Axiom space station along with your fleet of mind-control ships was because she cares about you, and I care about what she cares about.” Callie stepped toward him, crowding into his personal space, and spoke low and quiet. “But it also means I protect her. Obviously if all this ‘I feel so bad’ crap is a ruse, I’ll shove you out an airlock. But even if you are a person again instead of a monster, watch yourself. If you hurt her, if you so much as disappoint her, you’ll contend with me. Do you understand?”
He didn’t shrink away, but held her gaze, and nodded. “I do.”
“Yeah. So you say. We’ll see.” She snapped her fingers, and left the simulation.
Chapter 18
“How did it go?” Elena tried not to sound too eager, but she was bubbling over with hope. It would be so nice if Sebastien was OK – or at least OK enough that she could stop worrying about him all the time, and free up her mind to worry about other t
hings.
Callie sat up. “He said all the right things. I don’t know how reading body language works when the bodies aren’t even actually real, but that all looked right, too, unless he’s very good at faking, which I think takes more social awareness than he’s shown in his last couple of iterations. How’s the brain scan, Stephen? Is he a lying murderer who murders people and lies about it?”
He grunted, consulting his terminal. “You know my reservations about using brain scans to try to detect lies – it’s so inaccurate it’s barely better than chance – but I didn’t see any strong indications that he was making things up in there. Otherwise, and without going into technical details you neither have the training to comprehend nor particularly care about… everything looks good. His past scans showed almost no activity in the parts of the brain that involve empathy, or guilt, which wasn’t a surprise, because they were badly damaged by the Axiom machines. This time, he’s lighting up in ways that indicate real emotional engagement. The responses are a bit muted, perhaps, but his pathways are still forming, and I don’t know what his original baseline capacity for love, kindness, and understanding was anyway.”
“Sebastien was… always more interested in systems than people, I think,” Elena said. “He could get interested in individual persons, sometimes – he was interested in me, that way – but he was a big-picture sort of thinker, let’s say.”
“We might not get a big weepy breakdown and show of penitence, is what you’re saying,” Callie said. “My question is: can he be trusted not to kill everyone?”
“I refuse to promise that,” Stephen said. “About anyone, really. But based on these scans, if Sebastien kills us all, he might at least feel bad about it afterward.”
“He could be useful to us,” Callie mused. She glanced over at Q, probably to make sure she was still deeply asleep, but lowered her voice anyway. “He can understand Axiom language at least as well as Lantern, and has a better sense of their – what did Uzoma call it? Conceptual architecture? – than anyone else on the ship. If we’re headed to an Axiom facility, that insight could be helpful. But I don’t want him thinking, ‘Ooh, a nanobot swarm, I can use that to conquer the galaxy.’”
“At some point, we have to decide to trust him, or not,” Elena said.
“There’s an ancient Earth proverb,” Callie said. “‘Trust, but verify.’ Shall, spin up one of those snatch-and-grab drones for me? Actually, make it two. Nothing wrong with a little redundancy. Test them really thoroughly, and then send them to the infirmary.”
“Will do,” Shall said.
“You’re going to wake him up?” Elena couldn’t tell if she was happy or scared or an amalgam of both.
“We’re going to give him a probationary period, under close supervision. When the drones arrive… yeah, bring him out of the coma, Stephen. Keep an eye on him, Elena. You knew him before. You’re the one who’ll be best able to tell if he’s back to whatever his version of normal is. I’ll alert the rest of the crew.” Callie gave Elena’s arm a squeeze and left the room.
“How do you feel about this, Stephen?” Elena asked.
“Your friend attempted to murder me in a simulation. I am conflicted. But we are all parts of the mind of God, and so forth, so I’ll try to give him a fair chance, and trust in Shall to stop him from doing anything too dangerous. At the moment, I’m a lot more concerned with Q.”
Elena turned her attention to the woman in the other hospital bed. “She looks a lot better – the swelling has gone down.”
“I expected her to be awake by now, though,” Stephen said. “I don’t see anything too serious on the scans, and people recover at different rates, but I’ll feel a lot better when I can hear her voice.”
“Is there anything I can do to help with her care? I am supposed to be junior medical assistant in training.”
Stephen turned slightly away from her. “Yes. Have you been doing the reading?”
“As much as I can. I was always a good student.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
Elena could even read Liar body language pretty well at this point; reading human body language was far easier. “You don’t want me as an assistant, do you?”
Stephen winced and rubbed his jaw. “Ah. It’s not that, exactly, though I’ve never worked particularly well with others – it’s part of why I became a ship’s doctor and a generalist instead of continuing to work in hospitals as a surgeon. I like you, Elena – a lot, actually, and I don’t warm to people easily – and you are obviously very intelligent and dedicated. It’s just, when Callie came to me and asked if I could teach you, she talked about your years of studying field and emergency trauma medicine…”
He trailed off, but Elena understood where he was going. “Right. Callie basically said, ‘She learned how to chop off legs in the American Civil War, so she’ll be a great surgeon,’ huh? ‘She was at the top of her Miasma Theory of Illness class!’”
“Mmm.”
Elena thought for a moment, then nodded. “Worse than that, huh? My knowledge is basically medieval from your position, isn’t it? So it’s more like, ‘This plague doctor from the Middle Ages with the giant beaked mask and the censer full of burning incense is going to be your new bacteriologist.’”
“A somewhat closer analogy,” Stephen admitted. “In your time, they still treated cancer by irradiating and poisoning the patients, and hoping the cancer would succumb before the patient did. They almost seemed to treat cancer like it was one thing instead of scores of related maladies with some similar properties. Doctors in your day barely had access to basic genetic scanning, and targeted therapies were almost nonexistent. They’d send new mothers home with codeine even though some people process the drug into morphine more quickly than others, and the children would die from drug overdoses after nursing! They treated emotional disturbances by sticking icepicks into their patient’s brains, they electrocuted people in the hopes of curing so-called sexual deviance, and they punched holes in people’s skulls to drain out fluid because they didn’t have any better options!”
“A few of those things were actually before my time,” Elena said. “But from your vantage point, I can see how they all look contemporaneous. OK. Here’s the thing: what I learned, basically, was how to do emergency resuscitation, how to stop bleeding, how to clear airways, how to set broken bones, how to remove bullets, and how to stich wounds. That stuff probably hasn’t changed too much, right?”
“The principles are likely similar,” Stephen said grudgingly. “Though I’m sure our techniques are greatly refined.”
She smiled at him. “Excellent. So refine me. I don’t have that many bad habits to unlearn. Teach me what you can, and send me into the Tangle to study everything else, and I will make you proud. I promise. I want to contribute. I want to lighten your load.”
“Hmm,” Stephen said. “My loads are rather heavy. I wouldn’t mind having someone who could insert catheters and run tests… All right. I’ll put together a list of immersive classes for you to take in the Tangle, and begin giving you some practical instruction as well.”
The door opened, and two blurs flew in: the hummingbird-sized drones that would act as Sebastien’s minders.
“Starting with how to wake someone from an induced coma,” Stephen said.
“I’m sorry about… everything,” Sebastien said.
Elena walked down the corridor beside him, the two drones softly buzzing along, one in front of him, one behind. The bots were nearly, but not completely, silent. “I believe you,” she said.
“Part of me wants to protest, to say it wasn’t me who did those things, that I wasn’t myself, and that’s true, but… I remember doing it. I feel responsible. I feel guilty.”
“Sometimes guilt is our mind’s way of telling us not to do something. Listen to that part.”
He stopped walking. “Elena. You haven’t looked me in the eyes since I woke up.”
Not so long ago, his eyes had been glowing, lit from wi
thin by the strange workings of the Axiom machinery in his brain. “That’s probably true.” She tried to keep her voice bright, but it was mostly brittle.
“Are you afraid of me?”
“A little bit. You shoved me in a shower and tried to explode me last time we talked.”
“I hate that.” His voice was low but somehow ferocious. “You shouldn’t have to be afraid of me. I’m going to fix this, Elena. I’m going to prove myself. Win back your trust.”
“Just… refrain from trying to murder anyone to conquer the galaxy for a few months… or years… and I’m sure everyone will relax around you. Me included.”
Sebastien laughed, but it was a sad and rough sound. “I was sick before, and now I’m well. You’ll see that. Everyone will. I promise.”
“You’ve made some other promises. Maybe… less with the promises, and more with the follow-through, OK?”
“Right. Good advice. You always gave such good advice. I just haven’t been good about taking it.”
Elena didn’t know what to believe. In the last simulation, when Sebastien had professed remorse and said he’d changed, she’d wanted to believe him – and look how that had turned out. He was behaving himself better now, but he was also being followed by ping-pong-ball sized robots capable of stunning him into paralysis if he stepped out of line. It was going to take time for her to relax around him. It might take longer than she had to live.
“What happened to the rest of our crew?” he asked. That was a good sign, she thought – showing interest in people outside himself. Right? Unless he was faking. Or trying to get a headcount of the ship’s personnel, so he could do a threat assessment, and figure out how many people he had to neutralize. Ugh. All this second-guessing was exhausting.
She filled him in on Ibn and Robin and Uzoma’s plans as they walked to the galley. Callie wanted to have family dinner, since they might be going into the teeth of death and all that soon, and she’d reluctantly agreed that Sebastien should be there as well – let the crew get a look at him, and maybe start to get used to him. Everyone would be there, except Stephen, who was staying with Q until she woke.