“Such a clever name!” Mercy enthused.
I closed my eyes. There had to have been somebody other than her designer who would think naming a sexy metal android with a metal-based pun on Helen of Troy was a good idea. It was my luck that the other one was a colleague.
“Dr. Zhiruo said you’d already been working on Helen?”
“Since you’re her care liaison,” Mercy said, “I can tell you in confidence that her substrate is badly degraded. I’ve been patching her personality core with predictive algorithms. We’re rebuilding the substrate with modern materials and integrating the new core into her existing build as much as possible, to preserve continuity of experience.”
“Zhiruo said you had her using some external storage.”
“She already was, after a fashion.”
“The machine.”
“Yes. It’s semiautonomous. Not really a part of Helen, but also not really not a part of her. It might be more intelligent en masse, but the sample we have is built on reactive algorithms rather than being on the road to true consciousness. It’s possible that Helen started using the machine as external storage as her own systems degraded, and its lack of flexibility—for lack of a better word—infected her processes. I suspect it was intended to be a tool, and not autonomous. Helen was designed to have access to an external storage core—”
“Central,” I said.
“Yes. I’m not certain of the timeline. I theorize a potential sequence of events in which her captain ordered Helen to construct cryo pods and then ordered the crew into them before destroying the ship’s library and main computing core. Or perhaps he took it offline: I won’t know for sure until I have a chance to speak with the archinformists who are working on the generation ship itself and see what they have found. Helen must have been nearly quiescent at that point, as she’d been ordered not to access Central. The captain, well. You found him.”
I swallowed. Indeed we had.
“At some later time, possibly as an outgrowth of the evolving conflict over following the captain’s orders versus following her core values and caring for the crew in the pods, Helen hit on the apparently weird solution of converting a bunch of the ship’s remaining material into—”
“The machine.”
“Yes. The storage she needed, and a friend. Of sorts. And she hadn’t been specifically ordered not to do it. She was pretty well degraded into sophipathology at that point, though.”
I remembered the microbot pseudopod taking a swipe at me, and shuddered. “Well, tools are dangerous when used improperly. You can cut your finger off with a circular saw.”
“Indeed, one can.”
“So where do we start looking?”
“The generation ship itself might still have some or all of the data you’re looking for, despite whatever damage the library—Central—sustained. That is what we have archinformists working on it for.”
I began to see the problem. “But the generation ship isn’t networked, and its AI is corrupted.”
“The library might be salvageable. The archinformists will make duplicates of whatever they can retrieve from the files. They’ll bring those back to the Core. That information will be useful,” he said. “Also, I should warn you that every archinformist and journalist in fifteen light-ans is inbound in hopes of interviewing Helen.”
“Is that my problem?” Little space fishes, there were things I cared less about than history. And one of them was wrangling historians.
Humor tinged his disembodied voice. “As her care liaison… yes.”
Before I left the library, I checked in on Helen’s status—still recompiling—and then with Sally to see if she or the Core General mechanical teams were making any progress with the walker. Sally said that it was still crouching there with the door open.
Like some sort of ambush predator buried in sand, except for its gaping maw. Her turn of phrase, not mine. Sally has a colorful vocabulary.
They hadn’t managed to get a drone or even a passive probe past its door defenses, and drilling into the thing from the outside was as much of a failure as it had been when I tried it. I felt a little gratified that even people whose core proficiency was in breaking stuff weren’t managing any better than I had.
O’Mara had come down and looked at the thing, pronouncing it the equal of any military-grade hardware they’d seen. On their recommendation, the hospital stood ready to jettison it if it suddenly became aggressive.
Sally also told me that her repairs were nearly complete, but that she had not yet been cleared to return to duty. She expressed worry that I would not be available when she was released. I expressed my concerns right back, tuning like hell so I didn’t start crying.
I’d cry later, if I had to.
I told Sally that it was going to take quite a while to rewarm Helen’s crew. And I might be… grounded… until all that was well underway.
“Is that what you want?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Well,” she said. “I want to keep you.”
That left me feeling a warm glow that was something of an antidote to all my recent frustrations.
The next logical step for me was to check on Afar and his crew, who—being in the methane section—were much less physically accessible to Cheeirilaq, Rilriltok, Helen, and I. Well, honestly—I didn’t know about Helen. Possibly she could walk into a methane section like it wasn’t anything. Possibly it would speed up her processing to be superchilled.
Or maybe she’d freeze solid.
I should ask, once she was feeling well enough for visitors again.
Rather than suiting up and tromping through the methane section, with all the attendant risks and nuisances, I met up with Rilriltok and we removed ourselves to a remote observation lounge. The lounges were usually used by residents and doctors on a training rotation to watch treatment in sections they were not biologically suited to—but they were open to anybody with an interest. Teaching hospitals are great.
Monitors and holopresence units along two walls gave us a mediated view of the ward where the Darboof crew members were resting. It was, by human standards, pitch-black in the actual ward, but the lounge translated the Darboof’s homey, comfortable IR into wavelengths my visual receptors could process.
A patient care specialist of some description moved around the beds. Having given up the Darboof ayatanas, I did not know if the person manipulating their crystalline limbs and administering medication or nutrition was the equivalent of a nurse or filled some other function. They were, however, remarkably efficient, and I left myself a note in senso to find out who they were, so I could request them for my own patients in future, if needed.
We were barely getting settled when Tsosie walked in, followed by Cheeirilaq. Tsosie seemed as surprised to see us as I was to see him in the company of the Goodlaw. Or maybe he only noticed me. Rilriltok was suddenly blending into the upholstery again. I hoped it didn’t get sat on. That would be an embarrassing incident report to have to fill out.
Greetings, Dr. Jens, Cheeirilaq stridulated. I was certain it noticed Rilriltok, by how politely it kept its triangular face pointed toward the observation windows.
“Oh,” Tsosie said. “Are you checking on our patients?”
“Not ours anymore,” I said. “Technically.”
“I’m not busy while we’re grounded.” He walked to the monitors on the side of the room at right angles to the ones I had been observing. The new bank lit up in its turn with a different angle on the enhanced images of Afar’s crew. “Loese is volunteering in the nursery, she’s so bored. I’ve gotten involved with retrofitting the gravity generators into key areas. It’s grunt work—”