I looked up at Starlight. “It’s not just you, you know. The whole hospital is in danger.”
A rustle that was not words answered. And then words. [What about… the crew of Afar?]
“The first one to undergo surgery is awake,” I said. “With limited deficits. It’s going to be—”
I couldn’t say it was going to be all right.
“The prognosis is good,” I finished.
Starlight laughed. [Our prognosis is not good, Dr. Jens.]
“I am,” I said definitively, “a rescue specialist. I am also the only person we know of, other than Helen, who has managed to come into direct contact with this thing and find a way out again. We have the skills, Starlight.”
[We do not doubt your capabilities.] They sighed, wind through leaves, with a strange crystal edge to it. [We are tired and in a lot of pain.]
“Sibling,” I said, “I feel you.”
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Helen said. “We have to take on the meme, and the machine the meme is building, and disentangle it from your cellular structure. And once we learn how to do it here, we can apply that knowledge to getting it out of my own ship.”
[And how do you propose to accomplish that? If we could access its processing pathways—if we could even find them—we think we could fight it. But it’s building its own parallel infrastructure through ours, and in fact disassembling ours to accomplish this.]
Starlight rattled their crystallizing leaves for emphasis. Something cracked, and broken pieces tinkled.
I winced and held up one hand. “Please don’t harm yourself. We have a plan. We’re going to break into the machine with”—I waved—“my exo.”
What happened next involved a lot of tubes and wiring. Well, to be absolutely precise, what happened next in a rigorous sequence of events was a long walk through corridors with flickering, unsettling lighting, down to Cryo, where we met Carlos and Rilriltok. O’Mara had left: I assumed they were back in their office, coordinating treatment efforts on the other AIs and continuing support for Zhiruo. The fact of the matter was that now that we had the base code to work from, and the antivirus, once we could get the paralyzed AIs back online they were more than capable of handling their own defense. It was a matter of… well, I’m an organics doc. So I’m going to cast this in terms that make sense to me.
It was a matter of giving them a vaccination, so they could build their own antibodies to the problem, and adapt those antibodies as the problem evolved. That, and giving them a little platform of clear space to assemble their formidable resources on, and to sally forth to fight from.
I lay down in the cryo pod—Dwayne Carlos’s cryo pod, for a closer connection to the machine. I remembered how I had used my relationship with my exo to stand firm against the machine before, to weasel myself and Calliope out of its clutches, and reviewed the tactics I had used. It would be better prepared this time, I was sure.
And this time I had Helen.
There you go again, deciding to trust somebody you don’t really know.
Well, if it all went wrong, I could have the comfort of knowing I’d had one foot out the door the whole time. Maybe, before I died, I could mutter a single, ringing I told you so.
I was plastered all over with sticky disks, and Helen, sitting on the edge of the cryo pod, bristled with wires. Rilriltok was making the final, tricky, hair-fine connections directly into my fox and exo.
The door slid open and Goodlaw Cheeirilaq strode in, feathery feet clacking on the tiles, wing undercoverts showing flashes of fiery red and yellow. If I had had to guess, this was the Rashaqin body language for I am extremely pissed off and about to do something about it. I didn’t have to guess, though, because the instant Cheeirilaq entered, Rilriltok ducked itself entirely behind me.
I ought to arrest the lot of you, it said.
I tried to sit straighter in my hedgehog bristle of connective devices. “Probably,” I said. “What would the proximate cause be?”
It fiddled its forelimbs, as upright in posture as it could be, given the height of the ceiling. I wasn’t sure if it was counting up different offenses, or if it was picking out which one outraged it the most.
You concealed evidence leading to the identity of saboteurs!
“I brought that evidence to O’Mara. What else?”
A raptorial forelimb snapped out, so fiercely I thought it likely to sever my leads or possibly even me. Cheeirilaq had better control than that, though. It stopped a few centimeters from my chest. You’re about to endanger this entire facility with some… some primate shenanigans and untested protocols.
Rilriltok peered over my shoulder: just the eyes. Begging your pardon, friend Cheeirilaq. But the hospital is already in danger. Or did you have an uneventful trip here? One involving smoothly functioning equipment and reliable lighting?
Cheeirilaq loomed, then settled back slightly. It didn’t exactly have haunches, but the long legs folded to lower its abdomen. I… did not.
“Look,” I said. “We have—”
Carlos stepped between me and Cheeirilaq, interrupting me as if I had not been speaking. “We have to do something now. The equilibrium is punctuating, and if we don’t deal with the machine immediately… we’re all going to die. Ask me how I know.”
That man. Was so damned annoying sometimes.
But Cheeirilaq was listening to him. And to Helen, when she added, “If we can get the machine to de-integrate from the hospital’s structure, to stop disassembling the hospital… Well, the hospital is going to need structural repairs. But I’ve seen what the machine does to a habitat on the premise that it’s making the inhabitants safe forever. And it doesn’t even seem to have those constraints on this station. We cannot allow that to happen here.”
The extra processing power was definitely making a difference.
“I did it once, on a small scale,” I offered. “I think we can do it again.”
The Goodlaw gave one of its enormous highly oxygenated sighs. When we’re all dead and floating in space, I will save my last transmission to remind each and every one of you that I told you this was a terrible idea.
Carlos and I looked at each other. “Fair,” he said.
“Fair,” I echoed. “Now can we get the rest of these leads attached before anything else falls off this hospital?”
I lay in the dark again, and talked to the machine. It was less rewarding than I had anticipated.
The first object was to get it talking. Get it engaging.
I made sure I could feel Helen through my fox, there behind me. And Sally and Linden back there, too. I wished I had time to throw confetti and sing songs about the contact with Linden, but when the world is ending sometimes you have to save the party until there’s time to bake.
Then I reached out into the networks of the (disabled!) cryo chamber, and through it to the networks of the hospital. I groped. I squinted, metaphorically speaking. Sally and Helen groped and squinted with me, right alongside.
The cryo unit had been built by the machine. Or built using the same protocols as the machine. It was a back door, in other words, into the neural networks we were trying to locate and pry loose. By seeking through a neural network that was connected to and used the same protocols as the machine, I—well, really, Linden and Sally—were able to identify the threads of the machine’s protocols and infrastructure running through the stuff of the hospital.