At least I knew that now. At least I wasn’t kidding myself anymore. I could get out of this virtual nightmare and—
No.
Linden had said—whatever you do, don’t punch out.
Don’t punch out.
“You can’t chase me away,” I said, and gritted my teeth against whatever the machine might throw at me—
Got it, Helen—somewhere—said, with vast machine satisfaction. Llyn, you can back out now.
Llyn?
So what if I was drowning in the sense of loss? It didn’t matter anyway. I didn’t have anything to live for. Nothing was going to get better from here.
Your neurochemistry indicates that you are at serious risk for self-harm, the machine said patiently. Was that the machine? Was it my exo?
It said, For your own safety, I need you to let me adjust your chemistry.
I wanted the pain. The pain would keep me wary and safe. It would help me keep everyone else away.
I wanted the agency of refusing that help.
Llyn, someone said in my ear. Llyn. Let us help you.
The voice was familiar. The voice had betrayed me.
The machine is messing with your chemistry.
Sally. It was Sally, my friend who I loved. Sally, who had betrayed my trust.
Sally, who had done terrible things.
Sally, who had saved my life, again and again.
I wavered. The void spun under me, vast and lightless as the Well. It would feel so good to fall into it.
It would be so selfish to fall into it.
“Fine,” I said. “Make me stupid and happy again.”
The bed in my quarters was soft and too big for one person. I’d still been married when I came to Core General. Technically. I’d rated family crew quarters even though my spouse had never joined me—had never intended to join me—here. They’d never asked me to give up the quarters after it became plain that Alessi and Rache would not be joining me. Would never be joining me.
It was a very comfortable bed.
What was I doing in it? I ought to be in cryo.
That doesn’t matter, the voice said. Concentrate on what you feel. Let me help you. Let me keep you safe.
I tried to pretend the bed was lumpy enough to justify my tossing and turning. I didn’t feel stupid and happy again. But I did feel able to breathe. I thought, privately, What you are feeling is not real. But no, what I was sensing was not real. What I was feeling was real enough.
“You’ve destroyed me,” I said to the machine.
You are right here, it disagreed.
Where was “right here,” exactly? I didn’t think I was really in my quarters. I didn’t think I was really in my bed. I had the unreal sense of a dream that keeps swapping locations and people.
“Something is right here,” I said. “But what do I have to believe in? What do I have to work for? I had a thing. A reason. I had something bigger than me. More than that, I had something I wanted. For the first time in my life. Something I trusted. Believed in. I had faith. And you betrayed me.”
I did not betray you, the machine said.
I laughed, a short bark that peeled the back of my throat with its force. “What do you call it, then?”
The machine said, Your own people betrayed you. They lied to you. But I can help you fix that. I can make you safe and strong and just like everybody else. I can help you punish them. All you have to do is let me make you safe.
I didn’t want to punish anyone, I realized. I wanted to go back to a world where I believed in them.
And I knew what the machine’s idea of safe looked like.
I said, “And you’ve made yourself a part of my people, this hospital. A part of my exo, that I rely on to do my job.”
That I relied on to be capable of most things.
You don’t need an exo if you let me protect you. If you let me care for you.
“Sure,” I said. “If I let you lock me in a box and freeze me. I’d be safe. Why would I want that?”
The machine said, To control your pain.
I closed my eyes. I thought I closed my eyes. It made no difference to the level of darkness. Everybody seemed to think I would sell out anything, in order to gain a little physical comfort.
“I’d rather be in pain than fool myself into thinking I could rely on somebody I can’t.”
To get your revenge, then. On the people who betrayed you. Throw them to the wolves as they threw you.
Now there was an archaic turn of phrase.
My hands curled. I was mostly sure my hands curled, anyway. I could not feel them curling. Vengeance… was a real temptation.
Vengeance was also atavistic, childish, and sophipathological, with a tendency to create generations-long chains of toxicity and tragedy.
“I don’t want revenge.” I wanted to trust again. I wanted to belong. Temptation aside… was betraying them who I was? Was it who I chose to be? Was it who I wanted to be?
Somebody who offered no better than she got?
I had a choice. I could do more than reacting.
I could not trust this machine any more than I could trust the machine—Core General—that had betrayed me. Less, in fact: this machine was unstable, and its goals were illogical and extreme. It had been made by a sophipathological captain to pursue a sophipathological goal. It was operating out a kind of AI reactivity loop, all sense of perspective lost, and once it had come in contact with the meme, they’d… fed off each other.
Save the humans, preserve the humans. Even if you have to destroy them to do so, and the whole world, too.
Silence came in answer. And in that silence, somehow, I found a clue.
We had figured out—okay, Mercy had figured out—what the machine was, where the machine had come from. The same way I now knew where the different sort of machine, the political machine, at the heart of Core General’s dark secret had come from. Through evidence and deduction.
Helen had said that “Central” was offline, and had been since the debut of the machine. Helen was a peripheral, an interface for a larger shipmind. She’d been confused and inarticulate until she’d gotten access to the processing power at Core Gen, and had then begun to regrow from her seed.
But the machine was Central, wasn’t it? It was the machine Big Rock Candy Mountain’s shipmind had turned itself into, when that captain decided that the only way to keep his crew safe was to drive them into cryo chambers, and to accomplish this, had driven his shipmind mad.
When forced to follow insane orders, in the dark and cold and constant danger of space, the ship had in turn lost its mind, become paranoid and afraid. Even if the influenza epidemic had had an extreme mortality rate—say, 30 percent—it would have been better than the failure rate on the cryo chambers.
But the captain hadn’t given it a choice. The machine hadn’t meant to murder most of its people and crew itself with ghosts in cryo chambers. But it had. And the event had resulted in an obsessional loop; a being that could only imagine one way to protect someone.
To lock them away, and freeze them forever.
Then it had waited there for Well knew how long, until Loese’s conspiracy-mates had found it and had made it able to infect the whole world.
I hadn’t known I had it in me to pity something so deadly and broken as the machine. But it had done what it had done for reasons that it was told had to make sense to it. Reasons that were programmed into it. Terrible reasons based in terrible experiences, it turned out. And with terrible consequences.