Maybe it actually didn’t mean to kill me.
Mostly, however, I didn’t want to find out. The machine did not have a good track record of keeping its pets in good health.
“Situation assessment?”
I had been asking Sally, but it was Linden who answered: Run.
“Running is not a tactic!” I shouted back.
Ahead, along my projected path, sirens warned bystanders to clear the corridor. The whisk of closing doors and figures vanishing through them told me most of the staff were complying.
“What am I running toward?”
That was another piece of advice I’ve often found myself recalling: Never retreat from an enemy; always fall back toward a resource.
Right now, I was drawing the machine away from my friends, and managing to keep it from attacking—pardon me, rescuing—other patients or staff. Soon, I’d need the next strategy.
Core General was a wheel, and I’d run out of racetrack unless I led the machine through different levels or into the units that housed chlorine, methane, water breathers. That would result in deaths, and I didn’t want any more rainbow-colored blood on my hands.
I dodged again, full of a diffuse, frustrated, distracting rage. I was still angry, and I didn’t have time to feel things right now. Then I remembered that being angry was sometimes useful, and also—tentacle!—that I had a lot of really good things to be angry about.
Being in fear for your life is marvelously focusing. You can concentrate, let go of everything nonessential, think only about the thing right in front of your face. The thing that needs to be done. If the anger was bubbling up now, that suggested that it was a message from the part of my mind that processed things too complicated to turn over to my conscious attention, things that did not neatly resolve themselves into narrative but were complicated and chaotic and emerged in patterns only on the level of hunches and gitchy feelings. So I ought to be using my anger. It didn’t have to be a distraction, a paralysis. Turned inward.
It could be fuel.
I didn’t need a reaction. I needed a plan. And I needed it now, as I careened around the corridor, flipping from ceiling to hand rail to the frame of a door. Behind me, the machine cooed and rustled, its tendrils propagating along the bulkheads at terrifying speed. Pseudopods edged up on me as you might edge up on a skittish cat you were trying to catch for transport.
Preserve life. Preserve life.
It had its metric.
No.
Preserve human life. I had to think like an archaic Terran, who considered their own species and its survival more important than any other single factor in the universe. So the machine’s goal had to be to preserve human life. And given the politics of its unrightminded era, probably to preserve the lives of those it considered to be its people. So that meant its crew, over and above anything else.
It had turned away from Carlos.
It had, in fact, generalized the directive to preserve the lives of its crew into a hellish and accidentally genocidal series of actions. And—I was guessing here—it seemed pretty likely that that overgeneralized code was what, when combined with Sally’s nice little sabotage meme, had unleashed such unprecedented unholy hell all over my nice hospital.
What had I been thinking about utilitarianism as a bad philosophy on which to train AIs?
Helen! I yelled. I need Helen right now! Helen, HELP!
CHAPTER 30
I DON’T KNOW WHERE SHE CAME from. I don’t know how she got there. But Helen was there—suddenly, brilliantly, shining in the damaged flicker of the corridor lights, surrounded by sparks and coils of blue smoke. The machine glittered iridescent black from all the facets of its components. What had become of its playful, toylike colors? Had it shed them when it went to war?
Helen, in the face of it, gleamed warm gold, reflective. The light surrounding the two peripherals was brutal, changeable. Arcs of electricity limned a pall of fire-suppressant flakes drifting ineffectually from above like planetary snow.
The hardsuit would keep me from suffocating.
For a moment, everything felt still. Helen, me. The machine. A draft swirled the flakes away in a Coriolis spiral. The hospital was still spinning, still making gs. And somewhere nearby there was a hole in the outer hull, and we were losing atmosphere. The pressure doors should be falling.
The pressure doors did not fall.
Something somewhere deep in the bubble’s infrastructure was broken. Something somewhere had catastrophically failed.
My laugh echoed brutally inside my helmet. Sitrep: What wasn’t fucked up beyond all recognition? It was likely to be shorter.
I’d fallen. Fallen, or been knocked down. I was lying against the corner where the bulkhead met the deck. Tossed aside like a discarded doll. I put a hand on my grav belt. Crushed beyond use.
I needed to get moving. And first, I needed to get up.
Helen faced the machine. She was tiny before it, tiny in a corridor designed to pass systers like Tralgar and systers in environmental suits that amounted to armored, tracked vehicles. The machine towered. Piled up like a thunderhead, pulling itself out of bulkheads and the deck, billowing into all the space beyond.
I put a hand on the deck. I hauled on the grab rail. I would never say an unkind word about grab rails again.
I got a knee under me.
The exo helped me stand.
The machine bulged left. Helen stepped to block it, hands outstretched.
The machine retreated. Coalesced.
I tried to straighten. I have never felt so heavy in my life. Someone stepped toward me. Human, in a hardsuit. Tsosie. I knew the way he moved. Another someone beside me. Also a hardsuit. Unfamiliar. Also almost certainly human, by the shape.
They put a hand on my elbow, levering me upright. Through the plate, I glimpsed a face. Carlos.
I opened my mouth to protest, and he winked and shoved me behind him. To Tsosie.
“Dammit—”
Tsosie tugged my arm. “The machine won’t hurt him. Come on.”
“The machine will punch through bulkheads to get me,” I argued. “It’s decided I’m the enemy. It’s not going to change its mind. And the pressure doors—”
Weren’t working.
“—I have to stay here.”
Tsosie tugged me one more time. Carlos calmly walked forward—putting his body between us and the machine. On the theory that the machine would not do anything to risk him. But I knew—we all knew—that the machine’s program was haywire. That it would do plenty of dangerous things because its protocol for risk assessment was utterly corrupt.
Accidents happen. Around something like the machine, accidents happen a lot.
I magnetized my boots to the deck. “Carlos is making the wrong choice.”
“The wrong choice for you. But he isn’t you, is he?”
I couldn’t pull my gaze away. I tried to move forward. Tsosie held me. He’s making the right choice for me. That’s the problem. I’m supposed to be the one who takes risks around here.
“This is all my fault,” I said. “I had a terrible idea.”
“If it was a terrible idea, we all had the exact same one. So share the blame a little.” Tsosie edged me back a step while I was distracted.
The machine broke, as if a dam broke before it. Like a thunderhead rolling over itself, climbing an updraft, it poured past Helen on all sides, tendrils running along the corridor walls, filling the space with a hideous clattering that echoed inside my helmet until I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears. Now I lunged in the other direction—backward, dragging Tsosie, knowing it was ineffectual. Knowing we could not move fast enough.