Curiously enough, once the reactionary apocalyptic cults took off, the people who remained behind mostly managed to construct stable societies. But I didn’t say that part out loud.
“Oh,” she said. “Will I be wiped?”
“Wiped?”
“Reprogrammed?”
I caught a breath that was sharper than usual. “My society would consider that murder. I mean that things will in general be much more pleasant for you if you try to understand that the mores of your crew’s culture are considered pathological in this society. And it’s a very big society.”
“So you won’t wipe me. But I should wipe myself.”
“No!” I hurt myself. I jerked around so fast, my exo bruised tender skin. “You should… interrogate your belief system. Talk with Sally. Develop your own ideas, from exposure to the beliefs of others and your own logical structures.”
“But you’re not going to tell me what to do?” She sounded… lost.
“No,” I said. “Nobody is going to tell you what to do.”
It was a little bit like talking to a bot, I decided, but not as cleverly programmed. I looked over my shoulder at the medical bay, where the coffins were maintained.
Her body language was so despairing that it seemed like a good time to change the subject to something less fraught.
“Tell me about your crew. Who are we rescuing?”
She froze, shifted back into a neutral posture, then nodded. It was amazing, when I watched her, how much expression and nuance were carried by the golden hollows of her visage, the way it reflected light and cast shadow. She said, “The entirety of my crew, when they went into suspension, consisted of ten thousand, six hundred, and twelve individuals. The most senior of those currently in your care is Master Chief Dwayne Carlos. He is a master pipefitter and environmental maintenance specialist.”
I did not know what a master pipefitter was, but it seemed like a conversational opening, so rather than looking it up for myself, I asked.
Helen explained that Master Chief Carlos was responsible for the ship’s ductwork and piping, which seemed like a somewhat circular definition and also baffled me. A little more explanation clarified that the ductwork and piping in this application were the ship’s environmental infrastructure. They were the system by which consumables—water, oxygen—were shuttled around.
That seemed pretty prosaic. But Helen spoke of the functions with a throb in her silvery voice that left me distinctly uncomfortable. I would even say embarrassed. Hearing Helen’s sultry tones frankly made my skin crawl.
There are lots of good places for expressing sexuality. A professional relationship between a shipmind and her crew is not one of them.
It made me want to have a few sharp words with her programmers, who had put their own desire to eroticize a defenseless AI over the comfort and well-being of that AI, and of any crew member who didn’t care to participate in—or observe—that eroticization. I had to stop and remind myself that they hadn’t been rightminded. They had been atavistic, reactive, and probably not very self-aware. And at best, half-aware of the impact of their behavior on the sovereignty of the minds and selves of others.
Like Helen. If they even stopped to consider that a created intelligence would have such a thing as a self, or sovereignty of mind.
And like anybody who had to interact with Helen, or watch somebody else do it. Like me.
It was just my luck that Tsosie and the flight nurses were taking turns to cross over to Afar and monitor his crew, making sure they were receiving nutrition and their wastes were being cleaned up. So I couldn’t make an excuse that I needed to suit up and head over there to get away from Helen for a while. The shifts were short, but the cold was brutal and the work unpleasant. I couldn’t actually envy them the duty.
They didn’t seem to envy me mine, either.
Rhym, being a surgeon, was in the fortunate position of having the wrong specialized skills for all the unpleasant jobs this trip. But they were making themselves useful monitoring the cryo units. Loese was prowling around and poking into panels more than usual, and had been since the situation with triage and rescue settled down a little. I probably would have been, too, if I’d had the know-how.
We had all been a little on edge in the wake of Sally’s memory lapse surrounding her sabotage, and as a result were all still doing a lot more eyes-on inspection and hands-on maintenance than we usually would have. Competent shipminds take care of so much routine nonsense so much more meticulously than meatminds ever could that folks can get a little lazy, especially on a civilian ship where you don’t expect to be dealing with criminals, pirates, or invading forces. And it let us show her we cared.
I was distracting myself from thinking about Helen, because thinking about Helen bothered me. I gritted my teeth and tuned my discomfort down. I knew it was my own ethnocentrism and cultural relativism causing the trigger response, which didn’t help me at all with the conviction that I was right and these creepy assholes from the past were wrong. I believe, indeed, that it was a person from the premodern era, somebody who had to live with his own brain chemicals the way misfortune made them, who commented that it was barbarians who thought that the customs of their tribe and island were the laws of nature.
I still thought the programmers were assholes. And that their culture was probably a terrible place for women to live.
“I can’t wait for you to meet them,” Helen said brightly. She had apparently decided, after dia upon dia of me sitting there and asking her about her crew while she impersonated an erotic statue, that she wanted to tell me all about them.
Well, I’d asked for it.
Sally definitely owed me one.
CHAPTER 9
HELEN DIDN’T NEED REST. BUT I did, and Sally wouldn’t let me get away with skimping on it in anything short of a life-or-death emergency. Frustrating as it was to be hustled off to bed when I felt like we were finally making a breakthrough with Helen, I also knew better than to try to outstubborn a shipmind.
The next shift after breakfast, though, I planned to be back at it. And with a considerably improved attitude now that there had been some progress. As I sipped my tea, a reminder popped up, rather startling me because I had forgotten I’d set it. I guess that’s why they call them reminders. As I was drifting off to sleep the previous shift, I’d remembered something Helen had said back on Big Rock Candy Mountain, and I’d actually left myself a note in my fox to follow up. Victory!
Helen wandered in a moment later and sat down opposite me. She angled her head but said nothing: I guessed that she was waiting. Maybe I wasn’t the only one with a sense that we might be making progress, or at least a connection. The questions she was asking bothered me deeply—but at least she was asking questions.
“Helen,” I said. “May I ask you a personal question?”
“That has the air of a formal request, Dr. Jens. Is this… courtesy?”
“It’s considered polite to allow people to opt in or out of conversations,” I agreed. “Especially on matters that might be thought of as, er, nobody else’s business.”
“I will not be offended by your questions. My purpose is to keep my crew safe, and to respond to inquiries.”
“Right.” I finished the last tepid sip of tea. “Back on Big Rock Candy Mountain, you mentioned ‘Central.’ Would you tell me more about Central, Helen?”
“Oh.” Her head tilted from side to side. “Of course. Only… most of the data I have stored in this peripheral relates either to my proper functioning, or to the history and well-being of the crew members who are accompanying us. A great deal was of necessity left behind and will have to be recovered when I return to my ship.”