So she was, as we had more or less expected to learn, closely linked to the machine. Part of the same data architecture that was eating itself, like a mechanical ouroboros.
“Just tell me whatever you can, please.”
“Central is our library. It is where the memories are kept.”
Maybe they did have something like ayatana technology, then. “Your memories? Crew memories?”
“Crew logs,” she said, obviously thinking she was agreeing with me. “Backups. Scientific and historical records. Literature, both from Earth and from the wandering.”
I wasn’t overly concerned with history, and I Rise From Ancestral Night and his crew were en route to deal with the issue of data preservation. The shipmind, Singer, had managed to rewrite his own code to operate the ancient alien ship: I was pretty sure he and his crew could manage to unpick primitive human code.
Also, they would enjoy it, while I found it impossibly stultifying to contemplate all that old stuff. I imagined they would all feel a little thrill when they confronted an entire starship full of primary documents, unseen in something like a millennian. “Our archinformists are going to be very eager to swap packets with you.”
Helen didn’t answer immediately, but tilted her head at me in that uncomfortably flirtatious manner that I was coming to recognize as confusion. “What is ‘swap packets,’ please?”
“Uh.” I bit my lip. “Exchange information?”
“And what is an archinformist?”
“Someone who specializes in accessing, recovering, and interpreting ancient data.”
“A historian!” She was so pleased with herself that I didn’t want to correct her.
“A sort of historian,” I agreed, which was close enough to accurate that I didn’t feel I was being misleading.
The pleased tone still resonating, Helen said, “I have several historians among my crew.”
I knew it was a long shot, but it would give her something to focus on, so I still found myself asking, “Are any of them here on Sally?”
The odds of being able to rewarm Helen’s crew successfully hadn’t improved since we brought the coffins aboard. And now I was worried about Master Chief Dwayne Carlos as a human person and pipefitter, not as a patient-shaped abstract. So why was I asking Helen about our other passengers? I would just wind up fretting about them in turn.
On the other hand, talking about her crew was the one thing that seemed to concretize and ground Helen, even as limited as her processing power was, separated from the rest of her brain.
I wondered if the machine was the equivalent of her subconscious, and if so, how dangerous it would be to the other rescue and salvage crews working on Big Rock Candy Mountain without her there to guide it, or if it would lie quiescently. Sally’s override was still in place, and Ruth would have no problem using it. Everything would probably be fine.
Sally telling me about Master Chief Carlos had made me feel a personal connection to him. Feeling connected to Master Chief Carlos, by extension, made me feel connected to the rest of the crew. Helen obviously cared deeply about them, no matter if the expression of that care jarred me with its awkward sexuality. And her caring about them made me care about them in turn.
I mean, more than I always care for my patients.
There’s a certain level of professional detachment that gets you through a job like mine, and that detachment is a skill I have cultivated.
It was unsettling to feel so connected with a freight of corpsicles. And the shipload of corpsicles we’d left behind. And I knew it would only get worse, the more I found out about each of them as individuals.
It was hard to be constantly reminded that they weren’t just corpsicles. They weren’t just cargo. They were people. People we might or might not be able to save.
I had to tune down my worry so I could think clearly. As I did, it occurred to me that Helen had been silent for a fairly long time. Had she shut down again? “Helen? Are you still with me?”
“I was thinking about historians,” she said. “It’s so strange and wonderful that you lived. That you built all this. That you found”—she lowered her voice and gestured toward the control cabin, where Camphvis and Rhym were helping Loese—“aliens.”
Technically speaking, the aliens had found us. But I girded my loins, gritted my teeth, exerted all the power of my masterful will, and managed not to correct her. “You didn’t expect to find anyone else out here.”
“Are you absolutely certain that humanity survived on Earth? My records show that it was impossible.”
I admit it: I laughed.
But I also knew the answer without even checking my fox. I’d done a little research since visiting Big Rock Candy Mountain. Sally’s library was pared down, but she had the basics. Including a history of Terra. Or Earth, if you prefer.
I’d boned up. What a weird idiom.
“We nearly didn’t,” I said. “There was a population bottleneck, and Terra’s human population crashed from something over nine billion to a few hundred million.”
“That sounds terrible,” she said politely. “I am so sorry for your loss.”
“This was long before I was born, you understand, and I’ve never been to Terra. But my ancestors were among the lucky ones who realized that humanity needed to grow up.”
“Grow up? But you are an adult.”
“As a wise person once said: Adulthood begins when you look at the mess you’ve made and realize that the common element in all the terrible things that have gone wrong in your life is you. The choices you have made; the shortcuts you have taken; the times you have been lazy or selfish or not taken steps to mitigate damage, or have neglected to care for the community. As a species, the immature decisions we made contributed to the collapse of our own population and the radical alteration of our biosphere. Running away to space at sublight speeds was a desperate move. It made more sense and was more sustainable in the long run to fix the evolutionary issues in our own psyches that led us into irrational, hierarchal, and self-destructive choices.”
“I don’t understand,” Helen said.
I said, “My ancestors figured out how to hack into their own nervous systems and correct or ameliorate a lot of sophipathologies.”
Helen cocked her shining non-face at me. The question was evident.
“Sophipathologies. Antisocial behaviors, atavistic illnesses of the thought process. Maladaptive ideations. Once the population was stabilized and the immediate crises passed, they realized that it was possible to keep people operating in the state of altruism we’d already evolved to engage in during disasters. The architecture was already there in the brain: it was a matter of activating and using it.
“They were also pretty ready to discard existing systems of government, as it was evident that hierarchies and cronyism and the exploitation of the system by kleptocrats was a universal feature of every model tried so far. But they were already changing human nature—well, they were accelerating and universalizing the process of adulthood, shall we say. What some cultures used to call enlightenment. Which is basically sharing your stuff and playing well with others.”
“And now everybody does this.” Her disbelief was polite, but definite. Apparently even a primitive AI could manage to be a little arch when confronted with human self-aggrandizement.
I thought about pirates and criminals and all the… insufficiently rightminded folks I had met when I was in the Judiciary. “Er. No. I mean, Judiciary can enforce rightminding on convicted criminals as a condition of release. And mostly people, given the chance and appropriate social support structures, will elect to not be mentally ill.”