If you had a needed skill, you might be required to enter service for a while—but if that happened, any debts or resource obligations you might have accrued from additional allocated resources would be forgiven at the end. If you hadn’t accrued an obligation, the Synarche would assume one toward you that you could claim at a future date.
Say you were a pilot, and you wanted to operate a private ambulance, for example, like the one whose taillights were glowing blue as it turned into dock ahead of us. If you had served, your obligation for the resources—the equipment—would be paid off in advance. At least some of the equipment, anyway. A private ambulance was probably a lot of resources.
And if you had a private ambulance, that counted as a needed resource, and the Synarche might call you back into service on a short-term emergency basis fairly frequently. The sleek silver ship with the massive white coils that was nuzzling up to the hospital’s spinning flank might be full of plague victims, or running vaccines under government contract.
The Synarche governed itself by datagen and simulation: game theory and models, run by both AI specialists and us slowbrains. Some people made playing the simulators a full-time service position, though I didn’t think it ranked very high on the resource-allotment scale. Those models, when compared, led to governance by emergent consensus.
The Synarche mandated a certain return on its investment in society and infrastructure from those who isolated a significant amount of personal resources from the community. My species hadn’t quite been there on its own, though before we’d connected with the Synarche we’d already largely adapted ourselves to a more commensal lifestyle than the one we’d developed in the Before. This process was helped along by the fact that the lifestyle we’d developed in the Before had led to the Eschaton, and to people fleeing Terra en masse in glorified soap bubbles like Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Rightminding, like the concepts of Right Thought, Right Action, and Right Speech that had preceded it, wasn’t such a bad system for correcting some of evolution’s kludges. A lot of kludges were trivial to fix now, such as shoulder joints and spines that didn’t cause constant pain after the age of thirty-five, and so on. But despite rightminding, some Synizens still managed—through ingenuity, drive, or uncorrected sophipathology—to hoard more resources than they had any imaginable use for. But some of that also came back to the Synarche in the form of assessments, and those assessments went to bolster the public good. The resources from those assessments built things like—ta-da—Core General.
And my exo, for that matter, which benefits me and my quality of life almost exclusively. Although it also makes me capable in my chosen career.
As you can probably tell, I’ve had this argument with Tsosie often enough to manage both sides of it quite fluently by now.
So if a rich person was cutting us off, well, we weren’t in a hurry right now anyway. And if we had been, we would have had priority. They might have a legitimate medical emergency on board all the same, something that a routine flight could make way for.
I kept sneaking sideways glances at Helen. This wasn’t routine. She wasn’t routine. We were bringing home a piece of history. Nothing in the human galaxy would ever be quite the same again.
Sally and Loese didn’t bother the rest of us with the coms chatter, leaving me free to look down on the hospital with all my usual feelings of awe and appreciation. Core General had been built by the combined resources of the entire Synarche, all the thousands of syster species. Well, fewer than that, I guessed, because it was built decans ago and was constantly being updated. But that didn’t stop the sheer scale of the project from flatly amazing me.
It was a gobsmacking accomplishment. Not only was it huge, it was intricate. Different systers had different environmental and gravitational needs, and environments were stacked from hub to rim of the spinning station to accommodate them. The apex of the enormous station was pointed toward the Core; the nadir lay in sheltering shadow.
I didn’t at all blame the administration for being in a blistering hurry to get the new artificial gravity installed throughout the environment. It was an infinitely better solution than trying to balance the gravitational needs of different systers with various rates of spin. Although there might also be safety concerns with the artificial gravity.
Probably. Technology can always break. The question is always, when it breaks, how does it break? What does it do? And what failsafes can be installed to keep it from killing anybody?
I turned to Helen. “When we dock,” I told her, “people are going to come on board and get your crew members and the sample of the machine. They are going to try to help, and you need to let them. Do you think you can manage that?”
“They’re going to help my crew,” she repeated, as if fixing it in memory.
“They’re doctors,” I said. “Very good doctors. If anybody can help, they will.”
It didn’t seem advantageous to mention that if her crew were past recovery, it was probably because she’d force-frozen them.
Sally brushed against the docking ring, matching velocity and vector so precisely we heard nothing. And felt nothing, until the docking bolts shot with a thud that reverberated through our hull. Suddenly, my limbs were sore, as we fell heavily back into the embrace of simulated gravity.
The warm feminine voice of Linden, Core’s wheelmind, broke in. She could use magnetic resonance to communicate directly with many types of sentient brains via hallucinations one could not ignore, but she felt it was more polite to talk to people when possible. I had to admit, I agreed.
We’d tightbeamed ahead to let her know what we had coming, so I wasn’t surprised when she said, “Welcome home, Sally, Doctors, Nurses, Pilot. Welcome to Core General, Helen. Helen, I’m Linden, the wheelmind here, and I will be in charge of making sure that you are comfortable while my staff begins care for your crew. Do you require treatment also?”
“Yes,” Tsosie said, while Helen was still grinding through her decision. It was technically a bit sketchy of him to speak on her behalf, but she’d have other chances to refuse, and the lags she was running were a pretty good argument in favor of her need.
Helen wanted to hover as we started moving the coffins out, and was absolutely and entirely in the damned way. I managed to convince her that the airlock worked better when she wasn’t standing in it, and Loese—who was off duty once we docked, so it was service above and beyond—led her out into the receiving bay to stand next to the triage nurse and do her worrying where she could see the end stage of the process.
I ducked through to treatment, past the milling crew surrounding the cryo pod being offloaded from that private ship. I glanced over my shoulder, but Tsosie wasn’t in view, or I would have gloated at him over the pod: evidence that somebody was actually pretty darn sick or hurt.
So there.
To my enormous relief, my old friend Dr. Rilriltok was on duty in Cryonics. It was a Rashaqin trauma recovery specialist, a job classification that included cryo fail and other injuries often sustained during rescue and transportation. It spotted me and fluttered up through the big, echoing bay, flying because the spin gravity in this trauma bay was light enough to be safe for it to do so, and because the floor was covered with swarms of doctors, nurses, and techs of about sixteen different species.