I assumed. Right then, I was hoping I never had to find out.
Helen expanded, pulsing larger like a bull impanaton drawing a deep, angry breath. I half expected her to paw and toss her horns. Her seamless body broke into disconnected plates, all hovering over a lambent core of swirling flame-colored sparks like an internal galaxy.
I thought of footage of lava welling between adhered chunks of basalt. It was all I could manage not to step back.
Rilriltok had no such ego holding it in place. It dropped off my shoulder and zipped up and backward on a diagonal several meters, the drone of its wings rising to a pitch betokening alarm.
Helen spoke in a flat, metallic tone. The sparkles of light inside her dazzled my vision. “I need. To protect. My crew.”
“Helen.” I made my voice as level and unemotional as I could, but I didn’t want to tune away the adrenaline thumping through my veins: I might need it. All I had in a situation like this was good old-fashioned training and sangfroid. “Do you have a protocol you engage to allow medical intervention to save crew members whose lives are at risk otherwise? Even if that medical intervention may be dangerous?”
“I do,” she said, leaning forward in a gesture that made my exo tighten around my body, ready to yank me out of harm’s way.
I took a deep breath, intentionally slow. I wished I could make eye contact. I’d gotten used to the shimmery facelessness on the trip home, but it was suddenly creepy as anything once more, and the shifting gleams through the open sutures dissecting it did nothing to reassure me.
They looked like they were getting wider.
“Will you believe me that we are doing everything we can to save your crew, and allow us to proceed with that work without making my crew fear for their own safety?”
I heard a series of slow, pinging clicks like cooling metal as she thought it over. I held my own breath, irrationally certain that if I moved even that much, everything would crumble and Helen would start punching her way through the staff and environments of Core General.
With a snap, the plates collapsed back into one another, and Helen was again an exaggerated mannequin, not very tall.
I heard Linden breathe a sigh of relief in my head. Oh good. Thank you for rendering it unnecessary for me to intervene, Dr. Jens.
It’s good to know you were on the job anyway, wheelmind, I said, feeling my heart begin to slow. My exo wasn’t yet quite ready to relax around me, but I rolled my shoulders back and tried to let go of some of the tension. Tension turns into pain very quickly.
Rilriltok blurred forward again, stopping over my left shoulder with such precision that it almost seemed like an animation. It said, Shipmind Helen, do you require medical care as well?
I almost copied what Tsosie had done and said yes for her. Helen obviously needed her program adjusted, and pretty badly. But she was a sovereign person under Synarche law, though one currently without the obligations of citizenship. Obligations or no obligations, she had her inalienable rights, and one of those was the right to personal sovereignty. She could refuse treatment so long as her illness did not present a danger to others.
Did it present a danger to others? Well, the jury was still deliberating that. A jury comprised of Sally and me, mostly, though Tsosie had some opinions, too. And Hhayazh was made of nothing but opinions.
I felt like the Lava Avatar Incident was a check mark in the danger-to-others column, however. And based on how quickly the wall monitor nearby had glowed with presence lights, Linden—who monitored everything in the public spaces of her wheel—seemed to agree.
Linden probably belonged on that jury, too.
“Yes,” Helen said. “I consent to treatment.”
I wondered if she’d been conferring with Sally in the interim.
The identification tag on the wall monitor presence lights told me I was dealing with Dr. Zhiruo, Core General’s most senior artificial intelligence. Someone who had been with the hospital since it was nothing more than a crazy, brilliant, idealistic plan.
I absolutely wasn’t intimidated in the slightest.
That’s a lie.
“Oh, here’s the AI doc,” I said, and added, “Hello, Doctor,” toward the wall.
“Hello, Doctor,” she replied, in tones of mellow amusement. “I understand you have an unusual case for us.”
Quickly, as efficiently as I could, I filled her in on Helen—a little constrained because Helen was standing right there, but one thing medical training knocks out of you is too much self-consciousness (sometimes it knocks out all the politeness, too, and I hoped I was falling on the right side of that line)—and on the machine, a sample of which was still boxed up neatly in that Faraday crate in Sally’s hold. It seemed to stay quiet—quiescent—as long as we could keep it from talking to the outside, or contacting its own components.
I couldn’t quite tell if Helen was listening intently or if she had folded inward again. I didn’t mention the incident we’d witnessed, because I knew Linden would fill Dr. Zhiruo in. I did mention that Helen was uncomfortable with unbodied AIs, and that her culture was strongly inclined toward the use of peripherals.
Sally would have already given Dr. Zhiruo a full report, so I didn’t feel the need to warn her about Helen’s uncanny relationship with the machine, and whatever had gone wrong with her—their?—programming that led to the progressive deconstruction of the ship.
As I had hoped, by the time I finished telling the wall monitor about our rescue operation and introducing Helen’s background, Dr. Zhiruo had shown up driving a peripheral of her own.
It was a great deal less exaggerated than Helen’s chassis, but Dr. Zhiruo had chosen a humanoid model, which I thought was a good choice given Helen’s limited cultural referents. The peripheral had a dark gray polymer skin; narrow, even features; a genderless body under a chiton-like robe printed to emulate “natural” undyed fabric. The eyes were dark glass lenses, unreflective apertures in the neutral face.
Dr. Zhiruo held out a hand and smiled. It was a smile you might imagine on a deva: distant, controlled, serene. “Please come with me, Helen. I promise I will take very good care of you.”
Rilriltok and I watched them leave until they vanished through a decompression door, and Zhiruo’s presence lights blinked out.
I felt a little guilty at how thankful I was to realize that Helen Alloy and her quicksilver bosoms were somebody else’s problem now. I reminded myself that it wasn’t unreasonable to experience a reduction in anxiety when relieved of a responsibility for which one wasn’t really qualified. I let out the breath I’d been holding too long for comfort and said, “So what now?”
The Rashaqin zipped around me to hover at eye level, the breeze from its blurring wings stretching tendrils of my hair. I saw my dishabille reflected multiply in compound eyes and had to smile. DNA scans! it said brightly. Want to come?
CHAPTER 11
I DID WANT TO GO, BUT unfortunately I felt the press of responsibility toward less medically interesting duties. Regretfully, I took my leave of my old friend. I stopped by my on-hospital quarters and showered and dressed in scrubs and a lab coat, then headed toward the office of my other old friend, Master Chief O’Mara, the head of ox sector’s Emergency Department. My boss.
I sent them a message requesting an urgent appointment and got an immediate confirmation. My door is open.
As I walked, I thought about the patient who shared O’Mara’s title—Dwayne Carlos, the master pipefitter. I sent a note to Rilriltok while I was thinking about it, asking that—if Sally was in port—I be allowed to be present when he rewarmed Helen’s crew members. I felt like I owed them that, having brought them in from the cold. If they lived, and considering where they came from, it would probably be comforting if the first face they saw on wakening was a human one.