The machine. My exo, as I came to know it. It was always there, a skin between me and the universe. And I was always afraid that it might be taken away.
It occurred to me that there was something else I had learned never to trust. Not only the faith that everything would turn out all right, or that institutions had the best interests of Synizens at heart. I had never been able to take for granted something that many people did: Simply being functional. Simply being okay.
Waking up inside this new darkness was very much like waking up inside my exo had been, that first time. Once again, I had hurt so badly when it took me in—been so exhausted, my pain so uncontrolled—that when I woke up again and I wasn’t hurting or groggy, I wasn’t entirely sure I was awake. I was disoriented, confused.
But my thoughts were clear and focused, even though I didn’t know what was going on.
I was still in my exo. I could feel it there through the senso, status checks all okay. But that was all I could feel through the senso. There was no feed, no connection to the outside. To Sally, or the hospital, or O’Mara, or Cheeirilaq. To Calliope, even.
There was only warm darkness, and a lack of pain. I couldn’t seem to move, not even to press myself against the exo frame—or if I was succeeding, I didn’t feel it. I couldn’t seem to move the exo, either. So there was another something—another machine? Outside the machine that was very nearly a part of me.
To be honest, the lack of pain was so nice that I just lay there and enjoyed it for a short subjective eternity. It could have been five minutes or five ans. I tried counting breaths, but I couldn’t feel myself breathing, either.
Wasn’t there supposed to be something about sensory deprivation being used as a kind of torture, historically? I reached for the information, but without a feed it wasn’t there in my senso. You get so used to being able to pull up any information that you like, the loss of that ability feels like a dismemberment.
Like the loss of part of your own native faculties, and you can’t stop fussing at it.
Still, after three attempts, I tried to force myself to let it go. No senso, no connection. My fox was still regulating, though, and it told me that my bloodstream was full of an unusual concentration of naturally occurring opioid analogues. That would explain the lack of pain. Though I didn’t understand why they weren’t making me feel giddy.
Aw. Well. I tried to make a noise of frustration, and could convince myself that I heard it—dimly, hollowly. As if from another chamber in a largely empty hab.
Somebody did, in fact, have control of my fox and my exo. The virus—the meme…
Was this what had happened to the crew of Afar? To Afar himself?
To Linden?
Was this the result of the meme?
How had it gotten into me, in that case?
There had been a tentacle. Inside Jones’s walker. Something like the machine from Big Rock Candy Mountain. I remembered it grabbing me.
Was that machine the vector for the meme, rather than a manifestation of it? If it was, then where had it come from?
My exo had firewalls and was not supposed to accept external inputs without an override code that only I—or somebody with access to my medical or service records—could give. And my fox was protected, as all foxes are. Better than most, in fact, because I’d been in the military and my unit was EMP-shielded and used a triple-encoding transmission link that had been state-of-the-art fifteen ans before.
The meme might have gotten out of Dr. Zhiruo and Linden before they isolated themselves. It might have stripped data from them, such as their access codes. My medical records were available through hospital systems to authorized users. So that was possible, but this wasn’t the time to worry about what might have happened. This was the time for getting the hell out.
I tried not to stop to wonder how I was going to get myself out of this non-space if all those methane types and several artificial intelligences hadn’t managed to escape.
Helen’s crew hadn’t been affected. Neither had Calliope, concealed in Helen’s crew. They didn’t have etchable brains. I didn’t have an etchable brain, either, but I had a fox, and I had the exo.…
Helen hadn’t been affected, either, precisely. Or rather, she’d been affected, but not in the same manner as the other AIs. She’d been… turned against herself. Mostly disassembled. But the core had hung on, though she had been—I realized now—delusional in some of the same ways that Calliope had become delusional: paranoid and fixated.
(Was Calliope delusional? I shied away from contemplating the implications of that question. It was a problem for a moment when I was not fighting for my continued existence as something other than a disembodied consciousness.)
The first step was to break it down. What did the patients in different categories of… of infection, for lack of a better word… have in common with one another?
Helen was unlike shipminds and wheelminds and medical AIs in that she had a separate body.
Carlos and Calliope were unlike me and Afar’s crew in that they did not have foxes.
I was like Helen in that I outsourced some of my functions to a peripheral system. Some of us did a lot of that kind of integration: others (Carlos) none at all. Some of us were solid-state cognitive operations—the AIs, the Darboof—and some of us thought with programmable meat, with or without integrated circuitry.
So here I was, back where I started after a fashion. Back inside the machine.
A different machine. One I hadn’t chosen to make a part of me.
Was this line of thinking getting me any closer to a solution, or even a hypothesis as to how this whole bizarre mess of generation ship,
