What if I resorted to wild, out-there, black-sky speculation? What was the most outré idea I could come up with?
Theory: it was totally aliens.
Not ancient, safely dead, and apparently benevolent aliens like the Koregoi, that forerunner species that had ranged—and left—the Milky Way long before the Synarche and its systers came along. Those children of dead stars had left us occasional caches of impossibly advanced technology, like the recently discovered Baomind, a library the size of a solar system, and the physics that lay behind the gravity belt I was probably still wearing over my hardsuit, for example.
So not those. And not friendly, normal, everydia it’s-rude-to-call-them-aliens like Tralgar and Cheeirilaq, systers one could sit down for a nice beer or metabolically compatible beer equivalent with—though never coffee—and complain about local Synarche policies.
But actual, hardcore, scary, middle-of-sleep-shift-three-vee-you-have-to-be-up-in-four-hours-and-are-being-irresponsible-watching-this-now aliens. Aliens that wanted to disassemble my hospital the same way they were disassembling Helen’s generation ship, and convert it into computronium and the machine. Those kind of aliens.
I wondered again about Helen’s link with the machine. If it was aliens converting her ship and self into alien computronium microbots, they seemed to have left some of her personality intact. I wasn’t a science fiction expert, but it seemed to me that that was a rarity in the annals of all-consuming, assimilating, mind-control aliens.
In some ways, this was the most terrifying prospect. In others, I was surprised to find it somehow reassuring. Assimilating aliens were a horrifying existential threat, something that might destroy the entire Synarche, that might require shoving Big Rock Candy Mountain, Core General, Sally, Mercy, Afar—and me and literally everybody and everything I loved except the daughter I had not seen in twenty-odd ans—into the consuming embrace of the Well in order to prevent it from spreading.
It was also a horrifying existential threat that I could look at and say, “That’s not us. It comes from outside, and it’s monsters.”
Even in this age of adequate mental health care, when things are so much better than they were, I’m too much of a cop and too much of a doctor to ever convince myself that the monsters are conveniently other. The monsters don’t come from outside.
The monsters are calling from inside our genome.
That’s why, during the Eschaton, it took the medical interventions that eventually developed into rightminding to make us decently able to stop destroying ourselves. It’s a small comfort, I suppose, that once we got into space and met other sapiences, we discovered that they were all more or less equally as fucked up evolutionarily as we are, and had all had to take similar social steps to grow beyond their atavistic impulses into something we might recognize as culture.
I liked the scary predatory aliens theory a lot, for certain values of like. If it was scary aliens invading, waging war, and converting us into peripherals by means of their meme viruses, that left one huge logical problem, though: Where the Well did Calliope come from?
Ah, Calliope.
Well, then it probably wasn’t aliens.
And that led to an even more frightening proposition. What if Calliope was right? What if there was some vast corrupt conspiracy centering in the Synarche, in Core General? What if she was a freedom fighter? What if?
I didn’t think Calliope was right. I knew in my (no longer aching) bones that she could not be right.
But here in the belly of the machine, a quotation from an ancient, pre-Eschaton Terran statesman named Oliver Cromwell came floating back to me. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”
Christ was a religious prophet from an even earlier era, very popular on Terra for several thousand years. He preached all the usual things the better class of prophets preach, about respecting your fellow beings and treating them as one would like oneself to be treated. He got about the reception you’d expect, and his teachings were widely misinterpreted for millennians. Millennia, I suppose, it being actual Terran years we’re talking about.
The irony is that this Cromwell person, who provided such a useful sentiment that has since been widely appropriated by logicians, historians, archinformists, and doctors (like myself), was the sort of individual who overthrew a government. (Okay, it was a monarchy of some sort, or something equally terrible.) He also murdered a lot of dissidents because he was pretty damned certain he was right. And because he was pretty adamant that everyone should subscribe to his religious convictions.
Don’t be like Oliver Cromwell, I told myself, and tried to examine Calliope’s allegations from a more neutral point of view.
Perhaps the reason I was so certain Calliope was wrong was that the prospect of her being right was so deeply terrifying.
What if there was some kind of vast conspiracy—or rampant sophipathology—infecting the hospital, infecting it as certainly as the meme was infecting Linden and Dr. Zhiruo? What would that look like? How would I tell?
What would its nature and purpose be? Why would it be worth it? What sort of motive would allow for it? How would such a thing operate, and how could it keep its existence secret, or even secret-ish?
What was behind all the things Sally could not admit to any official knowledge of?
I sighed deeply, realizing that I could at least feel the air stretch my lungs when I drew enough breath in. That was reassuring: if I could feel my body I probably wasn’t dealing with locked-in syndrome or anything else similarly daunting.
Well, I wasn’t going to find out the answers stuck in here, wherever here was, and that was for sure. I had, I was certain, colleagues on the outside working to rescue me—exactly as I would have been working if things had been reversed.
That led me to wonder what my physical situation might be. Was I still stuck inside the walker, or had someone managed to extract Calliope and me? Was I physically encased in a barrier of some sort
