It made a garbled sound: not speech, but like a lot of audio information compressed into a very tight space, laid over itself again and again. I recognized the timbre of Sally’s voice in there, and Tsosie’s, though I could not make out words. And what could have been my own voice, changed the way voices are changed when you don’t hear them from inside your own head.
Then it spoke, in stilted but correct Standard, in a smoky contrived alto that made me flinch.
“I am Helen,” the android said. “The distress signal—yes. There is a distress signal. And there are casualties. Please, come with me.”
Helen? I asked Sally silently, forgetting for a moment that she wasn’t there. Who names their shipmind Helen? We followed the android through more of the ship’s habitation areas. She said she was taking us to a cargo area, which didn’t bode well for living casualties.
Tsosie heard me, though. We still had our local connection, even if the uplink had failed.
I’m not sure she is a shipmind, he replied. You could ask.
I was still contemplating the options when Tsosie said, “Helen, are you the shipmind?”
Helen did not look back. Her shimmering golden body preceded us, and I did my best not to stare at her shiny metal ass. What can I say? It was very distracting.
She said, “I’m Helen Alloy. I was made to wait.”
Helen Alloy.
Because some engineer thought he was funny. And between the smoky voice and the shiny metal ass, I will bet you whatever you care to name that the person who built her was a he.
Tsosie apparently was right there with me, as his voice came over our direct link: There’s a Trojan horse joke here, and I’m not going to make it.
I sighed out loud. One benefit of the hardsuit: I could be kind to myself and those around me and decide not to mike my exasperated sound effects.
“Wait for who?” Tsosie asked, when it became plain that I was ignoring his joke and that Helen wasn’t going to elaborate without prompting.
“Wait for you.” She shook her head, as if indicating confusion. “Wait for whoever came to save us. To maintain the ship and keep the crew safe until somebody came. It’s been a long time.”
“Does the shipmind still exist?” Tsosie asked. “How about the library?”
“There’s a library,” she said. “And there’s Central.”
“Central?” I asked, deciding not to remind Tsosie that I had been going to do the talking. I was a little distracted: without Sally to keep an eye on my pain levels and help coordinate my exo, I was still doing those tasks myself. Keeping abreast of it wasn’t a problem, but it used up a few cycles. “Who is Central?”
“Central,” Helen said, “isn’t a person.”
“You’ve been here alone?” I was beginning to understand why the whole ship was filled with bot toys. Helen must have been incredibly bored. I hoped she’d at least been programmed to be interested in astronomical data, because that was the only source of intellectual stimulation for parsecs.
“I’m not alone,” she said. “Here are the passengers.”
She pressed a metal palm to a pad beside an irising hatch. A big hatch: this must be one of the promised cargo bays. Sally’s map and my own sense of dead reckoning told me that we’d come up on the side of the spinning wheel. That made sense: cargo bays would serve as valuable radiation shielding, though this one seemed to be oriented away from the wheel’s direction of travel.
She stepped through and gestured us into the airlock with her. We went. Helen cycled the lock. The door in front of us came open. A pale light flooded past her, shimmering on the curve of her hip and thigh.
I peered over Helen’s shoulder. The hold was filled with rank after rank of caskets.
Coffins, or cryo containers? It was hard to be sure, and given that the cargo hold was cold as space and held no atmosphere, the only functional difference was going to be whether the people inside could be resuscitated.
Whatever the objects were, there were a lot of them. I did a little quick mental math and figured that there must be a thousand of them in this bay alone.
They might be alive. Or at least, aliveable.
“Bet you two standard weeks of kitchen duty that this isn’t the only hold,” Tsosie murmured.
“No bet.” My heart sank at the size of the job ahead.
Sally still wasn’t there. So I had to ask Helen about the history.
“Helen,” I said, “how good was your people’s cryonics technology?”
She looked at me and shrugged a fluid, rippling shrug. “In comparison to what, Doctor?”
“Do you know what your revival success rate is?”
“They are my crew,” she said. “They must be all right.”
Her program was focused on protecting her crew’s well-being to the point of being dangerous to herself or bystanders. It was a common problem in early model AIs: they were geared toward maximum preservation of human life in the very short term, and because their algorithms weren’t flexible, they had occasionally created a hell born of trolley problems.
Worry feels like somebody doing crochet with your internal organs. I subvocalized, Tsosie, are you seeing this?
“I am,” he answered, without turning on his suit speakers. “We’re going to have to salvage the whole ship, aren’t we?”
Suddenly, Sally was with us again. “Don’t panic,” she said, as if those words were ever inclined to keep one from panicking. They came with a nice dose of anxiolytics, though, which helped. “The crew is all fine. We’re dealing with a technical problem.”
I shot her a hard feeling.
She sighed. “A little damage came to light. We’re making repairs.”
How could you have damage and not know it?
The ambulance is, in a very real sense, Sally’s body. For her not to notice damage would be like me having burned my
