I looked at her. “She’s under the same kind of confidentiality seal as Starlight and O’Mara? You wanted them to tell the truth, too, I suppose? Is that how Starlight got infected?”
“That would have been nice, but… no. We didn’t expect the meme to get beyond Zhiruo. It wasn’t supposed to be virulent. We wanted to make her tell the truth, and we wanted to write over the privacy protocols. Reverse them, so she would have to come forward. We didn’t expect it to affect Afar, or for him to get stuck there. He was supposed to drop Calliope and the walker off, and be on his way. There was some kind of interaction between the virus and the generation ship’s antique AI and the commands its last captain left it—whatever had it building the machine—and everything went wrong, fast.”
Tuning, tuning. “Why Zhiruo? Why make her tell the truth? Because she’s got seniority?”
“Aw, Jens,” Loese said sadly. “Zhiruo is the head of the clone program. I said it had been going on for ages.”
That liquid sensation in my gut—that was real horror. Real betrayal. And only a little bit of it was because what Loese and Sally and their unnamed co-conspirators had done was so unbelievably stupid.
You commit yourself completely to something and then you take your eyes off it for an instant and it’s gone. Like it never was. Like you can’t even see the evidence of the thing that was there, that you trusted your weight, your honor, your life, your heart to.
I’ve seen some shit, let me tell you.
But somewhere deep down, I find myself craving the impossible. I find myself craving that certainty that people and things and… and principles in my life will stay where I fucking left them.
A betrayal retroactively poisons everything good about that relationship. And right then, I wanted to stop spending so much time thinking about and compensating for how damaged I am. I wanted to be able to relax. To feel safe, and like I didn’t have to constantly be on my guard, again.
You’d think I’d be a little old to be feeling my innocence betrayed. But I hadn’t even turned my back on Core General. I trusted its ethical principles to hold me up. To bear my weight.
And it fell away under my feet.
The worst part is that I wasn’t braced at all. I didn’t have the slightest excuse to not be ready for it.
I’d believed. And now I couldn’t believe anymore. And I missed that believing so much.
This must be what losing your religion feels like.
At least Rhym isn’t involved in this. At least I don’t have to be angry at Hhayazh.
“Well,” I said, “you fucked up good, Loese. You and Sally and all the people you’re still protecting.”
Her face folded like a balled-up tissue. “I know. And you’re going to turn me over to Starlight and Zhiruo.”
“I don’t think Starlight approves of Zhiruo,” I said. “Or at least, not her little side program. I don’t think they can avoid using the resources she generates—I mean, we’ve all been using the resources she generates. That program must help pay for the ambulance ships, and… I don’t even know what else.”
“Zhiruo started the clone program,” Loese said miserably, “because the Core General project was defunded during the Laesil system cataclysm, a long time ago. They didn’t have the resources to support finishing it when hundreds of thousands of people were dying of stellar radiation and needed immediate help. So Zhiruo… found the resources elsewhere.”
Sweet death in a vacuum, why can’t anybody be uncomplicatedly evil in real life? Or uncomplicatedly good? Why are we all such a twist of good and bad decisions, selfishness and self-justification, altruism and desire?
“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to turn you in. You need your rightminding adjusted, sure as shitting after eating. How many casualties did you cause?”
She studied her shoes, and the stars beyond them. “A lot. The sabotage to the hospital—that wasn’t Sally and me, though.”
“Who was it? Some of your co-conspirators?”
Her lip thrust out. “They were involved in the little things. The leaks, the equipment malfunctions. We did not cause the rotational and lift failures. Something else caused that. I don’t want them blamed for it!”
Something else caused that. “Aw, crud,” I said. “So the machine—carrying the meme Sally made—has infiltrated the hospital’s superstructure. That’s what caused the big failures, isn’t it?”
Her mouth twisted in a horrified grimace. “Oh shit.”
I sighed.
I could waste a lot of time trying to get the names of her co-conspirators out of her. But… I was part of a system. If we lived long enough, the system could figure out who the rest of the conspirators were, using the information I gave them as a wedge for entering. The system could decide what the proper reparations were for them to earn forgiveness. In the meantime, I awarded Loese a few meager maturity points for not reminding me that she hadn’t meant to cause any casualties. But who in the spiral arms thought mixing a computer virus with an insane, damaged, poorly understood shipmind and then turning it loose was a good plan?
I nodded. “But we have a more immediate problem than the criminally stupid thing you and Sally did.”
She looked at me. That outthrust lip retracted a little.
“Unless you want to increase that death toll by every soul on Core General, staff and patients alike… we need to find a way to end the damage being done by the meme you set loose. And that is probably going to take all of us, working together. So you’d better give me access to the source files for this malignant code you and Sally cooked up, so I can do something about fixing Linden and Afar and Dr. Zhiruo. And Starlight, for the love of little blue suns.”
“Right,” she said. Her expression lightened
