Hope.
She was, I realized, really young. Young and full of idealism. Faith that things could be made to work out all right.
Maybe they could. Maybe they could. And maybe the survivors of this minor disaster could be repaired and restored to health.
That wouldn’t help the dead, however.
“I can’t fix it,” I said. “Nobody can fix a thing like this, once it happens. But maybe we can prevent anybody else from getting hurt.”
CHAPTER 26
LOESE WANTED TO TALK TO Sally before she made any irrevocable decisions. I didn’t blame her. I wanted to talk to Sally myself.
I also badly wanted to talk to Dr. Zhiruo. But first we needed an AI doctor who could somehow fix her corrupted code. Or bring her out of her protective hibernation. Or—whatever, it wasn’t my specialty—make her go.
And hopefully make Linden and Afar go, too.
The problem was that the best AI doctors in the hospital other than Zhiruo were already working on Zhiruo. Sally was an AI doc… and Sally had written the toxic meme. And that was a problem, because although she had written it, it had since gotten corrupted and made—virulent? contagious?—by contact with the machine’s operating system, and apparently Sally couldn’t figure out how to stop it once it went wrong.
At least, I was choosing to assume that she couldn’t manage to stop it. And not that she was choosing not to stop it. Because, shocking revelations and horrible mistakes aside, Sally was my friend. A friend who had fucked up catastrophically. But, nevertheless, a friend.
I was angrier at Sally than I was at Loese. I knew Sally better. I had trusted her more.
I had trusted her implicitly. Reflexively. The way a child trusts a parent, I suppose, until proven otherwise.
The same way, I realized, I had trusted Core General. I hadn’t thought either of them would let me down. And yet, here we were. They were on opposite sides of this issue, and both of them had catastrophically let me down.
It’s so easy to be catastrophically wrong. And so difficult to admit it to yourself, internalize it, and act upon the knowledge.
Is faith ever warranted?
Probably not.
Sally’s betrayal felt more personal than Core General’s. Sally’s betrayal was more personal. I mean, for one thing, she was a person and not an institution.
I left Loese and walked into Ops. Sally was moored and spinning with the hospital, so we enjoyed the semblance of gravity and I settled into the familiar embrace of my acceleration couch. When I leaned back and looked up, the wide toroid of the hospital framed a sharp-edged, upside-down horizon across the top of the forward port.
Below that hard line, a line as solid and straight and massive as the stone edge of a crypt lid, the stars spilled out across the blinding brightness of the Core, with a whole galaxy turning behind it, the whole universe turning behind that. Billions upon billions of stars and billions upon billions of living souls.
They all seemed so bright and close that I almost could reach out my hand and cup them up, like cupping up reflections from the surface of still water. Except that putative water was light-ans deep, and mostly empty, and I was alone in it.
Well, staring into space wasn’t making me feel any less lonely. And difficult conversations don’t get any less difficult if you put them off.
“Sally,” I said, “can you make sure we’re alone?”
“We’re alone,” she answered. “I suppose you’re very angry with me?”
I knew she was already talking to Loese. And I was angry with her—very angry—but I paused a moment to inspect and categorize my feelings. I wanted to be fair, not punitive. I also wanted to be clear, so I let Sally into my senso while I ran the assessment, furious and hurt as I was.
I was angry on my own behalf. She had risked my life and betrayed my trust. Worse, she had lied to me about it—knowingly lied, not merely misdirected or left things out—and her lies had compounded the emotional damage.
Showing that vulnerability to Sally now, in the absence of trust that she would not use it against me, took courage I didn’t know I had, and I jump out of space ships for a living.
It was easier to let her see the other things I was angry about, the ones that made me a warrior rather than a victim. It was easy to show her that I was angry about her carelessness with Tsosie’s life, about the damage to the hospital and the casualties here, about her absolute bare-assed malicious negligence.
That was a righteous anger, and it was so much easier and more comfortable and safer to feel than the anger of personal hurt. But they were both real, and they both mattered, and—
And I was getting too angry to communicate effectively. To problem-solve.
I wasn’t going to start shouting at Sally. She deserved it, but yelling was a waste of time. And time was a thing we didn’t have in abundance right now. We had plenty of problems, crises, questions. Even plenty of tools: brains, skills, personnel.
But we didn’t have a lot of time. And we didn’t have a lot of answers, either.
So we needed to use the resources we did have to make up for or obtain the ones we didn’t. And the first step toward that was me not losing my shit all over Sally and wasting valuable hours when we could be problem-solving and saving lives.
I tuned, and I let Sally feel me tuning. I don’t know, even now, if that was honesty or a guilt trip. Or maybe sometimes a thing can be both. But right then I needed the machine in my head to make my emotions work, the same way the machine of my exo made my body work.
I was grateful for both of them. Which reminded me to plug myself in to the trickle charger on my couch while
