Carlos was eating methodically, with every evidence of enjoyment, cutting slices of protein ball with the side of his fork, swirling them through the sauce, and chewing each one meditatively. I still didn’t really understand him.
But he was, I thought, somebody I could trust. He wasn’t from here. He didn’t have alliances or duties. He might be useful somehow. And what we were doing involved his crew, and other than Helen—and Oni, who was still being kept under sedation—he was their only representative.
Briskly, in a low voice that wouldn’t carry over the cafeteria noise, I brought both Carlos and Tsosie up to speed on what I’d learned from Loese and Sally. Tsosie’s expression got darker and dourer as I spoke, but he said nothing. Carlos at some point quit eating his spaghetti.
He leaned forward. “So Jones isn’t one of mine.”
I made a sour face.
“Ha!” he said, and resumed eating as if well-satisfied. A bite or two later, he frowned at me and said, “So what does this mean for the rest of my crew?”
I shrugged. “If we can unpick the machine, we might have a better chance of reviving the ones who’ve made it this far. Something in the capsule programs has been… sticky.”
“Sticky?”
“Oppositional.”
“Oh.” He pushed his fork through noodles. “And you found some sort of cargo hold full of clones? Illegal clones? Do I understand that properly?”
“Unethical clones.” I set my own fork down. A moment of meanness made me add, “I said I would show you and… I’ll show you.”
“Mmm,” Carlos said. “Thanks all the same. I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around why me, why us. Why they thought this was a good idea in the first place.”
I laughed and covered my face. “If you found a disabled generation ship full of corpsicles, could you resist using it?”
“I resent the appellation corpsicle,” he said, so deadpan that it was a moment before I realized he was joking.
Tsosie said, “A literal sleeper agent. It’s like a conspiracy sandwich.”
I reclaimed the fork and made myself stick it into the food. Eating hurt. Not eating would hurt more, in the long run. “Treason between two slices of betrayal.”
“So what are we going to do about it?” Tsosie asked.
I shook my head. “Fix the problem, if we can? Save the dia? Save the hospital and Carlos’s ship and basically everything?”
A presence filled my senso. “Sally’s here,” I told the men. Tsosie, obviously also in the loop, nodded. Carlos leaned on his forearms.
Singer was there, too, I realized. Definitely taking a few risks, that one.
I’ve told Singer what we know, Sally said. He’s informed the Judiciary. They’re not pleased with his and his pilot’s decision to come to our rescue, but he doesn’t think they will take any action against him. Especially if we succeed in saving the hospital.
“Great,” I said. “Are we going to succeed in saving the hospital?”
We have something we think might work, Singer said.
Sally asked, Do you want to try it first on Afar, or on Linden? I’d recommend Afar, because if anything goes terribly wrong for Linden it might further damage the hospital.
“Zhiruo,” I answered, and everybody—physically present and in senso—stared at me. Or performed the virtual equivalent.
Are you… sure? Sally’s tone told me that she found my choice potentially punitive, which I wasn’t sure was a judgment she was currently entitled to make, but whatever.
It was true that if it didn’t work, Zhiruo—other than Sally, who wasn’t infected—was the person who most deserved whatever fallout the sequelae might entail. That was not a medically ethical reason to use her as a test subject, however.
But I very much needed to talk to her. And that… was a much more supportable reason.
I wasn’t at all sure it was the best idea I’d ever had, however.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”
Over by the printers, someone cursed. Tsosie craned his neck, frowned, and hunched his head back into his shoulders. Under his breath, he muttered, “Looks like no more provisions from this cafeteria.”
Carlos’s face sallowed. “This was how it started.”
“How what started?” Tsosie asked.
The ancient human swallowed, reached for water. Drank and swallowed again. “On the Rock. When the machine broke out. When we were all sick, and the captain wanted us to go into the pods. This is how the system failures started.”
There’s a thing that happens in medicine sometimes where you spend a subjective lifetime scratching your head (if you have a head) over a patient whose condition you can’t make heads or tails of. So you hand that patient over to a colleague in a more appropriate specialty, and get them back again, dizzyingly fast, cured of whatever was puzzling you.
It doesn’t happen often—usually, you get them back with whatever their other complaints were worsened by the delay, and a boatload of additional treatment modalities in place that may or may not be helping. Because patients insist on being not logic problems but real, complicated people with real, complicated problems that won’t tidily resolve with the application of an epiphany and a course of antivirals, or some stem cell therapy, or a quick reprogram of some damaged DNA.
But sometimes it does work. And those cases are gratifying and humiliating in equal measure. Gratifying because the problem is solved. Humiliating because you weren’t the one who solved it, and from the outside and in retrospect, the process of diagnosis and treatment looks so damned easy.
Dr. Zhiruo wasn’t my patient. And I knew perfectly well that what had solved the problem was the combination of Sally’s knowledge of the virus that had caused it with Helen’s knowledge of the machine and Singer’s skill at reading strange programs. It’s much easier to provide an antidote if the poisoner tells you how they made the patient sick in the first place.
Five standard hours after I left them alone to work on the problem, the artificial intelligences had solved it. Helen found me and delivered
