Starlight found a chuckle somewhere. [We’re glad to hear it wasn’t intentional. The problems will be resolved? There will be consequences?]
“Judiciary is following up on the rest of the conspirators. There will be consequences. I believe they will all be located,” I said. “You guessed that they were trying to draw attention to Zhiruo’s private protocols?”
[The incidents were localized in a suggestive way. Draw attention… no. We assumed they were attacking the protocols.]
“They didn’t realize that you and O’Mara were already—” I stopped. In on it wasn’t exactly correct. “They didn’t realize that you already knew what was going on and couldn’t stop it.”
[Their faith in the system is touching.]
I sighed. “As near as I can reconstruct, when Big Rock Candy Mountain’s crew contracted a pandemic, the captain ordered them all into cold storage. He got… a little strange, all alone. And altered the program on the ship’s AI in order to create a kind of guardian bot that first bullied his incapacitated crew into the pods, and then… guarded them. This worked out as well as mad science usually does. Time passed. That bot came in contact with the virus the saboteurs had set up as a trap for Dr. Zhiruo, to overwrite her protocols and force her to confess her sins—”
[Ambitious.]
“A little too ambitious,” I agreed. “The infection of the machine must have been intentional, because they needed the machine to make sure we took the right cryo casket.”
[It was an overcomplicated plan, and it went horribly wrong.]
“It was. It did. The conspirators that I interviewed have, however, surrendered. They are cooperating with the treatment of the affected AIs.”
[Good. Then we can rest.]
“Don’t you dare.”
A pause. Then, [Excuse me?]
“Don’t you dare give up on me,” I said.
[Llyn,] the tree said gently. [We’re dying.]
“And I’m a fucking doctor,” I said. “Don’t you dare give up on me. I will put this place to rights if it kills me.” I took a deep breath. “Anyway, Helen has been through this before. And Helen and I have a plan.”
It was a terrible plan, but that’s par for the course around here. We didn’t have a better one, and with the meme eating Core General from the inside out, our options were either to put off acting until we either starved or the hull cracked open or we thought of something less radical… or to take a risk and maybe have time to try something else if it failed and we weren’t dead after.
I sent for Helen. She must have been waiting outside the broken door, because in less than a minute, she was beside me. She plopped herself on the crystal of the hull immediately, as if she sat down on the bodiless depths of space every dia.
Although, come to think of it, she was a space ship. Even if she was a differently embodied space ship for the time being.
I reached into the ayatana—only one ayatana, thank the space goblins—for a better sense of Starlight’s anatomy. I reached out and took Helen’s hand. It still felt weird, but given who I was sharing my brain with, no weirder than my own body.
I looked up at Starlight. “It’s not just you, you know. The whole hospital is in danger.”
A rustle that was not words answered. And then words. [What about… the crew of Afar?]
“The first one to undergo surgery is awake,” I said. “With limited deficits. It’s going to be—”
I couldn’t say it was going to be all right.
“The prognosis is good,” I finished.
Starlight laughed. [Our prognosis is not good, Dr. Jens.]
“I am,” I said definitively, “a rescue specialist. I am also the only person we know of, other than Helen, who has managed to come into direct contact with this thing and find a way out again. We have the skills, Starlight.”
[We do not doubt your capabilities.] They sighed, wind through leaves, with a strange crystal edge to it. [We are tired and in a lot of pain.]
“Sibling,” I said, “I feel you.”
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Helen said. “We have to take on the meme, and the machine the meme is building, and disentangle it from your cellular structure. And once we learn how to do it here, we can apply that knowledge to getting it out of my own ship.”
[And how do you propose to accomplish that? If we could access its processing pathways—if we could even find them—we think we could fight it. But it’s building its own parallel infrastructure through ours, and in fact disassembling ours to accomplish this.]
Starlight rattled their crystallizing leaves for emphasis. Something cracked, and broken pieces tinkled.
I winced and held up one hand. “Please don’t harm yourself. We have a plan. We’re going to break into the machine with”—I waved—“my exo.”
What happened next involved a lot of tubes and wiring. Well, to be absolutely precise, what happened next in a rigorous sequence of events was a long walk through corridors with flickering, unsettling lighting, down to Cryo, where we met Carlos and Rilriltok. O’Mara had left: I assumed they were back in their office, coordinating treatment efforts on the other AIs and continuing support for Zhiruo. The fact of the matter was that now that we had the base code to work from, and the antivirus, once we could get the paralyzed AIs back online they were more than capable of handling their own defense. It was a matter of… well, I’m an organics doc. So I’m going to cast this in terms that make sense to me.
It was a matter of giving them a vaccination, so they could build their own antibodies to the problem, and adapt those antibodies as the problem evolved. That, and giving them a little platform of clear space to assemble their formidable resources on, and to sally forth to fight
