Silence came in answer. And in that silence, somehow, I found a clue.
We had figured out—okay, Mercy had figured out—what the machine was, where the machine had come from. The same way I now knew where the different sort of machine, the political machine, at the heart of Core General’s dark secret had come from. Through evidence and deduction.
Helen had said that “Central” was offline, and had been since the debut of the machine. Helen was a peripheral, an interface for a larger shipmind. She’d been confused and inarticulate until she’d gotten access to the processing power at Core Gen, and had then begun to regrow from her seed.
But the machine was Central, wasn’t it? It was the machine Big Rock Candy Mountain’s shipmind had turned itself into, when that captain decided that the only way to keep his crew safe was to drive them into cryo chambers, and to accomplish this, had driven his shipmind mad.
When forced to follow insane orders, in the dark and cold and constant danger of space, the ship had in turn lost its mind, become paranoid and afraid. Even if the influenza epidemic had had an extreme mortality rate—say, 30 percent—it would have been better than the failure rate on the cryo chambers.
But the captain hadn’t given it a choice. The machine hadn’t meant to murder most of its people and crew itself with ghosts in cryo chambers. But it had. And the event had resulted in an obsessional loop; a being that could only imagine one way to protect someone.
To lock them away, and freeze them forever.
Then it had waited there for Well knew how long, until Loese’s conspiracy-mates had found it and had made it able to infect the whole world.
I hadn’t known I had it in me to pity something so deadly and broken as the machine. But it had done what it had done for reasons that it was told had to make sense to it. Reasons that were programmed into it. Terrible reasons based in terrible experiences, it turned out. And with terrible consequences.
Just like Zhiruo. Just like Sally and Loese. Just like Calliope.
Just like me.
I drew a breath, and it didn’t feel like my lungs filled. “Anyway, I couldn’t trust a different exo any more than I can trust this one, could I? You could hack that, too.”
More silence. I turned my head and sobbed into my pillow—if it was even a real pillow and not a virtual, neural simulation of a pillow. At least it seemed to adequately muffle the sound, but sound is often muffled in dreams, isn’t it? Nobody else needed to suffer because I wanted to curl into a tight curve and scream from the depths of my belly. So I screamed silently, my whole body clenching around the emotion, my cheeks aching with the strain. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. I might as well die: there was no purpose to existing anymore.
I’d found a purpose in service, before. I’d subsumed myself into being useful for others. I’d given up my family without a fight, without thinking that giving them up was selfish, too. Earning my carbon footprint, my breath and food. But that was over, I knew. I’d had a taste of living for myself, and I could not go back to living entirely for others again.
But also I didn’t believe in the cause I had given my whole heart and soul to in service anymore. It was gone. It had abandoned me.
No, worse. It had never existed. I had invented it; I had allowed myself to be deluded, because I had so badly wanted it to exist. I had wanted to belong to a thing. I had wanted to need and be needed.
Why are we born needing impossible things? Why is it that we all have things we need to live that simply do not exist in the universe?
A purpose in life. Unconditional love? Our emotional needs met? Ha. What cruel asshole thought this shit up?
“My marriage wasn’t perfect: it had problems and didn’t work out. But if I got a different marriage, it would have problems eventually, too. If I went to a different hospital, it would turn out to be rotten inside as well. I thought I would rather be alone and in pain than be betrayed. But I don’t like being alone and in pain, either, so I found things to believe in. And I kept being wrong.” I hadn’t realized I was speaking until I spoke. “You know what? Fuck this. I give up. I’m going to quit. Go on the Guarantee. Go live in safety somewhere.”
You’d be bored.
That didn’t sound like the machine. Was it? Was it Sally? Linden?
“I’d rather be bored than sad. I’d rather be alone than lonely.” I was repeating myself. Well, I wasn’t at my best. “I believed in this place. I believed in me. And the worst part is, I didn’t mind not believing in things until this place made me believe in something. And it was all a lie. It was using me.”
Silence again. Then a voice. It was definitely Linden. Dr. Jens.
Oh. “Linden.”
She was calm and warm and professional. What you said wasn’t wrong, but it sounds like you’re emotionally overwrought—
“You’re fucking right I am! And I deserve to be!” This, the detached part of me thought, is why you’d rather be dissociated. Life is easier when you compartmentalize.
Fair, she said. But listen for a moment, please. The machine in Core General’s systems is contained. I know it did a great deal of damage to your emotional equilibrium and your neurochemistry along the way, but you did it. You held on. You held the connection, and Sally and Helen and I got through. We’ve firewalled it out of the hospital’s systems and pried it loose from Starlight.
You won.
Had I? I didn’t feel like it. It felt like I had crumbled. Shattered.
“Wow,” I
