They didn’t need readouts. Nobody was ever supposed to look at them and see if they were working other than Helen and the machine.
And, well, Helen appeared to be superficially correct. Whether those cryo chambers contained living persons or dead ones, they were all intact.
The chambers did each have a battery, which made my life that much easier. I thanked Helen profusely when she mentioned them to me. We’d have to fab chargers that fit these ports when we moved the caskets, but I wasn’t too concerned about that. We had the printers, and we could copy one of the originals. Electricity is a remarkably simple—though dangerous—animal.
The number of chambers we could haul would be limited by the amount of juice we could generate more than by our cargo space.
“Helen,” I said, “can I connect to the data storage on one of these chambers to run some diagnostics?”
“I will have to print you a connector,” she said. “They don’t broadcast a signal.”
“They’re hardwired into your systems.”
I had a tickle of an idea on how to get us out of this situation. How to get control of it. I couldn’t be certain that my encryption with Sally was completely secure, and I needed her for it.
I hoped she would guess.
Helen said, “Into the machine.” She began to drift toward me, body poised and toes pointed, like a monster levitating toward its victim in some old three-vee.
“Are you part of the machine?” I asked, very casually.
Tsosie’s level of worry spiked so high that Sally bumped his antianxiety cocktail before clearing it with him. She was within her rights as a shipmind to do it—she, like Helen, had an obligation to her crew—but I picked up his irritation that she’d felt the need.
Llyn, you’re going to invite her right into your fox? That’s too risky. I cannot allow it!
Relax. Sally has my back.
I didn’t have time to say more, because Helen was answering.
“We are all,” she said, with great conviction, “part of the machine.”
It sent a chill up my spine, and I didn’t tune the unease away. A certain wariness was good. A certain wariness was my brain and body telling me that I was in a dangerous situation. A certain wariness was useful. Sensible.
Sally seemed to agree, because my sense of peril stayed right where it was, and she could have gotten rid of it as easily as she’d defused Tsosie’s panic. How had people like those in the tanks gotten through the dia with just their own native brain chemicals and coping strategies?
If any of them were alive, I guessed I might have the chance to ask them.
“Please,” I said. “Print me a connector, Helen.” Encrypted, I asked, Sally, are you game for this?
It’s a terrible idea, she answered, so I knew she had picked up on exactly what I was planning.
I said, Just don’t hurt her if you can help it.
What if she hurts me?
Don’t let that happen, either.
I continued to make my way around the coffins—or the chest freezers—while Helen printed me a connector. Although I couldn’t access the vitals of the crew, I could double-check the integrity of the chambers.
At least in that, Helen’s confidence was justified. She’d arranged things so she didn’t have to do anything except cryo chamber maintenance. Who knew? Maybe she’d gotten very, very sick of having humans around after six hundred subjective ans. Years. Whatever.
“Helen,” I said, “why did the machine put the crew into cryosleep?”
“There was sickness. The ship wasn’t safe.” She had turned away from me, and from Tsosie, and was attentively waiting, her gaze—which wasn’t her gaze—trained back toward the hatch behind Tsosie. The machine hovered there, stretched between the airlock and me, balancing on all its rods and connectors. Staying out of trouble for the time being, I supposed.
“Structurally unsound?”
“The hull was too thin,” she agreed.
“Why was the hull too thin?”
I expected to hit another block here, but I didn’t. Whoever had programmed Helen not to understand the consequences of her own actions hadn’t thought to build denial around this.
“The materials were needed elsewhere.”
“So the hull’s structural integrity was compromised. Its strength and resilience.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Because the materials were needed to build the machine.”
“Yes.” She turned to me, shimmering gold and silver like moiré silk. “Should you go into stasis? The ship isn’t safe.”
As if I had some gift of clairvoyance, I could hear the echo of those words down the ans. I could imagine her telling her crew, “You have to go into stasis. The ship isn’t safe.”
The ship wasn’t safe because she had been taking it apart. To build the machine. A machine that was… a virus. A meme, a self-propagating set of ideas that could infect and cause sophipathology in an artificial intelligence.
A meme whose source I did not know.
But wherever it had come from, the machine was also an entity, as Helen was an entity. And as such I was duty-bound to try to rescue it—and her—and save both their a-lives if I could.
“I’m safe,” I told her. “I have my hardsuit on.”
“I think you should go into stasis,” she began to insist.
But she hadn’t countermanded her previous instruction. “Oh, look,” I said. “Here’s the connector.”
The machine snaked out and handed it to me. It was a fat, physical cable. I plugged one end into my suit jack, and it fit. I crouched beside the nearest cryo chamber, and felt Sally massing herself inside my fox, a grumpy wall of code
