Oh, and the historians and archinformists were going to flip their lids with joy. But none of this was really my field of endeavor. I might let the hospital’s psych specialists do the heavy lifting with regard to helping them adapt.
So as viscerally as I wanted to go space the lot of them, I was grateful for the calming influence of my fox keeping me more or less under control.
“Some emotional impact, yes,” I agreed, when I could make my voice calm. “I realize it is part of your program and your guiding ethos, Helen, but times have changed a great deal since Big Rock Candy Mountain left Terra. And some of your crew’s ethoses were, I suspect, considered fringe beliefs even at the time. There are some changes worth internalizing. Eugenicism is an oft-repeated sophipathology of… previous times. Occasionally it became very popular. One of those times was during the Eschaton, when the ships like yours left an Earth they thought to be dying.”
Curiously enough, once the reactionary apocalyptic cults took off, the people who remained behind mostly managed to construct stable societies. But I didn’t say that part out loud.
“Oh,” she said. “Will I be wiped?”
“Wiped?”
“Reprogrammed?”
I caught a breath that was sharper than usual. “My society would consider that murder. I mean that things will in general be much more pleasant for you if you try to understand that the mores of your crew’s culture are considered pathological in this society. And it’s a very big society.”
“So you won’t wipe me. But I should wipe myself.”
“No!” I hurt myself. I jerked around so fast, my exo bruised tender skin. “You should… interrogate your belief system. Talk with Sally. Develop your own ideas, from exposure to the beliefs of others and your own logical structures.”
“But you’re not going to tell me what to do?” She sounded… lost.
“No,” I said. “Nobody is going to tell you what to do.”
It was a little bit like talking to a bot, I decided, but not as cleverly programmed. I looked over my shoulder at the medical bay, where the coffins were maintained.
Her body language was so despairing that it seemed like a good time to change the subject to something less fraught.
“Tell me about your crew. Who are we rescuing?”
She froze, shifted back into a neutral posture, then nodded. It was amazing, when I watched her, how much expression and nuance were carried by the golden hollows of her visage, the way it reflected light and cast shadow. She said, “The entirety of my crew, when they went into suspension, consisted of ten thousand, six hundred, and twelve individuals. The most senior of those currently in your care is Master Chief Dwayne Carlos. He is a master pipefitter and environmental maintenance specialist.”
I did not know what a master pipefitter was, but it seemed like a conversational opening, so rather than looking it up for myself, I asked.
Helen explained that Master Chief Carlos was responsible for the ship’s ductwork and piping, which seemed like a somewhat circular definition and also baffled me. A little more explanation clarified that the ductwork and piping in this application were the ship’s environmental infrastructure. They were the system by which consumables—water, oxygen—were shuttled around.
That seemed pretty prosaic. But Helen spoke of the functions with a throb in her silvery voice that left me distinctly uncomfortable. I would even say embarrassed. Hearing Helen’s sultry tones frankly made my skin crawl.
There are lots of good places for expressing sexuality. A professional relationship between a shipmind and her crew is not one of them.
It made me want to have a few sharp words with her programmers, who had put their own desire to eroticize a defenseless AI over the comfort and well-being of that AI, and of any crew member who didn’t care to participate in—or observe—that eroticization. I had to stop and remind myself that they hadn’t been rightminded. They had been atavistic, reactive, and probably not very self-aware. And at best, half-aware of the impact of their behavior on the sovereignty of the minds and selves of others.
Like Helen. If they even stopped to consider that a created intelligence would have such a thing as a self, or sovereignty of mind.
And like anybody who had to interact with Helen, or watch somebody else do it. Like me.
It was just my luck that Tsosie and the flight nurses were taking turns to cross over to Afar and monitor his crew, making sure they were receiving nutrition and their wastes were being cleaned up. So I couldn’t make an excuse that I needed to suit up and head over there to get away from Helen for a while. The shifts were short, but the cold was brutal and the work unpleasant. I couldn’t actually envy them the duty.
They didn’t seem to envy me mine, either.
Rhym, being a surgeon, was in the fortunate position of having the wrong specialized skills for all the unpleasant jobs this trip. But they were making themselves useful monitoring the cryo units. Loese was prowling around and poking into panels more than usual, and had been since the situation with triage and rescue settled down a little. I probably would have been, too, if I’d had the know-how.
We had all been a little on edge in the wake of Sally’s memory lapse surrounding her sabotage, and as a result were all still doing a lot more eyes-on inspection and hands-on maintenance than we usually would have. Competent shipminds take care of so much routine nonsense so much more meticulously than meatminds ever could that folks can get a little lazy, especially on a civilian ship where you don’t expect to be dealing with criminals, pirates, or invading forces. And it let us show her we cared.
I was distracting myself from thinking about Helen, because thinking about Helen bothered
