[Dr. Zhiruo offered her an uncorrupted, air-gapped space within the Core General architecture in which to rebuild and update her personality modules under Dr. Zhiruo’s supervision and with her help. Dr. Zhiruo says she’s already more integrated. She’s going to bring in the hospital archinformist as well, to work with integrating the machine once Helen is stable. Messages will be going out to the other archinformists serving on I Rise From Ancestral Night at the site of the generation ship. So, no, she’s not ready to be released. But it’s Dr. Zhiruo’s professional opinion that it is safe to let her observe the care of her crew, and start integrating her into society.]
“I’m not qualified to be a care liaison.”
[Technically,] they said, with a pedantic tone that carried even across senso translation, [you’re extremely overqualified to be a care liaison. But the job should not be a problem for you. Which is good, because we are dealing with a dual first-contact situation. A form thereof, anyway. Helen’s encountered Terran humans before, but not the Synarche. And her crew, if any of them live, might as well be aliens.]
“At least we can figure out how to speak their language.”
[Your reports indicate that you already have studied their language and attempted speaking it to Helen when you met her. See?] Starlight rustled. [We are confident in your ability to do this job. We’re only formalizing a role you’ve already adopted.]
“What is she going to do when Sally goes out again?”
[Sally is under repair.]
“That won’t last forever.” I felt like I was having the conversation I’d had with O’Mara all over again, and not in a good way. Going over their head was never going to work, anyway: hospital administration might disagree among themselves, but they knew how to present a unified front once a decision had been reached.
Usually, I enjoyed the lack of politics. Usually, I enjoyed not reporting directly to the Administree, whose conversational style was, well, branching. Discursive. And I couldn’t always see how one topic hooked up with the previous one.
Starlight rustled, [Right now, Dr. Jens, you are needed here.]
I bit my lip and decided, for the time being, to save my ammunition. “I wanted to talk to you about this mission anyway. Something about this doesn’t add up.”
[Elaborate?]
“I’m worried about the coincidences,” I admitted. “I’m worried about the operations of three different shipminds, if we count up Sally and Helen and Afar, being affected, their memories—and in one case their consciousness—being damaged. I’m confused about the timeline, but it seems very strange that Sally’s memories would be sabotaged before she encountered two other ships with damaged shipminds. While she was on her way to find them. Responding to their distress beacon, in fact.”
[Yes,] the administrator agreed. [That is odd. I give you permission to enjoy exploring this question in your new role.]
“You’re asking me to play detective?”
[We understand that Master Chief O’Mara already has made such an investigative request of you. They believe you are suited to the task, and we trust their judgment.]
They really were all conspiring against me. “I don’t want to lose my berth. I have no ambitions to be anything but what I am, Starlight.”
[You’ll have your job. This is not a punishment, though you seem to think it is.]
I sighed, and blew a straggling coil of hair out of my eyes. “It’s been a long dia.”
[Get some rest,] Starlight said kindly.
And that was how, after a rest period that I was surprised to spend deeply asleep without any self-interventions (and without interruptions from other members of the hospital staff), I wound up playing secret agent/detective/tour guide to a sexy robot. If that sounds like the sort of punishment that would be handed out in a particularly surrealist purgatory, congratulations. You’re not wrong.
And I wasn’t as familiar with a lot of the hospital as I should have been, because I hadn’t spent very long grounded since I first came to the hospital for training.
Do they still say “grounded” when you’re on a spinning platform in space?
I imagined that my grounding wouldn’t really sink in until the first time Sally, having completed repairs, left without me. Left with a different rescue specialist in place. Somebody, I knew, who might want to keep that berth when I was free to fly again.
O’Mara had been very careful to withhold certain things from me. From what they’d said—and what they’d chosen not to say—it seemed likely Sally might be docked for longer than the dia or two it would take to get her back up to spec. But how much longer was the question.
The hospital couldn’t afford to keep a resource as scarce as 50 percent of its ox-sector fast-rescue fleet locked away indefinitely when lives were at stake—unless the risk of sending her out outweighed any possible consequences. So O’Mara might stall for a little while, and keep Sally off the milk runs that a Judiciary ship or a more ordinary vessel could handle. But eventually lives would depend on speed, and Sally would go.
And unless I had solved the crime and shepherded Helen through treatment, I would stay behind. Gnawing on my fingers behind closed doors and trying in public to compartmentalize and do my job.
The Administree had said this duty wasn’t a punishment. They had told me I wasn’t being declawed and decommissioned. That suggested that they were telling the truth, and there was a return to my old job waiting at the end of this assignment.
But it was hard to believe I wasn’t being punished when I knew very well that “my old job” was not even remotely the same as—or any guarantee of—my old berth. I enjoyed working with Sally and her crew. They were all good people and good at their jobs. I liked them. I trusted them. Even with Loese joining us so recently, we had become a team—a real machine. I
