The engineer whose skills and memories I was borrowing would be far more useful. “Use my hands if you need them,” I told Zhiruo, crouching beside Helen. “Tell me how to intervene.”
There was a pause that stretched subjective ans. Then, “It’s all right,” Zhiruo said. “She’s withdrawn herself into the core we provided.”
“Is her link with the peripheral severed?”
“Not permanently.”
I might have felt slightly disappointed at that. Less so than I would have when we found Helen. I still didn’t like her burlesque body, but maybe I was starting to get used to it.
Whether that was a good thing or a bad one, I wasn’t certain. It was certainly, however, a thing I could worry about some other time.
“Too much strain?” I asked.
“Conflicting calls,” Zhiruo answered. “Preserve her crew, or risk all to save some. Disobey a direct order from her captain, or follow it and let her people die. Her program is not very robust when dealing with real-world conflicts. As we bring her into modern architecture, her resilience will improve.”
“Right,” I said.
Zhiruo had backed a gurney up next to me. I scooped Helen’s gelatinous form up in my arms, remembering to lift with my knees—and my exo. I told myself that it could have been a lot worse. At least the peripheral was room-temperature, rather than actually clammy.
I put her on the gurney and arranged her decently. Her arms and legs were jointless and fluid in their relaxed state, unsettlingly as if her bones had liquefied. “Zhiruo, your patient.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Rilriltok zipped sideways out of the way as the gurney trundled itself toward the door.
Tralgar seemed to be watching it go. What are you going to do next? it asked me.
I bit my lip. “Talk to the archinformist, I guess.”
Let us know what you find out, said Rilriltok, from the corner by the door. I guess we’ll start seeing how many lives we can save.
CHAPTER 14
THE HOSPITAL HAS ITS OWN archinformist, the medical librarian. His name is Mercy.
And one nice thing about the hospital AIs is that you don’t have to go see them. You can call them up and ask a question anywhere.
On the other hand, I really like the library.
We didn’t have physical libraries back on Wisewell: the settlement was too new and the resources not available to dedicate an entire building—or even a room in one—as a temple to knowledge. Here on Core General, space is at a premium, but many people work more efficiently when they leave their quarters to do so, and communal workspace is much more efficient than private offices.
If sharing workspace means not having to either hot-bunk or manage my own journal subscriptions, I’m all for it. And libraries are pleasant and efficient communal workspaces. So we have a lot of libraries.
The ox-sector library closest to my quarters is a wedge-shaped compartment, half of which is divided into soundproofed study carrels capacious enough for sentients somewhat larger than me. The other half of the room has adjustable benches with wide aisles and privacy shields every two meters.
I wouldn’t care to try to cram Tralgar into a study carrel, either. Even as a theoretical exercise.
I selected a carrel at the back, with nobody working nearby, and programmed the chair and desk setup so I could settle in with my feet elevated and my knees propped up. Fortunately, I was well-caffeinated, or I might have dozed off, because the chairs were awfully comfortable.
The screens came alive with a dim, cheery glow as I lowered myself into the chair and dropped the privacy shield. Patient information is meant to be kept confidential. I was sure the entire hospital was already buzzing about Helen and her crew, but at least I could observe the forms.
“Mercy,” I said, “I have a problem.”
“Hello, Dr. Jens,” he answered. “I have a solution. Shall we see if they match?”
I should mention that one of the challenges of working with archinformists—or with Mercy, who is the only archinformist I’ve worked with extensively, so I should not generalize—is their fondness for very, very, very old things.
Including jokes.
Very, very, very old jokes.
You can’t stare at an AI under lowered brows, so I said, “I’ve been appointed to the care team for the archaic AI we recovered, and I’m hoping you can give me some data on the history of her ship and possibly even some development files, if there are any.”
“I can try,” Mercy said. “Information that’s specific to Terran history and which is not frequently called for may take a while to… unearth, however.”
Ouch. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
“Isn’t all of human knowledge since the 1990s preserved in a holographic solid somewhere?” Preferably, somewhere in the Core, so it wouldn’t take too long to get to.
“A lot of people think so,” he said. “There used to be an axiom that the Internet was forever.”
I had to look up Internet as he was talking. A primitive form of senso, without neural interface, accessible through small handheld devices.
“And it’s not forever?”
Graphics and charts and illustrations populated the screens around me, a bewildering array.
“Nothing is forever,” he said, as cheerfully as only a functionally immortal artificial intelligence could. “If retrieving archaic data were easy, if there were no informational decay, my specialty would not exist. There would be no archinformists, no research librarians.”
“Wait,” I said. “How can information decay?”
“They used to call it bit rot. Servers get taken down, data falls through the cracks and doesn’t get backed up. Physical substrates are destroyed or damaged, or degrade over time—especially the primitive ones. A holographic diamond is very durable but can’t be changed once it’s written to, and magnetic media only lasted a decan or so under ideal conditions.
“And even if the data is preserved somewhere, that somewhere might not be networked. If it’s networked, it might not be indexed. Even if it’s
