“Well.” Despondence is useless, so I tuned it down, took a breath, and regrouped. “I guess that gives you job security.”
“As long as somebody somewhere cares what happened in medicine in the past.”
“Do you only do medicine?”
“I specialize in medicine,” he said. “The past is a big place.”
“If it had bearing on a medical case, could you look up some information for me?”
“I could,” he said, judiciously, “try. It might take a while.”
“My whole lifetime?”
“A noticeable percentage. But not a large one, assuming you maintain good health and you continue to exercise due caution regarding the risks of your profession.”
Fantastic. Everybody needs an actuarial AI.
Well, I’d asked.
“Fantastic,” I said, forcing myself to feel and sound bright and cheerful. “I need any background you can get me on the Terran generation ship Big Rock Candy Mountain. Especially her crew roster and build details on the AI known as Helen Alloy.”
“Such a clever name!” Mercy enthused.
I closed my eyes. There had to have been somebody other than her designer who would think naming a sexy metal android with a metal-based pun on Helen of Troy was a good idea. It was my luck that the other one was a colleague.
“Dr. Zhiruo said you’d already been working on Helen?”
“Since you’re her care liaison,” Mercy said, “I can tell you in confidence that her substrate is badly degraded. I’ve been patching her personality core with predictive algorithms. We’re rebuilding the substrate with modern materials and integrating the new core into her existing build as much as possible, to preserve continuity of experience.”
“Zhiruo said you had her using some external storage.”
“She already was, after a fashion.”
“The machine.”
“Yes. It’s semiautonomous. Not really a part of Helen, but also not really not a part of her. It might be more intelligent en masse, but the sample we have is built on reactive algorithms rather than being on the road to true consciousness. It’s possible that Helen started using the machine as external storage as her own systems degraded, and its lack of flexibility—for lack of a better word—infected her processes. I suspect it was intended to be a tool, and not autonomous. Helen was designed to have access to an external storage core—”
“Central,” I said.
“Yes. I’m not certain of the timeline. I theorize a potential sequence of events in which her captain ordered Helen to construct cryo pods and then ordered the crew into them before destroying the ship’s library and main computing core. Or perhaps he took it offline: I won’t know for sure until I have a chance to speak with the archinformists who are working on the generation ship itself and see what they have found. Helen must have been nearly quiescent at that point, as she’d been ordered not to access Central. The captain, well. You found him.”
I swallowed. Indeed we had.
“At some later time, possibly as an outgrowth of the evolving conflict over following the captain’s orders versus following her core values and caring for the crew in the pods, Helen hit on the apparently weird solution of converting a bunch of the ship’s remaining material into—”
“The machine.”
“Yes. The storage she needed, and a friend. Of sorts. And she hadn’t been specifically ordered not to do it. She was pretty well degraded into sophipathology at that point, though.”
I remembered the microbot pseudopod taking a swipe at me, and shuddered. “Well, tools are dangerous when used improperly. You can cut your finger off with a circular saw.”
“Indeed, one can.”
“So where do we start looking?”
“The generation ship itself might still have some or all of the data you’re looking for, despite whatever damage the library—Central—sustained. That is what we have archinformists working on it for.”
I began to see the problem. “But the generation ship isn’t networked, and its AI is corrupted.”
“The library might be salvageable. The archinformists will make duplicates of whatever they can retrieve from the files. They’ll bring those back to the Core. That information will be useful,” he said. “Also, I should warn you that every archinformist and journalist in fifteen light-ans is inbound in hopes of interviewing Helen.”
“Is that my problem?” Little space fishes, there were things I cared less about than history. And one of them was wrangling historians.
Humor tinged his disembodied voice. “As her care liaison… yes.”
Before I left the library, I checked in on Helen’s status—still recompiling—and then with Sally to see if she or the Core General mechanical teams were making any progress with the walker. Sally said that it was still crouching there with the door open.
Like some sort of ambush predator buried in sand, except for its gaping maw. Her turn of phrase, not mine. Sally has a colorful vocabulary.
They hadn’t managed to get a drone or even a passive probe past its door defenses, and drilling into the thing from the outside was as much of a failure as it had been when I tried it. I felt a little gratified that even people whose core proficiency was in breaking stuff weren’t managing any better than I had.
O’Mara had come down and looked at the thing, pronouncing it the equal of any military-grade hardware they’d seen. On their recommendation, the hospital stood ready to jettison it if it suddenly became aggressive.
Sally also told me that her repairs were nearly complete, but that she had not yet been cleared to return to duty. She expressed worry that I would not be available when she was released. I expressed my concerns right back, tuning like hell so I didn’t start crying.
I’d cry later, if I had to.
I told Sally that it was going to take quite a while to rewarm Helen’s crew. And I might be… grounded… until all that was well underway.
“Is that what you
