“Surgical?” I asked. “What exactly—? How badly are they hurt?”
They need re-etching of the… I suppose the nearest equivalent is circuits—the neural pathways that I now, with this new information, suspect have been affected by the meme. Tralgar stopped itself. I’m getting ahead of myself. Something—probably the toxic meme, by Occam’s razor—infiltrated their foxes and rewrote the neural pathways to lock them into a deep sleep.
I shied away from the idea. It nauseated me. I know we’re all mostly microprocessors made of various substrates and chemicals and electrical impulses—the thing all sentients have in common—and the philosophers love to tell us that free will is an illusion. But the idea that something could just… reach in, and rewrite your brain.
How hideous.
There are so many reasons I decided not to specialize in neurosurgery, and right then I was remembering all of them. At least with my patients it is very difficult for me to make things worse for them, in terms of long-term outcomes, since they’re usually about to die if I don’t do something to help them.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck,” I said, after due consideration.
O’Mara nodded. “In the meantime, I need to go figure out how to feed a hundred thousand sentients on limited rations for an indeterminate time. I hope somebody on this bubble knows something about hydroponic farming. Or the crystalline ice-creature equivalent.”
Waiting in hospitals is the worst thing. It doesn’t get any better when you’re a doctor with a nonrelevant specialty. Or when the hospital is falling to pieces around you.
I did suit up and go EVA to rescue some staff members stuck in lifts when Linden had powered herself down. Miraculously—or rather, because of Linden’s skill—nobody had been injured, but quite a few people were trapped, and moving them to less claustrophobic environs was work that I was actually trained for. And “suited” for—and I didn’t even need a rescue hardsuit for this. Just a regular easy-to-maneuver softsider.
That killed a few hours usefully, and when I was done I needed a break without too many people around me. I could have gone back to my quarters on the hospital… but I was rattled and anxious and my whole body hurt and I didn’t want to tune to take the edge off it. I wanted to go home.
And home, for the time being, was still Sally.
But as soon as I stepped through the airlock, I heard something banging—like a tool pounded against a bulkhead. And a frantic voice, Loese: “This is bad! This is so bad, this is so bad—”
I was about to cringe my way right back out the airlock again when Sally’s voice interrupted smoothly. “We’ll be back on duty in no time, Loese. Somebody else will cover this call. Nobody will be left out in space because of us— Hello, Llyn. I’m sorry, we’re having a bad dia here.”
Loese shook her head. She had apparently been banging on a stanchion with a ship shoe, which was a pretty self-restrained way to deal with the level of frustration she seemed to be feeling. I mean, it would have been more restrained to have tuned it back a little, but sometimes you want to feel angry.
I held out my arms to her in a question. She sighed, and came to me, and accepted the best motherly hug a terrible mother could muster.
She wasn’t actually any older than Rache, was she?
I flinched, and tried not to let her feel it. I had been away from Rache long enough that she’d become a grown woman, entirely without me.
Maybe I should be the one smacking things on stanchions and yelling about how bad it was. “Hey,” I said, when Loese pulled awkwardly back. “You gonna make it?”
“This is my fault.” She flopped into an acceleration couch.
“Loese.” Sally’s mom voice was a lot better than mine ever had been.
“Right.” Loese folded her hands, choosing self-control. “Nobody’s going to die todia because of us, and everything else can be fixed. Right?”
“Right,” I said. “I’m going to take a nap. Unless you want to get that coffee?”
She looked at me wanly. “Thanks,” she said. “A nap sounds like a better idea, frankly.”
After I had rested for a standard or so, I went to fetch Helen. She hadn’t stirred from the Cryo observation lounge, where she’d been watching the rewarming staff go on and off shift since Tsosie, O’Mara, Cheeirilaq, and I left. Tralgar wasn’t present now, having gone to rest, but Rilriltok was, and the unit outside was a hustle of other bodies.
Helen didn’t glance over when I came in. She stood before the windows, leaning forward like a pet straining the leash toward a returning master. I could envision tail wagging, shivering, and happy little yips without trying too hard.
Would it have been too much to ask to let the damn shipmind have a little bit of dignity? If any of her crew survived, I wasn’t looking forward to meeting them.
I unwrapped a sandwich and beverage I’d brought from the caf and settled down in one of the chairs. I kicked my feet up onto the grab rails that circled the room and balanced the food on my knee. I hoped the peripheral hadn’t gone back into her fugue state.
“Helen,” I said.
“Yes, Dr. Jens?”
“Tell me more about your crew?”
She leaned back from the windows. “If any of them survive.”
There was a note of cynicism in her voice that I had never heard there before. As she stretched out into the additional space that Zhiruo had assigned her, was she becoming more self-aware? More questioning of her own program?
We didn’t, I realized, currently have a shipmind specialist that I could ask. Every AI in the hospital was bunkered down behind firewalls, following O’Mara’s quarantine protocols. And without their help, I wasn’t entirely certain where to go with that. I took a bite of sandwich as an excuse to chew rather than talking and realized
