I reached out through senso and my dedicated line to Sally. Firewalls and monitored connections made it feel slow and fuzzy, as if I were shaking her hand through layers of gauze. But she was there, and responsive.
Check me if you see me about to make a mistake? I said, and felt her affirmation.
“Okay,” I said to Helen. “If you don’t want to talk about you, what if we talk about me?”
Helen kept the fingertips of her left hand on the glass. But she turned, twisting her arm behind her, until she faced me. “Are you… trying to make me feel better?”
I sipped my juice. “Yes.”
“There are so many different options,” she said, pointing to my sandwich with her free hand. “So many foodstuffs.”
Not if we’re cut off from consumables for very long. What I vocalized was, “You didn’t provide a range of foodstuffs?”
“Not the variety of cultural origins available here. You eat artificial insects and pasta. Tsosie eats simulated chicken and rice with chilis. I have seen other people eating curries and meatball sandwiches and spicy fried noodle dishes. How do you keep everybody from fighting?”
“Rightminding,” I said glibly. And then, “We have a job to do. We are adults who know how to get along with other sentients who may have very different worldviews than our own. Diversity is a strength of the Synarche, and diverse perspectives offer a chance at discovering novel solutions to problems. Also… rightminding.”
“Are you from Earth?”
I shook my head because I was chewing. I peered over her shoulder, intrigued by movement, but it was only Rilriltok directing that one of the cryo pods be moved to a different monitoring station. I hoped that was a good sign.
“But you must be from Earth.”
“I’m from a planet. I’ve never been to Terra.”
“But your name. Brookllyn. It’s a place on Earth.”
I laughed. “People get named after things that are left behind. My sister is Cairo, which—well, honestly, I think Cairo Jens is prettier than Brookllyn Jens. But nobody really thinks about it.”
She stood quietly for a moment. I assumed she could still sense what was going on behind her, even when her attention seemed fixated on me.
“That was a big thing you did earlier, when we were first in Cryo.” I waved at the window. “Letting them be tested and rewarmed. A big risk you took, for the good of your crew.”
She shrugged, a fluid ripple of light across her breasts and shoulders, which slumped forward. “It’s my fault Dr. Zhiruo is infected.”
“What makes you say that?”
I filled my mouth with sandwich to kill time while she parsed my question and constructed an answer.
“The meme came from my ship. From me.”
“Well, we’re not entirely sure it did, but even if so, there’s no fault to be assigned,” I said. “Not to you, anyway. You didn’t build it or release it. You were following your program.” Saying that made me wonder something only tangentially related, so I said, “Hey, Sally?”
“Present,” she said through a wall speaker. The presence light didn’t blink on: I assumed because she was monitoring the situation through my senso and merely relaying her conversation to us, rather than inhabiting the local infrastructure. Air-gapped, verbal communications as much as possible.
Keeping herself safe. Good.
“We sampled loose DNA on Big Rock Candy Mountain. Any poetry in that?”
“There is,” she said. “At least, there is a jumble of artificially tidy sequences that seem similar to the ones Dr. Zhiruo was translating into poetry. I do not currently have the spare cycles to translate them, but the likeness is evident.”
“Right,” I said. “Sorry, Helen, I wanted to check that before it slipped my mind. Anyway, please don’t blame yourself—”
She spoke evenly, in a low voice. Without apparent strain, which only made it creepier. “Somebody got inside my mind. And somebody tried to use me against my crew. No. Someone got inside the captain, and used the captain to make me work against my crew. And I can’t… remember what happened.”
You know that saying about never giving an AI reason to be really angry, because they never forget? I remembered it then. I also realized that she’d interrupted me, without deferring. I also noticed that she was still not admitting to herself that her captain had been responsible for… well, freezing his entire crew and leaving his ship adrift in space.
Maybe he’d just really, really needed some time alone.
I wadded up the sandwich wrapper for recycling. “That is possible. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that somebody or something got inside him and made him do what he did, Helen. It’s possible that he made and released the meme on his own, to subvert your failsafes.” I remembered her utter collapse when she’d managed to override those instructions.
She didn’t exactly look at me, being featureless, but she angled her face in my direction. “How could he betray us, unless something from outside infected him?”
“I don’t think he meant to betray you. I think he meant to protect you, and protect your crew, from an epidemic. But he was ill himself, a sickness in his thought. And it made him… make poor choices. Coercive choices. To force you and the crew into what he had decided was the only course of action. But that’s not your responsibility.”
She sat with her hands in her lap, very silent and demure.
I glanced at the monitors. “It’s going to be hours before they try to wake anybody up, and they won’t do that without you present. It looks like they’re going to start repairs and grafts soon, and that will be an involved process. Would you like to go somewhere else for a while?”
Helen turned away. “I’ll wait here.”
I went back to my quarters. There was nothing immediate that needed doing with urgency. There was nothing but waiting, now.
There was still no word on Linden, and until there was a word on Linden, there would be no word on Afar or on Dr. Zhiruo. Sally told
