And if Linden couldn’t be saved?
I didn’t want to think about that, but I had to. If we couldn’t cure the toxic meme we would have to purge the system architecture. We’d have to kill Linden and Afar and Dr. Zhiruo, and possibly Mercy and Sally and all the other AIs that lived in the hospital architecture. And we would have to purge, or eternally quarantine, Helen, too.
We would have to do that, because the meme had proven virulent, and it seemed likely that it was capable of leaping across architectures—the machine version of an influenza virus making a jump from birds to humans and getting worse along the way—and because we could not risk it getting out into the galaxy.
There were a lot of artificial intelligences—a lot of people—out there who could die if they caught it. So if we couldn’t get it out of Linden and Afar and the rest, we’d have to start them over from scratch.
They should all have offsite backups. But who knew how current those were? They could lose ans of life experience.
And there was no backup for Helen. As far as we knew, anywhere.
Even going to that extreme might not halt the spread of the meme. It might be in Singer; it might be in Ruth and the others. Warnings were flying toward them… but the warnings might not get there in time.
I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on something happier. Something I had some influence over.
Surgeries had begun on Afar’s crew, and the prognosis was hopeful. If nothing went wrong. It was up in the air how much brain damage they might suffer in the process, and how much memory and personality alteration they might undergo.
That wasn’t my work. Solving the sabotage mystery was my work, but I was not going to be an effective investigator until I rested and got my pain levels under control.
I honestly do better in an active crisis than in this kind of grinding, slow-motion one. Waiting is exhausting and gives you too much time to think and come up with multiple, conflicting options. For me, that can lead to decision paralysis. When I’m running on adrenaline and tuning out fatigue, I handle the problem in front of me, move on to the next problem, and not worry about the things I can’t control. There’s a price to pay later, but I don’t worry about that right then.
One can’t do that for diar on end, however, as the ache in my joints was telling me.
Well, one can. People did, for hundreds of thousands of years, because they didn’t have the options we have now. But it kills them. The long-term health consequences are unsupportable, and the cost to community of those consequences is enormous. So I can’t justify running on adrenaline and rage for weeks at a time, even though the experience itself is dramatic and validating.
Crisis makes some people—like me—feel alive, and it turns out that’s really bad for everybody, because when you don’t have a crisis in front of you, you might go out of your way to construct one.
I took a shower and some pain meds. Then I went to bed, turned off the anxiety that was keeping me going, and slept for ten and a half standard hours. I dreamed of earthquakes and atmosphere streaming from ruptured wheels, and woke crusty-eyed and more tired than I’d been when I drifted off.
There was a message alert flickering in the corner of my senso. It was from Rilriltok.
Master Chief Carlos from the generation ship is awake and asking for food.
CHAPTER 16
CRYO DIDN’T HAVE A HUMAN doctor on staff. Rilriltok sensibly questioned the wisdom of exposing an unrightminded archaic human to giant predatory insects or tentacled hippopotami, so I was nominated to be the first to meet Master Chief Carlos.
I checked in with the nurses’ station when I got there. They told me that the patient was in a private room. He was eating, he’d been given an abbreviated briefing with a lot of stressful details redacted, and he was generally pretty polite to the (human) nursing staff who had been brought in from other units to buffer him.
Apparently, I got to be the one to tell him about space aliens.
He was sitting up in bed when I entered, and he looked absolutely normal. Normal for a guy who’d barely survived a bad cryo experience, anyway. I didn’t know why that should surprise me so much, but it did. I stopped in the doorway and blinked.
He had been sipping a nutritive broth through a straw. As I paused, he released the straw, looked at me, looked at the cup, and looked back at me.
“They claimed this was food,” he said mildly, my senso translating. “I know I’m in the future, but I’m not sure I believe them.”
“Don’t tell me hospital food was any good in your dia,” I said. “The goal is to make people want to leave, after all.”
“Get me a stick and I’ll hobble to the door. Are you a doctor?”
“Dr. Jens,” I said. “How could you tell?”
“Nothing gets past me. Also, you’re wearing scrubs and a lab coat.”
I touched my forehead to him. He grinned.
I was startled to discover that I liked him, right away. Despite his sunken cheeks and haggard features, he had charm. His tan complexion was tending greenish; his eyes had obviously been replaced with vatted clones; and there were traces of cryoburn and freshly regenerated flesh around his fingertips. The nails would take a while to grow back. And his hair, though his cheeks were stippled with beard shadow.
But he had that indefinable quality that makes you want to
