I checked in with Mercy to make sure he was still okay and open to receiving visitors. He was, as long as they were willing to come to him for a nice, in-person, air-gapped audio conversation. All of the remaining AIs had compartmentalized themselves, which meant that consulting them required intercom communication, or moving one’s self to the physical location of their storage media. As if visiting an oracle in a temple.
At the same time, I realized that Rilriltok and Tralgar had assumed that I would be available to midwife the rebirth of every single member of Helen’s crew. That… was not going to work out long-term. Whatever I was doing for Helen, I wasn’t the care liaison for ten-thousand-odd archaic humans.
And—I made a solemn promise to myself—I was not going to allow myself to be bullied into becoming the care liaison for ten-thousand-odd archaic humans. Or even three-thousand-odd, if we managed to save thirty percent.
Still a lot of humans.
“Sally,” I said, while I was masking up to go in and visit Jones. We have transparent polymer filter masks for situations like this. Very effective, and they help the patients’ psychology enormously. Rilriltok thinks it’s very funny that humans find other humans with their breathing and eating holes covered ominous, but then its face has an immobile exoskeleton and it breathes through spiracles, so I’m not sure its opinion is broadly medically applicable.
I hear you, Sally answered, muffled by protocols.
“Do you have time to send a message to Starlight that Core General needs to hire a lot of stable, sensible, Terran-style volunteers to manage introduction to modern society for the Big Rock Candy Mountain survivors? Once we’re not under quarantine, that is.”
That’s an excellent point, Sally said. The next load of survivors can’t dock until the quarantine is lifted, anyway. In the meantime, I can send you Loese. She’s cluttering up the place without enough to do. She’s getting on my circuits.
I laughed. Loese, grounded, sounded like a shipmind’s worst nightmare. And from what I’d seen, she wasn’t taking the enforced downtime or the vague sense of personal responsibility well. “Send her to Tralgar.”
I will. How are you doing?
“Overworked,” I said, trying to sound cheerful about it. “And none of it is actually my job.”
I still had barely begun the assignment O’Mara and Starlight wanted me to work on. It was amazing how much stuff everybody had for me to do.
I opened the door and stepped into the isolation chamber. A woman with black hair and a medium complexion rendered grayish and chalky by cryoburn and fatigue looked up, blinking as if her eyes weren’t focusing exactly as she expected. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Dr. Jens.”
“Calliope Jones,” she answered. “I’m alive? I’m in a hospital?”
“The biggest hospital in the galaxy,” I agreed. “And you’re definitely alive, unless dead folks have skills I’m not aware of. Welcome back to the land of the living.”
She laughed, then flinched when her dry lips cracked.
“Here.” I poured a cup of water and stuck a straw in. “This might help with that dehydration.”
She sipped. Her lip left blood on the straw. She seemed to surprise herself with her own thirst, and finished the water.
“What do you remember?” I asked when she’d put the cup aside.
“Um,” she said. “A… drill? Flashing lights. An alert. People scrambling for… for escape pods? No, that can’t be right. We don’t have escape pods. There’s nowhere to escape to.” She looked around. “Except apparently there is. I was in a cryonics freezer, wasn’t I?”
“Yes,” I said.
Ouch, I thought. What a way to live. Like being stuck on a single planet with no failsafes and no way off in case of catastrophe.
Except the generation ship was far more precarious and fragile even than a planet.
“There was a virus—”
“We know,” I said. “You’ve been treated and I’m immunized.”
“My ship? My crew?”
“Your ship and the shipmind—the angel, sorry, we use a different word—have suffered significant damage. What we’ve been able to recover of the shipmind is here, with the first group of evacuees—fourteen of you. One other has been successfully awakened so far: Master Chief Dwayne Carlos. Do you know him?”
She shook her head. “Everything is very fuzzy. I know the—the shipmind. Central?”
“Helen,” I said. “And what’s left of Central, I think. If I understand the outcome correctly, they both suffered damage and integrated out of self-preservation. Helen’s become self-aware; I understand she wasn’t before.”
“Helen!” She gave a big sigh of relief. “Well, that’s something to make me feel a little more grounded, I guess. How’s our command structure?”
“Right now, you don’t have one.”
“Oh. Captain and first mate? Officers?”
“The captain, we believe, perished. No other officers have been retrieved. We’re ferrying your crewmates here in groups, but it’s going to take a while, and there were no commissioned officers in the first group.”
“I’ve just realized,” she said incredulously, “that I cannot remember anyone’s name.”
“Anyone?”
“Any of my crewmates. My family. I must have a family?”
I sighed. She certainly seemed as if she came from a millennian ago. “Our scans show you’ve suffered some intracranial scarring. It may be impairing your cognition—”
“Brain damage?”
“Repairable damage,” I said. “The memory loss is probably permanent, I’m afraid, but we’ve already infused stem cells and growth medium, and you should be finding your cognition clearing up over the next few diar.”
“You can… patch up brain damage.” She snapped her fingers and winced when it made the infusion needle jump in her vein. I could have reached out and put my hand on her arm, but for some reason the thought made me feel shy, so I didn’t.
“We have doctors that do nothing else,” I said. “Which, I am afraid, brings me to another part of your orientation that you might find unsettling. Not all—or even most—of the staff here are human. The doctor who’s been working on your neurological injury is an oxygen-breathing, water-dwelling vertebrate from a planet whose name I need mechanical assistance to pronounce. She
