A sensible human being would spend less time jumping out of perfectly good spacecraft than I did. I was not, perforce, a sensible human being.
I squared my shoulders, embraced my inner warrior, and flicked the curtain aside.
The corridor was not crowded by Core General standards. I spotted a variety of ox-breathing staff and one lone Ceeharen, whose beneficial metabolic needs split the carbon dioxide my type of sentient produced and converted it back into oxygen and carbon. Nobody looked strangely at my softsider quarantine suit, or even appeared to notice me. It was a reasonable enough precaution, and doubled as a light environmental suit if the environments you were passing through weren’t too extreme.
Given the lack of functional lifts, we were seeing a lot more of them in the hospital corridors. People had to get to work.
I had no idea what I might be looking for. I had no reason to be here, other than curiosity and a nasty itchy sensation.
I felt, to be perfectly honest, like I was going through my wife’s private messages, looking for evidence because I suspected her of misleading me. Not that I had a wife anymore, or any reason to suspect one of malfeasance. But you know what I mean.
I knew it was ridiculous. I believed in this hospital. I had faith in this hospital.
And yet, here I was. Checking up.
The private unit looked like a perfectly normal hospital unit, albeit one with nicer rooms. Several were inhabited, bodies in a range of beds designed for three different species. I spotted holowindows and possibly even a real viewport or two through open room doors. Several more rooms were obviously empty. Waiting for the next sentient with the resources to buy their way in.
I kept walking, sweat stinging my eyes inside the helmet. Softsuits weren’t meant for anything this strenuous. As strenuous as walking down a hospital corridor under moderate spin gravity.
It hurt, and because I didn’t feel like being in pain, I decided I would rather be angry.
Being angry is a skill I have a lot of experience with, though I worked pretty hard in my military years to learn not to tote anger around with me all the time. There’s constructive anger, which motivates you to get up off the ground and get things done. There’s righteous anger, which motivates you to protect the afflicted and downtrodden. There’s helpless anger, which just makes you feel useless and turns you mean.
And there’s self-pitying anger, which gets under your skin and eats you away like a slow drop of acid if you let it.
This was probably two parts righteous and a half part each self-pitying and helpless, which wasn’t too bad a ratio to work with.
What could these kinds of resources—these resources that lay behind these quiet corridors and mostly empty private rooms—have meant to me as a kid?
The alchemy of my anger made the pain easier to bear and gave me energy. I tried to put my feet down softly, so I wouldn’t seem to be either staggering or stomping past the admin station, and because it hurt when I slapped them into the deck.
Don’t get so pissed off you lose your shit, I told myself. These people are not getting better care than everybody else. It’s just that the décor is a little bit nicer.
And they got to be important. There are some people, even in these enlightened diar, who do enjoy being important. That got up my nose as much as anything.
It was easy to forget, once I was angry, that I had decided to let myself be angry. Because it was useful. Because the adrenaline gave me strength to keep moving when exhaustion weighed me down.
One room had a human in it. An old woman, asleep on her pillow, gray locks spread around her in the most photogenic possible manner. I thought about going in and talking to her. I might have, if I hadn’t been so tired, and in so very much pain. The ache seemed to start in the soles of my feet, the nape of my neck, and the small of my back and radiate through my entire body.
Beyond the private rooms, I found another decompression door with another staff filter. It was too much; I’d come too far. My heart pounded so hard that I felt it in my belly. The corridor walls seemed to pulse in the edges of my vision.
I rested a hand on the back of another chair set against the wall, trying to look as if I were casually checking my senso. I wished on the first evening planet in the skies of whatever the closest world might be that I could lock the knees of my exo to help hold myself up. But a stiff-legged limp would be pretty obvious.
At least the softsuit hid my heavy breathing, though my faceplate had fogged around my mouth and nose. Not a top-of-the-line faceplate, but Core General used a lot of them.
I should turn back. I would already be paying for these choices for diar, thanks to my decision to push on. I’d either be groggy from the tuning I’d have to do to manage, or I would be groggy from the pain.
I should turn back. It was the only sane thing to do. However far I went, I had to make the same trip back. And I was going to get noticed if I kept standing here. I was way off my patch, and I’d walked the whole length of the unit and everything had seemed perfectly normal.
But Sally had said there wasn’t a unit AI, or even an AI doctor assigned to this team. And that made me nervous.
AIs are ethical.
AIs don’t need rightminding, because AIs are built that way. They are created to be ethical beings.
So what sort of operation would you be running if you couldn’t let an
