166: FREEZE

“What did you do?!” I ask the doctor, collapsed on the floor and struggling for breath. But he can’t talk right now, so I look instead to Max, who takes another step back.

“The doctors just provided healthcare,” they say. “You and the captain were reasonable, but your companions clearly had some kind of psychological block that – ”

“That’s not your call to make!” Tinera snarls.

“Of course it isn’t,” Max agrees. “It’s the doctor’s call to make.”

Dr Tellon gets enough breath back to struggle to his knees. “Anxiety and fear over operations aren’t uncommon. It sometimes takes a couple of days to adjust afterwards, with Mama’s help. But it never takes this long! There’s something wrong with you space people!”

“There’s something wrong with us?” I ask, disbelieving, while Tinera steps toward the doctor.

“Stand up so I can hit you again,” Tinera says. The doctor stays on his knees, looking up at us with wide eyes.

“Look,” Max says, from well down the corridor, looking like they’re not sure if they should stay with us or flee the ship, “I know you’re all upset about what happened on the radio today. I know you don’t trust trust us after that, I understand that. But – ”

“We don’t give a fuck about the radio today!” Captain Klees snarls. “We care about what you’ve done to our crewmates! Do you even understand how evil this is?”

Max just looks frightened and confused.

This argument is unimportant. There’s a much more dire situation to worry about. I look down at the doctor. “What did you do to the Friend?” I ask.

“That operation was a lot more complicated,” Dr Tellon says. “Fixing brain damage is – ”

Tal kicks him in the stomach. He collapses again. Max gives a little scream and backs further down the corridor.

“What,” I say again, “did you do?” I grab the doctor’s arm and drag him to his feet. The movement clearly pains him. He has trouble getting his feet under himself and leans heavily on me.

“We did the best we could! Your Friend is certainly in much better shape than when it arrived. It’s just having trouble adjusting. None of you people ever listen to Mama.”

“We’ve had bad experiences with AIs,” I say, while Captain Klees says, “You gave someone brain surgery it didn’t want?!”

“And it’s vastly improved! We think it might have a full recovery, after enough time. But it’s really not a good idea to disturb – ”

He stops talking as I start walking down the corridor, pulling him along. The Friend’s room isn’t all that far away. It’s bundled up under a sheet in bed, clearly recognisable by fuzz of reddish hair just visible on the crown of head over the sheet. I shove the doctor at the door, and he opens it, and Tinera grabs his arm and pulls him back while Captain Klees and I rush inside.

The Friend doesn’t look injured, beyond the professionally cut and closed surgery incisions on its skull that look mostly healed. Its hair was cut off, presumably for the surgery, but hair grows back. Mostly I’m worried by the sunken eyes, the gaunt look of someone who hasn’t been eating, the tightness of the grip of both hands clutching at bunches of sheet, the way it stares up at us through bloodshot, teary eyes like it’s not sure what’s going on. It’s naked; Captain Klees carefully extricates it from the sheet while I hunt around for a tunic to protect the sensibilities of the Hylarans on our walk back. I find it kicked into a corner of the bathroom, slightly damp with water that pooled on the floor in here at some point, shake it out, and help the Friend get dressed.

From the smell, the Friend hasn’t washed in days. From the look, it probably hasn’t eaten either. Its legs tremble, but I think it’s just form hunger and temporary disuse. Captain Klees ties its belt and I reach for an elbow to guide it out through the door, but its arm darts out and it grabs my wrist instead, painfully tight. The doctor lets us back out of the hall and we walk back to our living dome at a slow and stately pace, Captain Klees and I giving our oxygen to Tinera and the Friend, us crew walking as a group, the doctor and Max trailing uncertainly behind. The two Hylarans don’t accompany us all the way back to the dome.

Tinera, I notice, shoulders and adjusts her oxygen tank one-handed. She holds her new hand slightly away from her body like something heavy and delicate she needs to keep hold of, or like an injured limb. The Friend is cognisant but distracted, following along in the manner of someone who understands the destination, but paying attention to something I can’t see or hear. It cries, and doesn’t speak.

Hylarans give our group a wide berth as we move toward our dome. They eye the Friend with concern and worry, clearly knowing on sight that it shouldn’t be out and about, but nobody approaches us. Whether they’re intimidated by our expressions, or worried we’re plotting some sort of retaliation for the kill code thing, I don’t know. I don’t care.

We get back to our dome. We help the Friend get cleaned up, Tal presses some sort of protein drink into its hands (the Hylaran diet has been expended to include bland liquid meals from the biotanks and not just bland solid meals from the Vault, which the Hylarans must find very exciting), and we all sit at the table to have a discussion.

“This place is really fucked up,” Tinera says.

We all reflect on that for a little while. It is, indeed, pretty fucked up.

“Did I miss anything?” she asks, and we fill her in on what she missed. We sit in silence a bit longer.

“Oookay,” the captain says after a while, exhaling the word slowly in one long breath. “Obviously, nothing like this can ever be allowed to happen again.”

“They thought they could put a new hand on me and just have a fucking AI talk me down,” Tinera growls. She glances at the Friend, watching us but silent, and her expression darkens. “I know it’s undiplomatic to go and just murder that fucking doctor, but – ”

“Don’t murder the doctor,” Captain Klees says wearily. Now that we’ve gotten everyone safe, all the rage seems to have leaked out of him; he just looks tired.

“Wouldn’t help, anyway,” I add. “I think it’s all of them. I haven’t exactly had time to interview everyone in the colony, but judging by what we did see, they genuinely don’t get it. They were raised with a pretty narrow view of appropriate behaviour and a pretty narrow view of autonomy and by an AI that, to be honest, does seem perfectly nice and helpful inasmuch as an AI can be, but simply isn’t going to be able to exude the same kind of social power over people coming down from space as it is over those who have been able to trust it their entire lives. Kim’s experiments were a small rogue faction, but this?” I gesture towards Tinera and the Friend. “This is a deep cultural disconnect that isn’t going to be solved by focusing our rage on the doctor who happened to be in the hot seat. Nevertheless, the captain is right – this absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to happen again. We’re going to start dropping colonists on this settlement soon, and we cannot afford more of these kinds of misunderstandings. Not on this scale. Not only are those colonists under our protection, but if this kind of thing keeps happening, we’ll have open war within months. If there weren’t thousands of lives depending on us I’d sort of want open war right now.”

“Oh, I’d love a good war right now,” Captain Klees growls.

Tal nods. “I could come up with some ways to destroy their infrastructure pretty easil – ”

“Don’t actually start a war with the Hylarans, Tal,” Captain Klees says.

“I won’t. I’m just saying it’d be really easy.”

“That’s kind of a big part of the problem, actually,” I say.

“With that,” Tal says, “are we mad about the whole kill code thing?”

“I think we have bigger problems,” Captain Klees says.

I nod. “I was pretty mad at first. I mean, the fact that everyone up there was in danger like that, could just be killed at the whim of some random panicked Hylaran, and not even Max or Hive warned us? They just left them in danger? But if you think about it from their perspective, the opposite was true, and is still true. If they wanted to, the crew up on the ship could wipe out this colony pretty easily. They have the Vault down here, which means they can’t move and have something very important to protect that hostiles might want very badly. They have no reason to just take us on our word that nobody wants to wipe them out and take it – honestly, they shouldn’t take us at our word on that. After Sands and Kinoshita and everything else that went on up there, we have absolutely no guarantee of that. I think it would’ve been asking a lot of them, to expect them to give up their single defensive weapon against the ship.

“I think,” the Friend says, speaking up for the first time in a voice slow and cracked from disuse, “that they already extended a lot of faith to us.”

Captain Klees, like the rest of us, is clearly trying not to look surprised or worried at the Friend talking. “How so?”

“Were they told to kill us? Out in space. Before we got here.”

“I think so,” I say. “We send the message, get a clearly unprepared and unauthorised reply from Hive, then they go completely dark and have a whole lot of unrest and panic about Antarctica punishing them and fragment into pro-terraformation and anti-terraformation factions. I think it’s pretty clear that they were given that code and ordered to use it to kill us at that point.”

“And they didn’t. They risked Antarctica starving them again if they found out. They risked us killing them, on purpose or by accident through disease, and taking their colony.” It sips at its protein broth. “For two months, they knew we were coming, and nobody tried to kill us, even knowing the risks.”

“Yeah, well, even as a murderer, ‘oh good you didn’t murder me’ doesn’t win any brownie points from me,” Tinera says. “And as mice as they might be about not trying to kill us all in space, they still pulled this medical bullshit. And that’s not on.”

“It’s not on,” Captain Klees agrees. “We have to do something to change that system; we can’t just – ”

“No,” I say, and I must say it a little sharper than intended, because they both jump a little and stare at me. I soften my tone. “What we need to do,” I explain, “is make sure that there are protocols so that this doesn’t happen to any other colonists from the ship. Or us again, of course. But we didn’t come here to forcibly overthrow their culture.”

“Oh, so if this happens to some random Hylaran then it’s okay, so long as it’s not us?”

“If it happens to some Hylaran then that’s up to the Hylaran as to whether it’s okay or not. History is full of people who encounter other people, are injured or shocked by their traditions, and decide to improve and enlighten their society by pushing their own ideals on them; how often do you think that works out well?”

“We’re not some military-backed mining force showing up at an asteroid cluster and demanding that everyone there change their ways to make us more money! We’re talking about basic autonomy, which – ”

“Do you think, in the long history of this kind of thing happening, people only ever did it for profit? Do you think nobody ever uprooted a culture for noble causes, genuinely believing it was for their own good? It happens all the time! Always has! People come in with their deeply held ideals, decide they’re a universal good, and lay waste to the group they landed in who disgusts them. We have four times the population of this colony up in space, waiting, Tiny. And they have no other outside cultures to back them up. Our opinions on how this culture works have no relevance; we cannot allow them to have relevance. Furthermore, don’t you think it’s somewhat arrogant to just stroll in and decide that because something doesn’t work immediately for us, it doesn’t work? I don’t think you comprehend just how different these people are to us. This isn’t an Arborea vs. Luna vs. Texas kind of situation. This is a culture birthed ground-up on Hylara, with much less outside influence than most cultures and with biological differences that fundamentally affect the entire structure of their lives. A cluster is pretty similar to a family; neither of those things are remotely similar to a set. They’re infertile and raised in batches, with the help of that AI. Their living units do not change and grow and adapt in the same way that ours do. The fundamental structure of their society, of their leadership and their group dynamics and their priorities as a community, all step from this system. People tell me that my people are unusually community-minded, but Arboreans have nothing on people raised in a system like this. A system that is functional and works for them. And despite that ridiculous moniker they give their AI, they are not a bunch of lost children. They do not need the guidance of a bunch of oh-so-enlightened Earth system people coming in with their clearly superior ideas like filling a ship with reluctant prisoners and shooting it off into space to get half of them killed due to stupid spy shit and group infighting.

“Now, their culture is going to change, as is the culture of the colonists we drop down here. Because that’s how cultures work; they change over time, especially when they interact with each other. One thing that the Hylarans absolutely have been lacking is information, and they have that now. They’re already receiving our vast media collection, and that’s going to introduce them to a lot of new concepts and different ways of living, as are the colonists themselves. But if the Hylarans see something in the way we do things that’s better, if they want to change things, that has to be up to the Hylarans. Not us showing up out of nowhere and just assuming that we know better.”

I guess I must have made my point, because when I stop talking, Tinera doesn’t argue. Everyone just kind of quietly looks at me, like they expect me to keep talking and say something even more dramatic. Fortunately for them, I intend to.

“None of that needs to be our problem anyway,” I say. “It’s a distraction. We have a lot of problems, and most of them… don’t need to exist.” I grin. “I have a plan.”