Chill by Elizabeth Bear Page A

the toolkit peered between strands of his hair, but Jsutien’s eyes only flickered to the little construct and dismissed it. “The Engineer had terminated service to the tank,” he continued, “and wished me to observe the shutdown protocol so there would be no mishaps.” He paused, again pressing his temple. “There’s nothing after.”
    “Do you remember the blow?”
    “Blow.” His fingers still on the bandage, he frowned. “No. Nothing between watching the lights turn red, and now. Not even a timescroll. It’s as if purged.”
    He must have pushed too hard, because he winced and blinked hazel eyes under ridiculous black ringlets—the perfect kid brother. Except he wasn’t, anymore.
    Resurrected and mute was one thing; Benedick had seen friends come back as the speechless dead all his life, and he was accustomed. The body was not the mind. This new thing—resurrected and bearing someone else’s experiences, or at least the simplified, digitized version—unsettled him. Because the face was not blank as the face of a resurrected ought to be, and so he found himself responding to this young man as he would have responded to Oliver.
    But Jsutien was not Oliver. He was constructed from the repaired body of a dead Conn and the electrical impulses salvaged from the mind of a dead Engineer. And while neither of those things was a person, what resulted when such a textureless recording infiltrated and grew into such a still mind was a human being not entirely like either of the components that had constructed it.
    Benedick could think of it as a kind of reproduction, if he tried. Two parents united in a child both like and unlike each.
    But ordinary reproduction did not result in the destruction of the originators.
    “Caitlin will need to scan,” Benedick said. “You’re aware.”
    Jsutien frowned for a few moments, and then nodded. “The incursion—if there was an incursion—might have left something in my head.”
    It was a positive sign. Rather than asking ignorant questions, Jsutien took a moment to assess the information he had and draw conclusions.
    “Yes,” Benedick said. He reached beneath the stretcher and produced a draped silver-stain swag of nanochain. “Until then, I must restrain you.”
    Silently, Jsutien held forth his hands.
       The access tunnels Tristen navigated as he left the bridge were cold, unlit, weightless, and unpressurized, and after several hours his oxygen reserves were becoming a concern. High-intensity microlamps on his armor’s helm and shoulders swept over the irregular spaces between buckled bulkheads and decks, illuminating them with stark shadows that confused the eye. In atmosphere, the armor could have aided its course-plotting by echolocation, creating a sonographic map of the corridor, but the vacuum limited it to other forms of tomography. Still, it was useful to know where potential hazards lay, as all these passages were battered, torn, and open to the void.
    The Enemy had long ago claimed and colonized them. Jacob Dust in his wisdom had never seen fit to correct the problem. Vacuum would not serve as a barrier to the Exalt, especially one armored as Tristen was armored now, but it had kept less advanced biota from entering the world’s control core during the shipwrecked time.
    Tristen thought the time for such measures had ended.
    “Angel?”
    He felt the angel’s awareness settle on him. His armor had had a personality, a name, its own small servitor. Now that being was consumed in the world’s guardian, and Tristen found he missed it. He said, “I almost called you George.”
    The angel said, “Portions of George’s data have been preserved in archive. As time passes and I am able to allot more resources to noncritical functions, I will develop subroutines and personalities optimized for interaction with the crew. I am sorry not to be able to offer this service now.”
    If tone were any guarantee of sincerity, it was as sorry as it claimed. That