Free Upgraded by Peter Watts, Greg Egan, Ken Liu, Robert Reed, Elizabeth Bear, Madeline Ashby, E. Lily Yu Page A

lifesuit had counted five days.
    But what happened to the ship and colonists and the rest of the crew?
    It was a critical matter, but the suit had no opinion. And no interest. It was a minimally conscious machine, somewhat damaged by the abrupt fury. Maybe the ship’s engines exploded. Or a black comet gutted its body. Speculation was pointless. Circumstances were critical. But the suit was still able to hear a close strong radio signal, and there were no signals. The vacuum was silent. Nobody was calling to the suit or to its ungrateful passenger.
    The passenger wailed until exhausted.
    Detecting hunger, the suit fed him and infused his fluids with fresh oxygen.
    The simplest lifesuit could purify water and air, and it could synthesize food, and when necessary, generate pleasant sounds and odors. This particular lifesuit also possessed two fully-fueled reactors and several banks of unfinished machinery. Unfinished machines could be organized in any direction necessary. The suit had been designed to serve this starship and another fifty ships in the future. And to the limits of its cognitive powers, this suit could help its passenger survive.
    The starship was no more. There would be no rescue or even a sorrowful greeting from the black of space. An undeserving life had been delivered to this one creature, and it came for no good reason, and now his suffering would stretch into an eternity.
    That passenger proved to be an obsessive, half-mad beast. Each conscious moment was suffused with thoughts about those last moments of normal life. In excruciating detail, he replayed routine events where nothing went wrong, where he did what was expected of him, and every memory left him aching with guilt. Perhaps the engines failed. But if he hadn’t been brave enough or pliable enough to march out onto the hull, he would have remained inside, and maybe he would have seen the malfunction and saved the ship. Or an impact killed everyone. But if he had volunteered with the first call, and if he had worn a smaller, less massive suit, the vagaries of those tiny motions and masses would have shifted the ship’s trajectory a cell’s width. In another ten million kilometers, that faint change would have shifted the ship hundreds of meters, and everybody would have been saved, and he would have been the unknown hero.
    Enticing stories want to be told. But of all the possibilities, what was most likely, and what was most wonderful, was any variation killed him along with everybody else, leaving him beyond doubt and every misery.
    “Kill me,” he told the suit.
    Not understanding, the suit continued its important work.
    So the passenger tried to murder himself. But the lifesuit was designed to care for almost any level of damage. There were multiple ways to force its passenger to breathe and find nutrition as well as adequate energy to repair what pathetic little damages that the creature could inflict on a body that couldn’t be touched.
    Ages passed.
    Immortal beings can bear horrible things, and misery found its natural, bearable state. But with the ages and small measures of cleverness, the suit did manage one small decency: Wasted heat had to be bled off the reactors, and the suit did so in an uneven fashion, the wild spinning body slowing and then stopping entirely.
    Eventually the passenger went through space with his one eye forward.
    Still screaming, still weeping, but never quite as much as before.
    Orleans offered telemetry and images, and then he let the fourteen children weave their own conclusions.
    “The object, the artifact, is eight meters long, two wide,” he told them, opening the full files for examination. “Hyperfiber on the outside, and that’s all we know. This is the AIs’ best guess of its shape, its density, and this is its velocity right now, and this is how much the prize needs to slow to survive its impact with the Ship. Which is coming in just a little while. There’s no way around that