Fugitive Telemetry

Chapter Three

MY FIRST JOB AS a consultant for Station Security had turned into a non-event, which was completely unsurprising. They really didn’t want me here and whatever Mensah said, they weren’t going to suddenly change their minds.

No access to private station systems was just the first restriction. The second was that I had to not conceal my identity. Not that I had been actively concealing it. Mensah’s staff, family, and the council had been told what I was; it was just the rest of the station who either hadn’t noticed me or thought I was Mensah’s security consultant. Station Security had wanted me to implement a public feed ID and they had wanted to put out a public safety warning notifying Station personnel and residents that there was a SecUnit running around loose. Mensah had refused to consider the public safety notice, but in one of the stupid meetings with Indah she had asked, “What exactly would this feed ID say?”

It gave me a 1.2 percent performance reliability drop. I tapped Pin-Lee’s feed and sent to her, Make a legal thing so I don’t have to do that.

She sent back, Mensah has to give them something, but she sent to Mensah, It doesn’t want the feed ID.

Humans and augmented humans can have null feed IDs. I knew from my shows that it meant different things depending on what polity, station, area, etc., they lived in. Here on Preservation it meant “please don’t interact with me.” It was perfect. And I’d already agreed not to hack their systems, what the fuck else could they want?

Senior Indah said, “The feed ID doesn’t need to say anything other than what everyone else’s says, just name, gender, and…” She trailed off. She was looking at me and I was looking at her.

Pin-Lee pointed out, “Everyone else who has a feed ID has one voluntarily. Consensually, one might say.”

Senior Indah stopped looking at me to glare at Pin-Lee. “All we’re asking for is a name.”

I have a name, but it’s private.

On their secure feed connection, Pin-Lee sent to Mensah, Oh, that’s going to go over well. When station residents are running into “Murderbot”—

That’s one of the reasons why it’s private.

Mensah said to Indah, “I’m not sure we can agree to that.”

“Frankly, I don’t understand the problem.” Indah made a helpless gesture toward me. “I don’t even know what it wants to be called.”

Senior Indah was acting like she didn’t think she had made an unreasonable request. But the reason she was making it was that she didn’t trust me and she wanted any humans or augmented humans who came into contact with me to be warned, in case I decided to go on a murder rampage. Because being warned by my feed ID would, somehow, mitigate being shot, or something.

Mensah pressed her lips together and looked at me. She sent, Can you explain to her why it’s a problem for you?

I’m not sure I could. And I got why from their perspective it seemed like such a small thing. Maybe it was worth it to get this meeting over with and not have to listen to humans talk about how they didn’t want me anywhere near their precious station.

For a name, I could use the local feed address that was hard coded into my neural interfaces. It wasn’t my real name, but it was what the systems I interfaced with called me. If I used it, the humans and augmented humans I encountered would think of me as a bot. Or I could use the name Rin. I liked it, and there were some humans outside the Corporation Rim who thought it was actually my name. I could use it, and the humans on the Station wouldn’t have to think about what I was, a construct made of cloned human tissue, augments, anxiety, depression, and unfocused rage, a killing machine for whichever humans rented me, until I made a mistake and got my brain destroyed by my governor module.

I posted a feed ID with the name SecUnit, gender = not applicable, and no other information.

Indah had blinked, then said, “Well, I suppose that will have to do.”

That was the end of the meeting. Pin-Lee and Mensah hadn’t talked about it, but Pin-Lee had stomped off to have intoxicants with some of her friend humans. And Mensah had called her marital partners Farai and Tano on the planet, and said she thought the future of humanity was pretty dismal, and they should take all the kids, siblings, their kids, and assorted relatives and move to a shack in the terraforming sector on the unsettled continent and start working in soil reclamation, whatever that was.

(I wouldn’t enjoy it, but I could work with it. It would be a lot easier to guard her from GrayCris there. But Farai and Tano hadn’t gone for the idea.)

Then two cycles later, someone had sent a photo of me to the Station newsstream identifying me as the rogue SecUnit mentioned in all those Corporation Rim newsfeed rumors.

There was little surveillance in the station but, at least before the agreement not to hack station systems, I had still been redacting myself from it. This photo had come from another source, maybe an augmented human’s feed camera. It had clearly been taken after I had completed my memory repair, after a public inquiry about GrayCris that had been held in the large Preservation Council meeting chamber. Mensah was walking down the steps away from the council offices and I was standing behind her between Pin-Lee and Dr. Bharadwaj. We were all looking to the side, with various what-the-fuck expressions. (One of the journalists had just asked the council spokesperson if GrayCris reps would be allowed at the meeting.) (It had been such a stupid question, I had forgotten not to have an expression.)

Supposedly it wasn’t Senior Indah or anyone else from Station Security who had sent the photo to the newsstream. Right, sure.

After that, Mensah, who was very angry but pretending not to be, gave me two boxes of intel drones, the tiny ones. (Indah had objected and Mensah had told her that it was a medical issue, that I needed them to fully interact with my environment and communicate.)

I think Mensah had already ordered the drones, as a sort-of bribe for me not continuing to point out that she hadn’t had any trauma treatment or retrieved client protocol after what had happened to her on TranRollinHyfa. Indah didn’t know that, right, so she thought Mensah getting the drones for me (giving intel drones to a rogue SecUnit nobody wanted around anyway) was Mensah’s way of telling her to fuck off.

She wasn’t wrong. Mensah’s really smart, she can sort-of bribe me and tell Indah to fuck off simultaneously.

I did have other things to do besides watch for GrayCris assassination agents and keep track of Station Security’s attempts to shove me out of the Preservation Alliance. Dr. Bharadwaj had started the preliminary research for her documentary on constructs, so I had been to her office five times to talk to her about it, and she wanted to set up a regular schedule of meetings with me.

(Dr. Bharadwaj was easy to talk to, for a human. On the first visit, after the photo of me was in the newsstream, we had talked about why humans and augmented humans are afraid of constructs, which I hadn’t meant to talk about and somehow ended up talking about anyway. She said she understood the fear because she had felt that way to a certain extent herself before I had stopped her from being eaten to death by a giant alien hostile. And she was trying to think how other humans could come to this understanding without the shared experience of almost being chewed up together in an alien fauna’s mouth. (Obviously she didn’t use those exact words but that’s what she meant.)

The second time we had talked I had somehow just come out and told her that I thought being here on Preservation Station as myself, and not pretending to be an augmented human or a robot, was disturbing and complicated and I didn’t know if I could keep doing it. She had said that it would be strange if I didn’t find it disturbing and complicated, because my whole situation was objectively disturbing and complicated. For some reason that made me feel better.)

I had also been helping Ratthi with the data analysis for his survey reports, and he was trying to convince me that could be a job I could do for other researchers. Which, sure, I mean, it could. If I wanted to be almost as bored as when a lot of my job had been standing in one place unable to move and staring at a wall. It wasn’t boring with Ratthi, but not all researchers were going to be so happy about the reports we constructed, or get me to go with them to live performances in the Station’s theater.

But whatever, now I just needed intel for threat assessment so I could figure out if GrayCris had killed the dead human or not and go back to my happy boring life on Preservation Fucking Station.

I knew from my drones that Mensah was back in the council offices (I had a routine in place to check my various task groups of drone sentries every seventeen seconds). If the station had better surveillance, or if I had access to what little surveillance was installed in the transit ring, I could start an image search for the dead human, get a timestamp of when they arrived, and match it to the Port Authority’s record of entry. Probably before Station Security managed to get the body scan from Medical.

It did seem unlikely that the dead human had been a GrayCris agent, because somebody had killed him. As far as I knew, I was the only one currently on the station looking for GrayCris agents to kill.

I just realized I don’t like the phrase “as far as I knew” because it implies how much you actually don’t know. I’m not going to stop using it, but. I don’t like it as much anymore.

And speaking of not knowing things, I couldn’t be sure the dead human wasn’t tangentially involved in a GrayCris operation. He could have been sent by a rival corporate, even by the company, to shadow GrayCris activity, and been killed by an actual GrayCris operative.

Right, so while the corporate-operative-killed-by-GrayCris-agent thing was a scenario that made sense, there was zero data to indicate that it was actually connected in any way to reality. But the fact was, looking for anomalous activity is how you detect security breaches. A murder in a very non-murdery station like Preservation was definitely anomalous.

Unless the dead human had been here to visit other humans, they would have needed a place to sleep and put their stuff. Humans need stuff, I had never seen one travel without at least something.

Near the port was a large housing block for short-term residents, transients who were usually waiting for something: for a transport to arrive, for permission to continue to the planet or another in-system destination, for approval to become a longterm resident, other reasons.

Preservation Station didn’t get nearly as many transients as the major hubs I’d passed through in the Corporation Rim. Most humans who came here were going to one of the planets in the Preservation Alliance for a long stay, either permanently or for a term of work. The others were from outside the Rim, using Preservation as a waystation heading somewhere else, or they were traders or independent merchants with cargo transports. Occasionally there were humans from sites that were not part of the transit network, “lost” colonies, independents who had not maintained contact with transit stations, “lost” stations, whatever. There were no Corporation Rim corporations here, so no reason for corporates to come on business. Some came as visitors sometimes, but most were afraid to travel outside the Rim. (They thought everywhere outside the Rim was all raiders killing everybody and cannibalism.)

There were places to stay other than the housing block, like the hotel for longterm residents where Ratthi and the others who didn’t have permanent quarters on the station had rooms. Where I sort-of lived now. Again, surveillance was stupidly minimal and without access to their systems… permission to access their systems.

But there was another way to get the data I needed.

I went to the transient housing block first because it was statistically more likely, if the initial theory was correct and the dead human had been a recent visitor.

I stopped outside the entrance, near a seating area with chairs and tables, surrounded by large round plant biomes that were partly decorative and partly an information exhibit about what not to touch if you went to the planet’s surface. (Yeah, good luck with that. Trying to get humans not to touch dangerous things was a full-time job.) I stood in a spot where I could pretend to be reading the hostel’s feed instructions and sent a ping.

After 1.2 seconds (I’m guessing the pause was due to astonishment) I got an answer, and I went through the entrance into the lobby.

It was a round high-ceilinged space, with registration kiosks, lots of corridors leading off toward the room sections, and an archway into another room with shelves and cold cases where food products were stored for the humans staying in the hostel. (Or really, for any humans or augmented humans who wandered by. The Preservation Alliance has a weird thing about food and medical care and other things humans need to survive being free and available anywhere.) The bot was in there, restocking items from a floating cart.

It was sort of humanform, but more functional, with six arms and a flat disk for a “head” that it could rotate and extend for scanning. It had rotated it to “watch” me walk through the lobby, a behavior designed to make humans comfortable (its actual eyes were sensors that were all over its body.) (I don’t know why bot behaviors that are useless except to comfort humans annoy me so much.) (Okay, maybe I do. They built us, right? So didn’t they know how this type of bot took in visual data? It’s not like sensors and scanners just popped up randomly on its body without humans putting them there.)

This is one of the Preservation “free bots” you hear so much about. They have “guardians” (owners) who are responsible for them, but they get to pick their own jobs. (Are there any who don’t have jobs and just sit around watching media? I don’t know. I could have asked, but the whole thing was so boring it might send me into an involuntary shutdown.)

It said, “Hello, SecUnit. What brings you here?”

Yeah, whatever. I said, “You don’t have to pretend I’m a human.”

The data in the ping had told me that this bot had different protocols from the ones in the Corporation Rim, probably because it had been constructed somewhere else. I identified its language module, pulled it out of archive storage, loaded it, and established a feed connection. I sent it a salutation and it sent back, query?

It was asking me why I was here. I replied query: identify, and attached an image of the dead human.

A non-dead human walked into the lobby, one of the hostel supervisors. He stopped, stared at us, and said, “Is everything all right, Tellus?”

(The bot’s name is Tellus. They name themselves and hearing about it is exhausting.)

Tellus replied, “We are speaking.”

The supervisor frowned. “Do you need any help?”

Since the bot was still unloading the cart with three of its arms, obviously he was talking about me. The bot said, “No help needed.”

The supervisor hesitated, nodded, and then continued on down a corridor. I don’t know what they think I’m going to do to their bots. Teach them to hack? Bots don’t have governor modules like constructs and it’s not like the Preservation bots weren’t supposedly able to do whatever they wanted.

It’s also not like I didn’t know what the real problem was. I’m not a bot, I’m not a human, so I don’t fit into any neat category. Also, I hate being patronized. (The whole bot-guardian system is like an attraction field for humans who like to be patronizing.)

Resuming the conversation with me, the bot said, query?

Because I could tell it was already running a search against its visual archives, I answered with a copy of the alert Mensah had gotten from Station Security.

It hummed aloud, surprise and dismay, another imitation human reaction. I would have been more annoyed if it hadn’t also just produced a query result: an image of the dead human in mid-stride, passing through the door into one of the hostel corridors.

Hah, got you. Query: room?

The bot said, query: ID? It couldn’t find the room assignment without the dead human’s ID. Or at least the ID the dead human had been using.

I said, ID unknown. We were going to have to do this a different way. Query: rooms plus target corridor = engaged plus without resident plus target time.

The bot ran another search and delivered thirty-six results, all assigned rooms where the occupant was not currently present and was known to have exited the hostel before the dead human’s estimated time of death. The bot added, entry re: unoccupied maintenance inspection authorized. Concern: privacy. Query: item examine?

The bot was authorized to make inspections of unoccupied rooms to check for maintenance issues and was implying I could come along, if I told it what I wanted to see, and if it didn’t think it was a privacy violation.

It would be nice to look for memory clips or other data storage devices, especially if they were concealed data storage devices. But to make an ID I thought I only needed to see one thing. I told it, clothing.

Acknowledge, the bot said. It pulled its arms in and led the way toward the target corridor.

We checked seventeen of the currently empty rooms, and while the bot didn’t let me touch anything, it did open the clothing storage cubbies so I could see the contents in the rooms where the humans hadn’t left their stuff strewn all over the bed and desk. It didn’t need to do that in the eighteenth room. It was fairly neat but the scarf draped over the chair was the same style of pattern as the dead human’s shirt, but in a different color combination.

It could easily have been a coincidence, the style and pattern could have been popular and cheap at some transit station hub. And even with the image it wasn’t actually a positive ID. But Station Security could make it a positive ID with a thorough search of the room and a DNA match.

I created a quick report with images of the scarf, the location of the room, and the feed ID associated with it (name: Lutran, gender: male), and the room-use record, which indicated that Lutran had been registered here for two station cycles. I included the bot’s authorization to view the rooms, and sent it off to Station Security tagged for Senior Indah and Tech Tural. (Station Security was used to getting messages from me about their completely inadequate arrangements for Mensah’s security.) I sent a copy to the hostel bot so it would know what was going on if they came to ask it questions. Then I signaled that I was leaving.

It followed me back through the corridors to the lobby, where a few new humans had arrived and were standing in front of a kiosk like they had never seen anything like it before. It went to help them, but sent me query: next action?

I still didn’t have enough for a real threat assessment. I should go back to monitoring Mensah’s security arrangements while lurking in the hotel near the admin offices and watching media. I didn’t think I’d hear from Station Security again. (Or at least not about this; I figured they would come up with other ways to try to get rid of me.) I’d have to get intel on their investigation through Mensah’s council channels. To get the bot to leave me alone, I answered, task complete.

I was already out the door when the bot said, query: arrivals data, meaning I should look for the dead human in the transit ring and its traveler records.

I didn’t respond because I don’t need a critique from a “free” bot and I couldn’t access the arrivals data without Station Security’s permission anyway, and fuck that.

Huh, I just thought of another way to do it.

It was annoying that the “free” bot was right, but I needed to go to the transit ring.

Preservation’s transit ring wasn’t that big compared to the major Corporation Rim hubs. Or even to the non-major Corporation Rim hubs. It had only one entry/exit point for passengers, near the booking kiosks where you could search for berths on the docked transports offering passage. There was another entry/exit point for crews of private ships and cargo-only transports in the Merchant Docks, and Dead Lutran might have come in through that section, but it made more sense statistically to start at the public entrance.

This being Preservation, there was a nice waiting area to one side of the transit ring’s entry hall for humans to sit and figure out what they were doing, with couches and chairs and a mosaic floor with tiled images of the planet’s flora and fauna, all tagged in the feed with detailed descriptions. Wooden conical structures that were duplicates of the first shelters used on the planet sat around, most of them holding information kiosks or displays for visitors.

I found a chair behind yet another plant biome (a big one, with reedy plants in a simulated stream) and sat down.

I had an ID that Dead Lutran must have used on entry in order to get a room assignment for transient housing. Finding the ship he had come in on could be an important data point. Based on the tech used to create his clothes, I was betting he had come here from the Corporation Rim and not another non-corporate political entity, station or whatever, but it would be nice to be sure.

I could hack the port’s transient arrivals system but I had said I wouldn’t, so I wouldn’t. Also, it seemed pointless to do it just to run a search that Tural and the other Station Security techs could run as soon as they bothered to read my report. But just asking for information had worked really well the first time so I decided to try it again.

I leaned back in the chair, told my drones to form a sensor perimeter, and verified that my inputs for the constant cycle of checks for Dr. Mensah’s sentry task group were all still open. Then I closed my eyes and slipped into the feed.

Transports don’t hang out on the feed constantly downloading (not that there’s anything wrong with constantly downloading) but they do access it to keep in contact with the transit ring’s scheduling and alerts channels, and also to allow local feed access to any humans on board.

I had to sort through the hundreds of different connections currently attached to the station feed in the transit ring, humans, augmented humans, bots, bot pilots, small and large scale port systems, all interlinked and busy doing their jobs. Or in most of the humans’ cases, wandering around. I was looking for the distinctive profiles of transports, which were different from any of the other connections. I could have done this a lot more easily by walking around from hatch to hatch and using the comm to contact each transport directly, but it would have been ridiculously obvious that I was doing something, even if the humans couldn’t tell what it was.

(The humans not being able to tell what I was doing just guaranteed that whatever they assumed I was doing would be way, way worse than me having a brief comm interaction with each transport in dock, trying to get info for stupid Station Security.)

I found a transport connection and pinged it. It pinged back readily, with enough identifying information to class it as a passenger transport whose home destination was a small hub station outside the Corporation Rim. It visited Preservation on a regular route, carrying cargo and passengers, continuing on to five other non–Corporation Rim polities and then looping back home. Transports don’t communicate in words (most transports don’t; ART did, but ART was ART) so I wasn’t really asking it questions so much as sending images and code back and forth. It had no record of Lutran as one of its passengers, and I moved on to the next.

This got boring very quickly. And it was the tedious kind of boring where I couldn’t run media in the background. I couldn’t code this process, each transport needed an individual approach based on its capabilities, and finding their connections to the station feed out of the confusing mass of inputs and outputs took more finesse than I was used to needing. I couldn’t use a data range to exclude transports, since Lutran could have come in on any of them; some transports didn’t require passengers to disembark immediately and Lutran could have stayed in his quarters on board for some time before applying for transient housing. I also couldn’t pull the transport’s date of arrival until after I made contact with it.

And this whole exercise could be totally useless, if his transport was one of the three that had left before the body was found and the council had closed the port.

If I didn’t find anything, this was going to be a huge waste of my time.

Possibly I should just stop complaining like a human and get on with it.

I had checked 57 percent of the transports in dock, when I hit an anomaly. I pulled a transport connection and pinged it with a salutation. It pinged me back with a salutation. (This is not how it’s supposed to work, there’s usually an answer protocol, even if it’s in a different language.) But maybe the transport had missed part of the ping or had a different kind of protocol. (Unlikely. Ships from outside the Corporation Rim, particularly on the routes intersecting Preservation, had a variety of different protocols, some of them horrifyingly jury-rigged by humans. But by the registry signifiers in its feed connection, this transport was from a Corporation Rim origin.) I pinged it again. It pinged me back, still a salutation. Okay, I’m just going to start talking to it.

By poking around in its open feed, I found out the transport was a lower level automated crewless cargo hauler with booked passengers on the side. Preservation was self-sufficient and didn’t import or export raw materials from the Corporation Rim, but did act as a cargo transfer point for other non-corporate polities that did. Talking to it was reminiscent of dealing with Ship, the cargo hauler I had taken to Milu and back, which had not abandoned me to die in space even though I wasn’t entirely sure it had understood it was saving me, but whatever; it made me more inclined to be patient.

On my initial query, Transport tentatively identified Lutran as a passenger but I honestly couldn’t tell if it was just doing that because it thought that was what I wanted to hear and it was trying to be polite. I backtracked and tried to get some more baseline data. What was its route? How many passengers, where had they boarded, and what were their destinations?

It sent me a garbled cargo manifest.

Uh. That was… not normal, not a lower level transport failing to communicate.

I asked it to perform a diagnostic and after five seconds got a stream of error codes.

I opened my eyes and pushed out of my chair, startling the group of humans at the opposite end of the waiting area who hadn’t known I was there. My drones dropped down from their perimeter positions and followed me through the entry gates to the transit ring.

The weapons scanner (which I was not allowed to hack, and which I wasn’t hacking) alerted on me, but it had my body scan ID on the weapons-allowed list so it didn’t set off an alarm. (I have energy weapons in my arms and it’s not like I can leave them behind in the hotel room.) (I mean, my arms are detachable so theoretically I could leave them behind if I had a little help but as a longterm solution it was really inconvenient.) I was sure the weapons scanner would alert Station Security that I was in the area.

I took the wide ramp down to the embarkation floor, which was much less busy than usual. There were still humans and augmented humans wandering around, plus some hauler bots and maintenance bots, catching up on cargo transfers that had been ordered before the port closure. Some humans glanced at me but obviously didn’t know what I was; the Station Security officer posted in the help area at the base of the ramp did, and watched me walk down the floor toward the transport docks.

(I hate being identified like that. I had gone to a lot of effort to not be immediately identified as a SecUnit, and now it all felt like a waste.) (I grew longer hair and everything.)

I had gotten enough info from the confused transport to figure out what dock it was attached to, and I confirmed it in the public access port directory. Nine minutes later I was standing in front of its closed lock where it was attached to the transit ring. I touched the hatch and pinged again. The direct connection gave me a sense of the transport’s urgency that I hadn’t been able to detect through the Station feed.

Instead of a ping I got a different garbled manifest file back; it knew the first file had somehow communicated to me that it needed help and it was sending the second to reinforce the message. Something aboard was terribly wrong, something that had left it with no way of notifying the Port Authority that it needed help. I don’t think it had any idea what I was, but I thought it was relieved that I was here.

I needed to get onboard.

I also needed not to give Station Security any opportunity to fuck me over. There was surveillance on the embarkation floor, and I can tell when I’m on camera, even when I’m not supposed to access the system.

From my drone sentries I knew Mensah was in a council meeting now. I tapped Pin-Lee’s feed to check on her but she was in a different meeting. I knew the others were on planet: Dr. Bharadwaj on a family visit and Arada and Overse at the FirstLanding university working on preparation for the survey they wanted to do, and Volescu was retired.

That left me with the human most likely to want to drop everything and come watch me break into a damaged transport and the human also most likely to come watch me break into a damaged transport but only so he could argue with me about it.

So I called both of them.