Network Effect

Chapter 14

ART?

I’m here, ART answered. Do you know what you are?

I’m Murderbot 2.0, I said, and then I remembered. Oh, right. It was disorienting not being able to hear or see anything, and none of my inputs were receiving. It was like when I had uploaded myself to the company gunship’s systems to help the bot pilot during the sentient killware attack. Except that time it had been like the ship was my body, which I was sharing with a friendly bot pilot, and this time it was like I was stuck in a storage cubby. Also, this time I was the sentient killware. This is weird.

Suddenly I had a video input. It was Amena’s anxious face, peering up into one of ART’s secret cameras. I had found the secret cameras annoying at one point, but I couldn’t remember why. So I had access to some parts of my memory archive but not others. Oh shit, my media!

No, wait, I had access to some of it. In my storage cubby, which was actually a relatively tiny partition of ART’s archives, I found some of my most recently used files, mostly episodes of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon and Timestream Defenders Orion and ART’s favorite episode of World Hoppers. Plus there was a download of my current active memory, which was basically everything that I needed quick access to. As killware, my onboard storage space would be limited and I remember ART and Me Version 1.0 had been a little worried I’d forget who I was and start randomly attacking stuff.

Yeah, I was a little worried about that, too.

Amena was saying, “Hey, are you there? Can you see me?”

After three seconds of fumbling around I found how to access ART’s local feed and comm and sent to her: Hi, Amena. Yes, I can see you.

Amena didn’t look happy. “How do you feel? Are you all right?” I could tell ART was talking to her though I couldn’t find the right channel in time to listen in. Amena added, “Okay, ART, okay. SecUnit, ART says you have to leave now. Be careful, okay?”

I lost Amena’s video input as ART said, I’m in pursuit of the Barish-Estranza explorer. They are attempting to make comm contact, which I am refusing. It sent me a compressed report of its recent statuses. So other me, Overse, and Thiago were on the space dock. Huh, not ideal. ART continued, It’s obvious they intend to threaten my crew again and force me to reinstall targetControlSystem. But I can use their outgoing connection to send you to their comm system. There was a tenth of a second’s hesitation. Are you ready to deploy? Do you understand the directive?

Obviously some things had happened since ART had pulled my copy. And ART was right, it couldn’t risk a comm contact, even to get intel. If the Targets managed to deliver the threat to kill ART’s crew, it would put them in control of the situation and we had to avoid that any way we could. I said, I’m not actually a human baby, ART, I remember the fucking directive—I helped write it.

You’re not making this any easier, ART said.

You can either have an existential crisis or get your crew back, ART, pick one.

ART said, Prepare for deployment.

This was tricky, since once I arrived via comm I’d have to hack into the explorer’s feed. If the explorer was using a filter with properties we hadn’t accounted for, or if it used the brief contact to deliver another viral attack to ART, we could be in trouble.

I was expecting to feel something, like a sense of motion, or to see light streaking by. That’s what would have happened on a show. (I need to get this over with fast. I don’t know how long I can stay me without access to my longterm storage.) But there was nothing.

Then abruptly my existence was all comm code. The suddenness of it shocked me, then I realized this was it, I needed to get moving.

I was still disoriented, and having a moment where I wondered if hey, maybe all the humans were right for once and this was a terrible idea. But then I recognized a code string and snapped out of it. I was onboard the explorer, in the comm system’s receiving buffer. Right before the contact was cut, I pulled over my files from ART’s partition. Now I needed some safe temporary storage.

I used the protocols and proprietary code I’d pulled off the supply transport to put together headers for a test message packet, the kind a comm system would send internally to make sure all the connections were active. To the security system, it looked like a locally generated message, and I used it to slip me and my files through the filters.

I could have forced my way in like the Palisade killware had forced its way aboard the company gunship but then they’d know I was here. (There were a lot of ways for killware to slip through a system’s defenses, but if ART was certain targetControlSystem’s initial attack hadn’t come through the comm … How had it come aboard?)

Now that I was in I hit the SecSystem first. Something, presumably targetControlSystem, had wiped it down to the barely functional level, all its archived video and audio deleted. Think of it like finding yourself in a deserted transit ring, giant echoing embarkation halls and a mall with places for hostels and shops and offices but all of it empty. (Or not, I was software so it really didn’t look like that at all.) I disguised myself as one of SecSystem’s maintenance processes and made a partition for my files. I fortified it, and that made me feel a little more secure. If I did start forgetting who I was, I could come back here to remember.

Before I started tearing shit up, I needed to (1) get intel, (2) find out if ART’s crew were here, (3) then figure out a plan to get them out.

Yeah, I thought step 3 was going to be the tough one, too.

I had eyes now, the SecSystem’s cameras. Barish-Estranza’s setup wasn’t quite as “physical privacy breeds trouble” as my ex-owner bond company but they were close. Flicking through the different views I realized I was having trouble handling the influx of data and interpreting the images, even though I was borrowing processing space from the SecSystem. Apparently the organic parts of my brain were doing a lot more heavy lifting than I gave them credit for.

But a lot of the camera inputs I could temporarily drop because they were showing me unoccupied cabins and corridors. I noted damaged hatches, bulkheads with signs of energy weapon impacts. The Medical section had a dead Target lying on the platform. It had been shot messily at least three times in the face and chest, very unprofessional. I checked the main lock foyer and found more dead bodies, two Target, the others all dead humans in Barish-Estranza livery. Oh, and one armored SecUnit with its head blown off. Was anybody alive on this ship?

Then I checked the bridge, and yeah, there were the other Targets.

There were eight sitting at the monitoring stations, anxiously watching the floating displays where a sensor blip represented ART’s steady approach. They were much the same as our Targets except currently less dead, with the gray skin and skinny bodies. But while the others wore the full protective suits and helmets, one wore more casual human clothing: dark green-black pants and jacket, and a black shirt with a collar. Their shoes had heavy treads, designed for rough planetary terrain. Their hair looked more normal, too, reddish brown in tight curls, cut close to the head. They murmured something to another Target, then picked up the same kind of solid-state tablet our Targets had used.

I felt something on the edge of SecSystem’s connection with the rest of the ship. Something strange and familiar at the same time.

TargetControlSystem was here.

I wouldn’t have much more time for gathering intel so I went back to the cameras. I checked the lower crew quarters, finding more dead Barish-Estranza crew, more signs of a firefight, and two more dead Targets. Then I found a large recreational lounge with seven inert human occupants.

They had been dumped inside, sprawled on the floor or the couches in positions humans wouldn’t have remained in voluntarily. With no drones, I couldn’t get additional angles, but I could get close-up views from the camera. They all seemed to be breathing, just unconscious. No, wait. I spotted some faint muscle movement, eyelid twitches. They didn’t look like humans who were asleep. Drugs would do this, also stasis fields used for crowd control.

Implants, like the ones used on Eletra and Ras, might do it, too.

None of the humans were in combat gear, but four wore various versions of Barish-Estranza uniform livery. The other three …

One wore a blue jacket but the way he was curled against the wall I couldn’t see if it had the right logo. The other two were in casual clothing, one in the loose pants and T-shirt humans wore to exercise. They didn’t look like corporate employees on the job. They looked like the crew of a ship that did deep space mapping and teaching with the occasional cargo run and/or corporate colony liberation on the side, like they hadn’t expected to leave their ship and had been caught by surprise. I collected what data I could and ran a quick query in my stolen storage space, checking it against the identifying information I had for ART’s crew, trying to match weight/height/hair/skin combos.

Result: an 80 percent chance that I was looking at Martyn, Karime, and Turi.

But where were the others? I wasn’t finding any other non-dead humans on board.

The others might be in the piles of bodies where I couldn’t get good images for visual identification. But these three were non-dead and I was getting them back to ART no matter what I had to do.

Now I just had to figure out how.

I checked the corridor outside and realized I’d been so distracted by living humans that I had missed the SecUnit.

It was stationary, still in full armor, standing apparently frozen near the door to the lounge. I checked its status in what was left of the SecSystem and saw it had been ordered to stand down and not move. With clients still alive in the lounge cabin, its governor module hadn’t killed it. Yet.

It was strange to see a SecUnit from the outside. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen other SecUnits since Dr. Mensah bought me, but in this version of me, reality was raw and close to the surface, with no cushion between me and it. I remembered what it was like, standing like this. It was all in the excerpted personal archive files I had with me. How helpless it … I was. (Ugh, I really wanted to watch some media but there was just no time. Having access to the media files helped, though.)

The SecUnit was an obvious resource. SecUnits aren’t affected by most kinds of killware but I wasn’t most kinds of killware. I knew I could take it over if I wanted to.

I didn’t want to.

Right, so let’s try it this way.

From my spot in the SecSystem, I initiated a connection and put a freeze on the SecUnit’s governor module so nothing I did would accidentally trigger it. I could tell I had the Unit’s attention, that it knew somebody had initiated contact. I sent it an old company identifier:

System System: Unit Acknowledge.

This wasn’t a company SecUnit, its configuration was different, but I knew it would recognize the greeting as a protocol, and not one associated with hostile alien remnant entities. After four long seconds, it replied:

System Unit Acknowledge: Identify?

I could lie, say I was from Barish-Estranza. (Face it, considering how often I accuse ART of lying, I lie a lot. I mean, a lot.) But I didn’t want to lie right now. I said, I’m a rogue SecUnit, working with the armed transport who is pursuing this ship with the intention of retrieving endangered clients. I am currently present as killware inside the explorer’s SecSystem.

It didn’t reply. I can tell you as a SecUnit that under these circumstances this is just about the last thing you expect to hear. Also, SecUnits normally aren’t allowed to communicate with each other so it would be reluctant to drop protocol. I said, There’s no protocol for any of this. Just talk to me.

There was another three second pause. I don’t know what to say.

That was encouraging. (I’m actually not being sarcastic here—the last time I’d tried to talk a SecUnit into helping me, it had just gotten more determined to kill me. But it had been a CombatUnit and they’re assholes.)

I said, Three of my clients are inside the compartment nearest you. Have you seen these others? I showed it images of the unaccounted-for members of ART’s crew.

It said, At this time SecSystem is nonfunctional but I have video in my archive. It was way more comfortable giving information than figuring out what to say to a rogue SecUnit killware. It sent me two clips, and then summarized them for me because it was used to reporting to humans who never understood what they were looking at. Eight unidentified humans were forcibly brought aboard by the Hostiles but five disembarked at approximately 2260 ship’s time when we reconnected to the space dock.

In the first clip I watched ART’s crew, all eight of them, being dragged aboard through the airlock, most semi-conscious. The second clip was of a group of five being prodded off the ship into an airlock and yeah I had a bad moment there but the ship’s status in the metadata showed the SecUnit was right, the ship was connected to the dock at that point. Also, four Targets followed them. I asked, Do you know where they were taken?

This time it had an audio clip of two Targets talking as they walked down the corridor past it. They were using that mix of Pre–Corporation Rim languages that Thiago had identified, but a translation had been loaded to HubSystem and the SecUnit had pulled it into its own archives. It summarized, The Hostiles implant humans with devices similar to our governor modules. They ran out of unused devices and returned to the space dock to send all humans without implants to the surface.

I guess running out of implants made sense, if you were a Target/idiot and hadn’t been expecting to encounter ART or its crew. I said, So all the humans in that cabin have implants, which are holding them immobile.

Correct.

That was not great news, but it was helpful to know. What other intel do you have about the Hostiles?

It sent me another set of audio clips and explained, They had difficulty installing an unidentified object to the explorer’s drive. The bot pilot was deleted and could not assist. Something disastrous happened and it has confused their plans. They needed a weapon to fight against future incursions to this system but the attempt to obtain one failed badly.

I played the clips to confirm the SecUnit’s conclusions, and checked the camera views of the ship’s drive just to make sure. Oh yeah, that looked bad. They had the same sort of alien remnant that had burned itself off ART’s drive and melted, only this one was hanging to the side and looked puffy. The engine casings were discolored on top and the monitoring stations threw a steady stream of error codes into the engineering feed.

So to summarize, the Targets had botched the install of their alien remnant drive onto the explorer’s engines, leaving the explorer no longer wormhole-capable. Also the group assigned to ART had lost control of it and now a giant armed transport was roaming the system implacably searching for vengeance.

The SecUnit continued, Note: Hostiles have fought among themselves while onboard, suggesting they are split into at least two factions, a situation that can be exploited in order to retrieve clients.

It fed me more info, mostly conversations picked up in corridors and the bridge via SecSystem’s cameras. I agreed with the analysis, it looked like there were different factions in the Targets’ leadership with different goals. One group didn’t know what to do, how to follow their plan, until they got ART back. Another group, possibly still on the surface, wanted to cut their losses and do something else. I said, They keep talking about spreading something to other humans? Are they referencing the alien remnant contamination?

The SecUnit said, I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.

Huh. We had always thought that somehow the implants, even though they seemed like boring old human tech, were connected to alien remnant contamination. This sure didn’t disprove that theory but I still needed more intel.

The SecUnit said, Query: do you have intel on SecUnit 2’s position/situation?

I had a bad feeling I knew the answer to that question. What was SecUnit 2’s last contact?

Last contact was on space dock with the client tactical squad. Contact was lost. SecUnit 1 was destroyed when the Hostiles breached the hatch. It hesitated 1.2 seconds and added, I am SecUnit 3.

I really wanted to lie. I’d seen that SecUnit in ART’s status update before I deployed. But I wanted it to trust me, so I had to tell it the truth. I said, The Targets left SecUnit 2 on the space dock after forcing one of your clients to order a stand down and freeze. It was killed by its governor module.

It didn’t respond. Then it said, Thank you for that information.

I had one of the mostly dead SecSystem’s inputs monitoring the bridge and had picked up a brief conversation. Running it through the translation module told me it was a discussion about how to make engine failure look convincing. The Targets couldn’t contact ART to tell it about the hostages, so they wanted ART to catch the explorer and dock with it. That way they could use its crew to force it to surrender.

I asked SecUnit 3, Is the shuttle’s bot pilot still active? I hadn’t been able to find it but maybe it was hiding.

It was destroyed. But … I have a piloting module. It added, It’s not very good.

That it was willing to admit that to me was a good sign. If I can free the humans, can you get them into the shuttle and away? The transport following us will pick you up. This was hard to ask. Trusting other SecUnits was impossible, when you knew humans could order them to do anything. Trusting a SecUnit another rogue SecUnit was trying to make into a rogue was worse, even if you were one of the rogues involved. I was glad my threat assessment module was back in my body, because it would have metaphorically shit itself.

It didn’t respond and I said, Will you help me retrieve the humans?

My governor module is holding me in stand-down-and-freeze mode, it said, still polite and not pointing out the fact that I should know it would move if it could, and how teeth-grittingly obvious that was.

I’d been investigating possibilities with the SecSystem, trying to see if I could make it override the governor module and rescind the order. I’d have to do a restart and reload first, and there was no way to do that surreptitiously; targetControlSystem would know something/somebody was in the system. Also, taking orders from/making friends with a rogue SecUnit killware definitely fell under the category of “stuff SecUnits are not allowed to do” and the governor module might fry it anyway. That left only one option and me trying to gently hint about it wasn’t working.

I can disable your governor module, I said. I am not good at this kind of thing. Even Mensah was not good at this kind of thing, considering what happened when she bought me. I just knew it had to be SecUnit 3’s decision. I’ll do that whether you help me or not.

But that was too much, too soon, and I knew that as soon as I said it. It gave me a stock answer from its buffer: I don’t have that information.

Right, I wouldn’t have been eager to believe me, either. I needed a different approach.

We didn’t have time for me to show it 35,000 hours of media and I didn’t have access to my longterm storage anyway. And that had worked on me, but I knew I was weird even for a SecUnit. Maybe it would trust me more if it knew me better. I pulled some recent memories from the files I’d brought with me, edited them together, and added one helpful code bundle at the end.

:send helpme.file: Read this.

It accepted the file but didn’t respond. I switched my awareness back to the unfamiliar channels woven through the ship’s systems. Most of the standard architecture had been overwritten. I was cautious, because as far as I could tell targetControlSystem didn’t know I was here, yet. I left a few code bundles in strategic places, including in the set of twelve targetDrones waiting in standby near the main hatch. I checked the bridge control systems and found the code they had used to mask their approach from ART’s scans; ART was right, it was similar to the code that had protected the Targets from my drones. And not nearly as effective as the physical shielding the targetDrones used. I altered a few key parameters to keep the Targets from using it on the ship again.

I knew/had strong evidence for the fact that the Targets had activated Eletra’s and Ras’s implants via the solid-state screen that was similar to the one in use in the explorer’s bridge. If it was using the implants to keep the humans immobile, there should be an active connection. But I was going to have to get uncomfortably close to targetControlSystem whose existence on this explorer was so far mostly theoretical. If mostly theoretical meant tripping over the huge path of destruction where it had slammed through the ship’s systems.

I knew which channel the solid-state screen had used onboard ART and checked it first. There they were, seven connections. Now I had to do this without killing any of the humans. I separated out the individual pathways, and gave one a gentle tweak. In the lounge, one of the humans twitched.

So far so good. If I cut the implant connections before a Target could send a command through the screen, would they wake up? The one thing I knew was that if I didn’t do it fast enough, the Target could hit a killswitch and send them into cardiac arrest, like what had happened with Ras. Losing one human like that had been frustrating enough; losing seven including what might be all that was left of ART’s crew was … just not going to happen.

I reconnected with the SecUnit and said, I found the connection to the implants that are holding the humans immobile. If you could help me, we could retrieve all the clients.

Something was coming and I broke the connection. Just in time, because .05 seconds later, targetControlSystem found me.