Network Effect

Chapter 2

I told myself it wasn’t as much of a shit ending to my first time as Survey Security Consultant While Not Pretending to be a Human and/or Faking the Existence of a Human Supervisor as it could have been. Everybody was alive, they had all their sampling and scans done. Our original schedule actually had us leaving in six planetary days, but since we had finished early Arada had moved that up to three planetary days, that’s why most of the facility had already been prepped for launch.

But we’d been lucky, and I hate luck.

Standing in the access corridor I settled my drones, tasking four to stay with me and sending the others to take up various positions around the facility and go dormant. Then I checked the feed for alerts. The team members who weren’t busy piloting the facility up through the atmosphere were yelling at each other on the comm. Arada came down the corridor. She didn’t have her weapon anymore and my safety protocol check showed she’d unloaded and secured it back in the locker. “SecUnit, you need to get to Medical!”

I checked the feed again; still no alerts. “What happened in Medical?”

“You happened, you got shot.”

Oh, right, that. Arada was gesturing at me so I followed her down the corridor to the main ramp. I poked through the hole in my jacket and shirt and upped my pain sensors a little. The projectiles were still in there. (Sometimes they pop out on their own.)

Medical was at the top of the ramp, a small compartment on the same level as the crew lounge area and galley. The quarters, labs, and storage were on the two levels below and the control deck was above. Ratthi was there waiting for us, standing beside the MedSystem. “Are you all right?” he demanded. “You better lie down!”

I didn’t want to bother with it. “No, I’m fine. Just give me the extractor.”

“No, no, you were in the water, you need decontam and an antibiotic screen. When the system is prepped, you lie down.” He pointed emphatically at the narrow platform and pulled one of the emergency kits down from the rack. “Thiago has some scrapes on his neck,” he told us, “but otherwise he’s fine.”

Ratthi went out with the kit. The yelling on the comm had calmed down but I could hear tense voices from the rec room. Preservation-controlled facilities like this don’t have SecSystems recording everything and cameras everywhere because privacy blah blah blah but I could eavesdrop through the comm and my drones. If I wanted to, which I didn’t, not right now.

Arada said, “Ratthi’s right, SecUnit, you should let the system make sure the wounds aren’t contaminated.” She hesitated. “Did I…” She took a sharp breath. I just stood there because I didn’t understand the question yet. She added, “Was there any other way…”

She didn’t finish again but this time I knew what she was asking. “No. If you’d waited any longer, I would have had to try to use a drone. He’ll probably survive, if the others give him medical attention.”

She really hadn’t wanted to shoot anybody, and had told me she had to force herself to learn how to use the weapon. I hadn’t particularly wanted her to learn, either. (Humans have a bad tendency to use weapons unnecessarily and indiscriminately. Of the many times I had been shot, a depressingly large percentage of hits had come from clients who were trying to “help” me.) (Another significant percentage came from clients who had just wanted to shoot something when I happened to be standing there.)

Arada rubbed her eyes and her mouth pulled in at one side. “Are you trying to make me feel better?”

“No.” I actually wasn’t. I lie to humans a lot, but not to Arada, not about this. “I wouldn’t try to make you feel better. You know what I’m like.”

She made a snorting noise, an involuntary expression of amusement. “I do know what you’re like.”

Her expression had turned all melty and sentimental. “No hugging,” I warned her. It was in our contract. “Do you need emotional support? Do you want me to call someone?”

“I’m fine.” She smiled. On the feed, the MedSystem signaled it was ready. “Now you make sure you’re fine, too.”

She stepped out of the compartment and set the privacy filter on the doorway. I stripped off my clothes and dropped them in the decontam bin and got onto the platform. It would run a check for contaminants and pop the projectiles out of my shoulder and chest.

The process only took three minutes, just long enough to finish the scene of Lineages of the Sun I’d had to pause when Thiago had decided to get me shot. The MedSystem tried to cycle into the therapy and post-treatment options and I stopped it and climbed off the platform. The feed told me we had made orbit and were in the process of rendezvous with our baseship.

My clothes now smelled like decontam fluid but they were dry and clean. I got dressed and opened the privacy shield.

Thiago stood in the corridor. Oh, joy.

He looked angry and upset, which I could tell, even though I was looking just to the right of his head. He said, “Did you kill those people?”

I’d been angry enough to tear them all into tiny little pieces. The company who had owned me had protocols for these situations that would have required kill-shots, at least for the armed hostiles out on the deck. Plus I’d already been shot once, and the hostiles had been clear about their intent to kill and/or abduct my clients. But the company didn’t own me anymore and the only human here I was answerable to was Arada, and only in limited ways determined by a contract that Pin-Lee had negotiated for me.

But the whole point of hacking my governor module was that no one got to tell me to kill a bunch of humans if I didn’t feel like it. (Or even if I did feel like it.)

I said, “I’ve reported to my contracted supervisor.”

(I know, I know, I could have said no, I didn’t kill anybody. I could have said that even SecUnits under company protocol use minimum force necessary because the company hates paying survivor damage bonds, and also because SecUnits are not rabid murderers unless humans specifically order them to be. I could have said that I had risked his life not using kill-shots on the armed targets because I knew Arada didn’t want me to.)

He pressed his lips together. “I could ask her.”

I said, “You should definitely do that.”

He glared at me and the brown skin on his cheeks showed pronounced signs of a rise in temperature indicating anger, embarrassment, and possibly other emotions. I was pretty sure he was just pissed off, though. Then he hesitated and said, “Look, I—I didn’t mean to get you shot. I’m sorry.”

If you had meant to get me shot, Thiago, we would be having a different conversation. Because I was still mad, I said, “The security protocol all survey members agreed to is available on the facility feed.”

His face did the thing humans do when they’re trying not to show how annoyed they are. (Mission accomplished.) He said, “I made a mistake. But I had no reason to assume those people were hostile.”

I had reason. I could have thrown together a quick excerpt of my Threat Assessment Report of the approaching boat and why it had been 72 percent likely to attack. I could have pointed out that THEY HAD SHOT ME FIRST when for all they knew I was just another unarmed human. But I didn’t have to answer to him. He didn’t like me, I didn’t like him, and that was fine.

It was absolutely fine.

I walked away down the corridor.

HelpMe.file Excerpt 1

(File detached from main narrative.)

Since I’d decided to stay (temporarily) on Preservation Station, Dr. Mensah had asked me to go places with her seven times. Six of those times were just relatively short boring meetings on ships in orbit or in dock. The seventh was when she had asked me to go down to the local planet’s surface with her. I don’t like planets but she lured me there by explaining that it was for an Art Festival/Conference/Religious Observation that would include “a lot of” live performances. After checking to find out the definition of “a lot of” was eighty-seven plus, I agreed to go.

Some of the live performances were demonstrations or seminars I wasn’t interested in, but I managed to fit in thirty-two plays and musicals while Mensah was at meetings or doing things with her family members. (I used drones to record the performances that were overlapping or scheduled against each other. They were all being recorded for the local planetary entertainment feed, and the popular ones would be reconfigured as video productions, but I wanted to see all the versions.) One evening a play was interrupted when Mensah tapped my feed and asked me to please come get her.

The request was so abrupt and out of character I replied with the code phrase we had come up with in case she was being held against her will. She said she was just tired. That was even more out of character. I mean, I could see she got tired, she just hated to admit it.

I left a drone to record the rest of the play and slipped out of the theater. It was night and the crowd in the street was beginning to thin out, but the big open pavilion across the plaza where the party was being held was still bright and noisy.

If you had to be in a crowd of humans, the crowds at this festival weren’t bad, since they were the distracted kind where all the humans and augmented humans are talking to each other or on comm or feed or hurrying to get places. The downside was a lot of humans were waving sticks with lighted objects or spark-emitting toys, or tossing colored powders that popped and emitted light. (I have no idea.) But whatever, with all that going on, nobody noticed me.

Plus, it was Preservation and there were no scanning drones, no armed human security, just some on-call human medics with bot assistants and “rangers” who mainly enforced environmental regulations and yelled at humans and augmented humans to get out of the way of the ground vehicles.

In the pavilion, I located Mensah near the edge of the crowd talking to Thiago and Farai, who was one of her marital partners. I stopped next to Mensah and she grabbed my hand.

Right, it’s usually a good idea to warn bot/human constructs who call themselves Murderbot before making grabby hands, except during a security incident when you would expect/need the human you’re trying to extract from lethal circumstances to grab you and hold on. And this read as the latter; like Mensah needed me to save her. So I didn’t react except to shift closer to her.

Thiago was saying, “I don’t know why you can’t just talk to us.” I heard him clearly, since I was looping my ambient audio to lower the level of the music from blaring down to a pleasant background soundtrack level. The glance Thiago threw at me was annoyed, like I had interrupted their conversation. Hey, she called me. I have a job here, I get paid in hard currency cards and everything.

“I told you why,” Mensah said, and she sounded normal, calm and firm. Except that was also how she sounded when humans were trying to kill us, so. I had the whole pavilion covered by my drones, and weapons scan was negative. (Weapons weren’t even permitted on the planet except in designated wilderness areas where hostile fauna was a problem.) Voices were loud, but my filters showed they were still well within the range of happy-intoxicated-interested emotional tones. But Mensah’s grip on my hand told me how tense her arm muscles were. Situation assessment: I have no idea.

Farai said, “Thiago, no. She asks for space, you need to give that to her.” She smiled at me politely. I never know how to react to that. She leaned in to Mensah to kiss her, and said, “We’ll see you at the house.”

Mensah nodded and turned, and I let her tow me out of the pavilion.

We made it outside to the pedestrian plaza and I asked her, “Do you need a medic?” I thought she might be sick. If I was a human and I’d had to be in the pavilion with all those other humans for the past two and a half hours, I’d be sick.

“No,” she told me, still sounding calm and normal. “I’m just tired.”

I sent a feed request to the ground vehicle (which on Preservation was called a “go-cart” for some reason) (some stupid reason) to meet us at the nearest transportation area. The plaza and streets were lit with little floating balloon-lights, and the dirt and temporary paving painted with elaborate designs in light-up paint (fortunately it wasn’t the marker paint that broadcasts on the feed, which would have been a nightmare). As we walked through the crowd, people recognized Mensah and smiled and waved. Mensah smiled and waved back, but didn’t let go of my hand. On the fringe near the transport area, an intoxicated human wandered toward us with a handful of glitter dust but veered off when I made deliberate eye contact.

Our vehicle was waiting for us and I handed her in, and climbed into the other seat. I told it to head for the family camp house, which had been erected in a habitation area on the outskirts of the festival site. The vehicle had a limited bot-driver, which would take humans all over the campground and festival site but knew not to go into the designated no-vehicle sections.

It hummed out of the court and into the dark, along the path that led through high grass and scrub trees. Mensah sighed and opened the window. The breeze was still warm and smelled like vegetation, and the guide-lights along the way were low enough not to obscure the starfield. All the humans and augmented humans staying here for the festival made it a heavily populated area, but we were traveling through the section reserved for humans who actually wanted to sleep. The temporary housing (pop-up shelters of all shapes and sizes, camping vehicles, tents and collapsible structures that looked more like art installations) were all mostly dark and quiet. The camp area for humans who had to be loud was on the far side of the grounds with a sound baffle field to deflect the music and crowd noise. She said, “Thank you. I’m sorry I interrupted your evening.”

I recalled my drones except for the one that was recording the play and the detachment I had designated to keep tabs on the family still at the party. (Another detachment was at the camp house, maintaining a perimeter and keeping watch on the two adults and seven children who had gone back earlier.) I wasn’t sure how to react. Mensah wasn’t acting like I had rescued her from certain death, but she wasn’t acting like we were heading back to the habitat after a boring but successful day collecting samples, either. I said, “I recorded the plays. Do you want to see them?”

She perked up. “I never get to see the performances at this thing. Did you get the one— Oh, what was it called? The new historical by Glaw and Ji-min?”

The difference between “calm and normal” and actual normal was measurable enough that I could have made a chart. I just said, “Yes. It’s pretty good.”

Something was bothering her, and it wasn’t just that her family was clearly as weirded out by me as I was by them. They had assumed I would stay in the camp house, which, no. Mensah had told them I didn’t need any help or supervision and could find my own way around. (Quote: “If it can infiltrate high-security corporate installations while people are shooting at it, it can certainly handle a domestic festival.”)

It wasn’t that her family was phobic about the scary rogue SecUnits the entertainment media and the newsfeeds were so fond of, or that they didn’t like bots. (There were “free” bots wandering around on Preservation, though they had guardians who were technically supposed to keep track of them.) It was just me-the-SecUnit they didn’t like.

(That didn’t apply to the seven kids. I was illicitly trading downloads via the feed with three of them.)

I think if I had been a normal bot, or even like a normal SecUnit, just off inventory, naive and not knowing anything about how to get along in the human world or whatever, like the way humans would write it for the media, basically, it would have been okay. But I wasn’t like that. I was me, Murderbot.

So instead of Mensah having a pet bot like poor Miki, or a sad bot/human construct that needed someone to help it, she had me.

(I told this to Dr. Bharadwaj later, because we talked about a lot of things while she was doing research about bot/human relations for her documentary. After thinking about it, she said, “I wish I thought you were wrong.”)

(Farai was a possible exception. Up on the station, when Mensah had first introduced me to her family, she’d had a conversation with me. Or a conversation at me, you could say. Transcript:

Farai: “You know we’re grateful for how you returned her to us.”

I did know, I guess. What do humans say in this situation? A quick archive search came up with some variation on “okay, um” and even I knew that wasn’t going to cut it.

(Just a heads-up, when a murderbot stands there looking to the left of your head to avoid eye contact, it’s probably not thinking about killing you, it’s probably frantically trying to come up with a reply to whatever you just said to it.)

She added, “I wanted to ask what your relationship to her is.”

Uh. In the Corporation Rim, Mensah was my owner. On Preservation, she was my guardian. (That’s like an owner, but Preservation law requires they be nice to you.) But Mensah and Pin-Lee were trying to get my status listed as “refugee working as employee/security consultant.”

But I knew Farai knew all that, and I knew she was asking for an answer that was closer to objective reality. And wow, I did not have that answer. I said, “I’m her SecUnit.” (Yes, that’s still in the buffer.)

She lifted her brows. “And that means?”

Backed into yet another conversational corner, I fell back on honesty. “I don’t know. I wish I knew.”

She smiled. “Thank you.”

(And that was that.)

Mensah’s family were also weirded out by the idea that I would be providing security, and were afraid I would be, I don’t know, scaring legitimate visitors and killing people, I guess. And granted, while I have been a key factor in certain clusterfucks of gigantic proportions and my risk assessment module has serious issues, my threat assessment record is pretty great, like 93 percent. (Most of the negative points came from that time I didn’t know that Wilken and Gerth were hired killers until Wilken tried to shoot Don Abene in the head, but that was an outlier.)

Mensah’s family also thought they didn’t need security, which, maybe before GrayCris, that had been true. But as it was, during the festival I only had to deal with five incursions, four by outsystem newsfeed journalists with recording drones. I took control of the drones (I can always use a few more) and notified the local Rangers who drove off the human journalists. The fifth incursion was the one that got me in trouble with Amena, Mensah’s oldest offspring.

Since the festival had started, I had been taking note of a potential hostile that Amena had been associating with. Evidence was mounting up and my threat assessment was nearing critical. Things like: (1) he had informed her that his age was comparable to hers, which was just below the local standard for legal adult, but my physical scan and public record search indicated that he was approximately twelve Preservation standard calendar years older, (2) he never approached her when any family members or verified friends were with her, (3) he stared at her secondary sexual characteristics when her attention was elsewhere, (4) he encouraged her to take intoxicants that he wasn’t ingesting himself, (5) her parental and other related humans all assumed she was with her friends when she was seeing him and her friends all assumed she was with family and she hadn’t told either group about him, (6) I just had a bad feeling about the little shit.

You might think the obvious thing to do was to notify Mensah or Farai or Tano, the third marital partner. I didn’t.

If there was one thing I understood, it was the difference between proprietary and non-proprietary data.

So, on the night when Potential Target invited Amena to come back to his semi-isolated camp house with him to “meet some friends,” I decided to come along.

He led her into the darkened house, and she stumbled on a low table. She giggled and he laughed. Sounding way more intoxicated than he actually was, he said, “Wait, I got it,” and tapped the house’s feed to turn on the lights.

And I was standing in the middle of the room.

He screamed. (Yes, it was hilarious.)

Amena clapped a hand over her mouth, startled, then recognized me. She said, “What the hell? What are you doing here?”

Potential Target gasped, “What—Who—?”

Amena was furious. “That’s my second mother’s … friend,” she said through gritted teeth. “And her security … person.”

“What?” He was confused, then the word “security” penetrated. He stepped away from her. “Uh … I guess … You’d better go.”

Amena looked at him, and then glared at me, then turned and stamped out the door and down the steps to the path. I followed her, and he backed away as I passed him. Yeah, you better.

On the dirt path, lit by the low floating guide-lights, I caught up with her. (Not so much intentionally, but my legs were longer and she was putting more energy into stamping her feet than gaining distance.)

She said, “How did you know where I was? What were you doing, hiding under the porch?”

She thought I wouldn’t get the domestic animal reference. I said, “Wow, that was rude. Especially considering that I’m your second mother’s”—I made ironic quote marks—“‘friend.’ Is that how you talk to your bot-servants?”

My drone cam showed her expression turn startled and then a combination of sulky and guilty. “No. I don’t have bot-servants! I didn’t know—I never heard you talk.”

“You didn’t ask.” Had I not been talking? I had been talking to the kids on the feed, and to Mensah. Maybe with the rest of the family it had been easier to pretend to be a robot again. I added, “No one else approached that house. He lied about meeting other humans there.”

She stamped along in silence for twelve point five seconds. “Look, I’m sorry, but I’m not some kind of idiot, and I don’t fuck around. If he’d done anything I didn’t like, I was going to leave. And if he wouldn’t let me leave, I have the feed, I can call for help whenever I want.” She was scornful, and way overconfident. “I wasn’t going to let him hurt me.”

I said, “If I thought he was going to hurt you, I’d be disposing of his body. I don’t fuck around, either.”

She stopped and stared up at me. I stopped but kept my gaze on the path ahead. I said, “Mensah is a planetary leader of a minor political entity that has managed to get the angry attention of major corporates. Her situation has changed. Your situation has changed. You need to grow up and deal with it.”

She took a breath to say something, stopped, then shook her head. “He wasn’t a corporate spy. He was just someone…”

“Someone you don’t know who showed up out of nowhere at a massive public festival attended by half the continent and whatever offworld humans happen to be wandering through.” I knew he wasn’t a corporate spy (see above, disposing of bodies) but she sure didn’t.

She was quiet for sixteen seconds. “Are you going to tell my parents about this?”

Is that what she was worried about? I was insulted and exasperated. “I don’t know. I guess you’ll find out.”

She stamped away.

So, in retrospect, I could see that hadn’t gone so well.

Our vehicle rumbled through the dark, up the low hill to the camp house, which was a pop-up two-story structure with broad covered balconies off both levels. It had been placed near a couple of large trees with frilly leaves that curved over the roof. It had been built by Mensah’s grandfather, while her grandmothers and other assorted family members had been working on the original planetary survey and terraforming. The colonists who hadn’t been living in orbit on their ship had all stayed in temporary structures at that point, that were moved seasonally to avoid destructive weather patterns in the parts of the planet that had been habitable at that time.

There were other pop-ups, large and small, planted all over the hills around us, the nearest twenty-seven meters away. Lights were on inside the house and one light floated above the beacon spot for the vehicles. I would have worried about the lack of lighting if I hadn’t had thirty-seven drones on patrol in the immediate area.

(Drones had picked up previously identified humans and augmented humans returning to the other houses or passing through the area, and I’d conducted safety checks on unidentified humans encountered for the first time. I was cataloguing power signatures on some small mobility devices used by non-augmented humans for medical reasons; I hadn’t seen these anywhere in the Corporation Rim, though maybe that was because I hadn’t spent much time hanging out on planets with human populations not exclusively engaged in corporate slave labor. (The entertainment media showed planets that weren’t all corporate slave labor, I had just never been on one.)) (The drones had also tracked the five younger kids on a completely illicit expedition to a nearby creek where they had performed some kind of ritual that involved jumping out at each other from behind bushes and rocks. They returned to the house without being caught by the adult humans or older siblings and were now collapsed in their upstairs bunk room, watching media.)

(The house actually had secure sealable window and door hatches, WHICH NO ONE USED, but at least this made it easy for my patrol drones.)

As the vehicle settled into its spot, Mensah said, “I’m just going to sit outside for a bit. Why don’t you go on back to the festival? There’s a few more plays tonight, aren’t there?”

I try to avoid asking humans if there’s anything wrong with them. (Mostly because I don’t care.) (On the rare occasions where I did care, it would have meant starting a conversation not directly related to security protocol, and that was just a slippery slope waiting to happen, for a variety of reasons.) But humans asked each other about their current status all the time, so how hard could it be? It was a request for information, that was all. I did a quick search and pulled up a few examples from my media collection. None of the samples seemed like anything I’d ever voluntarily say, so before I could change my mind I went with, “What’s wrong?”

She was surprised, then gave me a sideways look. “Don’t you start.”

So there was something wrong and even the other humans had noticed. I said, “I have to know about any potential problems for an accurate threat assessment.”

She lifted a brow and opened the vehicle door. “You never mentioned that on our survey contract.”

I got out of the vehicle and followed her toward a group of chairs next to the house, scattered around in the grass under the trees. The shadow was deep so I had to switch to a dark filter to see her. “That was because I was half-assing my job.”

She took a seat. “If that was you half-assing your job, I don’t want to see what you’re like when…” The smile faded and she trailed off, then added, “But I suppose I did see you when you were doing your best.”

I sat down, too. (Sitting down with a human like this would never not feel strange.) Her expression wasn’t upset, but it wasn’t not upset, either. But I could tell my smartass comment had taken us down an awkward conversational avenue where I hadn’t wanted to go. I wished I was ART, who was good at this kind of thing. (The thing being getting you to talk about what it wanted you to talk about but also making you think about what it wanted you to talk about in different ways.) (I wasn’t kidding when I said ART was an asshole.) “You didn’t answer the question.”

She settled back in her chair. “You sound worried.”

“I am worried.” I could feel my face making the expression whether I wanted it to or not.

She let her breath out. “It’s nothing. I’ve been having nightmares. About being held prisoner on TranRollinHyfa, and … you know.” She made an impatient gesture. “It’s completely normal. It would be odd if I wasn’t having nightmares.”

I hadn’t seen much of the recovery phase of trauma (my job was to get the client to the MedSystem before they died; it took care of all the messy aftermath, including the retrieved client protocol) but in the shows I watched, recovery was featured a lot. There was a trauma recovery program that Bharadwaj had used in the Station Medical Center, and the big hospital in the port city had one, too.

I wasn’t the only one who thought Mensah should go get the trauma treatment. I was probably the only one who knew she hadn’t. (She hadn’t exactly lied; it was more a way of letting the other humans assume she had.) But the treatment wasn’t like a one-time thing with a MedSystem; it took multiple long visits, and I knew she had never made time for it in her schedule. I said, “Is that why you’re afraid to go off-station without me?”

So there were two positions on whether the Preservation Planetary leader needed security. The first was the one 99 percent of the population shared, that she did not unless she went on a formal visit to somewhere like the Corporation Rim. And to a large extent, they were right.

The crime stats on Preservation Station and the planet were pitifully low, and usually involved intoxication-related property damage or disturbances and/or minor infractions of station cargo handling or planetary environmental regulations. Mensah had never needed on-station or on-planet security before this, except for the young Preservation Council–trainee humans who followed her around and kept track of her appointments and handed her things occasionally. (And they did not count as security.)

The other 1 percent was composed of me, Mensah’s survey team, all the humans working in Station Security, and the members of the Preservation Council who had seen the GrayCris assassins try to kill her. But that incident had been kept out of the newsfeeds, so hardly anyone thought Mensah needed a security consultant let alone a SecUnit.

But GrayCris was not doing so hot now due to their hired security service Palisade making an extremely bad decision to punch my ex-owner bond company in the operating funds by attacking one of its gunships. (The company is paranoid and greedy and cheap but also ruthless, methodical, and intensely violent when it thinks it’s being threatened.) Relations between the two corporates had deteriorated since what we call The Gunship Incident, with GrayCris assets getting mysteriously destroyed a lot in supposedly random accidents and its executives and employees getting blown up or found stuffed in containers way too small for intact adult humans and so on.

And once GrayCris had started to cease to exist, even my threat assessment had dropped drastically, but Mensah had still wanted me to continue to provide security. I thought she was humoring me, and taking the opportunity to pay me in hard currency cards which I would need if/when I left Preservation, and giving me practice in being around humans in a setting where I was not categorized as a tool and/or deadly weapon. (Yeah, I assumed it was about me, but humans assume everything is about them, too. It’s not an uncommon problem, okay?)

But for a while now I had been thinking it was about something else.

Her mouth twisted a little and she looked away, over the dark hills and fields toward the lighted windows of the other camp houses and tents. She said, “I suppose it was obvious.”

I said, “Not obvious.” Not to most of the humans, anyway. I had a feeling that Farai and Tano knew, but weren’t sure what to do about it.

She shrugged a little. “It’s hardly surprising that I feel safer with you. It’s also easier to be around people who understand what happened, what it’s like to be in that situation. That’s you and the rest of the survey team.” She hesitated. “Farai and Tano understand, but I haven’t explained to my brother and sister and Thiago and the others why I can’t just rely on them for emotional support about this, as usual.” Her face turned grim. “They don’t understand what it’s like to be under corporate authority.”

That I got. Humans in the Preservation Alliance didn’t have to sign up for contract labor and get shipped off to mines or whatever for 80 to 90 percent of their lifespans. There was some strange system where they all got their food and shelter and education and medical for free, no matter what job they did. It had something to do with the giant colony ship that had brought them here, and a promise by the original crew to take care of everyone in perpetuity if they would just get on the damn thing and not die in the old colony. (It was complicated and when I watched their historical dramas, I tended to fast forward through the economics parts.) Whatever, the humans seemed to like it.

But she was right, these humans had no concept of what it was like to live under corporate authority. And they really didn’t know what it was like to be the target of a corporate entity that wanted to kill you.

I replayed my recording of Mensah talking to Thiago and Farai at the party. Mensah had been abducted from Port FreeCommerce at a meeting for the relatives of the murdered survey members. Maybe the noisy party, where the other humans who would normally help her had been distracted, had just started to feel too similar.

I said, “You need to get the trauma treatment.”

Her voice sharpened. “I will. But I have some things to finish first.” She turned toward me. “And I want you to go on that survey mission with Arada. They need you. And it’s a wonderful opportunity for you.”

It was too dark for her to see my expression. I’m not sure what it was but you could probably describe it as “skeptical.” (Ratthi says that’s how I look most of the time.)

With that confident planetary leader I am totally convincing you of this tone, she added, “And you know Amena and Thiago are going, too. I’ll feel better if you’re there to keep an eye on them.”

Uh-huh. “What about you?”

She took a breath to say she’d be fine. I knew her well enough to know those exact words were about to come out. But then she hesitated. The drone I had watching her face increased magnification, its low-light filter rendering her features in black and white. Her expression was intense and fierce and she was biting her lower lip. She said, “I hate feeling so weak. I just need to stop. And I need to stop leaning on you. It’s not fair to you. We need to be apart so I can … stand on my own feet again.”

I didn’t think she was wrong, but I still wasn’t used to things that were unfair to me being a major point of consideration for humans. It also sounded vaguely like the break-up part of the romance scenes on the shows I watched, most of which I usually skimmed over. I said, “It’s not me, it’s you.”

She huffed a laugh.

And then I sort of blackmailed her.

Part of my problem now was that Mensah, who was way too honest about this kind of thing, had later told Amena that she had asked me to keep an eye on her, which Amena interpreted in some hormone-related human way I’m not sure I understood. Thiago, who is not an adolescent and has no excuse, interpreted it as Mensah not trusting him to take care of his niece.

Amena is on the survey because her education requires an internship in almost getting killed, I guess. Due to our previous interaction, she really didn’t want me specifically tasked to watch her.

(Possibly I had been too emphatic with her about Potential Target. After spending my entire existence having to gently suggest to humans that they not do things that would probably get them killed, it was nice to be able to tell them in so many words to not be so fucking stupid. But I didn’t regret doing it.)

An attempt by Amena to go around Mensah and appeal to Farai and Tano had failed spectacularly, in a three-way comm call that became a four-way when Farai had called Mensah to join in on the discussion. (I’m not sure what happened past that point. Even I hadn’t wanted to watch it.)

So that was what had happened before the survey. Now we’re here, ready for the next major disaster. (Spoiler warning.)