Network Effect

Chapter 9

After twenty-seven minutes and twelve seconds, Ratthi tapped on the hatch and sent me the feed message: Can I come in and talk to you?

I sent back, Do you have my jacket?

There was a pause. I was keyword-monitoring my inputs, the way I used to back when I was rented out on contracts, to make sure no one was screaming for help. But with ART back online, it was unlikely. Unless ART had decided to murder everybody in which case shit was going to get real. But that was also unlikely, because ART kept trying to contact me and I doubted it was planning a mass murder while also composing messages about how I was ungrateful and also wrong and being a sulky dumbass (not in those exact words but that’s what it meant) and why wouldn’t I fucking talk to it and you get the idea. Then Ratthi said, I’ve got it.

He meant the jacket. Then you can come in.

There was another pause. Then Ratthi asked, Can Amena come in, too?

I thumped my head back against the wall. I was sitting on the counter next to the sink and running episode 237 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon in background so I could pretend to be watching it during the 400+ times ART had pinged me.

(You may have noticed, my processing capacity allows me to think about a lot of things and do a lot of things at the same time, more than humans, augmented humans, or lower functioning bots can. ART’s processing capacity made me look like I was moving in slow motion. This made ART capable of both enormous patience and also of becoming furious when it didn’t get what it wanted immediately. It was one of the few ways I could successfully mess with it.)

I had cleaned off all the blood and fluid with the hygiene unit but was too angry to take a shower. (Showers are nice and I wanted to stay angry.) One of ART’s long-sleeved crew T-shirts had fallen out of the recycler at one point. My first impulse was to throw it away, but I needed it, so I pulled it on over my head and threw what was left of my shirt on the floor. Now I was sitting with my boots on the polished counter surface. I hoped it was annoying ART. I was assuming it had a sensor view in here if not a camera view.

I didn’t want to upset Amena any more than I already had, so I sent, Yes.

The hatch slid open and Ratthi and Amena stepped in. Ratthi had gotten his knee fixed and wasn’t limping anymore. He shut the hatch and Amena went to the other end of the sink counter and boosted herself up to sit on it. She curled her legs up, watching me worriedly. I said, “It can hear anything you say anywhere aboard.”

Ratthi handed me my jacket with a smile. “Yes, but I’m used to that.”

(Yes, I got that that was about me.)

The jacket had been recycler-cleaned and the material rewoven to fix the burned parts and holes. Ratthi sighed, leaned against the wall and said, “So, you have a relationship with this transport.”

I was horrified. Humans are disgusting. “No!”

Ratthi made a little exasperated noise. “I didn’t mean a sexual relationship.”

Amena’s brow furrowed in confusion and curiosity. “Is that possible?”

“No!” I told her.

Ratthi persisted, “You have a friendship.”

I settled back in the corner and hugged my jacket. “No. Not—No.”

“Not anymore?” Ratthi asked pointedly.

“No,” I said very firmly. ART had stopped pinging me but I knew it was listening. It’s like having a malign impersonal intelligence that is incapable of minding its own business reading over your shoulder.

Ratthi’s expression was doing a neutral yet skeptical thing that was really annoying. He said, “Have you made many friends who are bots?”

I thought about poor dead Miki, who had wanted to be my friend. There was a 93 percent chance Miki had wanted to be everybody’s friend, but Miki had said to me “I have human friends, but I never had a friend like me before.” I said, “No. It’s not like that. Not like it is between humans.”

Ratthi was still skeptical. “Is it? The Transport seems to think differently.”

I said, “The Transport doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about, plus it lies a lot, and it’s mean.”

A minute, undetectable in the range of human eyesight, fluctuation in the lights told me ART had heard that.

“Why do you call it ART?” Amena asked. “It said its name was Perihelion.”

I told her, “It’s an anagram. It stands for Asshole Research Transport.”

Amena blinked. “That’s not an anagram.”

“Whatever.” Human words, there’s too many of them, and I don’t care.

“Regardless,” Ratthi said, “I think that while you and Perihelion know how to have relationships with humans, neither of you is quite sure how to have a relationship with each other.”

It still sounded disgusting. “Do you have to call it a relationship?”

Ratthi shrugged one shoulder. “You don’t like the word ‘friendship.’ What else is there?”

I had no idea. I did a quick search on my archives and pulled out the first result. “Mutual administrative assistance?”

The lights fluctuated again, in what I could tell was a really sarcastic way. I yelled, “I know what you’re doing, ART, stop trying to communicate with me!”

Amena looked around the room, trying to see what I was reacting to. Ratthi sighed again. He said, “I don’t know if you’ve been listening to what we’ve been doing outside this restroom, but Arada and Thiago have been negotiating with Perihelion and have come to an arrangement. We will help locate and hopefully free its crew, and it will give us any assistance needed to return to Preservation space.”

“That’s not an arrangement,” I said, “that’s just doing what it wants.”

“We know.” Ratthi made a helpless gesture. “But we don’t have any other choice. Even if it would let us send a distress beacon through the wormhole to the nearest station, that station would be in Corporation Rim territory. And we’re in a so-called ‘lost’ system that has been claimed as salvage by a corporate, which makes us in violation of a lot of their laws, plus we’re in a transport that had alien remnant technology installed on its drive. Telling whoever responds to the call that the transport was modified against its will is not going to get us anywhere but buried under massive fines, and it might be even worse for Perihelion’s crew and their university.”

He was right about all that but it was actually worse than he thought. “This is not like Preservation Alliance territory. You can only get a station responder when you’re inside a station’s defined area of influence, and they won’t forward distress beacons and they don’t send responders through wormholes. At most, they’ll pass the call to a local retrieval company, which would contact us and contract to rescue us. We’d have to pay them up front, and probably end up owing the station for passing the call along, though that depends on local regulations.”

Amena’s jaw dropped. “We’d have to pay someone to rescue us?”

Ratthi rubbed his face and muttered, “Oh, I hate the Corporation Rim.”

“Really? Me too,” I said. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)

And I had just thought of something that I should have noticed earlier.

Amena was clearly trying to work out all the possible repercussions. “And if corporates did show up, would you be okay? Because you’re a construct?”

“I’m fine,” I told her. It is amazing what the people on Preservation don’t know about how the Corporation Rim operates. “SecUnits are legal here. Your mother is my registered owner and you’re her designated representative.” And it was definitely Amena and not Thiago.

Amena looked appalled. “My mother doesn’t own you.”

“Yes, she does.” Dr. Bharadwaj had told me how Preservation-based humans don’t understand these concepts and I had believed her, mostly, but seeing it in action was always different.

Amena looked at Ratthi for help. He nodded grimly. “Arada, Overse, and I all have certified copies of the legal document stored in our interfaces, just in case. If we do fall into the hands of corporates, Amena, you must assert legal ownership of SecUnit.”

Amena waved her hands. “But that’s—Ugh!”

“I don’t like it, either,” I told her.

Ratthi said, “That aside, Perihelion says it will be some time before it can make repairs to its engine systems so we’re able to start the search, and we have preparations and plans to make.” He clapped his hands briskly. “So will you come out of the bathroom now?”

“Yes.” I pushed myself off the counter and pulled my jacket on over ART’s stupid T-shirt. “Because ART is lying.”

This time when the lights fluctuated, it wasn’t sarcastic.

I walked out into Medical. The view of the control area was still active, with Arada seated in a station chair and Thiago now standing next to her. They were cycling through engine status data on ART’s alien-remnant-augmented wormhole trip, occasionally making little horrified noises.

Overse was in Medical now, with the implant we had removed from Eletra on a sterile work surface. She was examining it using an imaging field. The magnified scans of the individual parts floated in it, rotating. Eletra was sitting up on a gurney near Overse, peering uncertainly at what she was doing with the implant.

Overse pulled out of her feed to look over at us inquiringly. “Is, uh, everyone ready to talk now?”

“Not exactly.” Ratthi sounded concerned, which was totally unfair.

I said, “Arada, this transport did not come to this system in answer to a distress call.”

Thiago turned around to watch me suspiciously. Arada pushed back her station chair. Someone had brought her some supplies from the emergency kit, because the burn on her cheek had been treated. “SecUnit, I think we have a working arrangement with Perihelion for now. Unless this is something that could endanger us, are you sure you want to … confront it just at the moment?”

I said, “I am absolutely sure.”

Ratthi threw his hands in the air and went over to sit next to Overse.

With a “let’s get this over with” expression, Overse asked, “SecUnit, how do you know there wasn’t a distress call?”

I said, “This is a teaching and research vessel. The student quarters and classroom compartments aren’t in use, and the lab module was inactive, and there was no cargo module attached. So what was it doing when it got this distress call?”

All the humans looked up at the ceiling.

ART said, And this is your idea of being helpful.

I said, “This is my idea of the opposite of being helpful. I am here against my will and you are going to regret that.”

Arada pressed both hands to her face. “Maybe you should go back in the bathroom and think about this a little more.”

“I’m done thinking,” I said.

ART said, That’s obvious.

I know, I walked into that one, which oddly enough, did not make me any less mad. I said, “You came here for a reason, and it wasn’t a distress call. What was it?”

On the side of the room to my right, this was going on:

(Eletra whispered to Overse and Ratthi, “Why are you letting your SecUnit … do this?”

Overse’s jaw tightened. She said, “It’s not our SecUnit, it’s—”

Ratthi squeezed her wrist and gave her what I recognized as a “don’t trust the corporates” look. He told Eletra, “It’s normally very responsible.”)

Thiago was eyeing me through the conference image, frowning. He said, “It is a good question.”

(Of course, none of the sensible humans are supporting me now, it has to be the one who never agrees with me when I’m not being an idiot.) I said to ART, “Why were you here? What do you really do? Deep space research, teaching humans, cargo hauling, none of those are reasons to be here, in the system where corporates were trying to salvage a dead colony.”

ART said, Everything that occurred before my crew was captured is irrelevant. It is none of your business.

I said, “You made it my business when you kidnapped me.”

You are not here against your will. Leave whenever you want. You know where the door is.

That sounded just as sarcastic and mean as you think it did. Also possibly really threatening to the humans. Arada and Ratthi were both waving at me, making gestures which I interpreted as urgent requests for me to shut up now. But I had gotten ART to lose its temper again and be threatening, and that was what I wanted. I folded my arms and said, “You’re upsetting Amena.”

I’d noted that ART’s tone when it spoke to Amena was completely different than it was to the other humans. I didn’t think it would hurt the others, but it wasn’t careful of their feelings the way it was of Amena’s. Whatever else ART was, the classroom space and bunkrooms said it was actually, on a regular basis, a teaching vessel. And before this when I was stupid and we were still friends it had talked about human adolescents in an indulgent way.

Amena took a breath, probably to object, based on her whole “despite being a relatively sheltered adolescent from the most naive human society in existence, I feel a need to pretend that none of this is bothering me” thing. I looked at her and tapped our private feed connection. Be honest.

She let the breath out. She prodded the deck with the toe of her shoe and admitted, reluctantly, “The gray people were terrifying. And being shot at, and … I’d really like to know what’s going on, not just a convenient story.”

There was a long silence. I felt a lot of human eyes looking at me, and the sense of weight and attention through the feed that was ART. Finally ART said, I have to violate my crew’s confidentiality agreement in order to answer that question.

I said, “You kidnapped me and my humans. That violated my contract. A contract I made with them, myself.” Not a company contract, I meant. A me contract. And ART had got me dragged into this and messed everything up.

ART said, I will consider it. Then it put up a connection schematic, which showed it had just cut Eletra’s active connection out of the general feed. On a closed channel with me and my five humans, ART said, This information must be kept private. If any of you reveal anything I tell you to the corporate representative, I will kill her.

I had a release of adrenaline from my organic parts. Uncomfortable, and weird. I wasn’t attached to Eletra, who seemed like the typical human client I had had with the company. (Not too dumb, not too smart, and only 53 percent likely to do something that ended up with me (1) shot (2) abandoned on a hostile planet.) But she was adjacent to my humans and I didn’t like the idea of anybody dying anywhere in that neighborhood.

The humans clearly had a moment of tension. There were a lot of gazes all intersecting each other and attempts to conceal worried expressions. Then Arada said, Agreed. We won’t tell her anything. She cleared her throat and said aloud, “Maybe we can use your cabins, to clean up and rest?”

ART said, on the general feed, Of course.

Ratthi and Overse helped Eletra get settled into one of ART’s bunkrooms (an unused one that the asshole gray people didn’t manage to get their growth medium odor all over). There was an attached bathroom and Ratthi brought self-heating meal boxes and beverage containers for her so she didn’t have an excuse to wander around. I put a drone sentry outside the door because I don’t trust anybody with security, particularly ART.

My humans went to the galley, which was far enough from the bunkroom that Eletra wouldn’t hear the conversation, even if she walked out into the corridor. The humans were eating meals, too, and Thiago had made a hot liquid for them in the galley’s prep unit.

ART put up another unnecessarily elaborate split display, with a view on Eletra, who had finished eating, taken the medication ART’s MedSystem had recommended, and curled up to sleep.

Arada, still eating her meal, said, “Perihelion, are you ready to answer SecUnit’s questions now?”

(Actually first she said, “SecUnit, will you stop pacing and sit down?”

I said, “No.”)

ART said, I am a teaching vessel, and a research vessel for deep space mapping, and I sometimes haul cargo. All that is true. My crew also gathers information and takes actions for anti-corporate organizations that operate as part of and are supported by the polity of Mihira and New Tideland, and administered by the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. These actions are often dangerous.

Arada nodded, exchanging a look with Overse. Arada said, “So you came here because of this lost colony. To examine it before the corporates arrived?”

We received information that a database reconstruction contracted by a consortium of corporations involved in salvage and reclamation had turned up coordinates to a colony seeded approximately thirty-seven corporate standard years ago.

“An abandoned colony.” Amena stirred the goop on her plate, glaring. “A bunch of people left to die, like our great-grandparents.”

Amena wasn’t wrong, it was similar to what had happened to the colonists who had eventually founded Preservation. They had been “seeded” (that actually means “dumped”) on a mostly terraformed planet with the idea that supply ships would return through the wormhole at frequent intervals until the colony was self-supporting. This was exactly how corporates established colonies now. Except sometimes the corporates went bankrupt or were attacked by other corporates and the wormhole data was destroyed or the wormhole itself destabilized or all record of the colony’s existence was just lost in a database that ended up locked due to legal battles over ownership. And so no supply ships came and all the humans starved or died when the cheap shitty terraforming failed. I’d seen movies and shows that used this as a plot, but I hadn’t known they weren’t just stories until I came to Preservation. (Most had depressing endings and were part of a whole “awful things happening to isolated groups of helpless humans” genre that was not my favorite.)

ART said, The colonies are abandoned and cut off due to corporate bankruptcy or negligence, yes. Dead, not necessarily. Some manage to survive.

Arada had finished eating and was folding up her plate for the recycler. “Didn’t you say this site had two colonies?”

Yes. Historical sources recorded the existence of a former Pre–Corporation Rim colony on this site, but no other information.

ART put the colony report, what there was of it, in the feed. It looked like it was put together from fragments, as if someone had deleted the original and this was a reconstruction. Most of it was what ART had already told us: original Pre–Corporation Rim colony site, which nobody knew crap about or if they had none of the data had survived to make it into this report. Corporate colony seeded by a company called Adamantine Explorations, partial terraforming. No info on number of colonists, terrain, weather, habitats, equipment, illegal genetic experimentation, very illegal alien remnants, nothing.

The only interesting new info was from one of ART’s crew members, an augmented human named Iris, who had added some newsfeed archives about the hostile takeover of Adamantine Explorations after the colony had been established. There were three different articles from news sources that said an undetermined number—anywhere from four to twenty-four—Adamantine Explorations employees had died in a firefight, holding off the corporate takeover long enough for their database of wormhole coordinates to be deleted. The only reason the physical data storage still existed was that the attackers had broken in and killed the techs before they could vaporize it. Iris’s note ended: Tempting to think that they were trying to deliberately protect? conceal? the colony. Possible? Just not likely.

I didn’t think it was likely, either. But like Iris, I thought the fact that three different news sources had reported versions of the story indicated that the incident or a variation of it had actually occurred.

All the humans were quiet as they read the report. (Yes, it feels like it takes them forever. I sorted through my media storage but I knew they would finish before I could get anything started.)

“That’s strange,” Overse said softly. “Were they trying to protect the colony? Or just their investment?”

“You just like a mystery,” Arada told her, most of her attention on the report.

“I like mysteries in fiction, not in our lives,” Overse retorted.

ART ignored them. My crew’s mission was to ascertain whether the colony was still inhabited, and if so, attempt contact, and prevent interference and exploitation by salvage corporations, whether by evacuating the inhabitants or, if the colony is actually viable, providing assistance.

Amena leaned her elbows on the table. “But why do you have to do that? If people from the colony survived, then there’s nothing another corporation could do, right? If the original corporation that sent the colony is gone, then the people are free.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works here,” Overse told her. Her expression had that grimly frustrated quality that was common when my humans talked about the corporates. “Another corporation could move in and take over.”

Amena was skeptical. “Take over? But people are living there. I guess they could settle a second colony somewhere on the planet but they couldn’t take over the existing colony. Could they?”

“They could,” Overse assured her. “They have.”

Amena’s expression turned horrified. “But that’s like—I don’t know what it is, but it’s at least kidnapping.”

“That’s how it works in the Corporation Rim,” Thiago told her, stirring his liquid. “The planet is considered property, someone’s property that can be salvaged if the original owner is gone. The colonists, or their descendants or whoever is living there now, don’t have any claim.”

“Perihelion, what do you do about it? How do you help the colonists?” Ratthi asked.

ART said, The University has the means to produce the colony’s original charter documents, which often contain clauses specifying that if the originating corporate body has ceased operations, then ownership of the planet is ceded to the colonists or their issue or successors living on the original site.

I’d heard the key words “means to produce” as opposed to “archival copies.” I said, “You and your crew collect the necessary survey data from the colony and the University forges the documents.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, I was mad at ART, but the overall mission sounded great in a “screw a corporation sideways” way.

“Is that right, Perihelion?” Ratthi asked.

ART ignored us. A contract between the colony and an independently operated transfer station is then facilitated. Once the station has established a presence, then the colony is relatively secure from the worst excess of corporate predation, and free to accept other forms of assistance offered by non-corporate entities.

Arada’s mouth was twisted. “Eletra said there were two corporate ships here, correct? Did you arrive in this system before or after they did?”

Before. With my crew held hostage, I was forced to comply with their captors’ orders to fire on a Barish-Estranza support carrier. But my memory archive of that period is damaged and I don’t know what happened to the vessel or the crew.

“So the gray people could also have these corporate crews as prisoners.” Ratthi looked like he was trying to figure out just how many humans we might have to rescue. “Do you know why they brought Eletra and the other corporate onboard … you?” He made a vague gesture over his shoulder. “Why they put the implants in them?”

“I thought it was to torture them for fun,” Amena said darkly.

ART hesitated, though not long enough for the humans to notice. They may have wanted their shuttle. It’s still docked in my secondary cargo module slot. That hesitation would have been suspicious, but I also thought ART might honestly not know. Which was strange, because it should know. Maybe the memory archive issue was worse than ART had implied. But my two landing shuttles are also still in place, so that’s unlikely.

Arada propped her chin on her hand. She was exhibiting several behaviors indicating that she was deep in thought. “Perihelion, did the rest happen as you explained, that when you came back online your crew was gone?”

Yes.

There was a tone to that word. Not ART’s base level of sarcasm. It had an edge that echoed in the feed.

I didn’t react. ART had kidnapped me to get me here, put my humans in danger. I was not going to feel sympathy for it. Absolutely not.

Ratthi’s expression was dubious. “Any luck remembering what happened when they disappeared?”

I am still reconstructing damaged archives.

“Could SecUnit help you with that?” Amena asked, very casually, not looking at me.

I folded my arms and glared at the side of Amena’s head.

ART very obviously did not answer.

Overse leaned back in her chair, not comfortable. “We need to try to put together a timeline of when things happened.”

By the time I opened my mouth to say I had a chart, ART had said, Obviously, and threw a chart up next to the split screen. It showed the times (1) ART knew it had first arrived through the wormhole into the colony’s system, (2) when ART’s memory disruption occurred, (3) when it had reinitialized to find intruders aboard and its crew gone and an alien remnant installed on its drive, (4) the attack on the corporate supply carrier, (5) the moment the deletion occurred, and (6) the moment ART’s backup restarted. All except for Point One were estimates as ART’s onboard timekeeping had been disrupted. (Yes, it had actually left out the whole part about telling the Targets that I was a weapon they could use and bringing them to where they could attack our baseship, and using the comm code to locate me. That was fucking incredible.)

Amena was telling the others, “Before everything got weird—weirder—Ras tried to tell me about the colony reclamation project, but Eletra cut him off and changed the subject.”

Thiago looked at the view of the bunkroom, where Eletra was hidden under blankets. He said, “Is it possible that these people—the gray people—” He shook his head. “We know influence—terrible effects—from alien remnants are possible. Could the gray people have come from either the recent colony or the original one? Or are the corporates likely to use genetic manipulation on their colonists?”

Undetermined, ART said, like it honestly didn’t give a crap.

And honestly, it probably didn’t. The Targets had attacked ART’s crew. It wasn’t interested in the mystery, it just wanted its crew back.

When no one else could answer the question, Ratthi leaned his elbows on the table. “I think the corporates would do anything they could get away with. Obviously these gray people—what do we call them?”

“Targets,” I said.

Thiago did a thing with his eyes that was like an eyeroll but not quite. Ratthi continued, “The Targets must have brought the alien remnant tech that was installed on the wormhole drive.”

Overse tapped her fingers on the table, thinking. “Those implants weren’t alien remnant tech. In fact, they were old. Much older than thirty-seven years, when the corporate colony was established.”

“Yes, there must have been usable but outdated tech left behind on the site of the earlier colony, the Pre–Corporation Rim one.” Ratthi poked absently at the food left on his plate, then slid it over to Arada so she could finish it off. “That solid-state screen interface, I’ve seen those in historical displays.”

Amena nodded, waving a hand at me. “And you know, they called the wormhole a ‘bridge-transit.’ I’ve never heard that before.”

Thiago seemed intrigued. “Did they speak a standard language?”

“No, but there was a translation at first, then it stopped when SecUnit woke up and the fighting started,” Amena told him.

Since ART didn’t have any usable video or audio, I pulled some examples and sent them into the general feed. The humans listened with puzzled expressions. Then Thiago nodded grimly to himself. “That’s a mix of at least three Pre–Corporation Rim languages.”

“That certainly matches their tech,” Overse said.

Thiago added, “And many of the really deadly alien contamination incidents were Pre–Corporation Rim.”

“What sort of incidents?” Arada asked.

Thiago said, “Preservation’s archives only have detailed information on one, that took place on a moon that was being converted into a massive base of operations for one of the early Pre-CR polities. Over seventy percent of the population was killed. The only reason anyone survived was because a recently activated central system managed to lock off the living quarters and keep it sealed until help arrived.” He glanced at me. “So they were saved by a machine intelligence.”

I know what a central system is, Thiago. (It was more outdated tech, like a HubSystem that did everything, with no subordinate systems. I hadn’t ever encountered one that wasn’t part of a historical drama.)

Overse leaned forward. “So how were the people killed? The ones who were affected by the contamination attacked the others?”

Thiago wasn’t nearly as annoying when he was being smart like this. He said, “Yes, though that sort of violent reaction to remnant contamination appears to be rare. But since so many of these incidents, historical and contemporary, are suppressed, we don’t actually know whether it is or not.”

Ratthi nodded agreement. “With the corporates being so secretive, it’s hard to tell.”

Overse said, “The only laws they all seem to recognize are about alien remnant discovery and interdiction, and the licensing restrictions for use of strange synthetics.”

“But why would alien remnants affect people like that?” Amena asked. “Is it intentional? Is it something that’s protecting the site, where the aliens didn’t want anybody else to take what was there?”

Ratthi took a breath, then let it out again. “I never thought so. I think it’s the same as if an alien person who had never seen anything like a terraforming matrix accidentally touched one and was poisoned. There’s no intentionality. Sometimes the contamination effects are as if different priorities are loaded into the affected person’s brain, like alien software running on human hardware. The result is chaos.” He gestured with a utensil. “But do we think the Targets are from the Adamantine colony? Or descendants of the Pre-CR colony? Or could they have come from outside this system?”

All indications suggest they came from within this system, ART said.

I said, “You’re having memory archive issues, how do you know who was or wasn’t onboard you? There could have been hundreds of corporate salvage groups and raiders and colonists and aliens—”

“SecUnit—” Arada started at the same time as Ratthi said, “I don’t think—”

ART interrupted, SecUnit’s earlier statement that I “lie a lot” was untrue. I obviously cannot reveal information against the interests of my crew unless circumstances warrant.

Arada nodded. “Right. We understand. I think SecUnit is looking out for our interests—”

ART said, I want an apology.

I made an obscene gesture at the ceiling with both hands. (I know ART isn’t the ceiling but the humans kept looking up there like it was.)

ART said, That was unnecessary.

In a low voice, Ratthi commented to Overse, “Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don’t have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now.”

ART was suddenly in my feed, on a private channel. I did what I had to do. You should understand that.

I said aloud, “I’m not talking to you on the feed! You’re not my client and you’re not my—” I couldn’t say it, not anymore.

All the humans were staring at me. I wanted to face the wall but that felt like giving in.

I suddenly had views all over the ship. ART had given me access to its cameras. I snarled, “Stop being nice to me!”

Then Amena said aloud, “I think you need to give SecUnit some time.”

Right, that’s all this situation needed. I asked her, “Is it talking to you on a private channel?”

Amena winced. “Yes, but—”

I yelled, “ART, stop talking to my human behind my back!”

You know that thing humans do where they think they’re being completely logical and they absolutely are not being logical at all, and on some level they know that, but can’t stop? Apparently it can happen to SecUnits, too.

Arada got up from the table and held up her hands. “Hey, now, let’s stop this. It’s unproductive. Perihelion, you need to stop pressuring SecUnit. I know you’re upset about your crew and being deleted and this has all been terrible and confusing. But SecUnit is upset, too. Yelling at each other isn’t going to help.”

ART said, I was not yelling.

“Of course you weren’t,” Arada agreed, in the same reasonable tone Mensah’s marital partners Farai and Tano used when they talked to their younger kids. She faced the others. “We need to work this situation. Perihelion, if you could give us access to any other information your crew had on this colony, we’d really appreciate that. In the meantime, Overse and I are going to start collecting data on this alien thing that was on Perihelion’s drive and see if we can’t help get the normal-space drive online any faster. Ratthi and Thiago, I want you to check out the deceased Targets and do some pathology scans. We also need a translation of what they were saying in SecUnit’s recordings. If we can confirm they’re descended from one of the two groups of human colonists, I think—Well, I think we’ll be able to make more effective plans. Amena, I’d like you to try to talk to Eletra again, see if you can get any more information out of her. I think it’s clear she’s been holding back, and now that she knows about the implants, she might be more forthcoming. SecUnit, maybe you could figure out what caused Perihelion’s first reinitialization and how the Targets got aboard? I think we can all agree that having mysterious intruders invade Perihelion again is something we really need to avoid. Is everyone good with that? Perihelion, are you all right with this plan?”

ART said, For now.