Марта Уэллс: Artificial Condition

I’d never really had long periods of unobserved free time before. The leisure to sort through everything and get it organized, and give it my full attention, without having to monitor multiple systems and the clients’ feeds, was still something I was getting used to. Before this, I’d either been on duty, on call, or stuck in a cubicle on standby waiting to be activated for a contract.

I chose a new serial that looked interesting (the tags promised extragalactic exploration, action, and mysteries) and started the first episode. I was ready to settle in until it was time to think about what I was going to do when I got to my destination, something I intended to put off until the last possible moment. Then, through my feed, something said, You were lucky .

I sat up. It was so unexpected, I had an adrenaline release from my organic parts.

Transports don’t talk in words, even through the feed. They use images and strings of data to alert you to problems, but they’re not designed for conversation. I was okay with that, because I wasn’t designed for conversation, either. I had shared my stored media with the first transport, and it had given me access to its comm and feed streams so I could make sure no one knew where I was, and that had been the extent of our interaction.

I poked cautiously through the feed, wondering if I’d been fooled. I had the ability to scan, but without drones my range was limited, and with all the shielding and equipment around me I couldn’t pick up anything but background readings from the ship’s systems. Whoever owned the ship wanted to allow for proprietary research; the only security cameras were on the hatches, nothing in the crew areas. Or nothing I could access. But the presence in the feed was too big and diffuse for a human or augmented human, I could tell that much even through the feed walls protecting it. And it sounded like a bot. When humans speak in the feed, they have to subvocalize and their mental voice tends to sound like their physical voice. Even augmented humans with full interfaces do it.

Maybe it was trying to be friendly and was just awkward at communicating. I said aloud, “Why am I lucky?”

That no one realized what you were.

That was less than reassuring. I said, cautiously, “What do you think I am?” If it was hostile, I didn’t have a lot of options. Transport bots don’t have bodies, other than the ship. The equivalent of its brain would be above me, near the bridge where the human flight crew would be stationed. And it wasn’t like I had anywhere to go; we were moving out from the ring and making leisurely progress toward the wormhole.

It said, You’re a rogue SecUnit, a bot/human construct, with a scrambled governor module. It poked me through the feed and I flinched. It said, Do not attempt to hack my systems, and for .00001 of a second it dropped its wall.

It was enough time for me to get a vivid image of what I was dealing with. Part of its function was extragalactic astronomic analysis and now all that processing power sat idle while it hauled cargo, waiting for its next mission. It could have squashed me like a bug through the feed, pushed through my wall and other defenses and stripped my memory. Probably while also plotting its wormhole jump, estimating the nutrition needs of a full crew complement for the next 66,000 hours, performing multiple neural surgeries in the medical suite, and beating the captain at tavla. I had never directly interacted with anything this powerful before.

You made a mistake, Murderbot, a really bad mistake. How the hell was I supposed to know there were transports sentient enough to be mean? There were evil bots on the entertainment feed all the time, but that wasn’t real, it was just a scary story, a fantasy.

I’d thought it was a fantasy.

I said, “Okay,” shut down my feed, and huddled down into the chair.

I’m not normally afraid of things, the way humans are. I’ve been shot hundreds of times, so many times I stopped keeping count, so many times the company stopped keeping count. I’ve been chewed on by hostile fauna, run over by heavy machinery, tortured by clients for amusement, memory purged, etc., etc. But the inside of my head had been my own for +33,000 hours and I was used to it now. I wanted to keep me the way I was.

The transport didn’t respond. I tried to come up with countermeasures for all the different ways it could hurt me and how I could hurt it back. It was more like a SecUnit than a bot, so much so I wondered if it was a construct, if there was cloned organic brain tissue buried in its systems somewhere. I’d never tried to hack another SecUnit. It might be safest to go into standby for the duration of the trip, and trigger myself to wake when we reached my destination. Though that would leave me vulnerable to its drones.

I watched seconds click by, waiting to see if it reacted. I was glad I had noted the lack of cameras and not bothered trying to hack into the ship’s security system. I understood now why the humans felt it didn’t need additional protection. A bot with this complete control over its environment and the initiative and freedom to act could repel any attempt to board.

It had opened the hatch for me. It wanted me here.

Uh-oh.

Then it said, You can continue to play the media .

I just huddled there warily.

It added, Don’t sulk.

I was afraid, but that made me irritated enough to show it that what it was doing to me was not exactly new. I sent through the feed, SecUnits don’t sulk. That would trigger punishment from the governor module, and attached some brief recordings from my memory of what exactly that felt like.

Seconds added up to a minute, then another, then three more. It doesn’t sound like much to humans, but for a conversation between bots, or excuse me, between a bot/human construct and a bot, it was a long time.

Then it said, I’m sorry I frightened you.

Okay, well. If you think I trusted that apology, you don’t know Murderbot. Most likely it was playing a game with me. I said, “I don’t want anything from you. I just want to ride to your next destination.” I’d explained that earlier, before it opened the hatch for me, but it was worth repeating.

I felt it withdraw back behind its wall. I waited, and let my circulatory system purge the fear-generated chemicals. More time crawled by, and I started to get bored. Sitting here like this was too much like waiting in a cubicle after I’d been activated, waiting for the new clients to take delivery, for the next boring contract. If it was going to destroy me, at least I could get some media in before that happened. I started the new show again, but I was still too upset to enjoy it, so I stopped it and started rewatching an old episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon .

After three episodes, I was calmer and reluctantly beginning to see the transport’s perspective. A SecUnit could cause it a lot of internal damage if it wasn’t careful, and rogue SecUnits were not exactly known for lying low and avoiding trouble. I hadn’t hurt the last transport I had taken a ride on, but it didn’t know that. I didn’t understand why it had let me aboard, if it really didn’t want to hurt me. I wouldn’t have trusted me, if I was a transport.

Maybe it was like me, and it had taken an opportunity because it was there, not because it knew what it wanted.

It was still an asshole, though.

Six episodes later I felt the transport in the feed again, lurking. I ignored it, though it had to know I knew it was there. In human terms, it was like trying to ignore someone large and breathing heavily while they watched your personal display surface over your shoulder. While leaning on you.