Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

For fuck’s sake. “I am not angry at you.”

Okay, that’s a lie, I was angry at her, or really annoyed at her, and I had no idea why. It wasn’t her fault she was here, we were here, she hadn’t done anything but be human and she wasn’t even whiny. And her first reaction to another human shooting me had been to jump on his back and try to choke him.

Amena gave up on the mask and gave me her full attention. “You look angry.”

“That’s just something my face does sometimes.” This is why helmets with opaque face plates are a good idea.

Amena snorted in disbelief. “Yes, when you’re angry.” She hesitated, and I couldn’t interpret her expression, except that it wasn’t annoyed anymore. “I should have said more, when they were talking about you. It was just like my history and political consciousness class. I didn’t think the instructors were making things up, but… it was just like the examples they used.”

They had been talking about me as a SecUnit the way humans always talked about SecUnits, and it had been pretty mild, compared to a lot of things I had heard humans say. If I got angry every time that happened… I don’t know, but it sounded exhausting. Talking about this was exhausting. “I’m not angry about that.”

Amena demanded, “If you’re not angry, then what’s wrong?”

I was definitely glaring now. “How do you want the list sorted? By time stamp or degree of survivability?”

Amena said in exasperation, “I mean what’s wrong with you!”

There’s that question again, but I assumed she didn’t want to discuss the existential quandary posed by my entire existence. “I got hit on the head by an unidentified drone and shot, you were there!”

“Not that! Why are you sad and upset?” That was the point where even I could tell that Amena was terrified as well as furious. “There’s something you’re not telling me and it’s scaring me! I’m not a fucking hero like my second mom or a genius like everybody else in my family, I’m just ordinary, and you’re all I’ve got!”

I wasn’t expecting that. It was so far from what I thought she had meant, and she was so upset, that the truth inadvertently came out. “My friend is dead!”

Amena was startled. Staring blankly at me, she asked, “What friend? Somebody on the survey?”

I couldn’t stop now. “No, this transport. This bot pilot. It was my friend, and it’s dead. I think it’s dead. I don’t see how it would have let this happen if it wasn’t dead.” Wow, that did not sound rational.

Amena’s expression did something complicated. She took a step toward me. I backed up a step. She stopped, held up her hands palm-out, and said in a softer voice, “Hey, I think you need to sit down.”

Now she was talking to me like I was a hysterical human. Worse, I was acting like a hysterical human. “I don’t have time to sit down.” When I was owned by the company, I wasn’t allowed to sit down. Now humans keep wanting me to sit down. “I have a lot of code to write so I can hack the targetControlSystem.”

Amena started to reach out for me and then pulled her hand back when I stepped away again. “But I think you’re emotionally compromised right now.”

That was… that was so completely not true. Stupid humans. Sure, I’d had an emotional breakdown with the whole evisceration thing, but I was fine now, despite the drop in performance reliability. Absolutely fine. And I had to kill the rest of the Targets in the extremely painful ways I’d been visualizing. I needed to check Scout One’s data to see if I could tell where we were going in the wormhole and how long it would take us to get there. And it occurred to me there might not be a destination, if whatever was controlling ART’s functions knew I’d killed three Targets and had decided to revenge them by trapping us in the wormhole forever. I said, “I am not. You’re emotionally compromised.”

(I know, but at the time it seemed like a relevant comeback.)

Amena, like a rational person, ignored it. She said persuasively, “Won’t it be easier to write code if you sit down?”

I still wanted to argue. But maybe I did want to sit down.

I sat down on the floor and cautiously tuned up my pain sensors. Oh yeah, that hurt.

Amena knelt down in front of me, angling her head so she could see my face. This did not help. She said, “I know you don’t eat, but is there anything I can get you, like something from the kit or a blanket…”

I covered my face. “No.”

Right, so say, just theoretically, I was emotionally compromised. A recharge cycle which I actually didn’t need right now wasn’t going to help with that. So what would help with that?

Taking over targetControlSystem and hurting it very, very badly, that’s what would help with that.

My drone view showed Amena getting up and pacing slowly across the room, her shoulders drooping. Then on the platform, Eletra stirred and made bleary noises. Amena hurried over to her, saying, “Hey, it’s all right. You’re okay.”

Eletra blinked and peered up at her. She managed to say, “What happened? Is Ras all right?”

Amena leaned against the platform, and from the high angle she looked older, with lines on either side of her mouth. Keeping her voice low, she said, “I’m sorry, he died. You had these strange implants in your back, that were hurting you, and his killed him. We had to take yours out and it almost killed you. Did you know they were there?”

Eletra looked baffled. “What? No, that’s… I don’t understand…”

I checked my penetration testing, but there were no results. That was annoying. If a system won’t communicate with me, I can’t get inside it. And apparently targetControlSystem was operating as a single system. Stations and installations use multiple systems that work with each other as a safety feature. (Safety is relative.) I usually went in through a security system function and used it to get to all the others. (Technically, I am a security system, so it was easy to get other security systems to interact with me, or to confuse them into thinking I was already part of them.)

There are still ways to get into heavily shielded systems, or systems with unreadable code, or unfamiliar architecture. I didn’t have a lot of time, so I needed to use the most reliable method: get a dumb human user to access the system for me.

Ras’s implant had ceased functioning, probably having destroyed its own power source to kill him. Eletra’s implant was still in the emergency kit’s little container, where it thought anomalous things removed from humans needed to be stored. It was now covered with a sterile goo but was still capable of receiving. I dropped my jamming signal.

Via Scout Two in the control area foyer, Target Four had set the screen device aside on a bench. All the Targets were talking, ignoring the control area hatch. They looked agitated and angry. They might have figured out that we weren’t locked in the control area, finally. I was glad I hadn’t had the chance to kill all of them, since there was a possibility now that they might actually come in handy.

(I had no idea where the targetDrones were, but logic and threat assessment said they should be congregated up against the hatchways sealing off my safe zone. That was going to be a problem.)

I checked on Scout One’s progress, searching through the images of the floating display surfaces it had captured. Lots of shifting diagrams and numbers that might as well have been abstract art as far as I was concerned. These screens were meant to be interpreted through ART’s feed, and without it to explain and annotate the data, it was all a mess. Couldn’t anything be simple, just for once? I can fly low atmosphere craft but nobody ever thought it was remotely rational to give murderbots the modules on piloting transports. Wait, okay, there was a display with a schematic of ART’s hull, with a lot of moving wavy patterns around it that probably would make sense if I knew anything about what happens in wormholes. There was a time counter on it, but nothing indicated what it was timing. So, not helpful.