Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

Oh, fantastic. I said, “Is your comm shut down?”

It was not an attack launched via the comm, because I’m not an idiot .

“And I’m not the one who got taken down by a viral malware attack, so maybe you are an idiot,” I said. Yeah, I was all over the place with that one.

ART said, It was not a viral malware attack, it was an unidentified event .

“That’s fucking reassuring.”

“Hey, hey!” Amena waved an arm, snapping her fingers. “Please don’t stop telling us what happened! So your crew were taken prisoner by these gray people, correct? And are the gray people from the lost colony that Eletra’s ship was looking for?”

Everybody turned to look at Eletra, who stared blearily back.

ART said, Those are logical assumptions, though I have no direct evidence to support them. I know that we arrived in this system in response to a distress call from a corporate reclamation expedition. At some point, I experienced a catastrophic system malfunction that caused me to reinitialize. After the reinitialization, I found the intruders aboard. They said they were holding my crew hostage, and demanded weapons. I offered a weapon .

Everybody looked at me again.

Arada did the lip-biting thing. “You brought them to SecUnit. Because you knew SecUnit would be able to handle the situation.”

I did .

“The attack on our baseship could have killed all of us,” Thiago said, some heat creeping into his voice.

No shit, Thiago, you think?

Ratthi hissed under his breath, but before he could tell Thiago to shut up, ART said, That was a chance I was willing to take .

Oh, okay. I was either having a processing error, or something that the shows I watch call a “rage blackout,” or another emotional collapse. So I pushed off the med platform, walked out of the sterile field and into the restroom, and slammed my hand on the hatch close control.

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.”