Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

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.”