Марта Уэллс: Network Effect

I’d been angry enough to tear them all into tiny little pieces. The company who had owned me had protocols for these situations that would have required kill-shots, at least for the armed hostiles out on the deck. Plus I’d already been shot once, and the hostiles had been clear about their intent to kill and/or abduct my clients. But the company didn’t own me anymore and the only human here I was answerable to was Arada, and only in limited ways determined by a contract that Pin-Lee had negotiated for me.

But the whole point of hacking my governor module was that no one got to tell me to kill a bunch of humans if I didn’t feel like it. (Or even if I did feel like it.)

I said, “I’ve reported to my contracted supervisor.”

(I know, I know, I could have said no, I didn’t kill anybody. I could have said that even SecUnits under company protocol use minimum force necessary because the company hates paying survivor damage bonds, and also because SecUnits are not rabid murderers unless humans specifically order them to be. I could have said that I had risked his life not using kill-shots on the armed targets because I knew Arada didn’t want me to.)

He pressed his lips together. “I could ask her.”

I said, “You should definitely do that.”

He glared at me and the brown skin on his cheeks showed pronounced signs of a rise in temperature indicating anger, embarrassment, and possibly other emotions. I was pretty sure he was just pissed off, though. Then he hesitated and said, “Look, I—I didn’t mean to get you shot. I’m sorry.”

If you had meant to get me shot, Thiago, we would be having a different conversation. Because I was still mad, I said, “The security protocol all survey members agreed to is available on the facility feed.”

His face did the thing humans do when they’re trying not to show how annoyed they are. (Mission accomplished.) He said, “I made a mistake. But I had no reason to assume those people were hostile.”

I had reason. I could have thrown together a quick excerpt of my Threat Assessment Report of the approaching boat and why it had been 72 percent likely to attack. I could have pointed out that THEY HAD SHOT ME FIRST when for all they knew I was just another unarmed human. But I didn’t have to answer to him. He didn’t like me, I didn’t like him, and that was fine.

It was absolutely fine.

I walked away down the corridor.

(File detached from main narrative.)

Since I’d decided to stay (temporarily) on Preservation Station, Dr. Mensah had asked me to go places with her seven times. Six of those times were just relatively short boring meetings on ships in orbit or in dock. The seventh was when she had asked me to go down to the local planet’s surface with her. I don’t like planets but she lured me there by explaining that it was for an Art Festival/Conference/Religious Observation that would include “a lot of” live performances. After checking to find out the definition of “a lot of” was eighty-seven plus, I agreed to go.

Some of the live performances were demonstrations or seminars I wasn’t interested in, but I managed to fit in thirty-two plays and musicals while Mensah was at meetings or doing things with her family members. (I used drones to record the performances that were overlapping or scheduled against each other. They were all being recorded for the local planetary entertainment feed, and the popular ones would be reconfigured as video productions, but I wanted to see all the versions.) One evening a play was interrupted when Mensah tapped my feed and asked me to please come get her.

The request was so abrupt and out of character I replied with the code phrase we had come up with in case she was being held against her will. She said she was just tired. That was even more out of character. I mean, I could see she got tired, she just hated to admit it.

I left a drone to record the rest of the play and slipped out of the theater. It was night and the crowd in the street was beginning to thin out, but the big open pavilion across the plaza where the party was being held was still bright and noisy.

If you had to be in a crowd of humans, the crowds at this festival weren’t bad, since they were the distracted kind where all the humans and augmented humans are talking to each other or on comm or feed or hurrying to get places. The downside was a lot of humans were waving sticks with lighted objects or spark-emitting toys, or tossing colored powders that popped and emitted light. (I have no idea.) But whatever, with all that going on, nobody noticed me.

Plus, it was Preservation and there were no scanning drones, no armed human security, just some on-call human medics with bot assistants and “rangers” who mainly enforced environmental regulations and yelled at humans and augmented humans to get out of the way of the ground vehicles.

In the pavilion, I located Mensah near the edge of the crowd talking to Thiago and Farai, who was one of her marital partners. I stopped next to Mensah and she grabbed my hand.

Right, it’s usually a good idea to warn bot/human constructs who call themselves Murderbot before making grabby hands, except during a security incident when you would expect/need the human you’re trying to extract from lethal circumstances to grab you and hold on. And this read as the latter; like Mensah needed me to save her. So I didn’t react except to shift closer to her.

Thiago was saying, “I don’t know why you can’t just talk to us.” I heard him clearly, since I was looping my ambient audio to lower the level of the music from blaring down to a pleasant background soundtrack level. The glance Thiago threw at me was annoyed, like I had interrupted their conversation. Hey, she called me. I have a job here, I get paid in hard currency cards and everything.

“I told you why,” Mensah said, and she sounded normal, calm and firm. Except that was also how she sounded when humans were trying to kill us, so. I had the whole pavilion covered by my drones, and weapons scan was negative. (Weapons weren’t even permitted on the planet except in designated wilderness areas where hostile fauna was a problem.) Voices were loud, but my filters showed they were still well within the range of happy-intoxicated-interested emotional tones. But Mensah’s grip on my hand told me how tense her arm muscles were. Situation assessment: I have no idea.

Farai said, “Thiago, no. She asks for space, you need to give that to her.” She smiled at me politely. I never know how to react to that. She leaned in to Mensah to kiss her, and said, “We’ll see you at the house.”

Mensah nodded and turned, and I let her tow me out of the pavilion.

We made it outside to the pedestrian plaza and I asked her, “Do you need a medic?” I thought she might be sick. If I was a human and I’d had to be in the pavilion with all those other humans for the past two and a half hours, I’d be sick.

“No,” she told me, still sounding calm and normal. “I’m just tired.”

I sent a feed request to the ground vehicle (which on Preservation was called a “go-cart” for some reason) (some stupid reason) to meet us at the nearest transportation area. The plaza and streets were lit with little floating balloon-lights, and the dirt and temporary paving painted with elaborate designs in light-up paint (fortunately it wasn’t the marker paint that broadcasts on the feed, which would have been a nightmare). As we walked through the crowd, people recognized Mensah and smiled and waved. Mensah smiled and waved back, but didn’t let go of my hand. On the fringe near the transport area, an intoxicated human wandered toward us with a handful of glitter dust but veered off when I made deliberate eye contact.