Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

I said, “Yes. I’m also going with you.”

Really, I was the only one who needed to get over there, and it would be better than sending drones that I wouldn’t be able to retrieve. But I don’t think Supervisor Leonide, who wasn’t too happy letting Arada visit, would say yes to the question “Hey can our SecUnit come over instead? It just wants to stand in your transport for, say, three minutes? No, no reason, it just enjoys looking at other people’s ships.”

On the feed, Overse said, Yes, please. Arada, SecUnit has to go with you . She sounded normal again. I had a camera view and audio on a tertiary input of her and Ratthi standing in the foyer to ART’s bulk lock, with her waving her arms and talking angrily while he nodded sympathetically and three of ART’s repaired drones hovered around them. It ended with her apologizing to Ratthi for venting at him and being angry at herself for getting angry at Arada during a crisis. I could play it back to listen in on the whole conversation but I could also punch myself in the head with a sampling drill and I was not going to do that, either.

(If I got angry at myself for being angry I would be angry constantly and I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else.)

(Wait, I think I am angry constantly. That might explain a lot.)

Arada’s expression was complicated, then it settled on relief. “Okay. I wasn’t going to ask, but that’s probably a very good idea.” She took a shaky breath. “Thank you.”

You don’t have to thank me for doing my stupid job.

But it is nice.

In the bunkroom, Thiago was trying to reassure Eletra. He told her, “You sound much better. I think speaking to someone you know helped.”

I sent to Amena, Ask her if there are SecUnits on either the explorer or the transport.

Amena did. With what seemed a reasonable amount of confidence under the circumstances, Eletra said, “Yes, there were three on the explorer.”

“But none on the supply transport?” Amena clarified.

Eletra nodded. “Right. The explorer carries the contact party. Everyone on the transport is support staff.”

I told Amena, Ask her if the SecUnits were made by Barish-Estranza, or if they were contracted rentals. I didn’t think they would be company units—the last thing you wanted when you were asserting rights over an unclaimed colony was the company getting its greedy datamining hands all over it.

Amena repeated the question, adding to me, “Rentals” is a creepy way to talk about people .

Yes, Amena, no shit, I know that. (And I knew this was all new and horrifying to Amena but it was just same old same old for me and Eletra and her permanently indentured family. Which was why I was saying this silently to myself instead of out loud to the whole ship.)

Eletra answered, “No, there wasn’t any contracted equipment involved in this job. They didn’t want to chance another corporation finding out what we were doing.”

Thiago watched Amena thoughtfully, as if he suspected she was talking to me on the feed. Then Eletra’s expression started to drift again and he hurriedly distracted her with a question about her family.

Amena said on our private feed, You’re going with Arada?

Yes, I told her.

Amena said, If there were three SecUnits on the explorer, why didn’t they stop the Targets from… taking over, or whatever they did? And the Targets didn’t seem to have any idea what you were.

I told her, The SecUnits on the explorer would have been under the control of a supervisor, either directly or through a HubSystem. If the Targets got control of either, the SecUnits would have to obey an order to stand down. Which is why I hate hostage situations. You have to get in there fast and neutralize the hostage-takers. They can’t make threats and force you to do stuff you don’t want to do if they’re unconscious or dead. If the Targets knew what I was, they may have thought they could order you to stop me.

Amena snorted. Sure, right .

Amena was implying that I wouldn’t listen to her, which, right, I wouldn’t, not in that situation. But also, there was so much about the Targets that we didn’t understand. It was a data vacuum big enough for us all to fall in and die, including ART.

Arada’s expression had gone preoccupied. The Barish-Estranza manager had sent the specs for the needed supplies and transfer logistics and she was going over it with ART in the feed. Then she asked me, “So they’ll know you’re a SecUnit because Eletra will tell them, so… how should we handle that?”

I wasn’t sure what “that” meant. But I wasn’t sure Arada knew what “that” meant, either. Her experience with SecUnits was limited to exclusively me. I said, “I’ll be the SecUnit the University provided for your security.”

I really expected ART to weigh in here, at least with some kind of rude noise. But it didn’t comment.

Listening on the feed, Ratthi was dubious about the whole idea. Wouldn’t you be wearing armor then?

“Not necessarily. Some contracts require SecUnits to patrol living spaces and that’s usually done in uniform instead of armor.” There are standardization guides for the manufacture of constructs but most humans wouldn’t know that. As long as I didn’t have to walk into a deployment center filled with SecUnits and the human techs who built and disassembled us, my risk assessment module thought everything was great. (I know, it worries me when I say that, too.)

Then ART said, Your configuration no longer matches SecUnit standard . ART knew all about that because it was the one who had altered my configuration to help me pass as an augmented human. That combined with the code I’d written to change the way I moved, to add the random movements, hesitations, blinking, and all the things that said “human” to other humans, made it easier to get by, though I’d still had to rely a lot on hacking weapons scanners.

“That’s right.” Arada turned to me, her brow pinching up in worry. “You look different since we first met you. You’ve let your hair grow out a little.”

Some of ART’s changes to my configuration had been subtle—longer head hair, more visible eyebrows, the kind of fine, nearly invisible hair humans had on large sections of their skin, the way my organic skin met my inorganic parts. Other changes had been structural, to make sure scanners searching for standard SecUnit specifications wouldn’t hit on me. “I also got shorter,” I told her.

“Did you?” Startled, Arada stepped back, eyeing the top of my head.

Lack of attention to detail is one of the reasons humans shouldn’t do their own security.

But humans do detect subliminal details and react to them whether they’re consciously aware of it or not. Even on Preservation (especially on Preservation) I ran my code to make my movement and body language more human to keep from drawing attention. I was running it now out of habit. When I stopped it, I’d look a lot more like a “normal” SecUnit even without armor. (Normal = neutral expression concealing existential despair and brain-crushing boredom.)

Arada and Ratthi still wanted to argue, so I said, “If they ask—and they won’t ask—say I’m an academic model designed specifically for your university.”

ART said, I would prefer you go as an augmented human .

What I really needed right now was a giant omniscient machine intelligence second-guessing me. “I don’t care what you prefer,” I said. It was safer this way. We were trying to tell one big lie—that we were ART’s crew—and it would be easier to make that believable if we kept the smaller lies to a minimum. The fact that I was a SecUnit and that Arada had contracted for me as security was true, if in a different way than the corporates would assume. I could have said all that, but instead I said, “It’s my decision and you can shut up.”