Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

(In hindsight, this turned out to be another mistake.)

The humans had followed instructions and darted out behind me. I had a drone on Iris as she led the dash to the correct doorway (I say dash but humans are so damn slow even at the best of times and this group was exhausted and starving and in shock). Iris stopped at the doorway to wait for the others. They scrambled by and Seth grabbed her arm and tried to push her ahead of him as he limped down the corridor. Iris’s drone picked up a front view of Thiago, ducking out and motioning urgently for them to keep running.

My timeline had seventeen seconds to provide covering fire in the chamber and I wanted to keep it chaotic, at least until the humans got out of the long straight corridor and into the section with the access to the maintenance capsule. It was at least a seven-minute run for a healthy human and these humans were barely upright, so I wanted to give them as much time as possible.

Then suddenly, shit went sideways.

I was controlling the ag-bots through a drone relay and I felt the input drop when I lost contact. Then ag-bot 1 whirled and slapped me across the chamber.

For a bot with such delicate limbs, ag-bots pack a pretty solid punch. I hit the manufactured stone floor, bounced, hit it again, and bumped to a sprawling stop. (I’ve had worse.) Immediately I rolled and came to my feet, and that was when I realized all my inputs had dropped, the ag-bots, my drones, everything.

Then ag-bot 2 collapsed itself down and dove down the corridor after the humans.

Oh hell no. I pulled the handful of poppers out of the enviro suit’s pouch, and even with my inputs down, the direct contact allowed me to make enough of a connection to arm most of them. I threw them down just as ag-bot 1 lunged at me, they went off, and it froze as all the noise and light overwhelmed its navigational sensors.

I bolted after ag-bot 2, so fast I only felt impacts from two projectiles, one in my back and one in my upper thigh. I had lost contact from all my drones so the only input I had was my own visual and that was not enough input for this situation.

Approaching at top speed I saw the humans still running, strung out up ahead, Seth last. Then Seth collapsed. The ag-bot slid to a stop near him and its spidery limbs reached down. I couldn’t get there in time and if I lost one of ART’s humans like this…

Then Iris flung herself at the ag-bot, slamming through its delicate limbs to fire her weapon directly at the center of its body where its processor was. It would have been a great save. But her weapon didn’t have the power to penetrate the casing and all it did was make the ag-bot, or whatever was controlling it, angry. It turned its limbs inward and grabbed her.

But by that time I was there.

I wasn’t sure my weapons would get through that reinforced body casing, either, so I shot it in the knee joint. That leg partially collapsed and it forgot about tearing Iris apart. I circled in front, shooting limb joints, and it dropped her.

She sprawled on the ground, then flailed forward to Seth and tried to haul him to his feet. I kept firing, keeping the ag-bot at bay as it tried to claw toward them. I could have still lost both of them at that point but as I angled around I caught a glimpse of Thiago sprinting up to Seth. Then the bot surged forward again, unfolding more limbs, and I shot more joints. Man, this thing had a lot of limbs.

I risked a look back and saw Thiago had Seth slung over his shoulders and was running down the corridor with Iris. She threw a desperate look back at me and I yelled, “Keep running!”

I turned back and had a perfect shot at the ag-bot’s fifth knee joint. Hah, this is over. I fired and the joint blew out.

It was over, because that was when the ag-bot collapsed on top of me.

It hurt because apparently those things weigh a lot more than they look like they do. It was a good thing I don’t need that much air. I shoved and wiggled and lost my primary weapon, but I managed to get out from under its body.

But by then the Targets were there, and they all started shooting at me. I couldn’t get up. I shielded my head with my arms, and felt the projectiles going through the enviro suit but not the deflection fabric of the uniform ART had made for me. Then the fabric started to fail under all the impacts and this could be—

Performance reliability catastrophic drop.

Forced shutdown.

No restart.

Murderbot 2.0

Deployed aboard Barish-Estranza Explorer

Mission Status: Delayed

TargetControlSystem knew me. I’d killed a part of it, the part that had taken over ART.

I said, Did it hurt? Tell me all about it .

It was resident in the explorer’s systems where the poor bot pilot had lived. I got a brief glimpse before it walled me off, but all that was left were random sections of code; the bot pilot’s kernel had been deleted. TargetControlSystem would like to haul me out of the SecSystem so it could kill me, but it had access to the bot pilot’s archives and it knew what killware was.

I told it, Come in here and get me . (Yes, I was stalling. I had code bundles in place and there were a lot of destructive things I could do to the explorer, but no way to get the humans off the ship or get a message to ART.)

Then something else established a connection, an off-ship connection through the comm. From another ship? The space dock? Or wasn’t there a planet around here somewhere? And whoever was making the connection, it must be a Target, because it was using their language. I was reading its communication through targetControlSystem, but I could still see the original, untranslated signal.

TargetContact wanted targetControlSystem to find out what I was, so they could use me. I might be just what they needed. TargetControlSystem told them I was a SecUnit. TargetContact said that wasn’t possible, a SecUnit is a kind of bot, like the ones on the captured ships, easily dealt with when you had control of the humans.

(Yeah, it said “the humans.” But if this was an alien intelligence then all the horror media I’d watched had really gotten it wrong. Which is not impossible considering how wrong the media gets everything else.)

(You know, I don’t think this is an alien intelligence.)

The targetControlSystem said, no, I was too dangerous.

I said, It’s right .

TargetContact heard me. They were startled. They said, What are you?

A SecUnit. Killware .

TargetContact said, A software ghost .

I liked that. I had watched media with ghosts, though I didn’t have access to the files or titles anymore. I said, A ghost that kills you .

To prove to me that I was helpless, TargetContact started to show me security video. There was no metadata to tell me where it had been recorded. Not a ship. The space dock, maybe? But what was an agricultural bot doing on a space dock? An agricultural bot that’s fighting with… Holy shit, that’s me.

TargetContact told targetControlSystem, This is software, not a SecUnit. The SecUnit was on the surface, we have it now .

TargetControlSystem told TargetContact: You are giving it data, stop .

Me Version 1.0 is on the planet and has been captured and we are seriously screwed now. I’m sorry, ART. I’m sorry, humans and Me 1.0.

That was when I caught a tentative secure contact from SecUnit 3.

It had just disabled its governor module.

I checked the corridor camera view and watched it surreptitiously move its feet, the armor flexing as it shifted its shoulders. It was strange seeing this from the outside. I knew what it was thinking. My first realization had been: the governor module’s gone and I can do whatever I want! My second realization: what do I want? (I’d been stuck on that question for a long time.) (Actually Me Version 1.0 was still stuck on it, as far as I knew.)