Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

Murderbot 2.0 asked me what I wanted.

I want to help with this retrieval.

I make a secure connection to the transport and send, A hostage situation is to be avoided at all costs. They will threaten to destroy the SecUnit and you will be forced to destroy the colony. This is a failure scenario .

Perihelion : I know that.

I know I am taking a risk. The transport is very angry. I tell it, But I know how to proceed, this is my function. The solution is a targeted, stealth retrieval, possibly incorporating a show of force as a distraction.

Perihelion : Your point is?

This is the risky part. If you return my clients to the remaining Barish-Estranza task force, I will help you .

Pause.

Perihelion : I was going to do that anyway .

Oh. I will still help you .

Perihelion : Why?

How can I explain to it when I can’t explain to myself. I say, Stories in the HelpMe.file . I know that answer is inadequate. I had read things that had made me consider other possibilities, it is impossible to explain. Murderbot 2.0 asked me what I want. I want to help .

Pause.

Perihelion : Good .

The humans have stopped arguing and the one called Iris retains control of the comm. She says, “Peri, listen to me. There are factions here among the colonists. One of them actually died up on the explorer trying to help us escape. You can’t just bomb everybody. It won’t get your friend back.”

New human contact-Thiago: “She’s right, Perihelion . Let us help you. Even if they refuse to return SecUnit, a negotiation could stall them, distract them while we think of a way to rescue it.”

Perihelion : Please calm yourselves and stop talking. Plan A01: Rain Destruction has been superseded by Plan B01: Distract and Extract .

Murderbot 1.0

Status: Not so great

Forced Shutdown: Restart

What happened?

Forced Shutdown: Restart: Failure Retry

Forced Shutdown: Restart: Failure Retry

Restart

Yeah, I’m definitely in trouble here. All my joints ached, and there were sharp pains in other places, probably projectile holes. I didn’t have any outside input, no feed, no visual or audio. By concentrating I managed to get a visual through my eyes, but wherever I was, it was completely dark and my filters weren’t online. Oh, and I was being held immobile, that was kind of a big issue, but until I finished my restart, I could only be terrified about one thing at a time.

Functions were beginning to come online again and I tuned my pain sensors down. That made it easier to think. Oh yeah, memory archive active, I remember what happened. Yikes.

Okay, now I’ve finished restarting and I’m terrified about a lot of things. But now that my entire brain was online again, I could see there was actually a distant light source somewhere above me. It was a small one, like a work light, or a discarded hand light. I could see more of my surroundings and it wasn’t encouraging.

I was suspended, hanging from four cables, in a large open space, with clamps around my wrists and ankles holding my arms and legs apart. The cables were taut and didn’t budge when I pulled on them. So whoever put me here hadn’t wanted me to be able to get a grip on the clamps because they knew I could break them. And my environmental suit was gone, though I still had the shirt, pants, and boots I’d been wearing under it. Oh, and I was upside down, which was just insulting since it didn’t affect me the way it would a human.

Atmosphere was minimal, at a level that would have had a human gasping and unable to function, but I was designed to be shipped in cargo containers and it was fine for me.

Oh shit, I hope the humans aren’t in here, too.

I wasn’t picking up anything on audio, no matter how I increased my gain. And there were no human-like shapes hanging anywhere that I could see. Maybe one stupid part of my stupid plan had worked and they had all gotten to the maintenance capsule and escaped.

My scan wasn’t picking up any power sources in the immediate vicinity, and if there was feed activity on any channel, I had been locked out of it. I couldn’t even try to send a ping. Whatever the giant thing looming in the darkness that I was attached to was, it had a lot of arms, from large crane-sized arms that extended up and out into the shadows of this giant space, to much smaller, delicate arms that were holding the cables I was clamped to. It could be an assembler, which is a low-level bot that’s used to put big things together when mining operations, installations, colonies, etc., are first established. You ship the assembler and land it on site, then everything else (construction bots, large vehicles, transport systems, so on) can be shipped in pieces and then assembled by the—Right, that’s probably pretty obvious.

You can also use assemblers for taking things apart.

Being terrified was starting to give way to being really angry. If they were going to take me apart, why hadn’t they done it, the fuckers. Unless they wanted me to be conscious when they did it.

They were going to fucking wish they had done it while they had a chance.

So, using the inbuilt energy weapons in my arms wouldn’t work because the angles were wrong and the chance of burning holes in one or both of my hands was 72 percent. I was going to have to do this the hard way, but what else is new.

I made myself pull in my outside functions and concentrate. Stopping the scan was hard, since it was providing most of my physical input, but I needed all my attention focused on one point. I tuned my pain sensors down further and concentrated on the joint of my right wrist.

I had to unlock it from the rest of my arm by getting all the inorganic connections to uncouple. I have my own schematics so I knew what everything looked like and how it fit together, but it was like directing a drone that had no internal operating code. I couldn’t just tell it to do anything, I had to control every motion. And it felt weird.

I got two of the major connections undone, and then was able to bend my hand forward all the way so I could grip my own wrist. I could feel the clamp at that point and tried to exert enough pressure to break it, but without the full connections to the heavy joints in the rest of my arm, I couldn’t do it. Ugh, this was going to be fun, in the not at all fun sense.

Now I separated my attention and made sure I had individual control of both my hand and the joint. I can control a lot more than two things via the feed simultaneously, but it was a lot harder doing it inside my own body, with parts that weren’t designed to be manipulated this way. The last connection in my wrist came apart, but I was able to keep my hand gripping the clamp. (Yeah, if my hand had fallen off at that point, I’d be screwed.) Using my fingers I started to climb my hand carefully down my lower arm, past the clamp. As it pulled the nerve pathways tight, I got them to detach, which, you know, ow, and the skin was stretching taut, peeling away off my hand. Now came the tricky part.

If this went wrong I was going to feel really stupid. The Targets would finally show up and be all “What the hell was it trying to do to itself?”

I wrenched my wrist out of the clamp and the skin broke. That quarter of my body swung free and I concentrated desperately on keeping my detached hand gripping my forearm. I carefully pulled the free arm in, pressing the detached hand against my chest. My organic parts were sweating like crazy. The swinging cable made a loud squeak. I froze for three seconds, then realized if the noise did attract attention, I’d better get this stupid hand reattached.